Another Part of a Long Story: Literary Traces of Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton

328 Pages·2010·1.64 MB·English

by  William Davies King

A
nother Part of a Long Story
Agnes Boulton, date unknown.
Photographed by Nickolas Muray © Nickolas Muray Photo Archives.
Louis Sheaffer—-Eugene O’Neill Collection, Connecticut College. Used by
permission.
another part of a long story
L
iterary Traces of
Eugene O’Neill and Agnes Boulton
W
illiam Davies King
the university of michigan press Ann Arbor
Copyright © by the University of Michigan 2010
All rights reserved
Published in the United States of America by
The University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America
cPrinted on acid-free paper
2013 2012 2011 2010 4 3 2 1
No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise,
without the written permission of the publisher.
ACIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
King, W. D. (W. Davies)
Another part of a long story : literary traces of Eugene O’Neill
and Agnes Boulton / William Davies King.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-472-11717-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)
1. O’Neill, Eugene, 1888–1953. 2. Boulton, Agnes, 1893–1968.
3. Dramatists, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3529.N5Z6776 2010
812’.52—dc22
[B] 2009047781
ISBN13 978-0-472-11717-8 (cloth)
ISBN13 978-0-472-02705-7 (electronic)
W
for endy
“You know my gratitude.And my love!”

acknowledgments
S
till another part of Another Part of a Long Storyis the long story of how
this book came to be written and the many, many people who gave help
along the way. I’d like to begin by thanking Harold Owen, the English in-
structor who assigned Long Day’s Journey into Nightwhen I was a fresh-
man at Phillips Academy. I also thank Chris Kirkland, who nurtured my
early fascination with O’Neill in the classroom, and the Andover and Ab-
bot classmates who tolerated my obsession with him in the Drama Lab.
(“I got to get the ‘ile!”)
I took up my interest in Agnes Boulton in 1988 when I was working
on a small historical project concerning O’Neill at the Huntington Library
and soon found myself reading the O’Neill-Boulton correspondence at
the Harvard Theatre Collection, with the assistance of its curator, Jeanne
Newlin. Thereafter, of course, I found myself at the Beinecke Rare Book
and Manuscript Library at Yale University, where Donald Gallup, Curator
of the Yale Collection of American Literature, helped me to see what a
challenging topic I had chosen, and he set a fine example of how to meet
its difficulties. Patricia C. Willis, who followed in Gallup’s position at
Yale, has also been extremely helpful over these years. The late Howard
C. Gotlieb, Director of Special Collections at the Mugar Memorial Library,
Boston University, gave me much help with the Max Wylie Papers. I also
want to thank Diane Schinnerer and the Eugene O’Neill Foundation at
Tao House, which houses the Travis Bogard Collection.
Special mention must be made of Brian Rogers, Laurie Deredita, and
Benjamin Panciera, who have assisted me immensely with the Louis
Sheaffer–Eugene O’Neill Collection at Connecticut College. They serve
the legacy of Sheaffer well. I am also greatly indebted to that prodigious
collector of all things O’Neill, Dr. Harley J. Hammerman, who has been a
true friend in all our interactions, not least in his sponsorship of
eOneill.com, which continues to show how this increasingly remote topic
stays current with our times. That website now features a new edition of
viii • Acknowledgments
Agnes Boulton’s Part of a Long Storyand Selected Stories of Agnes Boulton,
both “books” edited by me and welcomed by him.
Other institutions that have served as homes away from home for
this project include the libraries at Cornell University, Dartmouth College,
Princeton University, the University of California at Los Angeles, the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Uni-
versity of Virginia. I would probably never have taken up this project if
the Library of Congress had not preserved and presented to me the en-
grossing world of early pulp magazines. I scanned (with my eyes) count-
less bound volumes and reels of microfilm, all courteously supplied to me
by the dedicated library staff, and the experience was not unlike that of
the Egyptologist opening an untouched tomb.
In my edition of the O’Neill–Boulton correspondence, I have already
thanked many people who helped me in the early stages of this project,
through conversations and editorial advice. They are all, again, thanked
here. With no disrespect to the others, who have also served this book, I
would single out a few for their continuing importance: Travis Bogard,
Jackson R. Bryer, and Ellen Margolis. To this list I would add George
Beecroft, Stephen A. Black, Steven F. Bloom, Lucey Bowen, Zander Briet-
zke, Brian Desmond, Robert M. Dowling, Richard B. Eaton, Kathleen A.
Foster, Felicia Londré, Cynthia McCown, Jo Morello, Mimi Muray, Brenda
Murphy, Roy Pedersen, Laurin R. Porter, Richard Sater, Michelle Slung,
Madeline Smith, and Beth Wynstra. I particularly wish to thank Jane
Scovell, whose biography of Oona is also a rich source of information on
Agnes Boulton. Thanks, too, to Margaret Loftus Ranald, whose Eugene
O’Neill Companionwas my constant companion. Susan Wax helped guide
me through the deep water of this project, of which there was a lot. Many
others, students and colleagues, should be thanked, and so they are.
I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of Theater and
Dance at the University of California Santa Barbara, and David Marshall,
Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts, for their understanding of what a long
road one takes when the subject is close to home. The University of Cali-
fornia has also given me several research grants and a University of Cali-
fornia President’s Fellowship to assist my work.
This book has been expertly handled by the University of Michigan
Press under the guidance of that wise Akronian executive editor LeAnn
Fields. I give many thanks to the copyeditor, Richard Isomaki, for catch-
ing all the errors except my own. Many other Michigan laborers have
helped to bring forth this book and many other books in a tradition of the-
Acknowledgments • ix
ater scholarship; I am happy they have worked to put this one on the
highway.
Maura O’Neill Jones, granddaughter of Agnes Boulton and Eugene
O’Neill, has stood by this evolving project from its early years, always
trusting that it is better for a family to know its history than to be misled
by its myths. Agnes’s daughter, Barbara Burton, patiently assisted yet an-
other researcher of Gene and Agnes to get it right, or at least not wrong,
we can only hope. I wish she had lived long enough to see the result, but
her life came to a peaceful end in 2009. I’m grateful to the whole and
hearty O’Neill/Boulton family for helping to sustain a vision I had that
there was more, another, long story to be told. I hope they will see that
some love has gone into the making of Agnes’s new book.
In that same spirit, I thank my children, Ruthie and Eva, bearers of
the love, and Wendy Lukomski, my wife, who expresses it all, so well.