by Charlie Canning
In 1987, I got a job as a tour guide at the Eugene O’Neill National Historic Site in Danville, California. Tao House was my fourth stop with the Park Service. I’d started at the Adams National Historic Site in Quincy, Massachusetts, not five miles from where I was born. Then it was Saint-Gaudens in New Hampshire and the Carl Sandburg Home in Flat Rock, North Carolina. At each place, there was something beyond the buildings and the grounds, the furnishings and the artwork that would speak to you if it were quiet and you listened carefully enough. At the Adams site, it was JQA, at Saint-Gaudens it was the Muse, and at the Carl Sandburg Home it was Lillian Steichen.
The best thing about being a tour guide at an historic site is the access. The money isn’t great – usually just a few dollars above minimum wage – but the access is. After a short amount of time working in an old house, you are allowed to go into pretty much all of the restricted areas. This is important. I’d been on the other side of the cordon lines enough to know that what you really need to do in order to get to know a place and who lived there is to feel it. But if you’re taking a tour, you rarely – if ever – have this opportunity. There’s either too many people around or too many rules coming between you and the associative power of the place.
When you’re a tour guide, it’s different. No matter what you’re doing and how busy the site is, there’s going to be time during the day when you can sit quietly in a library, a study, or a room and feel the surroundings. If it’s a small site – and I only worked at small sites – you’ll be entrusted with the keys and the security codes to the alarm system before long. Once you have the keys and the codes, you can stay on in the evenings past 5 p.m. when no one else is around. This is the best time to feel a place.
At Tao House, I’d give a tour in the morning, research whatever I’d been asked that I couldn’t answer and then have my lunch out on the grounds. Once the afternoon tour was over and the last visitors had gone, I’d take a book or a play and a folding chair and sit down to read in either the study or the living room.
O’Neill had moved around so often that there wasn’t much in the house that was original. The desk was his as were a few of the personal items, but otherwise the house was being furnished with period look-alikes based on photographs of Tao House when the O’Neills were there. It was a work in progress.
Because they had the desk and the room was small, the study on the second floor was almost complete. There was a period chair behind the desk and built-in bookcases along the walls with first edition copies of O’Neill’s work as well as any book that O’Neill had alluded to in his diary or his letters during the Tao House years, 1937-1944.
The living room on the first floor actually had more furniture in it than the study, but it looked empty because it was such a large room. There was a player piano in the corner that we would turn on midway through the tour, as well as a photograph of O’Neill with his prized Dalmatian “Blemie.” Most of the windows in the room were on the eastern side and looked across the valley to Mt. Diablo. On the west wall was a curious feature: a large, plate-glass green mirror four or five feet high and eight feet across. The mirror we had was a replica of the original that had been broken during restoration work. But that was before my time.
Shortly after the National Park Service had taken over management of Tao House from the Eugene O’Neill Society, my boss had been sent to oversee the restoration work to get the house open for visitors. Craig had had a hard time of it. The O’Neill Society was headed by one of the foremost O’Neill scholars in the world. But Craig was from Walnut Creek and knew the area and the building trades better than anyone. These two guys would have “knock-down, drag-outs” over the smallest detail. It got so ridiculous on occasion that you’d want to call O’Neill back to come and settle the matter.
Craig had been right about the mirror. It had been recessed into the wall. The people who had bought the house from the O’Neills hadn’t had the original mirror removed – they’d just walled it in. When Craig set about removing the concrete, there it was. The mirror came out in green shards of silver-backed glass. Soon there was a pile of it at the back of the house. Craig had the recessed part scrapped and cleaned then put in a new green mirror.
Despite the fact that the green mirror in the living room wasn’t original, it still had the same effect that it had for O’Neill, his wife and a few close friends: there was something other-worldly about it. It was something in the glass. It seemed to reflect the spirit of whoever stood before it. When you stood in front of it, there was a faintly defined shadow around your form like an image from a Kirilian photograph. But there was something else besides that you could see when the light was down. There was a depth to the frame that you could almost climb into. It was so pronounced in the evening that I remember once trying to put my foot into it. My shoe hit the glass like a starling trying to navigate the next clearing.
