She sinks down in one of the wicker armchairs at rear of table and leans her head back, closing her eyes. But suddenly she grows terribly tense again. Her eyes open and she strains forward, seized by a fit of nervous panic. She begins a desperate battle with herself. Her long fingers, warped and knotted by rheumatism, drum on the arms of the chair, driven by an insistent life of their own, without her consent.)

CURTAIN

That grim ballet of looks between mother and son, followed by the terrible, compulsive drumming of her long fingers, has a lyric force that only the verse quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, and others in O’Neill’s text are able to match. Certainly a singular dramatic genius is always at work in O’Neill’s stage directions, and can be felt also, most fortunately, in the repressed intensities of inarticulateness in all of the Tyrones.

It seems to me a marvel that this can suffice, and in itself probably it could not. But there is also O’Neill’s greatest gift, more strongly present in Long Day’s Journey than it is even in The Iceman Cometh. Lionel Trilling, subtly and less equivocally than it seemed, once famously praised Theodore Dreiser for his mixed but imposing representation of “reality in America," in his best novels, Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. One cannot deny the power of the mimetic art of Long Day’s Journey into Night. No dramatist to this day, among us, has matched O’Neill in depicting the nightmare realities that can afflict American family life, indeed family life in the twentieth-century Western world. And yet that is the authentic subject of our dramatists who matter most after O’Neill: Williams, Miller, Albee, with the genial Thorton Wilder as the grand exception. It is a terrifying distinction that O’Neill earns, and more decisively in Long Day’s Journey into Night than anywhere else. He is the elegist of the Freudian “family romance," of the domestic tragedy of which we all die daily, a little bit at a time. The helplessness of family love to sustain, let alone heal, the wounds of marriage, of parenthood, and of sonship, have never been so remorselessly and so pathetically portrayed, and with a force of gesture too painful ever to be forgotten by any of us.

HAROLD BLOOM

Publisher’s Note, 1989

Since its first publication in February 1956, Long Day’s Journey into Night has gone through numerous reprintings. With this printing, the sixty-first, we have taken the opportunity to correct several errors recently reported by scholars who have made careful examinations of final typescripts of the play. It has been discovered that Carlotta O’Neill, retyping from a previous version heavily edited by O’Neill, accidentally dropped lines in several places.

We wish to take note first of a correction that was silently made in the fifth printing after Donald Gallup called our attention to missing lines on page 170. The dialogue and stage directions restored were those beginning with “Kid" in line 22 and ending with “old" in line 24.

For the corrections made in this printing, we thank the following: Michael Hinden (for pointing out missing lines on pages 97, 106, and 167 and errors on page 158), Judith E. Barlow (for missing lines on page 97), and Stephen Black (for an error on page 111). On page 97 a sentence ("Anyway, by tonight, what will you care?") has been added to Edmund’s dialogue at lines 18-19. On page 97 lines 29-33 are printed for the first time. On page 106 a sentence ("It’s a special kind of medicine.") has been restored at line 1. The errors corrected on pages 111 and 158 were minor, although puzzling, misprints (e.g., “fron" for “front," “sibject" for “subject"). On page 167 a sentence ("No one hopes more than I do you’ll knock ‘em all dead.") has been restored in line 20.

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!

Gene

Tao House

July 22,1941.

Characters

JAMES TYRONE

MARY CAVAN TYRONE, his wife

JAMES TYRONE, JR., their elder son

EDMUND TYRONE, their younger son

CATHLEEN, second girl

Scenes

ACT 1
Living room of the Tyrones’ summer home 8:30 A.M. of a day in August, 1912

ACT 2, SCENE I
The same, around 12:45

ACT 2, SCENE 2
The same, about a half hour later

ACT 3
The same, around 6:30 that evening

ACT 4
The same, around midnight

Act One

SCENE

Living room of James Tyrone’s summer home on a morning in August, 1912.

At rear are two double doorways with portieres. The one at right leads into a front parlor with the formally arranged, set appearance of a room rarely occupied. The other opens on a dark, windowless back parlor, never used except as a passage from living room to dining room. Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase, with a picture of Shakespeare above it, containing novels by Balzac, Zoh, Stendhal, philosophical and sociological works by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx, Engels, Kropotkin, Max Stirner, plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Strindberg, poetry by Swinburne, Rossetti, Wilde, Ernest Dowson, Kipling, etc.

In the right wall, rear, is a screen door leading out on the porch which extends halfway around the house. Farther forward, a series of three windows looks over the front lawn to the harbor and the avenue that runs along the water front. A small wicker table and an ordinary oak desk are against the wall, flanking the windows.

In the left wall, a similar series of windows looks out on the grounds in back of the house.