This Used Books entry examines two works of imaginative literature—Hamilton Basso’s 1954 novel The View from Pompey’s Head and S. N. Behrman’s 1964 play But for Whom Charlie—that feature characters arguably based on Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey. I conclude that Garvin Wales in The View from Pompey’s Head is a composite character principally based on O’Neill and William Faulkner. I further conclude that Behrman, in the service of comedy and to his great discredit, drew upon the most tragic elements in the lives of O’Neill and Carlotta for his characters Craig and Gilian Prosper.Considered a “southern realist,” Hamilton Basso was a friend and, under the legendary editor Maxwell Perkins, a stablemate of William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe.1 The View from Pompey’s Head was the ninth of Basso’s eleven published novels and his most successful, critically and financially. However, Basso had to supplement his income by writing well over 100 nonfiction pieces, principally for the New Republic. For a series of articles in the New Yorker, Basso interviewed Eugene O’Neill two afternoons a week for months, the last interviews O’Neill granted.2The storyline of The View from Pompey’s Head can be briefly told, though not by Hamilton Basso. The protagonist is Anson Page, a junior partner in a New York law firm. The action begins when Page is summoned to a meeting with the president of the prestigious Duncan & Co. publishing house. It concerns Garvin Wales, once one of Duncan’s most acclaimed authors, but now a blind recluse who hasn’t published in years. Wales’s wife, Lucy, has accused Phillip Greene, the revered, recently deceased Duncan editor-in-chief, of embezzlement. Duncan’s records reveal that Greene did in fact draw upon Garvin’s royalty account to write checks to an Anna Jones that totaled $200,000 in today’s money. The firm assumes that Greene did so at Garvin’s direction, but can they prove that to Lucy Wales’s satisfaction? Page gets the assignment because the Waleses live in seclusion near Pompey’s Head, South Carolina, Page’s hometown.3Page arrives in Pompey’s Head on page 81 and doesn’t meet the family until page 337. In between there is such a pileup of flashbacks to the youthful Page’s life, loves, and duck hunting that Louis Auchincloss parodied them in a Saturday Review article.4Cutting to the chase, Page learns that Greene issued the checks to Anna Jones at Garvin Wales’s direction. Wales kept it a secret from everyone, including Lucy, because Anna Jones, a Black woman, was Garvin’s mother.The View from Pompey’s Head was a New York Times best-seller for forty weeks and was sold to the movies for the equivalent of $1 million. (The movie did not bury the lede. The poster proclaimed, “She stumbled on the truth—her husband was a Negro!”5) Critics then and later agreed that Pompey’s Head was Basso’s finest novel, which disinclines me to read the lesser ones.6So, were Gene and Carlotta the models for Garvin and Lucy Wales?William Davies King is unequivocal. “A few years after writing his New Yorker profile, Basso depicted the O’Neills in his own novel, The View from Pompey’s Head. Carlotta appears as the seemingly malicious, over-protective, vengeful wife of Garvin Wales, a tragically afflicted novelist who had, at the insistence of his wife, severed ties to his saintly editor, a composite of Saxe Commins and Harry Weinberger.”7Basso’s biographer Inez Hollander Lake, on the other hand, spread her bets. While noting that Garvin Wales’s editor, Phillip Greene, is unquestionably modeled on Basso’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, she concludes that Wales himself “is an amalgam of Thomas Wolfe, Eugene O’Neill, and Ernest Hemingway.” Why Wolfe? Because Wales was a brawler whose books “gave the South a bad name.”8 Why Hemingway? Lake doesn’t really explain, but the director of the movie evidently had the same thought because the actor playing Wales was “made to look like Ernest Hemingway.”9New York Times reviewer Orville Prescott raises Hollander one author. “Some of Wales’ personal traits and some of the facts of his biography resemble those of four of the most famous of modern American writers, whose identities are easily recognizable.” Prescott adds, “Wales is a mixture of imaginary elements as well as of real ones taken from four major sources. He cannot be considered a portrait of any particular writer.”10Prescott does not reveal which “four major sources” he has in mind, but I agree with him that Garvin Wales is more a Cubist rendering of several writers than a portrait of Eugene O’Neill.In his New Yorker series, Basso did emphasize elements of O’Neill’s biography that he would later assign to Garvin Wales. Like O’Neill, the young Wales had been “a gold hunter, a seaman.”11 Like O’Neill, Wales developed a physical affliction (blindness) that prevented him from writing and was unable to compose by dictation (340). Moreover, like Carlotta, Lucy had been an actress, distinguished by her beauty, not her talent (46–47, 141). Like Carlotta, Lucy