Making It New: 1900–1945 429of eleven plays entitled “A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed” tracing the fortunes
of an American family from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, were first staged
in, respectively, 1958 and 1962. Hughie, the single play in another projected series,
was first performed in 1958. Above all, Long Day’s Journey into Night, which has a
claim to the title of O’Neill’s finest work, appeared in the theater three years after his
death, in 1956. Set over the course of one long day in August 1912, Long Day’s Journey
into Night tells the story of the Tyrone family: James Tyrone, a former matinee idol,
his wife Mary, a nervous, sickly woman addicted to morphine, their older son Jamie,
a hard-drinking cynic, and their younger son Edmund, who has literary aspirations
and suffers from tuberculosis. O’Neill was clearly drawing on his own life, and the
life of his family, when he wrote this play. Edmund, for example, is an exercise in
self-portraiture. But he was drawing on this for a deeper purpose. What is on offer
here is a study of lives in disintegration, people without something to give coher-
ence, shape, and significance to their lives. They have lost that something, anything
that might have convinced them once that life made sense; that is, even if they ever
had it. As a result, they are left astray and anxious. They look back, perhaps, with a
sense of longing and loss; they look around them in pain and confusion, stumbling
uncertainly through their lives like people in a fog seeking release, relief from
their vacillation and division – their sense of separation even from themselves – in
numbness and dreams. “It was a great mistake, my being born a man. I would have
been much more successful as a sea-gull or a fish,” Edmund wryly observes, and, in
doing so, speaks for all the Tyrone family. “As it is, I will always be a stranger who
never feels at home,” he explains, “who does not want and is not really wanted,
who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!’
“Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people,” Edmund says, shortly after
this. The Tyrones are divided, disintegrated people. Lacking belief, grounding, they
lack a sense of community, stability. They are at odds with themselves and each
other; and this is expressed in the words they use, their reflections and conversations,
which are characterized by a continual oscillation, an ebb-and-flow movement in
which one statement will cancel out another. So Mary Tyrone can fluctuate between
longing to be alone, despairing of being alone, then longing to be alone again,
all within a space of a single speech. She can call herself a “sentimental fool” for
dwelling on her childhood dreams of becoming a nun or a concert pianist, or her
“ schoolgirl” romance with “a matinee idol” that led to marriage. Then she can and
does lapse back into those dreams again. Every member of the family vacillates, with
alarming speed, between expressions of hatred and love, self-justification and
self- recrimination, despair and hope, pride, guilt, and remorse. That comes out,
with particular power, in the episode when Jamie warns his younger brother against
himself. “I’d like to see you become the greatest success in the world. But you’d better
be on your guard,” he tells Edmund. “Because I’ll do my damnedest to make you fail.
Can’t help it. I hate myself. Got to take my revenge. On everyone else. Especially
you.” There is no continuity here because there is nothing, no grounds for it, no
foundations in faith or conviction. The characters are aimless, without anchor in
anything except their dreams of what they might have been (a nun, a concert pianist,GGray_c04.indd 429ray_c 04 .indd 429 8 8/1/2011 7:53:57 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 57 AM