How wide my acquaintance has been but I have met few enough really tender men, men not seeking to justify their own existences.  I think of men like Theodore Dreiser and Eugene O'Neill.  They,  it seems to me, have succeeded in being, in becoming the thing I mean.  I have known others, how many others, having much of it at times, and like all men who go about looking at life have found it most in unknown, unheralded men.  I mean that tenderness for others that can come only from freedom from that self-consciousness that plays havoc with most of us.

                                               — Sherwood Anderson (Memoirs 3)

In an October 1925 interview, Sherwood Anderson, author of Winesburg, Ohio (1919),[i] was asked by Dolly Dalrymple of the Birmingham News to name the foremost American Playwright.  Although Anderson had balked at citing other “greats” in the interview, without hesitation he named Eugene O'Neill, because, as Anderson quite simply put it, O'Neill “writes the best plays and knows life.”  Anderson believed that he and O'Neill were working in “defiance of conventional standards and dogmas” (Winther 44).  In December 1930, in a speech accepting his Nobel Prize for Literature, their contemporary, Sinclair Lewis, noted that the award was less for himself than for American literature as a whole, which, in his view, had moved away from the restraints of the Victorian era toward a more honest and passionate view of life.  He named O'Neill and Anderson among a select group of American authors in the vanguard of this movement, a generation which, as Francis Fergusson notes, “was impatient of tradition and convention, and their great discovery was their emotional needs” (280).  Having discovered those emotional needs and explored them in their individual works, they made a first step in the direction of the more recent men's movement that has attempted to put “tender men” in closer touch with their  pain, confusion, loss and grief.  While both O'Neill and Anderson plunged into a search for what Robert Bly has called their “deep male” (“What Men” 34),[ii] each was only able to approach attaining it through an isolation from other men, and each other.  A Bly-style “gathering of men” was something they may have flirted with; but each remained ill-equipped to realize it in any fruitful way.

O'Neill and Anderson were acquainted, but not intimately.  They first met in the early days of their careers, and it appears that they remained admirers of each other's work until Anderson's death.[iii]  Although Anderson reached out to O'Neill on several occasions, particularly between the mid-1920s and the mid-1930s, O'Neill's reclusive nature prevented a closer relationship, despite a strong bond in their creative interests.  Anderson hoped to bring together a group of ten or twelve male writers—“tender men”—equal to his own stature.  He believed that they, building on the close friendships that he supposed would emerge from such a group, could help each other's development as artists, and, perhaps most importantly, break through what he felt was the chilling isolation that marked both his own and O'Neill's careers.  Edmund Wilson agreed, when he wrote that it “seems unfortunate that some of our most important writers—Sherwood Anderson and Eugene O'Neill, for example —should work, as they apparently do, in almost complete intellectual isolation, receiving from the outside but little intelligent criticism and developing, in their solitary labors, little capacity for supplying it themselves” (370).  Despite the fact that Anderson's “tender men” never came together as he had hoped, his acquaintanceship with O'Neill spanned many years and clearly had a potent influence on both of them.

In planning his uncompleted memoirs, halted by his untimely death from peritonitis in the Panama Canal Zone during a South American goodwill tour in 1941, Anderson listed O'Neill among the subjects to be covered.  No in-depth reflection was completed before Anderson's death, but he did write a few impressions of O'Neill and their mutual generation of American writers.  He recalled that at the outset of his career, a few of them—Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, O'Neill and himself—“were making a fight.  We were all, I think, striving to bring life back into writing” (Memoirs 467).  Recalling outraged public reaction, particularly to the sexual content of their works, he explained that “We men of that time had a certain pioneering job to do and we tried honestly to do it.  It wasn't that we wanted particularly to speak of sex, but knowing, from our own experiences of living, what a vital role sex played in lives and, being honest workmen, we could not avoid doing what we did” (467).  Besides sharing a movement toward greater frankness, they also aimed for a deeper reality than had been typical in nineteenth-century literary forms.  The attempts to censor works by Anderson and O'Neill clearly suggest that they were raising issues sensitive to some readers and audiences.

