The Theater: The Ordeal of Eugene O'Neill

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During those first years, according to O'Neill's great friend, George Jean Nathan (in the October American Mercury), the playwright:

¶ Outlined "in minute detail" the cycle of plays (which had grown to eleven) to be called (according to rumor) A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.

¶ "Definitely completed seven of them, including the three double-length ones, and got pretty well into the eighth."

¶ Completed three other plays: A Moon for the Misbegotten (which will be produced in December), A Touch of the Poet (which will be produced next year), Long Day's Journey into Night, which, for reasons unspecified, cannot be produced until 25 years after the author's death.

¶ "Completed the first play of a much shorter and entirely different cycle. . . ."

¶ "Gradually convinced himself . . . that his dramaturgical plan [for the cycle] was faulty"—the cycle should tell of one family, not two—and "without further ado . . . destroyed two of the double-length or four of the plays he had written. . . ." (In his time, O'Neill has ruthlessly scrapped several other plays.)

¶ Conceived "an exciting idea for another play which bears no relation to the cycle."

¶ "Made copious notes on at least three or four" other plays.

The Coming of Catastrophe. O'Neill's idyllic quiet, which was ultimately to be destroyed by illness, was first invaded by something more sinister. By 1938 the sickening geologic slipping and faulting of world affairs had so profoundly disturbed him that he had gone stale on his cycle. By 1939 he turned, for relief, to The Iceman Cometh. By 1940, his whole scheme of work began to fall apart. His financial and personal relationships were untouched; his leisure for work was still unlimited. But some subtle, insidious things (and some brutally simple ones) destroyed the apparent perfection of his life.

O'Neill loved and venerated France as holy ground; when the Germans moved in, O'Neill says, he felt as though they had moved on to the next ranch. Thenceforth he found it all but impossible to keep on writing at all. When their servants left to do war work, the O'Neills in their big establishment were stranded as literally as a beached vessel. (Neither of them has ever learned to drive a car.)

So they sold their house, stored most of their belongings, and moved into a three-room apartment on San Francisco's California Street. There O'Neill suffered a paralytic stroke and for six months required constant nursing. The stroke was followed by an increasing (and incurable) palsy so severe that it made writing as physically impossible for O'Neill as it already was mentally. (To shave himself he still has to grip the razor with both hands and, even so, the act is nerve-racking.) For five years the O'Neills lived in their little apartment. During those years, O'Neill had neither the heart nor the hand for creative work. But those years of silence and suffering may yet prove the most formative and productive years of his life. For there is no chemistry to equal that which works in the marriage of catastrophe with a courageous heart.