Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill

EDMUND: The fog was where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can't see this house. You'd never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted--to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor, where the road runs along the beach, I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea. As if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog, and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost.

A couple weeks ago, we got to tour Eugene O'Neill's house near Oakland, California. I knew nothing about O'Neill--it's possible he's the most important author I have no real experience with or knowledge about--but the house made an impression on me. It's in a beautiful spot, high in the golden hills of the East Bay, with a square-on view of Mt. Diablo. The house itself is odd, a white cinder block affair filled with African masks and odd chinoiserie (O'Neill and his wife called it "Tao House"). In his bedroom, O'Neill had a black mirror, as hideous and dour a decorating choice as any I've ever seen. But on the other side of the bedroom, past a number of intervening doors meant to keep out guests, was O'Neill's study, where, as the guide explained to us, O'Neill shut himself up to write the masterwork of his life, Long Day's Journey Into Night, a fictionalized version of his own upbringing. The experience was so difficult and cathartic that he emerged afterward like someone coming up from the sea, and made his wife Carlotta promise it wouldn't be published until several decades after his death.

These are the terrible secrets that plagued O'Neill, and which are transposed into the life of the Tyrone family of Long Day's Journey Into Night: before O'Neill was born, his brother Jamie inadvertently caused the death of another, infant brother, Edmund, by ignoring their mother's command to not go into the baby's room when he had measles. Grief-stricken, father James implored wife Mary to have another child to replace the lost one; this was O'Neill. The birth was so difficult that it set Mary on a path to lifelong morphine addiction, a fact that explained Mary's distance as a mother, though O'Neill never knew about it as a child. Long Day's Journey Into Night puts these various strands of crossed guilt on display: Jamie Tyrone's guilt at having killed the infant Edmund; Eugene's guilt at having caused his mother's addiction; James and Mary's guilt about the insuffiencies of their parenting, and the resulting resentment toward their sons. Only, O'Neill makes one switch, subtle and profound--he names the protagonist Edmund after the real-life dead son, and the dead son Eugene. Take what you will from that.

The main thrust of Long Day's Journey Into Night seems to be that "truth will out." Set, as the title suggests, over a single day at the Tyrones' fog-cloaked summer house, it depicts the family driven to a breaking point by the looming diagnosis of Edmund with tuberculosis. James and Jamie try to keep the diagnosis a secret, from Edmund at first, and especially from Mary, whose distrust of doctors and fear of losing another son can be easily traced back to the infant's death. The details come out drib by drib, and only in moments of intense pressure and anger. The characters are constantly confessing things, and then admonishing themselves or others to shut up about them; the Tyrone family lives in a fragile but totalizing web of self-repression that they require to continue a baseline of functioning. Confessions and outbursts are lubricated by drink; the three men seem to inhale inhuman amounts of whiskey from morning to night, while Mary slips further away from them, into a morphine fog. The most powerful scene, perhaps, comes at the very end (of course) when Mary descends the stairs into the room where the men are drinking and recriminating, holding her wedding dress, having mentally receded to her youth, before the point at which she was forced to decide between her love for James and her desired life in the convent.

The way our guide described it to us--and again, I know so little about O'Neill, that I'm sure this explanation is painfully simplistic for anyone who's more acquainted--O'Neill ushered a transition on the American stage from shallow entertainments like musicals and Vaudeville to a tradition of serious realism. (It's easy to see, now, the way Edward Albee drew on the play for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, another play about serious repression in a single family.)  Long Day's Journey Into Night might mark a prototype, but as is often the case with prototypes, it is in itself something really stunning and not quite surpassed. The last act especially is full of rich and desperate language, the kind of things that people say when they are creative, overeducated, and miserable. I enjoyed the running battle between Edmund and James over their literary heroes; James is an old school Shakespearean actor and Edmund reads Baudelaire, Nietzsche, etc., authors that James regards as unhealthily morbid. In the end, O'Neill's widow published Long Day's Journey almost immediately after his death, which, in a way, seems appropriate, because as the play suggests, you can't keep the truth under wraps for very long.

