Long Day’s Journey into Night (Criticism)

Criticism

John Fiero

In the following essay, Fiero discusses the differences between the printed and produced versions of O’Neill’s play. Fiero is a professor of English at the University of Southwestern Louisiana and an actor.

By the time Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night hit the boards at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theatre, absurdist playwrights like Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco had already begun an assault on language as an inadequate tool for authentic communication. In his play, written fifteen years earlier, O’Neill seems to have come to a similar conclusion, though in a much more familiar guise: his relentless and trenchant realism. Edmund, die playwright’s persona in the baldly autobiographical play, seems to sum up O’Neill’s belief as he concludes his long monologue in Act Four: “I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. I mean, if I live. Well, it will be faithful realism, at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.”

In Edmund’s words lies the essence of the O’Neill paradox. No other playwright so highly acclaimed on stage is so often found flawed on paper. To the annoyance of many critics, Long Day’s Journey into Night, often reputed to be O’Neill’s crowning achievement, best illustrates that paradox. It is a text that, if merely read, seems to fall embarrassingly short of the glory it has achieved on stage. Unaided by the magic of the theater, at some disjointed and awkward places, the text does seem to stammer, lurch, and sputter along — but it does so at least partly by design.

Theater only admits to one cardinal sin — boring an audience. Literary trespasses, on the other hand, seem almost infinite. As the premiere production of Long Day’s Journey into Night in Stockholm demonstrated, on the stage the play was absolved of its literary failings; its audiences sat through its four and one-half hour length, not just without complaint, but with unflagging attention and final approval. That fact perplexed some critics, including Henry Hewes, who in his Saturday Review assessment of the Swedish production and the published play ventured the opinion that O’Neill’s work improved in translation. For him, the Swedish rendering gave “the play a movement and a music that it sometimes lacks in English.” The raw English text, on the other hand, was permeated “with old arguments hashed, rehashed, and re-rehashed.” For Hewes, there even seemed to be some emotional chord in the Swedish national character that O’Neill managed to strike, a chord, presumably, not found in the English-speaking world.

Hewes wrote on Long Day’s Journey into Night again in the Saturday Review, after its Broadway opening, during which Quintero and company kept the American audience glued to their seats. The work proved every bit as stage worthy in English as it had in Swedish. For all its real or assumed literary sins, it struck, not just a Swedish, but some universal emotional chords. Hewes recanted. For him the play now became “enormously interesting,” with “a breadth . . . that may make it the most universal piece of stage realism ever turned out by an American playwright.”

The play’s stage success may baffle but should not surprise those who read O’Neill’s works with some sense of the transforming power of the stage. There is a time-tested truism of theater that says that many plays read poorly but play very well (and, of course, vice versa). In the case of Long Day’s Journey into Night, the maxim may well have its greatest currency, for on paper, O’Neill’s craftsmanship, in places, seems almost primitive and his expression flat and even hackneyed.

Yes, Long Day’s Journey into Night suffers from a comparison with, for example, Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Miller’s “tragedy of the common man,” from the same period, is generally considered the chief rival to O’Neill’s play as the greatest tragedy of the American theater. Death of a Salesman reads very well, revealing a stylistic mastery presumed lacking in O’Neill’s play. Miller’s dialogue flows smoothly, even when Willy breaks into his hallucinatory conversations with Ben, as in Act One, when Willy plays cards with Charley while conversing with the specter of his dead brother. It is a marvelous piece of word stitching and control. By comparison, O’Neill’s dialogue often seems rough hewn, even crude, particularly in the sudden emotional lurches that move a character from angry recrimination to abject contrition, as in many of Jamie’s lines. On paper, these sudden shifts may well seem jarring and forced, although even C. J. Rolo, otherwise hostile in his Atlantic Monthly review, characterized the emotional phrasing as “generally convincing.”

Critics have carped about other problems with Long Day’s Journey into Night,“the massive faults” that Stephen Whicher mentions. O’Neill has been damned for his crude technique, for the excessive incursion of borrowed poetry, for example, or his redundancy and attention-challenging prolixity. Some criticism, highly subjective, goes beyond technique to the play’s content, its unrelieved gloom, its self-pitying characters, or its skeleton-rattling quest for personal absolution.

A play, of course, is not the text; it is the very thing on stage, a place where, in post-modernist terms, the text is repeatedly deconstructed to the bone. O’Neill, for all his real or imagined textual flaws, had an acute sense of the theater, the only proving ground of drama. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, the playwright reveals his great faith in the interpretive artists of the living theater to find the play, not just in, but behind, between, and around his words. As Travis Bogard noted in his Contour in Time: The Plays of Eugene O’Neill, O’Neill’s “ultimate ‘experiment’” was to return to “a confident reliance on his actors.” In both Long Day’s Journey into Night and A Moon for the Misbegotten, Bogard claimed that “[e]verything, now, is in the role. An actor in these plays cannot hide behind personal mannerisms, clever business or habitual stage trickery. O’Neill has stripped all but the most minimal requirements from the stage, leaving the actors naked. They must play or perish.”

