Summary of the actual days of work on writing the play, according to Eugene O’Neill's Work Diary and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill's Diary

Total days of writing = 147

Carlotta's typing = 25

Saxe Commins’ typing = 16

(for any reader who needs a reminder)

How does one summarize a play? A play is an experience, which is made as thick as pos¬sible by the theater artists who gather to put it in focus. Anything else is just synopsis, a reduction of a story to its self-evident facts, but no one would pay attention to the art if it consisted only of that. Yet summation is a fair term for what we do in watching a play, bringing its characters and incidents to a totality, even though we know that only in the full-scale experience do we get taken in by the fiction and the effects.

Long Day's Journey unfolds over the course of a single day in August 1912. The setting is described as “James Tyrone's summer house,” and so at once we know of a man, a father, and several pages of scenic and character description will give us an unusually detailed sense of how we should see this place and these characters in relation to him.

(Act 1) It is around 8:30 a.m. The day begins in good humor and affection, with James (65) appreciating the home he shares with his adored wife, Mary (54), and their two adult sons, Jamie (33) and Edmund (23), who are also in good humor. A few dis¬cordant notes are heard. Mary seems troubled by the sense that she is being watched over, and Edmund shows signs of ill health. The tension is broken by a funny anecdote Edmund tells of an Irish tenant farmer on a piece of property owned by the family, but even that bit of humor brings out underlying tensions, like the sons’ cynicism about the father's status as landlord and the father's bitterness about the waywardness of his sons, who both depend on him at the moment.

Jamie has taken up his father's profession as an actor, but he enjoys nothing—not wealth, not art, not pride—of his position, and antagonism has grown between father and son as a result. The younger son has led a vagabond life according to some roman¬tic and decadent fantasies. At a low point, he attempted suicide, but lately he has been working for the local newspaper and publishing some poetry, giving his family hope that he has turned a corner in his life.

Eugene O’Neill was 50 years old on June 6, 1939, when he first made mention of the work that would become Long Day's Journey. His most recent Broadway premiere, Days Without End, had been five years earlier—a disastrous critical failure. Frustrated by the stand¬ards of theater artistry and the commercial pressures that necessitated compromise, and above all by the sense that his plays were misunderstood even when the tickets sold well, he sought, as he had frequently done in the past, creative refuge as far from New York as he could go within the United States. And so, he came to the Pacific Coast in 1936.

Gene was born in New York City on Longacre Square (now Times Square) in 1888, and his father was one of the more successful actor-managers of the era, so flight from New York always expressed a turn away from his origins, both in terms of geography and lineage. In the 1920s, when his plays were constantly in the New York spotlight, he retreated to places like Provincetown, Bermuda, Nantucket, and Maine, then in 1928 to France with his new wife, Carlotta Monterey. In 1931, he returned to New York to oversee the Theatre Guild's production of Mourning Becomes Electra, but even at that point he preferred Long Island to Manhattan as a residence. The characteristic gesture of his life was leaving New York, but that gesture would mean little without his returning again and again. Broadway needed him (even as it doubted him) as a definer of a new standard of excellence, and in a crazy way he needed Broadway (even as he doubted it) as a definer of his aspirations.

Despite what Carlotta wrote in her diary, which was often self-effacing, she did have an outstanding talent, and it was for home building, also home management. Her specific achievement at Tao House was the shaping of home around Eugene O’Neill's need for home in a way that conformed with her own. Some strange fate brought them together, because her need for home—and him—reacted with his need for home—and her—in such a way that many plays could be written, most extraordinarily Long Day's Journey. As she frequently lamented in later years, she created home after home for their marriage. But Tao House was her masterpiece, just as Long Day's Journey was his.The two acts of creation are interwoven to the degree that they can be seen as a co-creation.

As I argued in my book on O’Neill's previous marriage, to Agnes Boulton, Gene clung to the romantic image of the solitary author who single-handedly struggles to bring forth pure art. The implication for Agnes was that she should not be there, even as he always needed her to be there. In a sense, she had to vanish and enfold him. The end that justified such a contortion of marriage was, for Gene anyway, the creation of a great work of art. The clustered interests of the marketplace—publishers, producers, critics, and audiences—should not get in the way of the poet's genius. Due respect has been given to Gene's resistance to the usual commercial lures of the day and his refusal to treat his art with anything less than dignity. He did not cater to the market, and he stood by the integrity of his work. But a great author who goes unpublished is an anomaly, and a playwright cannot avoid dealing with the commerce of the book trade and theaters and the economic realities of people trying to make a living from their art—actors, directors, designers, and producers. The paying audience drives that whole industry.