O’Neill had noted this quality about the mirror in the living room and he’d stood before it for hours. It wasn’t vanity. O’Neill didn’t care what he looked like when he was at Tao House because he wasn’t going out. He’d already won the Nobel Prize, three Pulitzers, and all the fame that came with it. He’d had enough of the present and with the war on, he didn’t care much for the future. O’Neill was looking into the mirror to see the past.
If Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten are difficult for us to read and to watch, think what it must have been like for O’Neill to write them. I tried to imagine by going up to O’Neill’s study with a copy of Long Day’s Journey in my hands. The sun had gone down and I turned the desk light on. I didn’t have the nerve to sit in the chair behind the desk – just being in O’Neill’s study in the gathering dark took nerve enough – so I opened my folding chair at the front of the desk and began reading a scene. I don’t recall which scene it was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. Just a page and there were tears in my eyes. A few pages more and I was crying. I had to stop reading – I couldn’t continue.
It was pain – the existential pain of being alive in a world of alcoholism and torment with only sarcasm and irony to lighten the load. I turned back to the dedication to Carlotta at the front of the book, “Written in tears and blood.” No exaggeration there. I turned off the desk lamp and went downstairs. On my way through the living room, I made sure not to look in the glass.
I repeated this experiment a number of times with Long Day’s Journey into Night and the other Tao House plays. Each time I read these plays when I was in the house alone, the words went right through me. I wasn’t going crazy – at least not in relative terms. There was an actress who came to Tao House on a tour who spoke of something even more extraordinary. A local theater company was doing A Touch of the Poet and this woman was playing Nora, Con Melody’s daughter. She spoke of the power of the lines – how there was something in them that was propelling her forward. There were moments in the play when she felt that it was the dynamic that O’Neill had created that was intending her movements. She was a puppet on a string – a rag doll being thrown this way and that across the stage. “A Touch of the Poet” was a perpetual motion machine that had been kick-started with the opening line. All she had to do as an actress was to not get in the way.
O’Neill would have loved her. All his life, he’d been searching for actors and directors who wouldn’t get in the way. There was no interpretation necessary. He’d already played it out in front of the green mirror and he knew how it went. He had written it down faithfully. It went like it went.
The feeling at Tao House was the most intense of all the places I’d worked. O’Neill was a lone wolf and Tao House was a garrison. The others had plenty of company. With the Adamses, it was family: four generations living under the same roof. JQA was the prevailing spirit, but he had plenty of support up and down the line. With Saint-Gaudens, it was a colony of artists with Saint-Gaudens as the leader. Even when the Muse wasn’t in Saint-Gaudens’ studio, she was never far away. With Sandburg, it was his marriage to Lillian Steichen and their three daughters that nurtured and sustained him.
But O’Neill! A New Englander on the West Coast looking east. A man who was alone even when he was with his family. Up there in that house on the hill during the war years opening one Pandora’s box after another. Doing battle with whatever jumped out. Carlotta was there for support but she couldn’t help. All she could do was nurse his wounds and get him ready for the next day. Seven years of it! It is a wonder O’Neill didn’t go mad.
The swimming helped. O’Neill had always been a great swimmer. As a boy in New London and a young man in Provincetown, O’Neill had swum in the ocean for hours. At Provincetown, his swimming feats were legendary. O’Neill would swim straight out to sea for as long as his arms and legs would carry him. When he was so tired that he couldn’t swim another stroke, he’d turn around and swim back.
The swimming pool at Tao House was so much a part of O’Neill’s regimen that the Park Service restored and maintained that too. It was part of the tour. We’d take visitors there and talk about what a strong swimmer O’Neill was and how swimming was his primary form of recreation. Invariably, someone would ask if I ever got a chance to swim in the pool. My stock answer was that I wasn’t supposed to.
Although no one was supposed to swim in the pool for safety reasons, Craig had hinted that he would look the other way. Dozens of times on a hot day, we’d be looking on while the maintenance man Dale adjusted the PH. “Seems a shame no one can swim in this pool,” Craig would say.