Nakedness is the play’s essential condition. Each character is ritually stripped of dignity and self-control as the outward mask of filial regard and concern falls away, exposing an array of conflicting emotions: love, jealousy, shame, guilt, hate — within whose endless jars truth resides. Characters almost immediately begin a ritual of repeated recriminations: the miserliness of James Tyrone, the apostasy and dereliction of Jamie and Edmund, the inability of Mary to escape from her addiction. The play thus becomes a crucible of pain, whose grinding pestle is the rude and abrasive language that resonates throughout. Characters stammer and babble because the polite and rational language of conversation cannot carry the overload of their discharging emotions. In their most poignant moments, Edmund grasps at the truth of his inner self in his own poetic metaphors, Mary escapes into narcosis, James Tyrone into self-pitying incoherency, and Jamie into the expropriated poetry of others. For each, normal discourse simply fails to bear adequate witness to the character’s inner agony.

As John H. Raleigh noted in The Plays of Eugene O ‘Neill, throughout the play there is also “a continuous tension between the present and the past.” In a ritual quest for absolution, each character is forced, at some point, to confront both. Although Mary seeks to restore her lost innocence in her romanticized girlhood, in Act Three she faces a moment of painful truth: “You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can’t hide from her!” But, as Whicher observed in Commonweal, “the most poignant effect of the play is the counter-movement by which the mother retreats into illusion while the others move to a clear sight of truth.” Ironically, that clear sight comes through alcohol, which thickens their tongues and numbs their minds. They face themselves honestly when least able to convey their honesty in lucid and coherent language.

The men try to cope with their current feelings by a protracted and self-critical examination of their past. Each has at least one confessional monologue, painfully linking the past to the present in an effort to expiate his human failings. James Tyrone, for example, explaining that his miserliness springs from his deep-rooted fear of poverty, evinces some self-disgust because he sold his acting talent short for material security. Although long and somewhat redundant, these speeches are necessary to explain the ambivalent feelings that Eugene O‘Neill and the Tragic Tension: An Interpretive Study of the Plays author Doris V. Falk asserted “lead to tense, exhausting, and brilliant drama.”

Much of what seems clumsy or primitive in the text becomes poignant on stage — the heavy-handed reliance on fog as symbol, for example, or Jamie’s mood lurching between sneering accusations and instant regret. The physical gestures and objects, merely described in the play, become very important complements to the dialogue. In fact, the physical objects create a poignant effect in proportion to their very scarcity, particularly in the last act, when the Tyrone family tragedy seems somehow embedded in a single lighted bulb, a worn out deck of playing cards, a bottle of cheap whiskey, and an old, satin wedding gown. Oddly enough, some descriptions in stage directions, richly suggestive on the page, may be impossible to render in the theater. For example, as Mary sinks deep into her morphine-induced narcosis, her eyes grow increasingly brighter. In staging the play, the description can only serve to cue actors, to draw them to a physical focal point revealing Mary’s relapse into her addiction and attendant isolation. On the other hand, the fog horn, beginning in the third act, takes on the force of a keening chorus of mourners, a powerful counterpoint to the characters’ pain in its melancholic and desolate wail. Its power is only hinted at by the stage directions.

The O’Neill paradox is a troubling problem. Plays that pass into the realm of dramatic literature must ultimately survive as texts to be read, as fixed and permanent as fiction and poetry. The staged play, on the other hand, is ephemeral and forever

changing — right up to the final curtain of the play’s last performance. O’Neill, a great innovator and experimenter, worked tirelessly to test the limits of the stage, not leave behind a canon of literary masterpieces. Unfortunately for his reputation, many of his plays, theatrical swans, are textual ugly ducklings, and, like his actors, must be played or run the grave risk of perishing.

Source: John Fiero, in an essay for Drama for Students, Gale, 1997.

What Do I Read Next?

• A Moon for the Misbegotten, produced in 1947, was written by O’Neill as a eulogy for his brother, Jamie, who is fictionalized as Jamie Tyrone in the play. As he is in Long Day’s Journey into Night, Jamie is an alcoholic who seeks solace in the arms of a series of large women. The play deals with his hapless affair with Josie Hogan. It was a work that O’Neill finally came to loathe, possibly because his own son followed in his uncle’s footsteps and committed suicide.
• Trouble in the Flesh (1959), is Max Wylie’s graphic fictional account of Seton Farrier, whose life as the greatest dramatist of his day is clearly based on O’Neill’s biography.
• East of Eden (1952), John Steinbeck’s fictional saga of the Trask family investigates themes parallel to those treated in Long Day’s Journey into Night. Based on the biblical story of Cain and Abel, the novel focuses on family depravity, sibling jealousy and rivalry, guilt, and forgiveness.
• Death of a Salesman (1949), Arthur Miller’s great “tragedy of the common man,” has some parallels with O’Neill’s play, including the tragic consequences of material pursuits and the alienation of sons from their father. Miller’s play is the principal rival claimant to Long Day’s Journey into Night as America’s greatest tragedy.
• Buried Child (1978), Sam Shepard’s mythic study of a dysfunctional family riddled with guilt-for the murder of a real or illusory child, with some parallels to O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night in its themes and retrospective method.
• A Hatful of Rain (1955), Michael V. Gazzo’s play dealing with the impact of a veteran’s drug addiction on the lives of his wife, father, and brother has thematic parallels to O’Neill’s work. An excellent 1957 film version won Anthony Franciosa an Academy Award nomination for best actor.