Fate and Blame in “Long Day’s Journey into Night”

Who is to blame for Mary Tyrone’s morphine addiction? Is it Mary herself? Is it Edmund, her younger son, after whose difficult birth Mary was first prescribed the drug? Is it Jamie, her older son, who caused the death of the brother that Edmund was born to replace? Is it the doctor who prescribed morphine too readily? Or is it James, Mary’s husband, who hired a third-rate doctor because he was too cheap to pay for his wife’s proper care? James, in turn, will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary’s addiction, or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering. Are our woes self-created—or at least self-perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by caregivers, the legacies of nature or nurture that we are powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Wes & Erin discuss. 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James, in turn will have his own story to tell of familial suffering and a miserliness acquired from a childhood fear of the poorhouse. To ask who is to blame for Mary's addiction or for the alcoholism that seems to plague every other Tyrone, is to ask who or what is responsible for our own suffering? Are our woes self created or at least self perpetuated? Or is suffering something visited upon us by character caregivers? The legacies of nature or nurture that we're powerless to control? If so, whom do we have the right to accuse? Today we're discussing Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. This is Erin O'Luanaigh. This is Wes Alwan, and you're listening to Subtext. So, Wes, in one of the several editions that I own of this play, it turns out Harold Bloom wrote the intro in one of them. Bloom kind of surprises me in his assessment of the play, which he thinks is the greatest American play, but only kind of by default. There's a little reluctance. He says, okay, so if Eugene o' Neill is our greatest American playwright and this is his best play, then, well, I guess this is America's greatest play. And he seems to think that the power of the play lies in the stage directions, in the bits of business that o' Neill really writes quite a bit of in between the lines of dialogue. So I guess I'd kind of extrapolate from Bloom's point to say that maybe there are very few if any memorable single lines of dialogue in the play, which is sort of surprising. It's not like maybe Streetcar to use another play that we've talked about on the podcast, which has a couple of those really memorable moments, at least that the movie has made famous. So I guess I just kind of wonder if you agree with that, if you think that this is America's greatest play by default, and where you think what is great about this play if the lines aren't particularly memorable. 2:47 Wes: Yeah, it's interesting you say that. I had that thought that it's Very unplay, like dialogue in a way. Even though the speeches are often quite long. There's honestly not that much poetry to it, I guess, is the way to put it. Even though Eugene o', Neill, he was a poet and like Edmund, the play, I'm sure, as people know, is highly autobiographical. And many of the names have not been changed, although he's switched his name and made himself Edmund in the play and made the dead brother Eugene. And of course, this wasn't supposed to be published or performed. It wasn't supposed to be performed at all. Right. It wasn't supposed to be published until 25 years after his death, which his wife did not honor that request. So I honestly had trouble enjoying this, let's just put it that way, which surprised me. And I haven't read this since high school and all I remembered from high school is that there were people drinking in the play. It's just like, all right, there's going to be people drinking. So this surprised me. Nothing resonated from my memory. And as I read it, I just kind of felt sucked down into the quagmire of misery. And there's not much that's pleasurable to kind of redeem that you're just kind of stuck with these people and these very plain speeches. There are some impassioned, just a few, just a handful of impassioned, touching speeches in this, but a lot of it is just bickering. And it took me, it was a slog for me to get through it. 4:34 Erin: In all honesty, I felt that way too. I also hadn't read it since high school either, and I remember being ecstatic about it in high school, which I don't know what to attribute that to at this point. Maybe because it seemed like such a grown up play and I was probably about 14 when I read it. I think that the, you know, the strange thing about the lack of memorable dialogue too, is the fact that so much of the dialogue is repeated. So you would think that some lines would kind of, you know, raise their heads above the parapet and be memorable for that reason, because so many of the accusations are sort of traded or someone will say something that later, another character, it'll come out of their mouth. And yet I think maybe it's because it's also sort of plain spoken that even those repeated like, you recognize them, oh, someone said that before, but after the play's over, you can't say, oh, that's, you know, I remember that line. And so I think that ultimately the effect is, is just extremely cumulative. So the power of the play maybe comes in that sort of snowball result where at the end we feel weighed down and we feel like the powerlessness of the family to change and all that stuff. So I think that's part of it, too. Is that the slog of it, which is very purposeful, or must be. It doesn't really reward you until maybe the very. And then it's a funny kind of reward. Did you watch any adaptations of this? 6:02 Wes: I watched a little bit of the Katharine Hepburn, and I watched half of a Canadian 1996. It's the one I liked the best, by Wellington. 6:14 Erin: Oh, I knew you were gonna say that. That one bored me to tears. I had to turn it off. 6:18 Wes: I just thought it was the best in terms of acting. But I also. Yeah, it wasn't captivating, but neither was the written play. And I did watch bits of the Katharine Hepburn. And maybe if I had just let myself get into the Katharine Hepburn, it would have been more engaging if I'd given that more of a chance. 6:37 Erin: That's another reason, I think, why I was struck by the play as a kid was because I did watch the Katharine Hepburn version. And though I wish that Fredric March, who played it on Broadway, was playing James Tyrone in the film, I'm not a Ralph Richardson fan, particularly. I think Robards is great in it. And Kate is just. I think, from the very beginning, she's playing the character with so much tension that wasn't there for me in the Canadian production. So she's sort of immediately riveting. And I think it's a fantastic performance. One of her best. And it takes a lot of the boring stretches on the page and makes them really captivating. Maybe just because she's so captivating and she's so sort of oddly gorgeous in the film. You know, she looks both. You know, she looks super young in certain stretches and super old in others. She seems to be able to shapeshift or something. So that was really effective. And I think Mary is the. Obviously, that's the prime role. I saw a couple of clips also on YouTube of Laurie Metcalf, and I thought her interpretation would have been really interesting to see on the stage. 7:42 Wes: Which one is that? 7:44 Erin: It was just a stage production. And so the clips were of. They must have been used to either, like, they did a broadcast performance, the stage one, or it was just used to promote the play, something like that. But I thought her interpretation was really interesting. And then I saw the same thing with a Jessica Lange production, which I thought was much less Interesting. I could kind of predict what that was going to be like. 8:09 Wes: I saw a little bit of that. And then there's the one with Jack Lemmon and what's his face from House of Cards. 