The Road to Ruin: The Beginning of O'Neill's Long Day's Journey

THE ROAD TO RUIN: THE BEGINNING OF O'NEILL'S LONG DAY'S JOURNEY IN HER RECENT, excellent study Eugene O'Neill and the Tragic Tension. (Rutgers University Press, 1958), Miss Doris Falk has indicated the recurrence of psychological motifs throughout the works of the greatest of America's playwrights. It is hoped that further publication will fully analyze the interwoven biographical content which culminates in Long Day's Journey Into Night. Yet Miss Falk, perhaps taking seriously O'Neill's offhand classification of his one "comedy" as a sentimental interim, has dismissed Ah, Wilderness! as falling outside both tragic tension and biography. Examination of this play, originally labelled a play of reminiscence, alongside the crushing Long Day's Journey, however , abrogates such dismissal and refocusses the "comedy" as a "play of old sorrow." Despite the pitfalls which biographical interpretation sets up, this paper will show that Ah, Wilderness! is unquestionably a play of biographical import depicting that time of adolescent innocence which all men pass through just before they are rudely made aware that life can be a bitter experience, that their heroes are not so untarnished as they seemed in their youth, and that a long journey down a road to ruin awaits some before tears and blood exculpate their dead. Any doubt that Ah, Wilderness! is biographical is dispelled by the setting of the "sitting-room of the Miller home in a large small-town in Connecticut" with its "strip of beach along the harbor."l Parallels of this setting with the living room of the Tyrones' (O'Neills') summer home at New London are conclusive: Ah, Wilderness! Beneath the two windows at left, front, a sofa with silk and satin cushions stands against the wall. At rear of sofa, a bookcase with glass doors, filled with cheap sets, extends along the remaining length of wall. In the rear wall, left, is a double doorway with sliding doors and portieres, Long Day's Journey In the left wall, a similar series of windows looks out . . . Beneath them is a wicker couch with cushions ... Farther back is a large, glassed-in bookcase with sets of [various authors] .•. At rear are two double doorways with portieres ••. the other opens on a dark, 1. Quotations are cited from the 1933 Random House edition of Ah, Wilderness! and the 1956 Yale University Press edition of Long Day's Joomey Into Night. We should note that this moonlight-flooded strip of beach with an orchestra from a summer hotel playing in the distance is just removed from the moonlight-flooded pier of the Casino in the Prolo~e and Epilogue of The Gt-eat God Brown. General likenesses of sets and "persistent memories' between the two plays here examined have also been. noted by Drew B. Pallette, "O'Neill's A Touch of the Poet and His Other Last Plays," Arizona Quarterly, XIII (1957), 310--312. 289 290 MODERN DRAMA December leading into a dark, windowless back parlor. At right of this doorway, another bookcase , this time a small, open one, crammed with boys' and girls' books and the best-selling novels of many past years-books the family really have read. To the right of this bookcase is the mate of the double doorway at its left, with sliding doors and portieres, this one leading to a well-lighted front parlor . . In the right wall, rear, a screen door opens on a porch. Farther forward in this wall are two windows, with a writing desk and a chair between them. At center is a big, round table with a green-shaded reading lamp, the cord of the lamp running up to one of five sockets in the chandelier above. Five chairs are grouped about the table-three rockers at left, right, and right rear of it, two armchairs at rear and left rear. A medium-priced, inoffensive rug covers most of the floor. The walls are papered white with a cheerful, ugly blue design. windowless back parlor ... Against the wall between the doorways is a small bookcase . . . containing novels . . . the astonishing thing about these sets is that all the volumes have the look of having been read and reread ... The one...