Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (10 page)

But the play moves toward utterance. Consider this conversation between James Tyrone and his son Jamie:

Tyrone: Yes, this time you can see how strong and sure of herself she is. She's a different woman entirely from the other times. She has control of her nerves—or she had until Edmund got sick. I wish to God we could keep the truth from her, but we can't if he

has to be sent to a sanatorium. What makes it worse is her father
         
died of consumption. She worshiped him and she's never forgot-

ten. Yes, it will be hard for her. But she can do it! She has the will power now! We must help her, Jamie, in every way we can! jamie:
(Moved)
Of course, Papa.
(Hesitantly)
Outside of nerves, she seems perfectly all right this morning. Tyrone:
(With hearty confidence now)
Never better. She's full of fun and mischief.
(Suddenly he frowns at Jamie suspiciously)
Why do you say, seems? Why shouldn't she be all right? What
         
the hell do you mean?

jamie: Don't start jumping down my throat! God, Papa, this ought
         
to be one thing we can talk over frankly without a battle.

TYRONE: I'm sorry, Jamie.
(Tensely)
But go on and tell me— jamie: There's nothing to tell. I was all wrong. It's just that last
         
night—Well, you know how it is, I can't forget the past. I can't

help being suspicious. Any more than you can.
(Bitterly)
That's the hell of it. And it makes it hell for Mama! She watches us watching her—(37-38)

It is as if the so-called present tense were a mirage, because you are constantly on the lookout for the insidious signs of the past.

Later in this book, an entire chapter is devoted to the issue
of diagnosis,
but it is worth underscoring here just how central (and destabilizing) diat drive is in O'Neill's play, yielding a kind of medical scrutiny of each other that is all the more unbearable because of the emotional ties between the watchers and the watched.

O'Neill indulges in stage directions which doubtless seem tiresome to today's readers, but they are the indispensable markers of precipitous change and alteration. We know that O'Neill experimented with some of the conventions of Greek tragedy in earlier plays such as
Mourning Becomes Electra,
and that an ambitious work such as
The Great God Brown
seeks to reinstate the convention of Greek masks as conveyors of senti-

ment.
Long Day's Journey into Night
brilliantly reconceives the Greek masks, by offering us a human visage that is in almost constant metamorphosis as it reflects its many moods, as it performs its dance in time. Sometimes it is all in the stage directions themselves:
"He gives her a kiss. Her face lights up with a charming, shy embarrassment. Suddenly and startlingly one sees in her face the girl she had once been, not a ghost of the past, but still a living part of her"
(28). At other times, we see it as a kind of verbal and facial ballet, the kind of thing only a great actress can pull off, as indeed Katharine Hepburn (who seems to have been born for this role) did in one filmed version of the play:

Tyrone:
(With dull anger)
I understand that I've been a Goddamned fool to believe in you!
(He walks away from her to pour himself a big drink)

mary:
(Her face again in stubborn defiance.)
I don't know what you mean by "believing in me." All I've felt was distrust and spying and suspicion.
(Then accusingly)
Why are you having another drink? You never have more than one before lunch.
(Bitterly)
I know what to expect. You will be drunk tonight. Well, it won't be the first time, will it—or the thousandth?
(Again she bursts out pleadingly)
Oh, James, please! You don't understand! I'm so worried about Edmund! I'm so afraid he—

TYRONE: I don't want to listen to your excuses, Mary.

mary:
(Strickenly)
Excuses? You mean—? Oh, you can't believe that of me! You mustn't believe that, James!
(Then slipping away into her strange detachment
—
quite casually)
Shall we not go into lunch, dear? I don't want anything but I know you're hungry.
(He walks slowly to where she stands in the doorway. He walks like an old man. As he reaches her she bursts out piteously)
James! I tried so hard! I tried so hard! Please believe—!

Tyrone:
(Moved in spite of himself—helplessly)
I suppose you did, Mary.
(Then grief-strickenly)
For the love of God, why couldn't you have the strength to keep on?

