Before launching into a response to the essay by Barbara and Arthur Gelb: “The Twisted Path to More Stately Mansions,” published in a previous issue of this journal, I think it would be helpful to lay the groundwork for this ongoing saga. In 1982, Robert Hapgood, Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire, who was the director of my dissertation on Eugene O’Neill, called me into his office and pointed to a line in the introduction of Virginia Floyd’s book, Eugene O’Neill at Work (1981). Floyd was given access to all of O’Neill’s unpublished plays, notes and scenarios save the cycle plays which were off limits to all but Donald Gallup, the longtime Curator of the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.¹ Professor Hapgood looked at me with a stare of authority and said, “That’s where you ought to go as soon as possible.” I had no idea how right he was or how complicated my life would become after I made my first trip to Yale.

The Beinecke had just acquired a new curator—Donald Gallup had retired—so I found myself in David Schoonover’s office making a plea in a soft voice to this very soft spoken reasonable man, a plea to be allowed to read, at least, the unpublished holographs of the cycle notes, scenarios, etc., written in pencil that had been so protected and coveted. After a couple of trips to Yale and more conversations with David Schoonover, he finally began to see the logic of letting me in on the big secret. After all, was it really in Carlotta’s will that no one should read or publish the cycle notes/plays except Donald Gallup? Maybe we should peruse the will and find out. We did and it wasn’t. Therefore in March 1983, I began to read page after page of barely legible miniscule penciled handwriting at the Beinecke, under Donald Gallup’s watchful eye, who had agreed to release some of the manuscripts. After all, what harm could a graduate student from UNH do? However, from time to time, he seemed worried and restricted me from publishing any direct quotes from the “Bessie Bowen” material.

One afternoon in May of 1984, Gallup offered to let me see the “Bessie Bowen” and the “Hair of the Dog” folders and said that he was not really interested in the cycle anymore and was now working on a book about Thornton Wilder. Amazed, I couldn’t get enough and scribbled as fast as I could. After a few trips to the Beinecke, I learned from Schoonover that I could publish any notes I wished as long as I received official permission. Schoonover told me later that as I read the manuscripts the library was photographing them and I was soon carrying home hundreds of pages of cycle material to be transcribed and used in my dissertation and later, of course, in my book, Eugene O’Neill’s Unfinished Threnody (1992).

As I was reading through the index of folders, I saw that there was a typescript of More Stately Mansions—in fact two scripts of the play. I requested these two manuscripts and went into the reading room to explore the play in its different versions—one, the original O’Neill typescript and two, the performing script as abridged by Karl Geirow and the basis for Donald Gallup’s so-called reading version. I was stunned by the omissions and changes. Of course, I knew the Yale/Gallup version was severely shortened but had no idea how the play—its meaning and characterizations—had been altered by the abridgement. After consulting with Schoonover, he advised me to write a proposal to the Yale Committee on Literary Property to ask permission to edit and publish the complete edition of More Stately Mansions from the typescript dated 20 January 1939. I was finally granted permission in writing on 22 May 1986.

On May 30 at the Eugene O’Neill conference at Suffolk University, Donald Gallup and I shared a panel on the cycle plays. The title of my paper was “Two Versions of More Stately Mansions: a Comparison Study.” I also announced that Yale had granted me permission to publish the original typescript. Ironically, Yale Press turned the project down, but Oxford University Press happily accepted the project after the vetting and I have Jackson R. Bryer to thank for his positive reactions. After I had finished my dissertation on the cycle plays and earned my PhD, I was hired by UNH to teach in the English department and I began working in earnest on the typescript of More Stately Mansions. In the fall of 1987, my work was almost complete and I was looking forward to sending the edition off to Oxford.

As I was sitting at my computer rereading the script, I received a call from the senior editor of Library of America, Gila Bercovitch, who informed me that Travis Bogard was editing the complete plays of O’Neill for them and that she had heard that I was working on an edition and wanted to know if we could cooperate, as Bogard was having trouble reading some of the handwriting on the script. It was a mystery to me how he had obtained a script from Yale. However I refused and called William Stempel, the Counsel for the American Collection at Yale. He told me that Bogard and Library of America could not publish More Stately Mansions—I had the sole rights and this matter was up to me and Oxford.

