TRAGIC LIFE STORY

Press, Volume XCIV, Issue 28050, 18 August 1956, Page 3

TRAGIC LIFE STORY

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL PLAY BY EUGENE O’NEILL

Lonir Day’s Journey into Night. By Eugene O’Neil) Cape. 156 pp.

To include a portrait ot one’s family in an autobiography requires tact. If members of the family cannot be admired or approved by the author the dangers of self-pity or bad taste become almost insuperable. We remember Edmund Gosse’s “Father and Son,” but few other examples of a successful attempt at such potrtraits.

Such an autobiography was written in 1940 by Eugene O’Neill, but not published during his lifetime. Appropriately the autobiography of Eugene O’Neill, the winner of three Pulitzer prizes in drama, takes the form of a play. His father and mother appear as James Tyrone and Mary, an actor who having lost his chance of greatness to make a fortune in a popular part yet never loses a fear of ending his life poor, and his wife who, frustrated in her desire for a home during the acting days on the road, seeks escape in narcotics. The two sons, James, jun.. and Edmund (who is Eugene himself) are. like their father, drunkards. Edmund suffers from consumption. A sombre setting, and we can only admire the writer’s objectivity in dealing with the remembered details of such a life. No character is sympathised with disproportionately, nor is any refused his due allowance of justification. Even James, jun.. for whom little enough can be said, achieves a certain touch of heroism when in his drunkenness he warns his younger brother against his own evil influence. The length and detail of stage directions suggest that this book is as much designed as a play to be read as one to be acted. We are told the names of books on the shelves, and though this information would reach a theatre audience when in the play some of the titles are mentioned by name, only the reader would profit from the direction that the books “have the Jook of having been read and reread. But this is not to say that it is not a play for acting. The whole conception ana organisation of the story is dramatic. There is. without any artificiality, unity of time. The whole situation is made clear in the events of one critical day. Not only is the whole conception dramatic, but even details appear to be thought out m terms of the stage. Tyrone’s parsimony is exemplified m his objection to burning unnecessary electric light. In the last scene, a scene otherwise in danger of dragging since for a long time two characters sit drinking and exchanging remarks labelled “drily,” “irritably defensively,” “cynically, reluctantly or “drunkenlv,” what action there is consists of Edmund's switching on more lights and Tyrone’s later switching them off. On the stage the consequent frequent variation in lighting might save this scene from monotony. As in the plays of O’Casey, gloomy events and despondent speeches are lightened by the intrusion of Irish humour. Members of this family have no conventional pretences: remarks are penetratingly truthful and often witty. The result is excellent dramatic dialogue. Sometimes the material becomes a little too much for the dialogue as in the last scene when a number of poems are quoted. Yet on the stage this might be more successful than it appears to be in manuscript. The special interest of this play is. of course, the information it gives us about O’Neill ’himself. Edmund in the play has aspirations as a poet and tells us about them “with alcoholic talkativeness.” “I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, he says, almost in Housman’s words. He hasn’t the makings of a poet only the habit. “I just stammered. That’s the best I’ll ever do. . . . Well, it will be faithful realism at least. Stammering is the native eloquence of us fog people.” In the context the impression is entirelv one of humility without hint of self-pity. All the “high spots”

of his life are, he tells us, connected with the sea. In this book the dominant symbolic force seems to be the fog. In each case it is somewhere where one loses awareness of self and reality and sees for a second the secret.