Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale Nota Bene) (2 page)

My reflection however is inaccurate, and O’Neill’s dramatic art is considerable, though it does make us revise our notions of just how strictly literary an art drama necessarily has to be. Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Molière are masters alike of language and of a mimetic force that works through gestures that supplement language, but O’Neill is mastered by language and relies instead upon a drive-towards-staging that he appears to have learned from Strindberg. Consider the close of
Long Day’s Journey.
How much of the power here comes from what Tyrone and Mary say, and how much from the extraordinarily effective stage directions?

TYRONE
(trying to shake off his hopeless stupor).
Oh, we’re fools to pay any attention. It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this.
(Gruffly.)
Pass me that bottle, Jamie. And stop reciting that damned morbid poetry. I won’t have it in my house!
(Jamie pushes the bottle toward him. He pours a drink without disarranging the wedding gown he holds carefully over his other arm and on his lap, and shoves the bottle back. Jamie pours his and passes the bottle to Edmund, who, in turn, pours one. Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.)

MARY
(staring dreamily before her. Her face looks extraordinarily youthful and innocent. The shyly eager, trusting smile is on her lips as she talks aloud to herself).
I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good. A saint on earth. I love her dearly. It may be sinful of me but I love her better than my own mother. Because she always understands, even before you say a word. Her kind blue eyes look right into your heart. You can’t keep any secrets from her. You couldn’t deceive her, even if you were mean enough to want to.
(She gives a little rebellious toss of her head—with girlish pique.)
All the same, I don’t think she was so understanding this time. I told her I wanted to be a nun. I explained how sure I was of my vocation, that I had prayed to the Blessed Virgin to make me sure, and to find me worthy. I told Mother I had had a true vision when I was praying in the shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes, on the little island in the lake. I said I knew, as surely as I knew I was kneeling there, that the Blessed Virgin had smiled and blessed me with her consent. But Mother Elizabeth told me I must be more sure than that, even, that I must prove it wasn’t simply my imagination. She said, if I was so sure, then I wouldn’t mind putting myself to a test by going home after I graduated, and living as other girls lived, going out to parties and dances and enjoying myself; and then if after a year or two I still felt sure, I could come back to see her and we would talk it over again.
(She tosses her head
—
indignantly.)
I never dreamed Holy Mother would give me such advice! I was really shocked. I said, of course, I would do anything she suggested, but I knew it was simply a waste of time. After I left her, I felt all mixed up, so I went to the shrine and prayed to the Blessed Virgin and found peace again because I knew she heard my prayer and would always love me and see no harm ever came to me so long as I never lost my faith in her.
(She pauses and a look of growing uneasiness comes over her face. She passes a hand over her forehead as if brushing cobwebs from her brain—vaguely.)
That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.
(She stares before her in a sad dream. Tyrone stirs in his chair. Edmund and Jamie remain motionless.)

Critics have remarked on how fine it is that the three alcoholic Tyrone males slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them, as the morphine-laden wife and mother begins to speak. One can go further; her banal if moving address to herself, and Tyrone’s petulant outbursts, are considerably less eloquent than the stage directions. I had not remembered anything that was spoken, returning to the text after a decade, but I had held on to that grim family tableau of the three Tyrones slowly lowering their glasses. Again, I had remembered nothing actually said between Edmund and his mother at the end of
act one
, but the gestures and glances between them always abide with me, and Mary’s reactions when she is left alone compel in me the Nietzschean realization that the truly memorable is always associated with what is most painful.

(She puts her arms around him and hugs him with a frightened, protective tenderness.)

EDMUND
(soothingly).
That’s foolishness. You know it’s only a bad cold.

MARY
. Yes, of course, I know that!

EDMUND
. But listen, Mama. I want you to promise me that even if it should turn out to be something worse, you’ll know I’ll soon be all right again, anyway, and you won’t worry yourself sick, and you’ll keep on taking care of yourself—

MARY
(frightenedly).
I won’t listen when you’re so silly! There’s absolutely no reason to talk as if you expected something dreadful! Of course, I promise you. I give you my sacred word of honor!
(Then with a sad bitterness.)
But I suppose you’re remembering I’ve promised before on my word of honor.

EDMUND
. No!

MARY
(her bitterness receding into a resigned helplessness).
I’m not blaming you, dear. How can you help it? How can any one of us forget?
(Strangely.)
That’s what makes it so hard—for all of us. We can’t forget.

EDMUND
(grabs her shoulder).
Mama! Stop it!

MARY
(forcing a smile).
All right, dear. I didn’t mean to be so gloomy. Don’t mind me. Here. Let me feel your head. Why, it’s nice and cool. You certainly haven’t any fever now.

