Eugene O'Neill and His Early Contemporaries: Bohemians, Radicals, Progressives, and the Avant Garde

This collection of eleven new and three reprinted essays makes O'Neill not just the descendent of Ibsen and Strindberg and under the influence of German expressionists but also places him rightfully among pre-World War I aesthetic modernists and among Greenwich Village's political radicals.

From these essays we learn that O'Neill attended ten performances of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1907, the year he was expelled from Princeton; he had already been introduced by Louis Holladay to Benjamin Tucker, editor of the anarchist journal Liberty and bookstore owner who featured the works of anarchist Max Stirner, along with those of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and Shaw. After living with his family for a while in the Hotel Lucerne, O'Neill moved in 1908 to the Arcade Building, where he shared a studio with painter George Bellows, and through whom he met Ash Can painter Robert Henri, the model for Grammont in O'Neill's Bread and Butter. During all of his New York stays, O'Neill frequented dives such as Jimmy-the-Priest's and the Hell Hole.

After impregnating his first wife Kathleen Jenkins in August 1909, O'Neill deserted her in October by running off to Honduras prospecting, where he got not gold but malaria. Returning to New York, O'Neill set sail on the square rigger Charles Racine, more passenger than seaman. He encountered a hurricane and later was becalmed for days. Landed in Buenos Aires, he lived as a beachcomber and through odd jobs—perhaps taking donkeys to South Africa (or maybe not), working in a meat-packing plant. In March of 1911 O'Neill signed on as an ordinary seaman on the steamship Ikala, which returned him to New York and Jimmy-the-Priest's boardinghouse (the setting for Iceman), and in July he sailed on the SS New York for Southampton, where he witnessed the maritime strikes sweeping England. In August, now an able-bodied seaman—an elevation of rank—he sailed on the SS Philadelphia back to New York and Jimmy-the-Priest's once again. That fall O'Neill attended the six-week tour of the Abbey Players, taking in their naturalistic acting style, so different from his father's, in plays by Shaw and Synge. On New Year's Eve 1912, O'Neill attempted suicide with an overdose of veronal and was rescued by fellow lodgers. Leaving New York, he joined his father, James O'Neill, on tour and returned with his family to New London, Connecticut, getting a job through his father on the New London Telegraph, until he displayed the symptoms of tuberculosis that sent him to a sanitarium in December; that period with his family, with his mother's struggling with her drug addiction, is portrayed in Long Day's Journey Into Night.

At the sanitarium he read widely in dramatic literature and resolved to become a playwright. Upon returning home, he wrote the plays that James O'Neill had privately printed as Thirst and Other One Act Plays in 1914, including plays that drew upon his sea adventures. That fall O'Neill entered George Pierce Baker's playwriting course at Harvard. Bread and Butter, a play he wrote in 1914, focused on the conflict between art and making a living, but also featured anarchist artist Grammont, and by this time O'Neill was calling himself an anarchist. He briefly worked for Hippolyte Havel's anarchist weekly Revolt in 1915. Through Havel (the model for Hugo Kalmar in Iceman), O'Neill met fellow anarchist Terry Carlin, who the next summer would take him to Provincetown and introduce him to another anarchist, Hutchins Hapgood, cofounder with George Cram Cook and Susan Glaspell of the Provincetown Players, and the rest is history—but it is history with a politically radical and Bohemian base.

Patrick Chura's initial essay, one of the reprinted articles, sets the tone with O'Neill's presenting himself to the Provincetown group as a recently working able-bodied seaman, thus able to speak to the middle class about the plight of the working poor, as well as his friendship with Jack Reed. Robert A. Richter then carefully details O'Neill's limited time as a working sailor, including his stay in Southampton during the national maritime strike. Richter also explores O'Neill's idealization of working on sailing ships, which were already being replaced by steam power.

Cynthia McCown, in a long and detailed essay, examines O'Neill's maturation after his suicide attempt in 1912 and the biographical and psychological bases of characters and their actions in both early and late plays. Nelson Ritschel's chapter traces the influence of the Abbey Irish Theatre, as well as the influence of its playwrights. Thierry Dubost focuses on the marginalization of the Irish in O'Neill's plays and how the playwright, while denouncing capitalism, espoused no other philosophy, seeing no cure whatsoever for America's dystopia.

Drew Eisenhauer investigates the period when O'Neill shared quarters with two young painters associated with the Ash Can school, arguing that O'Neill saw the modern artist as "part of the context of bourgeois modernity" (128), particularly through the forces of economics and marriage; that is, if one wants to support a family, one's art must sell. Eisenhauer also notes that O'Neill's early radical plays were performed before an equally radical, and therefore receptive, audience.

Doris Alexander's reprinted essay examines the reality of the model (Hippolyte Havel) behind Iceman's Hugo Kalmar and believes the play is weakened because its accurate representation of eccentric, aimless drunks distances its discussion of believing in illusions from "normal" audiences. Donald P. Gagnon focuses on Iceman's black Joe Mott (who recurs by name in August Wilson's Radio Golf) as an expression of O'Neill's criticism of American capitalism and as one of O'Neill's characters who attempt "expiation for their guilts," failings, and psychological woes in the face of a deterministic universe that will ultimately destroy them.

Jeff Kennedy provides a detailed, comprehensive history of the Provincetown Players and O'Neill's association with it. Zander Brietzke uses a scene from the film Reds to discuss O'Neill's ambivalence about political and social radicalism on the one hand, and about realism and modernism in art on the other. Brietzke reads the plays as showing that radical political action was an expression of human desire and sexual need, but that love was never a permanent answer, as Long Day's Journey makes clear. Eileen Herrmann links O'Neill to Dorothy Day—journalist, social reformer, nominee for Catholic sainthood in 2000—and to Francis Thompson's poem "The Hound of Heaven," which O'Neill had memorized. In 1917 and 1918 Day was O'Neill's friend and drinking companion, with whom he could discuss literature and religion, including Thompson's poem, but evidently never his lover. Both felt the need for certainties unavailable to them at the time. Day, after a Bohemian youth given over to radical activism, converted to Catholicism and continued her activism within the Church; O'Neill never found the answer he was looking for.

David Roessel looks at Mike Gold's association with the Provincetown Players and with O'Neill. As a dedicated communist, Gold praised both for their early proletarian efforts and then criticized both when he saw art taking precedence over propaganda. Joseph Dorinson examines O'Neill's link with Paul Robeson, both theatrically and psychologically, and O'Neill's insistence on providing African American actors with their first roles in white companies in major New York productions. The concluding essay, a reprint of Robert M. Dowling's recent O'Neill Review article, investigates O'Neill's philosophical anarchism, its roots, and its distinction from Emma Goldman's more violent anarchist actions. The volume includes a helpful chronology from O'Neill's birth to 1928, the year he won his third Pulitzer for Strange Interlude and left the United States for Europe with Carlotta Monterey, who would become his third wife the following year.

In sum, this is a valuable and useful book for those studying O'Neill's formation as a playwright, particularly the forces—philosophical and artistic—then working on him. It details and explains what's at work in many of the early one-acts, as well as casting light on later plays, particularly Iceman. It collects and interprets information from many biographies, memoirs, and original sources, adding some that I have never seen before. Its strength—a comprehensive look at O'Neill as formative playwright—is also its limitation, in that its time-specific focus shifts attention from later plays. But it should be in the library of every O'Neill scholar and in the hands of those curious about our only Nobel Prize-winning playwright's early development.