by Arthur Gelb
All summer long, O’Neill had kept an ear on the war news and, when listening to Hitler’s broadcast speech on July 19, 1940, he remarked in his Work Diary, “What could be more squalid than a dictator who is also a fifth-rate ham!”
A month later, he’d abruptly interrupted work on his nearly completed first draft of Long Day’s Journey to make notes for two plays (outside the cycle) dealing with the “present world collapse & dictatorships,” which would be “timely but timeless spiritually.” He called one of these plays “Time Grandfather Was Dead”; the second, as yet untitled, he described as a “timeless, timely ventriloquist play.”
He had yet another “fascinating new idea” on August 30, describing this one in terms that made sense only to him: a “duality of Man play—Good—Evil, Christ—Devil—begins Temptation on Mount—through to Crucifixion—Devil a modern power realist—symbolical spiritual conflict today and in all times.” He first called it “The Thirteenth Apostle,” later changing it to “The Last Conquest.”
And then it was back to Long Day’s Journey Into Night; nearing the completion of his first draft, O’Neill spoke in depth to Carlotta about his real family, tracing, as she recalled, “their true relationships one to the other,” scrutinizing “their idiosyncrasies & disloyalties!” And a month later, on the day he wrote “finished” to the first draft of Journey, he pondered what it had cost him “in strength & emotion to write it!”
After spending the next month making revisions, he put the play aside on October 16—his fifty-second birthday. (He would not take it up again until March of the following year.)
To Carlotta’s amazement, O’Neill put aside not only Long Day’s Journey Into Night but also the three new play ideas that had excited him in August. Instead, unpredictably, he chose to ensnare himself ever more intensely in his cycle, which he now had definitely decided to expand to eleven plays. He had, however, lost all interest in ever producing the cycle on Broadway. There was no longer a theater to which he belonged, he wrote to Macgowan, “a theater of guts and idealism.” He dreaded to have a play of his produced “in an atmosphere to which neither I nor my work belongs in spirit, nor want to belong.”
Production, he insisted, was “a long, irritating, wearing, nervous, health-destroying ordeal”; it was backed by “no creative enthusiasm”; it was “just another Broadway opening.” Reminiscing about the old Playwrights’ Theatre, he added, “there is no longer a theater of true integrity and courage and high purpose and enthusiasm. . . . The idea of an Art Theater is more remote now, I think, than it was way back in the first decade of this century.” So long as he shunned production and lived quietly with Carlotta, “doing my job of writing plays,” he concluded, “I rate myself the most fortunate of men.”
Resigning himself to writing for an ideal theater of the future, O’Neill grimly chiseled away at his cycle during November, making notes for rewriting A Touch of the Poet and More Stately Mansions. He also began plotting a series of short “monologue plays” with the overall title By Way of Obit.
As he explained to Nathan, enclosing a copy of the first of those monologues, Hughie, “There will be seven or eight of them if I ever manage to get them all done.” Like Iceman, Hughie illustrated O’Neill’s thesis that survival depends on clinging to one’s illusions, even knowing they are pipe dreams.
In each playlet, O’Neill told Nathan, the main character was to talk about a person who has died to a person who does little but listen: “You get a complete picture of the person who has died—his or her whole life story—but just as complete a picture of the life and character of the narrator.”
O’Neill said, “These plays are written more to be read than staged,” adding, “some of them will be based on actual characters I’ve known—some not. Hughie isn’t. The Night Clerk character is an essence of all the night clerks I’ve known in bum hotels—quite a few!” The narrator of Hughie, continued O’Neill, “is a type of Broadway sport I and my brother used to know by the dozen in far-off days.” He is Erie Smith, a small-time gambler and horseplayer down on his luck. Although set in 1928 in a cheap hotel just off Broadway, its narrator and his near-silent foil, the hotel’s night clerk, would be at home in Harry Hope’s waterfront saloon of 1912. Erie is a less astringent Hickey, a Hickey not burdened with O’Neill’s symbolic message of despair, a coarser, more elementary type—but a blood brother nonetheless.
