Tomorrow

Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953)
From Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943

Interesting Links

“Eugene O’Neill’s Dive-Bar Fascination Went Far Beyond The Iceman Cometh” (David Wondrich, The Daily Beast)

“Eugene O’Neill: the Sailor, the Sickness, the Stage” (Morgen Stevens-Garmon, Museum of the City of New York)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “In the Zone,” Eugene O’Neill
• “The Days of Jig Cook,” Djuna Barnes
• “The Hossack Murder,” Susan Glaspell
• “Mare Island and Back,” Arthur Miller

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Eugene O’Neill: Complete Plays 1932–1943
The Iceman Cometh | Long Day's Journey into Night | 6 other plays | 1,007 pages
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“Hell Hole,” etching and aquatint by American artist John Sloan (1871–1951), showing The Golden Swan Café, a seedy Irish saloon on the corner of 4th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. Eugene O’Neill is seated at the upper right of the etching. (Source: Christie’s)

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The winter of 1911–12 would prove to be the low point of Eugene O’Neill’s life. Months earlier, after a stint as an ordinary seaman on the British freighter Ikala, the twenty-two-year-old arrived in New York from Buenos Aires and moved into the waterfront saloon and flophouse run by James “Jimmy the Priest” Condon. O’Neill had been traveling since his marriage to Kathleen Jenkins two years earlier (which they had kept secret from their families): a trip to San Francisco, followed by gold prospecting in Honduras, where he contracted malaria, then working in ship crews before ending up in Argentina. He had seen his infant son only once, and in December Kathleen requested a divorce. To substantiate adultery charges, O’Neill arranged to be “discovered” in a hotel with a prostitute. Then, at the beginning of the new year, he accumulated doses of the barbiturate Veronal from various pharmacists and, in his room at Jimmy the Priest’s, he attempted suicide with an overdose but was rescued when his roommate, James Findlater Byth, discovered him unconscious in bed.

Byth was a skid-row alcoholic who had once been a press agent for Eugene’s father, James O’Neill, an actor famous for starring in more than six thousand performances of a stage adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo. In 1924, when a reporter for The New York World asked about the short story “Tomorrow,” Eugene O’Neill responded with a description of Byth, who was the inspiration for the main character:

The man of whom that story was written lived with me at Jimmy the Priest’s. He was a graduate of Edinburgh University, and until the beginning of his social decline was a highly valued correspondent of one of the greatest European news agencies. He covered the South African War, for instance. There came an appalling tragedy in his life. The booze got him and he had reached the depths, which, in New York at that time, meant Jimmy the Priest’s. One couldn’t go any lower. . . . But always my friend—at least always when he had had several jolts of liquor—saw a turn in the road tomorrow. He was going to get himself together and get back to work. Well, he did get a job and got fired. Then he realized that this tomorrow never would come.

For decades, many of O’Neill’s associates, as well as biographers and scholars, were convinced that the tales told by Byth of his past adventures as a war reporter were fabrications he would spin to entertain his fellow drunks. Although there is no evidence Byth ever attended Edinburgh University, Robert M. Dowling uncovered documentation “hiding in plain sight,” indicating that “Byth appears not to have been the inveterate liar O’Neill scholars have largely presumed.” In the pages of the 1912 yearbook of New York’s Pleiades Club, one can find O’Neill’s first published literary poem, “Free,” yet no one seems to have noticed that the same publication includes Byth’s memoir titled “Cecil Rhodes,” which details his memories of the Boer War. Adding credence to the validity of these recollections is Dowling’s additional discovery of material describing Byth’s role as the “amusement manager” at the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, including a biographical entry touting his recent travels through South Africa. One of the amusements he oversaw at the fair was the “Great Boer War Spectacle,” a reenactment staged by combatants from the conflict. Byth introduced O’Neill to several of these South African fighter-actors, both Boer and British, when they visited New York. “To my mind,” concludes Dowling, “it is highly improbable he would lie about South Africa while working alongside hundreds of the war’s veterans who could easily call him out as a fraud.”

In June 1913 Byth fell or leaped from the window of his third-story room at Jimmy the Priest’s, and he died from his wounds the following day. The death was reported as accidental, but a few friends, including O’Neill, convinced themselves it was a suicide—although it seems unlikely, as O’Neill biographer Doris Alexander remarks, that “a man bent on killing himself should decide—in a city full of accessible ten- and fifteen-story windows—to throw himself from a little low-ceilinged edifice with only three stories and a half-attic over the bar on the ground floor.” Regardless, the former war correspondent would be memorialized not only as Jimmy Anderson in “Tomorrow” but also, far more famously, as James Cameron, or “Jimmy Tomorrow,” in the 1946 play The Iceman Cometh.

In the years after Byth’s death, O’Neill’s star would rise with the Provincetown Players, and he would move from the waterfront to Greenwich Village. Abandoning Jimmy the Priest’s, he found an equally sordid hangout in The Golden Swan Café, which was more commonly known as the Hell Hole. “There was a stinking quality to it,” wrote Mary Heaton Vorse in 1930. “Something at once alive and deadly.” O’Neill would “get tight” and declaim, from memory, such poems as “The Hound of Heaven” to “an admiring audience of gangsters and truck drivers.” Vorse recalled that when the Players rehearsed his plays, including Bound East for Cardiff and In the Zone, O’Neill would be late arriving at the theater. “‘Someone’s got to go and rake Gene out of the Hell Hole!’ But it happened often that whoever went ‘to rake Gene out’ himself had to get raked. There were times when we followed one after another there, and there remained.”

Among the habitués of the Hell Hole were Louise Bryant, who appeared in some of O’Neill’s one-act plays, and John Reed, future author of Ten Days That Shook the World. Shortly before her marriage to Reed in November 1916, Bryant began an affair with O’Neill, a liaison that would continue until she and Reed left for Russia the following year. O’Neill’s association with Bryant and her circle of friends would in many ways help to jump-start his career. Bryant recommended his writing to Waldo Frank, editor of The Seven Arts, and O’Neill used the introduction to send him the story “Tomorrow,” which was accepted for $50 and published in June 1917.

Although “Tomorrow” is O’Neill’s only published short story, it was originally meant to be, as he wrote to Frank, “the first of a series of Tommy the Priest’s yarns in which the story-teller [is] a sort of Conrad’s Marlow” (the narrator of several works by Joseph Conrad, whose influence is apparent in the piece). Tommy the Priest is, of course, based on the owner of Jimmy the Priest’s, and his character would be immortalized as Harry Hope in Iceman. “I learned at Jimmy the Priest’s not to sit on judgment on people,” O’Neill would say in interviews. It was “a waterfront dive with a backroom where you could sleep with your head on the table if you bought a schooner of beer.”

When O’Neill donated the original manuscript for the story to be auctioned off for the Fourth War Loan Bond Drive in 1944, he wrote a brief assessment to critic and poet Mark Van Doren: “As a short story—well, let’s not go into that, but I thought it was pretty devastating stuff at the time, and so evidently did Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, etc., although I doubt if they were as overwhelmed by its hideous beauty as I was.”

O’Neill's note to Mark Van Doren is quoted in The Unknown O’Neill: Unpublished or Unfamiliar Writings, ed. Travis Bogard.

Note: Among the other titles O’Neill had considered for The Iceman Cometh were “Tomorrow” and “Credit Tomorrow.”

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It was back in my sailor days, in the winter of my great down-and-outness, that all this happened. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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