Posterity by Dorie McCullough Lawson Read Free Book Online Page A

you:
    Remember we really don't know anything. Keep your baby eyes (which are the eyes of genius) on what we don't know. That is your playground, bare and graveled, safe and unbreakable.
    Love your mother, but don't you believe and revere her; and as for your father, laugh at him as he laughs at himself till the tears start.
    L. Steff.
    E UGENE O'N EILL TO S HANE O'N EILL
    â€œBecause any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish
is the only way to be happy.”
    In July 1939, playwright Eugene O'Neill had just completed notes and outlines for two of his masterworks,
The Iceman Cometh
and
Long Day's Journey Into Night
. At fifty years of age he had already won the Nobel Prize and three Pulitzer Prizes (a fourth Pulitzer was awarded to him after his death).
    O'Neill was the father of three children—Eugene, Jr., with his first wife, and Shane and Oona with his second wife. A shy, often depressed and extremely driven man, he was not particularly affectionate nor involved with any of his children. His second child, Shane, was a sweet but troubled boy who idolized his father. For O'Neill, Shane's lack of commitment and his dependence on others were persistent sources of frustration. Here O'Neill, who was living in California with his third wife, Carlotta, writes to nineteen-year-old Shane, who over the preceding several years had been asked to leave one school after another.

    July 18, 1939
    Dear Shane,
    I wrote Oona a couple of days ago to tell you to expect an answer to your letter soon and here it is.
    My feeling, that Harry spoke to you about—and by the way, I didn't tell him to say anything to you—was based on the fact that you had let me hear so little from you at Lawrenceville. But forget it. I appreciate a lot the frankness of this last letter of yours and I hope you will always write to me in just that spirit. What you say of your feeling a new understanding had sprung up between us on your last visit was exactly what I felt. Which made it doubly hard to comprehend why later on you went ahead with a complete change in your plans without consulting me and were all booked for Lawrenceville by the time I heard from you.
    My advice on the subject of raising horses would not be much use to you. I don't know anyone in that game, what conditions or prospects are, or anything else about it. All I know is that if you want to get anywhere with it, or with anything else, you have got to adopt an entirely different attitude from the one you have had toward getting an education. In plain words, you've got to make up your mind to study whatever you undertake, and concentrate your mind on it, and really work at it. This isn't wisdom. Any damned fool in the world knows it's true, whether it's a question of raising horses or writing plays. You simply have to face the prospect of starting at the bottom and spending years learning how to do it. The trouble with you, I think, is you are still too dependent on others. You expect too much from outside you and demand too little of yourself. You hope everything will be made smooth and easy for you by someone else. Well, it's coming to the point where you are old enough, and have been around enough, to see that this will get you exactly nowhere. You will be what you make yourself and you have got to do that job absolutely alone and on your own, whether you're in school or holding down a job.
    After all, parents' advice is no damned good. You know that as well as I. The best I can do is to try to encourage you to work hard at something you really want to do and have the ability to do. Because any fool knows that to work hard at something you want to accomplish is the only way to be happy. But beyond that it is entirely up to you. You've got to do for yourself all the seeking and finding concerned with what you want to do. Anyone but yourself is useless to you there.
    I'm glad you got the job on the party-fishing boat. It's a start in the right direction of