O'Neill, son and artist by Sheaffer Louis

Author:Sheaffer, Louis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953, O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953, O'Neill, Eugene, 1888-1953, Dramatists, American, Dramatists, American
Publisher: Boston, Little, Brown
Published: 1973-03-13T16:00:00+00:00

Homecoming

adjoining building with an exit on another street. O'Neill welcomed the suggestion and soon, after following the press agent up and down fire escapes and across roofs, was on his way, undetected, back to the Madison. According to Carlotta, he told her that "the men were all right but the women reporters had asked the damndest personal questions."

The couple one day made a fleeting visit to New London. After the stories she had heard of his mother drifting around the house "like a ghost" and of the countless drunken scenes between the two brothers and their father, Carlotta was surprised that her husband would ever want to see the cottage again. "Don't do it, darling," she said, attempting to dissuade him, "don't ever try to go back."

"No," she recalls, "he must go. So we took the car and we went up. But in the time that Gene had been away the town had cut a street through and built little houses along here to the water and [at first] he couldn't find it. Well, I was thunderstruck when I saw this quaint little birdcage of a house sitting there. And he said, 'I shouldn't have come.' And I said, 'Well, never mind, you have come now. Let's get out of here.' And he said, 'Yes, let's get away.' "

By mid-June the O'Neills had settled for the summer in Northport, Long Island, in a house with a private beach on Long Island Sound; once again the "Sea-Mother's Son," who had felt landlocked at Le Plessis, was living within view of the water. Originally he and Carlotta had intended to spend part of the summer in California, where Nellie Tharsing, who had reared her granddaughter since infancy, was clamoring to be relieved of the responsibility. Carlotta had promised to attend to the problem, but once her husband became involved in the preliminaries of the Electra production, she used him as an excuse to defer the California trip.

Although more scrupulous than Carlotta about parental obligations, it appears that O'Neill, basically, was no more of a father than she was a mother; he was too much a "son," too bound emotionally to his own parents, to be a parent himself. At the same time, however, as a man of conscience with an abiding sense of guilt, he wanted to do right by the three who bore his name. So long as they did not infringe on his special way of life and, above all, his work, he was willing to act the role of father; he wanted them to like him and to believe that they meant a great deal to him. By contrast, Carlotta's history suggests that she was more or less unconcerned as to how her daughter Cynthia felt about her.

Loath to deal directly with Agnes, O'Neill arranged through Harry Weinberger for Shane to visit him this summer on Long Island; Oona, now aged six, he intended to see later in the city. A quiet, withdrawn

[ 377

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.