Family Disasters

By Melvin Maddocks

O'NEILL: SON AND ARTIST

by LOUIS SHEAFFER 750 pages. Little, Brown. $15.

Eugene O'Neill seemed to write as if God (or the Devil) had given him life for just one reason: to shout with every breath that all was a ghastly mistake. "Froth! Rotten!" were his actor father's dying lines, and the playwright son with the eyes of a fallen angel carried on the refrain. "The Great Sickness" was among O'Neill's milder epithets for human existence.

What an extraordinary record O'Neill compiled for a life hater! The second and final volume of Louis Sheaffer's fair-minded biography picks him up, 31 and ascendant, at his Broadway debut with Beyond the Horizon, which won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1920. Between 1920 and 1922 he turned out eight plays. He wrote The Emperor Jones in about two weeks, The Hairy Ape in 2 1/2 and Ah! Wilderness in less than a month.

A dutiful pessimist, O'Neill damned New York as a Sodom and Gomorrah of the arts. But his labors for the New York stage brought him four Pulitzers and a Nobel Prize (in 1936--for Mourning Becomes Electro, O'Neill thought). Strange Interlude netted O'Neill, who was not immune to the charms of money, about $275,000. He inhabited at least three artist's dream palaces, including a 35-room chateau at Le Plessis near Tours. In his closet O'Neill had 75 pairs of shoes; in his drive, a Bugatti roadster. What more could even a black Irishman ask for?

Lots, as it turned out. Almost perversely, O'Neill forced his life to come out as tragically as his scripts by specializing in family disasters. O'Neill families resembled his literary influences: plots by Ibsen, wives by Strindberg. In his 40th year he left Agnes Boulton (mother of Shane and Oona O'Neill), a short-story writer who once fell asleep while he was reading a script to her. His third and last wife never made that mistake. Born Hazel Tharsing, Carlotta Monterey met her fourth husband when she played in The Hairy Ape. Once her eyes, "like wet grapes," fixed on him, she blessed and cursed the playwright with all the attention a writer could dream of.

"Real Love." Carlotta played mistress (a little), mother (a lot), as well as efficient housekeeper and secretary. She intercepted O'Neill's mail, censored his clippings, and jealously screened his friends--especially women. Half a dozen innocent conversations with O'Neill put a very young actress named Patricia Neal on Carlotta's enemy list. Years later, when Miss Neal, then a star, was about to be signed for a revival of Desire Under the Elms, Carlotta vetoed the casting. Yet by her fanatical possessiveness Carlotta gave O'Neill both the protection he needed as a practicing artist and the pain he needed as a practicing masochist--which may be better than he gave in return.

O'Neill, Carlotta said, could feel "real love" only for his plays. Only Oona survived O'Neill's catastrophic fatherliness, which seemed to consist of a month of misleading warmth and charm followed by years of neglect, or hostility. After a brilliant start as a Greek scholar at Yale, Eugene Jr. killed himself. Shane turned to heroin, Oona turned to Charlie Chaplin, and both were eventually disinherited. But the family, the scene of O'Neill's greatest failure as a man, was the occasion for his greatest success as a writer. O'Neill is uneven, and much of his work has not worn well--the prostitutes with hearts of gold, the barroom philosophers marinated in Nietzsche, the neoclassical alas-and-alackers of his Greek-facade tragedies. In experiments like The Great God Brown, O'Neill aspired to be the playwright-as-thinker and failed. It was with the family that he could do almost nothing right in life and almost nothing wrong in the theater. In Long Day's Journey into Night--not only O'Neill's best play but the best play in the history of the American theater--the world is reduced to the nuclear family: loving each other, torturing each other in one room with the dark night and a foghorn outside. Everything O'Neill knew and felt circled back at last to this family of his childhood, as original and terrible a myth to him as the Garden of Eden.

O'Neill's final decade made a slow and messy dying, as superfluous as a bad epilogue. No matter. In Long Day's Journey he wrote his last testament, for giving the human race in the name of his family and -- who knows? -- maybe even forgiving himself .

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