Aside from his actual writing, Anderson concerned himself most centrally with the role of realism in American literature and problems of censorship—matters of similar concern to O'Neill.  Regarding the movement toward realism as “tricky,” Anderson believed that the “life of reality is confused, disorderly, almost always without apparent purpose, whereas in the artist's imaginative life there is purpose.  There is determination to give the tale, the song, the painting, form—to make it true and real to the theme, not to life.  Often the better the job is done, the greater the confusion” (“Man” 70).

O'Neill, like Anderson, often emphasized the struggle of the individual pitted against social norms, and the individual's struggle within a difficult personal reality.  The latter is seen in Long Day's Journey Into Night, when an agonized Edmund Tyrone cries, “Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?” (131).  In The Iceman Cometh most particularly, O'Neill's characters attempt to escape their individual reality through self-delusion or drink, while Anderson's small-town denizens often find themselves trapped in a life that only illusions can make bearable.  In Anderson's case, this view may come from his own early experiences as the manager of a small-town Ohio paint factory.  One day, he simply walked out on that life to pursue writing opportunities in Chicago.  A few years after his arrival there, Anderson suggested in his novel Winesburg, Ohio that the individual could escape from the oppressions of reality, and in this he influenced many contemporaries, including Lewis, Dreiser, Willa Cather and O'Neill.

In many respects, Anderson's brand of realism mirrors O'Neill's: the verisimilitude of his characters, and their desperation, like O'Neill's, undoubtedly comes from his own experience.  He writes in his essay “Man and His Imagination” that “the work of any writer and for that matter any artist in any of the seven arts should contain within it the story of his own life” (58).  Neither Anderson nor O'Neill could be content with a realism that was either simply autobiographical or photographic.  “The story or novel will not be a picture of life.  I will never have had any intention of making it that,” Anderson wrote in “A Note on Realism” (1924), going on to say that “most people are afraid to trust their imaginations and the artist is not.  Would it not be better to have it understood that realism, in so far as the word means reality to life, is always bad art—although it may possibly be very good journalism?” (1-2).  At the very least, Wilson suggests of their art and mutual influence that “O'Neill, in his gift for drawing music from humble people, had a kinship with Sherwood Anderson” (100).

O'Neill's first full-length play, Beyond the Horizon, continued what he had begun in his early one-act plays of the sea.  A naturalistic study of tragic frustration set in contemporary American backgrounds (in this case a New England farm), Beyond the Horizon in not unlike Anderson's early novels, although Anderson's setting is almost always a small midwestern town.  As O'Neill's dramaturgy evolved during the 1920s, he attempted a breathtaking variety of experiments in technique, adding elements of symbolism, expressionism, masks, asides and mysticism.  Anderson was similarly drawn to the use of symbols and incorporated occasional mystical touches.  John J. McAleer has noted, in both essays cited below, that in Winesburg, Ohio Anderson makes the first modern use in fiction of Christ symbolism, linking his characters to Christ's suffering in order to show the purposelessness of suffering.  McAleer further suggests that in Anna Christie O'Neill may be adapting Anderson's idea to drama.[iv]  In The Haunted Heroes of Eugene O'Neill, Edwin Engel describes Anderson's novels as filled with such “fumbling dreamy mysticism” (66), and points out that the interior monologue technique that O'Neill employs most effectively in Strange Interlude is also present in various Anderson works.

During this era of experimentation, O'Neill also continued in his naturalistic vein with such plays as All God's Chillun Got Wings and Desire Under the Elms.  Anderson's Dark Laughter (1925), a novel in which the humor and song of unrepressed blacks is contrasted with the spiritual sterility of whites, is indebted to Gertrude Stein's innovations in the use of language and to the works of black writer Jean Toomer; but it owes even more to O'Neill's All God's Chillun, produced on Broadway the previous year to considerable controversy over its depiction of the emotional pain caused by an interracial marriage.