As a result of many calls to William Sisler, the editor of Oxford, he at first was shocked that Travis was working on this edition but in the end he convinced me that it would be in my best interest to allow Library of America to publish my edition, and that my book would be published by Oxford in September of 1988, so it would still be the “first” edition. I received a letter from Cheryl Hurley, the publisher of Library of America who told me I would be paid $500 and given full credit “in four places” in the volume: she said they would send me their Poe volume and flag the places the editor of “Eureka” (Roland Nelson) had been given similar credits. I gave in and Library of America was thrilled. Later, I learned that Bill Sisler knew the women at Library of America very well and was on an MLA panel with Ms. Hurley before all this was settled. The panel was entitled “Ethics of Publishing.”

It’s been fourteen years since my unexpurgated edition of More Stately Mansions was published by Oxford University Press, and after experiencing and getting over certain stressful and traumatic ramifications of that 1988 publication, I never thought that I would ever want to speak or write about Mansions again. However, fate, as Eugene O’Neill would say, is “ironic” and it is because of a series of events that took place from 1997 to 2003 that I return again to this subject.

The first of these occurred in October of 1997 while I was working on my book about African-American women playwrights. I was interrupted by a call from Steven Drukman of the New York Times, who wanted an interview about the upcoming production of More Stately Mansions at the New York Theater Workshop—a production based on the Gierow/Gallup shortened version and directed by Ivo van Hove, the Dutch director. I was stunned that the Times would even consult me and, of course, not a little flattered. The questions involved my feelings about the production and I was, not surprisingly, against it. In the course of our brief conversation, I enlightened Mr. Drukman about the significance and the amount of excision that the play by Gierow/Gallup represented. After the phone interview the article, “Off the Spike and onto the Stage: An O’Neill Reject,” was published on 5 October 1997, a few days after the opening.

To my dismay, many of my words were taken out of context and resulted in a misinterpretation. What Drukman had right was that I was appalled to learn of this production because it was not anywhere close to being the “completed” typescript. However, in the end, he had me agreeing with Arthur and Barbara Gelb that the play (any version) was in “fragments” and should not ever be produced. When I said that I agreed with the Gelbs that their long essay included in the production program, outlining the history of the various versions of the play, was the right thing for them to do and that the production by van Hove was not only incomplete but that it was “unethical” to advertise it as “a play by Eugene O’Neill,” I was not arguing that the original typescript was a fragment and incomplete. Later I discovered that Drukman had taped the interview which was aired on NPR.

Another annoying factoid that Drukman printed was that “unbeknown to O’Neill, however, a portion [my italics] of the only typescript of More Stately Mansions was sent with his papers to the O’Neill collection of Yale University, while he was ill in 1951.” The truth is, in case you haven’t read either the original typescript or my edited version of it, the play as sent to Yale was hardly “a portion.” The typescript itself is a hefty 290 pages. I really don’t think that the manuscript was “inadvertently” sent to Yale. Carlotta knew what she was doing and, as O’Neill’s will indicates, she had carte blanche to do with his papers whatever she wished. And Yale, as the heir, according to Carlotta’s will, had and has the authority to do as it wishes with the O’Neill papers. As outlined above, before I was granted permission to edit and publish Mansions, I sent a lengthy proposal to the Yale Committee on Literary Property and was in communication with Mr. Stempel, the Counsel for the American Collection.