MARY:
(Her face setting into that stubborn denial again)
I don't know what you're talking about. Have the strength to keep on what? (69-70)

There is a very dark moment in August Strindberg's hallucinatory late play,
The Ghost Sonata,
when the theory is put forth that language is always and ever a form of lying, with the corollary that people who know and live with one another turn ultimately silent, because they can no longer lie successfully, because each of them is so transparent to the other, by dint of time. O'Neill has taken this grim concept and released the poetry in it, by putting on stage a family that knows—of course they know! don't we always know the ugly truths of those we live with?— everything about one another, but keeps on talking nonetheless, keeps on with the endless performance of saving face, denying reality, turning on the other, emitting the poison, withdrawing, pulling back. The play codes this rhythmic dynamic as
fog
and
foghorn,
as the desire to withdraw into private fantasy and darkness, to a place where we can no longer be reached or hurt—and the morphine and the alcohol are our ticket to that place—counterpointed by the no less powerful opposing tug into reality, into recognition and light, out of the fog and into recognizing the horror of what life has done.

Pain and suffering are O'Neill's theme song, just as they are James Baldwin's, but it becomes stereophonic in
Long Day's Journey into Night,
an affective roller coaster through time and space, so that all the ghosts of the past make their presence known: Tyrone's impoverished childhood, his miserliness; Mary's memories of the convent, her desire to be a pianist or a nun; Jamie's expulsion from school, his descent into drink and whoring and boundless cynicism; Edmund's fragile health, his desperate adventures, his tumultuous self-exploration; and then the deforming accidents: Jamie's (intentional?) infecting of the infant brother Eugene with his measles, leading to the baby's death; Mary's unbearable pain in childbirth—giving birth to Edmund—leading to the quack doctor's morphine prescription, leading to her condition as a

"dope fiend." All this, and much more, is flushed out in the open in this single day in a summer house, flushed out because it has been surreptitiously humming and buzzing there all along, moving ever more potently toward expression.

All of the Tyrones are scarred and formed by their pasts, and in the course of the play this occulted material moves from echo and refrain, a foghorn in the distance, to overt utterance, reaching its operatic crescendo in the final scene where each Tyrone confronts his or her ghosts and demons, and shares this confrontation with the others. James reveals to Edmund the act of complacency and cowardice that kept him a matinee idol rather than becoming the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day; Edmund articulates the epiphanic visions he has had during his seafaring days, confirms his identity as stammering poet; Jamie tells Edmund to beware, that he hates him as much as he loves him, that he has intentionally poisoned his values, that he wants his younger brother to fail (just as he has); and, grand finale, Mary, moving ever more fully into the morphine-fog, remembers the innocence of her convent days while she seeks for her lost soul. Each of these characters has needed considerable lubrication to arrive at these utterances, whether in the form of copious alcohol installments or repeated morphine doses. But their actions are cathartic, just as Sonny's blues are cathartic, inasmuch as the curtain at last lifts up fully on their damaged histories, illuminating the defining wounds that continue to bleed through their present-day speech, behavior, and interactions.

"Interactions" seems such a poor term to convey the sheer emotional
traffic
that O'Neill's play stages for us, as if the life of a family were exactly that: traffic, incessant circulation and interweaving, a quasi-molecular or -cellular picture of our place within the whole, but exposed and lit in such a way that we see the whirling molecules themselves, as visible and materially present as the fog itself. Such a scheme announces that the individual actor is always/already
permeated
with the life of the others, not merely their contemporary existence, but the whole dreadful sweep of their transactions over time.
Long Day's

Journey into Night
reveals the sticky glue that joins me to you, as if life in the family were a form of flypaper, a morass of sorts in which each figure is stuck, where your skin is attached to me, so that all the desired hegemony I claim for myself turns out to be a mirage.

