Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night: "Crumble and fade and--regrets--recriminations … 'If you'd done this, it wouldn't've cost me that!' " - Page 2

The miracle of the play is that the family dynamics are so perfectly nightmarishly bad that these weaknesses become strengths. When Robert Brustein wrote that O'Neill "had to write badly in order to write well," he meant he had to write bad plays before he could write good ones, but the truth is that there's a lot of what should technically be called bad in even his best plays, and I think he had to write badly even in his best plays to write well. (You could say the same of Theodore Dreiser and his two commanding novels.) In Long Day's Journey O'Neill is in the thrall of an immense, primal subject and if he can do no better than "stammer," as Edmund, the character based on O'Neill, puts it, then he'll stammer, and the subject is so awesome it's worth it. There's even value in the stammering itself because you feel at last the artist is no longer ashamed to be what he is, American, among other things, and to say all that he knows without leaving anything out or trying too hard to pre-determine our experience for us. (That's what makes bad writers like John Steinbeck and Arthur Miller simply bad.) O'Neill isn't afraid to let the play open and open and open until it swallows us.

In Long Day's Journey the exposition is justified because the family members are bound to each other by their mutual recriminations--which are interwoven like a Celtic knot: put your finger on it anywhere and it will bring you around the entire tracery back to where you started--and they go at it all day long and into the night. The Tyrone sons try to shut their father up by saying they've heard his stories and adages and complaints ten thousand times, and O'Neill astoundingly makes this sense of rehashing the past into the focus of your experience of the play. You begin to feel you're eavesdropping on people who within their family have become unsocialized in a way that's extreme and yet representative of family interactions, seen without filters. You can torture family because you're so close to them, and you end up torturing yourself at the same time, in no small part because of the torture you're inflicting on the people who know you best and love you without conditions. They hate you, too, but love you more than they hate you, but not so much that they can keep themselves from letting you know how much they hate you, and you're so tied to them you can't get away, or keep from returning their spite in kind.

Article Author: Alan Dale

Alan Dale earned a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and a J.D. from Yale Law School. He currently works as a corporate tax attorney in Portland, Oregon.

He is the author of What We Do Best: American Movie Comedies …

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