Ever since I first, in June 1965, heard about the forthcoming publication of the Sigmund Freud-William Bullitt collaborative study on Woodrow Wilson, a manuscript mentioned earlier in Ernest Jones’s authorized biography of Freud, I have been on the track of learning as much as possible about it. Although the book itself did not appear until 1967, I had asked Bullitt questions over the telephone and done preliminary interviewing with psychoanalysts who knew him. After his death in 1967 I persisted in following up on his life, wrote to various relatives of his, and tried to track down his papers, which nonetheless for years remained inaccessibly with his daughter Anne in Ireland.¹

Obviously other matters attracted my attention in the intervening four decades, but I never let go of my interest in this subject. Since Louise Bryant, John Reed’s widow and Bullitt’s second wife, was a notable woman for Bullitt, the mother of their daughter Anne, and, some claimed in print, the subject of Freud’s analysis, not Bullitt himself, I also kept an eye out for material about her. Although only one biography, an unauthorized one, has ever been published about Bullitt, three good studies of Bryant have appeared in print.²

After I took early retirement from university teaching in 1995 and moved back to the States, I actively renewed my quest for Bullitt material. I was astonished to find that the owners of the Freud copyrights, who had continued to sell foreign translations of the book about Wilson, still seemed to think that Bullitt, without Freud, was solely responsible for the book (which had received harsh reviews when it first came out). The German authorities on Freud were firm on that point, too, and curiously enough the Freud-Bullitt book, although sold for translation in Germany, was never allowed to come out there. I remained in the minority, along with Barbara Tuchman and a few others, in thinking that the fact that the Freud family accepted royalties bore on the question of the authenticity of Freud’s collaboration in the Wilson book. Freud’s intense aversion to Wilson was based on the conviction that the American intervention in the Great War had not only been unnecessary, but a hindrance to the development of a deadlock, which had been Wilson’s initial aim too.

For some time I was in touch with a New York City lawyer who had been in charge of Bullitt’s papers as a legal guardian appointed over Anne Bullitt’s affairs. Parts of these papers, bearing largely on Bullitt’s political career, had once gone to his alma mater, Yale University, but had been then withdrawn for the sake of the biography that his daughter had been writing. After many phone calls over a number of years, I finally learned that the papers had finally succeeded in being organized and catalogued, and had all finally arrived back at Yale. So in early 2004 I went there to look through the 86 library containers. Essentially I was on the track of finding Freud’s handwritten manuscript material, which was indeed there, and establishing the case, which was also definitively successful, for Freud’s genuine involvement in the Wilson text. Two book contracts between Freud and Bullitt from 1932 existed, along with much other fascinating documentary material.

But serendipitously it turned out that several cartons of Louise Bryant’s papers, after her death in 1936, had been sent back to Bullitt, and in looking through them I found these letters to her signed by “Gene.” I immediately guessed who that was, and brought them to the attention of the librarian in charge of the Bullitt collection. So that is the background to how these letters, along with the poems, happened to come to light. The tormented intensity of these freshly discovered documents should enrich future biographies of both O’Neill and Bryant.³

Professor Stephen A. Black, whose biography of O’Neill I have consistently relied upon, first alerted me to the fact that the three O’Neill poems below do not appear in the published collection of his poetry, and I am thankful for his encouragement and help. I am also immensely indebted to William R. Massa, Department of Manuscripts and Archives at Sterling Memorial Library of Yale University, for his help in getting copies of this primary material. I am also grateful to Robert M. Pennoyer, attorney-in-fact for Anne Moen Bullitt, of Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler LLP in New York City, and William Schaaf, whose New York law firm, Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, handles copyright matters for Eugene O’Neill’s poems and letters.

[July 6, 1916]

Blue eyes.⁴

You stir my soul
Ineffably.
You scatter all my peace.
Blue eyes,
What shall I do?

I smile persistently
That I may not curse
The irony of life.

