Eugene O’Neill at Tao House: Journey Into Pain

Gazing across the broad San Ramon Valley from the room where Eugene O’Neill wrote his final plays, a visitor senses the solitude and isolation of the hillside estate that the National Park Service preserves as a memorial to an author many regard as America’s greatest playwright.

Although only 15 miles east of Oakland, the valley with Mt. Diablo forming a majestic backdrop still has much of the rural charm that O’Neill and his third wife, Carlotta, discovered when they came here in 1937 to build a home that would offer him serenity. O’Neill was at the height of his fame.

He had won three Pulitzer prizes for his plays--”Beyond the Horizon” (1920), “Anna Christie” (1921), and “Strange Interlude” (1928). A year earlier in 1936, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. And here he would write among others, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a tortuous revelation of his own early years and the tragedy of his family that would earn him his fourth Pulitzer. The award was presented posthumously.

Path to Righteous Knowledge

The O’Neills called their new home Tao House, a name derived from the teachings of an ancient Chinese philosopher. Tao means the right path--the way to righteous knowledge. Carlotta, a former actress, favored an Oriental decor within the house. O’Neill’s bed was an ornate couch that had been discovered in an opium den. The exterior is typical of the California ranch style during the days of Spanish and later Mexican rule. Concrete blocks were used to simulate adobe, and the roof is of Oriental tile.

Since acquiring the property from the state in 1980, the National Park Service has restored the house and its interior to its original condition. It is now open to the public. Although O’Neill originally purchased 158 acres of land, the present site administered by the Park Service is 13 acres. A swimming pool below the house is shaded by pines and redwood trees that the O’Neills planted, and there are the remnants of a grove of almond and walnut trees.

“It was in pretty bad shape from neglect when we took over,” said Craig Dorman, the Park Service resident ranger who is in charge of the property and who has also supervised restoration work on the house and grounds during the last five years.

Search for Furniture

The house remains unfurnished while an effort is made to locate furniture of the period when the O’Neills lived here. While the National Park Service is responsible for the operation of the site, it has a cooperative agreement with the Eugene O’Neill Foundation, which is responsible for planning and programming activities related to the performing arts. Among the foundation’s future plans is development of an arts center with a residential program. Another is to establish a research and conference center with a major theater library for the study of the American theater and the life and work of Eugene O’Neill.

Travis Bogard, a vice president of the foundation, is a professor of dramatic art at UC Berkeley, where he teaches a course on O’Neill and his work.

Bogard is the author of “Contour in Time--The Plays of Eugene O’Neill” (Oxford University Press, 1972), which is a critical study of O’Neill’s work.

“In the 30 years of his creative life, O’Neill completed the drafts of 62 plays,” Bogard said. “Eleven were destroyed, and of those remaining over half contain discernible autobiographical elements.”

In his book, Bogard wrote: “His was, in part, a quest for identity. . . . O’Neill used the stage as his mirror, and the sum of his work comprises an autobiography. In many of his plays, with a bold directness of approach, he drew a figure whose face resembled his own, and whose exterior life barely concealed a passionate, questing, inner existence. Around this figure, he grouped other characters who served as thin masks for members of his close family and for his friends and significant acquaintances.”

Eugene O’Neill was born Oct. 16, 1888, in New York City. His father, James O’Neill, was a well-known actor who became typecast as Edmond Dantes in “The Count of Monte Cristo,” a role he played for 25 years and came to detest. Eugene’s mother, Ella, became addicted to morphine prescribed to her to alleviate complications from Eugene’s difficult childbirth.

Search for Gold

The future playwright married Kathleen Jenkins in 1909, leaving her to search for gold in Honduras. A year later, he signed on as a sailor on a Norwegian square rigger. He became a beach bum in Buenos Aires and continued a dissolute life after returning to New York, living in squalid hotels and spending most of his time in cheap saloons patronized by the dregs of society. Kathleen divorced him and was left to raise their young son, Eugene Jr., who would commit suicide at 40.

O’Neill’s experiences during one of the lowest points of his life would later furnish him with the material for his prolific literary output. Thirteen of his plays had a nautical setting--dramas like “The Long Voyage Home” (1917) and “The Hairy Ape” (1922). The derelicts O’Neill had known were on stage in “The Iceman Cometh,” which was produced in 1946, and was one of the five plays he completed during his seven-year stay at Tao House. The turning point in O’Neill’s career was his association with the Provincetown Players, a theatrical group established on Cape Cod that later shifted its productions to New York. “Bound East for Cardiff,” his initial effort for the company, was presented in 1916.

