Introduction

These days, Agnes Boulton is remembered only as the second wife of the playwright Eugene O’Neill. Their marriage (1918-1929) spanned the period of O’Neill’s emergence as the first American playwright of international reputation. Seen merely as a promising writer of one-act plays at the beginning of their marriage, he had won three Pulitzer Prizes by the time it came to an end, and no one could rival him as a definer of the leading edge in American drama.

Meanwhile, Boulton cut short what had been a promising beginning for a professional writer. For about a decade, beginning in her teens (1910-1922), Boulton published in a variety of popular magazines, ranging from “pulp fiction” (Breezy Stories, Snappy Stories, Young’s Magazine) to “glossies” (Holland’s Magazine) to a cutting edge literary monthly (The Smart Set). During the early years of the marriage, her stories began to show O’Neill’s influence on her, and indeed to contain glimpses of O’Neill himself, just as his plays would give glimpses of her and show the influence of her mode of writing in plays like Beyond the Horizon and Anna Christie. Within a couple of years, she was sidetracked from her writing career—managing a series of increasingly elaborate homes and bearing two children, Shane and Oona—while O’Neill, increasingly, was becoming acclaimed. The early years of their marriage were challenged by the successive deaths of O’Neill’s father, mother, and brother within a span of three years. These were also the years he was in an open struggle with alcoholism. Boulton had to cope with the difficulty of living at a distance from her first child, a daughter from a previous relationship, and the death of her father in 1927. O’Neill had an affair with the actress Carlotta Monterey in 1926, which he resumed in 1927. Finally, in 1928-29, O’Neill convinced Boulton to divorce him so that he could marry.

At that point, Boulton tried to resume her career as a writer, but she found the market had changed. Several surviving manuscripts of short stories from around 1930 show her effort to adapt, but she only published one story during this period, in Liberty. In 1944, she came out with a novel, The Road Is Before Us, with good reviews, but that was the only thing she published until 1958 when Doubleday released Part of a Long Story, her remarkable memoir of the first two years of her marriage to O’Neill. She intended to publish another volume, telling of the later years of her marriage, but she died in 1968 before completing the book.[1]

Her unflattering “intimate” memoir of O’Neill was dismissed by O’Neill scholars and enthusiasts because of some inaccuracies and its “novelistic” style, but it is an impressive book, fully a synthesis of her “pulp” aesthetic and O’Neill’s modernism. It is as much mythic as it is historical, seeking resonant image more often than salient fact, but it tells us a lot about this literary marriage. The book was praised by many reviewers, and it has always been an entertaining read, but, in 1958, it seemed too impressionistic for a serious study of such an iconic figure of American culture, indeed, altogether too much about the author herself and not the Author himself. She might have deferred to the legend. But, after all, two people who are married, especially two writers, transform in the process, necessarily complicating the notion of individuality. Individuality is never simple, but in marriage the self undergoes translation, like Bottom the Weaver and all the other enamored characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Even so determined an individualist as Eugene O’Neill, who often cultivated the image of the solitary genius, became part of the long story of Agnes Boulton, just as she became part of the long story of Eugene O’Neill. “Became” in this case means transformed, adapted into, synthesized. In Agnes Boulton’s book, we can see how they “become” each other, in the way that mourning becomes Electra.

So, even in its partiality, the book tells us a lot about both O’Neill and Boulton. In late 1957 or early 1958, Louis Sheaffer, who was just starting out on his monumental two-volume biography of O’Neill, read and reread the manuscript of Part of a Long Story, and in a letter to Boulton he wrote that it stood the test of rereading:

The general thing about it that impresses me is its vividness, sharp, clear detail, the sense of immediacy and aliveness, as though it happened yesterday or last week or last month, with the color still fresh on it, not something of long ago recollected in blurry outline or yellowing colors, not seen through a thickening curtain of time, but looked at nakedly and honestly. . . .

But the major achievement probably is my feeling that this was Gene, this was what he was like. He came alive, he rang true in every respect, as I have come to think of and know him; his contradictory sides, his warts and his good points seemed in the right proportions and perspective. An honest, just, understanding portrait of a driven man. Without working for it, simply by telling the facts and the truth as you saw it, not holding back things which a smaller writer would leave out, your book engages the reader’s feeling and sympathy for both Gene and yourself.

