These two memories encapsulate so much about the lives dramatised in ‘this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood’ (the playwright’s own words); and, as Dowling’s book makes clear, about the tormented lives of the O’Neills as well as of the Tyrones. The play is as strongly autobiographical as it is powerfully imagined; and Dowling in a clear statement of his intent also claims that ‘There’s autobiography in all biography’, drawing attention to parallels in his own Irish Catholic family life. His purpose, admirably achieved, goes beyond just showing how much O’Neill drew on the tortured and tormenting facts of his life in creating his plays. Dowling also wants ‘to show how O’Neill’s personal experience was intertwined with the revolutionary theatre of his time, a theatre that he moulded and uncompromisingly urged forward’.

Whereas Tennessee Williams may be deemed the ‘poet of American drama’, Dowling characterises O’Neill as ‘its novelist, with strong elements of the composer’. Throughout his writing career, O’Neill seemed almost more drawn to the idea of his plays being read rather than performed, though most of us would be at odds with this point of view. He changed the face of American drama, perhaps even more definitively than John Osborne did for British theatre. O’Neill despised the idea of drama’s being at the service of propaganda, but he wrenched it away from those Victorian forebears that had dominated US stages well into the twentieth century. Less obviously polemical than Osborne, he was nonetheless quite as revolutionary; for instance in overturning the tradition of ‘using white actors in blackface, rather than hiring an all-black cast’. It was he who brought the unknown Paul Robeson to public acclaim in The Emperor Jones (1920).

‘For some, O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night (1956) remains one of the unforgettable theatrical experiences’

Perhaps this iconoclastic approach had its origins in growing up in the household (to use that term loosely) of his father, James, who had squandered his ambition in favour of settling for long-running commercial success as the titular count in Monte Cristo. Son Eugene remained committed to an opposite goal, even when it led a playgoer to say in the lobby after a performance of his Mourning Becomes Electra in 1931: ‘Gosh, isn’t it good to get back out into the depression again!’

The book is divided into four acts, not absolutely clear-cut in their distinctions, but no doubt applying to the structure of O’Neill’s plays and also alerting readers to the major stages both in his life and his major works. Act I, unsurprisingly, chronicles the anguished childhood and adolescence, with the father frustrated by the curtailment of a serious acting career and by his morphine-addicted mother. ‘Home’ and ‘childhood’ are concepts barely registered by the young O’Neill, and in his first, fleeting marriage (to Kathleen Jenkins) he was barely equipped for creating a harmonious domestic life.

Eugene O'Neill at Sea Island Bend (Library of Congress, Van Vechten Collection, via Wikimedia Commons)

In Act II, he establishes himself with the Provincetown Players, Massachusetts, an innovative theatre group founded in 1915. O’Neill would become its most celebrated alumnus. Its nonconformist approach suited the young dramatist-in-the-making, as did the political journalist Louise Bryant, with whom he had a long-running affair that preceded, even overlapped, his second marriage to, and divorce from, Agnes Boulton, by whom he would have two more children. By this time drinking vied with writing as his most time-consuming activity, but Act II does see him achieving Broadway success, with such titles as The Emperor Jones and Anna Christie (1921). Despite ‘the stranglehold of alcoholism’, in Act III he manages to cement his Broadway reputation with the confronting Desire under the Elms (1924) and several other titles, and to acquire a third wife, Carlotta Monterey, who, under taxing conditions (some created by her), sticks around until the end of Act IV. By the start of this last, the genesis of Long Day’s Journey in family agonies has found its way on to paper but not on the stage. Carlotta somehow managed (and we must be grateful) to circumvent his dictum that the play was not to be performed until twenty-five years after his death.

‘Despite ‘‘the stranglehold of alcoholism’’, in Act III he manages to cement his Broadway reputation’

In coming to terms with Eugene O’Neill it is probably necessary to separate the life from the play, difficult though this can be. His achievement as playwright is beyond question, and the three Pulitzer Prizes (for Beyond Horizon, 1920, Anna Christie, 1922, Strange Interlude, 1928) and the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936, along with honorary degrees, are merely its most obvious indicators. Dowling deals carefully with the critical and audience responses to productions of plays that make so little concession to popular taste. At his best, he makes a series of mini-dramas of these, instead of the more usual parade of review snippets.

The achievement as playwright is one thing, but what kind of man emerges from Dowling’s meticulous research? Is O’Neill another of those unappealing men who create great art and for whom this matters far more than anything else? I recall Orson Welles in an interview towards the end of his life declaring that ‘art is not enough’. The situation with O’Neill in this respect is a complex one. He felt he never really had a childhood, and his own adult experience no doubt had its roots in the itinerant and penny-pinching locations in which he and his brother grew up. His brother died of alcoholism, after lapses of sanity. O’Neill treated none of his three wives very tenderly, but Dowling is careful not to portray him as no more than a drunken egoist. But then, one turns to the children and finds that two suicided and one, Oona, married Charlie Chaplin, which may well have given her grounds for alcoholism.

What emerges in the end is a man desperately difficult to live with, even in his rare sober intervals, one who caused a good deal of pain to those he supposedly loved. American drama was never the same again after his ascendancy, but as for the life? Let him have the last word (which Carlotta refused to allow on his tombstone): ‘There’s a lot to be said for being dead.’ It makes you think about the man who said it.