Anderson's early works protested against humankind's dependence on machinery; and some of his novels, particularly Winesburg, Ohio, and articles such as “Machine Song” examine related issues.  Anderson was passionately interested in the subject of machines replacing men, and suggested, in a letter to Charles Bockler, a young New York banker and painter, that

perhaps men like myself, Dreiser, O'Neill, Sandburg, and others might write something for these men [Anderson had recently addressed a group of strikers in Danville, Virginia], talks to be delivered, some feeling given that artists and writers, some few men they feel have some distinction, were with them, in sympathy anyway.  I wrote something myself.  I tried to say that the new world of which men sometimes talk was not to be born, but had been born.  The machine had made the new world.  It was a question of going into the new world, opening doors, going in.  Like a new house standing ready. (Letters 231)

Anderson was clearly moved by the dehumanizing effects of modern society that Bly and other “men's movement” writers would stress had been at least partially responsible for the isolation of twentieth-century men.[v]  While working on his “Labor and Sinclair Lewis,” an essay that Anderson felt had “dance and reality in it,” he wrote to publisher Horace Liveright that it was “what Gene O'Neill tried for, I think, in Dynamo, only if it comes, it will be more logical and clearer, I believe” (Letters 209).  Aside from Dynamo, an assault on the machine age in which man perceives the power of the electrical dynamo as a new god, a few of O'Neill's other plays also contributed to Anderson's view of the plight of the laborer and the brutality inherent in factory and field, especially in earlier American life:

Well, I have always thought, since I saw the play one night in New York, that the figures of the two sons who went off to California in Mr. Eugene O'Neill's Desire Under the Elms, those dumb creatures, tied to the soil and brow beaten by the arrogant old father, that grim hard European peasant life transferred to America, I have always thought that the true note of early New England.  (Memoirs 242-243)

By the time Dynamo had been produced on Broadway in 1929, Anderson's view had begun to change.  He now saw the machine not as a new god, but as something that might indeed be tamed by man, although he remained suspicious of any sort of technological utopia.

Along with Anderson's personal admiration for O'Neill's plays, he himself flirted with playwriting throughout his career.  He was encouraged in that direction by celebrated French actor/director Jacques Copeau, who “left him with the fantasy that he might be `the American dramatist' without realizing it” (Townsend 283-284).  At various times, he considered making plays of his novels Dark Laughter, Poor White (1920), and Marching Men (1917); and in the mid-1930s he thought of turning one or more of his works into operas, having been impressed with Louis Gruenberg's successful operatic adaptation of The Emperor Jones.  During the 1924-25 Provincetown Players season, O'Neill's Diff'rent (1920) had shared a double-bill with a dramatization of Anderson's The Triumph of the Egg (1921), produced by Kenneth Macgowan with scenic designs by Robert Edmond Jones.  Diff'rent, in fact, bore some striking similarities in theme to Winesburg, Ohio, particularly in its focus on the subconscious mind of a repressed, small-town spinster.  But, as Engel writes, “O'Neill's play suffers in a comparison with Anderson's story.  Crude and confused in form and content, its perceptions, too, are less incisive” (36).  Critics have often cited the influence of Winesburg, Ohio on O'Neill's work, particularly during the era between the end of World War I and the mid-1920s when O'Neill was becoming firmly established as a dramatist.

Through his interest in the theatre, Anderson became friendly with actress Mary Blair, the wife of Edmund Wilson, who had played in the Provincetown Playhouse production of Diff'rent; and he wrote to her about it and his enthusiasm about the theatre in general on 15 February 1926:

Three things in New York excited me that winter, that is to say in connection with the theatre.  Your own playing in O'Neill's play, Paul Robeson [in Emperor Jones] and Lawson's play [Processional] at the [Theatre] Guild.  I presume that the trouble with me is that I have never gone to the theatre much and my imagination has never played very freely within the confines of the theatre and when I am in New York and if I am lucky enough to see a good play or two, I get all stirred up again and when I come away the excitement oozes out of me.  I get caught up by some novel or story and the theatre is quite forgotten.

