Eugene O’Neill: From “Days Without End” to “Long Day’s Journey,” his winning the Nobel Prize in Literature as playwright of Multiple Personality.

This retrospective of five posts on the multiple personality of Eugene O’Neill is prompted by a book review in the New York Times which completely misses this issue: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/books/review-by-women-possessed-a-remix-of-a-flawed-eugene-oneill.html

Table of Contents

1. Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

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

3. Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

4. Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: His Mother’s Multiple Personality

5. Eugene O’Neill used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature to praise August Strindberg [search Strindberg posts to understand the significance]

July 6, 2014

Eugene O’Neill won Nobel Prize in Literature as Playwright of Multiple Personality

He won the Nobel Prize in 1936, having written his two plays that were most overtly about multiple personality, The Great God Brown, in 1926, and Days Without End in 1933.

The Great God Brown was a commercial success, but Days Without End was a flop. And O’Neill had such a deep emotional investment in Days Without End, and felt so bad after its poor reception, that he did not put another play on the stage for more than a decade.

Days Without End is one of O’Neill’s two most autobiographical plays. Other than his hurt feelings after it flopped, my reason for saying this is outrageously superficial. Out of his more than fifty plays, the only two that have the word “days” or “day’s” in the title are Days Without End and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, the latter generally considered his most autobiographical play. The titles are almost the same, except that one was written in the prime of life, for immediate publication, while the other was written toward the end of life and published posthumously.

Obviously, the two plays are not autobiographical in the same sense. Long Day’s Journey is factually autobiographical. And if Days Without End is autobiographical, it is so psychologically.

The title of the multiple personality play, Days Without End, suggests timelessness, since multiple personality, especially in regard to its child-aged alternate personalities, has a timeless quality. As discussed previously in regard to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan, child-aged alters never grow up. They are frozen in time. They experience life as days without end.

July 7, 2014

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.

July 15, 2014

Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End: Its Gratuitous Multiple Personality Suggests the Author’s Personal Experience

Days Without End (1934) begins in John Loving’s private office, where he is writing a novel. John, and his alternate personality, Loving, are played by two different actors. The actor playing Loving wears a mask, which looks like John, but has a scornful, mocking expression.

John and Loving—who see and hear each other—discuss the plot of the novel, until Bill Eliot, John Loving’s business partner, enters the office. Eliot, and all the rest of the characters in the play, do not see or hear Loving (only John and the audience do).

The protagonist’s dramatized, split personality continues throughout the play until the last page, at which point John accepts God, his alternate personality dies, and John becomes John Loving.

The play has been reviewed three ways. The first approach is to mostly ignore the split personality, and to focus instead on the other issues which occupy the characters: marital infidelity, belief in God, and love. The second approach is to denounce the split personality as a stupid gimmick. The third approach is to recognize the split personality as “a hallmark” of O’Neill’s plays, and as part of “the tradition of the split character in modern American and British drama” (2).

Days Without End is “patently autobiographical”; it describes O’Neill’s “own spiritual-intellectual peregrinations”; and John Loving “is a persona for the playwright” (3). But if the play is patently autobiographical, why don’t any of the reviewers infer that O’Neill had multiple personality?

The main thing that strikes me about this play is that the multiple personality of the protagonist is totally unnecessary, unless that was the main issue that O’Neill wanted to dramatize. If it wasn’t, then it is one more example of what I have called “gratuitous multiple personality,” which is multiple personality that is included in works of fiction for no other reason than that it was part of the author’s personal experience.

One last comment. O’Neill ends the play by killing off the alternate personality, as though alters were demons and the way to deal with them is exorcism. Alters are not demons. They are part of the person’s total personality. Cooperation or integration may work. But alters that you think you have exorcised are just lying low.

1. Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

2. Albert Wertheim. “Eugene O’Neill’s Days Without End and the Tradition of the Split Character in Modern American and British Drama,” in Frederick Wilkins (Ed.), The Eugene O’Neill Newsletter, Vol. VI, No. 3, Winter, 1982.

3. John Henry Raleigh. The Plays of Eugene O’Neill. Southern Illinois University Press, 1965, p. 6.

July 18, 2014

Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night: His Mother’s Multiple Personality

The main characters, based on the author and his family, are the mother, 54, a morphine addict; the father, 65, an alcoholic, and former matinee idol; the older son, 33, an alcoholic; and the younger son, 23, an alcoholic who aspires to be a writer. The mother has been previously hospitalized for strange behavior attributed to her drug addiction. The play describes a day in which she relapses.