8:15 Erin: Yeah. Kevin Spacey. 8:16 Wes: Kevin Spacey. And that looked good. I just can't abide Jack Lemmon. 8:21 Erin: Sorry, what? 8:25 Wes: Yeah. 8:26 Erin: Wait, what? 8:26 Wes: I don't know, it's just. 8:28 Erin: But I thought you love Jack Lemmon because. Jack Lemmon. 8:31 Wes: When did I say that? 8:33 Erin: Oh, I don't know. Well, I thought you liked the Apartment and. 8:36 Wes: Well, the. The Apartment, Yeah, in the Apartment. But otherwise, if he's in a. When he's in plays. I don't know, I haven't. Like in Kenneth Branagh's the Hamlet. Can't abide him either. 8:48 Erin: Oh, wow. Well, that's. His other great role is the. What was it? 8:53 Wes: The guard. Right, the guard. Yeah. Yeah. He's. Yeah. It sounds like the cumulative effect for you was that you enjoyed the play by the end of it. 9:05 Erin: I'm also interested in this assumption that it is our darkest play, which is something that Bloom says in the intro as well. I mean, to compare it to Streetcar. There's certainly a lot of dysfunction in the play, of course, but there's also a lot of love in the play. And maybe I'm reading in the facts behind it. There's a certain self evident biographical element which if you know anything about Eugene o' Neill at all, you know this is about him. And if you know that Edmund is a proxy for Eugene o', Neill, then he obviously did beat tuberculosis and go on to write this play. Right. So there's a certain kind of triumph that's sort of embedded in that. And then there's the less evident biographical element which you would have to dive deeper into the biography to know. Which, okay, yes, Jamie drank himself to death, but I think the mother actually did beat her addiction to morphine. And I think that was in the play, takes place in 1912. I think the mother beat the addiction in 1914, something like that. And also for a good chunk of his adult life, o' Neill had a reasonably good relationship with his father. And of course, none of that is evident in the play itself. But I guess just the fact that these people do love each other, that is obvious to me. And they do sort of will the best for each other on a certain level. Of course, the tension in that is most obvious when they're sort of like telling Edmund he shouldn't be drinking because it's not good for him, and then they're Sort of like rewarding him with a drink at every turn, you know? So there's this disagreement about what is good for you. 10:39 Wes: There's no harm in it just as an appetizer before dinner or a tonic. 10:44 Erin: Right. It might improve your appetite in moderation. 10:47 Wes: Of course, if you do that 50 times during the day. 10:52 Erin: Yeah. 10:53 Wes: Then it's going to spoil your whiskey. Dinner during the night. 10:59 Erin: That's right. Then Edmund checks into the clinic or whatever and discovers that he has the world's only case of quadruple tb, tttt, 11:07 Wes: bbb, or who knows, you know, the alcohol may have destroyed it. 11:13 Erin: Yeah, that's right. That's right. It's like drinking Lysol anyway. So, I don't know. I mean, maybe that's kind of dumb of me to. To think that this isn't so dark, but I just. I think the end of Streetcar, you know, when Blanche is being carried off is a heck of a lot sadder and more disturbing ultimately, because nobody cared about her. I don't know. 11:38 Wes: Was Mary not lost at the very end of it? 11:42 Erin: Yeah, but they're really sad about that. I don't know. 11:47 Wes: I mean, she is. There are some Blanche like qualities to her. At least that's the for sure. The experience I had during this, though. One of the things that happens a lot during the play is the alternation between different states. You were kind of getting at this with the whole idea that there's a lot of love. So people are quickly alternating between on the one moment saying something affectionate and then on the other saying something really cruel or mean. And in Mary's case, you get some of that. And then you also get her alternating between states of being kind of detached and carefree, especially under the influence of morphine, and then being more openly distressed. And then you have her alternation between sitting at home and hating people and wanting to be alone, not wanting to be around anyone. And then as soon as they arrive saying, I was so lonely. It's such a good thing you're back. I had to hang out with horrible Cathleen just to not be lonely. So this is one of the things in the play that it's kind of crazy making. It's hard to experience is this alternation back and forth between affection and meanness. I mean, hey, at least they communicate as family, right? No one's unclear about where. It's not like it's all repressed underneath the surface. Everyone's saying what's going on in their head. 13:24 Erin: Yeah, it's like one big long family meeting. 13:27 Wes: Exactly. So for better or for worse, everything is very out in the open. On the other hand, something is in a fog, right? Fog is a major theme of the play, especially in Mary's case. But I think this applies to everyone. There's the attempt to not be seen. So Mary, she wants to be able to have her habit to do the drug, but to get everyone to ignore that. And she's constantly troubled by the idea that people aren't ignoring it or can't or they're suspicious of her. And you know, her big thing with the hair, which I guess her hair gets unkempt when she's using so she's worried about it falling down. And then that's sort of connected to her larger concerns about getting old and the ugliness of her hands and getting too fat and things like that. So her physical appearance is a tell in a way. It's a tell for her age and it's also a tell for her morphine use. And what she seems to prefer or demand of others is that they simply just not notice it, that there kind of be a fog in between the family members and people just refuse to say anything. So maybe that. And then of course there's the fog effect of the drug its on her psyche. It's like a family that just can't leave some things unsaid. And so you get this attempt to ameliorate the effect of that by introducing intoxicants. And for her it's morphine in particular. But you could apply this to the other guys as well. You know, what is it they're doing with the alcohol? Is that the cause of the family dynamic? I mean obviously it's not just the cause, but it's the effect of it as well. They're trying to handle something with the drugs and alcohol. And I was thinking it has something to do with desiring to be less frank. In a way it's like trying to undercut the natural frankness of their relationships. But that's kind of an unformed thought. I don't know. What do you think of that? 15:36 Erin: Yeah, it's sort of like the longing for repression or the idea, the wish that they could repress things. They seem to want to dampen everything, including from each other, and yet they're addicted. They're addicted to drugs that seem to make them loose lipped. I think someone at some point says in vino veritas, that line is in the play. So there's one line I remember. But anyway, you know, and there's something funny about that too, because they're not drinking wine, of course, but you know, the morphine sort of like lets the cat out of the bag for. For Mary's craziness, right. She goes on these, these flights of fancy which you can tell that the other characters find extremely embarrassing. You know, she starts reminiscing about her childhood and all this other stuff, you know, the veracity of which is sort of consistently questioned. But at least this is the idea of her, to herself and her history that she wants to rehearse. And then we have the men who are also drinking quantities of things that make them start to open up. And the fact of addiction itself is also something that's very, very difficult to hide. You know, you are making yourself vulnerable in those ways too. And so I don't know how to tie all that together. It seems to me also to be related to this class difference which then at the same time like they're living in a house which we know is dilapidated, at least on the inside. I don't know if mention is made of the outside of the house and how much people know of James miserliness that at least among the men, seems to be another open secret in the town. But it seems to me like there's a desire for them to be. Or that rather that the desire that they have to repress all of these problems is somehow aspirational, like class aspirational as well. Or maybe I'm. Maybe I'm overreading. 