Bohemians on the Bookcase: Quotations in Long Day's Journey into Night and Ah, Wilderness!

The literary allusions in act 4 of Long Day's Journey Into Night have worried producers and commentators alike. Often pared down on stage to cut the play's running time, they are heard as redundant, unnecessary, even as a substitute on O'Neill's part for the hard work of writing expressive dialogue. George Steiner deplores the quotations in Long Day's Journey, suggesting that their brilliance "burns a hole" in the fabric of the play and shows up O'Neill's deficient writing. In response to Steiner, Laurin Porter has argued persuasively for the economy and effectiveness of these quotations. She goes through all the musical and literary allusions in the late plays, showing how they reinforce character and theme, move the plot, and create counterpoints of feeling, atmosphere, and thought. Indeed, she argues, the allusions are deeply and significantly embedded in the plays.¹ In this article I would like to suggest that they serve another purpose as well. The quotations from what James Tyrone, speaking to Edmund, calls "That damned library of yours!" evoke the darkest, most radical thought of the previous century, the late-romantic nineteenth century that the characters in O'Neill's play, set in 1912, are trying to survive without knowing how.² The quotations from Baudelaire, Swinburne, Wilde, and Dowson suggest in their pessimism an impasse reached by the end of the romantic century, an impasse of identity. The characters in Long Day's Journey, who have inherited their identities from the previous century, no longer know who they are.

Ah, Wilderness! contains quotations also, from the same or similar nineteenth-century authors, but they are not so troubling because there are fewer of them, they are briefer, and their purpose is clear and less threatening to the audience. They are the reading material of Richard Miller, the adolescent son of a prominent small-town family, who uses them to express his angst and to impress his girlfriend Muriel with his worldly wisdom. And the quotations in Ah, Wilderness! serve another purpose, to point up a difference between two kinds of early twentieth-century middle-class characters: the Millers, especially Richard's father, Nat, who are sophisticated and conversant with the darker side of life, and the McCombers, especially Muriel's father, David, who are unsophisticated and live in denial of it. Quotations from Swinburne, such as the following, have thrown Richard into conflict with his conservative social environment:

That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eatThy breasts like honey, that from face to feetThy body were abolished and consumed,And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!³

Having intercepted one of Richard's letters to Muriel in which this quotation appears, David McComber arrives at the Millers' house demanding that Richard be punished and be forbidden from seeing David's pure daughter ever again. The crisis is finally resolved at the end of the play when, in a father-and-son talk, Richard declares the innocence of his motives and his father insists that he go to college before embarking on marriage. O'Neill often said of Ah, Wilderness! that it represented the family life he wished had been his. But more broadly, these two plays, with their fin-de-siècle quotations, deadly serious in Long Day's Journey and mock-serious in Ah, Wilderness!, locate their respective sets of characters, actions, and themes at a crucial historical juncture, the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the move from romanticism to modernism.

Other iconic twentieth-century American plays locate themselves in a modern context similarly, by distancing themselves from the past, whether from the nineteenth century or from the early twentieth, by means of quotations of various kinds. By "quotation," I mean any evocation of attitudes, roles, and styles from the past, as well as the actual words. Our Town, all too often staged as a piece of nostalgic Americana, has as its central event Emily's decision to return from the dead in order to revisit one day in her life. She chooses her twelfth birthday, traditionally a day of transition from childhood to adulthood. In The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield, as narrator, revisits the St. Louis apartment where he had lived with his mother and sister, who themselves "quote" from a past of gentlemen callers and high school experiences, respectively. In A Streetcar Named Desire, when Blanche Dubois, at the end of her rope, visits her sister and brother-in-law in New Orleans, she is haunted by "phrases" from her past at Belle Rêve, notably the fragment of the Varsouviana dance music she persistently recalls. Death of a Salesman contains echoes of a time when success seemed graspable, at least for men who were handsome and "well liked." The problems faced by the characters in these plays are problems of the present and of the future, problems of modern times. Their struggles all contain an element of wishing to go back to a time when they felt they knew who they were, when they "belonged." But they cannot. They must live in a frustrating present and face an indeterminate future. This is their "modern" condition.

