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drink" (or dope) -all these go out the window, in a moment, when
the implacable imagination, the seizure of the nerves, the impossible
desire for a nirvana that lies at the bottom of a bottle of whiskey,
comes over the Irishman. Then there is the constant chorus: "You
drink!" "You failed!" "You'd like to see me dead!" "You take
dope!" "Where's the hophead?" says Jamie of his mother.
The combination of sentiment and irony in matters of love is
likewise a Tyrone characteristic, and most cogently illustrated by the
mother in her relationship to her "loved ones." For she does love
them all, deeply, and is quite sentimental about them. In her most
sentimental moments she is capable of misty-eyed dreams of the fu–
ture happiness of the family. Edmund, the gifted son, is an especial
love. Yet she is capable of the most searing and corrosive statements
to all of them. To Edmund, her beloved, she can say:
Turns on Edmund with a har.d, accusing antagonism- almost a .,.e–
vengeful enmity.
I
never knew what rh eumatism w as Ibefore you were born! Ask
your fath er!
Throughout the play we find her alternately sentimental and
corrosive.
As
Edmund says of her:
Deliberately, that's the hell of it! You know something in her does it
deliberately-to get beyond our reach, to be rid of us, to forget we're
'llive! It's as if, in spite of loving us, she hated us.
Love for all of the Tyrones is ambiguous, unresolved tension between
tenderness and hate, sentimentality and irony.
It is impossible to estimate accurately the cosmic import of
the "bottle" in the lives of the Tyrones (the only reason that the
mother does not take to it is because she possesses something strong–
er). In a way the Irish addiction to drink is a simplifying element
in their lives, for this is how all problems are met-to reach for the
bottle. When the mother takes to dope on the morning of the "long
day," she knows, as a matter of course, that her men will all be
drunk by nightfall. "The Bottle" is at the center of the room, and
in many ways is the most important object in the room.
If
not using
it, they talk about it. It enters into their very characters; the father's
penuriousness is most neatly summed up by the fact that he keeps
his liquor under lock and key and has an eagle eye for the exact
