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  • Editor’s Foreword
  • William Davies King (bio)

One year ago today I opened the New Yorker and found the oddest entry I can recall reading in that magazine: a one-act by Eugene O’Neill, the long-lost Exorcism from 1919, a work the author had hoped to repress—now returned. Written half a dozen years before the New Yorker was first published, and set half a dozen years before that, the play presents an unhappy, even unwilling New Yorker whom anyone could identify as the author, deep in the bowels of the city, living and nearly dying in the prehistory of his long day’s journey into night. By the time O’Neill wrote the play, painful memory of his suicide attempt had become an anecdote to laugh off because he was living far from New York, in Provincetown, in a rustic U.S. Life-Saving Service station (refurbished for luxury by Mabel Dodge), which had been bought for him by his father and mother as a wedding present.

In fact, his life had been saved, as his character hoped, by “new life . . . spring—and fresh air,” though Jimmy’s was not (out the third-floor window of that “rotten dump” he went in 1913). For Gene, in the interim, one ill-advised marriage had been replaced by another, which for the moment seemed satisfactory. The neglected son born from that earlier union (Eugene Jr.) was soon to be joined by a new neglected son (Shane). But the daily mail brought letters from theatrical producers, critics, and other powerful men eager to make his acquaintance, also a powerful woman or two. The world must have looked pretty good when O’Neill turned to this episode from his past for the material of new drama. Two other plays he wrote around this time were comedies, though he destroyed those scripts before anyone had a look. His friend Harold de Polo later declared that O’Neill missed his calling by not using his gift for comedy. De Polo was thinking more of the fortune his pal could have made, not so much of the big prizes and “immortality” he would have had to let pass. O’Neill was already strong for tragedy. But when [End Page v] he came back to New York a few months after writing Exorcism, he stayed uptown, in a decent hotel, and his eye was on Broadway.

The New Yorker was launched in 1925 for just such a sophisticate as he was becoming, a man who could be humorous as well as caustic, who could cash a big check and summer on the beach, who knew not to be taken in by the cheap entertainments of the masses but who welcomed the attention of the literary/intellectual elite, with a clipping service under contract to deliver every notice to his eager I. Perhaps it was the sudden illness and subsequent death of his father, just when Exorcism was in the works, that told him he must take himself more seriously than that.

What a year we have had, poring over the long-lost play. Eugene O’Neill Newsletter editor Jo Morello took an early interest in teasing out the inside story for American Theatre, and we are glad to have her fully developed report in these pages. Rob Dowling’s formidable Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill came out a year too early to catch Exorcism, but he more than fills the gap here with his thorough study of yet another O’Neill who seeks companionship. He also gives us a glimpse of O’Neill in a scene he did not write in a drama he did not attend, yet amply caused—the scene of divorce. Jeff Kennedy guides us back to the lively time and place in which this play became indispensable—and then dispensable. Kati Donovan propels us forward to the play as play on stage now, at a time when we have learned somewhat more about how drama might talk to trauma. Michael Fenlason gives us an inside look on producing the play in a professional theater in Tucson and feels the strong hand of O’Neill even in a play he jettisoned...

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