Other Writer's Daughters

     In 1984, when Susan Cheever published her memoir, Home Before Dark, about her father, the novelist and short story writer John Cheever, I was quite simply green: jealous, envious, covetous and naive. John Cheever was the quintessential New Yorker writer. Susan, already a published novelist, hit the memoir ball out of the park with this one, and it is still in print. She was married then, to Robert Cowley, the son of Malcolm Cowley, one of my father's and my favorite resident writers in Sherman, CT.

     The not so pretty part of this story was John Cheever's alcoholism and depression. Later Susan Cheever herself battled alcoholism and what she describes as an addiction to sex. All three of her marriages ended in divorce. Through it all, while raising two children, Susan Cheever kept on writing: 10 books published, when last I counted. I find it astonishing that knowing what she did about the writer's life, she decided to pursue it.
     If she's anything like me, she did it because she wanted her father's approval. She wrote that he expressed his disapproval of her, admonishing her to loose weight, dreaming that she would marry a fabulously wealthy man. In my father's letters to his mistress, he observed that I seemed to able to attract boys, even though I had, in his words, absolutely no sex appeal. Both fathers viewed their daughters thru the lense of men's primal attraction to beautiful women. Not much support for a career in that blindered evaluation. Susan Cheever makes an observation about Home Before Dark, ''having written it I know my father better than I ever did while he was alive.'' I've certainly felt the same in writing about Croswell Bowen. One of the reasons I envied Susan Cheever was that she got about 15 more years with her father than I did with mine. Of course, it's possible she kept marrying those writers as the closest she could get to her father's complete approval. When my father died, I divorced my writer husband; I don't think you can earn the approval of the dead.

Mrs. Fisher

In the 1922 novel, four women of various ages flee to Italy to escape the English climate.

     

     For the past three years or so, I've resembled Mrs. Fisher in Elizabeth von Arnim's The Enchanted April. As the story begins, Mrs. Fisher seems a rather dis-agreeable old woman. von Arnim wrote of her:
Her father had been an eminent critic and in his house she had seem practically everybody who was anybody in letters or art. Carlyle had scowled at her; Matthew Arnold had held her on his knee; Tennyson had sonorously rallied her on the length of her pigtail. My father's friends sometimes seem to me more alive than my contemporaries.
     At first Mrs. Fisher studiously finds nothing in her present circumstances to live up to her memory of those distinguished dead white males. I don't go to that extreme, but it has seemed to me that Croswell Bowen knew an awful lot of very colorful characters, including some distinguished artists and writers. Was it simply that Greenwich Village in the 1930s was overflowing with talent? Or was it his gregarious personality, cranked up for social occasions, that made for so many interesting encounters?  Perhaps I live in a world where the concentration of intellectual energy is far less than it was then or in post-War Manhattan.  Or maybe these people are fascinating because I am beholding them from a distance, anchored in a time I'm just learning to understand.
     Mrs. Fisher has no desire to produce. No new criticism or essays or poetry will come from her. She only asked, she said, to be allowed to sit quiet in the sun and remember. Eventually, she does grow out of her passivity, and becomes mentally and emotionally much younger, more responsive and feeling. I do want to produce in these post-middle age years. I'm hoping for a sort of Picasso or Matisse like run-up to the end. Take that Mrs. Fisher!

Writer's Daughters Writing

    
My starter husband's daughter just published her first book, the account of her first 30 years, which includes her marriage and divorce. The book is How to Get Divorced by Thirty by Sascha Rothchild, who quotes her writer father on the subject of me and our honeymoon. People think I'm crazy for reading the book and laughing. Actually, I have a great deal of empathy for her, having had a writer for a father myself. My failings are not the only ones exposed; she more-or-less does open heart surgery on herself. It is an impressive first book, maybe her screenwriting successes account for that. The book helped me finally get a bead on one of the many theories I've had about why my starter marriage ended way before I was thirty. Deep incompatibility. I take everything seriously and I hate Florida. My X took nothing seriously and was born and has stayed in the Sunshine State. I couldn't imagine a child of mine enjoying Las Vegas or living in Los Angeles, which Sascha does. So everything works out the way it is meant to, and along the way, I've acquired a sense of humor, but I will never like Las Vegas or Los Angeles.

    

Croswell Bowen, Close Up and from A Distance

Croswell Bowen attracted nicknames. At his prep school, Choate, he garnered the monniker of Dizz. While he was sailing to North Africa with the Commonwealth troops as a photographer, he earned Flash.
In Washington, D.C. a friend of mine, photographer Neil Mauer called him Boswell, after Dr. Johnson's biographer.
Boswell fits a non-fiction writer who is never quite as famous as his subject. Dizz fits the perennial non-conformist that was Croswell Bowen. I'll be posting musings about his non-fiction and non-conformity, and mine. Read and laugh!

Shane and Dad

From Time Magazine, July, 1959

"Wandering dazedly through New Jersey's port town of Perth Amboy, Shane O'Neill, 39, son of tormented Playwright Eugene O'Neill, proved to have torments of his own in the ill-starred family tradition. Hauled in by sympathetic cops, unemployed Family Man (four children) O'Neill, twice committed to public hospitals in the past for dope addiction, was carrying on him a large bottle of amphetamine pills, a prescription drug sometimes used by former addicts to curb their craving for stronger fixes. Rapped $55 for not having a narcotic user's identity card, he had only $1 and small change to propitiate the law. The money to spring him after a night in jail was put up by Author Croswell Bowen, Shane O'Neill's collaborator on the current bestselling The Curse of the Misbegotten, a candid saga of the O'Neill family's tragic, repetitive journey into night."

Do I remember this, or do I know it just from reading about it?

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!