Journeying to the Past

Like most classical works, Long Day’s Journey into Night is set in the past–the summer of 1912, when Eugene O’Neill (in photo), then twenty-four, was stricken with tuberculosis, a disease which sent him to the sanitarium where he first decided to become a dramatist. And like most classical works, its impact derives less from physical action (the play has hardly any plot, and only the first act has any suspense) than from psychological revelation, as the characters dredge up their painful memories and half-considered thoughts.

Long Day’s Journey contains the finest writing O’Neill ever did–and the fourth act is among the most powerful scenes in all dramatic literature. O’Neill has created a personal play which bears on the condition of all mankind; a bourgeois family drama with universal implications. Here is a family living in a close symbiotic relationship, a single organism with four branches, where a twitch in one creates a spasm in another. No individual character trait is revealed which does not have a bearing on the lives of the entire family; the play is nothing but the truth, but there is nothing irrelevant in the play. Thus, the two major characteristics which define James Tyrone, Sr.–his miserliness and his career as an actor–are directly related to the misery of his wife and children. Tyrone’s niggardliness has caused Mary’s morphine addiction, because it was a cut-rate quack doctor who first introduced her to drugs; and Tyrone’s inability to provide her with a proper home, because he was always on the road, has intensified her bitterness and sense of loss. The miser in Tyrone is also the source of Edmund’s resentment, since Tyrone is preparing to send him to a State Farm for treatment instead of to a more expensive rest home. Edmund’s tuberculosis, in turn, partially accounts for Mary’s resumption of her habit, because she cannot face the fact of his bad health; and Edmund’s birth caused the illness which eventually introduced his mother to drugs. Jamie is affected by the very existence of Edmund, since his brother’s literary gifts fill him with envy and a sense of failure; and his mother’s inability to shake her habit has made him lose faith in his own capacity for regeneration. Even the comic touches are structured along causal lines: Tyrone is too cheap to burn the lights in the parlor, so Edmund bangs his knee on a hatstand, and Jamie stumbles on the steps.

The family, in brief, is chained together by resentment, guilt, recrimination; yet the chains that hold it are those of love as well as hate. Each makes the other suffer through some unwitting act, a breach of love or faith, and reproaches follow furiously in the wake of every revelation. But even at the moment that the truth is being blurted out, an apologetic retraction is being formed. Nobody really desires to hurt. Compassion and understanding alternate with anger and rancor. Every torment is self-inflicted, each angry word reverberating in the conscience of the speaker. It is as if the characters existed only to torture each other, while protecting each other, too, against their own resentful tongues.

There is a curse on the blighted house of the Tyrones, and the origin of the curse lies elsewhere, with existence itself. In tracing down the origin of this curse, O’Neill has returned to the year 1912; but as the play proceeds, he brings us even further into the past. Implicated in the misfortunes of the house are not only the two generations of Tyrones, but a previous generation as well; Edmund’s attempted suicide, before the action begins, is linked to the suicide of Tyrone’s father, and Edmund’s consumption is the disease by which Mary’s father died. The generations merge, and so does Time. “The past is the present, isn’t it?” cries Mary. “It’s the future too. We all try to lie out of that but life won’t let us.”

All four Tyrones share an intense hatred of the present and its morbid, inescapable reality. All four seek solace from the shocks of life in nostalgic memories, which they reach through different paths. For Mary, the key that turns the lock of the past is morphine. “It kills the pain. You go back until at last you are beyond its reach. Only the past when you were happy is real.” The pain she speaks of is in her crippled hands, the constant reminder of her failed dream to be a concert pianist, but even more it is in her crippled, guilty soul. Mary has betrayed all her hopes and dreams. Even her marriage is a betrayal, since she longed to be a nun, wholly dedicated to her namesake, the Blessed Virgin; but her addiction betrays her religion, family and home. Throughout the action, she is trying to escape the pain of the present entirely; and at the end, with the aid of drugs, she has finally returned to the purity, innocence, and hope of her girlhood. Although the title of the play suggests a progress, the work moves always backwards. The long journey is a journey into the past.

O’Neill suggests this is many ways, partly through ambiguous images of light and dark, sun and mist. The play begins at 8:30 in the morning with a trace of fog in the air, and concludes sometime after midnight, with the house fogbound. Under the influence of Mary’s drugs–and, to some extent, the alcohol of the men–time evaporates and hovers, and disappears: past, present, future become one. Mary drifts blissfully into illusions under cover of the night, which functions like a shroud against the harsh, daylight reality.

