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PARTISAN REVIEW
God's Chillun Got Wings),
after nineteenth-century New England
(Desire Under the Elms ) ,
after the sea, after Greek masks, after dy–
namos, after all kinds of themes and devices and bizarre subjects, he
finally returned home to New London, Connecticut, to
his
family, and
to himself.
As
Stephen Dedalus says in
Ulysses:
If Socrates leaves his home today he will find the sage seated on his
doorsteps. If Judas goes forth tonight it
is
to Judas his steps will tend.
Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meet–
ing robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers–
in-love. But always meeting ourselves.
For certainly even a most superficial knowledge of the O'Neill
family and of the facts of Eugene O 'Neill's early life show that the
play is very close to being straight autobiography (no matter what
discrepancies may ultimately be pointed out). In another sense it
does not matter how close to, or how far from, are the facts of
O 'Neill's life to the facts of the play, for
Long Day's Journey
is more
impressive as a cultural document than it is as an autobiographical
document. Furthermore, its distinctive qualities are given, not so
much by family, as by culture, or by family-culture, since the two
cannot be separated. The culture is, of course, New England Irish
Catholicism, and it is this that provides the folkways 'and mores, the
character types, the interrelationships between characters, the whole
attitude toward life that informs
Long Day's Journey
and gives it
its meaning. As such,
Long Day's Journey
is
the
great cultural ex–
pression of American Irish-Catholicism; it puts permanently into the
shade all the "stage-Irish-St. Patrick's Day-'Going My Way'-'Mother
McCree' " type of sentimentality that has encircled the image of the
Irish
in
America. Just as effectively does it underline the shallowness
of the higher-level sentimentality of Edwin O'Connor's
The Last
Hurrah,
a whimsical account of the farcical and shoddy character
and career of Boston's James Michael Curley. The only other Ameri–
can Irish-Catholic document that even approaches O'Neill's in power
and truth is the
Studs Lonigan
trilogy of James T. Farrell, but Farrell's
novel is tendentious and therefore "dates," and it lacks both the com–
passion and the humor of O'Neill's picture. Farrell's novel was writ–
ten in anger-well justified, it should be added-but O'Neill's play
was written out of sorrow, forgiveness, and, strangely enough, a kind
