Although Eugene O'Neill spent a little less than three years in Bermuda, his first attempt to establish a permanent family residence here was an important decision for America's great dramatist who, in his autobiographical play, Long Day's Journey Into Night, had observed "I will always be a stranger who never feels at home.'' A sub-tropical island, several hundred miles away from the distractions of big-city life, seemed an ideal refuge for the already famous writer, where he would be able to indulge his life-long love of the sea, to overcome the increasing ravages of alcoholism and so acquire the tranquillity which was so necessary for his life's work.

O'Neill succeeded on several counts. It was in Bermuda that he made the first, serious attempt to abstain from alcohol and his soon-improved health enabled him to work steadily on three of his greatest plays -- The Great God Brown, Lazarus Laughed and Strange Interlude; and for a fleeting moment, the restless son of a touring actor was able to enjoy the longed-for stability of family life.

But, apart from some meticulously researched articles by Tim Hodgson in The Bermudian magazine, written some years ago, little has been forthcoming about O'Neill's Bermuda interlude.

It seems fitting, then, that this omission has now been remedied by the woman who eventually bought the playwright's former home, Spithead, situated by the water's edge on Harbour Road.

Joy Bluck Waters herself emphasises in the Preface to her book that Eugene O'Neill and Family is not an academic work. As the title suggests, it concentrates on the private life of the Nobel Prize winner during the time that he was, albeit briefly, a Bermuda resident.

A former contributor to the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune, Mrs. Bluck Waters writes with fluency and ease. A decade of research, during which she was granted access to the O'Neill papers at Yale and Harvard, and countless interviews with those residents whose paths crossed with that of the O'Neill family during their Bermuda sojourn, has resulted in a fascinating book.

Her evocation of island life in the 'twenties (when she was a pupil at the Bermuda High School) should appeal to the general reader, while her account of the `how, why and where' of this period of the writer's troubled life, will be of value to O'Neill scholars and enthusiasts.

For Mrs. Bluck Waters succeeds, through her own intimate knowledge of Bermuda and Bermudians in bringing this story vividly to life: her description, for instance, of the family's (and dogs') arrival in the inner courtyard of the New Windsor Hotel in Hamilton, where "bougainvilleas bloomed, palms grew, canaries sang and the famous, or infamous old parrot perched swearing in his cage'', sets the tone for a book that skillfully evokes the immediacy and sense of place against which background O'Neill fought his inner demons.

She relates that, before purchasing his house, the playwright rented Campsea, high above the South shore at Coral Beach, and Southcote, an old Bermuda home where his wife Agnes gave birth to Oona -- who would achieve another kind of fame as the wife of Charlie Chaplin.

They also lived for a while at Bellevue, at Grape Bay, where Eugene could swim in the ocean and walk his dogs in the seclusion which part of his complicated personality craved.

He decided to purchase Spithead as a family home in 1926. Standing on the edge of Granaway Deep, it was built towards the end of the 18th century by Bermuda's legendary privateer, Hezekiah Frith. The large stone house sheltered many fine treasures, wrested from Hezekiah's exploits on the high seas. He also created a local scandal when he brought back a young French woman who eventually died there. Her ghost, that of Hezakiah himself and his son, were all said to haunt the ancient home.

By the time the O'Neills came on the scene, Spithead had become very run-down and thousands of pounds were to be spent in its restoration.

Any plans for permanence, however, were soon shattered when the dramatist met Carlotta Monterey, the actress who was to lure O'Neill away from his island home, leaving Agnes to cope with her small children and a large estate. Later on, she would sell part of that estate and the cottage known as Spithead Lodge would become, briefly, the home of another renowned playwright, Noel Coward.

Mrs. Bluck Waters fills in many gaps in the story of O'Neill's Ber muda period, such as the horrific circumstances of the death of his beloved Irish woolfhound, Finn MacCool, told now for the first time. She also details the lives of the rest of the family after his abandonment of them.

There is an account of his son Shane's return as a young man to live in one of Spithead's farm cottages with his young wife. He, too, had inherited the O'Neill family curse of addiction and had already been briefly imprisoned in the US for possession of heroin. Strange as it may seem today, the drug era had not yet dawned and Shane's cultivation of marijuana plants, presumably just after World War II, shocked Bermudians.

The dates in this last section of the book are a little hazy. It would have been useful, too, (especially for scholars) if information culled from O'Neill's literary estate could have been so identified.

As Jackson Bryer, Professor of American Literature at the University of Maryland notes in his Introduction, the story of O'Neill's Bermuda idyll and the reasons for its abrupt end is a story worthy of his own fiction -- a story in which Joy Bluck Waters' intimate knowledge of Bermuda "recreates the atmosphere of a place which fascinated the famous playwright just as much as it does those who visit it today.'' There are black and white photographs, many of them not seen before, and evocative pen and ink line drawings at the beginning of each chapter by the author herself. That this author is also one of Bermuda's best-known artists is confirmed by her impressionistic oil painting of the meandering coastline around Spithead which forms the colourful front cover of the book.

Mrs. Bluck Waters continues her signings of the just-published volume at Mall Magazine in Washington Mall on Saturday, April 24 from 11.30 a.m. to 2.30 p.m.

-- Patricia Calnan EXPLORING THE PAST -- Joy Bluck Waters' new book explores some of the more personal details of the O'Neill family during their time in Bermuda.