O’Neill describes Erie and Hickey in almost the same words. Both are short, stout, balding, with boyish faces, blue eyes, button noses, and pursed mouths. Both have the shrewd glance and breezy familiar manner of the wised-up salesman confident he can always find a sucker. Underneath the facade, both are on the verge of crumbling.
“Gene started writing these plays as a diversion,” Carlotta later recalled. “He had been writing so many serious things at the time, this was something to play with—required no responsibility. It amused him.” She said one of the playlets dealt with an old Irish chambermaid O’Neill knew when he and Jamie lived at the Garden Hotel.
“They would wake up in the morning with hangovers,” said Carlotta, “and the chambermaid would be scrubbing the bathroom. She would tell Gene stories and gossip, and Gene would encourage her to talk.”
After a lifetime of writing double- and triple-length plays, and struggling to complete an eleven-play cycle, it’s something of an irony that Hughie, the next-to-last play O’Neill completed, was one of his shortest. It was published in 1959, six years after his death, and did not receive its American premiere until December 22, 1964, when Jason Robards Jr., directed by José Quintero, brought it to Broadway. Robards performed the play (in his words) “on and off everywhere for thirty-two years.”
While O’Neill busied himself with writing Hughie that November, Carlotta was typing Long Day’s Journey Into Night, squinting her way with a magnifying glass through handwriting ever more difficult to decipher. “Am so moved,” she wrote, after finishing Act III, “so torn to bits by it—that I feel ill. . . . No wonder he is as he is now! Poor Darling—no proper upbringing, no love, no tenderness, no discipline, no real care of any kind—oh, I can understand so many things now!”
The typing of Act IV nearly undid her. “This is now a torture to me!” she wrote, adding, “I have never been so disturbed by any piece of writing before! . . . I feel ‘possessed!’ Long Day’s Journey Into Night absorbing all of my thought—& what an insight into the very soul of Gene!”
Absorbed as she was with her suffering husband’s soul, she was almost as wrapped up in concern for their aging adopted canine child. She had returned home from a shopping trip on November 19 to find that Blemie had fallen backward down the kitchen steps, tearing ligaments in his leg. “Blemie in great pain trying to walk 3 legs,” she recorded. She and Blemie spent an unhappy restless night together. “I take blankets & lie on the floor with him—Give him aspirin—.”
Blemie’s condition had seriously worsened by November 25, and Carlotta found herself nursing him with the same tender devotion she’d so often lavished on O’Neill. “Blemie has the jitters—he is getting so blind—I pull his bed up close to mine so I can hold his paw—that gives him a feeling of security. He sleeps—which allows me to.”
Carlotta might have been describing an experience with one of O’Neill’s worst seizures when she wrote, on December 4, “Have a God awful night with Blemie. Poor darling is either in pain or his nerves are bedeviling him! He paces the floor dragging his bad leg! It is heartbreaking to watch him. I have tried all my known remedies.”
By now, Carlotta herself was feeling shaky: “Hope to goodness I don’t get flu—then things will be in a mess! ‘Mama’ must never fall down on her job! The very few times I have had to rest in bed for a day or so—Gene always does some not-so-good thing! I think it is thro’ terror that ‘Mama’ isn’t there to give him care & protection!”
“Blemie seems to be fading out,” Carlotta noted on Decembe
r 10, “—his face looks so thin &—he is quieter!” Dr. Dukes advised her, a few days later, that Blemie had either stomach ulcers or cancer, and should be put to sleep. After the veterinarian examined Blemie and confirmed this diagnosis, Carlotta asked him to give Blemie something to make him comfortable and to return the following morning.
O’Neill, she told her diary, “is not good at a time like this—he says it upsets him!” Snappishly she added, “it more than ‘upsets’ me!”
In truth, as O’Neill recorded in his Work Diary, he was plagued during the period of Blemie’s illness with “bad night pain,” “terrible nerves,” and “exhaustion,” and gave up all work on his cycle from December 12 till month’s end.