Mary, however, is not alone among the “fog people”–the three men also have their reasons for withdrawing into night. Each haunts the past like a ghost, seeking consolation for a wasted life. For Tyrone, his youth was a period of artistic promise when he had the potential to be a great actor instead of a commercial hack; his favorite memory is of Booth’s praising his Othello, words which he has written down and lost. For Jamie, who might have borne the Tyrone name “in honor and dignity, who showed such brilliant promise,” the present is without possibility; he is now a hopeless ne’er-do-well, pursuing oblivion in drink and the arms of fat whores while mocking his own failure in bathetic, self-hating accents. For Edmund, who is more like his mother than the others, night and fog are a refuge from the curse of living. Reality, truth, and life plague him like a disease. Ashamed of being human, he finds existence itself detestable.

There is a fifth Tyrone involved in the play–the older Eugene O’Neill. And although he has superimposed his later on his earlier, the author and the character are really separable. Edmund wishes to deny Time, but O’Neill has elected to return to it once again–reliving the past and mingling with his ghosts–in order to find the secret and meaning of their suffering. For the playwright has discovered another escape besides alcohol, Nirvana, or death from the terrible chaos of life: the escape of art where chaos is ordered and the meaningless made meaningful. The play itself is an act of forgiveness and reconciliation, the artist’s lifelong resentment disintegrated through complete understanding of the past and total self-honesty.

These qualities dominate the last act, which proceeds through a sequence of confessions and revelations–the first between Tyrone and Edmund, the second between Edmund and Jamie–to a harrowing climax. Tyrone’s confession of failure as an actor finally makes him understandable to Edmund who thereupon forgives him all his faults; and Jamie’s confession of his ambivalent feelings towards his brother, and his half-conscious desire to make him fail too, is the deepest psychological moment in the play. But the most honest moment of self-revelation occurs at the end of Edmund’s speech, after he has tried to explain the origin of his bitterness and despair. Tyrone, as usual, finds his son’s musings “morbid,” but he has to admit that Edmund has “the makings of a poet.” Edmund replies:

He hasn’t even got the makings. He’s got only the habit. I couldn’t touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. . . . Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.

In describing his own limitations as a dramatist, O’Neill here rises to real eloquence; speaking the truth has given him a tongue. Mary’s last speech is the triumph of his new dramatic method, poetically evoking all the themes of the play; and it is marvelously prepared for. The men are drunk, sleepy, and exhausted after all the wrangling; the lights are very low; the night and fog very thick. Suddenly, a coup de théâtre. All the bulbs in the front parlor chandelier are illuminated, and the opening bars of a Chopin waltz are haltingly played. The men are shocked into consciousness as Mary enters, absentmindedly trailing her wedding dress. She is so completely in the past that even her features have been transfigured. What follows is a scene remarkably like Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene, or, as Jamie cruelly suggests, Ophelia’s mad scene–an audaciously theatrical and, at the same time, profoundly moving expression from the depths of a tormented soul. While the men look on in horror, Mary reenacts the dreams of her youth, oblivious of her surroundings; and her speeches sum up the utter hopelessness of the entire family. Shy and polite, like a young schoolgirl, astonished at her swollen hands and at the elderly gentleman who gently takes the wedding dress from her grasp, Mary is back in the convent, preparing to become a nun. She is looking for something, something that protected her from loneliness and fear: “I can’t have lost it forever. I would die if I thought that. Because then there would be no hope.” It is her life, and, even more, her faith. She has had a vision of the Blessed Virgin, who had “smiled and blessed me with her consent.” But her faith has turned yellow, like her wedding dress. On the threshold of the later horror, Mary grows uneasy; then puts one foot over into the vacancy which is to come: “That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the springtime something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.”

Her mournful speech, which concludes on the key word of the play, spans the years and breaks them, recapitulating all the blighted hopes, the persistent illusions, the emotional ambivalence, and the sense of imprisonment in the fate of others that the family shares. It leaves the central character enveloped in fog, and the others encased in misery, the night deepening around their shameful secrets. But it signalizes O’Neill’s journey out of the night and into the daylight–into a perception of his true role as a man and an artist–exorcising his ghosts and “facing my dead at last.”