Eugene O'Neill Long Days Journey Into Night (Small Works List)

Just finished Long Days Journey into Night by Eugene O’Neill which was a deeply challenging text. I watched the 1987 version featuring Jack Lemmon, Peter Gallagher, and Kevin Spacey. There is some moments in this text that ring a little false, the relationship between the brothers when it works is good, but this idea of molding the younger brother seems very odd to me. I am not sure that stands up, but the mother’s preoccupation with becoming a nun or a concert pianist rather than taking up with the likes of the actor is a compelling story. The Irish dad that fights with his two sons that accuse him of being cheap is also fascinating. I didn’t know my dad who is 100% Irish, but the only time that I met him as an adult, I knew that I would have hated him. Oddly, he thought that the reason I came to see him was because I wanted money which I thought was odd. The one thing we did discuss while I was there was the books that we had read. I thought that he was lying to me the literature he had read because it seemed to be exaggerated, but then later I found out that my dad had given my mom a copy of Pablo Neruda’s poetry. Just like the tirades that the Tyrone family assaults each other with, it is hard to know what is true. I have been in the state these people get themselves into. This play is long, and comes in waves, the storms sort of work themselves up, there is this building suspense, then the delivery of the fight itself pays off in a tremendous way. This is the way art diverges from nature. The conflicts are there, and there is the time and space, but the lambasting, flood of words and invectives don’t pour out like this, at least not in my family, there is the few sharp words then people storm away, back to their corners.

 

One of the other things that I will take away from this text is the arguments of literature that they get up to. There is a serious wrestling with the culture of art among the generations, the father seems completely invested in Shakespeare and seemingly everything that comes after him is tawdry in someway. The younger son, Edmund, is concerned with poetry and composes some aloud to his father who ignores him or demeans him. I am not sure what the boy thinks the father will say in these moments, and this seems as self-defeating as any one else in the house. I wonder if O’Neill means to sing the song of the American Irish in this self-defeating motif. I have not read enough Irish fiction to know, but this feels very familiar. Edmund mentions Baudelaire, Swinbourne, and others, When I get a copy of the text I will look through this section to see who Eugene O’Neill thinks I should have on my list. I recently had a video chat with two Scottish friends and the first 30 minutes of that phone call were about the books we were reading. It was fantastic and something I have never done with many of my American friends. I want to make this change in my friend circle.  

 

The section in question is the only scene between Edmund and Tyrone alone. There is never a moment in this play that you might think is ‘nice’ or ‘pleasant’ in a way that I find challenging to connect to but this may be the only moment in the play where this father and son exchange barbs about the authors they like. Edmund accuses his father of thinking everyone is an Irish Catholic, both Shakespeare and the Duke of Wellington, but then Tyrone goes on to quote a poem by Dowson whom I made sure is on this list so that I will interact with this poem some day in the future. Then, Edmund quotes Baudelaire, but not only does O’Neill choose to include lines from another perhaps more famous poet’s words in his own which subtly suggests his work can stand up next to Baudelaire but O’Neill, notoriously fastidious and exacting, includes which translation he is specifically quoting from. Edmund quotes from Baudelaire’s “Epilogue” which the older generation, Tyrone, takes as morbid. Edmund claims that Tyrone takes his inspiration from Dowson’s “Cyrana” which I am not familiar with but I am also not entirely sure O’Neill could have been able to assume his audience would have been either. Tyrone then accuses Edmund of being interested in or influenced by Voltaire, Rousseau, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Ibsen. All of these names are on my list now. Tyrone continues to implicate Baudelaire, Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. Then finally also Emile Zola and Dante Gabriel Rossetti who Tyrone claims was a dope fiend which seems to be too much for Edmund.

“The fog was where I wanted to be. Half-way 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” (O’Neill Act IV).