EDMUND
. Forget! It’s you—

MARY
. But I’m quite all right, dear.
(With a quick, strange, calculating, almost sly glance at him.)
Except I naturally feel tired and nervous this morning, after such a bad night. I really ought to go upstairs and lie down until lunch time and take a nap.
(He gives her an instinctive look of suspicion—then, ashamed of himself, looks quickly away. She hurries on nervously.)
What are you going to do? Read here? It would be much better for you to go out in the fresh air and sunshine. But don’t get overheated, remember. Be sure and wear a hat.
(She stops, looking straight at him now. He avoids her eyes. There is a tense pause. Then she speaks jeeringly.)
Or are you afraid to trust me alone?

EDMUND
(tormentedly).
No! Can’t you stop talking like that! I think you ought to take a nap.
(He goes to the screen door—forcing a joking tone.)
I’ll go down and help Jamie bear up. I love to lie in the shade and watch him work.
(He forces a laugh in which she makes herself join. Then he goes out on the porch and disappears down the steps. Her first reaction is one of relief. She appears to relax. She sinks down in one of the wicker armchairs at rear of table and leans her head back, closing her eyes. But suddenly she grows terribly tense again. Her eyes open and she strains forward, seized by a fit of nervous panic. She begins a desperate battle with herself. Her long fingers, warped and knotted by rheumatism, drum on the arms of the chair, driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent.)

That grim ballet of looks between mother and son, followed by the terrible, compulsive drumming of her long fingers, has a lyric force that only the verse quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and others in O’Neill’s text are able to match. Certainly a singular dramatic genius is always at work in O’Neill’s stage directions, and can be felt also, most fortunately, in the repressed intensities of inarticulateness in all of the Tyrones.

It seems to me a marvel that this can suffice, and in itself probably it could not. But there is also O’Neill’s greatest gift, more strongly present in
Long Day’s Journey
than it is even in
The Iceman Cometh.
Lionel Trilling, subtly and less equivocally than it seemed, once famously praised Theodore Dreiser for his mixed but imposing representation of “reality in America," in his best novels,
Sister Carrie
and
An American Tragedy.
One cannot deny the power of the mimetic art
of Long Day’s Journey into Night.
No dramatist to this day, among us, has matched O’Neill in depicting the nightmare realities that can afflict American family life, indeed family life in the twentieth-century Western world. And yet that is the authentic subject of our dramatists who matter most after O’Neill: Williams, Miller, Albee, with the genial Thorton Wilder as the grand exception. It is a terrifying distinction that O’Neill earns, and more decisively in
Long Day’s Journey into Night
than anywhere else. He is the elegist of the Freudian “family romance," of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us.

HAROLD BLOOM

Since its first publication in February 1956,
Long Day’s Journey into Night
has gone through numerous reprintings. With this printing, the sixty-first, we have taken the opportunity to correct several errors recently reported by scholars who have made careful examinations of final typescripts of the play. It has been discovered that Carlotta O’Neill, retyping from a previous version heavily edited by O’Neill, accidentally dropped lines in several places.

We wish to take note first of a correction that was silently made in the fifth printing after Donald Gallup called our attention to missing lines on page 170. The dialogue and stage directions restored were those beginning with “Kid" in line 22 and ending with “old" in line 24.

For the corrections made in this printing, we thank the following: Michael Hinden (for pointing out missing lines on pages 97, 106, and 167 and errors on page 158), Judith E. Barlow (for missing lines on page 97), and Stephen Black (for an error on page 111). On page 97 a sentence ("Anyway, by tonight, what will you care?") has been added to Edmund’s dialogue at lines 18-19. On page 97 lines 29-33 are printed for the first time. On page 106 a sentence ("It’s a special kind of medicine.") has been restored at line 1. The errors corrected on pages 111 and 158 were minor, although puzzling, misprints (e.g., “fron" for “front," “sibject" for “subject"). On page 167 a sentence ("No one hopes more than I do you’ll knock ‘em all dead.") has been restored in line 20.

For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary

Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for
all
the four haunted Tyrones.

These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light
—
into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!

Gene

Tao House

July 22,1941.

Characters

JAMES TYRONE

MARY CAVAN TYRONE
,
his wife

JAMES TYRONE, JR.,
their elder son

EDMUND TYRONE,
their younger son

CATHLEEN,
second girl

Scenes

ACT 1
Living room of the Tyrones’ summer home 8:30
A.M.
of a day in August, 1912

ACT 2, SCENE I
The same, around 12:45

ACT 2, SCENE 2
The same, about a half hour later

ACT 3
The same, around 6:30 that evening

ACT 4
The same, around midnight

SCENE

Living room of James Tyrone’s summer home on a morning in August, 1912.

At rear are two double doorways with portieres. The one at right leads into a front parlor with the formally arranged, set appearance of a room rarely occupied. The other opens on a dark, windowless back parlor, never used except as a passage from living room to dining room. Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zoh, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Stirner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling, etc.