O'Neill's "Damned Unconventional" Play from the Prohibition Years: "Anna Christie"

In 1941 Eugene O'Neill responded to Lawrence Langner, cofounder of the Washington Square Players and the Theatre Guild, about his interest in reviving "Anna Christie." Intrigued with the prospect of Ingrid Bergman in the title role, O'Neill remained, nevertheless, skeptical: "The fact is 'Anna Christie' is the stalest of all my plays—stale from much use, and stale because it is the most conventional playwrighting of anything I've done." Underscoring the point, O'Neill urged Langner to "contrast it" with The Iceman Cometh, which "is worth a hundred 'Anna Christies.'" This disapproval of "Anna Christie" is the impetus though not the subject of this essay. Instead, I'm intrigued by what O'Neill inserts between these remarks: that while the play was conventional in its writing, "its subject matter was damned unconventional in our theatre of 1921."¹ Wistful, even frustrated, this comment reflects not the resentment that O'Neill displayed for critics of "Anna Christie" twenty years earlier, but instead something about the interplay of subject, play, and period that he lamented in 1941.² Often, the subject addressed by critics has been the "ole davil sea," connecting "Anna Christie" with the sea plays, or Anna's scandalous past, connecting the play with the fallen woman tradition. But the lengthy and complicated composition of "Anna Christie," which began with Chris Christophersen, a version that focused on the sailor O'Neill knew from Jimmy the Priest's, suggests another possibility. As Virginia Floyd has documented, the composition of Chris began in 1918, was interrupted for more than a year, and did not culminate in "Anna Christie" until 1921—dates that situate the composition of the play in the years leading up to and immediately following passage of the Volstead Act in 1919, which led to Prohibition.³ More than coincidental, this context suggests an important—and thus far overlooked—way of considering how the subject of "Anna Christie" was so "damned unconventional" for O'Neill's "theatre of 1921."

Both versions, Chris and "Anna Christie," draw on Jimmy the Priest's, the Fulton Street saloon that O'Neill frequented (along with the Golden Swan, otherwise known as the "Hell Hole") in 1911-12, for the setting of the opening acts. Here it is renamed Johnny-the-Priest's. The connection to Prohibition comes from letters O'Neill wrote to Agnes Boulton (his wife at the time) during the period of composition. The first, from December 1919, describes his "voyage to the Hell Hole" while staying in New York, "to see how it had survived the dry spell."⁴ Full of reminiscences of the old gang and better times, O'Neill regrets that there was "no whiskey in the house" except for one or two days a week when the gang managed to steal it, so they drank sherry, which had "just enough kick" to make them "jovial." This deprivation notwithstanding, he "had quite an 'old time' night down there—minus drunkenness." He took pains to stress, "Believe me, Prohibition is very much of a fact" [original emphasis]. The second letter, from January 1920, substantiates this nostalgia for the "good old healthy H. H. days" although it makes no direct mention of Prohibition.⁵ While he does not discuss Jimmy the Priest's in these letters, he certainly felt the same nostalgia for this other haunt, as Boulton noted in comments on Chris: "It was Chris that Gene really knew and loved, and old Marthy too—all the bums and outcasts in the first act down at Johnny-the-Priest's."6 Because of remarks like these, Floyd argues that many of the early plays, including Chris, function as "epitaphs" for "friends he had known at Jimmy the Priest's."⁷ Building on Floyd's point, I consider how "Anna Christie" (with Chris as part of its origins) laments not only lost friends from his saloon days but further the potential loss of "saloon culture" under the regime of Prohibition. More specifically, "Anna Christie" can be considered as an early and ultimately unsuccessful effort at what I describe as a "saloon play."

