Eugene O’Neill was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936, and won several Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. “Long Day’s Journey…” is generally considered his magnum opus. It was first performed in 1956, three years after his death. For this Kindle edition, with the all-too-appropriate cover, there is an introduction by Harold Bloom, one of the many of this genre that might be easily skipped. Bloom is unequivocal in his praise: “Long Day’s Journey must be the best play in our more than two centuries as a nation.” Bloom performs a tour-de-force of brief comparisons between O’Neill and most other celebrated writers. Warning! If you decide to plod through the intro, you may enjoy the following insights: “O’Neill seems a strange instance of the Aestheticism of Rossetti and Pater, but his metaphysical nihilism, desperate faith in art and phantasmagoric naturalism stem directly from them.”
As for the play itself, there are only five characters: James Tyrone, 65, an accomplished actor, his wife Mary, 54, stricken with rheumatism, their son James, 33 a ne’er-do-well, still searching for his place in the world, and the younger son, Edmund, 23, who is not in good health, along with an Irish servant girl, Cathleen. The entire play occurs on one day, in August, 1912, at the Tyrone’s summer house (and only house), somewhere along the New England coast.
Although the play is set in time more than a century ago, the central theme could be ripped from today’s headlines concerning opioid abuse and addiction. Mary got “hooked” on morphine, prescribed to her by a doctor after the death of her second son. She continues to seek its solace, since, as she says: “It hides you from the world and the world from you. You feel that everything has changed, and nothing is what it seemed to be. No one can find or touch you anymore.” Denial is the addict’s crutch, as Mary proclaims: “Now I have to lie, especially to myself.” But she is not the only one in denial – at one level or another, all the males in the family skirt around the issue of their wife’s / mother’s dependency problems – it is just a little medicine for her rheumatism.
And the men have their own “dependency problem”: alcohol! It is a dependency that has always been more open, and socially acceptable. I had to chuckle at one part of the play – both my son, and I, when I was my son’s age, had roommates who had alcohol dependency problems, and would drink our liquor, and then add water to the bottle so that the level of alcohol would appear to be the same. This technique played out prominently in the play, with the father James knowing that the sons did this.
No question that it is a well-written and structured play. O’Neill utilizes flashbacks to provide scenes from James and Mary’s courtship and marriage. Mary had two youthful dreams: to be a nun or a concert pianist – the latter now impossible with her rheumatic fingers. Money issues have continued to be a major issue in their lives. The author has helped push me to finally read Baudelaire since O’Neill has the younger son, Edmund, quote him (to the annoyance of the others) on several occasions (“the vulgar herd can never understand”).
It is a depressing play, about an unfortunately depressing and familiar subject. The reader – or at least this one – wants to shake any one of the characters, and say simply: “Get on with your life – there are a lot of roses that still need to be smelt.” I know that is a prime reason I would never re-read this play, and have been tempted to give it only four stars, yet that rating is simply too subjective. O’Neill has written a great, 5-star, timeless play.
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