430 Making It New: 1900–1945a great Shakespearean actor) or what they might be (a great writer, a success), and
no forms of emotional rescue other than those offered by various narcotics – drugs,
alcohol, poetry, the blanketing numbness of the fog. What they all long for, secretly,
intuitively, is described when Edmund recalls his life as a seaman. At sea once, he
remembers, he felt that he had “dissolved in the sea,” that he “became beauty and
rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky!” On the
beach once, he “became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock,
swaying in the tide.” “For a second you see,” he explains, “– and seeing the secret, are
a secret. For a second there is meaning!” “I belonged,” he insists, “within something
greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put
it that way.” But such moments of union, of belonging, are rare here. “The hand lets
the veil fall,” Edmund concludes bitterly, “and you are alone, lost in the fog again,
and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason!” That is the condition of
the Tyrones, and the human condition in O’Neill’s plays. The secret of joy, losing
oneself in “a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and
dreams,” is professed, if at all, only for a fleeting moment. Before and after, there is
only waste and exile.
O’Neill is essentially a religious writer without a religion. The power and pain of
his best work is a measure of that paradox. Long Day’s Journey into Night achieves a
tragic pathos precisely because it requires the audience both to see and to share in
the disintegration of the Tyrones: to recognize that they are “fog people,” stammering
for something they can never possess, but also to share their need, feel compelled by
their “native eloquence.” What is especially remarkable about this portrait of a family
being borne toward extinction is how intricately O’Neill weaves the familial web.
Like Faulkner, he believed that, as he has one of the characters say here, “the past is
the present”; like Faulkner, too, he uses that belief to present the family as an
elaborate network of blame and dependence, in which the family members both
resist and rely on each other – feel isolated and betrayed, yet also feel an intense need
to be with one another for personal survival, mutual support. The Tyrones are
constantly accusing one another, blaming one another for what they did or were not
able to do, for the damage done to their own lives. They are also, constantly, relying
on one another, not just for advice or assistance, nor even just for conversation or
comfort, but to bolster their image of themselves through the rehearsal of shared
memories and illusions – by seeing themselves, as they would like to be, in the
mirror of the past or the gaze of a husband or wife, a father or mother, son or brother.
This sense that the fates of the different members of the Tyrone family are all
intimately bound together – and that we, the audience, are intimately bound to
them – as they journey inexorably into night is never stronger than in the closing
moments of the play. Mary Tyrone appears, trailing her wedding gown and utterly
immersed in her memories of the past. “What is it I’m looking for?” she asks her
family. “I know it’s something I lost.” “I remember when I had it I was never lonely
or afraid,” she recalls. “I can’t have lost it for ever. I would die if I thought that.
Because then there would be no hope.” Slowly, in details, it comes back to her. It is
her dreams, her illusions, the moments when she was surprised by joy. “Then in theGGray_c04.indd 430ray_c 04 .indd 430 8 8/1/2011 7:53:58 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 58 AM