17:29 Wes: Well, now I'm having two thoughts as you, as you speak, I was thinking about the way in which alcohol is used in the play with the father and the brothers and the level of denial involved in that. So with Tyrone saying he never gets drunk and with. At some level they understand it's a serious problem. But then you have this very light hearted. And these in a way are the most light hearted moments in the play when they're having a drink, when they, you know, it's like, oh, that's just how, you know, just one won't hurt. Steal some from the father's bottle, fill it up with water. And it kind of reminds me not to get too personal of my own childhood where there were decrepit conditions, but it was food. Food was the celebratory thing. So you had these sort of. It's really odd because there's a. Those are the moments in which they kind of rise out of the misery and it's almost like they're toasting to each other in celebration of some accomplishment, some non existent accomplishment. And Then the other thing you were talking about, class, I was thinking about, well, what is it that just led them from being so cut off from the world? In a way, Mary feels friendless and alone, and she blames that on Tyrone being a traveling actor. Right. So she never had a home. We should talk about home a bit, too. Home is a big part of this and what that means, and maybe we can make some connections to E.T. just kidding. But, yeah, they are cut off and they're stuck with each other. And I think that's part of the problem. They're too entangled in the family dynamic. They don't have enough connection with the outside world. And that's what's naturally foggy. Right. If you're too embroiled in the familial scene, it's hard for reality to cut through that. So because the mode of engagement of the males, the guys in the play, is, again, it's through bar rooms and drinking and that kind of thing. And that's not a real. And whores. It's not a real engagement. So they, in a sense, are just as cut off as Mary is. And why is that? Is it really just because of that itinerant lifestyle, or is it something else? 19:47 Erin: I think the reason why I'm thinking about this is because of that James Joyce class that I took this past semester. In it, I read a lot of helpful secondary literature about Irish culture and why certain patterns emerged within that based on things like the Potato Famine and how that was actually played out in terms of the way that society worked. And I know I mentioned this in our episode on the Dead, but Ireland at this time, so 1912, and this would have started, I think, right during or after the Potato famine, they had one of the lowest, if not the lowest, I think, marriage rate in the world, at least in Europe. And there was a culture in Ireland of men sort of not being able to marry for reasons that they felt as though there were many different reasons interwoven. But for the purposes of gravity, I'll just say because maybe they couldn't get food on the table or, you know, for work reasons. Right. And so there was a culture of men going to the pub and spending all day at the pub and only being with other men. And very often because they weren't getting married, they lived with their mothers. So they were trying to sort of escape women by having this sort of fraternal connection. It reminded me so much of the way that this family works. And, of course, Eugene o' Neill would have known this intimately. And it seems as though James Tyrone, the father, is still holding on to a lot of these sort of Irish dynamics. And so I wonder, you know, Mary is the only woman and she's extremely isolated for that reason among others. And what the morphine does for her is make her even more feminine, right. More childlike. It makes her kind of dreamier and it makes her reflect on feminine concerns basically on the domain of women. She thinks about her childhood fantasy of wanting to become a nun and be in a convent which would have been an all female environment of being at boarding school, which was presumably also an all female environment. And so I think there's something there too though I don't, you know, I haven't worked this out and I don't know what that is but it seems like part of the issue here is almost like the aggression and the sort of anti woman sentiment which is sort of most obvious in Jamie because of his inability to be around any other women except for these prostitutes. It's most obvious in him but I think it's also expressed in all the other men in the family as well. I can only imagine that the relationship to class is also tied up in this. Right. If you have a woman who's given a certain household budget or, or whatever with which to run a proper home that's like part of the requirements of being a certain class is having a place to entertain and having a woman to make up a home and to make people comfortable. That's just a basic of being any class, but particularly high class. 22:49 Wes: Yeah, that's really interesting. I think it's one of the brothers. I think it might be Jamie who when he's back from the whorehouse says something about men being nothing without the love of a woman. Do you remember that? 23:03 Erin: Yeah. Edmund asks him, what did you do uptown tonight? Go to Mamie Burns, presumably. That's the madam. Jamie says, sure thing. Where else could I find suitable feminine companionship and love, don't forget love. What is a man without a good woman's love? A goddamned hollow shell, Right. The two of them are laughing together and Edmund says, you're a nut. 23:25 Wes: Yeah, yeah. So it's really interesting of course, because there isn't actually any love there. Right. So in a way this is a parody, but in a way I think he means it. And then he tells the story of picking Fat Violet because he pities her and then wants to talk to her and then she's thinks of him as beneath her and then they end up kind of falling for each other or something. Like that. That's the way that story runs, but it's all fake. And what you were saying was making me think that these are men who. So Tyrone found a good woman and someone that he loved and someone who loved him. And he even says, at a certain point, this is why I think. I was thinking it might have been Tyrone who said this. But he says something like, his ambition was, in a way, enabled or was. You know, he was already successful by the time he met her, but she, in a way, anchored his ambition and her love, in a way, made his career. But she never got to be the homemaker. She never got to fully play that role because he was dragging her around with him, you know, to cheap hotels and all that, as she puts it. And then. So the brothers, for the brothers, it's even worse, right? They never. I'm just thinking about the extent to which. Yeah, all of this is a. Maybe the way to put it is there's not a strong enough feminine principle at work, and that's the source of all the disorganization and destabilization and chaos in the family. The feminine principle is far too weak. 25:09 Erin: I think that's right. There are lots of crossed wires in the play in terms of accusation and blame. I feel like almost everything that anyone says in the play