Women Possessed: A Life of Eugene O'Neill by Arthur and Barbara Gelb (review)

In a sense, the late Barbara and Arthur Gelb spent sixty years preparing for this volume, beginning in 1956, just as Long Day's Journey Into Night was premiering on Broadway, when they watched and taped an interview with Carlotta Monterey O'Neill conducted by Seymour Peck for the New York Times.¹ As they explain in this volume, it was at the Peck interview that the Times's distinguished drama critic Brooks Atkinson secured Monterey's agreement to be interviewed by assistant drama critic Arthur Gelb and his wife and collaborator with a view toward writing a biography of O'Neill. The result, after numerous interviews, not only with Monterey but with more than 400 other sources, was their O'Neill (1962), the first substantial biography of the playwright after his death, excepting Croswell Bowen and Shane O'Neill's popular account, The Curse of the Misbegotten (1959). In the years following, the Gelbs returned again and again to O'Neill and his circle, updating their biography several times and writing O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo (2000) when new information became available. Barbara also wrote So Short a Time (1973), a biography of O'Neill's sometime lover Louise Bryant, as well as a one-woman play about Monterey, My Gene (1987), which was performed by Colleen Dewhurst.

The authors explain that it was while they were working on Life with Monte Cristo and Ric Burns's 2006 Eugene O'Neill: A Documentary Film that they became aware of how much more primary material and scholarly research was available, and made the decision to revisit the narrative of O'Neill's life after the period covered in Life with Monte Cristo. As they "searched back through [their] original file notes" (xviii), they also discovered material from interviews that had been restricted by the subjects until after Monterey's death. In writing By Women Possessed, they "tried to interweave these long-withheld items of lore with the newly revealed chunks of information" now available (xix).

Some of the notable sources that were not available to the authors earlier include letters in A Wind Is Rising: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O'Neill (2000) edited by William Davies King, as well as his Another Part of a Long Story (2010), and letters and other items posted on Harley Hammerman's website eONeill.com, including "More of a Long Story" by Shane O'Neill's daughter, Sheila. The footnotes show that the authors also made extensive use of O'Neill's unexpurgated 1925 "Scribbling Diary," published by Yale in 1981, some of Monterey's diaries not originally available to them, the Tao House Library collection, and other documents such as the account that O'Neill wrote about his family while in psychoanalysis. They also write in a footnote that "excerpts from interviews with C[arlotta] M[onterey] that were included in the 1962 O'Neill (when CM was still alive) have now been considerably expanded" (803). In short, compared with previous volumes, the authors marshal a large amount of new material that serves to expand, enrich, and, in some cases, correct the earlier narratives.

While the accuracy and expansion of the narrative are important, the main focus in this book is on telling the story. As the title suggests, this is a private rather than a public version of O'Neill, centered largely on his relationships with the important women in his life. These are mainly his second and third wives, Agnes Boulton and Carlotta Monterey, but also his mother, Ella Quinlan O'Neill, whose impact on O'Neill's life the authors had come to think "considerably greater than her husband's" (xviii); his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins; and various women who were romantic interests throughout his life, from Beatrice Ashe in 1913 to Jane Caldwell in 1945; as well as his daughter Oona, his nurses, and others.

The...