Chapter 7 - Long Day’s Journey . . . Wrong Ways

Summary

Act 4 is centrifugal—the Tyrones come home to each other. Act 3 is centrip¬etal. “I—I can't stay here,” says Edmund, heading into the fog. Mary must “go to bed and rest.” James “walks wearily off” to dinner. Jamie is who knows where. The men have heard too much of what Doc (Thomas) Hardy, in “The Voice,” calls the “wan wistlessness” (originally “existlessness”) of the woman, a mother, who once made life meaningful. Hardy's dark poems of 1912, on the occasion of the death of his first wife, must have rested (uneas¬ily) on the bookshelves of Edmund Tyrone.

If a still-point was created with the writing of Long Day's Journey, nevertheless a catastro¬phe was coming, and there was tension in the marriage (but not yet discord or separa¬tion), and there were misbehaving children (but not yet repudiated), and there were bodies getting old (but not yet breaching mortality). At the same time as Long Day's Journey can be read as an achieved point of stillness—an end that is simultaneously a beginning—it can also be read as the site and moment of breakdown, and Tao House is the frame of that scene, too. The cracks in the structure can be read in the play and in the days and nights of Carlotta and Gene persevering in the house through those years— 1939, 1940, 1941—more than a thousand days, out of which 147 went into the creation.

Without losing sight of the play as an achieved masterpiece, we can also read it as a realized nightmare, the neurotic breakdown of a damaged man. Catastrophe is not just imminent, it is commencing here, and this is a disaster zone in the making. What in the foregoing chapter was described as a Taoist mandala, within which the Long Day's Journey of Tao House sits at a center point, could also be characterized as a vicious circle within which the play is caught. Stephen A. Black, who had training in psychoanalysis as well as literary studies, wrote his biography of O’Neill, subtitled Beyond Mourning and Tragedy, to assert that the late plays, particularly Long Day's Journey and A Moon for the Misbegotten, represent the achievement of a successful self-analysis.