Conversations With Eugene O’Neill: His Best Friends are Puzzled

“Interviewing Eugene O’Neill is like extracting testimony from a reluctant witness” (p. xi).

“Even his interviews thus confirm the repeated marks of dual personality observed in O’Neill in other contexts by his later critics and biographers, those irreconcilable character conflicts expressed in such key works as The Great God Brown (a play he consistently tells interviewers is a personal favorite)…” (p. xiv).

O’Neill says, “People do recognize…that every one wears a mask—I don’t mean only one, but thousands of them…I don’t think The Great God Brown had a long run merely because it was a novelty” (p. 112).

George Jean Nathan says, “The way to lose O’Neill’s friendship is to ask him for oral expressions of opinion on anything (if he feels like expressing an opinion, he will write a letter, and a satisfactorily long one)…” (p. 124).

[Is he afraid of what one of the people behind one of the masks might say?]

“My plays are about life as I’ve known it,” says O’Neill (p. 160).

Because his plays include “murder, disease, suicide, insanity, and incest…O’Neill…has gained the reputation of being privately a rather morose fellow. His best friends are not so sure he is. They are not sure he isn’t, however. Nor are they sure that the truth lies somewhere in between. He merely puzzles them.” A friend who has known him for twenty-five years says, “His face is a mask. I don’t know what goes on behind it, and I don’t think anyone else does.” Another friend says, “We’ll be talking, and he’ll go into one of those long, staring silences of his” (p. 224).

Mark W. Estrin (Ed.). Conversations with Eugene O’Neill. University Press of Mississippi, 1990.