zealously guarded access to her husband.However, as they reach for comparisons to other authors, everyone ignores the elephant in the room—William Faulkner. Like Faulkner, Wales had only one subject—the South. And, of course, miscegenation was an obsession of Faulkner’s, not O’Neill’s.As to the model for Garvin Wales’s saintly editor, Phillip Greene, I see no reason to doubt that he was modeled on Maxwell Perkins. Basso himself flags the resemblance, saying of Greene that “he had ‘more discoveries’ to his credit than any other editor in the business, with the possible exception of Maxwell Perkins” (26). Moreover, Lucy Wales complains of Greene that he was given credit for “making” Garvin (365). Wolfe famously left Scribner’s because he felt that Perkins was being given too much credit for his novels.If the evidence for the identification of Garvin and Lucy Wales as O’Neill and Carlotta is mixed, S. N. Behrman all but gives the Social Security numbers of O’Neill and his family in But for Whom Charlie.In Charlie, the O’Neills’ stand-ins are the deceased American playwright Craig Prosper; his much younger widow, Gilian; and two of his children, his daughter Faith and his surviving son, Willard, from a previous marriage. Craig Prosper was a Nobel laureate (17), which certainly narrows the field of possible real-life counterparts. Moreover, Gilian has the only manuscript of a play by Craig, and she intends the world premiere to be produced in Stockholm (108, 116–17). Craig had been estranged from his children, an estrangement that Gilian actively abetted (35). Craig’s elder son committed suicide and, when informed, Gilian sought to keep the news from Craig (33, 34). Like Craig, his younger son Willard is an alcoholic (19, 11, 46). If further identification evidence is required, Salome Jens, who created the role of Gilian Prosper, told me that Gilian was Carlotta.12The eponymous Charlie is Charles Tanner (Ralph Meeker in the Lincoln Center premiere), the director of the Seymour Rosenthal Foundation. Years earlier Charlie had made an issue of resigning from his Yale fraternity because it would not admit Seymour (Jason Robards Jr.), a Jew. Charlie had calculatedly taken this apparently noble step in order to win Seymour’s gratitude. When Charlie was kicked out of Yale for an unrelated and presumably not noble act, he promptly cashed in Seymour’s gratitude for the richly compensated directorship of the foundation that he convinced Seymour to create. Charlie considered Seymour ripe for the picking because he, like other children of ruthless tycoons, was a masochist “striving pathetically to expiate something or other” (40–42).The Rosenthal Foundation provides stipends to authors working on “books no one else will publish” (11). Craig Prosper’s actress daughter Faith (Faye Dunaway) is carrying on an affair with Charlie, an affair perhaps not coincidentally related to her desperate effort to get a Rosenthal fellowship for her brother Willard, a brilliant but alcoholic scholar of the French Revolution (11). Faith is also being pursued by a besotted and earnest bassoonist, Harry Lorch, who is being paid not to play in the play she is performing in. Actors Equity, with its featherbedding rules, is, along with arts foundations, a secondary target of Behrman’s satire here.Charlie is built out of intersecting romantic triangles, which is presumably why this grim play is considered a comedy. Gilian is at the apex of all of the triangles. Behrman cooked this curdled dish of a part from a recipe he first served the theatergoing public thirty-seven years earlier—“a singularly attractive, usually emancipated woman who functions in the play as a catalyst and synthesizer of the other diverse satellite characters.”13Behrman created this archetype in a successful effort to lure Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt into starring in The Second Man, his 1927 breakthrough Broadway success. Kenneth T. Reed sees The Second Man’s “strong-woman weak-man pattern” repeated in Behrman’s Serena Blandish, Brief Moment, Rain from Heaven, and End of Summer.14 Indeed, when Behrman set out to use this well-worn pattern one last time in Charlie, he had hoped to fit it on Lynne Fontanne and Alfred Lunt again.15However, as Robert F. Gross has observed, “Gilian Prosper is almost a demonic inversion of the roles Behrman wrote for Ina Claire [in Biography, End of Summer, and The Talley Method] and looks back to the vamps and melodramatic sirens of Behrman’s earliest plays.”16In Behrman’s play Biography, for example, Richard Kurt, a judgmental young radical journalist who has fallen for Claire’s character Marion Froude, tells her he hates the fact that she is so “tolerant.” Marion replies, “I know you do. You hate my essential quality—the thing that is me.”If Marion Froude is the moral center of Biography, Gilian Prosper is the moral black hole of Charlie. Thirty years younger than Craig, Gilian is still so fiendishly attractive that she seduces men effortlessly, amusedly. Even Willard, Craig’s surviving son, is in thrall to her. When