 

What I really need, I daresay, is someone about who would drive me at it and keep up my interest in the theatre long enough to at least make an attempt.  Whether I could do it or not would be another matter. (Modlin 73)

Not long after, in late 1926, Anderson and O'Neill, along with Dreiser, met at a dinner party arranged by Donald Friede at the home of Horace Liveright.  This was the closest Anderson would come to his hopes for a group of male artists.  During the course of the party, the subject of death—and fears about it—emerged as the evening's major topic of discussion.  Dreiser recounted, in painful detail, the death of his mother.  O'Neill, often shy in social settings and perhaps chilled by Dreiser's revelations, said little.  Anderson proceeded to tell a yarn which he later published in Vanity Fair as “A Ghost Story.”  Although it has nothing of the power of the mythical fairy tales that Bly includes in his Iron John collection of stories for men, it is clearly a whimsical attempt to demonstrate men's general inadequacies in intellectual and cultural matters, and the importance of women in helping men discover their “softer” selves.

In the published version of “A Ghost Story,” which recounts supernatural events in a house in South Bend, Indiana, Anderson begins by acknowledging its original audience: “I once told the story to Mr. Theodore Dreiser and Mr. Eugene O'Neill as I sat with them in a room and now have a fancy to put it in print” (78).  The story involves a lonely schoolteacher who rents a haunted house for herself and her child.  The teacher, as Anderson writes, “was intent on culture.  That was her strongest characteristic.  In the evening she sat up to read.  She read the works of all the latest and most intellectual authors—particularly the moderns.  That is the reason I told Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Dreiser about it.”  Later, a “tall and rather serious” male ghost appears to the woman (78), and even he is impressed by her cultured ways.  The ghost, a lowbrow businessman when alive, is now forced to associate with similarly uncultured folk;  the elite dead will have nothing to do with him.  The teacher had been married to a plumber, who “talked of nothing but ball games.”  But she had been a loyal wife, and now that her husband has died, she believes she is past the point where she can find a serious-minded spouse.  Recognizing that they are in the same boat, the ghost and the teacher spend the winter discussing literature together.  The teacher is “a long way ahead,” for at “just that time” she is busily reading all of the moderns.  Not only does she “know her Joyce and her O'Neill but also her Dreiser, her Frank, her Hemingway and her Gertrude Stein” (78).  But with the coming of spring, the ghost, having now acquired sufficient culture to be accepted by the astral elite, comes to the teacher to say goodbye.  He states that to gain entrée to the best and exclusive circles one need only “mention the names of a few moderns and show familiarity with their work” (142).  Without even a farewell kiss, the ghost departs, the teacher noting wryly that “it just shows how a woman comes out when she tries to do anything for a man.  You try to lift them up and make them something better than they are and then they quit you.”  O'Neill's opinion of Anderson's story is not known, but their continued good relations suggest that at least he was not offended at serving, with Dreiser, as a frame for this lightly amusing, proto-feminist tale.

The names of O'Neill and Anderson would often be similarly linked through a variety of publications celebrating new movements in American literature and drama beginning around World War I.  In Smart Set, edited by H.L. Mencken, stories by Anderson were featured along with some of O'Neill's early one-acts.  In the fall of 1925, O'Neill and Anderson, along with Van Wyck Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Boardman Robinson and Max Eastman, were featured as contributing editors of New Masses, a magazine aimed at offering arts criticism as well as first hand accounts of strikes and other major national events which had impact on laborers and members of the lower classes.  O'Neill and Anderson would also be featured, along with Dreiser, James Branch Cabell and Ernest Boyd, as unpaid contributing editors to The American Spectator, launched in October 1932 under the guidance of O'Neill's longtime friend, critic George Jean Nathan.

Persisting in his hope to turn more of his attention to writing for the theatre, and undoubtedly reaching out for a deeper connection with a kindred spirit, Anderson attempted to meet with O'Neill in New York in April of 1934. O'Neill, in New York for a court case involving an auto accident, had managed to avoid a dreaded court appearance with the announcement that he was suffering a nervous breakdown.  Whether or not this was so, O'Neill followed through by cancelling a number of planned New York engagements, including the meeting with Anderson.  Following a brief appearance at a Museum of the City of New York exhibition honoring his father and himself, O'Neill returned to Casa Genotta, his home in Sea Island, Georgia, where he hoped to work in earnest on his projected cycle, “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed.”  Anderson wrote solicitously to him there on 12 May 1934:

I am very sorry to get your letter and hear of your ill health.  I was so sorry I didn't see you when you were in New York and wish it were possible for you to come to the farm this summer.  We are going down about the first of June and will be there during June, July and August.  If you get better and want to see anyone and if you stay there for the summer, we might get in the car and come down for a day with you.

