45

Eugene O'Neill

1888–1953

 

The first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1936), Eugene O'Neill was also the major dramatist of the Irish community in America.  All his plays, with their sense of doomed misfortune, reflect not only his own personal experience but also those of many Irish people, in Ireland and abroad.

      His grim patriarchs, his doomed mothers, the curse of alcohol - all of this was presented with an almost Greek sense of tragedy as an essential part of the human condition.  After his death, Time magazine commented that 'Before O'Neill, the US had theatre; after him it had drama.'

      The Nobel citation said that the reward was 'for the power, honesty, and deep-felt emotion of his dramatic work, which embodies an original concept of tragedy'.  That sense of tragedy arose from his experiences as an Irish American.

      Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a New York hotel room on 16th October 1888.  His parents sprang directly from Irish roots.  His father, James O'Neill, was a prominent actor and a theatrical idol of the day; his mother was Ella Quinlan.  James O'Neill had been born in Ireland in 1849 and was brought to America by his parents at the age of five.  He was on the stage and getting leading roles in New York when he became typecast in 1882 as Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Such was his success that he played the role over six thousand times.  An Irish nationalist, he gave his son the second name of Gladstone out of admiration for the British prime minister who introduced the first Irish home rule bill in 1886.

      Ella O'Neill was neurotic, shy, and mystically inclined, and the over-emotional nature of his parents' relationship deeply affected Eugene.  Both his parents were Catholics, but despite his education from the Sisters of Charity and the De La Salle Brothers, he had lost his faith by the age of fifteen and refused to go to church any longer.  Religion became merely an episode of growth, but it lingered in the depths of his feelings nevertheless.  Here there is a strong parallel with that other creative artist of the Irish tradition, JAMES JOYCE [25].  At this time O'Neill also learned that his mother had become addicted to the morphine she took to ease her post-childbirth pains.  All his life he would struggle with a sense of the cruel nature of God, fate, or the universe, whatever it was that made people's lives hell.

      O'Neill completed his early education at Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1906, and secured entry to Princeton University.  But this lasted only a year, and he was thrown out.  His only other formal education was a playwriting course taken in 1914 at Harvard in Professor G.P. Baker's famous Forty-seven Workshop.

      Between 1907, when he dropped out of college, and 1913, O'Neill did many things.  For a while he lived a rakish life in Greenwich Village; he toured with his father's production of The Count of Monte Cristo as assistant manager, worked as a secretary, sailed as a seaman, prospected for gold in Honduras (where he suffered from malaria), and starved as a newspaper reporter.  He wrote poetry, and later contracted tuberculosis.  He also tried to commit suicide.  If nothing else, these adventures gave him a wider view of life than the college classroom would have provided.

      While recovering from tuberculosis, then an often fatal condition, he began to write.  Thirst, his first play, was produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, and started a long association.  However, it was his next play, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920, that confirmed the arrival of a major new American dramatic talent.  It won the Pulitzer Prize, and brought recognition to O'Neill as one of America's most important playwrights.

      This was followed by Anna Christie, Emperor Jones, and The Hairy Ape.  All were vivid, powerful plays.  Of Anna Christie (1921), he said, 'The play has no ending.  Three characters have been revealed in all their intrinsic verity, under the acid test of a fateful crisis in their lives'.

      He produced an immense body of work, some forty-five plays, varying from elaborate tragedies to light entertainments, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times.  The Nobel Prize was his final crown.  During his career, in search of a deeper meaning and a broader significance to life, O'Neill moved to more symbolic and experimental forms.

      Though the influence of Euripides, Strindberg and Nietzsche can be traced through his work and outlook, there is also an important personal strain.  This lies not only in the highly autobiographical nature of his plays (especially Long Day's Journey into Night), but in the general attempt to recreate the American experience onstage.  He was the first important playwright to attempt this.

      Just as important was the influence of his father, whose always popular melodramas Eugene claimed to despise.  Yet he could not escape his theatrical childhood, nor could he quite escape the Catholic religion, so deeply ingrained in so many Irish Americans.  His own marriage and family life was painful.  He brooded on his sense of sin and guilt, but his characters find little or no forgiveness, grace, or reconciliation.  They are pitted against each other in a narrow space, his themes drawn from the incidents of his own life but given no larger context.  This makes his plays often seem airless and claustrophobic, but this, too, reflects much of the inner American experience.

      Illness forced him to give up writing, and after long years of isolation, Eugene O'Neill died in a Boston hotel room on 27th November 1953.  His last words reflected his sense of doom: 'Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.'  Arthur Miller, a playwright of the new generation, said: 'O'Neill was the great wrestler, fighting God to a standstill.  The theatre will forever need the towering rebuke of his life and his work and his agony.'

      In Eugene O'Neill, America possessed a great writer, one whose life and work influence both his contemporaries and a younger generation of writers.  But the heart of this American dramatist drew on the inner life of the Irish-American community, and on the dark secrets of the emigrants that success in business and politics often hid.