Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists: The Influence of the New York Art Movement on the Plays

Eugene O’Neill and the Ashcan Artists is Zander Brietzke’s most recent monograph since his estimable, long-overdue study Magnum Opus: The Cycle Plays of Eugene O’Neill. In that book, Brietzke, a highly respected authority on O’Neill and American theater, challenged the previous body of scholarship on O’Neill’s “Cycle,” A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed. With his latest book, Brietzke spelunks into a period of O’Neill’s life that’s been only cursorily explored and only then as the near exclusive purview of set pieces for major biographies. For his investigation, Brietzke plunges into the nostalgie de la boue that defined the Ashcan painters’ singularly scrappy aesthetic, notably in the works of John Sloan, George Bellows, and their teacher Robert Henri, all of whom were among O’Neill’s cohort in the years following his unartful leap from Princeton University, after only two semesters, to Manhattan in 1907.After a spell at the Lucerne Hotel with his parents on the Upper West Side, O’Neill inhabited a studio in the nearby Lincoln Arcade building at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway, the current site of the Juilliard School, where other notables such as Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Ralph Barton (Carlotta Monterey’s third husband), Marcel Duchamp, and John Barrymore all lived and worked for a time. O’Neill occupied the studio with his New London pal Ed Keefe and the painter George Bellows. Just down the hall lived his friends’ instructor, the storied Ashcan painter Robert Henri (reproduced in Bread and Butter as the character Eugene Grammont), with whom O’Neill would later study philosophical anarchism.Brietzke’s biographical scope thus lies between the stretch of time from O’Neill’s spring semester at Princeton to his marriage to Kathleen Jenkins two years later. His chapter titles nicely tally his topics of inquiry: “Terminal Excavation,” “Lincoln Arcade,” “Hell Holes,” “Tenement Squalor,” “Village Radicals,” “Vanderbilt Alley,” and “Tenderloin Vice.” Brietzke weaves a rich and fascinating tapestry around these topics, despite the period’s relative dearth of factual biographical evidence about O’Neill. Some of the book’s most engaging sections, in fact, are about the dramatist’s reputation among these artists and even a girlfriend, whose descriptions of O’Neill sound more like Exorcism’s Ned Malloy than Edmund Tyrone: Bellows’s bride-to-be, Emma Story, never allowed herself to be alone with O’Neill, this “strange man,” in her boyfriend’s studio. Bellows’s biographer reports that she was “terrified” of the writer because “He had a reputation as a conscientious womanizer that he made no effort to conceal” (58). In another example, Brietzke makes a case that Beyond the Horizon’s Robert and Andrew Mayo should in part be read as reflecting the dynamic between O’Neill and Bellows, respectively, on their excursion with Keefe to James O’Neill’s farm in the unincorporated town of Zion, New Jersey, where the artists painted and O’Neill wrote “bad imitations of Dante Gabriel Rossetti” (quoted in 62). (Emma Story addressed her letter to Bellows there, “Decadance sic Farm” 62.)O’Neill thought Bellows was “a damned genuine person, lovable, with a grand sense of humor, generous, a friend to have—and a true artist” (69). Bellows was sorry O’Neill never sat for a portrait for him, Brietzke reports, as was O’Neill, but their shared history, it’s persuasively argued, gave conceptual heft to the dramatist’s goal of being “an artist or nothing” (68–69).Inspired by the tenets of the Ashcan School, as Brietzke reveals with an illuminating quote from Edmund Wilson, Bellows and O’Neill surveyed radical new territories in New York’s modern art world: “The artist Bellows began audaciously to represent the American city in terms of its own crudeness, and the writer O’Neill to describe the people in their own half-literate language” (68). In each chapter, Brietzke juxtaposes Ashcan paintings with plays: Bellows’s Swans in Central Park and Sloan’s Spring Rain with Servitude; Bellows’s Men of the Docks (1912) with The Personal Equation; and Bellows’s action portraits of Jack Johnson with All God’s Chillun Got Wings and The Dreamy Kid, among many more. The frontispiece of Brietzke’s book is Bellows’s drawing Disappointments of the Ash Can—“Deys Woims in it” (1915). The scene depicts a destitute man in a vacant lot holding up an ash can for inspection by two similarly attired vagabonds. It’s a tableau of urban decay that speaks to O’Neill’s use of the Ashcan School aesthetic alongside the Genteel Tradition’s response to Bellows’s and O’Neill’s unorthodox styles and subject matter. To give one of numerous examples, O’Neill’s most recognizable Ashcan-style work, The Hairy Ape, is simply heaving with “woims.”The term “influence” in Brietzke’s title can be slightly misleading. “Proof of whether O’Neill actually saw a particular work of art by Bellows or Sloan is ultimately less persuasive than demonstrable impact of a painting on a play,” Brietzke argues (19–20). To tether Sloan’s portraits of McSorley’s Bar to O’Neill’s masterwork The Iceman Cometh may seem stretchy, as he readily admits, but the correspondences between them are undeniable. And, as undeniably, there’s one true source from which these artists arrived at such near-identical visions—roaming the dive bar scene of Manhattan and luxuriating in the art they made there (84–88).Brietzke makes fascinating direct connections as well: Hippolyte Havel, Hugo Kalmar in Iceman, is one of the topers in Sloan’s McSorley’s Cats (1929); and another customer positioned in his painting McSorley’s Back Room (1912) can’t help but call to mind