Eugene O'Neill.

A Touch of the Poet dominated his last writing years because it was intended to be the 5th play in an 11-play cycle, one of the most ambitious projects an American playwright had ever conceived.

Eugene O'Neill was born in 1888 in a hotel room on Broadway, where his father, James O'Neill, famously performed in the popular melodrama The Count of Monte Cristo. Eugene also died in a hotel room, in Boston in 1953, where he lived his last two years near the medical facilities he would come to require. In his journey as a playwright, it's ironic that A Touch of the Poet takes place in a hotel of sorts-an 1828 backwoods New England stagecoach saloon and inn. The shabby little dive, owned and operated by the character of Cornelius Melody, may be one of the most important artistic stops that O'Neill made.

A TOUCH OF THE POET: TIMELINE December 1934: O'Neill's distress at the state of the world, and specifically American life, inspires him to conceive of an epic dramatic cycle. January 1935: Begins outlining plans for a large multigeneration, multiplay saga detailing the lives of an Irish family in New England. February 1935: His outlines and scenarios come to require 5 plays and he initially entitles the entire cycle A Touch of the Poet. April 1935: The cycle gets a new title: “A Threnody for Possessors Self-Dispossessed.” July 1935: O'Neill writes in a letter: “Each play will be concentrated around the final fate of one member of the family but will also carry on the story of the family as a whole.” He claims he's written 25,000 words worth of scenarios and outlines, but no dialogue. August 1935: O'Neill determines a 7th play is necessary. June 1936: By this date, O'Neill has found he'll need 9 plays. A Touch of the Poet will be the title of the fifth play about the Melody family. October 1936: He receives the Nobel Prize for Literature, but stops writing due to illness. June 1937: Restarts work on the cycle, revising his outlines. March 1939: Finishes 3rd draft of A Touch of the Poet. June 1939: O'Neill writes in his journal, “Feel fed up and stale on Cycle after 4 years of not thinking of any other work.” He begins working on The Iceman Cometh. January 1940: Finishes The Iceman Cometh (not produced until 1946) and returns to work on the cycle. March-October 1940: O'Neill is compelled to finish another play: Long Day's Journey into Night. November 1940: O'Neill continues to tackle his cycle but discovers he has so much material for the first two plays that he makes them four, thus enlarging the cycle to 11 plays. February 1942: Last attempt to rewrite A Touch of the Poet; finishes by November. He never returns to work on what he himself described as his “magnum opus.” June 1942: Writes his first one-act since 1918: “Hughie.” It's not produced in the U.S. until 1964. May 1943: O'Neill finishes his last play, A Moon for the Misbegotten. 1952: He and his wife Carlotta burn all the manuscripts for the cycle, except for Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions. 1958: A Touch of the Poet is given its world premiere in Stockholm, Sweden, and produced on Broadway, where it runs for 284 performances.

By the time O'Neill started writing A Touch of the Poet in the mid-1930s, he had won three Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Unfortunately, he had also become so ill that he couldn't travel to Stockholm for the Nobel Prize in Literature that he was awarded in 1936. By 1943, O'Neill had written his last play; the physical act of writing had become virtually impossible due to his Parkinson-like illness. Even so, during those six or seven years, O'Neill wrote, in a tiny trembling script that was barely decipherable, some of the best plays ever written by an American dramatist. Throughout this period, A Touch of the Poet served as his touchstone: in between the completion of the first scenario in 1934-35 and the last draft in 1942, he wrote The Iceman Cometh, Long Day's Journey into Night, “Hughie,” and Moon for the Misbegotten.

A Touch of the Poet dominated his last writing years because it was intended to be the 5th play in an 11-play cycle, one of the most ambitious projects an American playwright had ever conceived. Not that he'd ever lacked ambition: early in his career, O'Neill had written experimental works imbued with Expressionistic elements like Emperor Jones and The Hairy Ape. He had concocted his own version of Aeschylus' Oresteia trilogy, Mourning Becomes Electra, set in a Civil War-era New England household; the Broadway production began at 5:15 pm, included a 90-minute dinner break, and finished after 11 pm. How much more ambitious could a playwright be?

Plenty. O'Neill wanted to respond to the severe world problems he saw in the mid-1930s, including the lasting effects of the Great Depression and the increasing signs of another war in Europe. He decided he needed to write a play cycle that traced the roots of America's—if not the developed world's—ills through one Irish-American family's history. O'Neill couldn't understand how individuals forfeited their souls, their idealism, for material greed. He found the theme crystallized by the Biblical verse from the gospel of Mark: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” (7:36)

O'Neill tried dramatizing this idea in a series that examined one family, the Harfords, through five generations of its history. He started thinking in terms of 5 plays; then the cycle mushroomed to 7, then 9 and, finally, 11 plays, starting in the late 1700s and ending in 1932. Each play would deal with the fate of one Harford family member, each set in a different part of the country. A Touch of the Poet was to be the fifth.

A Touch of the Poet may at first seem a dark, little intense family drama, not unlike Long Day's Journey into Night, except for its period setting. Its central character, Con Melody, is an old Irish soldier-braggart, whose rise from a saloon-keeper's son in Ireland to a major under Duke Wellington justifies his insufferable arrogance, which he wears as handsomely, and pathetically, as his old Dragoons uniform to celebrate the anniversary of his heroics at the Battle of Talavera. In fact, we learn that Melody was kicked out of the Dragoons for adultery and left Europe disgraced and married to Nora, a peasant. Melody is not unlike a certain Irish “type” of comic blowhard that populated the American stage in the 19th century. Scholar Norma Jenckes found O'Neill borrowed elements from the melodramas of Irishmen John Brougham and Dion Boucicault, two of that genre's masters. Other scholars have noted that Melody resembles James O'Neill's most famous portrayal, that of Edmund Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo. O'Neill himself suggested only two actors he knew could play Con: “Maurice Barrymore or my old man.” Others note that Melody is just a rough sketch for the autobiographical James Tyrone, from Long Day's Journey into Night. And that's the sign of great playwriting. Each character, each scene, each play incorporates material from a lifetime of sources and experiences, to form a new work whose sum is greater than its parts. -JI

Sources: 1. Modern British, Irish, and American Drama: A Descriptive Chronology, 1865-1965 by Charles A. Carpenter. Internet URL: http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/%7Eccarpen/ONeill.htm 2. Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O'Neill by Travis Bogard. (Oxford University Press, 2000) 3. “O'Neill's Use of Irish-Yankee Stereotypes in A Touch of the Poet” by Norma Jenckes. These sources and many others are available at www.eoneill.com.

BACK