Correcting Some Errors in Annals of O’Neill

1 COMPARATIVE drama Volume 17 Fall 1983 Number 3 Correcting Some Errors in Annals of O’Neill Louis Sheaffer “It is extraordinarily moving to find the inmost track of a man’s life and to decipher the signs he has left us.” Saul Bellow, The New York Review of Books, Feb. 17, 1983. Eugene O’Neill was generally critical of what was written about him. When his first biographer, Barrett H. Clark, sent him a sketch based on a number of sources—on interviews and articles in newspapers and magazines, on material drawn from questioning O’Neill’s friends and associates—the playwright wrote back that the sketch “is legend. It isn’t really true. It isn’t I” {Clark, p. 7). Decades later he sounded a similar note while reminiscing about his life to Hamilton Basso, who was writing a “Profile” of him for The New Yorker. (This was the last time he ever was interviewed for public print.) After his wife Carlotta Mon­ terey had interjected, in one of his sessions with Basso, that “nearly everything” that had been written about him was “all wrong,” O’Neill added: “What Carlotta just said is true. Nearly LOUIS SHEAFFER is the author of the two-volume biography, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (1968), which won the George Freedley Award of the Theater Library Association as the best theater book of its year, and O’Neill: Son and Artist, winner of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for biography. 201 everything that has been said about me is all wrong” (Basso, 3/13/48). Since he felt this way, you would imagine that he must have made some efforts to correct the record; yet, on the whole, the opposite appears true. According to Barrett Clark, Miss Mon­ terey once told him that she had “discussed with her husband the anecdotes I had picked up from time to time. She had had ‘quite a talk about these things, and I begged him to take the time some day and go over them with you, straightening out the anecdotes, putting “truth” in them! He said, “Nonsense, what do I care what they say—the further from the truth they have it, the more privacy I have! It’s like a mask!” ’ ” (Clark, p. 8) O’Neill did more than take comfort from his “mask”; he helped to create it. From years of researching his life to write a comprehensive biography, I found a good many errors in print, chiefly about the years before he became famous, and it turned out that some of them could be traced to O’Neill himself. He gave misleading impressions or accounts, for instance, of his seagoing career, of his suicide attempt at Jimmy the Priest’s (the waterfront dive that would give him material for both Anna Christie and The Iceman Cometh) and of his brief fling at acting with his father in vaudeville. By and large, however, others were responsible for the errors that I have noted and corrected here. (For the sources identified by a catchword in the text, see the list of works cited at the end of the article.) * * * Forebears. “I know little about my father’s parents,” Eugene replied to a writer who was working on a monograph of James O’Neill. “Or about his brothers and sisters. He had two older brothers, I think. I remember him saying one brother served in the Civil War . . . was wounded, never fully recovered and died right after the war. He had three sisters, all dead now [in 1940], whom he never saw except when a theatrical tour brought him to the Middle West where they lived” (San Francisco). In one respect, regarding the sisters, O’Neill’s account is inaccurate. According to Mary Keenan, a cousin of the play­ wright, James O’Neill had five sisters, not three, while yet an­ other relative, Manley W. Mallett, who has done extensive genealogical research on the O’Neills, discovered that there were six. The following family history is partly based on Mr. 202 Comparative Drama Louis Sheaffer 203 Mallett’s summary of his findings. (Letter from MWM to LS, 11/12/74; for previous accounts of James O...