I am silent
Because I am hopeless
And must not speak.

Think?
No!
I pray.

And I dream
In a great wide space
Where horizons meet
And the unattainable is possessed.

Blue eyes.
The sky is blue,
I dare not look at it
Because my soul is lonely.

Don’t you know then
Why,
Blue eyes?

EGO [Signed]

“Eugene O’Neill to Louise Bryant in reply” [Louise’s handwritten remarks following the poem]

“The Youngest Angel Speaks”

Golden wings,
Dishevelled, so long asleep
In the loam of the world,
But golden,
A little golden,
Still!

Wings of dream,
Weary with many soarings
Toward the alluring stars
Which beckon,
And smile,
And are gone.

Triumphant wings,
Remember the heights you won—
Joyless and desolate!
I will never
Fly again
With you.

Out with wings
I tear you to pieces—so!
Naked but laughing loud,
As a mole
I burrow
In earth.

Forgotten wings
I follow the mole—God, love,
Deep in the velvet earth
Where all glad
Mad jewels
Are found.

Beloved wings
You have brought me home to life,
And my mirrored dream
In the eyes
Of Mary
Mae Cann

________________________________

I will never
Fly again.

EGO July 1916

“Mire”

I dug down
Into the mire of my soul,
And with black-rimmed fingers
Pulled forth many worms,—
Repulsive, pallid, squirming worms,
Each squirm a reproach,
Each repulsion a vindication,
Each pallor a prophecy.
- - - - - — - - - - - - - - - - -
Now I shall go fishing!

Eugene G. O’Neill
Provincetown,
Mass.

[Letter # 1]
[1918]

Provincetown, Mass. Tuesday

Dear Louise,

How do I think I would act if I should see you?⁵ I think I would want to say a lot of things—and find no words; would want to kiss you—and dare not; would want to weep—and find my eyes had become incapable of tears; would look into your eyes furtively—and be afraid; and I would feel very sad, and very humble, and very dirty!

“Dear Youngest Angel”? Alas, because you clung so cruelly to your wings when I had flung mine away, I became a mole that I might not see you.

Perhaps if I had seen Russia in the throes as you have I might be aroused to a love for the human race, or at least some branch of it. As it is, humanity inspires me only with loathing. Everything over here is bombastic cant and cheap sentimentality. I hate it, and my only salvation lies in my ability to sink into myself, to grow—or eat—inward. My “little world” is an immense myself extending infinitely into both Past and Future. Do not urge me out of the Dream which is eternal reality into a reality of this life which is only a pitiful illusion.

“The freedom of humanity” sounds to me like four words, hopelessly meaningless, which I might have read in Carlyle’s French Revolution, quoted from a long-winded speech of Robespierre’s. We are bound on the wheel. The old Gods remain. “Even thus they remain possessors of the land, while the centuries roar past them and are gone.” To find a release for one’s soul in one’s spiritual self, to rise to a higher plane in which the phantasmagoria of this life no longer frets the eyes—that is the only hope, as I see it. I would set “myself upon a throne in space”—or, preferably, a South Sea island and play on my spiritual fiddle while modern civilization is destroyed by flames.

What you write of the death of eight hundred out of a thousand children in Russia leaves me sad in as much as I deeply pity the two hundred who survive. And then—so many children are killed!

If you feel “empty and burnt out,” so do I; but I have my work to take the place of your love of Russia. In it I find what scattered moments of the joy of living are still vouchsaved [sic] to me. I work hard and, I trust, pass on gradually to better and bigger things.

I acknowledge my last letter was unjust—as unjust as your’s [sic] were. You hurt me, and I felt the primitive desire to hurt back. And I can imagine what the war did to you—because through you it killed so much of me.

If you had only come sooner—a month, two months sooner! But you didn’t, or couldn’t; and in this I see that our old familiar demon, who took malignant delight in torturing us in the past, still hovers around. I can remember once saying —probably tempted by a desire to be clever—that “everything comes to him who waits too long.” But how true it is! I waited too long—and snapped—and so did you wait too long—and now everything we waited for is here—an impossible possibility!

