John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Eugene O’Neill in Provincetown: A Novel Based on a True Legendary Love Triangle . . . and a Well Kept Secret Never Before Revealed by Cynthia Gallant-Simpson (review)

This novel tells two stories, one based on solid historical research and one based on pure speculation. The title’s “true legendary love triangle” is of course the O’Neill–Louise Bryant liaison of 1916–1918, carried on while Bryant was the lover and later the wife of John Reed. The book’s conjectural “secret never before revealed” is divulged in the prologue. Around the time O’Neill began his affair with Bryant, he also had a drunken one-night stand with a “pretty British girl” named Natalie who became pregnant with his child. A theater groupie and admirer of Provincetown’s “radical Greenwich Village crowd,” Natalie, sixteen, seduced O’Neill by convincing him that she was older. Sent to the country to stay with an aunt when her parents discovered the pregnancy, she never told O’Neill of her plight and gave birth to an “illegitimate secret daughter” before returning to London the next year.

The novel’s narrator, a Massachusetts undergraduate on a study-abroad semester in London, meets and quickly befriends that secret daughter, Simone Waverly, about fifty years later, when Simone is a recent widow seeking new relationships. At their first meeting, Simone and the American are discussing their mutual love of Provincetown and the New York Bohemians who made theater history there, when the elder of the two suddenly shares the “deep secret” of her parentage. The book’s story is the product of the “copious notes” taken by the narrator as the women travel together through England over the next several months.

To its credit, this novel doesn’t try to be something it’s not; its unpretentiousness is signaled immediately in its cloying title. And from the opening sentence, which states that a semester in London is “not be sneezed at,” it’s clear also that the author isn’t trying to impress readers with fresh or original language. The cliché phrases and hackneyed expressions—“in my mind’s eye,” “trials and tribulations,” “pulling my leg,” “first things first”—accumulate quickly, and they repeatedly blunt moments in the story when more effort might have produced nuance, insight, or sharper analysis. Gallant-Simpson is content to have her story and her narrator’s thoughts skim along the surface of things rather than dive deep, an approach that makes few demands on the reader. Considering, for example, O’Neill’s deeply tortured relationships with his known children, I find it odd that the playwright’s lost daughter seems perfectly unconflicted about her origins, treating her secret as little more than juicy gossip eagerly revealed to a relative stranger.

The book is nevertheless enjoyable and at times fascinating, mainly because the author’s interest in facts and real characters outweighs what she calls the “events surrounding the secret” of the illegitimate daughter. The title of the first chapter, for example, is “Mary Heaton Vorse, Provincetown, 1909,” and the subsequent 180 pages of narrative are wholly given over to depictions of settings and personalities that O’Neill fans have found endlessly intriguing. In addition to Heaton Vorse, who is a major character, Jig Cook and Susan Glaspell make substantial appearances, along with Neith Boyce, Mabel Dodge, Emma Goldman, and Alexander Berkman. Also mentioned or described are Hutchins Hapgood, Floyd Dell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Hippolyte Havel. Foreknowledge of these colorful figures helps greatly to appreciate the novel.

The three primary characters—O’Neill, Reed, and Bryant—seem plausibly drawn. O’Neill in his first Provincetown summer is described as a “man whose demeanor screamed failure, and who was, at best, taciturn, morose, seething with suppressed anger . . . and most often drunk.” Reed comes across as a good friend who deserves credit for encouraging O’Neill...