578
PARTISAN REVIEW
Irish character. To these rune characteristics should be added a
tenth, which was .an emergent, post-famine phenomenon, namely, a
tendency toward less and later marriage on the part of the young
men and a tendency, therefore, for these young men to remain at
home with their father and mother. In short, here is an abstract pic–
ture of the Tyrone family, and it is on these generic lines that the
characters, and the interrelationships, in
Long Dajs Journey
are
formed.
There is a further historical complication in the play, which
makes the whole situation much more concrete and which cuts across
the generic abstractions outlined above, in that
Long Day's Journey
into Night
also shows the Irish in the process of assimilation, or,
rather-for none of these characters can properly be called assimilated
-in the process of breaking away from the culture of the "Old
Country." There are at least four levels of this process represented
in
Long Dajs Journey.
There is first of all-never seen on the stage
but talked about by the Tyrones--an authentic, unregenerate Irish
peasant-farmer-a tenant of the Tyrones-named Shaughnessy, cun–
ning, crafty, powerful, and possessed of a "terrible tongue." The Ty–
rones pretend to be shocked but are secretly delighted when they
learn that Shaughnessy, just by use of this "terrible tongue," has
run a Standard Oil man named Harker off his property although he
was quite guilty of what Harker had come to accuse him. This inci–
dent, which must have been based on fact, amused O'Neill im–
mensely, and he presented it directly and fully in
A Moon tor the
Misbegotten,
where he ch.anges "Shaughnessy" to "Hogan" and "Har–
ker" to "Harder." Hogan's verbal assault on Harder is a masterpiece
and one of the high points of O'Neill's humor, and Irish mock-elo–
quence. (What had happened was that Hogan had let his pigs-of
course, he keeps pigs--wallow in a pond on Harder's property.) Ho–
gan's peroration is worth quoting; he has .accused Harder of giving
his pigs pneumonia:
All prize pigs, too! I was offered two hundred dollars apiece for
them. Twenty pigs at two hundred, that's four thousand. And a thous–
and to cure the sick and cover funeral expenses for the dead. Call it
four thousand you owe me.
(Furiously)
And you'll pay for it, or I'll
sue you, so help me Christ! I'll drag you in every court in the land! I'll
paste your ugly mug on the front page of every newspaper as a pig-