is either is just blaming someone or accusing someone of the family problems. At one point, there's this idea floated that, well, the reason why they couldn't have people over or the reason why Mary doesn't have any friends is because of her problem. There's a constant desire to look at the genetics of Mary's morphine addiction. That is like what started it in the first place. There's this sense that, well, she couldn't make a home because Tyrone wanted her on the. On the road with him. Right. He wanted her to be a wife to him. And that's part of the reason why Jamie killed that Eugene, the middle child, because Mary wasn't there to watch over Jamie and to keep him away from that baby when he had measles. And it was because she was on the road with Tyrone. And so there's an interesting split there where he seems to want her around and he seems to have a desire for that femininity. However, it's sort of like he wants his wife around, but really she's supposed to be at home. That's her story, anyway, that she's supposed to be at home taking care of the children and running the. The proper home. So there seems to be a sort of Tension there. But anyway, I think all of this brings us to this idea of who is the one who's responsible for Mary's addiction? Who is responsible for it, in your view? 26:41 Wes: That's a really good question. Because it's who or what? Is it because of her hands, her rheumatism? Is it because of childbirth, which you could recast in a personal way, is because of Edmund in particular? He's to blame. Is it Tyrone? Is it his itinerant lifestyle and their essential homelessness? Or is it the psychological version of that? He's also not fully there. So you could talk a lot about Tyrone's problems and the legacy of poverty, which I think is connected to what you were talking about with Ireland and his stinginess and his inability to be generous, his inability to keep the lights on, which is not unconnected from the fog, his inability to shed light on the situation because it demands too much of him, because it's. Because he's too insecure about losing everything, about going to the poorhouse, not just literally, but spiritually, psychologically. So he, in a way, is withholding, and that's part of the problem. She talks a lot about loneliness, right. And that we can say that there's a lot of truth to that. Part of what people do when they're using drugs and alcohol is that they're trying to recreate the effect of human connection. They're trying to make the substance replace other people, which it can to some extent, because the effects of being drugged or intoxicated in some ways approximate the feelings that you get from human connection. But what you can't get out of that is the true sense of being seen by others and heard by others. You know, Mary talks a lot about, you know, I want someone to joke with, I want someone to gossip with. The drug can't do that. If the drug could do that, then it might be a full supplement to her lack of real connection to someone. Her and Tyrone do love each other, but in a way they don't have each other, despite all the frankness and people blaming things, blaming each other out loud. And I think this is connected to Tyrone's lack of generosity. But she's not receiving enough from him, let's put it that way. And then she's watching her sons follow in their father's footsteps, except they're not even successful, and there's not much she can do about that. She's using morphine because of the family dynamic. To what extent is she to blame for that dynamic? To what extent is it a Result of her character and personal problems. And to what extent has she just been unfortunate, Right? Just married the wrong guy and been sucked into the wrong situation? It's not entirely clear, but she thinks a lot about this. And when you read your intro, I thought about the fact that Mary is really onto this question of whether anyone is to blame. They're trying to figure out, are we alcoholics because we're just trying to deal with our mom's morphine addiction, or is she a morphine addict because we're alcoholics? Right? And then Mary is onto this question to blame as well. So, for instance, on page 45 of my edition, she'll say, this is Mary about Tyrone. All he likes is to hobnob with men at the club or in a bar room. Jamie and you are the same way, but you're not to blame. You've never had the chance to meet decent people here. I know you both would have been different if you'd been able to associate with nice girls instead of. You'd never have disgraced yourself as you have so that now no respectable parents will let their daughters be seen with you. She's always onto this idea that people are products of their circumstances so that no one's to blame. 30:16 Erin: So I think you can actually trace all of this back to Tyrone. There's a part of me that wants to say, okay, what Eugene o' Neill is writing is basically being an actor, being involved in playwriting and all this stuff. That is the original sin of this family in a way, Tyrone, because he is an actor. So I've been thinking about the implications of an actor at that time. And Mary makes this clear as well. Very similar to prostitution for women, right. And for men. I don't know what they would say about that, but of course not very respectable. And in the play, repeated mention is made of these hotels that are called one night stands, which is because they were in a one night stand show. Probably he did like One Night in a Town before they moved on. And so these are hotels which are not respectable, I think, because you only stay in them for one night before you move on. So there's an automatic association with prostitution, I think at that time, because maybe it would be more common to stay longer in a hotel. But she says at one point in a list, one night stands, cheap hotels, dirty trains, leaving children, never having a home. So there's a connection here between the idea of prostitution, I think, and this idea of acting, which is more than just the, oh, an actress is no better than a prostitute kind of, you know, idea of the day and also about the mechanics of the way that this life functions, really, which I think is part of why it had a negative connotation to begin with. But I think the effect of this is that, in essence, Tyrone's job splits the atom of Mary's identity. So if we think at that time of what being a woman would mean, it would be being a wife and a mother. And then this is something that she says to a lot, right? She wanted to have a home and be a wife and a normal wife and mother. Well, the kids are at home, it seems. They seem to be born in hotel rooms. Other people are taking care of them because of the fact that Tyrone is on the road and Tyrone wants his wife with him. So he's sort of separating the mother part of her from the wife part of her. And it seems to me that the reason why. I mean, he is very in love with her but the reason why he would want his wife on the road with him is because he wants to sleep with her. So, in a sense, Tyrone's profession, in addition to bringing shame onto him in the eyes of some respectable people, also sort of makes her into a theater person and therefore gives her this sort of stain of prostitution. And because he's so unwilling to pay for her to be sort of like set up he's willing to appoint to do the bare necessities for her. But because of his profession and because of the fact that they're not really settled, Tyrone is not really married. He's not really seeing her as a full person. And so you can argue that the first instance of prostitution or of having these unhealthy relationships with women that Jamie seems to have, it's really in Tyrone and Mary's relationship that this is modeled. I don't know if I'm going too far there with that parallel. 33:28 Wes: No, no, that sounds right. 