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  • Eugene O’Neill’s ExorcismThe Lost Prequel to Long Day’s Journey Into Night
  • Robert M. Dowling (bio)

The day I quit smoking was October 10, 2010. As part of my ongoing research on O’Neill, I had just interviewed the 101-year-old nurse Katherine Albertoni, who for years took care of the Nobel Prize–winning playwright. Now retired, Mrs. Albertoni lives on the West Coast, and I took advantage of the long flight back east to end the habit. Once home, I realized with frustration that writing up my notes on the interview was out of the question, much too heady a task in the early stages of withdrawal. To distract myself in those unexpected moments when the desire for a lungful became unbearable, I settled in front of the computer and conducted extensive Internet searches for O’Neill’s lost one-act play Exorcism—the undisputed holy grail for generations of O’Neill scholars.

After typing the words “Exorcism O’Neill manuscript archive” or some variation, I clicked through pages of university archives, foreign libraries, old-timey theater magazines, book dealers’ websites, the papers of O’Neill’s friends and associates. (The most profitable research is generally done at archives, of course, but these days, as with any profession I suspect, researchers ignore the Internet at their peril.) Any direct reference to the lost work would dwindle away after a page or two; lengthier searches based on subtle but promising leads would divulge themselves eventually as yet another freefall down the rabbit hole.

The following June, at the Eighth International Conference on Eugene O’Neill, an astounding trace of the play’s continued existence, in fact, surfaced at a preview of playwright Tony Kushner and composer Jeanine Tesori’s A Blizzard at Marblehead Neck, an operetta based on a violent quarrel between O’Neill and his third wife, Carlotta Monterey, that left [End Page 1] O’Neill in traction and Carlotta institutionalized. During the talkback after the performance, an audience member mentioned how unfortunate it was that Exorcism no longer existed. “But it does exist!” shouted Arthur Gelb, a veteran O’Neill biographer. Gelb told me the following day that the dealer who bought the script had contacted him, but he hadn’t yet seen or authenticated it. I redoubled my efforts online.

The dispiriting tale of Exorcism’s loss is well known among O’Neillians: After the play had a two-week run in 1920 at the Playwrights’ Theatre in Greenwich Village, O’Neill contacted the Provincetown Players’ secretary, M. Eleanor “Fitzie” Fitzgerald, and requested the return of all copies of the script, then destroyed them upon receipt. All that survived was one page of work diary notes and a handful of reviews that ran the gamut from the near rhapsodic (New York Times) to the patently disappointed (New York Tribune).1 In 1922 O’Neill wrote the bookstore proprietor Frank Shay that “‘Exorcism’ has been destroyed . . . and the sooner all memory of it dies the better pleased I’ll be.”2

Then one morning—Friday, September 16, 2011, to be exact—there it was. Near the bottom of the first search page was listed a notice from Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The caption at the bottom of its second page read: “Eugene O’Neill, ‘Exorcism: A Play in One Act,’ draft, typescript, corrected, 1919.” I called the Beinecke for a copy a few minutes later, and the librarian told me to check online in their digital images. Sure enough, the entire script had been uploaded. My next breathless hour or two was spent absorbing the play, utterly entranced, delighting over its references and echoes. Once the Beinecke’s fiction and drama curator, Louise Bernard, learned I had accessed it, the images were immediately taken offline, within the hour in fact. Yale had negotiated a deal with the New Yorker, which acquired it for publication, agreeing to keep its existence under wraps until the release date. Not a bother. I already had it downloaded on my computer for later, more clearheaded scrutiny.

A month after my sneak preview of Exorcism, the New Yorker stunned the literary world by publishing the...

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