Larry Slade in the finale of Iceman: “In his chair by the window, Larry stares in front of him, oblivious to their racket” (quoted in 90). Whether or not O’Neill actually saw these paintings is less important to Brietzke than “a timely critical movement away from logocentrism and toward more expansive reckonings with imagination and delight” (19–20, 4). His point, again, is not quite that the paintings were verifiably incorporated into O’Neill’s plays, although there’s a wealth of sound speculating on that front throughout the book. He rather emphasizes how “the visual artists inspired O’Neill’s dramatic imagination” (19). “Similarities between paintings and drawings and etchings to moments and scenes in O’Neill’s plays—in terms of theme, focus, composition, and a sense of movement—seem more than coincidental,” Brietzke writes, “they strike me as revelations of the feelings O’Neill had in mind” (180).Indeed, though he doesn’t announce it, Brietzke’s approach to New York’s effect is phenomenological; he deals in the echoes and reverberations of city life and how they impacted these artists’ work. Their New York City wasn’t that of Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Louis Armstrong, speakeasies and bathtub gin, but rather of such intrepid slummers of the Gilded Age as Jacob Riis, whose How the Other Half Lives (1890) is invoked in The Hairy Ape, and works by O’Neill’s Provincetown comrade Hutchins Hapgood, author of 1902’s The Spirit of the Ghetto and 1910’s Types from City Streets, among other Ashcan-adjacent books.The Ashcan School, Brietzke contends, furnished the playwright with his earliest known aesthetic: a longing for and emulation of New York lowlife that he shared with these bohemian artists. From whence is this aesthetic born? From the prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, anarchists, hotel clerks, down-and-outers, gangsters, Black members of New York’s disenfranchised, bohemian artists, safecrackers, bartenders, Broadway rounders, and all the other types from the city’s mean streets. O’Neill put all of them in his plays, in lurid detail and from memory, just like an Ashcan painting. Genteel New York appears liberally in O’Neill’s oeuvre too: Now I Ask You, The Great God Brown, Welded, Days Without End, each of which Brietzke critiques in his book. But the upscale milieu appears less impactful in its own right than as a sounding board for the psychological discontent that accompanied industrial modernity.Brietzke offers over sixty Ashcan paintings for analysis in the context of O’Neill’s dramas. Let’s take John Sloan’s Hairdresser’s Window (1907) and three of George Bellows’s signature works, Club Night (1907), Stag at Sharkey’s (1909), and Both Members of This Club (1909). Each of these four paintings include performances by individuals (a hairdresser in a second-floor window/boxers at a club fight) being cheered and jeered by spectators ensorcelled by the objects of their attention. Bellows painted the last two of these works listed above while sharing the studio with O’Neill, and each demonstrates what Brietzke calls the “conscious theatricalism” of the Ashcan School that O’Neill would adapt for the stage (14).In his discussion of Bread and Butter, a play whose middle two acts take place in the Lincoln Arcade, Brietzke might have profited from exploring more turn-of-the-century literary depictions of New York’s artistic bohemia, such as Stephen Crane’s “Stories Told by an Artist” (1894) and his novel The Third Violet (1897) or Mark Twain’s play Is He Dead? (1898), if only to bring us deeper by comparison, specifically to O’Neill’s literary translations of visual artist’s lives in New York at the time. (The Third Violet, for instance, contains a tantalizingly similar plot and setting to Bread and Butter, and O’Neill read Crane.) But in fairness, Brietzke’s explicit focus is the Ashcan School movement alongside the relevant O’Neill plays, an approach that happily allows for steady descriptions of these extraordinary paintings and drawings, which are accompanied by inset images and an appendix. In such moments, Brietzke sounds less like a drama scholar, or even an art historian, than a passionate ekphrastic poet.With O’Neill’s penchant for slumming in mind, Brietzke contends that the playwright must be recognized as a revolutionary Ashcan artist of the stage as much as a teller of sea tales; he realigns, in this way, our understanding of O’Neill’s artistic development. The bulk of O’Neill scholarship presumes that the first stage of his career started the day he fled New York for the open seas. Brietzke debunks that presumption and positions O’Neill’s earliest adult New York days, just after he left Princeton and before he went to sea, as providing the initial spark for the playwright’s artistic visions and aspirations (179). Indeed, if we scan the settings of O’Neill’s over fifty published dramas, we find that seventeen take place in New York City, at least in part, while only fifteen take place at sea; six are set in New York’s suburban towns, while only thirteen take place in New England. It’s even more, Brietzke argues, up to thirty-two New York–inspired plays, if you count “settings or reference points” (8).Over recent decades, scholars who have rigorously historicized O’Neill’s plays, like Joel Pfister, Patrick Chura, Katie N. Johnson, J. Chris Westgate, and I guess I have to add myself here, have broken the hoary hegemony of old New York’s Genteel Tradition, opening new doors of inquiry for generations of scholars and students alike. Brietzke’s book is a magnificent addition to a growing body of work that will help readers and audiences to appreciate the artistic value of New York life for O’Neill as a playwright, as he saw it on the city’s streets and through the artist’s brush.