For God’s sake, do not give any more heed to the Tarantulas of the Village! How could they understand me?—that is my pride. You know they couldn’t. If I thought they could I would cut my throat, shamed to death by that revelation of my smallness. Because I preferred bar-tenders [sic], and negro gamblers, and gangsters, and truck-drivers [sic], firemen and the like to their vacuous insincerities they sniffed their petty disdain—not realizing that I needed to touch real life and was not interested in the mincing of marionettes. Occasionally, just to show I could, I took a hand with them and [romanced?]⁶ their thread-bare [sic] souls a bit—hence, my reputation for indiscriminate love-making [sic]. Love? Great God, what a title to give it! You reminded me of the fact that we are both Irish, and yet you cannot be lenient to—blarney!

I assure you my physical lapses were few indeed—that is truth!—and they were the result of drunkenness and a dead soul to which nothing mattered. I passed thro’ them “with sorrow like a mask upon my face” and they disappeared in forgotten yesterdays. This is a disgusting admission just as those one-night amours were themselves disgusting—above all to me. Then why? you will ask. I cannot answer for I do not know; except that I had no hope of any better thing. Once I let go my grip I was, in all truth, no longer clearly conscious of what I did. The whirlpool sucked me under and I was carried here and there, indifferent, making no struggle, consumed with apathy. Ask the child why it was born blind, or the tempest why it is a tempest. Kismet!

Again I warn you: Beware of your “friends” (?) [sic] down there, especially those of your own sex. (I except Susan, of course.⁷ She is a real person—and she knows how I suffered last fall.) But the others! Also, I know them and they know I do. If they were not so beneath notice I would turn loose a barrage fire that would blow them into the earth—by simply telling the truth I gained from personal experience. That is why they are afraid of me, but peck at me through you, and you are forced to suffer the brunt.

So you intend to fly to Russia again? I should think you would take off your wings for a time and regain a spiritual balance before setting out. It seems to me you are at present the victim of too much undigested experience. You are bound to need perspective after being through so much—in order to see it.

If, as you write, it is dangerous for us to see each other then we must still be lying to ourselves, and the wall you speak of does not exist, and your going away again is another cowardly flight to avoid the consequences of being what you are, of meeting yourself face to face. I would dearly love to see you—no matter how it hurt—for I am convinced that neither your efforts nor mine will ever sever our souls, and that Our Dream of Yesterday is not dead but only stunned into unconsciousness.

I was tempted to go to you when I received your first letters—if for nothing else than to show you I was still I, and not the thing they had painted me. Two reasons stopped me. First, I doubted if you would see me. Second, I was troubled with my old sordid complaint—lack of money. Although “In the Zone” is on the vaudeville road and I am supposed to be getting 35% as my share—for the weeks it plays, mind you. It often skips—I find getting my own money from the W. [Washington] S. [Square] P. [Players] is like pulling teeth. Also, have cut loose from paternal aid—not in anger but in confidence of independence which is liable to prove premature.

God damn it! Isn’t life contemptible when you have to make Godawful statements such as the above? Oh, how sick I am of it!

Recently sold two plays to the Smart Set but have only been paid for one as yet.⁸ Again! I mention all this to show you that in the hide-and-seek game of Mohamet and the Mountain I am compelled to play the Mountain.

You speak of making Agnes unhappy. At the beginning of our relationship I told her frankly that, although I cared a lot for her, I was not absolutely sure whether I still loved you or not. I said that it was very probable that you had changed completely, that the war would have made you another being; in short, that the person who came back would no longer be the Louise I had loved or who would still love me. (This was a real fear with me, a gnawing doubt which ate into my soul for six months, which helped to drive me into the excesses which meant forgetfulness. I suppose you haven’t considered that part of it.) Anyway, Agnes knew this feeling of mine and accepted it. I was frank about everything from the first. I would not hurt her for the world. She is much too fine for that. And any hypocrisy of my part would have hurt her more than anything.⁹

Those doubts of mine were real—are real—hurt me—hurt you—hurt Agnes—and the pity of it is that if they were definitely cleared up some one or two of us would have to suffer an added pain in order that the other two or one might be free. And there you are!

