Chapter 9 - Long Day’s Journey Into Night. . . The Way to the World

Summary

Act 1 is the genesis of a new play, a first edition, a premiere. After death, the curtain rises. The living room fills with life again. The journey begins.

By 1948, three years after the O’Neills moved from California to New York, divorce seemed inevitable. Gene's friends openly advised it, and Carlotta was in such a state of fury that she severed all ties for a while. A breaking point came early in 1948, after a lengthy period of disputes, exacerbated by prescription drug overuse and drinking. She told a friend of her attempted suicide in late 1947, which was driven by Gene's alleged abuse of her. On one occasion, an observer reported, Gene “threw a wall mirror at her, and if it had hit her, it might have killed her.” On another occasion, she seized the only picture he had of himself with his mother “and tore it into bits, crying, ‘Your mother was a whore!’”We cannot read the aftermath of Long Day's Journey, from the time it was finished to the time it was published and produced, without encountering Carlotta's bitterness and cynicism and Gene's fury and despair. However, those feelings were generated by marital dysfunction and the misery of ill health, conditions which had worsened since the play was written. At several moments, the marriage seemed beyond saving, but meanwhile the play was saved for later. This period of demise is recounted elsewhere in this book, but the low that was reached was extremely low.

And yet, by 1951, Gene's ill health was so poor and his spirit so crushed that he resigned himself to live out his days in Carlotta's care. In a gesture of re-commitment, he rewrote his will to leave her everything, including his literary estate. She became the authority over his authorship. To her, that meant establishing a fitting memorial to his work, in the form of the Eugene O’Neill Papers at Yale, but it also meant protecting his image and his legacy. After his death, which came on November 27, 1953, she would take charge of all questions of rights, including what to do with all the unpublished material. The three-year saga of bringing out Long Day's Journey is also an important set of days in its creation.