Down the Nights and Down the Days

Eugene O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility

Edward L. Shaughnessy

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2000
• ISBN:
  9780268092979
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito letterario

This latest book from veteran O'Neillian Edward L. Shaughnessy examines the influence of the Irish playwright's Catholic heritage on his moral imagination. Critics, due to O'Neill's early renunciation of faith at age 15, have mostly overlooked this presence in his work. While Shaughnessy makes no attempt to reclaim him for Catholicism, he uncovers evidence that O'Neill retained the imprint of his Irish Catholic upbringing and acculturation in his work.

Shaughnessy discusses several key plays from the O'Neill cannon, such as Long Day's Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, and Mourning Becomes Electra, as well as the lesser-known Ile and Days Without End.

Winner of the Irish in America Manuscript competition, Down the Days and Down the Nights: Eugene O'Neill's Catholic Sensibility is a compelling investigation into the psyche of one of the most brilliant, internationally honored playwrights of our time.

PART ONE

The Reluctant Apostate

… I must confess to you that for the past twenty years almost, (although I was brought up a Catholic, naturally, and educated until thirteen in Catholic schools), I have had no Faith.

—Eugene O’Neill to Sr. Mary Leo Tierney, O.P.

1

The Lad, the Rebel, the Artist

The O’Neills: Cradle Catholics

EARLY AND OFTEN Eugene O’Neill had been reminded of his Irish heritage. That, it is probably fair to say, was not much different from being reminded of his Catholic heritage.¹ If one’s ethnic and religious origins often shape one’s identity, this principle surely held true in the case of O’Neill. The Celtic background appealed to him. Indeed, he took considerable pride in the history of the O’Neills, especially that of the second Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill.² But the Catholic influence of his formative years produced lifelong anguish. He could neither forget his past nor live comfortably in the knowledge of it. Down the years he fled his fate. When he sketched the scenario for a “miracle play,” Days Without End, the playwright described the hero’s dilemma in words that undoubtedly carried autobiographical overtones: “[O]nce a Catholic always a Catholic.” To O’Neill, moreover, whatever touched upon identity became ineluctably charged with mystery. A complex fate, Henry James might have called it.

The near reflex response to religious authority that once obtained among the Catholic laity has been forgotten by many and never experienced by other contemporary Catholics. Earlier devotional habits of daily living are now so long forgotten that their renewed practice would seem the starkest eccentricity in this late day of the twentieth century. The overused word ambience may be the only fair characterization of the pre–Vatican II state of Catholic consciousness. An entire vocabulary has been lost to a generation. Not only has liturgical Latin been preempted by the vernacular, but a very catalog of phrases, formulae, and objects is no longer stored in the memory bank. Nearly a century ago James Joyce recorded some of these terms in his first novel: genuflection, thurible, chasuble, tunicle, paten, dalmatic, monstrance.

Unfamiliarity with these words cannot be measured merely by our chronological distance from them, however. Separation is psychological and intellectual as well as temporal. The contemporary Catholic’s understanding of himself is something very different from that of his counterpart a century ago. The institution’s earlier customs might well seem, to today’s believer, something very close to superstition. Some appreciation of the older forms can be gained from novels like those of Patrick A. Sheehan (1852–1913), Irish author and priest, or from the American, J. F. Powers (1917– ). And yet, Canon Sheehan’s stories are altogether out of vogue today, and Powers’s work is less and less read. Here is the nub of the thing: without direct contact, one lacks experiential insight. To have lived in an institution’s presence, even if one is contemptuous of its power, is to sense something of its culture. One will then know its diurnal hum and rhythms by acquaintance (connaître).

What is fading is a memory of the ethos that animated American Catholicism as it was practiced, let us say, from 1870–1960. The institution, on the eve of the twentieth century (it is hard to overemphasize the point) had been formed by a hierarchy whose roots were Irish. And for another three score years, the American Catholic Church would retain this decidedly Irish character. This meant that its administrative style was authoritarian. In the life of both its professed (priests, nuns, and brothers) and its lay Catholics, we will discover a faith in the institution as the living embodiment of mystery.

Laws of fasting and abstinence were built into the calendar, constant reminders of the need to do penance: the forty days of Lent, introduced by the stern lesson of Ash Wednesday; meatless Fridays; the Easter duty (a requirement to confess one’s sins and to receive the Eucharist between Easter Sunday and the feast of the Ascension). Arranged by the calendar, the gospel stories were retold every year. No human activity could stand unregulated. The rules of relationship were enforced with paternal authority; all moral deviance was considered sinful and was punished. The laws were clear and unequivocal: no divorce, no sex outside matrimony. The most egregious offenses were called mortal sins (death to the life of grace in the soul; death until the sinner confessed, received absolution, and did penance). Even to place oneself in proximity to temptation was called an “occasion of sin.” It should not be hard to see how these negative assessments of one’s own nature (puritanical, Jansenistic, even Manichaean) might induce overscrupulosity among the timid.