Defined historically, saloon plays were a branching from the long history of temperance dramas in the United States during the nineteenth century. As John Frick observes, temperance dramas were highly melodramatic and consequently favorite vehicles for reformers because of the assumption "that the theatre, by presumably holding 'a mirror up to nature' could serve instructive purposes and hence inculcate a complex of values."⁸ Accurate or not, this premise informed hundreds of temperance dramas, which generally condemned the saloon as "a breeding place of crime and violence, and the hangouts of criminals and degenerates" and almost always as "the backbone of prostitution."⁹ Near the turn of the century, however, many dramatists shifted allegiance: plays like J. W. Todd's Arthur Eustace; or, A Mother's Love (1891), Charles Hoyt's A Temperance Town (1892), and Edward Locke's The Drunkard's Daughter (1905) took openly antitemperance stances and lampooned reformers.¹⁰ Other plays, like Robert Neilson Stephens's On the Bowery (1895), Clyde Fitch's The Straight Road (1907), and Edward Sheldon's Salvation Nell (1908), staged drunks, saloons, and saloonkeepers sympathetically, even enthusiastically, forming the foundation of the saloon play.

Defined ideologically, saloon plays shared subject matter with temperance dramas but inverted their condemnatory portrayals; rather than something to fear and shun, saloons became something to understand and experience. Early works like On the Bowery were full of adventure and offered romanticized representations of saloonkeepers like Steve Brodie.¹¹ Later works like The Straight Road and Salvation Nell were realistic and offered sociological studies of saloons, especially among the working classes of New York City. Not overtly political, saloon plays were, when considered in terms of the cultural materialism defined by Ric Knowles, "sites for the negotiation, transmission, and transformation of cultural values."¹² Like the antitemperance plays defined by Frick, saloon plays provided "logical and necessary resistance to the containment efforts of the middle class, 'dry' hegemony" of temperance plays.¹³

Reading "Anna Christie" as a saloon play does not imply that O'Neill had a coherent antitemperance philosophy; as critics have demonstrated, O'Neill's social criticism was intuitive at best, contradictory at worst.¹⁴ In fact, O'Neill's inconsistency of political or ideological perspective is central to this essay. On the one hand, his dramatization of Jimmy the Priest's is genuinely sympathetic: he knew and loved and, more significantly, gained insight into the lives of the working-class patrons of this saloon during his drinking days. Much of his fascination with saloon culture is on display in "Anna Christie" and can be read as an act of resistance to the ways the temperance, class, and cultural values were debated leading up to the theatre of 1921. On the other hand, O'Neill cannot completely resist temperance hegemony as evidenced by the pattern of revision and omission that emerges when considering Chris and "Anna Christie," a pattern that reveals compromises in verisimilitude and ideological allegiance to the "bums and outcasts" that he knew a decade earlier.

The intent of situating "Anna Christie" in the subgenre of saloon plays is not to heap more scorn upon a play that has received more than its share. Instead, it is to offer a cultural materialist reading, situating origins and production within the material conditions of the period, in order to demonstrate how "Anna Christie" and Chris reflect cultural debates about temperance and Prohibition. More than just establishing a "dry" society, these debates, historians argue, were part of a "class war" through which the middle class sought to contain and regulate saloons like Jimmy the Priest's.¹⁵ Additionally, a cultural materialist approach suggests how "Anna Christie," in performance, had every opportunity to negotiate and redefine values about temperance and Prohibition, but failed to do so because of ideological contradictions within the play. This reading explicates another way that the subject matter of "Anna Christie" was "damned unconventional" for its time and offers new possibilities in terms of O'Neill's ambitions and ultimate frustrations with the play.

