Chapter 2 - . . . Day’s . . . Diary of a Day’s Journey

Summary

Act 2, scene 1 starts at 12:45. Lunchtime brings the family together after the morning's division. James and Jamie have been at odds over work that demands sunlight and precision—that hedge (and every hedge divides). The shearing. Mary and Edmund have been at odds over shade and indulgence— a drug, a drink, a dream, a poem (and every indulgence divides). The shoot¬ing up. The day that had brightened is half gone, and the telephone is soon to bring bad news.

Eugene O’Neill was 50 years old on June 6, 1939, when he first made mention of the work that would become Long Day's Journey. His most recent Broadway premiere, Days Without End, had been five years earlier—a disastrous critical failure. Frustrated by the stand¬ards of theater artistry and the commercial pressures that necessitated compromise, and above all by the sense that his plays were misunderstood even when the tickets sold well, he sought, as he had frequently done in the past, creative refuge as far from New York as he could go within the United States. And so, he came to the Pacific Coast in 1936.

Gene was born in New York City on Longacre Square (now Times Square) in 1888, and his father was one of the more successful actor-managers of the era, so flight from New York always expressed a turn away from his origins, both in terms of geography and lineage. In the 1920s, when his plays were constantly in the New York spotlight, he retreated to places like Provincetown, Bermuda, Nantucket, and Maine, then in 1928 to France with his new wife, Carlotta Monterey. In 1931, he returned to New York to oversee the Theatre Guild's production of Mourning Becomes Electra, but even at that point he preferred Long Island to Manhattan as a residence. The characteristic gesture of his life was leaving New York, but that gesture would mean little without his returning again and again. Broadway needed him (even as it doubted him) as a definer of a new standard of excellence, and in a crazy way he needed Broadway (even as he doubted it) as a definer of his aspirations.