33:29 Erin: Or how we can tie that back to Mary's morphine addiction, except for the fact that she feels that she is being used. I think she is being used like a drug by Tyrone. I think that Tyrone is ultimately responsible. Of course, he has this whole story about his father. And I'm sure if we asked the father, he would have a whole story to tell about all the evil things that happened to him, some of which I think, you know, I'm sympathetic to. But I think ultimately it's this fact of being an actor which is really funny. Of course, in a play, what I 34:00 Wes: put in my notes is that the morphine addiction, in a way, is it's an attempt to. Kind of a failed attempt, obviously, to remedy her attachment with an itinerant husband. Right. So he wanders in his profession. He does it characterologically. He's another one who jumps back and forth, hey, he's amused by the pig story. He's outraged by the pig story. He has these artistic proclivities. Not proclivities, but he's very successful actor and artist, and yet he's withholding and stingy and obsessed with money and real estate. And so those sorts of contradictions. But then the biggest way that he wanders is booze. He takes himself, even when he's not traveling as an actor, he takes himself to the bar room, or presumably when he's with his wife, he takes himself away with the alcohol. So ironically, so she's doing the same thing. The morphine takes her away. But the odd paradoxical thing about that is each of them, in a way, is trying to re establish a connection by means of the substance. Like I said, it gives that faux connection feeling that I think is ultimately connected to home. So the morphine is the last ditch, desperate attempt at creating a home, at creating some sense of home, creating some sense of stability and some sense that not everything isn't constantly in motion and moving, but that people are somehow anchored. And I think that anchoring is connected to shame. So she's, in a way, trying to vindicate her shame by being unseen. And again, there's the paradox here is because by using the drug, she's more seen, she's more surveilled, people are more suspicious of her. And precisely what she wants is for them to pretend the problem doesn't exist. But I think the attempt to be unseen, in the sense of in a fog, is connected to the shame of them not having a being able to entertain. Right. Them not having connections to the outside world and real friendships and the reputation of Tyrone around town because of his stinginess and his bad real estate investments and all that. I haven't fully thought that out. So I'm trying to make a connection between her husband's evasiveness and lack of home and then the desire to remedy that with the morphine. And I'm trying to figure out how the morphine does that. The very basic explanation, again, is that it creates that feeling of connection. But I think there's more to be said about that. 36:41 Erin: Well, I wonder how you're making me think of another really interesting fact about Tyrone, which is the stable identity of his most recognizable role. Right. We know that this Has a basis in fact that Eugene O'Neill's father played in the Count of Monte Cristo so many times that he actually wrecked his own. His own reputation. Right, right. Wow. Really? 37:04 Wes: 6,000 times he played that? Yeah. 37:06 Erin: Wow. Yeah. So that he actually damaged his own reputation as a serious actor because he went after this cash cow. But that also your use of the phrase stable identity made me think there's maybe another addiction or something. Or it comes from a kind of addiction to being cheap because he knew that he could take advantage of this money making opportunity and just play that role to death. It also kind of presents as maybe a kind of morphine or alcohol addiction in that this. Playing this role seems to have similar effects. I don't know if that's too much of a stretch, but I'm curious what you think about that fact of his personality, which I find really interesting as a symbol, though. I don't know of what. 37:49 Wes: The fact that he got into the rut of playing this part over and over again because of the financial success. 37:56 Erin: Yeah. He's spoiled his own talent like one would do if they were an alcoholic and they spoiled their potential. It functions like an addiction. 38:06 Wes: Yeah, I think that's right. I think he is addicted to the attempt to get security right. Not to end up in the poorhouse by being stingy, not keeping the lights on, acquiring property, being a cheapskate, sending his son to the state sanitarium. And of course, he can never get that feeling of security. This is something too. I know from my own father, even though I didn't grow up with him, I met him when I was 21 or 22. Someone who grows up in extreme poverty, they never get over. Nothing is ever enough to make one feel secure again. I have a little bit of that myself. In his case, it's pretty remarkable that he was able to become an actor to do something. Usually from that situation you're like, all right, I'm going to be a doctor, I'm going to be an engineer. I'm not going to be an actor and risk poverty again. I'll never risk that again. But then he made it work. So he made it work on the one hand. But given his characterological propensities and his desire for safety, he somehow turned that into an act of stinginess. The stinginess is connected to just repeating the same play over and over again, not moving on because there's solid financial reward in that and everything else becomes too risky. So you mentioned earlier the arts being a kind of original sin in all of this. Right. So the sons are bequeathed not just the alcohol, but the interest in being an actor or a poet or a playwright, all that stuff, which is a very ungrounded, impractical sort of aspiration that I'm trying to make the connection now to. 39:54 Erin: And I think there's something funny too in the fact that Tyrone is able to turn it into a kind of family business. Right. That is Jamie's profession, is it? That he's an actor, but sort of a second rate actor. Of course, now we're used to, you know, nepotism in Hollywood and everything. But back then that would have been, I think, kind of silly. And I think even if one's father is an actor, the hope would be that the child, at least in 1912, would get into a more stable profession and kind of make good and become a doctor or a lawyer or something. Right? Or am I getting that wrong? 40:25 Wes: Yeah, I think you're right. I had kind of taken this a little bit off track by talking about the arts, going back to your point, as the arts as original sin. But you had emphasized before that this idea of the repetition of the play as addiction, which I like. And I was also connecting that to his stinginess and his desire for security. And the way in which Mary's morphine and their alcohols kind of an attempt to create some sense of connection and some sense of home. All of those things are connected. The stinginess is part of that too. This is all about security in the end. It's weird because you would think that a family that's just so self involved in a way. What's more home like than that everyone's at home with each other for the whole summer. And there's way too much time spent together, probably, you know, despite the guys going out to the bar. But strangely enough, that kind of is a home wrecking thing. Home depends on these connections to outside society, which is part of what Mary wants. Right. She can't have a home unless she has friends and she's entertaining people. There's gotta be some sort of commerce between the home and the outside world. If it just becomes its own sort of black hole and nothing escapes, there's no real connection to the outside, then that no longer is home. It's so home, it's not home. 41:50 Erin: Right. I think there's something too, in this. Well, this will take us to Connecticut. The idea that this is a