Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
What Haunted Eugene O'Neill?
By Fintan O'Toole
Collected Shorter Plays
by Eugene O'Neill, with an introduction by Robert Brustein
Yale University Press, 306 pp., $15.95 (paper)
Eugene O'Neill's America: Desire Under Democracy
by John Patrick Diggins
University of Chicago Press, 305 pp, $29.00
It was almost obligatory for a matinee idol to lie about his age, but in the case of James O'Neill, father of Eugene O'Neill, the falsehood was rooted in something more than vanity. 'It was in Kilkenny—smiling Kilkenny...,' he told the readers of Theater Magazine in 1917, 'where I was born one opal-tinted day in October 1847.'[1] The place, the year, and especially the opal tint were all deliberate distortions of an intolerable truth. By changing his place of birth from the little rural village of Tinneranny to the nearby city of Kilkenny, he was imbuing his origins with a baroque romance. Two decades earlier, in a book called Famous American Actors of Today, the opal tinting was laid on thick, and a rich shade of immemorial antiquity glossed over the brute facts of history:
Review, 4453 words
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