Eugene O’Neill is at his most dramatically romantic when writing to Beatrice Ashe. She was the subject of a year-long epistolary wooing that he eventually, and suddenly, dropped. Here, O’Neill passionately entreats “Bee” to leave New London and free her artistic spirit from the constraints of small-town life. He also fits in an appropriate amount of boasting.
[postmarked July 25, 1916]
My Own— No one realizes better than I do the difficulty of the position you are in. I can sympathize with all my heart with your indecision. It is hard to go and just as hard to stay. The time has come, the inevitable moment which confronts everyone of us at some period in our lives, when you stand at the crossroads. One way or another, choose you must. You may mark time undecidedly for a space while Youth dances past and beckons you unheeded, but postponement is of no avail. The choice is finally thrust upon you.
I think the time has arrived when you are compelled, in justice to yourself and to all those who love you, to make your decision—and irrevocably. The blind selfishness of parents is appalling, and more appalling because it is prompted by love and excites our sympathy for that reason—thus weaving another of the ties that bind. Who can blame them? We are all creatures of selfish emotions and in their place we would doubtless feel and think likewise. We are forced to love their love for us even though that love stands between us and freedom.
My advice is always the same. I can remember talking myself hoarse on this same subject on more than one occasion. To my idea, happiness is the one aim we all seek to achieve and there is no happiness outside of self-development. One’s duty to one’s self must forever stand first of all duties.
You are far too splendid a creature, you have too much of the Joy-of-Living spirit in you to permit your vibrant youth to wither and grow stale in the vapid atmosphere of a New England small town. Why are you loitering, Glorious One, among those dull lives, those small hopes, those mean ambitions? You have eyes to see great distances. What use will you put them to—on State Street! You have a soul and a voice that sings. What are you doing among those deaf ones whose cheap familiarity is a species of contempt? You have a fine spiritual beauty and a keen brain. But those grey moles will always speak only of your body.
To be misunderstood by them, to be stung by their poisonous bites, that is a distinction, a proof of worth. To continue living among them, that is criminal folly.
Beware! There is a time when the constant, deadening pressure of environment breaks the will of the strongest one. In hopeless apathy one ceases to resist and sinks back, one of the herd.
Bee! Bee! If you want to become an artist you must come out of your shell. There is so much to see, so much to experience which will all be new to you. There is so much moral excess baggage you will have to throw overboard before you can gain the comprehension which is indispensable to true art. How can comprehension be born without a multitudinous experience? You must come out and scratch and bite, and love and hate, and play and sing and fly, and earn your place in the sun. You will have to starve and weep and know great sorrows and great joys and great sacrifices. You will have to thrill with the eternal ecstasy of a self-surrender which scorns compromises and counts no cost. Only by throwing yourself away will you realize your own worth and find your soul. Only by standing on the grave-mound of the past will you see the vision of the future clear before you, alluring in its possibilities.
Does this all sound as if I were making a plea for myself? Do not misunderstand me. I am trying to forget for the moment how much I love, want, need you! I am writing to you as I would write to any girl in your cruel predicament whose soul is crying to be free. If I did not know you at all and was only familiar with the details of your case, I would write you the same words, and love you in a general, human way—for I love the rare ones who love the things I love, and who struggle for self-expression through the medium of art…
Bee! Bee! You mustn’t stay! Think what it means! Can you see yourself, wild, wayward, bird-soul that you are, caged in a home, propagating with a husband-man? Or clutching your virginity to the miserable, stagnant end? Or after years, in a moment of bitter desperation wasting your wonderful self on some lover of the moment who would be too conventionally small-minded and moral to value the depths of your sacrifice? These seem to me the three alternatives New London holds out.
No! No! No, Bee! God damn me (and the oath reveals how intensely I feel about it) you must save yourself; and I pledge you in advance the sympathetic aid of all us others who work and struggle and starve and are happy in the fight for greater freedom in life, in Art, in everything…
There, you sweet, foolish old fish! Tristan could not have said more to his Iseult, or Paolo to his Francesca.
News of myself? I am half through the first act of a three-act comedy which I have hopes for in the producing line when completed. Have been busy directing rehearsals of my play Bound East for Cardiff which the Provincetown Players are to produce next Friday and Saturday nights…
Also have written much poetry—free verse—in past months and think a lot of it will eventually land in Poetry, The Little Review, The Masses, Blast, The Flame, or some of the other radical publications. Used to write for Revolt, the Anarchist Weekly which was suppressed by the Federal police after running three months. That was last winter. I was one of the group who helped get the paper out every week. We all narrowly escaped getting a bit to do in the Federal pen.
I will sometime write you or tell you—for your ears alone!—a story entitled—“The Passing of Hutch Collins.” His debut and finish in G. Village life were lamentable. He had every chance to make good, too. I was a fixture there when he arrived and knew everyone and was popular, if I do bouquet myself. I introduced him and took him everywhere. At the end of a few months one after another of my best friends came to me and protested about him: “Is he a friend of yours?” They condemned him as stupid, “nothing to him,” etc. and they were disgusted with his grafting. Hutch went at Bohemia as if he thought it was a place where you sponged without getting gratitude and made no pretense of return. Honestly, Bee, it was a shame! No one would have minded if he had ever shown he appreciated their kindness but he only acted like a surly, silent bore, and so anathema is his name…
Will tell you all about the place and the celebrities and their scandalous lives when I write next. This letter is already a four-decker novel and I know the most boo’ful eyes in the world are already tired peering at my dwarfed handwriting.
The long kiss, Own Sweetheart, and the old cry of my whole being, but ten times more poignantly and lonely than of old— I love you, I want you, I need you so! Gene
P.S. This poem [“Choices”] of Carl Sandburg’s from The Little Review expresses something of the spirit I have tried to put into this letter…
FURTHER READING
For a brief history of the Provincetown Players, the American theatrical association of writers and artists to which O’Neill belonged at the time of this letter, click here.
In 1914, O’Neill wrote a poem for Ashe called “Just a Little Love, A Little Kiss”, the title of which was derived from a song which Beatrice would perform. To read an excerpt from the poem, click here.