The Long Journey of Exorcism: A Note on Provenance

In the unfolding story of Exorcism’s rediscovery, various stories have been told about the role of Agnes Boulton in the transmission of the manuscript. It has been said that she held on to a copy of this play that O’Neill wanted destroyed, then defied his wish to have his manuscripts turned over to him at the divorce, as if she knew that one day the world would hungrily receive the lost play. More likely, I think, is the following scenario.

Though O’Neill wanted the playscript to be taken out of circulation and therefore destroyed duplicate copies, he retained the original for himself—as what writer would not? Unlike Honor Among the Bradleys and The Trumpet, which he wrote around the same time and then destroyed, this play reflected on his personal and family history, and eradicating it completely might have seemed a little like a suicide in itself. Besides, he was aware of his growing pile of manuscripts as an archive for his own self-study and also as a set of potentially valuable items to be sold. Boulton, too, was a keeper of her own manuscripts (also letters, receipts, tickets, and much else), and eventually it became clear she was a true hoarder.

At the point when his marriage to Boulton was breaking up, in December 1927, O’Neill wrote to her from New York, asking that she send up from their Bermuda house all of his manuscripts. He claimed that a dealer, A.S.W. Rosenbach, was interested in brokering their sale but needed to inspect them first. On December 2 he insisted on her boxing up everything for immediate delivery. By December 17 he was in a panic because the boxes had not arrived. Then, on December 19 he cabled that the first box had arrived, and on December 20 he says he expects another box on the next boat. On or about December 26 he wrote her a long letter, at last announcing his wish for a divorce.¹ He makes no mention of the other box of scripts, so one can assume that what he was expecting had arrived. It seems likely that he delayed the divorce declaration until he had the scripts in hand.

Whatever was contained in those boxes did not include everything he wanted, though the fact that Yale and Princeton now hold many of his early manuscripts, which came directly from the author, shows that a lot did come through. That spring, in conjunction with early negotiations over the divorce, O’Neill had his attorney and friend Harry Weinberger travel to Bermuda. A secondary purpose was to obtain more of his papers—“an attempt in which he was only partly successful,” say the Gelbs.² On September 30, 1928, O’Neill wrote to Weinberger, specifically concerned about three years of diaries he claims she kept at Spithead. (In fact, one diary, the so-called Scribbling Diary for 1925, was kept by her and was sold to the Beinecke Library after Boulton’s death.) No mention is made of missing scripts in that letter.³ He continues to express concern about “personal things” she retained as late as May 9, 1929, two months before the divorce was finalized.

In fact, she did possess O’Neill playscripts, as became obvious when she sold a few manuscripts and/or corrected carbon copies to Harvard in the late 1950s, along with the nearly complete Boulton-O’Neill correspondence. The plays included Bread and Butter, Lazarus Laughed, Marco Millions, and Now I Ask You. The sale to Harvard was set up by Max Wylie, a writer who had approached Boulton as part of his research for a novel he was writing, a roman à clef about O’Neill, Boulton, and Carlotta Monterey, which was titled Trouble in the Flesh (1959). He recalled that Boulton had a pile of O’Neill papers in the corner of a bedroom in her house in West Point Pleasant, New Jersey. The pile included the correspondence and these few manuscripts. He realized that she needed the money and helped arrange the sale to...