To some extent, Elizabeth Jordan\u2019s depiction of Eugene O\u2019Neill\u2019s world as sunless and sinister was quite accurate. He suffered and saw the sins and suffering of others. Dorothy Day recounts the day when she and O\u2019Neill witnessed O\u2019Neill\u2019s friend Louis Holliday inject enough heroin to kill himself in a Greenwich Village bar in 1918. The incident affected both Day and O\u2019Neill deeply. Soon after Holliday\u2019s death, Day left the Village and became a nursing student, and Eugene left for Provincetown. The death haunted O\u2019Neill all his life.<\/p>\n
Because of his illness, O\u2019Neill was unable to grip a pen and write anything during the last seven years of his life. Having moved to Marblehead, Mass., he became isolated. He did not want to see others, nor did anyone wish to see him. In 1950, O\u2019Neill\u2019s son, Eugene Jr., committed suicide. The event was especially gruesome; some time after his son had slashed his wrists and one of his ankles in a bathtub, he tried to save himself and died on the floor of his house near the front door. O\u2019Neill did not attend his son\u2019s funeral. He was also estranged from his daughter, Oona, after she married Charlie Chaplin. Another son, Shane, was a heroin addict also disowned by his father. Shane O\u2019Neill committed suicide in 1977. In the last years of his life, O\u2019Neill made his third wife sole executor of his estate and made no mention of his children.<\/p>\n
This was a dark world that was saturated with death and desire for death. But it is not, as Elizabeth Jordan pointed out in 1928, a world confined to Eugene O\u2019Neill.<\/p>\n