Chapter 5 - A House / A Marriage

Summary

Act 4 begins around midnight, a dark hour. “Turn that light out before you come in.” After solitaire and Casino fail to play out, after accusation and apology, the bridegroom cometh (cruel, mocking, after Fat Violet), also the bride (an unholy mockery, no shrinking violet). Is it a dirty joke, since all that arrives is the new dismal day? Tomorrow arrives, and a new sanito-rium must be found.

Gene's life with Carlotta began with their stealthy departure for France, which hap-pened to coincide with the moment when the famous Russian director Georges Pitoëff was staging The Hairy Ape in Paris. Also around that time, Gene was beguiled for a while by the prospect of writing screenplays (he had been offered one hundred thousand dol-lars to write dialogue for a film), and he set about adapting The Hairy Ape. In the screen version, he developed the character of Mildred further “to build up the attraction-repul-sion, hate-lust thing between Yank and Mildred, to make her even more of a bitch.”

That b-word comes up relentlessly in Gene's dealings with women, especially his rejected second wife, Agnes Boulton. “Bitch” is a keyword in the male-defined, fallen world of The Iceman Cometh, but it is spoken only once in Long Day's Journey and then as a joke ( Jamie: “I’m as drunk as a fiddler's bitch”). From that play, all indecorous language has been stripped, except for the word “whore,” but Edmund and Jamie and Tyrone are casting about for an appropriate vocabulary to capture the love and hatred, attraction and disgust, that they feel for Mary. Gene had been focusing on the dualities of inti-mate relationship, particularly husband/wife and son/mother, from the point when his marriage to Agnes began to falter, and his affair with Carlotta began. Late in 1926, he implored Carlotta to read The Great God Brown, saying “[t]here is so much of the secret me in it.”

That play shows the conventional wife (Margaret) in love with the romantic mask of her husband (Dion), while the latter as he is, unmasked, a tormented figure of moder¬nity, can only find love in a prostitute (Cybel), who is also, unmasked, an ironic “Earth Mother.”