Father and sons (and apparently the doctors) have presumed that the mother’s strange behavior is drug-induced, since the behavior is said to have started 23 years ago when she was given morphine for obstetric pain, and because it is thought to happen only when she abuses morphine.

Had she had such behavior even before taking morphine? Since childhood? Does the drug only make the strange behavior more conspicuous by tranquilizing her host personality and making it easer for her other personalities to come out? These questions, of course, were never asked.

Her behavior is often referred to as “strange.” This may be meant as a euphemism for crazy, but the fact is, that although her behavior is strange, it is not irrational. Each thing she says—however odd, out-of-character, anachronistic, inappropriate, and self-contradictory—is, in and of itself, rational.

Her switches from one personality to another are described, for example, in Act Three:

“There is at times an uncanny gay, free youthfulness in her manner, as if in spirit she were released to become again, simply and without self-consciousness, the naive, happy, chattering schoolgirl of her convent days.”

[This child-aged alternate personality is oriented to a time in the past, and is not “out” or involved in such current events as the filling of a prescription for morphine, which another personality and her maid had done that day.]

Maid—The way the man in the drugstore acted when I took in the prescription for you [the mother was waiting outside in the car]. The impidence of him!

Mother—(with stubborn blankness) What are you talking about? What drugstore? What prescription?

[The child-age personality has amnesia for the period of time that the prescription was filled. As the conversation proceeds, the mother switches back and forth between child-aged and present-oriented personalities, which is confusing to the maid, who suspects the mother has taken some of the medicine, and that it’s making her “act funny.”]

Mother—(dreamily) It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real. (She pauses—then as if her words had been an evocation which called back happiness she changes in her whole manner and facial expression. She looks younger. There is a quality of an innocent convent girl about her, and she smiles shyly.)

[Later in the conversation, when the mother says she’s not hungry…]

Maid—You ought to eat something, Ma’am. It’s a queer medicine if if takes away your appetite.

Mother—…What medicine? I don’t know what you mean. [She has switched back to the child-aged alter, who is not aware of taking drugs. Then…]

“She suddenly loses all the girlish quality and is an aging, cynically sad, embittered woman.”

Mother—(bitterly) You’re a sentimental fool…[Another personality is now speaking to the girlish personality, who had been telling how she fell in love with her future husband, a successful actor.] What is so wonderful about that first meeting between a silly romantic schoolgirl and a matinee idol? You were much happier before you knew he existed, in the Convent when you used to pray to the Blessed Virgin…You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words!

[Is this personality a nun, or the personality now grown up from childhood who had wanted to become a nun? In any case, this personality condemns both the personality who fell in love with the matinee idol and the other personality who is now a “dope fiend.” She hears the men returning to the house (probably from drinking), and says,]

Mother—Why are they coming back? They don’t want to. And I’d much rather be alone. (Suddenly her whole manner changes. She becomes pathetically relieved and eager.) Oh, I’m so glad they’ve come! I’ve been so horribly lonely!

Clearly, what is “strange” and confusing about the mother’s behavior is the way she keeps switching from one personality to another. And it is highly likely that this has been going on—but less conspicuously—since childhood, when she had one personality who wanted to be a nun, one who wanted to be a concert pianist, one who fell in love with a matinee idol, etc.

In any case, neither morphine nor any other drug causes (or cures) multiple personality. However, almost any drug or substance can affect one alternate personality (alter) more than another, and by doing so, affect the balance of power among alters, so that alters who would ordinarily remain behind the scenes, come out on the stage and thrust themselves into the action, which can be strange and confusing.

Eugene O’Neill. Complete Plays 1932-1943. The Library of America, 1988.

August 18, 2014

Eugene O’Neill used his acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature to praise August Strindberg

“It is difficult to put into anything like adequate words the profound gratitude I feel for the greatest honor that my work could ever hope to attain, the award of the Nobel Prize…

“…the greatest happiness this occasion affords…is the opportunity it gives me to acknowledge…the debt my work owes to that greatest genius of all modern dramatists…August Strindberg…

“It was reading his plays…that, above all else, first gave me the vision of what modern drama could be, and first inspired me with the urge to write for the theatre myself…

“Of course, it will be no news to you in Sweden that my work owes much to the influence of Strindberg. That influence runs clearly through more than a few of my plays and is plain for everyone to see…

“…I am…proud of my debt to Strindberg…For me, he remains…the Master, still to this day more modern than any of us, still our leader. And it is my pride to imagine that perhaps his spirit, musing over this year’s Nobel award for literature, may smile with a little satisfaction, and find the follower not too unworthy of his Master.”

[Search “Strindberg” for posts that explain the significance of O’Neill’s Nobel Prize speech.]