I had more or less put aside the furor and debate spurred by the New York Times article when, perusing the fall 1998 issue of the Eugene O’Neill Review, I was a bit surprised and curious to see an article by the Gelbs, “The Twisted Path to More Stately Mansions.” Here we go again, I thought—the same dead horse beaten once more. The Gelbs’ article (which is a copy of the remarks that were printed in the program of the van Hove production of Mansions) went over familiar ground: that there was a note inserted in the manuscript that read “unfinished work, this script to be destroyed in case of my death” and that it was a “clumsy draft,” and that “it was impossible [referring to Karl Gierow] for anyone to know—notes or no notes—what O’Neill would have considered to be ‘essential’ in his draft of More Stately Mansions. . . .” They further exclaim that the posthumous Gierow version (or any version I suspect) would have caused O’Neill’s “ghost to howl with fury—or possibly to split its sides in ironic laughter” (106-7). The Gelbs mention the Oxford 1988 unexpurgated edition of the play in passing (without mentioning my name) as “the original unfinished, uncut script” (107).

Why all the fuss about More Stately Mansions now when I haven’t heard much complaining about Long Days Journey into Night? In that case Carlotta ignored O’Neill’s wishes to wait twenty-five years after O’Neill’s death to publish it and according to the Gelbs, Carlotta had “wrested the sealed manuscript . . . from the safe of Random House” (106). What a pity if the play had not been wrested but lay for twenty-five years languishing in the safe. Perhaps, it never would have won the Pulitzer or been as highly praised or received by the general public. Imagine not seeing or reading or teaching that great play until 1978, if then. Why didn’t the Gelbs complain publicly about Donald Gallup’s reading version of Mansions, the only available published script until my edition came out in 1988? Or where was the hue and cry when Gallup “developed” from scenarios, no less, the third cycle play The Calms of Capricorn, published by Ticknor and Fields in 1982.

When in November 1988, the New York Times Book Review printed a special section in honor of O’Neill’s centenary, Barbara Gelb wrote a review of the Library of America’s three volume edition of O’Neill: Complete Plays, edited by Travis Bogard, and published in December 1988. I was urged by Oxford “to lease” my edition (published in September 1988) to Library of America so it could be part of the Complete Plays. As I have explained above, I was finally persuaded and was paid $500 for the privilege. When I saw the volume, the promised credit in various places, including one on the copyright page, was omitted and instead my name was hidden in the “notes” at the back of the volume. Barbara Gelb in her review of all the volumes said the following:

An important inclusion to the Library of America volumes is the heretofore unpublished draft of More Stately Mansions which was to have been part of a never-completed 11 play cycle. O’Neill clearly labeled it: “Unfinished Work. This script to be destroyed in case of my death!” The manuscript will be fascinating to scholars interested in learning how O’Neill labored over his play scripts.

She further praised Travis Bogard for his “crisp, lucid notes.” In addition to the incorrect information that this was an “heretofore unpublished draft,” my name was not mentioned. The original Oxford edition antedated the Library of America’s volume by two months. Further, Gelb mentions that Carlotta O’Neill “did her husband a disservice” when she allowed Donald Gallup to publish the greatly abridged manuscript in 1964. However, she goes on to say that “she did him an inestimable service in releasing—much earlier than O’Neill had specified—the intact and excellent Long Days Journey into Night.” This seems a far cry from the tone of the O’Neill Review essay and a contradiction of the Gelbs’ attitude and harsh words about any version of Mansions in that same essay. To add insult to injury, at the end of Barbara Gelb’s review in the Times there followed a list of books published for the O’Neill centenary. The Oxford edition of Mansions was mysteriously omitted. Newsweek in their 5 December 1998 Christmas book selections had the Library of America’s O’Neill: Complete Plays at the top of the list. The blurb read as follows:

In honor of Eugene O’Neill’s centennial, Library of America has for the first time published the Complete Plays (three volumes $100). O’Neill meant his work to be read as well as performed. Travis Bogard has assembled the 50 plays in the order in which they were written, and provides for the first time the complete text of More Stately Mansions.

I have nothing but the greatest regard for Travis Bogard who made so many contributions to O’Neill scholarship, and he did write me a letter of apology in which he insisted that he had no idea I was working on an edition of MSM. Actually, he attended the conference where I announced my plans and the Yale permission to all assembled. Barbara Gelb also wrote me a letter in which she said she “was sorry” and claimed she knew nothing of the Oxford publication and my part in it. But after spending years reading and transcribing More Stately Mansions, and hundreds of other notes, scenarios, character sketches, etc., penciled in O’Neill’s tiny writing, the depression that followed the gross omissions mentioned above was devastating and I almost abandoned academia and O’Neill there and then.