summer home. And so there's still a kind of transience in those instances in which they are at this house. The engagement will always end like Staying in a town for a series of performances, a limited engagement. And I think the parallel to, I guess, another deep irony is the stinginess of Tyrone and buying up land. Right. So having tons and tons of land but no home is also, I think, ironic, too, because he's buying up the land in this. It's in Connecticut. Right. It's around where the summer home is. And at least his connections are in Connecticut. And so he's buying up probably land on which there are summer properties. So that, too, has a kind of duality to it, which I think is expressed, as you said, in all of the characters sort of thinking two ways about things or behaving two ways about things, which is like a lot of land and no home. And where is the land? Well, it's in a place where people are only there temporarily. He's not building a sort of ancestral dynasty or anything. And I think there's something, too, about the location of Connecticut here. Connecticut can mean lots of things. In our Awful Truth episode, I talked a bit about how do you want 43:03 Wes: to reveal your personal connection to Connecticut? I mean, I know you have before, but. 43:07 Erin: Oh, I should, I guess. 43:08 Wes: I don't think you've mentioned that you're from Connecticut. 43:10 Erin: Oh, right. And I'm currently call. 43:13 Wes: You are speaking from Connecticut speaking. 43:15 Erin: That's right. The very place you are. 43:18 Wes: Inside the house. This podcast is coming from inside the house. 43:24 Erin: That's right. And of course, you can go to the house where all of these events actually really took place. It's the Eugene o' Neill house at the Monte Cristo cottage, because it was built by the count of Monte Cristo. And for some reason, we're all proud of that. It's kind of funny. People should read the play more. But anyway, the implication in the Awful Truth episode of Connecticut is that it's sort of the playground of people who are in New York who want to escape to the country. It was called the country to people in New York. It's also, for a lot of people, I think it's kind of a liminal space between New York and Boston. And what I see in Connecticut in this play is definitely that liminal space. It's the foggy place, right? It's the place between places. This is the New London area. So it's not a place where you would go to put on a show. There wouldn't be any place nearby where you would have an engagement. Like, for instance, having a home just outside of New York City, like in Fairfield county or in Westchester, someplace like that. This is A foggy place that's kind of nowhere. And it's also not really a summer place associated with the rich and famous of the day. It's almost there, but not quite so this is the far eastern coast of Connecticut, very close to Rhode island and to Newport, but not there. Right. And at this time the Vanderbilts and all those rich families had built those enormous palatial summer homes in Newport which you could still visit to this day, which were very, despite being summer homes, were very permanent in which no expense was spared. They're sort of aspirational, if you will, by being in that kind of direction. But then with this dilapidated place, had Tyrone wanted to, he probably could have poured money into some big Newport home and then they would have been very respectable and they would have been able to entertain all these other very wealthy families, these dynasties. And so there's something I think about this location which to me seems really perfect. Of course it's the real location, but it seems like a wonderful sort of poetic justice that that is the real location for its symbolic meaning. 45:37 Wes: So the way Edmund puts this is just to go back a little bit to what you were saying about him buying up property. So Tyrone and Edmund are bickering about whether he did enough to help cure Mary of her morphine addiction. And the idea is that also that he sent her to a cheap doctor who was just going to prescribe morphine to her instead of really addressing the problem. And that's why she got addicted. And then he wasn't willing to spend the money to send her to a specialist who could really help her kick the habit, but just sent her to this quack who kept telling her to have willpower. And then so Tyrone says, what did I know of morphine? It was years before I discovered what was wrong. I thought she'd never got over her sickness, that's all. Why didn't I send her to a cure? You say bitterly, haven't I? I've spent thousands upon thousands in cures. A waste. What good have they done her? She's always started again. And then Edmund says, because you've never given her anything that would help her want to stay off it. No home except this summer dump in a place she hates. And you've refused even to spend money to make this look decent while you keep buying more property and playing sucker for every con man with a gold mine or silver mine or any kind of get rich quick swindle. I just wanted to reinforce the point you were making about this odd thing that Tyrone is doing. He could be putting money into making a nice home and into giving Mary what she wants. Instead of doing that, he's doing this thing which is directly adjacent to that, buying up all this property. It's still home related and house related activity, but it's misdirected, it's oblique to the central question. So it's almost as if he's trying to address the home concern, but is doing it in a self undermining way or can't directly address it. 47:32 Erin: And I think this is related to the way that he's spending money, supposedly thousands of dollars, but probably in drips. So that in the. And he might have generously given all the money up front for her to go to a nicer place. And in the end it would have come out the same. It's kind of like a poor person's way of dealing with money, which is you kind of have to sink a lot of money into something right up front and get the best possible treatment you can get. Instead, he's trying to maybe treat symptoms or treat things with as little money as possible. And therefore in the end it's the same expense. Right, but he's just looking at it as a miser would, or as someone who's maybe raised in a very poor home in which they're so reluctant to spend any small amount of money that they might have. Of course he has a lot of money. Right. But he still has this poor person's mindset. But you're leading me to another thing that I wanted to talk about, which I think maybe is the most fascinating. Blame accusation. Genetic hereditary kind of entanglement, which is at the end of the play when Jamie admits to purposely being a bad influence on Edmund. Sort of like purposely spoiling Edmund for the world or purposely screwing him up. 48:48 Wes: Edmund is Jamie's Frankenstein. 48:50 Erin: Right, Right, His Frankenstein. So the last pages of the play, Jamie gets super drunk and he starts to confess to Edmund. He says, not drunken bull, but in vino veritas stuff. You better take it seriously. Want to warn you against me. Mama and Papa are right. I've been rotten, bad influence. And worst of it is I did it on purpose. Edmund tells him to shut up. He says, I don't want to hear it. Nix, kid, you listen. Did it on purpose to make a bum of you or part of me. Did a big part. That part that's been dead so long that hates life. My putting you wise so you learn from my mistakes. Believed that myself at times, but it's a fake. Made my mistakes look Good. Made getting drunk romantic. Made whores fascinating. vamps instead of poor, stupid, diseased slobs they really are. Made fun of. Work is a sucker's game. Never wanted you succeed and make me look even worse by comparison. Wanted you to fail. Always jealous of you Mama's baby, Papa's pet. So here we have this idea that he's made Edmund something outside of Edmund's own will, which is related, I think, to Tyrone's tracing his miserliness back to his childhood poverty and to his father, who abandoned the family when he. When James is only 10. So this is of a different order, I guess. I don't know if we can classify these various problems that the family has, but this one seems to be of the hereditary order, of the thing that's inherited, that you have no control over order rather than something else. I mean, maybe that's what all of these addictions or issues ultimately amount to, is something outside of these people's will. But I don't know that I believe this. Or we could still then argue. Well, Edmund accepted all of it, of course. Is this silly, or what do you think about this moment? 