S. Eliot, Hart Crane, and Theodore Roethke—all of whom tend to incorporate the image of a desired death into the great, triple trope of night, the mother, and the sea. Edmund Tyrone and Larry Slade long to die because life without transcendence is impossible, and yet transcendence is totally unavailable. O’Neill’s true polemic against his country and its spiritual tradition is not, as he insisted, that “its main idea is that everlasting game of trying to possess your own soul by the possession of something outside it." Though uttered in 1946, in remarks before the first performance of The Iceman Cometh, such a reflection is banal and represents a weak misreading of The Iceman Cometh. The play’s true argument is that your own soul cannot be possessed, whether by possessing something or someone outside it, or by joining yourself to a transcendental possibility, to whatever version of an Emersonian Oversoul that you might prefer. The United States, in O’Neill’s dark view, was uniquely the country that had refused to learn the truths of the spirit, which are that good and the means of good, love and the means of love, are irreconcilable.

Such a formulation is Shelleyan, and reminds one of O’Neill’s High Romantic inheritance, which reached him through pre-Raphaelite poetry and literary speculation. O’Neill seems a strange instance of the Aestheticism of Rossetti and Pater, but his metaphysical nihilism, desperate faith in art, and phantasmagoric naturalism stem directly from them. When Jamie Tyrone quotes from Rossetti’s “Willowwood" sonnets, he gives the epigraph not only to Long Day’s Journey but to all of O’Neill: “Look into my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell." In O’Neill’s deepest polemic, the lines are quoted by, and for, all Americans of imagination whatsoever.

II

By common consent, Long Day’s Journey into Night is Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece. The Yale paperback in which I have just reread the play lists itself as the seventy-seventh printing in the forty-five years since publication. Since O’Neill, rather than Williams or Miller, Wilder or Albee, is recognized as our leading dramatist, Long Day’s Journey must be the best play in our more than two centuries as a nation. One rereads it therefore with awe and a certain apprehension, but with considerable puzzlement also. Strong work it certainly is, and twice I have been moved by watching it well directed and well performed. Yet how can this be the best stage play that an exuberantly dramatic people has produced? Is it equal to the best of our imaginative literature? Can we read it in the company of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Portrait of a Lady, As I Lay Dying and Gravity’s Rainbow? Does it have the aesthetic distinction of our greatest poets, of Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Hart Crane, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery? Can it stand intellectually with the crucial essays of Emerson and of William James?

These questions, alas, are self-answering. O’Neill’s limitations are obvious and need not be surveyed intensively. Perhaps no major dramatist has ever been so lacking in rhetorical exuberance, in what Yeats once praised Blake for having: “beautiful, laughing speech." O’Neill’s convictions were deeply held, but were in no way remarkable, except for their incessant sullenness. It is embarrassing when O’Neill’s exegetes attempt to expound his ideas, whether about his country, his own work, or the human condition. When one of them speaks of “two kinds of nonverbal, tangential poetry in Long Day’s Journey into Night" as the characters’ longing “for a mystical union of sorts," and the influence of the setting, I am compelled to reflect that insofar as O’Neill’s art is nonverbal it must also be nonexistent.

My reflection however is inaccurate, and O’Neill’s dramatic art is considerable, though it does make us revise our notions of just how strictly literary an art drama necessarily has to be. Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Molière are masters alike of language and of a mimetic force that works through gestures that supplement language, but O’Neill is mastered by language and relies instead upon a drive-towards-staging that he appears to have learned from Strindberg. Consider the close of Long Day’s Journey. How much of the power here comes from what Tyrone and Mary say, and how much from the extraordinarily effective stage directions?

TYRONE (trying to shake off his hopeless stupor). Oh, we’re fools to pay any attention. It’s the damned poison. But I’ve never known her to drown herself in it as deep as this. (Gruffly.) Pass me that bottle, Jamie. And stop reciting that damned morbid poetry. I won’t have it in my house! (Jamie pushes the bottle toward him. He pours a drink without disarranging the wedding gown he holds carefully over his other arm and on his lap, and shoves the bottle back. Jamie pours his and passes the bottle to Edmund, who, in turn, pours one. Tyrone lifts his glass and his sons follow suit mechanically, but before they can drink Mary speaks and they slowly lower their drinks to the table, forgetting them.)

MARY (staring dreamily before her. Her face looks extraordinarily youthful and innocent. The shyly eager, trusting smile is on her lips as she talks aloud to herself). I had a talk with Mother Elizabeth. She is so sweet and good.