In 1949, two American playwrights who would never meet, each a heroic spokesman for his own generation and time, conducted a brief correspondence at almost the last possible moment.  This hitherto unknown exchange of letters between Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller—discovered by this writer—coupled with another hardly noted exchange between Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams after the opening of The Iceman Cometh, presents a broad-stroked picture of an emerging generation of American playwrights in the forties paying homage to the godfather of the tragic tradition on the American stage.  Though the letters are brief—each but a few paragraphs on a single page—their significance is overwhelming.

 

The O'Neill letter to Arthur Miller, dated 29 April 1949—reproduced in this issue with accompanying notes and comments—was found first at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin (HRC) in July of 1984,[i] in a folder of Arthur Miller manuscript material that had been placed on deposit at the HRC by Andreas Brown on behalf of Arthur Miller on 3 October 1983.[ii]

 

The survival of this Miller manuscript material was indeed fortuitous, for the Miller house in Connecticut burned down in 1983 while Miller and his wife, photographer Inge Morath, were in China.  Miller was on a cultural mission to direct the first production there of Death of a Salesman.[iii]  But all of Arthur Miller's personal materials—from working manuscripts and production photographs to correspondence about productions—were in his barn, which was spared.  After their return from China, the Millers invited Andreas Brown—the owner/proprietor of the Gotham Book Mart in New York City, who deals in rare books and manuscripts—to Connecticut to appraise the loss of their book library.  As Andreas Brown subsequently told it,[iv] they were sitting and talking in the barn, where the Millers were of necessity then living, when Mr. Brown noticed some filing cabinets and asked: “What in the world is in there?”  Miller responded: “That's the balance of my archive that's not been sent down to Texas.”  (A substantial contribution of Miller material had been donated to the HRC in the early 1960s.)  Mr. Brown's shocked response came quickly: “This barn is a fire trap, Arthur, and that material is of considerable value.”  Recently traumatized by the loss of their home, the Millers quickly agreed to have Mr. Brown expedite a deposit of this manuscript material, which included the letter from O'Neill.[v]

 

The April 1949 letter from O'Neill to Arthur Miller points back to a precedent letter from Arthur Miller dated 22 February 1949, sent to O'Neill at the Theatre Guild.  Upon my inquiry at the Yale University Library, this earlier Miller-to-O'Neill letter was quickly located and retrieved, thanks to Reference Librarian Patricia Middleton and Curator Patricia Willis.  And it is reproduced as an appendix to this article with the permission of the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.[vi]  Permission from Arthur Miller to publish his 22 February 1949 letter to O'Neill was communicated by his agent, Bridget Aschenberg, to this writer in a letter dated 6 July 1989.

 

As the Miller letter indicates, this exchange between generational playwrights was initiated by O'Neill in the Spring of 1947, when he sent a telegram to Arthur Miller congratulating him on winning the New York Critics Circle Award for All My Sons.[vii]  This singular act of generosity on the part of O'Neill takes on even more significance when it is recalled that The Iceman Cometh, O'Neill's first new play after more than a decade of silence, opened on Broadway on 9 October 1946, which put it in the same theatrical season as All My Sons.  And it was All My Sons, opening several months later on 29 January 1947, that proved to be the exciting event of the 1946-47 season—the breakthrough hit that first brought public recognition and acclaim to Miller.

 

The Iceman Cometh was accorded respect, and here and there received a laudatory review for old times' sake; but for the most part it was damned with cool, distanced praise.  For most critics it was a curiosity from another age, somehow not what was hoped for from America's master tragedian.  The bleak barroom landscape of broken lives and dead hopes did not speak to the mood of the historical moment; while Miller's Ibsenic play, where characters were forced to bear the responsibility for their corrupt past, did.

 

Furthermore, Miller's play was about the failure of parents, the folks at home during World War Two; and it was this older generation that was both confronted and indicted in an action contemporary to the period in which it was produced.  Whipping up a rich Freudian/Marxist mix, All My Sons portrayed a virtuous younger generation—too recently returned from the war to be of the business/entrepreneur establishment—exposing the greed, corruption and confusion of a father-factory owner.  In contrast, Iceman, set in 1912, may well have seemed an antique period piece to audience members for whom the Boer War had never been a crucial cause.

 

Inexplicably, no Pulitzer Prize was awarded for drama in May of 1947.  Even more curious, a recent inquiry to the office at Columbia University that administers the Pulitzer Prize decision-making process revealed that the records for the drama committee's discussion of the 1946-47 season are missing.  Perhaps the committee was bitterly divided between two generations of playwrights, two visions of American tragedy.

 

In 1947, Arthur Miller made no response to O'Neill's congratulatory telegram.  But on 22 February 1949—a mere 12 days after Death of a Salesman opened to a firestorm of enthusiastic praise—Miller finally sat down and wrote a letter to O'Neill that began with a confession of embarrassment for not having answered earlier.  “I can't rightly say just why I never wrote to express my thanks for that wire.  Maybe that I have held your work in such high esteem since my first consciousness of the theatre that a certain humility stopped my tongue.”  Whatever the reasons for not writing then, the reason for writing O'Neill now was to invite him to see Death of a Salesman; and Miller concluded the letter with a fervent request for a meeting.

