Center Stage

...Ann Morrissett Davidon (Ann Morrissett Davidon is a member of the Dramatists Guild and has had plays produced on public radio...

...One can only try to summarize and be grateful to the editors for a judicious overall glimpse, in his own off-stage words, of the life of a troubled man who prodded Twentieth Century theater into portraying tragedy both personal and universal, and distinctively American...

...To judge by O'Neill's letters, he was a man of strong emotions capable of loyal friendships, scornful contempt and vitriolic hatred, and passionate declarations of undying love—to at least three women...

...of the one eternal tragedy of Man in his glorious, self-destructive struggle to make the Force express him instead of being, as an animal is, an infinitesimal incident in its expression...

...O'Neill's first marriage was a brief one of convenience to Kathleen Jenkins, whom he had impregnated—but it was their son, Eugene Jr., for whom O'Neill seemed to care most and in whom he placed the most hope...

...His plays received four in all—and the Nobel Prize...

...Nevertheless, out of this period came A Touch of the Poet, The Iceman Cometh, A Long Day's Journey into Night, and Moon for the Misbegotten, and fragments of a longer cycle never completed...

...Shane, after O'Neill's divorce from Agnes, drifted eventually into dissipation and drugs...

...Where the theater is concerned, one must have a dream, and the Greek dream in tragedy is the noblest ever...

...Oona became a "glamour girl" and, at eighteen, married fifty-four-year-old Charles Chaplin, for whom O'Neill had little respect...

...it is more a matter of passing judgment on a person's life...

...But I found myself reading it all, including O'Neill's financial instructions and the footnotes that cluster at the bottom of almost every page—not just to satisfy my reviewer's conscience, but because there are revealing reflections throughout of O'Neill's personal relations and creative drives, of his theatrical connections and maneuverings, and of the turbulent eras encompassed by his 1889-to-1953 life span...

...He was sure the marriage would not last, but Oona remained married to Chaplin for thirty-four years, until his death in 1977, and had eight children by him...

...Writing about personal letters is unlike reviewing any creative work—even biography or autobiography...

...They also reflect his progression from Princetonian to able-bodied seaman and drunkard (in 1912 he attempted suicide) to tubercular invalid and finally—in his thirties—to successful playwright and family provider...

...O'Neill's third and last marriage at the age of forty, to Carlotta Monterey, was the longest and most persistently romantic, although his love letters to her echo many of the passionate phrases that he had used on Agnes and an earlier love, Beatrice Ashe...

...Taken together, these letters reveal many sides of O'Neill: sensual, scornful, idealistic, skeptical, mystical, cynical, generous, arrogant, guilt-ridden, sometimes bigoted, often judgmental, wise and foolish...

...Reading this extensive selection of playwright Eugene O'Neill's letters is something like watching a Greek tragedy whose enactment holds you to the end though you already know the general plot...

...Or perhaps Chinese theater would be as apt a comparison: the time span and length of this volume—fifty-one years and 600 pages—make it necessary to go out at frequent intervals for meals and other exigencies...

...committed suicide at age forty...

...It is not a critique of style or effectiveness...

...Though he later regarded his nine-year marriage to Agnes Boulton as totally negative, their family years at "Spithead" in Bermuda were productive ones...

...After his marriage to Carlotta—he claimed it was the best thing that ever happened to him—he became sporadically discouraged about his writing...

...O'Neill gave up drinking and was able to write Mourning Becomes Electra and Ah, Wilderness!—for which he had a particular affection—before illnesses set in during the late 1930s...

...But he was still riding on the relatively successful domestic and foreign productions and publication of other plays —The Emperor Jones, Strange Interlude, Beyond the Horizon, The Great God Brown, The Hairy Ape, Desire Under the Elms—and two Pulitzer Prizes...

...The first play he wrote after going to live with Carlotta—Dynamo, which he thought at the time would be one of his best—turned out to be a failure...

...Several passages in the letters capture O'Neill at his most eloquent (with a touch of bombast)—as, for example, this from a letter to theater historian Arthur Hobson Quinn: "I'm always acutely conscious of the Force behind...

...One of those he came to revile most bitterly was his second wife, Agnes Boulton, eventually extending that bitterness to their children, Shane and Oona...

...Interspersed among the letters that enable the reader to piece together this personal information (with the help of the editors' introductory essays and footnotes) are many communications to theater people—directors, actors, agents, writers—with whom O'Neill apparently maintained warm and long-lasting friendships...

...These and Parkinson's tremors plagued him the rest of his life...

...The rise of the Nazis, the occupation of France, and World War II also disheartened him—the first time politics enter his letters...

...After a promising career as a Yale scholar and professor, however, Eugene Jr...

...Among those for whom O'Neill had unchanging respect and affection were George Pierce Baker, with whom he studied playwriting at Harvard...

...While he claims in various letters to be "the world's bummest" correspondent, these 560 letters are only a portion of more than 3,000 that have survived...

...Certainly not every line or letter in this selection is worthy of equal attention, except to a collector of O'Neill minutiae...

...the critic George Jean Nathan, and his lawyer Harry Weinberger...

...O'Neill died at sixty-five in 1953 in Boston, after many household moves and marital rifts with Carlotta—although the last item in this collection is a love note to her...