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nothing. I am a bit soused, I guess. I'll put out the damned light.
He starts to get up.
TYRONE
No, stay where you are. Let it burn.
He stands up abruptly--and a bit drunkenly--and begins turning
on the three bulbs in th e chandelier, with a childish, bitterly dra–
matic self-pity.
We'll have them all on! Let them burn! To hell with them! The poor–
house is the end of the road, and it might as well be sooner as later!
He finishes turning on the lights.
EDMUND
Has wat ched this proceeding with an awakened sense of humor–
now he grins, teasing affectionately.
That's a grand curtain.
He laughs.
You're a wonder, Papa.
?
TYRONE
Sits ,down sheepishly-grumbles pathetically.
That's right, laugh at the old fool! The poor old ham! But the final
curtain will be in the poorhouse just the same, and that's not comedy!
Then as Edmund is still grinning, he changes the subject.
For the Irish are just what the popular legend about them says:
mercurial. As another American Irishman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once
said of himself: "I was always saving or being saved-in a single
morning I would go through the emotions ascribed to Wellington at
Waterloo. I lived in a world of inscrutable hostiles and inalienable
friends and supporters."
The sexual chastity of the Irish is likewise a motivating force in
the play. In the mother's preoccupation with the Virgin we can see
its feminine manifestation. For while it is never said in so many
words, we can see that one of the mother's basic difficulties lies in
that initial rude shock of the male assault and that the morphine
addiction is an effect, not a cause. For the dope is her way back to
her virginal childhood. Tyrone himself explains that she was not quite
the nun-like, little girl that she now pictures herself. On the con–
trary, she was attractive, flirtatious, almost hoydenish, and she fell
immediately and irrevocably in love with the handsome and charm–
ing young actor that was James Tyrone. Yet the hard facts of the
marriage were too much for her, too little prepared for by the sweet,
