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.