Some called it all a mindless program of rote recital. Its practitioners, however, internalized its symbolism and therewith learned to read “reality.” If a person’s training were solid enough to carry her through adolescence and young adulthood, she might even find it possible to speak without shuddering about her own imminent demise. Indeed, at their first communions, a moment of ineffable joy, children whispered the “prayer for a happy death.” The sentiment would be reinforced thousands of times over a lifetime in the Ave Maria: “Pray for us, now and at the hour of our death.” Thus, there was no incongruity on Ash Wednesday, when one heard the reminder, Memento mori (Remember death). At home and on the playground children used this vocabulary. Indeed, they spoke of things doctrinal and liturgical with such confidence that one might have thought of them as elfin theologians or infant mystics.

There is not an uncertain moment in the young Catholic’s acceptance of established creed. Before he has completed his years of adolescence, every fundamental truth of his Church has become a part of him; the articles of the Apostles’ Creed are the steel uprights in the process of his religious thought. The truths his whole life is founded upon are dogma, and he spurns the liberality of open Bible and free interpretation. There is not an elastic idea in the structure of his belief.

Hence it is that the Catholic’s attitude toward life in all its phases is fundamentally theological. And the more his mind grows in capability to grasp ideas for the superstructure of his dogma, the more does it become theological in attitude.³

Strange beyond all was that this parochialism existed in America, where the stolid Protestant was both worthy citizen and wary neighbor. In the streets of New York, Chicago, Detroit, and scores of other cities one saw nuns in a hundred different habits, priests wearing Roman collar at the ball game, altar boys in cassock and surplice and marching in public procession. It is a picture worth imagining. We are not speaking here of life in the capitals of medieval Europe; we are recalling a phase of life amid the buzz of twentieth-century American cities. The strangeness of it all seemed even greater, moreover, because this openness appeared not to be self-conscious. Thus oriented, one might remain confident, even joyful, on life’s pilgrimage. There was the other side of things, to be sure: the sense of sin, a crippling legacy for many. That is another chapter, however, to be taken up at length further along. The point to be stressed here is that a child coming into awareness in this elemental Catholic world would bear until death its indelible character, its mark on the soul: a complex fate indeed.

It was into this view of the natural and supernatural that James, Sr., and Ella entrusted the winsome and hopeful Jamie and, a decade later, the impressionable Eugene. The latter, after boyhood, came to realize that he shared with his parents and brother a fate impossible to avoid: Life was a tragedy.

James and Ella O’Neill were “cradle Catholics,” persons baptized, as their sons would be, in infancy. They would immerse these “lads,” James, Jr., and Eugene Gladstone, into the ethos they knew and revered. Here was the classical operation of tradition, literally the handing on of a way of life and a set of beliefs, a sense of the world’s and the self’s reality as formed by religion. To fail in this rite would constitute a serious dereliction. A parent’s life was blighted whose child should abandon his faith. Thus, in O’Neill’s family drama, James Tyrone chides his sons for their betrayal: “You’ve both flouted the faith you were born and brought up in—the one true faith of the Catholic Church—and your denial has brought nothing but self-destruction.”⁴ The parents were legion who, like James and Ella O’Neill, committed their children to an intellectual and spiritual regimen that they themselves had experienced and honored.

If parents could afford, as the O’Neills could, to place their offspring in the best Catholic grammar and prep schools, they could insulate the children from threats to their cultural identity that would surely be encountered in daily exchanges in the urban public schools. When reinforced by ritual practice in church and school, the stern lessons of the catechism became things so fixed in memory that their echoes might be recalled, even after faith itself had been discarded. “What will it profit a man if he gain the entire world yet suffer the loss of his own soul?” Even more sombre: “Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.”⁵

It is important to realize that O’Neill’s prepubescent years coincided exactly with the final dozen years of the nineteenth century. The times themselves offered far fewer challenges to parental authority than are fronted in today’s cacophony of distractions. Moreover, in their earliest years children seem little inclined to challenge authority figures in value-conflicts. Indeed, the child will probably wish to please her adult protectors and models. At no time in later life will all matters seem so clear. When one has experienced this protected childhood, she remembers forever the language and impressions of these early years, when other ideals had not yet surfaced to conflict with what one knew to be true.

Whether such a regimen is at bottom efficacious is a question beyond consideration here. We do know, however, that religious memory can produce powerful effects on adult perception. Memory can offer a retreat from the trauma of the moment. We know this in part because the playwright has, with unusual authority, recorded many such instances. So it is that Mary Tyrone mourns her fall from innocence: “I was brought up in a respectable home and educated in the best convent in the Middle West. Before I met Mr. Tyrone I hardly knew there was such a thing as a theater. I was a very pious girl. I even dreamed of becoming a nun” (LDJ, 102). Her husband also recognizes his failures in virtue. “It’s true,” he says, when his sons challenge his fidelity, “I’m a bad Catholic in the observance, God forgive me. But I believe” (77).