"Little Drunk, Not Much. Yust feel Good ": Working-Class Celebration

Floyd is right that the origins of "Anna Christie" lay with the sailor O'Neill knew from Jimmy the Priest's. Yet "Anna Christie" begins neither with Chris nor with Anna, who supersedes him in the final version, but with two vignettes that are only peripherally related to the principal story of reunion and redemption. The first involves two longshoremen entering, drinking whiskey followed by lager and porter, and leaving. The second involves the postman delivering Anna's letter for Chris, who regularly receives mail at the saloon since he lives on a barge and has no other address. While the second provides some exposition in that it introduces Chris and hints at his daughter in Minnesota, the first has little to do with Chris, Anna, or even the sea. Hardly advancing the story, these vignettes, the premise of which was perhaps borrowed from Edward Sheldon, introduced the milieu for the opening act.¹⁶ The waterfront saloon not only welcomes but maintains important links with its working-class clientele, such as the longshoremen who, significantly, are wearing their "working aprons" and "the button of the union pinned conspicuously on [their] caps."¹⁷ Dressed this way, they introduce the nature of some of the saloon's clients and the saloon's politics: for labor, and against capital. In fact, the longshoremen seem like regulars in the saloon, suggesting that Johnny-the-Priest's may, as many saloons did, supply its backrooms for union meetings.¹⁸ It also cultivates ties with the working class by serving their needs not only for drinking but for social services, including receiving postal service, to which the working classes of the Progressive Era had little access. These vignettes establish, then, class affiliation for this saloon and, potentially, for working-class saloons in general that was geographical, economic, and even ideological.

This perspective becomes better defined with the entrance of Chris. Already half-drunk from the whiskey consumed on his barge, Chris throws open the saloon doors and announces to one and all, "Have drink on me" (961). After a round of hand-shaking, drinks flow for Chris, Johnny, and Marthy (once Chris remembers that she is waiting outside the family entrance), and Larry takes a cigar on Chris. The saloon was central to notions of leisure that were developing around the turn of the century: it was where the working classes, primarily men, would go not merely for drinking and drunkenness but further, as historians have documented, for companionship and camaraderie.¹⁹ In fact, Roy Rosenzweig goes so far as to contend that the working classes developed their own culture of "alternative values" in the saloon, which foregrounded the discourse of community in contrast to that of individualism defined by and defining the middle class.²⁰

Chris demonstrates two of the key customs of this culture with his arrival, first by "treating" everyone in the bar to drink, a custom derived from Ireland and commonly reported among saloon visitors in the United States, which promoted "an ethic of mutuality" among the working classes.²¹ Second, Chris's attitude toward drinking is not just about intoxication (though this was certainly part of the allure) but additionally celebration of his return to New York and his reunion with friends. What Chris says about himself with his entrance speaks to the ethics of drinking among the working classes: "A little drunk, not much. Yust feel good" (962). Drinking need not result in violence, indolence, and depravity—all three of which figured conspicuously in temperance propaganda. Instead, drinking could be a way of promoting good cheer and social affiliation. Given how much of the opening of "Anna Christie" corresponds with this culture, two conclusions are likely. First, O'Neill's drinking in Lower Manhattan in 1911-1912 provided more than friendships; it gave him insights into the culture of working-class saloons. Second, "Anna Christie" offers a defense of that culture.

These initial vignettes originated with Chris Christophersen and were "transferred intact" to "Anna Christie," implying that O'Neill had certain elements of saloon culture that he was intent upon staging.²² But three changes to the first acts of Chris and "Anna Christie" are just as informative about how the latter defends that culture. The first and last involved cutting vignettes: the first, a humorous scene between regulars, Jack Burns and Adams, who squabble drunkenly and jokingly, which suggests the possibility of violence; the second, a scene among Chris and two sailors, Mickey and Devlin, which lacks any of the humor of the first scene and raises the specter of drunken violence when the sailors mock Chris for giving up the sea. Moving Anna's arrival forward in "Anna Christie" meant O'Neill had less time for vignettes about saloon life, but these cuts suggest that he may have been downplaying negative elements of saloon culture: specifically, the correlation of intoxication and rowdiness. This correlation was common in temperance propaganda at the time, so omitting any semblance of it after the passage of Prohibition was, perhaps, a way of challenging the dry hegemony of the middle class. The drinking that remains in the opening act of "Anna Christie" represents intoxication as harmless, even pleasurable, without a hint of violence or anything socially unacceptable. The third change from Chris to "Anna Christie" seems to suggest the capacity for self-regulation of drunkenness in saloon culture. In Chris, when Chris feels too drunk to read Anna's letter, Larry offers him a "lemon and seltzer," keeping him in the bar and drinking.²³ In "Anna Christie," when Chris feels too drunk to meet Anna, Larry suggests he go "round the corner" and get "a good beef stew" that will fix him up (968). This change defines the connection between saloonkeeper and saloon patron in terms of communal concern rather than potential profits, thereby minimizing exaggerated images of predatory saloonkeepers common during the period. When contrasted with Chris, "Anna Christie" demonstrates a pattern of revisions and preservations that suggests a defense of saloon culture.