In these plays, attempting to revisit the past is experienced as unbearable, not simply because the past is lost in time or because it contains tragic elements, but because it is in every sense too much. "Only at dusk," Hegel reminds us, "does the Owl of Minerva take wing and fly." In the same key, Mary Tyrone implores James, "Let's . . . not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped—the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain." But more than an awareness of irreversible conclusion, the wisdom of hindsight contains an element of estrangement or displacement, as the world revisited is seen by the characters as something other than how it was remembered. When characters try to go back in time they become, as Edmund says, "nothing more than a ghost within a ghost."⁴ The dramatic force of these plays derives not from nostalgia but from a merciless clarity of thoughtful re-examination, the objective just-so-ness of revisitation. The intellectual weight of observation is overwhelming: the characters cannot bear it; the audience cannot bear it; no one could bear it. Each of these iconic American plays refuses to give comfort, and in its withdrawal of comfort expresses its power.

Thinking of Long Day's Journey and Ah, Wilderness!—and plays by Wilder, Williams, and Miller—as autobiographical plays reinforces such readings. It is as if O'Neill, the author, were revisiting his past in the form of Edmund in Long Day's Journey and as if his alter ego Richard were going back in Ah, Wilderness! to the past Eugene O'Neill wished he had experienced. Perhaps we, as readers, are also looking at these plays as a return to the past in some sense, especially if we read and see them repeatedly over a lifetime. But a closer, harder look at these great works will not let us rest in such subjective, nostalgic, or sentimental pleasures. And the differences among these playwrights, as they define their approaches to the modern, force readers and interpreters of theater to think hard about what these authors are doing. Thornton Wilder is clearly seeing through a philosophical or theological lens when he shows us Our Town with a Christian/Buddhist overlay. Tennessee Williams seems focused on the psychological condition of characters being persistently trapped between the ways they see themselves and the ways others see them. And Arthur Miller represents his characters impacted by the economic and social forces of their worlds, which should, and presumably could, have been otherwise.

Some critics have argued that O'Neill's lens is literary. "That damned library" of his made O'Neill a great poet of the theater. In "O'Neill's Literary Biography," an appendix to Forging a Language: A Study of the Plays of Eugene O'Neill, Jean Chothia spells out how O'Neill's reading informed his work from the beginning.⁵ In parallel columns next to the titles, she lists "Influences and echoes noticed by commentators" and next to that, O'Neill's "Current reading or direct quotation." It is quite a reading list: Strindberg, Ibsen, Shaw, Dostoevsky, Conrad, Synge, Hauptmann, Melville, Fraser, Wedekind, Nietzsche, Wilde, Zola, Eliot, Gorki, and on and on. O'Neill's reading and writing were of a piece. O'Neill taught himself how to see life, how to read life, through the romantic-modernist texts on that bookcase in Long Day's Journey. And he allegorized that reading of life in his plays, especially in the way he saw and represented the characters of 1912 in Long Day's Journey and Ah, Wilderness!, inscribing nineteenth-and twentieth-century literary journeys within his realism.

John Henry Raleigh sees O'Neill as simultaneously a twentieth-century American writer and a nineteenth-century one. Finding elements of Eliot, Pound, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Lewis, Faulkner, and Stevens in O'Neill, Raleigh agrees with Van Wyck Brooks that "there was scarcely a literary current of the time that had not flowed through his mind." And Raleigh finds O'Neill's nineteenth-century connections, especially to the "American Renaissance," even more compelling. According to Raleigh, O'Neill even looked like Poe. Yet his strongest affinity was clearly with Melville, who articulated "the doubt of identity," which was perhaps O'Neill's most profound concern. Emerson is also a key figure for understanding O'Neill, of course, as is Henry James. Raleigh sees Tocqueville's Democracy in America as prophetic of O'Neill's plays, and he understands D. H. Lawrence's Studies in Classic American Literature to be consistent with O'Neill's view of America.⁶ Raleigh sees O'Neill as uniquely suited to convey what Henry James described in The Middle Years as the artistic "sense of infinity." In Raleigh's words, O'Neill's work embodied "a mighty, restless creativity which managed in one way or another to give voice to almost all the voices of the vast cacophony of American culture."⁷