The full name of the O’Neills’ Dalmatian dog was Silverdene Emblem O’Neill, which they shortened to Blemie. He was purchased at a price of 75 pounds as a puppy from a first-class breeder in England. “English bred dogs are the best,” said Carlotta. He joined the O’Neills in France on December 11, 1929, and he remained with them until his death on December 17, 1940, “a finer friend than most friends,” as Gene put it.

Thirteen is an above-average span of life for that breed, and no doubt the loving care he was provided helped prolong his life. There are stories that he enjoyed the wild areas around Tao House, also that he occasionally ventured to downtown Danville. But signs of age became increasingly evident in 1939, and by 1940 it was clear his end was near. He enjoyed a teak bed in Carlotta's bedroom, to which he had to be carried in his final weeks, and it was there he died. His demise coincided with the writing of Long Day’s Journey, and he lived less than two months beyond the completion of the initial draft of that play.

Death and obituary were on Gene's mind when he came up with the idea of a series of one-acts to be called By Way of Obit. The only play he completed from the projected series of eight was Hughie. The last play on his list of possible concepts was “Blemie one.” He added those words on December 2, 1940, and Blemie died two weeks later. So it seems Gene had some idea of creating a play from the death of Blemie before Blemie was put out of his misery by a veterinarian.

The death of Blemie was more emotionally devastating to the O’Neills than any other loss during their marriage. Gene saw Blemie's death as the turning point, after which, “Everything has gone wrong.”1 As an initial gesture to right that wrong—and, one might imagine, the wrong of his own premature aging—Gene wrote The Last Will and Testament of Silverdene Emblem O’Neill.

Much has been made by Stephen A. Black and others of Gene's dependent relationships and his search for a replacement of his mother, but less thoroughly explored is the story of how Carlotta came to need to be needed in that way, which has its own logic in family history and the culture of that time. She offered several versions of that story at various points in her life, and it is a crafted narrative, but some facts seem stable.

Hazel Neilson Tharsing was born in California on December 28, 1888, the daugh¬ter of Christian Neilson Tharsing and Nellie Gotchett. Carlotta, as Hazel would in her adulthood come to be known, later insisted on referring to the family name of her father (Taasinge) in its Danish form before he became a naturalized U.S. citizen because she felt it pointed to a higher class of origin, associated with land ownership. (There is an island called Taasinge, near Svendborg in Denmark.) Her father trave¬led from Denmark to East Asia at the age of 16 to learn the methods of Japanese and Chinese horticulture. He settled in the Central Valley of California and soon became the proprietor of a 160-acre orchard and eventually co-owner of a 2200-acre ranch with orchard. He was an innovator in the preparation of dried fruits and the railroad deliv¬ery of unripe fruit to distant markets. But his fortunes were mixed, and a broken levee in 1890 drowned out his investment—fish were eating his pear trees! He had a first wife who died in 1884, then he married Nellie Gotchett in 1886. She was 22 years his junior and had been pressured into marriage by her social-climbing mother.

On June 5, 1939, Eugene O’Neill broke away from his immense and expanding Cycle, A Tale of Possessors Self-Dispossessed, which had grown to a projected 11-play series, begin¬ning in the eighteenth century and ending in the present. On the next day, he turned his attention to the play that is the subject of this book. But a play like Long Day's Journey Into Night cycles back through multiple moments of origin, of which this endpoint, the turn¬ing away from the work that had been impelling him for half a decade, is one, and the long story of the new long play begins with that feeling of incompletion. O’Neill's work on the Cycle had already been interrupted several times by ill health, but each time he came back to it the epic seemed to get longer. That adjective, “long,” and its verbal cor¬relatives, “to long” and “to belong,” haunt the whole of Gene's career, but especially its later phases. It begins the title of Long Day's Journey, and it begins this book.

The play that ultimately broke his momentum on the Cycle was one he had con¬ceived as far back as 1932, when his Work Diary mentions a “California Clipper idea.” He later gave this never-finished play the title The Calms of Capricorn. That play idea led to ideas for other plays, sequels, and prequels, telling the story of two interwoven families through a large swatch of American history.

Gene's life with Carlotta began with their stealthy departure for France, which hap-pened to coincide with the moment when the famous Russian director Georges Pitoëff was staging The Hairy Ape in Paris. Also around that time, Gene was beguiled for a while by the prospect of writing screenplays (he had been offered one hundred thousand dol-lars to write dialogue for a film), and he set about adapting The Hairy Ape. In the screen version, he developed the character of Mildred further “to build up the attraction-repul-sion, hate-lust thing between Yank and Mildred, to make her even more of a bitch.”