How does this representation of saloon culture in "Anna Christie" offer resistance to dry hegemony? As Thomas Pegram shows, thanks to temperance propaganda, "for millions of Americans, the saloon conjured up . . . 'images of sodden drunks, of hideously fat men sucking stale cigars, of toilets fouled with vomit and urine in the haze of alcoholic narcosis, of the blind idiocy of drunken violence.'"²⁴ By the establishment of Prohibition, this nightmarish image had become the "facts" of the temperance debate: the saloon was tagged as a literal and existential threat to the middle class. This ideological premise is just what "Anna Christie" challenges through its depiction of Johnny-the-Priest's; in fact, this depiction wholly redefines the nature of the saloon. With the revisions from Chris to "Anna Christie," O'Neill loosens the connection of drinking and drunkenness and, for the most part, eliminates the hazard of "the blind idiocy of drunken violence" from the first act. More than that, O'Neill underscores positive aspects of saloon culture, such as the "democratic spirit that permeated most saloons": "In the saloon all men with a nickel were equal in the eyes of the bartender and a man was assumed a good fellow until proven otherwise."²⁵

This "democratic spirit" is expressed in Chris at the conclusion of the vignette between Jack Burns and Adams. When Larry and Johnny joke that Chris is always drunk and singing about "Josephine," Adams defends Chris with surprising vehemence: "Chris is a gentleman same's you and me. . . . He and I have had many a drink in your place, Johnny the Priest, sitting right here at this very table treating each other as man to man."²⁶ Although this scene is omitted from "Anna Christie," the same spirit pervades the scene between Chris, Johnny, and Larry, and extends beyond the gendered language of Adams to include Marthy and Anna who, after brief "scrappin'," decide to be "sociable" and share drinks and, just between them, details from Anna's past (970). In other words, in "Anna Christie" O'Neill dramatizes saloon culture as a viable alternative, rather than fundamental threat, to middle-class culture.

When Anna shares her past with Chris and Mat in act 3, the contrast of the middle class and saloon culture becomes more subversive. Easily summarized, her past stretches back to the Minnesota farm where she lived with her family and was forced to "slave" for them and was raped by her cousin. When she ran away to St. Paul to work as a nanny, she found no reprieve: she had to defend herself continually against the advances of husbands and fathers of the middle-class homes where she worked. Overwhelmed and resigned, she joined a brothel, was arrested and hospitalized before coming east for her reunion with Chris. The trajectory of her fall into prostitution resists, even reverses, the traditional narrative that defined the saloon as the halfway point between respectability and depravity for young women. When she arrives at Johnny-the-Priest's, she is already "showing all the outward evidences" of the "world's oldest profession" (968). Instead of going from the home to the saloon to the brothel, Anna has gone simply from the home to the brothel. O'Neill inverts the moralizing judgment of the middle class: as it was Anna's family that started her wrong, it is the home that offers the threat to female respectability and that promotes the "social evil" of prostitution, not the saloon. A radical rethinking of home and family along the lines of Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts or August Strindberg's The Dance of Death, this representation destabilizes the middle-class home as the bastion of respectability and morality, undermining some of the arguments advanced by temperance groups. Even more subversively, O'Neill suggests that the saloon is the beginning of Anna's ascendant trajectory toward redemption and respectability. It is in Johnny-the-Priest's where Anna reconnects with her father, who takes her on the sea, where she senses her history slipping away and the possibility of a new future that critics, with displeasure, recognize as corresponding with middle-class values. Not just a plausible alternative to middle-class life, the saloon becomes a preferable alternative. In fact, O'Neill goes so far as to suggest that the saloon is where the defunct values of the middle class can be revitalized.