The scholar best suited to contextualize O'Neill at the intersection of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, ideologically speaking, is Morse Peckham, whose synthetic interpretation of the romantic nineteenth century puts the quest for identity center-stage. In Beyond the Tragic Vision: The Quest for Identity in the Nineteenth Century (1962), Peckham proposes that romanticism, in its various permutations, arose from the collapse of eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals. Following George Herbert Mead and other American pragmatists, Peckham sees the genesis of romanticism as a crisis of identity following the French Revolution. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther and Byron's Manfred, for example, begin to valorize social alienation as such. In a world—the romantic world, in which the "I" is never quite the same as the "me"—writers and artists began exploring what Peckham calls the "sense of value," the sense of personally experiencing the world as meaningful, without simply repeating the social roles of the established culture.⁸ Romantics invented roles, sometimes called antiroles, for this purpose; these were, according to Peckham, Byronic Hero, Poet-Visionary, Bohemian, Virtuoso, Dandy, and Historian.⁹

In a postrevolutionary world, romanticism obviously takes on a great significance for Peckham. Presumably, people have always believed in the self, in some sense, though it was experienced within roles provided by religion, society, legal systems, assumptions about race, class, and gender, and so on. But the self that romantics began to affirm had to be continually regenerated by creating and affirming new tensions with old social roles. Peckham discerns four stages of romantic thought. Early transcendentalists like Wordsworth and Beethoven affirmed the value of the self in heroic isolation from society; then objective realists like Browning, Darwin, and Bruckner affirmed the value of the self in frustrated confrontation with the objective world; and aesthetic stylists like Swinburne, Wilde, and Debussy created elaborate surfaces of artificial beauty behind which could be glimpsed horrors of existence too terrible to confront directly. Peckham's fourth stage includes Mallarmé and Nietzsche, who used style to symbolize the process of creating and affirming the self against sheer nothingness. For Peckham, Nietzsche's death in 1900 marks the end of the romantic development. However, in a "free world," which is nevertheless filled with unsolved problems, romanticism will inevitably reappear in new forms or repeat old ones. Peckham called the inescapable, generating principle of romanticism "the irresolvable tension between subject and object."¹⁰ That principle can easily be identified in the works of modernists and postmodernists of all sorts in the twentieth century. Surrrealists, expressionists, cubists, minimalists, and others journey into the darkness discovered by the romantics, darkness necessary for their spiritual survival in a world of Philistines.

In that intellectual overlap where, as Raleigh suggests, nineteenth- and twentieth-century themes co-exist in the works of O'Neill, the concept of self is particularly problematic. One is tempted to say that the self (as in "the tension between self and social role") has vanished. Of course, the antiroles played by artists in the nineteenth century were masks, and beneath them was, it was assumed, a self. But in twentieth-century works like The Emperor Jones, The Great God Brown, Strange Interlude, and A Moon for the Misbegotten that self is very tenuous indeed. Arnold Goldman, picking up on a point made by Mary Colum in 1935, suggests that O'Neill's characters are disintegrated selves. He quotes her:

[O'Neill] has put with intensity on the stage one aspect of American life that no other writer has managed to express at all . . . that common character in American life, the disintegrated person. . . . [Strindberg's] disintegrated people were all madmen. But O'Neill contrives to present his people as disintegrated and yet holding on to sanity.¹¹

Goldman develops Colum's idea by questioning the presence of any "true self " on stage in an O'Neill play. These are Goldman's words:

O'Neill came to found the very being of his people on ambivalences and polarities and he seems to have felt he could do without ordinarily conceived "true self " in characters—or even without the discovery of true self (by character or audience) as dramas unwind.¹²

Perhaps the oscillation between polarities so many critics have noticed in the dialogue of O'Neill's characters is due to the unresolved tension between self and social role. No resolution seems to be found in any stance, attitude, or protocol, so they vacillate between opposites, all the while longing for that lost self or soul they seem to remember having experienced in the past. O'Neill's characters are historical leftovers. Those who are most conscious, like Larry Slade in Iceman, Edmund in Long Day's Journey, Josie in A Moon for the Misbegotten, and Nat Miller in Ah, Wilderness!, have an antiheroic, ironic awareness of themselves expressed in some of O'Neill's most memorable monologues. They are not the heroes of their own lives but secondary characters at best, like Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock ("No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be").

