Portrait of a Vulnerable Man

...Carlotta was a self-dramatizing, pretentious, fashion-conscious woman (she owned 300 pairs of shoes...

...Instead, he relates the dramas to O'Neill's psyche, producing a painful portrait of a vulnerable, withdrawn man whose moments of joy were experienced through his writing, not through his life...

...That sketch, a skeleton of O'Neill's 1941 masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night, points up the guilt O'Neill always carried with him, the belief that he was the cause of his mother's drug addiction...

...To Sheaffer's credit, he has presented a balanced picture of Carlotta...

...Amazingly, through it all, he retained his integrity and breadth of spirit...

...For the playwright's last years were marked by disease, the suicide of one son, the dope addiction of another, the erratic behavior of Carlotta, and almost complete public neglect...

...This year New York has seen two renditions of The Iceman Cometh, as well as a Broadway revival of A Moon for the Misbegotten...

...O'Neill, says his biographer, was the most autobiographical playwright, except for his acknowledged model Strind-berg...

...She intercepted his mail, allowing him to read only those letters she approved of, and even kept much of his children's correspondence from him, including a telegram from one of them congratulating him after he won the Nobel prize...

...Yet Sheaffer blasts the myth of the sacrificing, adoring wife...

...Referring to himself as E and to his mother as M, O'Neill wrote: "E born with difficulty—M sick but nurses child—starts treatment by Doc, which eventually winds up in start of nervousness, drinking & drug addiction...

...Sheaffer relates such instances of this as O'Neill's belief in racial equality, and his contempt for the bigots who attacked the interracial couple in All God's Chillun Got Wings...

...The person who dominates the second volume, however, is Carlotta, O'Neill's third wife...

...But on November 27, 1953, when O'Neill died, no productions of his plays were in progress...

...She took a passionate interest in his work, and her organizational ability, her sense of orderliness, appealed to his chaotic nature...

...Nonetheless, several moments in the biography tend to produce a final negative verdict about Carlotta in the reader's mind...

...In seeing to it that O'Neill had the privacy he needed, she also separated him from most of his friends, until he was isolated...

...With the publication of this second and final volume, it can be said that he has given us the finest life of O'Neill yet written...

...Someone (Sheaffer thinks it was the houseman) eventually called for help, but O'Neill lay out in the snow for almost an hour...

...The first volume of Sheaffer's study chronicled the years O'Neill spent seafaring to Buenos Aires and prospecting for gold in Honduras...

...Reviewed by David Evanier Author, "The Swinging Headhunter" Louis Sheaffer, who served as drama critic for the old and in its day formidable Brooklyn Eagle, devoted a full 16 years to his study of Eugene O'Neill, bringing to it a passion reminiscent of the playwright's own relentless drive...

...He makes it clear that Carlotta was essential to O'Neill, helping him in many ways to function as a dramatist during the period when he was writing his greatest plays...

...And if he details her growing paranoia, he also reports that she was later found to be suffering from bromide poisoning, a condition that affects the mind...

...and hung up...

...In a telephone exchange over some missing manuscripts, Carlotta, who accused Commins of taking them, "screamed that Hitler had not killed enough of 'your kind,' called him 'a crook, a Jew bastard,' among other epithets, and slammed down the receiver...

...Once, in a temporarily deranged state, she was found wandering in the snow, muttering, "The air is full of people...

...Where's your greatness now, little man?' Shortly after she had closed the door, he blacked out...

...Carlotta protected him from the world...

...Fearful of freezing to death, he kept crying for help, till finally Carlotta opened the door...

...in an era of biographies bloated with details, Sheaffer has successfully compressed a large amount of material down to the essentials...

...Still, the final chapters of O'Neill: Son and Artist are especially harrowing...

...There were few happy intervals in the life of Eugene O'Neill...

...But he is not primarily concerned with "literary" evaluation...

...Sheaffer's analysis of those plays is unhesitatingly realistic...

...He tripped over a rock hidden in the snow, and, as he struck the ground, felt a sharp pain...

...The most horrific scene in the book is Sheaffer's description of a bitter quarrel that took place in 1951...

...Carlotta kept the funeral a secret, and the only mourners in the cortege were O'Neill's doctor, his nurse and his suspicious, protective, tormented wife...

...O'Neill: Son and Artist, continuing the theme of an artist who "never really 'left' his mother and father," begins with the illness and death of O'Neill's father, soon after Beyond the Horizon's opening...

...Sheaffer's presentation of her is chillingly brilliant...

...No sign of these before...

...In Sheaffer's view, this guilt both determined the self-destructive, tortured course of O'Neill's emotional life and released the extraordinary reserves of creative energy that enabled him to write his plays...

...Despite its size—the first volume, O'Neill: Son and Playwright, published in 1968, was 543 pages—the entire work follows a clear line, unburdened by trivia...

...James O'Neill was famous in his own right as an actor, having performed The Count of Monte Cristo off and on for 30 years...

...He shows us a woman married to a man who was an enormous strain...

...Moreover, he has utilized previously inaccessible or unknown documents—for example, a one-page family history that was written by O'Neill in 1926, during the brief time he consulted a psychiatrist...

...During an acrimonious period between her and O'Neill, she blew up at his closest and most devoted friend, Saxe Commins, the playwright's editor at Random House...

...He had fractured his right leg at the knee...

...Plagued as he was with guilt over his mother's addiction and his alcoholic brother's early death, he led a semimonastic existence, immuring himself in his work...

...his hatred of the Nazis and deep depression during the early stages of World War II...

...O'Neill was helpless in practical matters...

...Another time, when the dramatist's lawyer called to tell O'Neill that his son had committed suicide, Carlotta roared, "How dare you invade our privacy...

...his outrage at Broadway over its lack of support for art, as opposed to entertainment...

...He was "an emotional hemophiliac whose family-inflicted wounds never healed...

...and Eugene never forgot the man's dying words of regret for succumbing to commercial success with Monte Cristo, rather than continuing to grow as an artist: "Glad to go—boy—a better sort of life—another sort—somewhere—this sort of life—froth!?rotten—all of it—no good...

...The book ended in 1920 with the Broadway triumph of Beyond the Horizon, which brought O'Neill his first Pulitzer prize...

...It described his bout with tuberculosis, his attempted suicide on New York's waterfront, his first two marriages, plus his experience as a shy young dramatist, nervously offering a play to the Provincetown Players (situated on a wharf at Cape Cod) and pacing in the next room while he awaited their decision...

...In his relations with his parents and one sibling, an older brother, are to be found the fountainhead of his passion and power, as well as much of his subject matter...

...He writes: "Eugene . . . walked out of the house, thinly clad and without his cane, possibly with the intention of ending his fife in the nearby icy waters...

...Standing at the entrance and looking down at him, she said: 'How the mighty have fallen...

...Of all the major playwrights," he observes, "O'Neill is, with little doubt, the most uneven...