"No Good Sailor Fallars . . . Gat Drunk": Middle-Class Censure

Dramatizing working-class saloons sympathetically, not to mention defending saloon culture, meant undermining notions of decorum and propriety that were fundamental to class differentiation. Much about "Anna Christie" had the potential to offend middle-class audiences, yet this was the furthest thing from what occurred. Writing retrospectively, Brooks Atkinson observes that "just about everyone happily surrendered to 'Anna Christie' as soon as it opened" because it was clear "something fresh and challenging had come into the theatre."²⁷ Reviewing the original production, Thomas Dickinson was less sanguine about the significance of it, but admitted that it was "one of the most successful of O'Neill's plays before the broad public."²⁸ As Ronald Wainscott has documented, the play enjoyed considerable success before the "broad public," including drawing in "curious sensation seekers who came to be shocked or titillated by language and situation" of the lower-class characters, even if they tended to laugh through serious scenes and exasperate its reviewers.²⁹

More tellingly, "Anna Christie" went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for the 1921-1922 season, an award that Katie N. Johnson defines as "one of the most legitimating prizes in the theater."³⁰ The award contributed to O'Neill's growing "respectability" as a dramatist in mainstream theater. O'Neill initially defended the play against criticisms that generally focused on the fourth act and the "happy ending" between Mat and Anna, although he eventually acknowledged that the play was full of compromises: it "catered to 'easy' popular tastes" and involved too many "Broadway tricks."³¹ These compromises go beyond aesthetics, though, and include the ideological perspective on the working-class saloon. However much O'Neill wanted to celebrate saloon culture, "Anna Christie" only superficially challenged middle-class opprobrium for saloons and, paradoxically, tacitly affirmed middle-class judgments.

This compromise becomes evident upon closer inspection of the first-act revisions from Chris to "Anna Christie," namely, the minimizing of intoxication. First of all, the omissions of drunkenness from the opening of "Anna Christie" involve a compromise of verisimilitude. As Arthur and Barbara Gelb have shown about the source of the first-act setting, "cheap whiskey was the lure at Jimmy the Priest's," which was, in O'Neill's words, "a saloon of the lowest type of grog shop."³² Intoxication was not merely a consequence of working-class leisure culture but frequently the goal: it was an escape from the drudgery of lives in sweatshops and tenements, or on the docks and at sea. Since the stigma of "sodden drunks" and "alcoholic narcosis" was so prevalent within the discourse of temperance during this time, it may have been reasonable to assume that downplaying this disreputable side of saloon culture would serve as resistance to dry hegemony. After all, scenes like those between Jack Burns and Adams or among Chris, Mickey, and Devlin could justify or invigorate temperance propaganda. Denying this realism of saloon life, however, is inherently problematic, because it involves defining reality in terms of ideology, that is, whitewashing saloon culture to fit into the social and moral norms of the middle class. A scene from "Anna Christie" hints at this problem. When Chris returns from his stew and finds Anna waiting for him, he wants her to come with him right away: "Dis ain't good place for young gel" because "only no good sailor fallar come here for gat drunk" (976). While Chris acknowledges that the ambitions of saloon habitués are uncomplicated, his point is that such ambitions should not be witnessed by anyone aspiring to respectability. His parroting of middle-class values shows what Keith Gandal has argued about those values becoming hegemonic and regulating aspirations, if not custom, among the lower classes.³³ O'Neill does something of the same thing with the minimizing of drunkenness in "Anna Christie"; by not allowing audiences to witness sailors getting drunk, he affirms the notion that such behavior has no place in the worldview of the middle class.