50:45 Wes: It's interesting because I had just been looking at what happens right before that, where Jamie is taking credit for turning Edmund on to literature. So you've been getting a swelled head lately about nothing. About a few poems in a Hicktown newspaper. This is all very autobiographical again, by the way. He really was publishing poems in the local newspaper. Eugene o'. Neill. But then he goes on to say, why shouldn't I be proud? Hell, it's purely selfish. You reflect credit on me. I've had more to do with bringing you up than anyone. I wised you up about women so you'd never be a fall guy or make any mistakes you didn't want to make. I love the slang in this, by the way. 51:29 Erin: It's so silly. 51:30 Wes: Ajax, I'm wise to the world. Is there anything that ages worse than slang? It's what sounds cool in its time, and it just sounds like the quaint thing in retrospect, but anyway. And who steered you on to reading poetry first? Swinburne, for example? I did. And because I once wanted to write, I planted it in your mind that someday you'd write. Hell, you're more than my brother. I made you. You're my Frankenstein. And then he goes on to talk about having been purposefully a bad influence. So in a way, supposedly he gives Edmund his aspirations, but also undermines those aspirations or influences him in a way that undermines them. Which is not an uncommon family dynamic. Setting up the goal, setting up the aspiration, but then having an undercurrent of envy, which this is usually parent, child, relationship and undercurrent of envy, such that you incept your offspring with a self destruct mechanism to ensure that they will actually never succeed. So the conflict over success gets acted out in the child. And of course, it's an odd thing for Jamie to say about turning him on to literature and poetry, because it's the father who's the artistic success. It's hard to take Jamie seriously there. And I think it's also hard to take him seriously about doing things on purpose to make a bum of you. Of course he didn't do it on purpose. There's truth to it. It's on purpose. In a sense, he's honestly identifying the underlying psychological dynamics of envy and being a bad influence. That's absolutely true. But he's making it more arch and more intentional and more sinister than it actually is. So he's trying to pretend that he's not also embroiled in the circumstance and along for fate's ride. But Jamie, of course, is being swept along by all these circumstances and forces as much as Edmund is. So we are all the Frankensteins of fate and our formative influences and especially our parents. But everything else that's happening, if you want to bracket out the concept of freedom and look at human beings purely as functions of external forces in the environment. 53:59 Erin: Yeah. So is this a case of. Is Jamie just a case of overactive self awareness wiseness? He's right. Right. 54:08 Wes: Hey, man, he's hip to the world. But of course, not really. 54:13 Erin: Right. But in terms of how aware he is of the effect that he might have had on Edmund, and he's taking upon himself things that ordinarily never rise to the conscious level in most of us, well, this is the moment at which I was like, oh, okay, so Jamie did kill that middle child. He did do it on point. 54:29 Wes: Right, right. Eugene. He killed Eugene. 54:33 Erin: Right. And then of course, you can argue. This is so tangled, then you can argue, well, the only reason why Jamie was supposedly successful in poisoning Edmund is because the parents weren't around. Right. Because of the fact that the father was taking Mary away and himself away, and Jamie himself didn't have a proper sort of formative influence. The issue of the father having the artistic aspirations that he bequeaths to Edmund, that's an interesting one because, I mean, first of all, o' Neill has these odd heroes and Swinburne and certain other poets, they seem to be of a very different order than what the father's interested in. So I'm associating, and I think maybe we're meant to, Shakespeare with James's Catholicism and also with his Irishness. Somehow there's that really funny moment where he says that Shakespeare was an Irish Catholic. So Shakespeare and the God of Catholicism and Ireland are all sort of yoked together in these sort of old fogey almost superstitions that James has, at least the way that Edmund and Jamie seem to view it, whereas they're into the cool, subversive stuff like Swinburne and Baudelaire. So Edmund's desire to be a poet, even though the father's an actor and knows all these Shakespeare roles by heart, Edmund wanting to be a poet or a playwright, oddly enough, seems to be in rebellion against the father being an actor. And as I say that, it occurs to me, it's really interesting because the rebellion is what. Wanting to rise up and kill the. Of course, there are a lot of Greek elements of this, right. Greek tragedy and elements of the play. So Edmund wants to rebel against the actor father by becoming the playwright and forcing all the actors to do his bidding. And it's a sort of desire to have a Frankenstein's monster. Right. To influence people in the way that Jamie has supposedly influenced him. 56:35 Wes: Yeah. To transcend creaturehood and become the creator. 56:39 Erin: Right. Which is fascinating, too, because then it has to do with what we've been talking about, which is this idea of hereditary what's inherited and what's picked up through nurture or a combination thereof. 56:51 Wes: Yeah, exactly. 56:52 Erin: Yeah. Edmund wants to assert that dynastic impulse and to affect other people, maybe the way that he has been affected or infected by bad influence. 57:03 Wes: This desire to escape creaturehood and become the creator is sort of integral to artistic aspiration. It's about freedom, in a way, and the desire to be more than merely a creature. And Frankenstein is about how that goes wrong. Right? So Victor Frankenstein creates a monster precisely because he thinks he can become a God. And so if we become too arrogant, if our ambition becomes overweening, then instead of escaping creaturehood, we become monstrous. We make ourselves monstrous. And that's part of the danger of being an artist. Being an artist can be a very dangerous thing. And this is what you see with isolation and drugs and alcohol here is integral to that. It's interesting because you use this word, poison, right? Jamie poisoned Edmund. He's claiming he poisoned Edmund, where poison is about being a formative influence. And you could say in the same way our parents poison us, our fate poisons us. Everything that happens to us to alter our character is a potion or a poison in some sense. Sometimes it's a potion, a good potion, sometimes it alters us in a. In a good direction. But that made me think of the ways in which these substances are also attempts at escaping creaturehood. They are substitutes for formative influences. So they call Mary's morphine poison over and over again, even as they poison themselves with alcohol. So you could think of people intoxicating themselves as this attempt to wrest