I know that you have written a valuable book—essential to any kind of understanding of Gene—future generations of theatrical and O’Neill scholars will bless you. It does a remarkable job, seems to me, of recapturing how it was then between the two of you, the original feeling and relationship, neither consciously nor unconsciously revised, colored, distorted by an Agnes who has changed from the Agnes of those days.[2]

No doubt there is a degree of flattery in these words—and Sheaffer would need favors from Boulton, just as she would need favors from him. Indeed, Sheaffer would enter into a strange sort of “marriage” with O’Neill over the seventeen years he worked on his biography and the many years to follow, and establishing this intense bond with Boulton was a way of wedding. However, this testament, from an authority on O’Neill with few peers, suggests that we can learn a lot from Part of a Long Story, even half a century after its first appearance.

Having said that, I must add that these days the book is challenging to read for a non-expert in the biography of O’Neill and the history of Greenwich Village culture of 1917-1919. Even for the expert, Boulton’s inaccuracies and oblique references present an obstacle. Harley Hammerman has generously offered to re-present Boulton’s book here on eOneill.com, with my annotations, and we hope the book will find a new generation of readers in this form. This web-publication coincides, nearly, with the publication of my book about Boulton’s marriage to O’Neill. Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill will come out in Spring 2010 from the University of Michigan Press. That book begins with a close study of Part of a Long Story. It also draws on analyses of some of the “pulp” stories by Boulton, and Harley Hammerman has kindly also given the opportunity to present a selection of those writings elsewhere on this website.

The advantages of an online annotated edition are many. In a fraction of the time it would take for this book to come out in a printed edition, it becomes readily accessible, transmissible, and searchable. It also can be revised—and corrected—with great ease. Indeed, if the original edition of Boulton’s book had been online, she might have fixed its several errors herself, thus forestalling some of the criticism she received, instead of waiting fifty-one years for me to do so. I urge anyone who reads the book now to let me know of any further errors in her book or my notes. I will gladly credit any such blogedits, and the book will be measurably improved in a matter of days or hours.

The only changes I have made to Boulton’s text are silent corrections of several misspellings of proper names. I have also included two short sections, which were deleted from the final typescript by the publisher. There might also be a few errors remaining from the scanning, which was initially done by someone unknown—the text was out there on the web, and we thank the scanner—then adapted by Harley Hammerman for eOneill.com. Again, I ask anyone who spots an error to let me know by sending an email to king@theaterdance.ucsb.edu.

Decades before these suffixes meant anything to the world, Agnes Boulton wrote a “dot-com” book about the domain she shared with Eugene O’Neill, which has long been treated as a topic “dot-edu.” However, I can imagine Boulton wryly smiling at the thought that her book now resurfaces in the world wide web on eOneill.com. In the first chapter of the book, she writes about her life as a writer writing for a paycheck: “But what kept me in a stupor on the bed was that The End was not the end. . . . Once this last page was removed from the typewriter another would have to be inserted. . . . New title—what? She Never Knew Why—fourteen thousand words. A novelette. A hundred and fifty dollars—and it was not even started. ‘She Never Knew Why.’ She never knew why what? And why not?”

It’s a long story, but eventually she would know why—and why not—and why what.

William Davies King
Santa Barbara, California
May 2009
 

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

AB	Agnes Boulton
EO	Eugene O’Neill
Gelb	Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb. O’Neill. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962.
PLS	Agnes Boulton, Part of a Long Story (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1958)
LS interview	Louis Sheaffer’s notes on his interviews of various people. The Louis Sheaffer-Eugene O’Neill Collection, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Shain Library, Connecticut College.
Sheaffer I	Louis Sheaffer.  O’Neill: Son and Playwright. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968
Sheaffer II	Louis Sheaffer.  O’Neill: Son and Artist. Boston: Little, Brown and Company,  1973.
Wind	William Davies King, editor. “A Wind Is Rising”: The Correspondence of Agnes Boulton and Eugene O’Neill. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000.

 

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