Revisions beyond the first acts only compound this compromise. In act 1, scene 2, Chris and Anna are on the barge, adrift in shipping lanes, because the "fallar on the barge tree" was so drunk that he threw Chris a "rotten ole tow line" that broke during the voyage. At the mercy of the sea that he fears so much, Chris vents his anger against the sailor: "He keep drunk all voyage on bottles, Ay bet . . . and ven line snap he asleep, he's too drunk, he don't know nothing happen—don't give damn eider." With this situation, O'Neill defines drunkenness (and the saloon that facilitates it) as complicit in the impending demise of father and daughter because of both negligence toward the drunken sailor's duty and indifference toward the welfare of others. Not limited to Chris, this judgment echoes through act 2, scene 1, in the quarters of Captain Jessup, captain of the Londonderry that hits Chris's barge, scuttling it, though the crew rescues Chris and Anna. As the rescue unfolds, Jessup complains about the accident: "Drunk, I suppose—and forgot to blow any horn. A nice go! Well, we'll make the beggars sweat for their passage down to give them a lesson."³⁴

Although liability falls on the "fallar on the barge tree" instead of Chris, the conflation of intoxication, negligence, and indifference proves accurate in this circumstance. What this suggests is the menace involved in drunkenness to both middle-class lives (of Anna, who in this version is a typist from Leeds who never drinks; of Captain Jessup, and even of Andersen, the second mate who eventually aspires to middle-class respectability in this version) and to middle-class aspirations (commerce and capitalism, threatened by the potential damage to the Londonderry). Linked with the saloon thematically by the sequence of scenes and logically as the source of the alcohol that keeps the sailor drunk "all voyage," drinking and intoxication are indelibly connected as threats in Chris, but not in "Anna Christie," where both scenes are omitted. These omissions have an easy explanation: Chris and Anna do the rescuing in "Anna Christie" instead of being rescued. But the omission of such threatening representations of drinking and drunkenness corresponds with the previous point: that this behavior must be hidden from the perspective of the middle class, which comes to regulate the "reality" of lower-class life.

Admittedly, this particular point would only be evident to theatergoers who managed to see Chris during its limited runs in New Jersey and Philadelphia and compare it to "Anna Christie" thereafter. Undoubtedly there were few such theatergoers. But the same ideological apprehensions about drunkenness persist in "Anna Christie," surrounding Mat Burke, the sailor whom Anna will marry. Learning about Anna's past during act 3, Mat stumbles toward the nearest saloon where he drinks "oceans of booze" to forget her. When he returns in act 4, the signs of his two-day binge are indisputable: his "clothes [are] torn and dirty, covered with sawdust as if he had been groveling or sleeping on barroom floors"; a "red bruise [is] on his forehead over one of his eyes, another over one cheekbone"; and "his knuckles are skinned and raw." Explaining these signs, Mat tells Anna how when the booze wasn't enough to forget her, he turned to violence: "I'd be hitting one a clout on the mug" but "it wasn't his face I'd be seeing at all, but yours" (1019, 1017).

Here, Mat not only describes the "blind idiocy of drunken violence" that temperance organizations warned against; he epitomizes it. Bruised and beaten, Mat confirms the worst fears of middle-class reformers about saloons: they stand in direct contrast to culture and civilization, enabling, even promoting the sort of libidinal outbursts, because of intoxication, to which Mat's body is a testament. The only culture found in this saloon—and by extension, any saloon perhaps—is one of debauchery and dissolution, the total opposite of the sympathetic and pleasurable culture of drinking that O'Neill took pains to dramatize during act 1. It hardly matters that this drunken violence occurs offstage. Mat's body is a semiotically apprehensible text for those familiar with temperance arguments of the early twentieth century. In fact, subjecting this scene to diegesis corresponds with the pattern of omission considered above: corroborating the threat inherent in saloons to middle-class values and lives, while tacitly suggesting the Foucauldian premise that this sort of drunkenness must be contained and regulated—in society through Prohibition, in theater through elision.