he was eighteen Willard had broken in on Craig and Gilian, intending to kill Craig because he blamed him for his brother’s suicide. Gilian summoned the police and, as they took Willard away, kissed him. The adult Willard confesses to Gilian that “I worship you. Ever since you kissed me that day—I’ve worshiped you” (126). Finally, having toyed with Willard, Seymour, and even Faith’s bassoonist, Harry, Gilian sails for Stockholm with Charlie, who is her match, if only in cynicism.Though working in different theatrical genres, Behrman and O’Neill lived parallel professional lives for almost forty years, starting with their enrollment in George Pierce Baker’s Harvard classes, O’Neill in 1914 and Behrman in 1916. And as unlike as their oeuvres were, they found their stars in the same firmament. For example, Alfred Lunt—Clark Storey in Behrman’s The Second Man—played Marco Polo in Marco Millions the following year. To give just one more example, Earle Larimore, who played Richard Kurt in Biography, appeared on Broadway as Sam Evans in Strange Interlude, Marco Polo in Marco Millions, Orin Mannon in Mourning Becomes Electra, John in Days Without End, and Willie Oban in The Iceman Cometh.So, though it went unremarked in most of the reviews, Behrman’s portrayal of the O’Neills must have made for titillating gossip in Broadway salons. Particularly so in the Lincoln Center Rep’s green rooms, because a revival of Marco Millions was also in the repertory that season, directed by Jose Quintero. Quintero, the legendary director of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, would direct the premiere of Hughie only a few months after Charlie closed. Jason Robards, Seymour in Charlie, had created the role of Jamie in Long Day’s Journey and would play Erie Smith in Hughie.Certainly O’Neill’s treatment of his children, in light of his complaints on stage and off about the crippling effects of his own upbringing, might be legitimate grist for serious theatrical milling. As Willard Prosper observes about his father’s parenting, “Whatever he went through he made us go through twice as much” (30). Indeed, Faith Prosper may speak for many of us when she decries the fact that her mother, “who saw Father through his years of struggle, died in poverty” and that Craig abandoned his grandchildren as he did his children (13, 93).However, having made the identity of his victims unmistakable to cognoscenti, it was gratuitously cruel of Behrman to make Craig’s elder son a suicide (33), to have Gilian describe Craig as “psychotic” (124), to have Gilian confide to Seymour that she was first “gainfully employed . . . posing nude for pornographic films (114),” and to describe Craig’s having engaged in a “fantasy of sex in four-letter words” while an uncomprehending seventeen-year-old Italian maid cleaned his room (62–63).Perhaps Behrman felt ashamed of what he was doing, for he has Faith say that when writers are “written out—as Father got to be—they revenge themselves on everyone around them. They murder right and left just to prove to themselves that they’re not dead” (18).Behrman was himself written out. Charlie was his last play, one of his least well received (forty-seven performances), and was almost universally panned by critics.17Behrman mentions O’Neill only in passing in his memoir.18 However, in By Women Possessed, Arthur Gelb and Barbara Gelb, who was Behrman’s stepdaughter, enlarge upon Behrman’s visit to the O’Neills in California. The Gelbs quote Berhrman as saying of O’Neill, “We became quick friends that day.”19Strangely, the Gelbs, having brought this up apropos of little, do not mention But for Whom Charlie. Perhaps because Charlie exploits so many tragic facts of O’Neill’s and Carlotta’s lives that it seems to have been drawn from an O’Neill biography.With friends like these . . .However, one should not judge S. N. Behrman by But for Whom Charlie. Nor should his reputation rest only on the bright, brittle comedies for which he was justly famous. Consider, instead, his memory play, The Cold Wind and the Warm, which was also written toward the end of his career.Though he became to the manor accustomed and set most of his high comedies in penthouses and country estates, Behrman was born into a poor Orthodox Jewish family in Worcester, Massachusetts. He first retrieved his memories of his childhood and youth in a series of articles in the New Yorker, then collected them in his memoir The Worcester Account, and finally dramatized them in The Cold Wind and the Warm.20 One of the rewards of reading it is that you need not rely on a biographer but rather can look over the shoulder of the playwright himself as he picks and chooses among his lived, deeply felt experiences in order to shape, or manhandle, them in service of his plot. Moreover, if you are old enough to have seen other performances on stage and screen by the members of the outstanding cast that included Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton, reading The Cold Wind and the Warm can seem very much like watching the play in your mind’s eye.