Write me what you think of this matter. Please! The approaching night is long, and—I am afraid!

Gene

P.S.

Of course, I would like to see your work!

[Letter # 2]

My dear Louise,

Your two letters are characteristically unjust. You ignore my side of the question entirely. You are blameless—although you have done more to ruin my life than any other person in the world, not even excepting myself—and you cannot, or will not, see wherein you have been responsible for all this. While I am—“strange and ugly.”

“Our dear one time love”—what did you do with it when you had it? Stand up and answer frankly, if you dare. For over a year and a half I loved you. During most of that time you lived with another man. That is undeniable. What does it matter if physically you were faithful to me—especially considering the circumstances.¹⁰ Spiritually you were untrue to me, to yourself, to him ever [sic] moment of that time—and that is a far greater sin.

Does it cause you pain to know I have been living with another woman? Then you know now how I suffered for five hundred days—and still suffer. You will immediately say the circumstances were different. You are wrong. In my eyes they were not. I suffered as you suffer. The cases are ever the same. For a year and a half—perhaps for the rest of my life, too—my love for you kept me in Hell. I lived only in that love, in the hope of those fleeting bits of Paradise you tossed me once in a while—only to turn back to the other man the next moment. Spiritually you tortured me as if, instead of love, a devil of hatred possessed you. You knew my agony. You must have known.

And your trip to Russia? Can a few letters pleading madness gloss over a cruel fact—a plan definitely meditated upon? What did you do to my dreams, my hopes that time? Destroyed them as if Our Love mattered not at all, was the last thing of all to consider. You could have come back from Halifax if you realized your mistake as you wrote you did. You could have returned from Russia when you promised me you would if you had cared enough. I waited until November. Then I gave you a month’s leeway. You didn’t come. Your letters were cold and indefinite. There I cracked. Noone [sic] can I say I was unfaithful to you before then. But then I let the devil [kick?] the millennium over the golden mountain. My cross had become too heavy to bear.

Besides, in one letter you threatened to let yourself go in Petrograd if you didn’t hear from me. I didn’t know whether my letters had reached you or not. I suspected—everything. And then there were always the serpent-Tongued who are now regaling you with their lies and exaggerations: “Have you heard from Louise? How is Jack? Are they married yet? Is it true they were married here before they left?” And so on.

So I tossed myself into the discord and went the limit for two months— in a spirit of revenge against you, all women, myself for being heart-broken, and life in general. I didn’t care what I did. There you have it. Nothing mattered, my own life least of all, I didn’t care! I drank all the time I was in New York— all I could. I had suffered my fill up here last Spring and Summer. I refused to endure the ache, and drink drugged me to an indifferent apathy.

You seem to have swallowed the Village gossip without a doubt as to its veracity. This is hardly fair—especially as you know the G.V. branch of swine. Much of it may have a basis in fact, I confess. I don’t remember, and I don’t care to. When my mind baths are over, they are forgotten. And I too was mad then! I must deny showing your letters around. The only one I showed which was personal was to Clara Wald soon after my arrival in New York. I thought she was your best friend and wanted to unbosom myself to someone. I didn’t know at the time what a sparrow-brain she was. You can discount anything she says. She has her reasons—which it would be futile to mention. Only don’t trust her.

I may have read bits of your letters to the “How is Jack” tribe to get back at them but never anything but new items from Russia.

As for my “Go-to-Hell” greeting—(I must have been drunk if I ever said it)—it’s no more than you left unsaid but understood for me when you went to Russia.