One could say, then, that the long day's journey of O'Neill's title represents, among other things, an allegorical journey beyond the various romantic heroisms of the nineteenth century into the darkness of the twentieth century and beyond. All four characters in Long Day's Journey are romantics beached on their present lives in 1912, looking back on romantic roles, or antiroles, they once played but now cannot reenact in a genuine way. Mary clings to her memories of religious and musical transcendental self-expression, trying to pray, trying to play a Chopin waltz with arthritic fingers, finding now that morphine works better than religious faith or music. She is caught between the traditional social role of a Catholic school girl with dreams of becoming a nun and the antirole of aspiring piano virtuoso. James futilely rehearses his roles of self-made melodramatic hero and Shakespearean actor manqué. He was a sort of virtuoso in his day, playing the Count of Monte Cristo thousands of times. James and Mary are incapable of abandoning the social roles through which they experience their love for each other and their sons, although family loyalty may be killing all four of them.

Jamie identifies with the sentiments expressed in the fin de siècle poems by Swinburne and Dowson quoted in act 4 and is stuck in them. His ironic pessimism is an antirole of aesthetic decadence. As a Broadway sport, he is also a bit of a dandy. Edmund presents himself as an innocent mystic, a would-be transcendentalist, a poet-visionary, whose famous loss-of-self-at-sea monologue is a development of Paddy's memorializing, in The Hairy Ape, of his days on "clippers wid tall masts touching the sky": "Twas them days a ship was part of the sea, and a man was part of a ship, and the sea joined all together and made it one."¹³ Paddy's speech is yet another pondering of the differences between now and then. Because the Tyrones belong to an actor's family, a low social status as social roles go, and because they are Irish Americans in a time of prejudice, they could use some romantic antiroles to see them through, but even with alcohol and narcotics, they cannot convince themselves that they are successful at being themselves. All four characters feel betrayed by their lifelong investments in metaphysical selfhood. Only Edmund seems capable, if he lives, of separating himself from the worldview foisted upon him by his brother, of realizing that he might be more than Jamie's "Frankenstein." His sobering incarceration in a sanatorium, like Hans Castorp's in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, might still prove to be the first chapter of a modern life.

The Bohemian deserves special attention because it is the role that Jamie has tried to instill in Edmund in Long Day's Journey and the role that Richard tries to play in Ah, Wilderness! In "Theorizing the Cultural Roots of the Bohemian Artist," Mary Gluck describes the artistic and economic dynamics of the romantic bohemian, fixed in memory by Murger's Scènes de la Vie de bohème (1949), which then became Puccini's La Bohème (1894) and recently the Broadway hit Rent (1996). Gluck's description of the literary history of this figure complements Peckham's ideas and helps us to understand, as well, the slippery connections between Edmund and Richard in their respective plays.

When Victor Hugo's Hernani premiered in 1830, a contingent of young people—poets, painters, and musicians—dressed themselves in outrageous medieval garb and shouted down their opponents in the audience who were on the side of dramatic classicism. These opponents were not really "classicists," according to Gluck, but the "newly assertive middle class that assumed the mantle of classicism and came to serve as the defender of transcendental values, Christian morals, and social stability in contemporary literary life," or, in other words, social conservatives. Echoing Peter Brooks, Gluck sees melodrama as the "heir of revolutionary politics and the tangible embodiment of modern experience," in a style, Brooks says, that articulated "simple truths and relationships" and "the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures."¹⁴ Peckham and Gluck agree that by the mid-nineteenth century transcendental romanticism was in difficulty. Melodrama was gaining a reputation as low-down, tawdry entertainment. And Eugène Scribe and others were creating a new kind of theater, the comédie-Vaudeville, with plots that imitated contemporary life and celebrated prudence, pragmatism, and moral Puritanism.¹⁵ Middle-class drama had arrived. As Gluck says, the totalizing impulses of romanticism and melodrama, which tried to create an identity of life and art through "interiority and sentimentality," were becoming passé.¹⁶ The bohemian role had dissolved into a recognizable, rather clichéd social attitude. But alienation and creativity continued, becoming "more autonomous, less identified with beauty and universal personal truth, channeling unstructured energies" instead of the "idealized vision(s) of traditional art."¹⁷