 

O'Neill answered on April 29th, accepting Miller's apology and emphasizing that he did understand the reasons for the long delay.  Thanking Miller for the invitation to see Death of a Salesman, O'Neill spoke of his tremors, the strange nervous affliction that mimicked Parkinson's disease.  Courteously, but quite sincerely, O'Neill expressed the hope that Miller would find an occasion to visit Boston, “and then we can arrange for you to come out here.”  But according to Miller's letter to Jackson Bryer, dated 7 March 1989, this hoped-for meeting never did take place.

 

O'Neill himself signed his letter to Arthur Miller; and to view the signature is a shattering experience, for it is thin and faint and filled with hundreds of almost microscopic jagged edges.  One can see the tremors— a seismographic record of the agony at the end.

 

In 1949, Eugene O'Neill was writing hardly at all.  The playwriting had completely stopped, and he apparently wrote only four other letters that year: two to his son, Eugene, Jr.; one to his lawyer; and a Christmas note to his wife Carlotta accompanying a gift.  The significance of O'Neill's prompt response to Arthur Miller—the very next day after receiving Miller's letter, which had been subjected to a roundabout rerouting—is underlined by remarks O'Neill made to Eugene, Jr., some four months earlier: “Well, this letter, believe it or not, has taken two days to write and an amount of energy and fatigue that would astound you.”[viii]  And on 4 February 1949, in the midst of a business letter to his lawyer, Winfield E. Aronberg, O'Neill wrote: “I am not well.  My tremors get worse every day.  I will never write another play and there is no use kidding myself that I will.”[ix]  And finally, but two months before he would respond to Arthur Miller—in a letter postmarked 7 March 1949—O'Neill wrote this brief, pitiful message to Eugene, Jr., foreshadowing the tone and cadence of a Beckett monologue:

Just a line.  Hand not so good, as you see.  Enclosed is the note, signed where it ought to be, I hope.

 

Nothing more now.  This is too much effort.  Hope you can read it.  Much love to you.  Father.[x]

Obviously, the letter from Arthur Miller heartened O'Neill and energized him to the point of making a positive response, issuing an invitation.

 

After 1949, O'Neill's physical and mental condition only continued to deteriorate, hastened no doubt by the news of Eugene, Jr.'s suicide in September of 1950, as well as the ongoing battles with Carlotta, followed by periodic separations.  On 27 November 1953, O'Neill died of pneumonia with Carlotta at his side.

 

*      *      *

 

Arthur Miller's 1987 autobiography, Timebends, provides an interesting coda to this account of two playwrights reaching across the chasm of generations to make contact.  For here Miller reveals that his early model and mentor among playwrights was not O'Neill but Clifford Odets.  (Indeed, Miller's first play, still unpublished, “They Too Arise,” reads as though it were written by Odets, replete with an embattled Jewish family whose younger members are filled with Marxist longings.[xi])  From the point of view of a young Marxist playwright coming of age in the 1930s—a description that aptly fits both Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller—O'Neill had come to look like a tired warrior who sold out.  Miller writes in Timebends: “O'Neill seemed the playwright of the mystical rich, of high society and the Theatre Guild escapist `culture.'”[xii]  But in the forties, after seeing The Iceman Cometh, Miller changed his mind:

Despite the extremely weak production of The Iceman Cometh in 1946, the same season All My Sons opened, I was nevertheless struck by O'Neill's radical hostility to bourgeois civilization, far greater than anything Odets had expressed....  It was O'Neill who wrote about the working-class men, about whores and the social discards and even the black man in a white world, but since there was no longer a connection with Marxism in the man himself, his plays were never seen as the critiques of capitalism that objectively they were.[xiii]

Miller's perceptive description and assessment of O'Neill as a critic of capitalist culture puts one in mind of a famous German Marxist playwright who has been championed—at least by Eric Bentley—at the expense of O'Neill.[xiv]  But O'Neill, too, belongs in the category of Playwright as Radical Thinker.  And one wonders if it is purely the coincidence of cultural parallelism that both playwrights used Asian settings—exotic disorienting Orientalism and the charm of chinoiserie—for fairy tale parables that masked trenchant attacks on adventure capitalism.  O'Neill's Marco Millions (1928) preceded Brecht's The Good Woman of Setzuan (1943) and The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1945) by 15 years.

 

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The exchange of letters between Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams was apparently similarly brief and from the same period as the O'Neill-Miller correspondence.  In all probability, the letters have disappeared.  Were it not for the Gelbs' biography of O'Neill and Tennessee Williams' page-long program note for the Los Angeles production of More Stately Mansions in 1967, there would be no record of the correspondence whatsoever.  Almost 20 years later, Dotson Rader recalled that once, while he was visiting Tennessee Williams in Key West, Williams read aloud to him a long letter from O'Neill, written on the occasion of the New York production of The Glass Menagerie; but when Williams later wanted to produce this O'Neill letter for an interviewer, it could not be found.[xv]  Williams himself—as will be seen—never referred to or recalled such a letter.

