O'Neill's Last Play:
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
WRITERS and WRITING O'Neill's Last Play Long Day's Journey into Night. By Eugene O'Neill. Yale. 176 pp. $3.75. Reviewed by Joseph T. Shipley Eugene O'Neill's last play is not so much a play as a...
...with scalpel and 'scope, he can probe beyond Freud into the recesses and rank abysses of a soul...
...It's consumption...
...His son, Jamie, a failure in the theater and already a wastrel, bitterly drowns his dreams in drink...
...presents the derelicts of Jimmy-the-Priest's saloon drifting to oblivion...
...I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time...
...Upon that drug-inspired and ironic memory the curtain drifts down...
...In analysis of characters, O'Neill is profound and challenging...
...That's where Eugene O'Neill landed...
...You get nowhere fast...
...This final mood is blended with their cynical comprehension of the sorry state of the family and the world, out of which the men quote pertinent ironic lines from Shakespeare (James's standby) and from Dowson, Baudelaire, Wilde and Swinburne (the favorites of the sons...
...In his anguished search for synthesis, he has reached on and on...
...The younger son, Edmund, although beginning to have his writings published, is cynical, drunken and tuberculous...
...It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish...
...of hatred and love...
...His Ah, Wilderness!, produced in 1933, is a celebration of the tolerance and goodness of the American way of life...
...What Jamie overlooks is the fact that the port of arrival, being the same for all...
...That is the source of O'Neill's triumph...
...The Iceman Cometh, written in 1939, a dramatized version of O'Neill's own short story of 1917, "Tomorrow...
...of recrimination and sympathy, bitter blame and tender consolation...
...Mary Tyrone, wife and mother, has failed to break herself of addiction to narcotics...
...For a second there is meaning...
...she recalls her years in the convent, her desire to be a nun: "Then in the spring something happened to me...
...It isn't a summer cold...
...But after dissecting the body, he leaves a thoroughly anatomized yet never resurrected corpse...
...Weary roads is right...
...His Days Without End, less than a year later, showed a tortured soul seeking among the spiritual highways and byways to find grace and salvation in the Catholic faith...
...Yes, I remember...
...It was presented in New York in 1946...
...The psychoanalyst may have his comment on the fact that the third son, who died in infancy, is named Eugene...
...With the gathering dark, the tender efforts to understand and help are more frequently broken by the bursts of wrath or hatred, which slump to a sodden indifference...
...Jamie had earlier quoted Kipling's journey on "the 'appy roads that take you o'er the world," commenting: "Happy roads is bunk...
...Soon, however, the black spell set in again...
...Where everyone lands in the end...
...she doses herself increasingly throughout the play...
...As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death...
...In its culmination of his career, it marks his final thought...
...The conflict in the play is beneath the surface, deep in the nature of the juxtaposed personalities...
...Most of O'Neill's characters are doomed persons, possessed of a devil, a drive or a dream...
...Such physical action as the drama contains consists mainly of entrances and exits and liftings of the whisky glass, as through the long day of the drama's enduring the men grow more drunken and the women more doped...
...As the curtain lapses, they are left in dull despair on the stage...
...for the play, like the playwright's questing, finds no solution...
...Edmund Tyrone is the budding author Eugene O'Neill...
...Hence, actors possessed of a quenchless fire may imbue them with a fervent glow, giving them, for the duration of the performance, a compelling power beyond the surface actions of the play...
...In Long Day's Journey into Night, this tragic finality is lacking...
...The best writing in the play occurs not in clash of personalities but in more lyric moments, such as Edmund's recollection of certain hours of "ecstatic freedom" on the high seas: "Like a saint's vision of beatitude...
...Penny-pinching James Tyrone, road-company actor and self-adjudged failure, is chafing and drinking away his summer rest...
...with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones...
...The play ends with Edmund ready to go to a sanitorium and Mary completely sunk in the spell of her drug...
...Reviewed by Joseph T. Shipley Eugene O'Neill's last play is not so much a play as a purgation...
...The Moon of the Misbegotten, which followed it, and Long Day's Journey into Night, completed in 1940, have not yet had Broadway production...
...Never has O'Neill been great in his syntheses, in his integration of the diverse persons and forces of his dramas into a single-blossomed unity...
...There is no question that Long Day's Journey into Night is the outpouring of an anguished soul...
...For a second you see--and seeing the secret, are the secret...
...That's where I've got--nowhere...
...Taking four-and-a-half hours to perform, the play was hailed as an "unparalleled success" but a "shaking" experience not likely to be seen "on any other stage because it is so demanding on both theater and audience...
...He grins wryly...
...They are O'Neill's words of his lifetime, at its end...
...he has grasped at many devices: In experimentation with forms and methods of theatrical presentation, as in analysis of character, he is America's pioneer...
...A jungle of buds--but no single prize night-flower of whatever treacherous beauty and heady perfume...
...Between these persons glint swift alternations of pretending nothing is wrong and attempting to face the facts...
...It helps us to understand the losing war the playwright waged to find meaning and values behind and within his creations...
...It carries the playwright's sense of the emptiness of living, the stinging and stinking futility of life, to the point where despair and suicide, offered in the chill fingers of the Iceman, are momentarily masked by drink and dope...
...This desperate summons does not break through Mary's faraway, drugged preoccupation with her childhood days...
...The last of these has just had its world premiere at the Swedish National Theater in Stockholm...
...though he long withheld their presentation, O'Neill wrote three plays of bleak despair, recoiding scenes and moods of his earlier life...
...The autobiographical seeker in this play is significantly called John Loving...
...they are indeed wearying, but they are intense...
...It cleanses the author's spirit of the nightmare that plagued his living days...
...is unimportant: what tells is the quality of the struggle along the way...
...Echoes of The Hairy Ape and other plays are in these words, which sound like a passage from Baudelaire's notebooks, stricken with nostalgia for the ideal, with despair of the actual...
...There had seemed, after his marriage to Carlotta Monterey in 1929, the gleam of a brighter hope in the playwright...
...The men, who have tried whisky vainly, wish that they were...
...That's where the play lands...
...As he states in the dedicatory letter of 1941 to his wife, it is a "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood...
...Edmund's last words in the play are his febrile cry: "Mama...
...Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand...
...And the autobiographical plays, especially this which is his final word, add comprehension and compassion, in our feeling for the man, to our admiration of the accomplishments of the artist...
...Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason...
...And usually, though he does not achieve the renewal of the spirit, he at least presents a sharp conflict, born in the play of the characters' nature and borne through the play to its grim resolution...
...The O'Neill of 1940 could not put period to the O'Neill of 1910...
...The woman is narcotically out of this world...
...The roads may not be happy...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 10