Melodrama, as Michael Manheim has shown, is transcended in Long Day's Journey Into Night.¹⁸ Yet traces of melodrama still give that play its romanticism and carry some of its most modern points. The characters in Long Day's Journey are trapped in a limbo between Victorian ideals of hard work, happy home, and family on the one hand and the breakdown of these ideals under the pressures of economics, aging, sickness, and addiction on the other. Yet the characters are more modern, more illusion-less, than they admit. Tyrone's love for Mary endures despite her addiction to morphine and his to alcohol, demonstrating a love without romantic redemption. Jamie knows how poisonous his sensibility is and warns his brother against it. He is a Byronic hero without any romantic self-approval. And Mary, in the last words of the play, grasps, whether she knows it or not, the ephemeral nature of life's comforts and victories: "I fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time." Like James, Mary no longer believes that love is redemptive, and yet she still loves. Edmund, the youngest character, has not yet absorbed the heartbreaking revelations of the play. But determined to survive without the shibboleths of the past, he is the play's one possible connection to the future. All the characters show the courage to live out their individual, unresolved, leftover lives as modern people. They are surviving, but theirs is not a bourgeois survival; it is a desperate journey into their own darkness, which the audience recognizes as utterly realistic.

Ah, Wilderness!, on the other hand, is undeniably a bourgeois comedy along the lines of comédie-Vaudeville, but with a difference. Richard, though he champions Swinburne, Ibsen, Shaw, and Wilde, does not understand the implications of their works because he has not had the experiences that inspired them. His journey to the whorehouse is a symbolic gesture that does not make contact with reality, ironically because of alcohol. The play's representatives of social stability, particularly Nat Miller, Richard's father, are, like the characters in Long Day's Journey, more modern than they first appear. Richard's family (unlike his girlfriend Muriel's) is familiar with the literature of the late nineteenth century, unthreatened by it, though acquainted with its implications and susceptible to its charms, especially those of Edward Fitzgerald's The Rubáiyát of Omar Kháyyám, which is evoked in the play's title. It celebrates pleasure in the context of passing time and hints at a deeper mysticism uniting all life and death. The Miller family appropriates Richard, their bohemian, to a bourgeois existence that they hope will be secure and rewarding for him, without being in denial of the real horrors that lie below the surface of bourgeois life and passing time. Richard will go to college and, unlike O'Neill, stay there until he graduates. And yet their deepest allegiances are to "the simple truths and relationships," "the cosmic moral sense of everyday gestures," which Brooks attributes to melodrama, rather than to the forces of government and religion, which Peckham says in Swinburne "pretend to give society order, [while] in reality lacerat[ing] the bodies and hearts of mankind."¹⁹ Thus Richard may be read as an image of the romantic bohemian, somewhat ridiculous in the bourgeois modern world. Like the characters in Gautier's Les Jeunes-Frances, he represents "a tragic-comic revelation of the incompatibility of the bohemian gesture with the dominant bourgeois version of modernity."²⁰

The bohemian gesture may appear ridiculous in the context of modern bourgeois life, but clearly some intelligent members of bourgeois society do not wish to stifle it. It seems to carry, like the melodramatic hero or heroine, some energy vital for the self. Nat Miller reads the verses Richard has been copying out of Swinburne for Muriel with some concern, but he never orders Richard to stop reading Swinburne. James Tyrone is personally repulsed by Edmund's enthusiasm for Dowson, Swinburne, and Wilde, but he admits to his son, "You have a poet in you but it's a damned morbid one!" Tyrone understands the power of literary inspiration. Speaking of his own love affair with Shakespeare, he says, "I would have acted in any of his plays for nothing, for the joy of being alive in his great poetry."²¹ The idea that one can be "alive" in poetry in a different way or on a deeper level than one is "alive" in one's everyday social roles is key to understanding what Peckham calls "cultural transcendence," the real purpose of romanticism. The ability of the self to persist beneath various social masks, its ability to affirm life when social roles turn nasty or even when the very definition of self becomes problematical is at the heart of romantic alienation and role-playing. One could call it spiritual survival.