In The Ole Davil, an intermediary version between Chris Christophersen and "Anna Christie," O'Neill includes a scene that potentially mediates this problem. Act 4 begins with the Donkeyman, who runs the "donkey engine" on the barge, asking Anna if she knows where Chris has been during the last two days. "He's on a drunk, that's all," she says bitterly. Surprised not by her answer but instead by her tone, he tenders a mollifying response: "Well, all of us goes on a bust at times. . . . I've been doing my best to cover him up and keep things going as if he was on board." He then offers to "take a look in some of the places I know and see if he's there."³⁵ Here O'Neill leaves Chris's drunken binge offstage, as he does Mat's, but he does not attempt to hide or condemn it. If anything, the Donkeyman's response to Chris's drunken absence, which he had already guessed, minimizes the anxiety about drunkenness that was so prevalent in Chris and which persists in relation to Mat in "Anna Christie." First, he attributes such behavior to the difficult lives of the working class, all of whom "goes on a bust" while simultaneously suggesting that this behavior is infrequent; it only happens "at times." Second, he has covered for Chris during his absence, suggesting that the working classes can self-regulate drunkenness in such a way as to not disrupt industry or commerce, as in the scene with Larry in "Anna Christie." O'Neill cut this scene from "Anna Christie" because, according to Travis Bogard, it contains "unnecessary exposition" for the story of Anna, Mat, and Chris.³⁶ Yet it contains an important gesture in terms of representing the saloon in that it offers a way out of the double-bind O'Neill attempts to negotiate during the composition of Chris and "Anna Christie." Neither celebrating nor obfuscating drinking and intoxication, it instead redefines both as ordinary but infrequent aspects of working-class life. As such, this scene could have moderated the apprehensions associated with Mat's return from his "bust" in act 4.

Without this or a similar scene in "Anna Christie," O'Neill implicitly confirms the interplay of drunkenness and dissolution advocated in temperance propaganda in a different scene, this one in act 2. Apologizing for trying to kiss Anna after being hauled out of the sea, Mat describes himself as torn between two worlds: that of "them cows on the waterfront" that he had known in the saloons he had visited when in port, and that of the "fine, dacent girl" that he believes Anna to be. As Anna ministers to him, he describes his history: "The only women you'd meet in the ports of the world who'd be willing to speak you a kind word isn't a woman at all. You know the kind I mane, and they're a poor, wicked lot." But a shift to his future reveals intriguing class-aspirations: if he could marry a "dacent girl" then he would "be able to have a little house and be home to it wan week out of four. . . . 'Tis no more drinking and roving I'd be doing then, but giving my pay day into her hand and staying at home with her meek as a lamb each night of the week I'd be in port" (987, 990-91).

Although Mat never uses the phrase "middle class," his ambitions correspond closely with these values: family, property, decency—notably all coming at the expense of his "roving" and "drinking" in saloons. His subjunctive aspirations, in other words, correspond not only with middle-class markers of success but further with the dichotomy of saloon life and middle-class respectability. To have one, he must absolve himself of the other. Like Chris before him, he parrots middle-class notions, in particular, the idea that, as Pegram writes, "'the saloon was 'the deadliest enemy of the American home.'"³⁷ Again, O'Neill seems to fall into much the same trap of confirming middle-class assumptions with Mat as with Chris, considering how the dichotomy of saloon/home extends through the final act, with Anna's repentance, Mat's proposal, and the possibility of buying a little home for Mat and Chris—the "happy ending" that so frustrated critics. However much "Anna Christie" evinces sympathy for working-class saloons, middle-class values remain hegemonic in terms of decorum, decency, and ambitions.