Carlotta, after sitting up with Blemie most of the night on December 16, found him, in the early morning, sunk into a coma. The vet arrived at 10:30. “I take Blemie in my arms & hold him tight—he looks up at me once—[the vet] gives him a huge ‘shot’ & Blemie sighs & he’s gone!”
The dog is tenderly placed in a coffin that has been fashioned by the O’Neills’ devoted factotum, Freeman; it is lined with Blemie’s mattress and pillow, and Carlotta covers him with his blanket. With O’Neill, Carlotta, Freeman, the groundsman Roberts, and his two helpers in attendance, Blemie is buried on the side of the hill under the pines.
“Carlotta & I completely knocked out,” wrote O’Neill, “—loved him for 11 years—a finer friend than most friends!” The following day, after visiting Blemie’s gravesite, Carlotta and O’Neill planned a headstone.
Amid their dispirited Christmas preparations, O’Neill once again came down with flu, followed by bronchitis, and was confined to bed from Christmas Eve until January 6, 1941. But, knowing how hard Carlotta was taking Blemie’s death and hoping to alleviate her pain, he rallied long enough on December 26 to write for her a lengthy touching essay. Heading it “The Last Will and Testament of Silverdeen Emblem O’Neill,” it was an expression of O’Neill’s philosophy that might almost have served for his own epitaph:
I, Silverdeen Emblem O’Neill (familiarly known to my family, friends, and acquaintances as Blemie) . . . do hereby bury my last will and testament in the mind of my Master . . . I have little in the way of material things to leave. Dogs are wiser than men. They do not set great store upon things. They do not waste their days hoarding property. They do not ruin their sleep worrying about how to keep the objects they have, and to obtain objects they have not.
I ask my Master and Mistress to remember me always, but not to grieve for me too long. . . . It is painful for me to think that even in death I should cause them pain. Let them remember that while no dog has ever had a happier life (and this I owe to their love and care for me), now that I have grown blind and deaf and lame, and even my sense of smell fails me so that a rabbit could be right under my nose and I might not know, my pride has sunk to a sick, bewildered humiliation. I feel life is taunting me with having overlingered my welcome. It is time I said good-by, before I become too sick a burden on myself and on those who love me. It will be a sorrow to leave them, but not a sorrow to die. Dogs do not fear death as men do. We accept it as part of life, not as something alien and terrible which destroys life. What may come after death, who knows?
I would like to believe with those of my fellow Dalmatians who are devout Mohammedans, that there is a Paradise where one is always young and full-bladdered; where all the day one dillies and dallies with an amorous multitude of houris, beautifully spotted.
I am afraid this is too much for even such a dog as I am to expect. But peace, at least, is certain. Peace and long rest for weary old heart and head and limbs, and eternal sleep in the earth I have loved so well. Perhaps, after all, this is best. . . .
Carlotta and O’Neill never owned another dog. “It was Blemie we loved, not the dog!” Carlotta once pronounced.
• • •
WHILE IT WAS CLEAR to O’Neill at the beginning of 1942 that his physical strength was waning, his intellectual prowess was as piercing as ever. Even sunk as he was in physical and emotional doldrums between January and mid-March—he erupted with ideas for two new plays.
In “Blind Alley Guy,” he depicted a contemptible political extremist modeled on Hitler and his equally contemptible wife; in the second play, a “comedy idea” entitled “The Visit of Malatesta,” he portrayed the legendary Italian insurrectionist of that name.
“Never have written about Italian-Americans although in past have known many of them as close friends.” The never-completed play seems to have been a kind of postscript to The Iceman Cometh; some of its characters are reminiscent of those in Iceman and it is set in the same year (1912).
O’Neill also summoned the energy to work on his two earlier concepts, “Time Grandfather Was Dead,” along with “The Thirteenth Apostle.”
This astonishing surge of creativity equaled (if not surpassed) the torrent of ideas that filled the notebooks of his earliest writing days. But his was not an easy mind to follow. He switched tracks on March 17, returning to his nearly completed job of cutting and revising his second draft of Long Day’s Journey Into Night and, within two weeks, he pronounced it finished.
“Like this play better than any I have written—does most with the least—a quiet play—and a great one, I believe,” he noted in his Work Diary.
