Essay for eONeill.com: some thoughts

What committed photo-journalist and crime reporter Croswell Bowen to the writing his 1959 full length biography of Eugene O'Neill?

• Partial answer in his own words from Preface
  

Familiarity with plays of the 1930s. (Bowen lived in Greenwich Village, worked as reporter for International News Service, 1930-1941; Bowen bought a farm in Sherman, CT in 1937; his neighbors included many of the old Provincetown Player contingent. )

Yale Connection, Gene Jr

Awareness of Shane in Village

1946 Interview for PM Sunday Picture News

Sense of some intrinsic Irish quality in O'Neill, from statements he heard by and about him

• Partial answer in Bowen's life:

By 1959, Bowen had reason to feel three times cursed: His father had been part of a real estate and banking failure in Toledo, Ohio, and two weeks later had died of heart failure. The family was left fatherless and homeless, as the widow could not remain in Toledo. While serving in North Africa as a photojournalist, Bowen had contracted polio and walked with a limp. Bowen's brother, a promising screen writer and painter, had succumbed to alcoholism. In a tragic automobile accident, Bowen had killed his infant son, Peter. That tragedy had strained his marriage, and was leading his wife into alcoholism as well. 

Bowen came from a family in some ways similar to the O'Neills: a mixture of Irish influences and assimilation to the WASP ways. Bowen's maternal Grandmother McCarthy was born in Ireland, educated in a Convent, and saw to it that her daughters were as well. The Immigrant Great Grandfather, James MacCarthy, was said to have fled Ireland after intemperate writings. Bowen himself was raised a Catholic, attending Catholic schools in Cincinnati and New Jersey. A close cousin, Jack Boyd-Barrett had left or was expelled by the Jesuits Order, while teaching psychology at Georgetown University. Bowen's mother was a devout Catholic and kept these stories in circulation, even as she sent Bowen to Choate and Yale.

• In the preface to his They Went Wrong, in depth profiles of assorted criminals, Bowen states that you have to love your subjects, and explained his identification with the criminal in them, to the point of taking a psychological test and revealing that he had borderline tendencies. Bowen as a teenager, asked his family if he'd always had his "particular tics," rebellion, getting attention by being bad, and they said yes. 

What was it like growing up with Croswell Bowen working with Shane O'Neill on the book?

• At Choate and Yale, Bowen had been trained to memorize poems. In this period, he recited the lines "Alone, above and apart." Betsy was 12, Lucey 10, when "Long Day's Journey Into Night"  opened in 1956,  and remember their parents leaving for the theatre. Shane, a gaunt and gentle figure, visited their home in Chappaqua, New York.

James McCarthy, Jack Boyd-Barrett and the "Great O'Neill" Tradition

As Big Mama told it, her father had to flee Ireland because of his seditious writing. Her cousin, Jack Boyd-Barrett rebelled at Catholic Institutions and the Jesuits almost from the moment he was sent to Clongowes. (Clongowes was, forgive me, the Hogwarts of Catholic Ireland.) He was a strong presence in the American McCarthy family, retiring to California in the 30s.

In 1937, he went to Ireland and researched one of "The Great O'Neills" of Elizabeth I's time and wrote a popular history book about it. The Great O'Neill's, Hugh and Sean, have the reputation of being the last great chiefs to resist the English authority.

Lots of ASPD and lots of occasion for it!

What Jeffrey Sweet (contemporary playwrite and Chicagoan) thinks about O'Neill

O'Neill's reputation really rests on his final handful of plays -- LONG DAY'S JOURNEY, MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN and ICEMAN COMETH. AH! WILDERNESS! is also held in affection. People are pretty split on the other plays, which tend to be ambitious and over-written and clunky. The Chicago festival of O'Neill is partially an attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of the earlier plays. Some years ago, Natasha Richardson, Liam Neeson and Anne Meara did pretty well with ANNA CHRISTIE but I haven't seen a lot of productions of that one since then. Mostly people think of him as the first important serious American playwright -- a trailblazer, someone who cleared the brush. But a lot of people think that others planted better crops on the area he cleared.

Sherman

Are the ghosts of previous years totally ignored? Does anyone listen to the whispers or gaze upon the stone walls and wonder?

Chicago Revival of Desire Under the Elms

This staging has gotten rave reviews!!!

Has O'Neill Lost His Appeal?

Are Eugene O'Neill's plays lacking in appeal to the under '30 generation?

They resonated for folks born in the early 20th century because they dealt with issues so important then: the decline of agrarian New England, the rise of materialism, the prevalence of poverty and so on. I read them in college. 

What about now?

The Provincetown Players Connection to Sherman

     Just remembered this: Eleanor Fitzgerald, the business manager for the Provincetown Players was the first of the Greenwich Village set to buy a house in Sherman. She got Susan Jenkins Brown interested. Susan had gone to high school with Jimmy Light, one of the important parts of the Provincetown Players and was married to him before Slater Brown. They also went to high school with Malcolm Cowley (and the critic Burke) and they all hung out in Greenwich Village before they went up to Sherman in 1927/28. Paul Lund, Ann Price's father, was a seaman and labor agitator who worked at Players before he married Margaret Wilson.

     So although O'Neill disappeared from the scene to CA, much of his spirit was still in the Village and Sherman.

Edward Boyd-Barrett, ex SJ

    Boyd - Barrett was the Irish Jesuit who left the order in the 1920s. He was the son of one of James McCarthy's neices. (Others in the family still live in Dublin; Connor has met them; the youngest, adopted by David Boyd-Barrett is an anti-war activist; another story!)

     Boyd - Barrett and Nanny saw each other in New York, and then the BCB Seniors visited with them in Dublin. Jack Boyd-Barrett and his brothers were well educated Catholics who were very sympathetic to the cause of Irish Nationalism. Boyd-Barrett, by his own account was in trouble with the Jesuit hierarchy almost from the moment he joined. Studying psychology very rare for the times. Tried to meld psychology and Catholicism. When he left the order, and eventually returned it was very much read about and talked about in Catholic circles. 

questions

I have a ton. How did Dad ever get interested in O'Neil at first? Was it truly an affinity or just a sign of the times?

Lucey: As he describes it in Curse, he first saw O'Neill in 1946. O'Neill and Carlotta had been living in Danville, CA at Tao House for 10 years, while O'Neill tried to write his huge cycle of plays. Dad got the "Black Irishman" from an O'Neill family friend, who called him the gloomy type of Irishman.

Dad indicates that before then, as with much of the country, he felt the plays were part of his life.

In 1958, when there was a revival of interest in O'Neill, he learned that Shane was in desparate straits in New Jersey, and Shane agreed to help him.

Corruption and Death in O'Neill

     Working through the tragedy of his father's permanent adoption of the role of Count of Monte Cristo and the death of his sibling are about guilt, and redemption: two very Catholic themes. Dad never talked about his father's role in the Toledo Bank Failure, and seldom about Peter's death...

But Is O'Neill Irish or American?

     I could make the case that O'Neill focussed on the American dream/drama. Desire is so totally what life was like in Sherman, CT in the 19th Century, for example. Some sons favored, some not, some lighting out for the territory, falling fertility rates, land shortage-all typical of 19th Century New England dying out as an agrarian society.

     Just a few shreds of evidence that O'Neill saw himself as a dark Irishman...

Thing I've wondered about BCB and O'Neill

What is this Irish thing about? For Dad? Was it real?