 

In the Gelbs' monumental biography of O'Neill, there is a brief report that Tennessee Williams had initiated a correspondence with O'Neill sometime toward the end of 1946, after reading The Iceman Cometh.  Williams was deeply moved by the play and wanted to let O'Neill know it.  O'Neill responded with a note of thanks, saying something to the effect that the letter had come at the right time because he was “down in the dumps” after reading the reviews.[xvi]

 

In a phone interview with this writer on 26 April 1989, Arthur Gelb related how the information of an O'Neill/Williams correspondence came to him.  In the late 1950s, as Mr. Gelb was gathering material for the biography, he received a phone call from Williams, who said that he wanted to be interviewed on the subject of Eugene O'Neill because O'Neill was one of his heroes.  According to Mr. Gelb, who vividly recalled the occasion, a meeting took place at Williams' East Side townhouse; and when Mr. Gelb arrived, there was a letter from O'Neill to Williams displayed on the coffee table.  Mr. Gelb further related in the telephone interview how ferociously Williams proclaimed that “O'Neill forced the Broadway producers to accept his concept of native tragedy.”  In the biography, Gelb would quote other words from Williams that also sound as though they had been fashioned to be written in stone: “O'Neill gave birth to the American theatre and died for it” (877).

 

Apparently, though, Williams had a sub rosa reason for arranging the interview; for he expressed an astonishing interest in O'Neill's long and complex relationship with Carlotta.  According to Mr. Gelb, Williams was hungry for details.  Years later—and perhaps this fantasy was present even in the fifties—Williams became paranoid about the presumed rivalry between O'Neill and himself, certain that the New York Times was denigrating his work to ensure the exalted position of O'Neill as America's premier tragedian.[xvii]

 

In 1967, Williams described the exchange of letters with O'Neill in his own words:

In 1946, when I was living in New Orleans, I read The Iceman Cometh....  At first I thought to myself, this play is too long, that's the trouble.  But I kept on reading it and soon I became aware that its length was indispensable to its power, its fullness of passion.

 

I wrote him a letter to this effect, and to my surprise and pleasure I received a reply.  He said that my letter had come to him at the precise time when he needed it, as he always felt, after the opening of a production, a sense of disappointment, of “let-down.”

 

I never met Mr. O'Neill, and these letters were the only communication between us.[xviii]

Of this trinity of American tragedians, Williams is the closet radical among them.  Although his addiction to alcohol and drugs has left his public image in tatters, his early depression-driven commitment is on record, and his radical sympathies proved to be deep and abiding.[xix]  Williams' affinity for O'Neill may be one clouded indication of a political attitude that was frequently expressed in flaming metaphors and apocalyptic fantasies.  Both Orpheus Descending and The Red Devil Battery Sign end with all-consuming conflagrations.

 

Only now that Broadway is about to disappear as a place that nurtures serious writers are we beginning to discover that we have developed a mature tradition of tragedy, a tradition that is as much rooted in the biblical prophetic mode that seeks justice and change, with a dash of Marxism thrown in for good measure, as it is in the Greek philosophic mode, dominated by complex causality systems that explore the interplay of necessity and chance.  Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller stand foremost now as our visionary spokesmen.

 

=For a brief moment in the 1940s, Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams reached out to the founding father of the tragic tradition on the American stage.  Miller was looking for confirmation, while Williams sought only to console and comfort the man dwelling on the sad heights.  Eugene O'Neill, though weakened by time and fate, responded to both.  So neglectful of his own natural children, O'Neill at the end was conferring blessings and seeking heirs.

 

*      *      *

 

Appendix: Miller to O'Neill, 1949

                                                                             31 Grace Court

                                                                             Brooklyn, N. Y.

 

                                                                             Feb. 22, 1949.

 

Mr. Eugene O'Neill

The Theatre Guild

23 W. 53rd Street

New York City

 

Dear Eugene O'Neill:

 

With some embarrassment, which I will explain in a moment, I take the liberty of writing to invite you to see my play “Death of a Salesman” at your convenience.

 

The embarrassment is due to my inability to reply to your most kind telegram sent me when the critics gave me the award for “All My Sons”.  I can't rightly say just why I never wrote to express my thanks for that wire.  Maybe that I have held your work in such high esteem since my first consciousness of the theatre that a certain humility stopped my tongue.  I have long wished to speak with you and take this occasion to ask whether we might get together for an afternoon or an evening.  Will you let me know if and when you could see the play and whether a meeting is possible at this time.

 

Again, my apologies for having waited so long before making reply.  I hope you will understand.

 

My best wishes for your health.

 

                                                                        Very sincerely yours,

 

 

                                                                        Arthur Miller

 

AM:ESM

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