A Play of Old Sorrow
By Gerald Jonas

Edmund pleads with his mother.

On his deathbed in a Boston hotel in 1953, the 65-year-old Eugene O'Neill -- suffering from a neuromuscular disorder that had robbed him of the ability to write -- bemoaned his fate in these words: "Born in a goddamn hotel room and dying in a hotel room."

The self-pitying tone was unusual; the self-dramatizing was not. Never one to put a pleasant face on pain, O'Neill had earned his reputation as America's foremost playwright by turning personal misfortune into art. After two decades of declining health, his hands shook so badly in the summer of 1953 that he needed the help of his third wife, Carlotta, to tear up and burn a bundle of unfinished plays that he feared leaving to the scrutiny of historians, critics and, even worse, other writers: "I don't want anybody else finishing up a play of mine." Spared this orgy of destruction was a typed copy of the work that posterity would judge his finest: the agonizingly autobiographical "Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Completed in 1941, the play cut so close to the bone that O'Neill -- whose entire life was devoted to writing for the stage -- sent the script to his publisher in an envelope sealed with wax and accompanied by a letter decreeing that it not be opened "until twenty-five years after my death." Even then, he stipulated, it should never be performed.

O'Neill died on November 27, 1953. Ignoring his instructions, his widow allowed "Long Day's Journey Into Night" to be published in 1955 and produced the following year. The New York production, directed by José Quintero with Frederic March and Florence Eldridge as the elder Tyrones, Jason Robards, Jr., as Jamie, and Bradford Dillman as Edmund, brought O'Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, his fourth.

In dedicating "Long Day's Journey Into Night" to Carlotta, O'Neill had thanked her for giving him "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." Of course, it was understood that the Tyrones were really the O'Neills, his father, mother, brother, and himself.

William Hutt as James Tyrone.

Having drawn on his own life experiences in somewhat disguised form to write his earlier plays, O'Neill all but dropped the masks in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." The few liberties he took with the history of his tormented family only deepened the impact of what he called "this play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood."

Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born on October 16, 1888, in a hotel room in New York. His father was on tour, as usual. Like James Tyrone, James O'Neill was a self-educated actor who had shown great promise as a young man, alternating in the roles of Othello and Iago with no less a stage luminary than Edwin Booth. But he had a morbid fear of dying poor, having learned, in the words of James Tyrone, that there was "no damned romance" in growing up dirt-poor in a large Irish immigrant family abandoned by its father.

So when James O'Neill married 19-year-old Ella Quinlan, beautiful and devout and accustomed to middle-class comforts, he traded his promise as a serious actor for a steady income as the star of "The Count of Monte Cristo," a dramatization of Alexandre Dumas's historical novel. Again like James Tyrone, he toured America for nearly a quarter century, impersonating the dashing Count five nights a week for audiences who, in an era before movies, radio or television, looked forward to the sure-fire excitement provided by theatrical touring companies. His total income during this 25-year period has been estimated at over $800,000, a princely sum for those times.

Like Mary Tyrone, the new Mrs. O'Neill dutifully accompanied her actor husband on his endless rounds. When the couple's first son, James Jr. (Jamie), was born in 1878, he joined the entourage, sleeping in bureau drawers in a series of what Mary Tyrone calls "second-rate hotels." The birth of a second son, Edmund, in 1885, forced a change. James bought a house in New London, CT, where the two children were left with Ella's mother while the couple took to the road again. At the age of one and a half, Edmund caught the measles from Jamie and died. Consumed with guilt, Ella reproached her husband for making her leave the children,

Martha Henry as Mary Tyrone.

and accused Jamie of deliberately infecting the baby. But as soon as the seven-year-old Jamie was dispatched to a boarding school, she gave in to her husband's entreaties and returned to the lonely traveling life she hated.

As recounted in "Long Day's Journey Into Night," the difficult birth of her third son left her in pain and severely depressed. A doctor who had been one of James's drinking companions gave her morphine, precipitating an addiction that she managed to hide from her husband for a long time.

Recalling his early years, Eugene O'Neill once said, "The truth is, I had no childhood." Accompanied by a nanny, he traveled with his parents for the first seven years of his life, then attended boarding schools where he was known as a loner, spending most of his time reading or writing long letters to the older brother he worshipped.

The year 1912, in which O'Neill chose to set "Long Day's Journey Into Night," was in fact a milestone in his own life. Having shipped out as a sailor on a Norwegian freighter, he had returned to New York to live near the docks in a foul rooming house called Jimmy-the-Priest's. Following in his brother's footsteps, he was almost continually drunk; an abortive suicide attempt with sleeping pills further damaged his health, and in December, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Just as in the play, his father first arranged for him to stay at a wretched state hospital, but sanity prevailed, and the 24-year-old Eugene instead spent six months at a private sanatorium, Gaylord Farm in Wallingford, CT. Here, he not only regained his health; he read extensively and began to write. More importantly, as he later recalled, "It was at Gaylord that my mind got the chance to establish itself, to digest and evaluate the impressions of many past years in which one experience had crowded on another with never a second's reflection. At Gaylord I really thought about my life for the first time, about past and future."

In recounting the events of 1912, O'Neill spared no one in his family, least of all himself. Aside from switching names with the deceased Edmund, the only significant change he made in his life story was omitting his marriage, at the age of 20, to Kathleen Jenkins, a young woman of good family whom he got pregnant and wed secretly just before sailing for Latin America on a trip arranged by his father. When he returned to New York, he and Kathleen were divorced, and he did not acknowledge their son, Eugene Gladstone O'Neill Jr., for another 12 years. Whatever O'Neill's personal reasons for excising

Jamie dilutes his father's whiskey.

these events from "Long Day's Journey Into Night," it is clear that the almost unbearable dramatic tension would have been seriously diluted by giving Edmund, the "kid" of the Tyrone family, a wife and child of his own.

While the Tyrones seem inescapably trapped by the dead hand of the past, the subsequent history of the O'Neills holds a few surprises. Eugene and his father had a kind of reconciliation in the older man's final years. Dying of cancer, James Sr. attended the Broadway opening of "Beyond The Horizon" in February 1920; the play went on to run 144 performances and win the Pulitzer Prize. Although James teased his son about the impact of the morbid plot on audiences -- "What are you trying to do," he asked, "send them home to commit suicide?" -- he was openly proud of Eugene's success. And Eugene confided in a friend, "It was the greatest satisfaction [my father] knew that I had made good in a way dear to his heart."

The mutual good feelings were reinforced by Ella's new-found strength. A long stay at a nunnery had apparently cured her drug habit. And after James Sr.'s death on August 10, 1920, Jamie, to everyone's astonishment, gave up liquor as well to help his mother settle the family's affairs. But early in 1922, Ella fell ill while in California selling off some of her late husband's property. In two weeks, she was dead, and Jamie began drinking heavily again. He died on November 8, 1923, a burnt-out wreck who looked decades older than his 45 years.

In "Long Day's Journey Into Night," after Edmund Tyrone describes to his father the rare moments of "ecstatic freedom" he experienced at sea, James Tyrone says, with almost grudging admiration, "Yes, there's the makings of a poet in you all right." Deflecting this compliment, Edmund insists that he could never "touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered. That's the best I'll ever do, I mean, if I live."

If so grim a play can be said to have a happy ending, it can be found in the fact that O'Neill lived to turn his family's agony into one of this century's enduring works of art, a heartrending exploration of the pain that only people bound together by love can inflict on one another.

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