Ghosts at the Feast

Eugene O’Neill was not usually so reticent about his work. When he died on November 27, 1953, the prolific author had written over forty-five plays, and commented extensively and forcefully on almost all of them. Letters to his friends are filled with exhortations to read and criticize his oeuvre, while a frequently voiced desire for his plays to be filmed confirms that silent humility was an unusual attribute for O’Neill. It is all the more surprising, therefore, to find in his correspondence virtually no reference of any kind to the play which is generally recognized as the finest ever written in the United States, Long Day’s Journey into Night.

Even O’Neill’s beloved third wife, the actress Carlotta Monterey, seems not to have read the script for several months after its completion. “She has had so much housework to do for a long time–we keep only a cook (when we can get one!) and the secretary work is out. Besides, it is certainly no play for now, for many reasons, so why bother?” O’Neill wrote a friend in 1943. The sealed envelope which was delivered to the offices of his New York publisher, Random House, on November 29, 1945, with a severe injunction that it remain unread for twenty-five years after the playwright’s death, was the first tangible confirmation that the play existed at all.

As the years passed, O’Neill grew ever more insistent about the fate of his masterpiece. In 1951 he wrote his publisher that not only did he refuse permission for Long Day’s Journey to be published, he also wished it to be “never produced as a play.” The closest he came to discussing the work was in a single paragraph of a letter to his close friend, the distinguished theatre critic George Jean Nathan, in which he gave the briefest of plot summaries:

[It is] the story of one day, 8a.m. to midnight, in the life of a family of four–father, mother and two sons–back in 1912–a day in which things occur which evoke the whole past of the family and reveal every aspect of its interrelationships. A deeply tragic play, but without any violent dramatic action. At the final curtain, there they still are, trapped within each other by the past, each guilty and at the same time innocent, scorning, loving, pitying each other, understanding and yet not understanding at all, forgiving but still doomed never to be able to forget.

What the letter did not tell Nathan, however, was that the “family of four” at the center of the play was, in fact, O’Neill’s own. Always a playwright who wrote from autobiographic experience, in Long Day’s Journey O’Neill drew every episode, every troubled character from life. In constructing the play he invented virtually nothing, from his mother’s morphine addiction to the drug, “inoffensive in design and color,” which still nearly covers the hardwood floor of the Monte Cristo Cottage, the O’Neills’ summer home in New London, Connecticut.

James O’Neill The summer of 1912, revisited in Long Day’s Journey, marked a particularly traumatic period for the twenty-four year old Eugene O’Neill, but no portion of his life remained free from tragedy for long. Born in a New York hotel room on October 16, 1888, he was the third son of the Irish actor James O’Neill (in photo as Count Monte Cristo in 1900) and Mary Ellen Quinlan, known as Ella. In 1885 Eugene’s elder brother Edmund had died in infancy of measles which he had contracted from Jamie, the oldest O’Neill son. Ella suffered appallingly from the loss, and throughout his life Eugene felt himself to be a poor replacement for his dead brother. Significantly, the boys’ names are transposed in Long Day’s Journey; it is now the baby Eugene who has died, and Edmund who lives on in his place.

Complications at Eugene’s birth led a hotel doctor to proscribe morphine for Ella, who quickly became addicted to the drug. The boys were raised devout Catholics, but Eugene lost all faith when he discovered his mother’s morphine habit at the age of thirteen. Feeling ever more estranged from their parents, he and Jamie found comfort in bars and brothels, until in 1909 Eugene made a New York girl, Kathleen Jenkins, pregnant. A marriage was hastily arranged, but since neither his nor Kathleen’s parents approved of the match, O’Neill was hustled out of town on a gold-prospecting expedition to Honduras. The trip was short-lived. O’Neill contracted malaria and returned to the United States early in 1910.

The two years that followed were perhaps the bleakest of O’Neill’s bleak life. Living on remittances from his father, he haunted the docks and wharfs of the Lower West Side, drinking heavily and conversing only with sailors and down-and-outs. Early in 1912, in a seedy room above Jimmy the Priest’s saloon, doped up with cheap whiskey and Veronal tablets, O’Neill attempted suicide. Just in time, a group of O’Neill’s drunken companions found his body slumped over a bench in his room, rescued him from a near-certain death. The episode marked a turning point in his life. Soon after moving back to his parents’ home to work as a reporter for the New London Telegraph, Eugene contracted the tuberculosis which figures so importantly in Long Day’s Journey and which was, ironically, to be his salvation. The isolation of a Connecticut sanatorium forced O’Neill to take stock of his life. For the first time he started reading extensively, and then, tentatively at first, soon with almost obsessional self-discipline, he began to write plays.

Although O’Neill achieved public acclaim relatively quickly–by 1920 he had earned the first of four Pulitzer Prizes–his professional fortune did not end the torment of his personal life. A volatile second marriage, to Agnes Boulton, ended acrimoniously in 1927 when O’Neill left her and their two children for Carlotta Monterey. Ella eventually managed to break free of her morphine addiction, but not before her son Jamie, who had tried and failed to follow his father as an actor, had slowly begun to drink himself into oblivion. He eventually died in 1923, and spent his last days, according to Eugene, “in tragedy, embittered, with his life wasted and ruined.”

The next generation of O’Neills fared still worse than the two preceding it. Eugene Jr., O’Neill’s son by Kathleen Jenkins, showed alcoholic tendencies as a teenager, like his father and grandfather before him. After three divorces, and repeated attempts to forge a career in radio and television broadcasting, he committed suicide in 1950, two years before his father’s death. Shane O’Neill, Agnes’ oldest child, was arrested on a charge of heroin possession in 1948. In 1977 he too committed suicide. At the age of seventeen his sister Oona moved to Hollywood, where she married Charlie Chaplin. O’Neill strongly disapproved of the match and, after several months of bitter fighting, disinherited his daughter.

Among this tragic litany of addiction, suicide, and recrimination, the relationships which unfold in Long Day’s Journey seem uniquely warm and familial. Through all the years of torment and resentment, O’Neill maintained a deep affection for his immediate family. The play is an expression of grief and regret for so much suffering, rather than a catalogue of blame. After the death of Eugene Jr., O’Neill told Carlotta that one day it might prove possible for Long Day’s Journey to be performed, as if he had been withholding the play to protect his eldest son. When the playwright died in 1950, his widow withdrew the play’s rights from Random House, nullifying the restrictions on publication and performance. Productions quickly followed, first in Sweden and then in London and New York, where the play was received with universal acclaim.

A postscript. In February 1915, two years after the summer of Long Day’s Journey, O’Neill had fallen deeply in love with a young New London girl, Beatrice Ashe. Their correspondence was long and passionate, but one letter from O’Neill stands out in particular. In it, he begs her to forget the traumas of her childhood and give herself to him entirely–a curious request indeed from a man who, thirty years on, would revisit the specters of his youth with such resolve:

My past is dead. There is not a single thread that binds me to it. I stand before you, I am yours free and unfettered! There is no room for doubt. I am yours. Not a single emotion remains. I have buried my dead because I thought, I felt, it would be unworthy of you not to do so. No ghosts can arise at my feast. My cosmos contains nothing, or rather no one, but you.