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.