“An Artist or Nothing”: The Journey of Eugene O’Neill

Autobiography into art: What dramatist has practiced this alchemy as relentlessly, and as magically, as Eugene O’Neill? His was a career-long theater of memory; his plays constitute an ongoing project of reinterpretation of his personal past. Beginning in 1920 with his Broadway debut, Beyond the Horizon, for nearly two dozen years and as many plays he compulsively re-imagined and reconfigured his family romance, culminating in his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night. “No dramatist to this day,” Harold Bloom writes, “has matched O’Neill in depicting the nightmare realities that can afflict American family life, indeed family life in the twentieth-century Western world.”

Tracing the correspondences between life and art has been the inevitable task of O’Neill’s biographers. It has been ably accomplished. Arthur and Barbara Gelb’s groundbreaking life in 1962 was nearly single-minded in identifying their subject’s real-life analogues. Their biography has been enhanced by Louis Sheaffer’s splendid (and probably definitive) two-volume account. The significant facts of O’Neill’s life have been firmly established. A devoted playgoer probably can identify what resident of the Hell Hole inspired what denizen in Harry Hope’s hotel.

What remain are minutiae, as demonstrated at intolerable length in Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts, a new biography by Robert M. Dowling, a professor at Central Connecticut State University. The book is a grab bag of trivia, a distressing amount of it peripheral to its subject (like that his real estate agent in Maine, Ervin Bean, was the “brother of clothing magnate L. L. Bean”). At least one can savor such tidbits like the fact that Ingrid Bergman visited O’Neill while the actress was playing Anna Christie in San Francisco, or the anecdote about the 22-year-old Marlon Brando truculently dismissing The Iceman Cometh during an audition for the play. (“He’s got something,” an amused O’Neill commented.) The knowledge that O’Neill’s second marriage was technically bigamous because his first divorce decree stipulated that he could not remarry has, at least, a prurient interest. But nothing is gained from Professor Dowling’s seeming determination to reprint every scrap of doggerel O’Neill ever put on paper during his self-consciously intense youth. (“Everybody writes poetry when he’s young,” O’Neill once said; he rejected a publisher’s offer to reprint his attempts at verse, saying, correctly, “It would be a shame to waste good type on such nonsense.”)

Curiously pointless (and atrociously written to boot), Eugene O’Neill: A Life in Four Acts is puzzlingly unconcerned with its subject’s evolving interpretations of the facts of his life. In the chronicle of an artist, this is inexcusable. The real-life sources of a writer’s imagination may be requisite for his biography, but such knowledge is only the starting point toward understanding his art. What matter more are the variances. An artist’s inspiration is discontent: The world he creates is one he finds more comprehensible (if not necessarily more comfortable). Instead of interpreting the work in terms of the life, the more valid and revelatory method is to interpret the life in terms of the art.

The inadequacy of Professor Dowling’s approach is illustrated by his treatment of his single interesting discovery, that a pre-production reading of Sidney Howard’s 1925 Pulitzer Prize-winner, They Knew What They Wanted, inspired O’Neill (unconsciously, all agree) to write Desire Under the Elms. Dowling treats this as a “Gotcha!” He does not discuss why the same situation—an elderly farmer marries a much younger woman, and later discovers her baby was fathered adulterously by a young farmhand—resulted in crowd-pleasing comedy for Howard but baroque drama for O’Neill. If Desire Under the Elms were to be put to music, the resources of grand opera would be required. They Knew What They Wanted was adapted by Frank Loesser for an enjoyable musical comedy, The Most Happy Fella, whose hit song was “Standing on the Corner (Watching All the Girls Go By...