 

The more I see of the theatre, the more I realize what you have done for it and you may be sure that everyone who cares about the theatre wants to see you well and at work again.

Anderson could hardly know that during the subsequent several years, O'Neill was commencing work on several plays—Long Day's Journey Into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Hughie and The Iceman Cometh—all of which would bring his art to its full stature.  It is interesting to speculate on how these plays might have influenced Anderson's own work, had he known of them.  Perhaps he sensed that O'Neill, then widely regarded as past his prime as a dramatist, was on the brink of his most significant dramatic achievements.  Within a year, Anderson made contact with O'Neill again, and on 15 April 1935, O'Neill, at Casa Genotta, wired Anderson, who was staying at the Flagler Hotel in nearby Jacksonville, Florida: “Could you lunch with us at one thirty tomorrow Tuesday Stop Please wire if you can.”  Anderson did join the O'Neills for lunch, a fact that the latter recorded in a 16 April note in his Work Diary, unfortunately offering no further comment.  An O'Neill friend, Fania Marinoff, recalled the anxiety that O'Neill and his wife Carlotta often felt in dealing with guests: “I know that the preparations they had to make for Sherwood Anderson's visit threw them both into a state of distress” (Gelb 797).  The lunch apparently went well, at least from Anderson's perspective, as he wrote to O'Neill on 20 April 1935, from his farm in Marion, Virginia:

Just a note to tell you how much I enjoyed the brief visit I had with you and Mrs. O'Neill.  It was only too short for me.  I had a thousand things I wanted to talk with you about but knew it would take me a long time to get started.  I was delighted to find you at work again and in good spirits.  I know you are always after something not too easily comprehended and that you continually have to go through your own little hells.  You have always been a man I have looked up to as one of the few great figures of the time and I am sorry that I cannot see more of you.

Four days later, O'Neill responded in kind to Anderson's letter:

I am so glad to know you enjoyed your visit here.  It was all too brief for me, too.  I felt as you did that there was a devil of a lot I wanted to say but that it was too long a story to start then.  Well, here's hoping that something will take you and Mrs. Anderson this way again before too long—or that sometime you will have the leisure and the urge to hop in your car and come down just to visit us.  I needn't say you will always be welcome.  Or, again, maybe I can take advantage of your invitation to Marion after I break the back of this outsize opus.  Anyway, no matter how, I hope we can, and will soon, get together again.  Because I've never lost the sense I had when I first read your work, and which was confirmed when I first met you years ago, that there was spiritual kinship between us—and so, the foundation of lasting friendship

 

What you said at the last of your note is darned kind, and coming from you it means the hell of a lot to me.  Thank you.  Mrs. O'Neill joins me in all good wishes to you and to Mrs. Anderson.

Anderson, obviously touched by O'Neill's note, wrote back on 29 April:

I got your delightful letter here at Marion.  I am starting east tonight and will be in the east for two or three weeks, but expect to be back here for a summer on the farm by June 1.

 

If you decide to stay at Sea Island I am going to try to run down for a day or two with you sometime during the summer as I would like so very much the opportunity of a few quiet walks and talks with you.

 

Give my best to Mrs. O'Neill.  Mrs. Anderson joins me in this.

This brief exchange of letters—polite in the extreme—seems to comprise heavily veiled attempts by each man to say how much the other has touched him.  Each seems to long for an opportunity to go further in their relationship.  It is clear that their world offered no opportunity for a closer association between two heterosexual men; and, as such, they are left without a vocabulary to express their need for each other as individuals and artists.

