Long Day's Journey into Night (Yale Nota Bene) Read Free

give you my sacred word of honor! (Then with a sad bitterness.) But I suppose you’re remembering I’ve promised before on my word of honor.
EDMUND . No!
MARY (her bitterness receding into a resigned helplessness). I’m not blaming you, dear. How can you help it? How can any one of us forget? (Strangely.) That’s what makes it so hard—for all of us. We can’t forget.
EDMUND (grabs her shoulder). Mama! Stop it!
MARY (forcing a smile). All right, dear. I didn’t mean to be so gloomy. Don’t mind me. Here. Let me feel your head. Why, it’s nice and cool. You certainly haven’t any fever now.
EDMUND . Forget! It’s you—
MARY . But I’m quite all right, dear. (With a quick, strange, calculating, almost sly glance at him.) Except I naturally feel tired and nervous this morning, after such a bad night. I really ought to go upstairs and lie down until lunch time and take a nap. (He gives her an instinctive look of suspicion—then, ashamed of himself, looks quickly away. She hurries on nervously.) What are you going to do? Read here? It would be much better for you to go out in the fresh air and sunshine. But don’t get overheated, remember. Be sure and wear a hat. (She stops, looking straight at him now. He avoids her eyes. There is a tense pause. Then she speaks jeeringly.) Or are you afraid to trust me alone?
EDMUND (tormentedly). No! Can’t you stop talking like that! I think you ought to take a nap. (He goes to the screen door—forcing a joking tone.) I’ll go down and help Jamie bear up. I love to lie in the shade and watch him work. (He forces a laugh in which she makes herself join. Then he goes out on the porch and disappears down the steps. Her first reaction is one of relief. She appears to relax. She sinks down in one of the wicker armchairs at rear of table and leans her head back, closing her eyes. But suddenly she grows terribly tense again. Her eyes open and she strains forward, seized by a fit of nervous panic. She begins a desperate battle with herself. Her long fingers, warped and knotted by rheumatism, drum on the arms of the chair, driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent.)
CURTAIN
     
    That grim ballet of looks between mother and son, followed by the terrible, compulsive drumming of her long fingers, has a lyric force that only the verse quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and others in O’Neill’s text are able to match. Certainly a singular dramatic genius is always at work in O’Neill’s stage directions, and can be felt also, most fortunately, in the repressed intensities of inarticulateness in all of the Tyrones.
    It seems to me a marvel that this can suffice, and in itself probably it could not. But there is also O’Neill’s greatest gift, more strongly present in Long Day’s Journey than it is even in The Iceman Cometh. Lionel Trilling, subtly and less equivocally than it seemed, once famously praised Theodore Dreiser for his mixed but imposing representation of “reality in America," in his best novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. One cannot deny the power of the mimetic art of Long Day’s Journey into Night. No dramatist to this day, among us, has matched O’Neill in depicting the nightmare realities that can afflict American family life, indeed family life in the twentieth-century Western world. And yet that is the authentic subject of our dramatists who matter most after O’Neill: Williams, Miller, Albee, with the genial Thorton Wilder as the grand exception. It is a terrifying distinction that O’Neill earns, and more decisively in Long Day’s Journey into Night than anywhere else. He is the elegist of the Freudian “family romance," of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be