In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Falling in Love with O'Neill
  • Laurin Porter (bio)

I have always been a creature of linear time. My struggle has been not so much with the past as with the future. I've lived in anticipation of whatever comes next, lining up the tasks of life, whether of the day, week, or year, then checking them off one by one. "When I finish this paper, this class, this degree (fill in the blank), I will . . ." To live each moment in the moment, to embrace what a favorite theologian of mine calls the eighth sacrament, presence—that has been my challenge.

So when I sat in a graduate American Drama class one evening in September 1973 (September 17, to be precise), listening to the professor unpacking the complexities of O'Neill's use of time in Long Day's Journey Into Night, I was transfixed. He explained how all of the characters were trapped in time, longing for a moment in the past when they had experienced the confluence of their values and desires: Mary's wedding day, James' compliment by actor Edmund Booth on his performance of Othello, Edmund's ideal moments of oneness with the sea, Jamie's innocence prior to learning of his mother's addiction. As year followed year and these ideal moments receded ever further into the past, they all experienced a searing sense of guilt they didn't understand; thus they lashed out at one another in cycles of accusation and recrimination, trying unwittingly to locate the cause of their guilt in one another. While the play is replete with references to linear time, the professor said, indeed is structured by it, it is also shaped by two other modalities of time, what Mircea Eliade calls cyclic and mythic time, concepts that were new to me.

Something about that discussion resonated deeply with me. No matter that the Tyrones were New England Irish Catholics (lapsed or not) and I was by birth a Midwestern German Lutheran: this play was about me. It probably didn't hurt that the professor was Fr. Tom Porter, a Jesuit and himself Irish Catholic, or that he was proving to be the best teacher I had ever encountered. It was the first semester of my doctoral studies at the [End Page 275] University of Detroit, a Jesuit institution, and I had had no idea what to expect. Given my Protestant upbringing, with little exposure to Catholics, not to mention priests, when I heard stories about the legendary Porter, I vaguely pictured someone like Bing Crosby in Going My Way, a mild-mannered, grey-haired fellow in a Roman collar. Thus I was startled when he walked into class the first night, dressed in black pants and a black turtleneck, chain-smoking, with a mass of unruly, curly black hair. This was not at all what I expected.

That class would change my life, both professionally and personally— personally, because I would end up marrying Tom several years later; professionally, because it was the beginning of my life-long love affair with O'Neill. The two stories are actually intertwined. My meeting O'Neill in Tom's class so many years ago opened up worlds to me that I never could have predicted, and it has been one of the great joys of my life that I have been able to share so much of it with Tom and, later, our two daughters.

As I look back, I realize that my relationship with O'Neill can't be separated from my relationship with O'Neillians and that one important strand of my story is that of O'Neill conferences. They are, I was to discover, unique in the world of literary gatherings. My first was at Suffolk University in 1986. Ten years after my graduation, with a dissertation on biography, culture, and time in O'Neill's late plays under my belt, and eight years after marrying Tom, I was the mother of two small children, living in Arlington, Texas, then a town of about 250,000 between Dallas and Fort Worth. I'd left a tenure-track position in San Antonio to join Tom in Arlington, where he'd...

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