“Yeah,” Dale would chime in, “It’s a waste of taxpayer’s money.”
“Can I swim in the pool?”
“Well, you’re not supposed to,” Craig would answer. “And any seasonal park ranger foolish enough to do something like that would want to make sure there was nobody around to see him when he did it.”
I waited until everyone had left the site and locked the gate. Then I changed into a pair of swimming trunks and dove into the pool. I began swimming laps. I didn’t swim for very long. It was kind of like reading in the study: I was only able to complete a couple of turns before I was overcome. I got out of the pool and sat in one of the deck chairs. The pool was blue and inviting and yet it wasn’t. Swimming in it felt like coming up against glass.
I told visitors to Tao House that O’Neill was the son of James O’Neill the actor, that he studied at Harvard, and that he wrote sixty plays. That he was married three times, had three children, and a Dalmatian named “Blemie.” All true, but these things hardly suggested a method. Even after looking at pages of manuscript, I still had no rational idea how O’Neill wrote the Tao House plays.
Of course, from a craft standpoint I could surmise how it was done: O’Neill created some characters – most drawn from life – and gave them a dramatic need. Then he set them at cross-purposes to one another and made sure that he had plenty of sharpened pencils and legal pads to catch what came. But there was something else.
O’Neill wrote the Tao House plays by summoning the spirits of all the people living or dead that figured in those dramas. He may have begun the works quietly enough with plot outlines and bits of scenes, but once he got into the writing, the characters were there with him in the room competing to be heard. It was a free-for-all and O’Neill had to defend himself at the same time that he was writing down what he could. The method might be fun if you are writing a play like Ah, Wilderness! But where’s the fun in calling forth the dramatis personae of The Iceman Cometh, Long Days Journey into Night, and A Moon for the Misbegotten? What a horror show! For O’Neill, it must have been like playing solitaire with only the black cards.
Summoning ghosts as a method for the composition of the plays explains a lot. It accounts for the defensiveness of Edmund in Long Days Journey into Night and the writing of A Moon for the Misbegotten. Long Day’s Journey was meant to be both curtain call and Last Confession for the four O’Neills. O’Neill was trying to affect a peace between each member of his family and a peace within themselves so that his father, his mother, his brother and himself could return to God in their innocence. He’d done that for his father, his mother, and his young self but he hadn’t done it for Jamie. With Jamie in Long Day’s Journey into Night, the absolution hadn’t been performed yet. O’Neill’s brother still had a black heart. So O’Neill went back in to write A Moon for the Misbegotten.
Spirit-led writing also accounts for the composition of The Iceman Cometh. In the character of Hickey, O’Neill tried to come to terms with his adult self. Before he’d met Carlotta, O’Neill had been married twice. Two times, he had abandoned wife and child, claiming the demands of Art. But in the great scheme of things, the Muse is far down the manna line. O’Neill knew there would be hell to pay and there was. His eldest son Eugene O’Neill, Jr. committed suicide. His youngest son Shane became a heroin addict on the streets of New York City. Only his daughter Oona was spared by marriage to Charlie Chaplin, a union O’Neill could not abide.
The O’Neills left Tao House in 1944. Tao House would be O’Neill’s last true home. Another ten years of rented houses and hotel suites and O’Neill would be dead. The story goes that O’Neill’s last words were, “God damn it, born in a hotel room and died in a hotel home,” but I don’t believe it. No sober man reconciled to God would ever say such a thing.
Excerpted from “The Arnold Trail,” an unpublished memoir about growing up in a family of alcohol and cigarette distributors in Maine.
Charlie Canning published his first novel “The 89TH Temple” shortly after receiving a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Adelaide in 2012. A second novel “The Sign of Jonah” followed in 2015. Canning is currently working on a third novel entitled “Gideon’s Trumpet” and a memoir called “The Arnold Trail” about growing up in a family of cigarette and alcohol distributors in Maine.
Photo used with Creative Commons License – JERRYE AND ROY KLOTZ MD, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