O’Neill’s close friends Sophus and Eline Winther were among the chosen few to whom O’Neill showed the manuscript, describing it as “autobiography.” To them, he confided, “I think the greatest lines I ever wrote were the final words of the play when Mary [Tyrone], holding her wedding gown in her hands says, ‘That was in the winter of senior year. Then in the spring something happened to me. Yes, I remember. I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time.’”
That May, Carlotta noted that O’Neill had recently told her about the “many things that he did not put” into Long Day’s Journey. “He is glad I know the play so well,” she wrote, “I can now understand why he has done and does do things that he is not proud of doing! He tells me why he hated his brother in his later years!”
Two months later, O’Neill dedicated the original script of Long Day’s Journey to his wife (the dedication was signed “Gene” and dated “Tao House, July 22, 1941”):
For Carlotta, on our 12th Wedding Anniversary
Dearest: I give you the original script of this play of old sorrow written in tears and blood. A sadly inappropriate gift, it would seem, for a day celebrating happiness. But you will understand. I mean it as a tribute to your love and tenderness which gave me the faith in love that enabled me to face my dead at last and write this play—write it with deep pity and understanding and forgiveness for all the four haunted Tyrones.
These twelve years, Beloved One, have been a Journey into Light—into love. You know my gratitude. And my love!
(In 1955, shortly after she authorized the publication of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Carlotta wrote to Dudley Nichols, telling him O’Neill had insisted that his dedication to her must be included in the published version of his play “and no other ‘forward’ or ‘introduction’ be used in place of it or with it.” O’Neill’s reason for this command, claimed Carlotta, was that “the ‘inscription’ showed what his mood was when writing it—and what hell he went through!”)
• • •
LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT, as O’Neill noted, is indeed “a quiet play”; to make his point, he did not require the pileup of poisoned, stabbed, or drowned bodies that signified so many of his earlier savage forays. There is plenty of bloodletting in the Tyrones’ vacation home (a faithful reproduction, in the author’s stage description, of the O’Neills’ summer cottage in 1912 New London). But it is symbolic—inflicted via the cruel and cutting taunts exchanged among the four Tyrones: about buried misdeeds; shocking betrayals of trust; deeply wounding bursts of repressed jealousy; scathing accusations of turpitude, parsimony, hypocrisy, gross
ingratitude, and other excruciating misbehavior, both past and present.
And all the while, in a dissonant descant, the four Tyrones profess their great love and forgiveness for one another.
While it’s true that all four members of the emotionally roiled Tyrone family are still standing at the final curtain, each has been brutally wounded.
Mary Tyrone has relapsed into her drug habit, pleading her inability to cope with her ailing younger son’s shocking diagnosis of consumption; the implication that she is forever lost is voiced by her older son, who sneers that addicts “never come back.”
James Tyrone, the onetime matinee idol, has become a crushed and hopeless old man; devastated by his wife’s relapse, he is almost equally concerned about his younger son’s illness—and the expense of treating it.
James Jr., once a bright and promising student and now, at thirty-three, a misogynic, washed-up actor, has—by play’s end—sunk into the alcoholic depths that his doctors have warned will soon kill him; his imminent death is plainly signaled in Long Day’s Journey (and O’Neill will shortly administer the coup de grâce in A Moon for the Misbegotten). The direst fate of all has been reserved for the younger son, Edmund, who represents O’Neill himself. Edmund is not unduly surprised, at play’s end, to receive a diagnosis of what is probably a lethal case of tuberculosis. He is destined to die young, O’Neill strongly implies, transparently dramatizing the death wish long attributed to him by a swarm of psychiatrists.
O’Neill acknowledged Long Day’s Journey Into Night as autobiographical to Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant, as well as to the Winthers. “This is the real story,” he said, giving Sergeant the manuscript to read. And yet, even though O’Neill invited his friends to do so, it’s a mistake to take Long Day’s Journey Into Night as literal autobiography. It is, rather, a dramatically heightened, drastically condensed, and factually manipulated version of the events that took place during the New London summer of 1912.