the reins away from fate, right? To say, I'm going to be the one who poisons myself. I'm going to be the only influencer here, even if it just means being under the influence. At least I did it to myself. And there is that feeling of freedom because of the disinhibition. There's a feeling of freedom that comes with that. So, anyway, I thought that was really interesting. At some point, I want to talk about. So Edmund tells us what drinking is good for. So I want to get to that. 59:21 Erin: At some point, I'd like to turn to drink as well. You're reminding me of this talk of poisoning, and we're using names like Edmund and James, and it's all very Shakespearean to me. And it reminds me, too, of the famous. A famous essay by Auden about Falstaff in which he talks about the effects of alcoholism in men versus women and how in men, you know. So James even makes mention of this. And Jamie's developed a little bit of a belly from drinking. So Auden will argue that in men, the alcoholism makes them put on weight, and it's a desire to basically be pregnant, gives them a pregnant belly, gives them like a kind of surrogate womb and something to nurture in that motherly way. And so he. You know, of course, Falstaff is an example of this, right? We have a mental image of Falstaff with almost like a pregnant belly from drink. And in women, it makes them typically. Auden says it typically makes them waste away the desire to, like, lose the excess and to winnow themselves past a point of, you know, the ability to. But, you know, it has the opposite effect. They don't want to bear children, you know, they want to kind of erase themselves in a way. Morphine is having similar effects on Mary where the idea to not want to be a creature or to lose one's creaturehood, as you say, she gets thin on the morphine, and she also is escaping into the Past and into a kind of girlhood, which I think is also related to this. Right. Into one's girlhood would be into a point before which one had children and also maybe before which one was capable of having children as a woman. And of course, TB is. It's a wasting disease as well. And Edmund is very much his mother's child. So there's something kind of ironic or a little bit twisted about the way that this expresses itself in Edmund, who is also very thin and yet who will become the playwright, the creator. But I think it relates to your point. We can look at what Edmund says about drink. 1:01:18 Wes: Yes. This desire to waste away. It's like going back to the position of potentiality, like with Hedda Gabler, killing yourself so that you can keep all your possibilities open. 1:01:29 Erin: Right. 1:01:29 Wes: I don't want to choose a major, so I'm just gonna go ahead and obliterate myself. But similarly. Right, yeah. Going back to the point of childhood and where she could have been a piano player, she could have been a nun. And back to the point where all the experiences that one have in life haven't scarred you or marked you and haven't altered your character in such a way that you become more and more set in your ways and more and more a product of those influences that have created you, that have made you. So, again, escaping. There's an element of escaping creaturehood. And I think Edmund kind of pretty directly talks about this. This is when he's having a conversation with Tyrone at the end, and there's this toast that he gives repeatedly during the play. So this is saying, here's how. So Edmund says to Tyrone, forget my condition. And then he raises his glass and he says, here is how. And I mention this kind of celebratory aspect, right. To their drinking and that particular toast and the celebration there. It's a celebration of forgetting. And again, the forgetting of one's condition is the forgetting of one's troubles. But again, I think it's an attempt to transcend formative influences. The toast is supposed to be about good luck, but this is kind of a cynical appeal to the mechanism of luck. What is the connection between drinking and good fortune, good things happening in the future? Well, really, it's just about obliterating one's consciousness of all the bad things that happen. So it's a cynical take on that. And then he goes on to talk about. After quoting Dowson, he will talk about the fog being where he wants to be. So he'll say, halfway down the path, you can't see this house, you'd never know it was here or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn't see but a few feet ahead. I didn't meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is. That's what I wanted. To be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself. Out beyond the harbor where the road runs along the beach. I even lost the feeling of being on land. The fog and the sea seemed part of each other. It was like walking on the bottom of the sea, as if I had drowned long ago. As if I was a ghost belonging to the fog and the fog was the ghost of the sea. It felt damn peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost. He sees his father staring at him with mingled worry and irritated disapproval. He grins mockingly. Don't look at me as if I'd gone nutty. I'm talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one. You look in their faces and turn to stone. Or it's Pan. You see him and you die. That is inside you and have to go on living as a ghost. It's two pages later that he will be quoting Baudelaire to say, and I think this is important because we're wondering about the function of alcohol and drugs in the play. And Edmund is going to straight up try and tell us, or through Baudelaire, he's going to give us a thesis about. A bit of a thesis about this. So reciting Baudelaire, he says, always be drunken. Nothing else matters. That is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth. Be drunken continually drunken with what? With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will but be drunken. This kind of goes to our discussion of escaping creaturehood and becoming the creator, gaining some element of freedom. But here we get three different methods for that lumped in together, right? Is it going to be alcohol and drugs? Is it going to be being an artist, being a poet? Or is it going to be by virtue of being a good person? Which just to put in a philosophical point here, the philosophical tradition is associated with freedom, both with happiness but also with freedom. As in, it's in acting ethically that one is truly free. But the alternatives are it's in being an artist that one is truly free, or it's in being intoxicated that one is truly free, where freedom again includes some transcending of influence, but also being an influencer, being a creator. 1:06:12 Erin: In artistry, though, it seems as though there wasn't too much freedom for o', Neill, because I was reading that he died in a hotel room. So he was born and died in a hotel room. And he made mention of that fact and said, look at me. Here I was, I was born. I was born in a hotel room and now I'm dying in one. 1:06:30 Wes: I think he said, like, I knew it. 1:06:31 Erin: Right, right, right. 1:06:33 Wes: I knew it. I knew I was gonna die in a hotel room, just like I was born in a hotel room. 1:06:37 Erin: Right. And of course, how perfect for someone who wrote Long Day's Journey into Night, because here his escape into art has only become the sort of reanimation of all of these ghosts from his past. So maybe even in the drunkenness of art, there still is no escape, at least if you're Irish. So. 1:07:00 Wes: Well, let's talk a little bit more about autobiographical art maybe in our, in our postscript. 1:07:07 Erin: Okay? 1:07:08 Wes: All right. 1:07:09 Erin: Thank you, thank you. 1:07:13 Wes: And thank you to everyone who listened to this episode. [email protected] subtext Also, this podcast is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. airwavemedia.com AirwaveMedia.com.