You needn’t damn Agnes to Hell for letting me drink. She knew she couldn’t have stopped me—or anyone else but myself; but she pulled me together until I realized what I was wasting of myself and felt a longing to be clean and do clean work again. She accepted me as I was—at my worst—and didn’t love me for what she thought I ought to be. She knew I could be led but not pushed. She helped understandingly, in every way she knew how, and I owe a lot to her. Whether I love her in a deep sense or not, I do not yet know. For the past half-year “love” has seemed like some word in a foreign language of which I do not know the meaning. It dazes me. It is more than probable that you have burned yourself so deep into my soul that the wound will never heal and I stand condemned to love you forever—and hate you for what you have done to my life.

I deny absolutely any affair with Elaine or Nina. I flirted with Nina out of pure perversity, and Elaine [a line crosses out the word(s).]¹¹ Good God, do you think I have lost all taste, too? If you are going to believe that stuff you are flattering them more than they ever flattered me. And when did you ever know me to be seduced by flattery? I had enough of it, God knows, to [sicken?] anyone.

Did they tell you I had accomplished anything real? No, they wouldn’t say that, God damn them for the nonentities they are. I could have made any one of them glad to lick my boots. Most of them did. And when they were through I kicked them for the slimy insects they are, and laughed, and turned away. They have good reason to hate me, but not to take it out on you.

You shouldn’t have listened to their tales. If you had loved me, you wouldn’t. You would have written and I would have told you the truth, as I do now.

Write me once more, at least—an answer to this. It is but just to me. I ask it in the name of Our Yesterday.

I give you the greeting of one shade to another—both your handiwork. We have each killed the thing we loved but I, at least, can plead self-defense. I was going mad. Some days, or years, or centuries hence our souls will meet and see each other naked, and the wounds on each, and then, and then only, will that unforgettable, inexorable Yesterday become Our inevitable Tomorrow.

For, stamp upon it as you will, neither your love nor mine was of the stuff this little breath of life can blow away.¹²

Gene

NOTES

1. See Stephen A. Black, Eugene O’Neill: Beyond Mourning and Tragedy (New Haven: Yale UP, 1999) for a short gloss on the life of William C. Bullitt: “A man of wealth and substance, Bullitt was the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union; while he was ambassador to France during the late 1930s, he and Princess Marie Bonaparte helped Freud and his family escape the Nazis. He married Louise in 1923, and they had a daughter. But Louise drank so heavily that after a few more years of marriage Bullitt divorced her, retaining custody of their daughter” (202-03).

2. See Will Brownell and Richard N. Billings, So Close to Greatness: A Biography of William C. Bullitt (New York: Macmillan, 1987). For biographies of Louise Bryant, see Barbara Gelb, So Short a Time: A Biography of John Reed and Louise Bryant (New York: Norton, 1973); Virginia Gardner, Friend and Lover: The Life of Louise Bryant (New York: Horizon, 1982); Mary Dearborn, Queen of Bohemia: The Life of Louise Bryant (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1996). Also see Robert A. Rosenstone, Romantic Revolutionary: A Biography of John Reed (New York: Knopf, 1975).

3. Biographer Louis Sheaffer, O’Neill: Son and Playwright (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968), describes Louise handing a package of letters to Bullitt shortly after their marriage and quotes this reaction from Bullitt: “If the letters were sincere, and they sounded so, O’Neill was certainly at one time violently in love with her. His letters to Louise were wails of despairing, unrequited love. Louise burned them—without sign of emotion— merely because she believed that the private emotions of individuals were not the concern of anyone else. So far as I know, Louise was never in love with O’Neill. She thought he had talent, felt sorry for him, and tried to help him. She described to me his frequent fits of drunkenness and his suicidal inclinations. On more than one occasion she helped literally to pick him out of the gutter” (383). Fortunately for future scholars, Louise Bryant evidently held on to a letter or two.