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Every night now Guitar was seeing little scraps of Sunday dresses--white and purple, powder blue, pink and white, lace and voile, velvet and silk, cotton and satin, eyelet and grosgrain. The scraps stayed with him all night and he remembered Magdalene called Lena and Corinthians bending in the wind to catch the heart-red pieces of velvet that had floated under the gaze of Mr. Robert Smith. Only Guitar's scraps were different. The bits of Sunday dresses that he saw did not fly; they hung in the air quietly, like the whole notes in the last measure of an Easter song.

Four little colored girls had been blown out of a church, and his mission was to approximate as best he could a similar death of four little white girls some Sunday, since he was the Sunday man.

How could a novel like Song of Solomon exist? It's so overloaded with moments, images, ideas; it actually seems to totter like an overburdened basket, sure to fall over. Although I haven't read all of Morrison's books, I feel safe in saying that only Beloved comes close to the sheer scope and audacity of this novel (and in my opinion, Solomon easily outpaces it). I'm planning on teaching it for the first time in many years, and for every key detail that stuck in my mind--the doomed flight of the insurance salesman at the beginning of the novel, Milkman earning his nickname by feeding at his mother's breast well into his childhood, Pilate's name hanging from a box in her ear--there's another that I had forgotten all about--Reba's uncanny luck, Circe luxuriating in her dead master's house with her pack of dogs, Hagar's attempts to murder Milkman... How does it all manage to work together?

The word that comes to mind for me when reading Song of Solomon is "inheritance." What can be handed down, and what must be left behind? The inheritances in Song of Solomon are often unwanted: Milkman inherits his father Macon's self-centeredness and materialism in the same way that the mistaken name "Macon Dead" is passed down through the generations. Pilate's name is essentially meaningless, plucked out of the Bible by an illiterate father, and yet she treasures it by keeping it in her ear. Men and women fight to pass on their own secret souls to their children; when Ruth continues to give the child Milkman her breast, it seems to me that she is trying to claim him by bestowing something upon him from his own body, and thus fend off the cruel, possessive Macon's more aggressive claims on her only boy. In contrast, Pilate's navel-less stomach shows how her mother died in childbirth and was unable to pass anything on at all. And, of course, there's the literal inheritance of the book, a bag hanging from Pilate's ceiling that Macon believes contains a stash of gold they discovered together in the wake of their father's death. The bag of gold is one of literature's most powerful MacGuffins, and through a series of convoluted turns, is transformed into something far more meaningful, a real inheritance. (Although, having read this book probably four times now, I don't think I can faithfully render the shaggy dog story that results in Pilate stealing her own father's bones without knowing it.) Milkman's journey into the South undoes the great migration and performs inheritance in reverse, seeking out the secret messages and forms that lurk in his own psyche in the same veiled way as the song that children in Virginia sing about his ancestor, Jake Solomon.

But for my money, nothing in Song of Solomon is as effective or unnerving as the character of Guitar and the group of the Seven Days. Guitar is Milkman's best friend, but he comes from poverty while Milkman comes from the Black upper class. He routinely chides Milkman for caring too little about civil rights, and he's right, but Guitar's sense of bitter injustice leads him to join the Seven Days, who are tasked with "keeping the balance" by murdering an equivalent white person whenever a Black person is killed by white. (Guitar's ultimate turn against Milkman is fed by the need to fund a mission to kill four white girls after the Birmingham church bombing of 1963). What is so frightening and effective about Guitar is that his terror ideology is seductive and compelling. The reasoning is wonky, bordering on innumerate--you don't "balance" unequal amounts by removing the same number--but the larger logic of a people who face a true existential threat is hard to dismiss, especially when compared to Milkman's wishy-washiness and naivete. The Seven Days are Morrison's Grand Inquisitor: a way of thinking that the novel rejects but nonetheless finds too powerful to entirely expunge. 

Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill

He said he had never really thought about her sexually. He said he had to spend a lot of time getting to know a person before he had sex. He said this was all very unexpected and he needed to digest it. He asked if she would like to see a movie with him next week. She understood his words. She understood the sentiments that would seem, at least, to lie behind his words. But she felt something beneath those words that she didn't understand. She said she didn't want to see a movie. She said that if they got to know each other, they probably wouldn't want to have sex. She told him that if she'd waited to get to know people before having sex, she'd probably still be a virgin. She didn't understand what moved beneath her own words. It seemed too big to be chipped off in word form, but it didn't matter' she kept talking until the dentist stepped forward and embraced her.

Is it OK to say that I find relationships, and dating especially, to be a particularly boring subject for fiction? The relationships in Mary Gaitskill's short story collection Because They Wanted To are incipient, short-lived, doomed. The central theme seems to be the difficulty of true communication between people, the complicated back-and-forth of desire and revulsion that occurs when two people collide in intimacy for the first time. A woman dating an older man, a woman dating a younger man, a woman dating a woman. The protagonist goes out with someone despite misgivings, misgivings they don't quite understand, as they don't understand the desire. Sex ultimately complicates things even more; a desire for roleplay and debasement always ends up crossing a line: in one scene, a woman throws a hunk of non-consensual tapioca pudding at her lover's genitals. To Gaitskill's credit, she does all of these scenes very well, and the push-and-pull of desire and cruelty is well done, but on the whole the subject seems sort of television-tedious to me. Maybe it's my stage of life; maybe it's being married.

The stories became most interesting, I think, when they dealt with the thornier issues of consent and even rape. In one story, "The Girl on the Plane," the narrator strikes up a conversation with a younger woman who reminds him of an old friend. The old friend long nursed a crush on the narrator, which was not reciprocated, until she submitted to a drunken gangbang, in which the narrator ends up, to her--what? joy? surprise?--taking part. The woman on the plane opens up about her alcoholism, he reciprocates by admitting he took part in a rape. Was it really a rape? Or was the idea of the rape a fiction they engaged in, something titillating, that perhaps had the benefit of giving them both they wanted--for the girl, the guy, and for the guy, a way to have his cake and his cruelty, too? (The woman on the plane, of course, stops talking to him immediately.) Another story deals with a couple whose transgressive sexual habits include fantasies of control and domination, but where do the rape fantasies end and actual rapes begin? It's a difficult topic, and requires a great deal of writerly calibration; the ambiguity holds, and the stories never collapse into certainty or simplicity.

I think my favorite of them, though, is one of the most straightforward, the first story, "Tiny, Smiling Daddy," written from the perspective of a man who learns that his daughter has written an essay about him in a popular magazine. He spends the story fuming, resentful of his daughter; before he reads the article, he is sure that she has been unfair to him, and describes a kind of happy, safe childhood in which she grew up to be sullen and rebellious. Such things happen. Only at the story's end, when we are still unsure about how seriously to take his claims, does he recall the time when he said to her: "You're a lesbian? Fine... You mean nothing to me. You walk out that door, it doesn't matter. And if you come back in, I'm going to spit on your face." It's a pretty simple story, really, an old trick, the first-person POV that we're not sure whether we can trust, but it works really well here.

Rabbit Boss by Thomas Sanchez

I know of your Ancestors. The blood of your blood saw the Whites eat of their own flesh on yonder lake, Donner. Captain Rex gambled the money of the people away and lost his way in a blizzard, he came into a cabin and slept, when he awoke white bodies were lying dead all around him with the blood they had coughed up splattered on their clothes. he took their White death back to the people, that was the year all the Washo were burned to the ground at Elephant Head, one was saved, Ayas, the Antelope, who was sent into the valley of clouds to warm his sightless grandmother who wove flowing streams into her baskets... I can see into all the days past. I can see into all the days coming. Along the Big Lake of the Sky your son shall walk in a new Rabbit robe. Sparling his image on the quiet waters. The forest shall grow thick and free. The Birds return. The fences fall. In their shadow the openness will find its home once more.