The Church had called this world a vale of tears. One should not expect to be happy. The world was not a playground, children were told. The liturgical calendar itself, in its annual cycle of feasts and seasons, was intended to remind the faithful of that sombre injunction: Take up your cross. Life is a kind of war in which one mystery (evil) contends with another and greater mystery (love). When the Church bade adieu to one of its sojourners, it had completed its mission in relation to that soul and now entrusted the departed one to other spirits: In paradisum deducant te Angeli (May the angels lead you into paradise). The faithful were taught to believe in the superiority of the “other,” as it sanctified the here-and-now.

James O’Neill had climbed from galling poverty onto the plateau of fame and wealth. Ella, on the other hand, had known the security of a pampered childhood. The fragile Miss Quinlan, christened Mary Ellen, had not been brought up to take a place in the somewhat racy world of the professional theater. Ella (the name she came to prefer) had been prepared to participate in a life of high culture. Thus she had been trained in music and languages, first by the Ursuline Nuns of Cleveland, and then by the Sisters of the Holy Cross at St. Mary’s Academy, South Bend, Indiana. Ella proved to be docile, talented, and modest. She was happy in an environment far removed from the hurly-burly of an expanding America in the decades following the Civil War. Later Ella O’Neill would recall her years in those semicloistered precincts as a time of peace and happiness. In the 1870s, however, her life was transformed. By the time she returned to Cleveland, her father had been dead one year.

James, who also grew up in Ohio, had been protected from nothing. With his brothers and sisters he had, like thousands of others, come from an Ireland of famine only to join in a hardscrabble campaign to survive. His family would live a catch-as-catch-can existence. After a few bitter years in Buffalo, where his father had apparently abandoned them, James moved with his mother and siblings to Cincinnati.

The young James O’Neill was nothing if not resourceful and eager to make his way. At age twenty or so, passing an idle evening at the billiards table, he was invited to come next door onto the boards of Cincinnati’s National Theatre. Extras were needed to fill small parts in Dion Boucicault’s immensely successful melodrama, The Colleen Bawn. The year was 1867. By 1874 James was playing with Edwin Booth, in one production alternating with the tragedian in the parts of Iago and Othello. He had already behind him an impressive list of important roles with other major stars: Joseph Jefferson, Barry Sullivan, and Edwin Forrest. He had played Romeo to Adelaide Neilson’s Juliet and Macbeth to Charlotte Cushman’s Lady Macbeth. He had been leading man in John Ellsler’s Cleveland stock company and achieved a similar prominence at McVicker’s and Hooley’s in Chicago. By the end of the seventies he had played the nation’s greatest theaters in the full range of parts from Boucicault to Shakespeare.

Along the way James had hit it off with Thomas J. Quinlan of County Tipperary, who had settled in Cleveland with his wife, Bridget (Lundigan) and their two children, Mary Ellen and William. With a partner, Quinlan had built a successful business, retailing tobaccos, candies, liquors and newspapers. His store was located near Ellsler’s Academy of Music, where James often performed. Before long the young actor had become a frequent guest in the Quinlan home, where he came to know the retailer’s shy daughter, eleven years his junior. He probably saw her infrequently in the years she attended St. Mary’s (1872–1875).

But the young lady had, withall, a certain measure of assertiveness. After completing her course at St. Mary’s, Ella convinced her widowed mother to move to New York, where she became reacquainted with James O’Neill. Bridget Quinlan, who had no high opinion of actors, hoped to discourage her daughter’s ardent response to the handsome actor, but to no avail. The couple were married at St. Anne’s Church in Manhattan on June 14, 1877, the new Mrs. O’Neill not quite twenty years old.

The bride and groom shared a love that was anchored in their devotion to the faith of their Irish forebears, a faith that would carry them through a long life and to the consecrated ground of St. Mary’s Cemetery, New London, Connecticut. In the beginning, however, the joy of this beautiful match was diminished somewhat by a paternity suit that was brought against James. The charge was made by a Miss Nettie Walsh of Cleveland, with whom the actor had lived for a brief time. The case was eventually dismissed. In the long years of their marriage, Ella had no reason to doubt James’s fidelity, but the premarital insult to her sensibilities could never be entirely forgotten. At any rate, the couple soon left for San Francisco, where James had been signed on and where, on September 10, 1878, James O’Neill, Jr., was born.

Over the next decade the first scars of married life were etched into the tissues of their relationship. James drank, probably too much, even if he kept a tight rein on his habit and never missed a cue or a line. Nevertheless, his habitual post-performance unwinding had not been anticipated by the sensitive convent academy graduate. She soon came to tire of travel by trains, inelegant lodgings, and in general the men and women who made up the acting company.

In 1883 James made a decision that would bring on his greatest professional tragedy. He agreed to replace Charles Thorne, Jr., in the part of Edmond Dantes in Charles Fechter’s adaptation of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part One: The Reluctant Apostate
• Part Two: Catholic Sensibility and Thematic Development
• Epilogue
• Appendix The Immigrant Church Press and the Catholic Writer, 1920–1950
• Notes
• Index