At about the same time, in a letter to Roger Sergel, written on stationery from the O. Henry Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina, and dated April 1935, Anderson, perhaps inspired by his meeting with O'Neill, again waxed enthusiastic about turning his own attentions to writing for the theatre: “I have a hunch that this play writing thing is really my meat.  I wonder if I am right.”  He obviously looked to a relationship with O'Neill for encouragement, but he was painfully aware of O'Neill's infirmities:

Gene is a sick man.  He says he is better than he has beem [sic] for a long time and told me of a vast scheme, a series of eight plays in sequence.  I take it they are to be all connected and played night after night, the same characters coming and going through the various plays.  God knows it is ambitious enough scheme but will he ever pull it off?  He is a very very sweet fine man but I did feel death in his big expensive house.  He has drawn himself away, lives in that solitary place, seeing practically no one.  He needs his fellow men.  I felt him clinging to me rather pittifully [sic].

Anderson, joining the ranks of many long-time O'Neill friends and colleagues, was obviously pained by O'Neill's isolation, and he also sensed tensions within the O'Neill household: “You know he married the actress Montaray [sic] ... reputed to be one of the really beautiful women of America.  I thought her cold, calculating. Certainly she is not one of the women who make a house warm.”

Anderson remained concerned about O'Neill's well-being and his seeming withdrawal from the theatre, as he wrote to Miriam Phillips, wife of his friend Jasper Deeter, founder of the Hedgerow Theatre in Rose Valley, Pennsylvania: “What I wonder is, have always a little wondered about, is this ... does Jap [Deeter], there, with all you others about, also get this feeling of isolation....  He must have felt deeply the loss of men, say like Eugene O'Neill, when he felt that O'Neill had more or less given himself to the N.Y. thing” (Modlin 196).  Anderson's thoughts about O'Neill's isolation are also evident in a 9 January 1936 entry in his diary: “Wrote a letter to Gene O'Neill.  Have had the feeling that he has separated himself too much from the rest of us” (Campbell 3).  Following up on this concern, on 12 January, Anderson included a postscript in a letter to Dreiser: “Say, Ted, write a nice little note to Gene O'Neill.  I've a hunch he is just now a down pin” (Letters 345). Within the year, however, O'Neill's spirits were undoubtedly lifted, at least momentarily.  On 12 November he was informed that he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, making him only the second American so honored, following Lewis's in 1930.  In a telegram sent from Seattle, dated 15 November,  O'Neill replied to a note of congratulation from Anderson in care of their mutual friend Nathan: “Much gratitude for your congratulations I deeply appreciate the thought and kindness of your message.”

This last is the final surviving item of correspondence between O'Neill and Anderson.  The former's increasing isolation and ill health, and the latter's unexpected death in 1941, ended an acquaintanceship that left significant imprints on the work of both men—and on American literature and drama.  Unfortunately, Anderson never succeeded in bringing together the dozen or so male writers and artists in a men's group as he once had hoped.  The Bly-style contemporary “men's movement” has recognized that men have felt isolated from other men for many generations—certainly something that Anderson and O'Neill seemed to be experiencing individually.  Their respectful politeness to each other was surely not ultimately satisfying to either; both seemed to long for a deeper connection than either was able to establish.  Both men had troubled, dark sides, as potently evidenced by their writings; dark sides created, in part, by difficult relations with their own fathers, failed marriages, and pained relationships with their children.  Bly has vividly described this “dark side” of men:

Genetic inheritance contributes to their obsessions, but also culture and environment.  We have defective mythologies that ignore masculine depth of feeling, assign men a place in the sky instead of the earth, teach obedience to the wrong powers, work to keep men boys, and entangle both men and women in systems of industrial domination that exclude both matriarchy and patriarchy. (Iron John x)

The greatness of O'Neill and Anderson as writers may stem, in part, from their individual abilities at sensing these problems, although both tended to look too high up and too far away for their solutions.  O'Neill, particularly in his plays of the 1920s, attempted to show the struggle between man and God; Anderson, in his novels, emphasizes the constricting role that society as a whole (particularly repressive small-town society) plays in stifling the individual.  Only in the later, Tao House plays does O'Neill throw his focus on the battle of the individual male with his own personal demons.  This may well have been a first step for American men on their harrowing journey toward wholeness—a journey still incomplete, but illuminated by the light shed by two “tender men.”