Ironically, only Edmund, who has contracted a life-threatening disease, is spiritually surviving. His quotations from Dowson and Baudelaire suggest a philosophical acceptance of life as illusion and an understanding of what strategies might work for him in the present and the future. After walking home in the fog, he quotes Dowson:

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:Out of a misty dreamOur path emerges for a while, then closesWithin a dream.²²

These lines, he says to his father, illustrate the fact that "We're all crazy." And he goes on to embrace the relief of feeling invisible in the fog: "It felt damned peaceful to be nothing more than a ghost within a ghost." Later in the act, when his father screws the light bulbs back into the chandelier, comically contradicting his words, "I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been," Edmund bursts out laughing. When his father asks, "What the devil are you laughing at?" he replies, "Not at you, Papa. At life. It's so damned crazy." The comic and pathetic spectacles at the end of act 4 illustrate how true to real life the lines from Dowson are, in Edmund's understanding. And his long quotation from Baudelaire, beginning, "Be always drunken. Nothing else matters," and ending, "if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will," moves beyond the polarizing symbolic gestures of the bohemian toward a bitter irony that accepts modern life as it is.²³ As Theodore de Banville said at Baudelaire's funeral,

[Baudelaire] had thus been able to give beauty to sights which did not possess beauty in themselves, not by making them romantically picturesque, but by bringing to light the portion of the human soul hidden in them, and he had thus revealed to literature the sad and often tragic heart of the modern town. That was why he haunted, and would always haunt, the minds of modern men, and move them when other artists left them cold.²⁴

Edmund does not romanticize himself with his quotations, as Jamie does. He is speaking not as a nineteenth-century bohemian, but as a laconic twentieth-century commentator. He is speaking as a survivor.

Jamie, James, and Mary use quotations in ways that encapsulate them in the past. Jamie's quotations from Kipling have only a sarcastic application to the current situation. And his quotations from Dowson, Rossetti, Baudelaire, Swinburne, Wilde, and Shakespeare all express his helplessness, cynicism, anger, self-pity, and despair. He uses quotations meanly, to victimize himself and others: "Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell."²⁵ James quotes Shakespeare to revisit his youthful dreams of being a great actor. And Mary tries to play Chopin, which is a kind of unsuccessful quoting, as she is haunted by Mother Elizabeth's fateful words that forced her to re-enter the world beyond the convent, where she was trapped by her love for James Tyrone. These characters lack the potential for rebirth because to have a new life they would have to give up the only sense of self they have. They lack the imagination to see themselves except through memory. The conclusion, if you can call it that, of Long Day's Journey must be the most vexing ending of any modern play. But it ends as it must, in a modern, twentieth-century way, suggesting that there are no longer any conclusive endings, only revisitations, revisions, and revaluations.

Thus, Richard in Ah, Wilderness! and Edmund in Long Day's Journey both owe a debt to the romantic bohemians who reside on their respective bookcases, yet with significant differences. The fate of the nineteenth-century bohemian in the twentieth century is being borne out in Richard. His bohemian posing provides him a vehicle to express the almost unbearable intensity of his adolescent life. This "phase" he is going through, as his family knows, is a well-established social role that will not necessarily lead to further intellectual alienation. Edmund, on the other hand, is traveling down a path that will lead him into further personal and social alienation, if he lives. The poetry he sardonically quotes expresses, among other things, the painful liberation he is experiencing as a result of his "consumption." He is beginning to realize that no familial or social roles can prepare him for his own confrontation with life-threatening illness. Critics tend to see both plays as haunted by O'Neill himself, of course, but these plays are also haunted by a romantic afterimage, that of the bohemian, which provides an imaginative space in which a modern person can reside in tension with his social roles. The bohemian in Ah, Wilderness! and Long Day's Journey into Night is an alter ego of the modern artist, an old friend O'Neill is not willing to disavow.