Summer 2021
Eugene O’Neill: ‘A little in love with death’
We all have this play in us. The play we’d write about our family, our childhood, its traumas, its secrets and its lies, if only we could bear the pain it would cause our family if they ever read it. And the pain that it would cause us, when they told us it was wrong. When they looked us in the eye and implicated us in their pain and brokenness. It’s why psychotherapy is done one on one. It’s all we can do to get our own story straight.
In 1923, Eugene was the last of the O’Neill family still alive. He was 35. The last of the theatrical O’Neill’s who took a house on the New London sound each summer, to rest from their father’s busy touring schedule. And he went back there in his imagination, to the late summer of 1912, to the sounds of the sea and the nightly fog horns and the distant bells and the sketched-in decor and the sharp, cheap whiskey and the furtive steps on the landing at night as his mother crept, almost silently along floorboards, to inject morphine in the room, now spare, where her baby son had died. The late summer of 1912. When Eugene had returned home after attempting suicide at a dive bar in New York City where drunks and sailors went to forget and to die.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that Eugene O’Neill’s alcoholism hit its zenith in the mid 1920s. His brother James, blind from the booze, had died from it in 1923. James had cleaned up his act for the previous two years and went to nurse his sick mother Ella, who’d been addicted to morphine for most of her adult life, but Ella died of a stroke in 1922. James O’Neill snr, Eugene’s father, a noted, but underachieving American actor died in 1920, of stomach cancer brought on by years of excessive drinking. O’Neill snr and Ella had lost an infant, Edmund, in tragic circumstances, while she was away on tour, in the 1880s. Eugene was born as an attempt to help Ella recover from her depression. But by the time of Eugene’s birth in 1888, the morphine that she had taken to numb the pain of her grief had become an addiction too. And this danse macabre of their addictions plagued their married life. O’Neill’s father died two weeks after Beyond The Horizon had opened on Broadway, and heralded Eugene’s arrival as the major dramatic artist of the age, winning him the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. The play was the tragic story of two warring brothers. In the wake of his son’s success, James O’Neill wrote to Eugene, ‘I am going to a better sort of life. This life here, all froth. No good, rottenness.’
Even O’Neill felt he couldn’t write this play. He tried not to on several occasions. He was a decade sober and deep into therapy when he retreated to Tao House, California, to write what he thought would be his final masterwork. But try as he might, he couldn’t stop Long Day’s Journey into Night from emerging between the lines of an (eventually abandoned) epic eight-play cycle about the history of the Irish in America. And even when he had completed it, when he had told his story, torn strips off himself by going back to New London in his mind night after night after night and he had met his family again as a sober adult and accused and forgiven them all… Even then, he forbade the play ever to be performed. It was only to be read at the earliest, ten years after his death. He sealed the envelope containing the play with wax and put it in a safe at his literary agent’s office in New York. I wonder if he knew what would happen.
This writer’s dare, freeing himself of the idea of an audience, of his family seeing it, of meetings with producers and responses from critics, precisely gives it its uncompromising quality. Its independence. Its freedom. In looking unsparingly at the minutiae of his family’s life, he found a searching universality in all families, savage and beautiful, perhaps unmatched since the Greeks.
In seeking to understand his father and his mother and his brother through the lens of their addictions, he sees their desire to look away from, if not entirely escape, the brutality of being alive. Yet he sees in the fog of addiction, not just destruction but creativity, of new insights and perception. He’s sees, truly, the lot of the Irish in America, brutalised, brutal, colonised children, forever searching for a lost home. He sees in our desire to tell stories about ourselves and our lives, a need to shield ourselves from the consequences of our own actions. He sees people a little in love with death, a fond yearning for the only true peace. In the Tyrone family’s desire to evade confronting the painful truth of the imminent death of Edmund, O’Neill shines a light on how we all spend our lives evading the truth of our own inevitable death, whilst still wanting it a little. We’re desperate for Edmund not to die. But we’re a little jealous of him at the same time.
How is it that this play about death, only ever ends up teaching its audience about life? By trying to understand his family truly, looking fearlessly into the eyes of their angels and their devils, into the messy depth of their humanity as they talk long into the night, by looking at what was actually there, Eugene O’Neill had no choice but to forgive.
‘Forget it! Let’s have another drink.’
Amen.
© Phillip Breen