Chapter 8 - . . . Into Night . . . The Way to War

Summary

Act 2 is the point of tragic recognition. Health is broken, addiction reig¬nited, trust betrayed (“Oh, you can't believe that of me!”). The family will eat together no longer on this day. The home becomes a place that must be left. Each has a war to fight, each on a different front.

We don't usually think of Long Day's Journey Into Night as a play of war, but 1912, like 1939 when the play was outlined, was a year on the verge of world war. And the man of 50 who conceived the play knew that these Tyrone characters were confronting a time of cataclysmic struggle in the coming years. Edmund was to face a crisis of how to remain creative and healthy in a modern world dominated by destruction and addiction, and Gene was to face a similarly challenging time. When American men faced conscription, Gene used his history of consumption to claim an exemption from the draft. In 1917, when he was 28, he wrote to the doctor who had overseen his treatment for tuberculosis at the Gaylord Sanitorium, telling him that he was “not trying to dodge service but, from what I hear, conditions in the camps and at the front are the very worst possible for one susceptible to T.B. […] I want to serve my country but it seems silly to commit suicide for it.” He was seeking a certificate from the doctor in case he got drafted anyway. He added that he had tried to enlist in the Navy, “but was refused for minor defects.”

In 1939, when he was too old to be drafted, he again faced the breakdown of his health, and he was dealing with the chaotic lives of his two sons, who would both face and elude conscription. He could sense the imminence of war. His turn to writing plays like Long Day's Journey can be seen as a way of facing the war, even fighting it. The play was almost left unfinished because of the actual outbreak of war, and the presence of at least two radios in the house can be blamed. Radio was the still novel technol¬ogy of reporting on such things as the worsening conflicts in Europe and Asia.