I have read all the notes pertaining to the Mansions script, including “revision notes,” some of which were already written in by O’Neill onto the typescript; there is no possibility that one can call this script a “portion” or, in my opinion, in spite of that scrap of paper found within Mansions’s pages, can “consider” that it is “unfinished.” It is as finished as it can possibly be (except for one missing page) and whatever O’Neill might have changed at rehearsals if it had come to that. O’Neill wrote a third draft in January 1939, but he destroyed it and one can see that as late as 1942 he made changes on the typescript that coincided with changes he made at the same time on the typescript of A Touch of the Poet. For example, changing the name from Abigail to Deborah Harford.

The play is in my opinion an important addition to the O’Neill canon and is as autobiographical as any other of his works (except for Journey). In Mansions, O’Neill wrestles with his mother/son demons—his and her inces­tuous repressions that dogged him much of his life. In notes to revisions to the play, O’Neill, in a dialogue with himself, describes Sara as a weapon of revenge, which both mother and son use against one another:

Sara is a means of final escape from her [Deborah], substitution, as well as genuine love and physical passion—she realizes this and it is reason, later on, she can feel friendship towards Sara. When she sees Sara as her revenge rather than as herself (etc.) and so [sic] the underlying plot of this play is the duel to the death between mother and son, in which each uses Sara against the other. (qtd. in Bower, O’Neill’s Threnody 79)

In other notes, O’Neill makes clear how Deborah (formerly named Abigail) becomes physically ugly as her greed and obsession to possess Simon’s soul increases. He articulates to Sara how she is different from his mother in her lust for life over death.

It is difficult not to compare Deborah’s retreat into the summerhouse with Mary’s retreat into a drug-induced escape from reality, and to compare Sara’s ambition with Carlotta’s. More of O’Neill’s conflicted feelings of love/ hate for his mother and Carlotta are played out in Mansions; whereas, in Long Days Journey into Night Jamie expresses O’Neill’s feelings, the playwright also sublimates them in the autobiographical observer, Edmund. However, the mother/son scenes in Mansions are “performed” subconscious desires—blatantly played out. There are many segments of dialogue that echo exact lines or close to exact lines in the late plays. For example, Deborah says to Simon in Act 4, Scene 2, “How I cursed the night you were conceived, the morning you were born” (MSM 517). Mary’s words in Journey are “ I was so healthy before Edmund was born” (CP3 765), and “I never knew what rheumatism was before you were born” (786). In another place, Simon has a long speech about how much of a disappointment human life has been, “a daily appointment with peace and happiness in which we wait day after day, hoping against hope, listening to each footstep, and when finally the bride or bridegroom cometh, we discover we are kissing death” (MSM 520-1). Shades of ----- Iceman. This is not surprising because O’Neill did not stop working on the cycle one day and start writing his late plays. On the contrary, Long Day’s Journey and Iceman were written concurrently with Mansions and Poet. These are just a few examples. It is hard to believe that O’Neill was able to sustain the length of the cycle plays and create the late great plays at the same time. Besides containing many autobiographical nuggets and echoes of other plays, Mansions serves as an index to all the other cycle plays, and includes many historical allusions. It is therefore an important addition to O’Neill’s canon.

The essential plot, theme and characterizations of the play did not shift from the very first conceptions when O’Neill named it “Oh Sour Apple Tree.” There are changes in structure and he moves much of the action to the Harford mansion where Deborah can more easily manipulate her son and daughter-in-law. Penciled in on the typescript are crossed out passages and additions which point to a desire to clarify diction—finding the precise word or segment of dialogue. It does not appear that if O’Neill had lived he would have made substantial changes, if any. Because most revision notes were written in early 1939—and additions and excisions were penciled in as late as 1942—I feel this script is virtually complete.