A Long Day Yet to Write

On O’Neill, Pain, and the Page

The year is 1941, and Eugene O’Neill, the American theatre’s brooding laureate of dysfunction and despair, is now a man in terminal decline, cloistered in a tight, upstairs room of a modest cottage in Sea Island, Georgia. A Parkinson’s-like tremor has almost stilled his hand, so he can no longer type. Every line of his new play is scratched out by hand, in crabbed and faltering script. The callous poetry of the play’s birth seems worthy of a literary giant itself - a metaphor for the internal war it took to tell this story.

O’Neill is not writing for the stage, nor critics, and certainly not for money. He is writing because the ghosts are screaming. The result is Long Day’s Journey into Night, a lengthy work (O’Neill was no stranger to those), in which he took the pathologist's scalpel to his own family.

O’Neill’s explicit instructions were that it remain unpublished for at least twenty-five years after his death. Jerry Lewis made a similar request for his shelved Holocaust comedy The Day the Clown Cried, as if shame could still torment the freshly deceased. But O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey, ignored his wishes, and in doing so gave the world what may be the most tragic and truthful work in the American canon.

Long Day’s Journey into Night is not tragic in the melodramatic sense, but in the quiet, relentless rhythm of real-time family decay. The play spans a single day, but that day is a lifetime, and one that we imagine plays on a loop, with only slight deviation. In it, we are introduced to the Tyrone family: James, the patriarch, proudly Irish, miserly and hollowed-out by theatrical fame long past; Mary, his wife, slipping in and out of morphine fugues and the safer hallucinations of memory; Jamie, the elder son, sodden with drink and nihilism; and Edmund, our stand-in for O’Neill himself, consumptive, poetic, and straining against the tide.

The drama in the play doesn’t escalate so much as deepen. There are no fresh deaths, no spectacular crimes. Their sins are ones we recognise: bitterness, self-delusion, lost chances, and blame. The sort of bruises that bloom over decades and only fully reveal themselves under the wrong light. The cruelty is not gratuitous, it’s – like any good cruelty – intimate, which ensures the play ends where it begins, in silence.

As a young actor, I carried Long Day’s Journey into Night around with me like a relic. Fifteen full reads cover to cover, and uncountable dives into monologues that I’d recite aloud in my kitchen or dressing rooms, just to feel O’Neill’s rhythm in my mouth. I wanted to play Jamie, the older brother, and I felt I had the requisite darkness and theatrical petulance to do a great job. But the truth is, I really wanted James Tyrone. I was only forty years too young.

I saw a filmed version, possibly produced in the late 80s, with Jack Lemmon as Tyrone and a young Kevin Spacey as Jamie. Peter Gallagher, better known now for playing Californian dads, took the role of Edmund. Lemmon was brilliant. He always was. But you didn’t believe he could’ve played Hamlet. You need a colossus for Tyrone, a Heston, a late-stage Lancaster - someone elemental and vaguely Roman. Lemmon had the soul and the chops, but not the shadow.

But I never put on the play. And I regret it deeply. Perhaps because even then, I knew what a dangerous piece of theatre it was. Not in content, but in exposure.

I was, to put it generously, a competitive young actor. Never spiteful, and I didn’t obsess over individual peers, but I was determined to go much further than the rest of them. Nudity? Sure. Violence? Let’s do it. The uglier the better. I wanted to be admired, and I wanted to be feared, in the way all young artists do. I wanted to shock. I wanted to be controversial.

Now, as a writer, I find myself older but not wiser - more employable, perhaps, but no less tempted by the same vanity. I can write as blandly as the next man or woman. I can sell something middle-brow and digestible to viewers ironing shirts as they watch, and I often do. But the voice in my head that loved Long Day’s Journey keeps reminding me: You have your own long day. The question is, will you dare to recount it?

We are, all of us, marked by the singular tattoo of personal tragedy. Time and loss ink it into our psyches. And yet, when invited to share this singular offering - the only thing unique to us – we forgo this gift and show up at the party with a Hallmark card grabbed at the last minute from a petrol station. Cheap sentiment in place of true suffering. A film about a film about a film about suffering. We powder over the tattoo. We cover it in makeup and “structure.”

But Long Day’s Journey wasn’t structured. It was excavated.

Carlotta O’Neill said she would hear O’Neill wailing from upstairs as he wrote. Not moaning. Wailing. As if birthing something that had claws. And as masochistic as it sounds, G-d do I envy that. I aspire to it. To write until it hurts. To scream into the page until something alive emerges.

Because if G-d, or accident, or chaos, or whatever clockwork thing you worship, has given you any measure of talent, then you'd damn well better offer something of value in return.

Something real.

Something big.