Boy with a Book

The following monologue is inspired by the photograph of the O’Neill family, minus Ella, sitting in rocking chairs on the porch of their New London home. The young O’Neill has a book in his lap, and he is looking at the book and not at the camera. His father, James, scowls, while older brother Jamie simply stares. The monologue imagines what the boy is thinking as a rare family photograph is taken.

The challenge in imagining O’Neill as a child is that his unconventional childhood produced an unconventional child. Even as a child, O’Neill had little understanding of children. According to one biographer, “children would always remain to him a separate race, unfamiliar and without interest.”¹ Until he was sent away to school at the age of seven, O’Neill lived in a world of adults, touring with his parents and his nurse, Sarah Sandy, primarily with The Count of Monte Cristo. O’Neill’s isolation from other children and his own shyness resulted in an inability to talk to children, which eventually would extend to his own children.

As a child, O’Neill showed no interest in the typical childhood pursuits. According to his cousin Phil Sheridan, “He didn’t want to play ball or anything; all he wanted to do was read.”² Most children, if given the opportunity, feel an irrepressible urge to roll in the grass; O’Neill was no such a child. At school, when the boys were allowed to play in the freshly mown hay as a special treat, O’Neill declined the invitation, finding it a curious and unappealing activity.

Instead, he immersed himself in the world of books, particularly stories of adventure, with a reading list that included Captains Courageous and The Jungle Book.³ This served as a form of escape from a chaotic childhood, both on the road and at the summer home in New London. Boarding school brought stability to his life as well as a group of contemporaries with whom he had little in common, still preferring the company of his books to that of his peers.

But as a child he would have thought as a child, seeing the world through a child’s eyes. Whenever the young O’Neill was looking “thoughtful,” the child with the large dark eyes and nervous disposition was asked by his alternately concerned and distant mother, “What are you doing, Eugene?” “Thinking,” he would reply.⁴ This monologue tries to imagine what the boy was thinking on that particular afternoon.

Eugene, James, and Jamie O’Neill on the front porch of Monte Cristo Cottage, ca. 1900. Photographer unknown. (Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O’Neill Collection, Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives, Connecticut College.)

Boy with a Book

Eugene O’Neill, almost 12 years old

Jamie O’Neill, his brother, 22 years old

James O’Neill, his father, 53 years old

Eugene, Jamie, and James O’Neill are seated in rocking chairs on the porch of Monte Cristo Cottage, sitting for a posed “casual” photograph circa 1900. The young Eugene, in short pants, has his nose buried in a book. Jamie, ten years older and dapper in his straw boater, stares straight ahead, and James is scowling in the direction of the camera.

During the monologue, staged as an aside, Jamie and James sit frozen in their poses as Eugene rises from his seat and moves around the rocking chairs of his brother and father, pausing at the edge of the porch to look out to the harbor, and finally returning to his seat, where he resumes reading.

EUGENE

Someone is taking my picture. Mine and Jamie’s and Papa’s. Where is Mama? I haven’t seen her since breakfast. She was smiling at breakfast. Mama mostly never smiles, but when she does, I like it. Papa never smiles when Mama is happy. Like when she was a girl at the convent school. She was the teachers’ pet.

Papa asks Jamie, “Where is your mother?” Jamie says she went upstairs to rest until lunchtime. Papa...