Tale of Two Masks

PART OF A LONG STORY (331 pp.)--Agnes Boulton--Doubleday ($4.50).

"There was never a great genius," said Aristotle, "without a tincture of madness." Part of Eugene O'Neill's genius lay in the fact that he could weave the near madness of his life into his plays. Long Day's Journey into Night showed how closely the life and the plays overlapped, and yet how brilliantly he was able to impose art on mere reminiscence. This book of recollections by his second wife is less than a work of art, but it adds some fascinating scenes to the growing script of Eugene O'Neill's offstage drama.

Author Agnes Boulton begins her story in 1917, five years after the end of Long Day's Journey, when O'Neill's first one-acters were making him the symbol and idol of the Provincetown Players. If, after 40 years, Author Boulton's memory is correct and young Eugene Gladstone O'Neill did woo and win her with the lines she attributes to him, it is no wonder that much of the story reads like a parody of Victorian melodrama. O'Neill once explained that he had trained himself as a playwright by reading "nothing but plays, great plays, melodrama" until "he was thinking in dialogue." Agnes, the convent-educated daughter of a painter, met him in a Greenwich Village joint called "The Hell Hole." As he saw her home that same evening, he said in a low, sure voice: "I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you. I mean this. Every night of my life."

Toper Into Craftsman. Impressed by so resplendent a prologue, poor Agnes felt let down when the curtain rose on Act I (a Village cocktail party), wherein Playwright Gene, studiously ignoring her, sprang half soused upon a chair and turned back the hands of a mantel clock, crying tragically: "Turn back the universe/ And give me yesterday!" Another time, he poured out a hate-filled tirade "in language that he had learned at sea and in the dives of the waterfront."

On becoming O'Neill's wife (as she did soon afterwards), Agnes automatically became his leading lady as well. Their joint act swung endlessly between tragical melodrama and slapstick farce, was happiest and steadiest whenever they left Greenwich Village behind and settled in Provincetown or New Jersey. Then O'Neill would shed the trembling toper and turn into the contented craftsman, in bed by 11 every night, at work sharp at 9 in the morning. He so hated to be interrupted in his work that he would hide in a closet when company came.

He doted on physical and mental "setting-up" exercises, excluding from his mind any "idea or discovery of science" that might shake his personal conception of life ("His index was as rigorous as that of the Catholic Church"). In his sober and industrious periods, the mere thought of drink terrified him, and he would clutch Agnes, crying: "I have found my work, my peace, my joy . . . ! I will not say to you, my love, as a poet once said, that I will pluck the stars of heaven to hang them in your hair--I say to you there are no stars in heaven, unless I can hang them in your hair . . ."

Dreamer Into Materialist. But always there came the day, usually during visits to New York, when the bourbon (Old Taylor) changed O'Neill back again into an angry, self-detesting wreck, too tremulous to shave himself, tensing himself for a first glimpse of what he called "the boys from Brooklyn coming over the bridge" (his expression for pink elephants). Then, too, the actor became a tragedian, crying: "I will tear down the curtain of Eternity that God has hung in the sky!" Or a crass materialist: "I'd like to have a pile of money--rich like Rockefeller!"

Later, Agnes found that this vision of riches was no mere drunken whim. Even when cold sober, O'Neill dreamed of "immense and unlimited power," of himself ruling the destinies "of all those with whom he came in contact." He drank in order to "meet" situations, not to "escape" them, and Author Boulton thinks now that when he indulged his vision of power, he was craving a world in which he would never be confronted by a situation "he was not fully organized to meet."

Part of a Long Story covers only the first year and a half of the O'Neill-Boulton marriage, ending with the birth of their son Shane in 1919 (Oona, now the wife of Charlie Chaplin, was born six years later).* It was an important time because it included the writing of three of O'Neill's notable plays--Beyond the Horizon, Anna Christie, The Straw. Author Boulton, now remarried, writes vividly and with dramatic flair (she used to eke out O'Neill's income with magazine stories). Her view of her ex-husband is detached but documented with the kind of detail that can only be caught by wifely observation. Agnes, for example, had one infallible clue as to when O'Neill would change from a character in "one of Strindberg's dramas" into the healthy, hardworking playwright. This clue was the Saturday Evening Post. So long as O'Neill sat buried in the Post, Old Taylor ruled the Strindbergian roost. But when, with a contemptuous gesture, O'Neill thrust the magazine aside, Agnes knew that tomorrow would usher in the sharpened pencils, the neatly piled-up paper, the tiny handwriting that brought into the world "those others who shared the days with us."

*By his first wife, Kathleen Jenkins, O'Neill had another son, Eugene Jr., who became a brilliant Greek scholar, committed suicide eight years ago. In 1929, after divorcing Agnes Boulton, O'Neill married Actress Carlotta Monterey, with whom he lived till his death in 1953.

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