Thomas Sanchez's Rabbit Boss begins with Gayabuc, a member of the Washo tribe of Nevada and Northern California, looking down at the infamous Donner Party. He watches them attack and eat each other, and he knows immediately that something evil has arrived in their lands. Rabbit Boss traces the history of this evil over four generations, beginning with Gayabuc, and continuing on with his son, Captain Rex, a gambler and petty criminal who makes money by recruiting other Indians to pick pigweed along the side of the transcontinental railroad. Captain Rex's son, a preacher named Hallelujah Bob, grows up among whites after all the other Washo are decimated by tuberculosis, and then burned in their huts by whites who fear the spread of the disease. Bob grows up knowing little about his background until he is taken to an Indian School (a real place in Carson City where, somewhat coincidentally, we were able to tour a small museum last week) and learns about his true identity. Hallelujah Bob's son is Joe Birdsong, who ekes out a proud but simple existence as a rabbit-hunter for large ranches during the Depression.

In Sanchez's telling, the Washo have always been a small tribe. They identify with the rabbit, whose medicine, or power, is small, but who gets by through tenacity and cleverness. They are few in comparison with the Shoshone or the Paiutes. Leaders of the Washo are said to wear the "Rabbit robe," and despite the designs that white settlers have on the land, it's exactly this identity and power that is passed down, perhaps unknowingly, to Birdsong. The stories of the four men resemble each other in certain important ways: the latter three are all, at times, hunted by white forces who want to destroy them or drive them out. For Captain Rex, it's marshals and bounty hunters that pursue him, in scenes that often provide the novel some of its blackest humor, as when the representatives of the federal and territorial government bicker over just who it is that's going to hang him, or when they realize they can't hang him, because the Nevada desert is short on trees. For Birdsong, it's a shadowy land company that has begun to make inquiries with all the landowners in the Lake Tahoe region. They begin by offering enormous sums, but when Birdsong refuses, they move against him with legal force, claiming that because Hallelujah Bob was not a U.S. citizen when he purchased the land (Native Americans were made citizens in the 1920s), his claim is null and void. They seize upon a murder and frame him for it, and Birdsong ends the novel like his grandfather: on the run.

As far as I know, the author, Thomas Sanchez, is not Native American, and I have to say, outside of perhaps Vollmann, I don't think I've ever read a fictional account of Indigenous history by a non-Indigenous writer that seems so scrupulously researched or knowledgeable. It was really something to be able to visit the actual residential school where Hallelujah Bob ends up, and where Birdsong must travel to search for the documents that prove his ownership of the land--I hadn't imagined such verisimilitude was necessary. It's especially impressive, I think, because the story is about the Washo, a small tribe whose history is not so popularly known as the Lakota or Cherokee, or even the larger local tribes like the Shoshone.

At the climax of his story, Hallelujah Bob has a vision of the Ghost Dance leader Wovoka (a member of the Paiutes, another Nevada tribe) who recognizes him as Ayas, the personification of the Antelope. Wovoka helpfully summarizes the novel for anyone who has missed it--Guyabuc has witnessed the arrival of a great evil, and Captain Rex has carried it along by unwittingly spreading the disease among his people, but Bob and his son Joe will oversee a rebirth of the Washo and the return of trees and animals. I found myself wondering, how does this novel think about the real-life prophecies of Wovoka? To me, it seems like there's a bitter irony here: Joe Birdsong ends up on the run just like his grandfather and his father did, hunted and dispossessed again. But then again there is the resilience of the rabbit power within Joe, and even when he is chased away by the predatory speculators, he ends up having a vision of ambiguous power on the shores of Lake Tahoe, the "Big Lake in the Sky." Is Joe the culmination of the rebirth of the Washo, as Bob hears from Wovoka--the one who wears the "Rabbit robe?" What does it mean to write such a book in the 1980s, and stop short of the next 50 years of the American Indian and environmental movements? I found Rabbit Boss troubling and ambiguous, but often very moving, even funny, and powerful.