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ion, but that she has always been rooted in pleasures that the actual world offers. Edmund encourages his father to play his hand in an attempt to change the subject. Tyrone explains that Mary’s recent relapse is due to her worry about Edmund’s condition, and he reminds his son to “remember she’s not responsible. Once that cursed poison gets a hold on anyone—.” 78 These words set Edmund off and he and his father finally have the argument that they have been avoiding throughout the entire play. Edmund blames his father for Mary’s addiction, asserting that if James had not employed such a cheap doctor to help her after his birth, she would never have been exposed to morphine. Tyrone responds in his defense, claiming that he had been ignorant of the effects of morphine and that he had attempted to find the best doctor he could to help Mary recover. Edmund refuses to believe his defense, and he further blames his father for her condition by asserting that Tyrone had left her to raise her children alone. At this point, Tyrone loses complete control of his temper and blurts out, “Or for that matter, if you insist on judging things she says by what she says when she’s not in her right mind, if you hadn’t been born she’d never—.” 79 He stops before finishing his sentence, but Edmund knows that what James has said rings true. He concedes his father’s point, 77 Ibid., 138. 78 Ibid., 139. 79 Ibid., 142. 171 admitting that he—through no fault of his own—bears some of the responsibility for his mother’s condition. Though Tyrone attempts to take back his harsh words, both he and Edmund have faced an awful truth together, and Edmund seems to feel closer to his father somehow. He says. “I’m like Mama. I can’t help liking you, in spite of everything.” 80 Despite the fact that Edmund and his father have realized a horrible reality of his existence, they find themselves connected in kinship, as they are both culpable for Mary’s condition. Now that the blinders are off, and the two drunk Tyrones are looking boldly at the horrors of existence, they examine another reality, one equally as horrific. Tyrone attempts to comfort his son about his condition, assuring him that if he will follow the doctor’s orders, he will fully recover. Instead of responding to his father’s Socratic optimism, Edmund looks into his father’s heart, “Don’t kid me. You don’t believe that...you think I’m going to die.” 81 As evidence for this claim, Edmund points to the fact that his father is sending him away to the Hilltown Sanatorium, a publicly funded tuberculosis ward instead of a private institution. Edmund asserts that his father does not wish to waste the money for the private sanatorium because he has the Irish belief that consumption is fatal; he would rather send his son to a tax-funded hospital and cut his losses. Tyrone, of course, denies this assertion, but Edmund persists, working himself up into such a rage that he breaks into a fit of coughing. The intensity of Edmund’s speech, coupled with the sound of his coughing, causes James to relent. He tells Edmund that all he desires is for his son to be well, and that he will send Edmund anywhere he wishes to 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid., 143. 172 go in order to recover. James tells his son to have another drink, as a “bracer,” Edmund obeys, and they each have a large glass full of whiskey. Tyrone is now drunkenly “loose-mouthed,” and he begins to tell his son about growing up in poverty, how his father had taken the family to America and then abandoned them to go back to Ireland and commit suicide. As a ten year old boy, Tyrone took a job in a machine shop , working twelve hours a day for fifty cents a week. It was in those days, he claims, that he had learned the value of a dollar. After painting the bleak picture of his upbringing for his son, he reveals something to Edmund that he had never told anyone before because “tonight I’m so heartsick I feel at the end of everything, and what’s the use of fake pride and pretense.” 82 He confesses, That God-damned play I bought for a song and made such a great success in—a great money success—it ruined me with its promise of an easy fortune. I didn’t want to do anything else, and by the time I woke up to the fact I’d become a slave to the damned thing and did try other plays too, it was too late. They had identified me with that one part, and didn’t want me in anything else. And they were right, too. I’d lost the great talent I once had through years of easy repetition, never learning a new part, never really working hard. Thirty-five to forty thousand dollars net profit a season like snapping your fingers! 83 At one point in his early career, Tyrone claims that he had possessed such drive and talent that Edmund Booth, esteemed as one of the greatest American actors, had said of James’ Othello that “That young man is playing Othello better than I ever did!” 84 However, at the age of 27, he purchased the production rights to the play that would make him a matinee icon, and he has spent the rest of his career doing nothing but performing the same role. In the lateness of the hour, exposed by an evening of drinking, James expresses his regret for chasing only money in his artistic career, “I don’t 82 Ibid., 149. 83 Ibid., 149-150. 84 Ibid., 150. 173 know what the hell it was I wanted to buy.” He recognizes how inauthentic his career has been—how he had never actualized his true talent as an actor—and he tells Edmund, “I’d be willing to have no home in the poorhouse in my old age if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been.” 85 James recognizes that his pursuit of an easy fortune has transformed him into an Apollonian, rote performer who might have been artistically significant had he not discovered his signature role. In his honest revelation of himself, brought on by the power of strong drink, Tyrone has revealed something significant of himself to his son, and this boldness has once again bred produced kinship between the two. Edmund says, “I’m glad you’ve told me this, Papa. I know you a lot better now.” 86 Father and youngest son are increasingly facing their demons, and instead of rapidly changing the subject to more pleasant topics in the interest of Apollonian distraction, they continue to face life as it is, though this act is only produced through violent and harsh Dionysian conflict. The men hear Mary moving around upstairs, and Edmund pours himself another drink. After Edmund consumes the whiskey, “his expression changes. When he speaks it is as if he were deliberately giving away to drunkenness and seeking to hide behind a maudlin manner.” 87 In an effort to give his father a window to his soul as Tyrone has given to him, Edmund then delivers his most famous speech of the play, You’ve just told me some high spots in your memories. What to hear mine? They’re all connected with the sea. Here’s one. When I was on the Squarehead trigger rigger, bound for Buenos Aires. Full moon in the Trades. The old hooker driving fourteen knots. I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment 85 Ibid., 151. 86 Ibid., 151. 87 Ibid., 152. 174 I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was so free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within your life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. Then another time, on the American Line, when I was lookout in the crow’s nest in the dawn watch. A calm sea, that time. Only a lazy ground swell and slow drowsy roll of the ship. The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneat me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Behind the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying the tide. Like a saint’s vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble toward nowhere, for no good reason. 88 Esther Olsen points out that this speech is very reminiscent of two passages in Thus Spake Zarathustra (Z III §15, IV §19), in which “he affirmed the joy of life in the moment and enunciated the doctrine of eternal recurrence.” 89 Edmund claims to have briefly found meaning in those moments when he has lost himself in the rhythm of the sea. He describes this state as one of drunkenness, beyond “men’s lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams.” Each of these pejoratives readily describes man’s Apollonian impulses, and in moments when Edmund loses himself in the sea, he sees his connection with all that exists; he realizes the illusion of individuation, and this realization provides momentary peace. At the end of the speech, he remarks that he cannot sustain such peace, because of the power of the Apollonian world in his life, “As 88 Ibid., 153. 89 Esther Olsen, “An Analysis of the Nietzschian Elements in the Plays of Eugene O’Neill,” PhD diss., (University of Minnesota, 1957), 575. 175 it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be

A paradox of American tragedy : Long day's journey into night and the problem of negative emotion in theatrical performance.