"Stalest of All My Plays": Conclusion

Because of such ideological contradictions, "Anna Christie" does not succeed as a saloon play, but this deviation offers interesting insights into O'Neill's personal and professional affiliation both in 1921 and 1941. During the period of composition from Chris Christophersen through the production of "Anna Christie," it's clear that O'Neill's sympathy was with the "bums and outcasts" of Jimmy the Priest's and the Hell Hole. In fact, his opinion about saloon life was probably in line with what Jack London, one of his favorite authors, said in John Barleycorn: saloons were "terribly wonderful places" where "life was different."³⁸ In his letters to Boulton, O'Neill fondly described this difference—what historians describe as the "democracy" and the "ethic of mutuality" enjoyed by working-class saloon patrons. In his autobiographical plays, decades later, he celebrated this difference in the otherwise out-of-character generosity of James O'Neill in Long Day's Journey Into Night, who bought drinks for all his companions in bars, and in the despairing community dramatized in The Iceman Cometh. In these plays, this celebration of democracy and mutuality in the saloon implies an alternative, a different mode of engagement with others, which stands outside of middle-class assumptions of individuality, competition, and prosperity.

The trouble with "Anna Christie" is that O'Neill can neither escape (epistemologically) nor oppose (ideologically) the middle-class assumptions that defined this difference as menacing its way of life. As historians have argued, temperance campaigns and Prohibition were driven by middle-class anxiety about working-class saloons since they challenged bourgeois values of "self-confidence, conscience, sexual discipline, measurable accomplishment, loyalty, reverence, responsibility, respect."³⁹ Because O'Neill could not extricate himself from this dichotomy, he found himself caught in a catch-22. To dramatize saloon culture honestly, with its more disreputable elements, was to potentially energize temperance arguments. To dramatize saloon culture euphemistically, without those elements, was to capitulate to middle-class assumptions. With "Anna Christie," O'Neill fell between two stools: while trying to do neither, he did both.

Given O'Neill's aversion to the middle class from even his early plays, why did the middle class exert such influence over his writing about saloons?⁴⁰ This question brings us to O'Neill's affiliations in 1921, a period when he was establishing himself as a playwright. After the success of Beyond the Horizon in 1920, his theatrical achievement was increasingly less dependent on amateur companies, like the Provincetown Players, with which he could operate outside the social mainstream, and more affiliated with the middle-class audiences of Broadway. In a way, Chris-"Anna Christie" emerges from and marks not only a crucial cultural moment of reflection about alcohol and class but also a crucial moment in the career of Eugene O'Neill, when his sympathy for the "bums and outcasts" of Jimmy the Priest's were at odds with his mandate to be "an artist or nothing."

I don't think O'Neill deliberately compromised his allegiance as much as he was torn between competing impulses that he could not successfully reconcile. In an article originally published in The Reporter in 1957, Malcolm Cowley's remembrance of a weekend with O'Neill, in 1923, not long after the debut of "Anna Christie," offers some circumstantial evidence supporting this explanation. "I think that for [O'Neill]," says Cowley, "the world was divided into downtowners and uptowners. . . . [O'Neill] entered the uptown world with trepidation and in disguise, almost like a scout in enemy country, fearful of being caught and condemned to death or forced to abandon his loyalties."⁴¹ This anxiety about loyalty is evident in "Anna Christie" not only to the sailors he had known in the waterfront saloons but in the culture that they had in those saloons. That O'Neill compromised his loyalty in 1921 may be part of why he was so frustrated with "Anna Christie" in 1941, especially considering his recent completion of The Iceman Cometh, a saloon play that honored the perspective of downtowners rather than uptowners. Perhaps that's why it was, to O'Neill, "worth a hundred 'Anna Christies.'"