Iris Gilbert

EUGENE O’NEILL

THE MAN BEHIND THE MAGNITUDE

            Chicken Soup is good for the soul; or so the saying goes.  But what happens when the ailments of the soul extend far beyond the sphere that chicken soup can reach?  What happens when the ailments of the soul cause one in desperation to search the world for a place to belong; a place to fit in – somewhere; anywhere - but instead, finds only pain and torment?  What happens when in this quest, “one neither belongs nor is comfortable not belonging?” (Flory 557).  Well, if you are Eugene O’Neill, you write and you do so immensely!  Where chicken soup soothes the common ailment; writing for O’Neill, soothed his complex soul.   

Eugene O’Neill began his writing career in 1913, at the age of 25.  By his death in 1953, he had written nearly 70 dramatics works though some unfinished, some destroyed, and some exist only in manuscript (Bogard, Later Plays vii).  Through many of these works but especially his masterpiece, Long Day’s Journey into Night (which was published three years after his death), earned O’Neill the reputation as the greatest tragic playwright in the 20^th Century.  How does one acquire such status?  Well, to understand this - to understand Eugene, the writer; one must first understand Eugene, the man. 

Eugene Gladstone O’Neill was born on October 16, 1888.  He was the third and youngest son of James and Mary Ellen O’Neill.  James O’Neill, “one of nineteenth-century America’s principal actors, was a “tightfisted, domineering but yet sad and bewildered man” (Raab 333).  Mary Ellen was a “nervous, lonely, morphine addict” who was filled with regret and remorse over lost dreams and a dead son (Raab 333).  “From these few facts, much of O’Neill’s career as a dramatist, and many of the torments of his adolescent and adult life, can be derived.  One incident in particular was traumatic” (Parry 320).

In 1885 at the age of two, Eugene’s brother, Edmund (second child of James and Mary Ellen), was infected with the measles by Eugene’s oldest brother, James, Jr.  As a result, Edmund died, which caused a “complex apportionment of guilt” for Eugene’s parents but especially Mary Ellen which left her “severally emotionally damaged” (Parry 320).  Eugene was conceived as a possible substitute for Edmund but instead of his birth being a source of consolation, it was instead an additional source of grief.  To the numb the pain of Eugene’s birth, Mary Ellen was prescribed morphine and ultimately became and remained addicted until 1914.  The circumstances around Eugene’s birth was foretelling of his adulthood in that he “led a deeply troubled adult life”.  Eugene contracted malaria in Honduras, attempted suicide, suffered a nervous breakdown, was diagnosed with tuberculosis which resulted in time at a sanatorium, was married three times and struggled with alcoholism for a vast majority of his life. 

However, in spite of his troubled life, Eugene became a great writer.  So much so that he is “commonly credited with having moved theater away from the melodrama that characterizes it all through the second half of the nineteenth century” (Raab 331). He was a theater reformer.  O’Neill’s intent in the theater was to produce “a convincing record of interior monologue through means of masks, asides, and stage directions” (Parry 321).

For a period of fifteen years Eugene O’Neill did more to shake the pillars of the naturalistic stage than did any of his contemporaries.  At the last, however, he returned to it, dropped his masks and the asides (though he never managed to drop, nor even to prune, his stage directions), and produced his very best work, in which at long last he seemed at peace in a medium that he had frequently reviled but had never deserted. (Parry 329)

O’Neill, the man, was “greatly intelligent, educated and informed, considerate, witty (often at his own expense), sometimes gentle, sometimes savage, often quietly amusing” (Black 311).   O’Neill, the writer, was an intensely verbal dramatist as well as a physical one; who wasn’t afraid to push the envelope, so to speak.  He was a radical experimentalist in the theater realm who embarked onto uncharted territory. 

            O’Neill, the man of magnitude, won four Pulitzer Prizes (the fourth one posthumously in 1957) and became the only American playwright to win the Nobel Prize for literature.  He died in Boston, in a hotel room, on November 27, 1953.

WORKS CITED

Black, Stephen A.  Rev. of Selected Letters of Eugene O’Neill, ed. Travis Bogard and Jackson R. Bryer.  American Literature May 1989:  310-312.

Flory, Claude R.  Rev. of The Curse of the Misbegotten:  A Tale of the House of O’Neill, by Croswell Bowen.  The English Journal Dec 1959:  557.

Parry, Philip.  “Eugene O’Neill.”  The Oxford Companion to American Literature.  6^th ed.  1995.

Raab, Josef.  “Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”  The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature.  2004.

The Later Plays of Eugene O’Neill.  Ed. Travis Bogard.  New York:  Random House, Inc., 1967.