o ' N ElL L '5 I R I 5 H CAT H 0 Lie 15M
579
murdering tyrant! Before I'm through with you, you'll think you're
the King of England at an Irish wake!
(With a quick change of pace
to a wheedling confidential tone. )
Tell me now, if it isn't a secret, what–
ever made you take such a savage grudge against pigs? Sure, it isn't
reasonable for a Standard Oil Man to hate hogs.
There is too on stage in
Long Day's Journey
Cathleen the serving
girl, ignorant, cheerful, bumptious.
A cut above Shaughnessy-Hogan and Cathleen is James Tyrone
himself, who, according to O'Neill,
is
in fact still a peasant: nerve–
less, full of vitality, physically powerful, penurious. Still less of
the earth is Mary Tyrone, neurotic, idealistic, dope-addicted, re–
ligious; further up still are the nihilistic sons, drunken, cynical, libi–
dinous, spouting
fin de siecie
estheticism and pessimism (Swin–
burne and NietZBche are the favorites ) . Nevertheless, the generic out–
line still stands, despite this historical progression. One is not Irish,
it seems, with impunity and even in rebellion, the norms are still there.
II
I shall proceed through my catalogue of attributes, in reverse
order, beginning with the tendency for late marriages and subsequent
prolonged adolescence.
2
Jamie, 33, and Edmund, 23, are still, from,
say, the contemporary American point of view and practice- which
seems to be steadily pushing the norma.! age for marriage back into
late childhood-in adolescence, living at home with the father who
grudgingly doles out "allowance" money to them.
It
is true that
Jamie is a wastrel and that Edmund is tuberculous; it is true too that
both have left home, at one time or another, but like Willie and Biff
Loman, they really
cannot
leave home, and they always return. This
feeling goes so deep that it is not even explained or discussed by the
play; it is a fact, like the weather, the "given" of a situation.
Loquacity, like drink, is one of the national addictions, and this
should not be confused with eloquence, which is the property of the
2. Since writing this, I have read Agnes Boulton's
Part of a Long StorJ,
and
have learned that Edmund (Eugene) had married and divorced before he
married h er and before the year in which
Long Day's Journey
takes place.
As she says : "Who, having seen
L ong Day's Journey into Night,
would ever
realize that Edmund, the younger son, had been married and divorced and
was the father of a child nearly three years old on that August evening in
191 2?" (p . 206 ). But I think my point still stands.