That is what this family knows: Tyrone's childhood penury is
their
legacy; Mary's morphine habit is on
their
plate; Jamie's cynicism is
their
cross; Edmund's consumption writes large
their
history: past, present, and future. The notion that your life could have clean contours is as naive as thinking you can track a
single thread
in the fabric you are wearing. We are made up of one another, despite appearances to the contrary. O'Neill shows this by sounding it. In doing so, he utterly cashiers the "realist" assumptions that many ascribe to him—after all, the dramaturgy itself does not seem revolutionary—by crafting a theatrical language to show how utterly saturated and infiltrated we are with one another. Living in a family reconceives the scream that goes through the house, refracts this plaint into a chorus of blood-related voices, each filled with the other, each extending back over time, each woven by O'Neill's genius into a dramatic tapestry that is unsurpassed in pathos and gathering power.

Let me close my discussion of O'Neill by again acknowledging the sepia, perhaps dated aura of the play. This story of two older adults and two grown-up children living and breaking bread together in the same house hardly seems a story for our time of vacated nests and hustling professionals. Likewise, it is a wonder that the text is not simply banned from the curriculum because of its humongous alcohol consumption, given today's culture of chemical dependency warnings (what would O'Neill have thought of this term?) and drinking disorders, given how acutely medicalized our vision of older social rituals has become. All this gave me considerable pause when I put this text in my university course on Literature and Medicine, but the result was not what I anticipated. My students had no trouble at all negotiating O'Neill's version of damaged families and problems of addiction. Moreover, several pointed out the (unaccented) gender dimensions of the play, especially concern-

ing the bereftness of Mary—lonely figure without "home," without friends, without resources, obliged to beg the servant girl to keep her company as she waits for the fog to set in—as contrasted with the drinking and carousing male figures, bathed in a kind of camaraderie that O'Neill simply took for granted, able to go to bars or brothels or clubs, reassembled at play's end to share their grief and solace with one another as Mary departs from their midst.

Above all, these students were attuned to the familial melody that plays throughout the piece, the ways in which each person's pain was an integral part of another's life. It seems to me that that is perhaps O'Neill's ultimate gift: to make us actually hear the plaint of our loved ones, to make it real at last. At one juncture in the play, Mary (who has the most comprehensive, and therefore forgiving, view of anyone in the play) rehearses for Edmund the sad fact that his father had to go to work in a machine shop when he was only ten years old, at which Edmund grouses, "Oh, for Pete's sake, Mama, I've heard Papa tell that machine shop story ten thousand times." Mary's reply is undemonstrative but it cuts to the bone: "Yes, dear, you've had to listen, but I don't think you've ever tried to understand" (117).

This line—and this play—made me think back to my own family, especially to my dead father, about whom the equally cliched story was that he had had to go to work at the age of six. Six. I too have heard this story ten thousand times, and, now, twenty years after his death, I could wish that my mother had told me what Mary told Edmund: you've had to listen, but have you ever understood? I don't think I ever did. I know I didn't. Other than in that halfway measure of all lazy conceptualizing, by which the key facts of our lives are there, all right, but there as dead letters, as inert data, never opened up as language of the heart, as indeed one of the keys to my father's life.
Long Day's Journey into Night
stirred me in just this way, caused me to grasp something of the deafness and thickness that wall us off from one another, a kind of perceptual and moral plaque that fills up our emotional arteries and veins, preventing the flow of blood and sympathy, occluding those passageways that

could link us together. O'Neill has opened them up, so that the flow of sentience goes through them, and even though his play is a long, heavy, and ponderous read or evening in the theater, it is anything but morbid: it vitalizes us by making its people finally alive to one another. In this, art's work is done.

MAKING THE SCREAM VISIBLE: EDVARD MUNCH

Blake's "London" articulates urban and cultural disease in terms of victimization and "marking," and he succeeds in transforming private suffering into public and political indictment, so that it may at last become visible and legible. It is an affair of voice and metaphor. We call this piece "visionary," but have only the words encoded in a sixteen-line poem. But what would urban plague
look like?
Could the narrative of human feeling and illness actually be
shown?
The work of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is richly cued to the governing premises in this argument, because Munch's entire long career is devoted to finding a pictorial language for binding moments of intense emotion. Who else has tided his pictures
The Scream
or
Jealousy ox Anxiety?