Because the playwright Eugene O’Neill, hailed by many as the best American dramatist of the 20th century, spent the summer of 1926 at Belgrade Lakes, his life, and perhaps arguably, the literary world, was changed forever. Had he not summered here in Maine that fateful year, deep in the creation of Strange Interlude, he may have not met a certain lady, and he may also have plunged back into a world of heavy drinking. O’Neill had only quit drinking a few months before and he was determined as ever to continue to write. That certain lady, Carlotta Monterey, who would become his third wife, would one day fight to publish one of his greatest plays posthumously, just as he wished it, without changes. Eugene stated that he couldn’t have written it without her. The play, Long Day’s Journey into Night, would earn O’Neill a fourth Pulitzer Prize. But we are ahead of our story.

We must travel back to a hotel room in New York City on October 16, 1888, where Eugene O’Neill was born.

Ironically, Portland, Maine, was nearly Eugene’s birthplace, because his father, the great Irish actor and matinee star James O’Neill, along with his family, had been in town here for extended performances of The Count of Monte Cristo just weeks earlier.

The elder O’Neill, who at the time was king the stage with the great tragedian Edwin Booth, had come to loathe his role of leading man Edmond Dantes in Charles Fechter’s adaptation of the Alexandre Dumas novel, having played it more than than 6,000 times between 1883 and 1917, resulting in a stultifying but financially secure career.

But now there was the promise of his new son, a promise fulfilled.

By the summer of 1926, young Eugene O’Neill had turned 38 and had already won two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays Beyond the Horizon, a four-act tragedy set on a New England farm, and Anna Christie. Not only that, O’Neill had already done enough living for three men.

He’d attended Catholic prep schools, flunked out of Princeton after two semesters, married, divorced, and remarried, had three children, mined for gold in Honduras, was a seaman, lived and spent much time in saloons and flophouses in New York, was a newspaper reporter and poet in New London, spent a winter in a sanitarium recovering from tuberculosis, studied playwriting at Harvard, spent a winter at Bellevue after he tried to commit alcoholic suicide, helped found the Provincetown (Massachusetts) Playhouse, and received a gold medal from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. And on top of it all, he suffered several personal tragedies.

After years of roaring fights with his father, Eugene was able to patch things up with him before he died in 1920. His mother Ella, who became a morphine addict after the birth of Eugene, finally went straight in 1914 and was put in charge of her late husband’s estate, which included real estate all over the country.

Eugene’s mother died unexpectedly in Los Angeles in 1923. At the time, Eugene’s play, The Hairy Ape was in pre-production. The night the play opened in New York, Eugene’s brother Jamie, extremely intoxicated, arrived with their mother’s body on the train from California. Jamie was placed in a sanitarium, battling real and imagined demons, where he died soon after.

Eugene did not want to end up that way. Realizing the terrible paradox of being a great writer and a great drinker, the playwright underwent a brief psychoanalytical period and with only a few slips, never drank again.

The events of 1923 were the basis for O’Neill’s last completed play, one of his greatest, A Moon for the Misbegotten (1943/1947).

In the spring of 1926 Eugene wrote to a friend that he needed new ports of call, especially a place to live and write for the summer. He needed a place to work, relax, and above of all stay sober.

Arrangements were made by Eugene’s literary agent and summer resident of Belgrade Lakes, Maine, Richard Madden, to preview some properties, who jumped on the telephone. Just a few weeks, a train ride, and a breath of fresh air later, the O’Neills, including his second wife Agnes Boulton, their son Shane Rudraighe, 6, and daughter Oona, not yet 2, arrived and were ensconced in the real estate office of Ervin A. Bean, brother of celebrated outdoorsman L. L. Bean, searching for the perfect lakefront getaway and perhaps a bit more.

O’Neill was about to embark on one of his strange interludes, the one we all share as residents of the very complex and pine-shored state of Maine.

The O’Neills finally settled on a cottage on Belgrade Lakes named Loon Lodge, a name he relished and commented on to friends. At one point he wrote that, “The above name of our camp is no horrible jest but a fact! After a winter spent at Bellevue, I’ll say it looks as if God had taken to symbolism, what? However, I remain not only sane, but also sober.”

He at once went to work on Strange Interlude, a play he hoped to finish that summer. O’Neill enjoyed relaxing on the lake and keeping up with swimming, which he loved. The locals who saw the tall, dark-haired, impressive-looking O’Neill probably never realized they had a famous playwright in their midst. Workmen built a tar-papered shack for O’Neill away from the cottage itself, where he could escape to write, away from screaming kids and all the other distractions at the cottage, which included a visit by Eugene’s eldest child, Eugene Jr., of whom he had seen little over the years.

After his writing sessions, O’Neill would make a beeline for the water and swim almost a half mile to a small point and back again. Only then was he ready for chit-chat.

Next Page| O'Neil Gets Restless
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©2003 Portland Magazine

Colin Sargent, Editor & Publisher

editor@portlandmonthly.com

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