O'Neill and Jamie: A Survivor's Tale

O'Neill and Jamie: A Survivor's Tale MICHAEL HlNDEN CC"V To, mybrotheris notalive," O'Neillwroteto acorrespondentin the -LN| 1930s. "Booze got him in the end. It was a shame. He and I were terribly close to each other, but after my mother's death in 1922 he gave up all hold on life and simply wanted to die as soon as possible. He had never found his place. He had never belonged. I hope like my 'Hairy Ape' he does now."1 The figure ofO'Neill's olderbrother, James O'Neill Jr. ("Jamie"), haunts the playwright's work. O'Neill's interpreters have speculated that Jamie served as the inspiration for several of the playwright's tortured characters, and O'Neill's biographers have traced the self-destructive course of Jamie's life. But little has been written about O'Neill's conflicted attitude toward his brother or his assessment of their relationship in the years after Jamie's death. In this essay I explore how O'Neill's struggle to free himself from his brother's influence —and his feelings about having done so—provided a rich vein of material for his writing. "Of all his boyhood attitudes," writes Stephen Black, "Eugene's idealization ofJamie would prove one of the most durable and one of the most troublesome for him."2 While Jamie was still alive, O'Neill recorded the germ ofan ideato write aplayabouthimselfand his brother thatwouldtrace the elder's influence on theyounger.3 O'Neill did sketch the lineaments of Jamie in a number of plays before Long Day's Journey : Eben Cabot in Desire Under the Elms, Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown, Orin Manon in Mourning Becomes Electra, and even the alcoholic uncle Sid in Ah, Wilderness! Jamie may have served as the psychological model for Hickey in The Iceman Cometh as well. However , in Long Day's Journey into Night, Jamie appears in the thinnest of disguises, and the relationship between that play and A Moon for the Misbegotten permits us to ask how the dramatic function ofJamie as a 435 436Comparative Drama character illuminates O'Neill's use of autobiographical materials. It is clear that O'Neill was memorializing his brother in these plays and providing a kind of absolution for Jamie's wasted life. But there also are grounds to suggest that in these later plays O'Neill may have been trying to come to terms with his own guilt for having abandoned his dissolute brother. In Long Day's Journey into Night, Jamie, who is a menace to his siblings, takes perverse pride in the fact thathe has had more to do with Edmund's upbringing than anyone else in the family. Edmund has always looked to his older brother as a model, and, indeed, Jamie has shapedhis attitudes toward sex, alcohol, and even literature. "Hell, you're more than my brother," Jamie tells him. "I made you! You're my Frankenstein !"4The dangeris thatwhateverJamie toucheshe destroys. Cynical , alcoholic, unmarried, having failed at work and school, he is the bane ofthe family, and his parents never let Edmund forget it. "Beware ofthat brother ofyours," Tyrone tells him, "or he'll poison life for you with his damned sneering serpent's tongue!" (109). The metaphor of poisoning implies that Jamie, if unchecked, will infect Edmund with moral decay just as he infected his baby brother with measles when, as a child, he defied a warning to stayaway from the infant's room. That act of jealous defiance, we are told in the play, led to the death of baby Eugene. Had Eugene lived, Edmund might not have been conceived. (In O'Neill's real family, the baby who died was named Edmund—and why Eugene traded names in Long Day's Journey with the brother he never knew is an interesting question, to which I will return.) The circumstances surrounding the "real" Jamie's role in the death of his baby brother are fairly close to those depicted in the play. In February 1885, Ella O'Neill left her two sons, James Jr., age seven, and Edmund, notyet two years old, in the care ofher mother in a NewYork...