Chapter 1 - Long . . . How Difficult It Is to Be Long

Summary

Act 1. Long Day's Journey Into Night begins at 8:30 a.m. The “Long Day,” counting from midnight, is already one-third passed. What dramatic action has taken place beforehand has been fog-bound, dark, and disturbing—a restless night. And now the sun is out, and the day begins again. Characters enter, a story is born, a play begins. But characters, story, and play all come from the past—a dining room where breakfast has just ended, a family his¬tory, including painful secrets, an audience assembling and watching the curtain go up. The play underscores its beginning as not an actual begin¬ning. This family—this house—this play—has belatedly much to tell.

On June 5, 1939, Eugene O’Neill broke away from his immense and expanding Cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which had grown to a projected 11-play series, begin¬ning in the eighteenth century and ending in the present. On the next day, he turned his attention to the play that is the subject of this book. But a play like Long Day's Journey Into Night cycles back through multiple moments of origin, of which this endpoint, the turn¬ing away from the work that had been impelling him for half a decade, is one, and the long story of the new long play begins with that feeling of incompletion. O’Neill's work on the Cycle had already been interrupted several times by ill health, but each time he came back to it the epic seemed to get longer. That adjective, “long,” and its verbal cor¬relatives, “to long” and “to belong,” haunt the whole of Gene's career, but especially its later phases. It begins the title of Long Day's Journey, and it begins this book.

The play that ultimately broke his momentum on the Cycle was one he had con¬ceived as far back as 1932, when his Work Diary mentions a “California Clipper idea.” He later gave this never-finished play the title The Calms of Capricorn. That play idea led to ideas for other plays, sequels, and prequels, telling the story of two interwoven families through a large swatch of American history.