Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts by Robert M. Dowling (review)

Robert Dowling has been on a scholarly binge not seen among O’Neillians since the great centenary publications by Travis Bogard circa 1988, which included the three-volume Library of America edition of the plays. Even leaving aside Dowling’s 2008 book, Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem, which includes O’Neill but does not showcase his life or work centrally, his output in the past five years has been, to say the least, impressive. Starting in 2009 with the authoritative and comprehensive Critical Companion to Eugene O’Neill, along with the 2011 collection, Eugene O’Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives and the Avant Garde (edited with Eileen Herrmann) and the recently published trove of first-run criticism, Eugene O’Neill: The Contemporary Reviews (with Jackson R. Bryer), and now culminating with this major new major biography, Dowling has effectively updated and in certain respects redefined O’Neill for the current generation of students, scholars, theater professionals, and playgoers.

In Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, Dowling creates a distinctive voice for himself among such other major biographers as Doris Alexander, Stephen Black, the Gelbs, and Louis Sheaffer. In contrast to the most recent full biography, Black’s penetrating 1999 study, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, with its focus on the plays as a process of “self-psychoanalysis,” Dowling offers a portrait of the artist as a man in the world, exploring O’Neill’s complex affiliations with family, friends, spouses, colleagues, institutions, and movements. The playwright himself would have seen in this lively and empathetic biography a realization, in a phrase that Dowling quotes, of the “concise and interest-catching” story that he’d hoped for but did not find in the earliest book-length account of his life, Barrett H. Clark’s 1926 Eugene O’Neill (316). Standing on the shoulders, inevitably, of the established giants among O’Neill biographers, Sheaffer and the Gelbs, and drawing on their research—especially the seemingly inexhaustible Sheaffer Collection at Connecticut College—Dowling nonetheless incorporates some important new primary sources and findings in staking out his place among them.

In the introduction, Dowling accounts for his strong sense of connection to O’Neill with a bit of his own background. He grew up in the same Connecticut-New York terrain that shaped O’Neill’s youth, and in his Irish Catholic upbringing Irishness turned out to be the stronger element, as it did for O’Neill. Dowling credits an unnamed student in one of his O’Neill seminars with a remark that led to the subtitle and structure of this book: that O’Neill’s own life is itself a great dramatic text, presumably one that biographers must continually revisit and reinterpret much as directors continually revisit classic plays. Though the basic narrative does not deviate significantly from the pattern established by the Gelbs and Sheaffer, Dowling has a knack for making O’Neill’s world stand out in sharp relief with such telling details as this image of Provincetown Harbor in 1916, the year and place of the first stage production of an O’Neill play: “Slick with seagull droppings and cod guts and strewn with tangled nets … the briny fumes of the daily catch steamed up off the harbor’s more than fifty wharves” (125). As if with an air of fond reminiscence, Dowling offers this on the food at the Golden Swan, or Hell Hole, the New York dive saloon that served as one model for the setting of The Iceman Cometh and other plays: “Food was ordered and retrieved through a jagged hole in the wall—the sandwich or bowl of spaghetti or stewed tomatoes you could get were all pretty good, considering the orifice they had come out of” (117). Biography is a special kind of dramatic art, and Dowling convincingly recreates the drama of O’Neill’s life with...