That b-word comes up relentlessly in Gene's dealings with women, especially his rejected second wife, Agnes Boulton. “Bitch” is a keyword in the male-defined, fallen world of The Iceman Cometh, but it is spoken only once in Long Day's Journey and then as a joke ( Jamie: “I’m as drunk as a fiddler's bitch”). From that play, all indecorous language has been stripped, except for the word “whore,” but Edmund and Jamie and Tyrone are casting about for an appropriate vocabulary to capture the love and hatred, attraction and disgust, that they feel for Mary. Gene had been focusing on the dualities of inti-mate relationship, particularly husband/wife and son/mother, from the point when his marriage to Agnes began to falter, and his affair with Carlotta began. Late in 1926, he implored Carlotta to read The Great God Brown, saying “[t]here is so much of the secret me in it.”

That play shows the conventional wife (Margaret) in love with the romantic mask of her husband (Dion), while the latter as he is, unmasked, a tormented figure of moder¬nity, can only find love in a prostitute (Cybel), who is also, unmasked, an ironic “Earth Mother.”

Brooks Atkinson (1894–1984) was the revered theater critic for the New York Times from 1925 to 1960 and a strong advocate for O’Neill's plays. Oriana Atkinson, his wife since 1926, was also a published author.

James T. Babb was the Yale University Librarian from 1943 to 1965.

Pincus Berner was an attorney with the firm of Ernst, Cane, and Berner, which han¬dled Carlotta's legal affairs before Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft.

Agnes Brennan, a cousin of Gene's mother Ella O’Neill, lived in New London, Connecticut, where she gave piano lessons. Louis Sheaffer describes her as “plump and goodhearted,” and adds that she “was hard of hearing and talked incessantly to divert attention from her handicap.” She died on October 29, 1956, when Long Day's Journey was in previews.

Carmen Capalbo (1925–2010) was a theater director who staged the New York pre¬miere of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1957.

Rupert Caplan was head producer for the Radio Theatre Guild in Montreal. In 1924, he appeared as the Captain in the Provincetown Players production of The Ancient Mariner, which was O’Neill's adaptation of Coleridge's poem.

Bennett Cerf (1898–1971), one of the founders of the New York publishing firm Random House, became the principal publisher of O’Neill's plays after he visited Gene and Carlotta in Georgia in 1933. Both liked him, but Carlotta saw him as a clever busi¬nessman more than a kindred soul. However, Gene followed the advice of his longtime editor, Saxe Commins, in signing with Random House, where Commins came to be employed. Cerf also appeared on the television show What's My Line? from 1951 through 1957, which might not have improved Carlotta's impression of him.

Stanley Chase (1927–2014) was a theater and film producer. He produced the New York premiere of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1957.

Saxe Commins (1892–1958) was one of Gene's closest and oldest friends. Initially a dentist, he took an interest in the Provincetown Players. Eventually, he became a highly regarded editor for Random House.

Richard N. Crockett was an attorney who specialized in estates for Cadwalader, Wickersham, and Taft.

Eugene Davidson (1902–2002) was editor of Yale University Press from 1931 to 1957.

Lately, I have been experimenting with the idea of putting the concept of this book into practice, putting it on its feet, as it were. My experiment consists of a re-entrance of Long Day's Journey into Tao House for reasons I hope I have made clear in these pages.

I have argued that Long Day's Journey Into Night belongs—or has its belonging—at Tao House in the moment of its creation, 1939 to 1942. We know the play through the Tyrone home that it summoned to the space and time of Tao House, and I am drawn to the interwoven text and context of that California home. I have even asserted that Long Day's Journey could be performed effectively in that space, and to do so would help us feel the immanence of the Taoist home that it bore out of that space and time.

But, of course, O’Neill's play is bound to work, as a play, much more effectively in the sort of space that usually houses drama's ancient art, a theater. Scenic, lighting, sound, and costume designers can help us experience the imaginative work that a well-directed cast of great actors can do with such a text to locate its story and make it resonate for a receptive audience. And a dramaturg could help. The play does not literally require the antiquated “CURTAIN” called for by the script, but theaters are typically well-equipped to mark the beginning, middle, and end of a play with blackouts or artful music cues. The echoing Basalite block walls and tile floors of Tao House are not ideal for theatrical acoustics, and the California sunlight draws your eye to whatever it will, even an audience's reflection in that giant blue mirror. Setting up a couple dozen folding chairs in that space would be feasible, but the National Park rangers would frown on a performance that ended after midnight with glasses of whisky all over the place.

As of this writing, I have a ticket in March to see a production in London, starring Brian Cox, and I will happily travel over 5,000 miles to Wyndham's Theatre, which opened in 1899 and seats about 800 in a velvety auditorium, to discover Long Day's Journey once again.