O’Neill met Agnes Boulton, an aspiring short story writer, in New York’s Greenwich Village. They were married in 1918. Two children were born, Shane and Oona. At 18, Oona married the comedian Charlie Chaplin, who was her father’s age. O’Neill disowned his daughter and never saw her again. Shane ended his life by leaping from a hotel window in 1977.

O’Neill divorced Agnes in 1929 to marry Carlotta Monterey, an actress. They rented a chateau in France near Tours. Here, as Bogard wrote: “He began to live in the isolation of work that was growing in scale, increasing in depth. What he asked was that Carlotta create a home like a fortress and that she undertake the guardianship of his creative life and join him in his solitude. He asked for sacrifice; she gave him her life.”

The O’Neills returned to the United States in 1931, settling at Sea Island, Ga., where he began work on a series of historical plays.

Crowning His Career

“There too,” Bogard continued, “with the writing of ‘Ah Wilderness!’ he began the group of autobiographical plays that would crown his career. Work continued with small interruptions through the 1930s, but his health was failing and at times he was too ill to write.”

When the O’Neills came to California, settling in Tao House in 1937, it was the playwright’s ambition to complete a number of plays that he had been formulating in his mind and notebooks. While living at Tao House, he completed “The Iceman Cometh,” “Hughie,” “A Moon for the Misbegotten” and “Long Day’s Journey Into Night.”

But he had developed a tremor in his hands. It was difficult for him to hold a pencil, the only way he could write. O’Neill found it impossible to create on a typewriter. Carlotta bought him a transcribing machine, but he was unable to dictate his thoughts.

“By 1943, the tremor in his hands made sustained work impossible,” Bogard said.

O’Neill’s constant companion during this period was a Dalmatian named Blemie who was devoted to his master. Blemie had his own four-poster bed and a special bathtub had been installed in the basement for the dog’s use. When Blemie died in 1940, O’Neill gave his wife a will he had written in words that might have been expressed by his pet. In part it read:

“I have little in the way of material things to leave. Dogs are wiser than men. They do not set great store upon things. They do not waste their days hoarding property. They do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain the objects they have not. There is nothing of value I have to bequeath except my love and my faith. . . .

“I ask my Master and Mistress to remember me always, but not to grieve for me too long. . . . It is painful for me to think that even in death I should cause them pain. Let them remember that while no dog ever had a happier life . . . now that I have grown blind and deaf and lame my pride has sunk to a sick, bewildered humiliation. I feel life is taunting me with having overlingered my welcome. It is time I said good-bye, before I become too sick a burden on myself and those who love me. It will be sorrow to leave them, but not a sorrow to die. Dogs do not fear death as men do. We accept it as part of life, not as something alien and terrible which destroys life. What may come after death, who knows? I would like to believe with those of my fellow Dalmatians who are devout Mohammedans, that there is a Paradise where one is always young and full-bladdered; where all the day one dillies and dallies with an amorous multitude of houris. I am afraid this is too much for even such a good dog as I am to expect. But peace, at least, is certain. Peace and long rest for weary old heart and head and limbs, an eternal sleep in the earth I have loved so well. Perhaps, after all, this is best.”

Mourning of Blemie

Blemie was buried on the property. A tombstone still marks the grave. O’Neill visited it often, mourning the loss of his friend.

It wasn’t only the physical effort of writing that taxed O’Neill’s strength. What devastated him was the mental anguish of recalling the bitter years of his early life.

Servants became impossible to find as World War II progressed so the O’Neills sold Tao House and moved briefly to San Francisco to be closer to medical treatment. They then returned to New York.

O’Neill’s health improved for a time, but the tremor still made it impossible for him to write. Carlotta bought a house overlooking the ocean at Marblehead Neck, 25 miles from Boston. For O’Neill, the next several years were depressing, knowing his creativity had come to an end. In 1951, he separated from Carlotta, but a reconciliation followed. She remained with her husband to the end, caring for him when he finally became a helpless invalid.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” opened at the Helen Hayes Theater in New York Nov. 7, 1956. The play was about his family, a harrowing portrayal of mental torment, despair, self-guilt and personal failure. It won a Pulitzer Prize. But for O’Neill, the final act and the last scene had been played three years earlier. He died in a Boston hotel room Nov. 27, 1953. He was 65.