conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first three paragraphs for a book with the title 'Long Day's Journey into Night'?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Long Day's Journey into Night
  At the time he took his early notes on what he would later call "The Story of the Birth of a Soul," he was thirty-eight and acknowledged as America's foremost playwright, the first to achieve world-wide recognition.1 He had been writing plays for fourteen years and producing full-length plays since 1920. He was ranging widely and probing deeply in quest of an approach to drama that would put him among the defining figures of modern art.2 He wished to leave behind what he understood to be the triviality and commercialism of Broadway, which he called the "Show Shop" (a place to cobble together goods for quick sale).3 Instead, he sought to follow the model of the Titan artist, creating for himself (and incidentally the audience) works of magnitude, deep meaning, power, and truth, all the terms associated with greatness in art since Aeschylus, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Strindberg, and many other immortals he admired.4 A shop is also necessary for that sort of work—plays are built as well as envisioned—and O'Neill had assembled the proper tools and learned the skills. He had also paid attention to the question of what an audience would accept, but art—not profit—was his motive. As early as 1914, at age twenty-five, he declared, "I want to be an artist or nothing" (see also "Documentary Chronology"), and that remained his resolve even after the royalties began flooding in.5 His vision was bold, his attitude uncompromising, and his ambition nothing less than epochal—to re-make tragedy for the twentieth century. In a letter of 1928 he expressed this goal, saying that he was trying to
  Just as he began to see the possibility of reaching his aspiration, O'Neill realized that his chief obstacle would be himself. A worsening tremor in his hands made it clear that his future as a writer had a limit. His periodic drinking was compulsive and becoming more intrusive on his domestic tranquility and creative energy. He turned to doctors and psychiatrists for ways to overcome his deteriorating mental and physical health, but even as he turned forty he had to face his own mortality.7 It seemed a proper time to take account of his life, and he found an image of himself as the son of a "sea-mother," a voyaging artist born out of early experience with the maternal and the nautical, mythically combined into one. Early in the 1920s, in three short years, O'Neill had lost all his immediate family members—first father, then mother, then brother—and shortly afterward had recognized that his drinking was setting him on a death course. (See "On Drinking and Addiction.") He put alcohol aside in 1926 and rededicated himself to writing with confidence that he could, with his talent and determination, create a body of work, a legacy in drama, that would defy oblivion, if only he could rise above the fear of his own end.
  The more widely recognized O'Neill became, the more he withdrew into privacy, even isolation. The circumstances of his childhood and youth had not been happy, with many conflicts and agonizing episodes. But the loss of his parents and brother and the awareness of his own death wish led him to recognize himself as a man caught in tragic circumstances, not unlike a character in one of his own plays, such as the self-obliterating Edmund, who calls himself "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 little in love with death!" ().10 O'Neill's height as an artist depended on the depths into which he was willing to go, but those depths could doom his ascent. The collateral facts of being already, by the early 1920s, prosperous, admired, settled in a decent marriage, blessed with children, and living in a series of beautiful homes did not stave off the overwhelming shame, guilt, self-hatred, and fear of death to which he was subject. Doris Alexander argues that O'Neill again became suicidal after the 1923 death of his brother, Jamie, and that he was "painfully alive to his tragic heritage from Jamie. He had actually experienced in himself Jamie's tragic rush toward death and the pangs of his corroded genius."11 These feelings made O'Neill a difficult man to know and love at times, but they also constituted the raw material of his art. His plays became the instruments to transform these disturbed emotions into works of permanent importance.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs? End with the sentence ' That Mary is doomed to return to the influence of morphine is inscribed in the dramatic logic of the character, but every performer of this role must discover a specific unfolding.'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Yet it is only by means of some form of "super-naturalism" that we may express in the theater what we comprehend intuitively of that self-defeating self-obsession which is the discount we moderns have to pay for the loan of life. The old "naturalism"—or "realism" if you prefer... no longer applies. It represents our Fathers' daring aspirations toward self-recognition by holding the family kodak up to ill-nature. But to us their old audacity is blague; we have taken too many snap-shots of each other in every graceless position; we have endured too much from the banality of surfaces. We are ashamed of having peeked through so many keyholes, squinting always at heavy, uninspired bodies—the fat facts—with not a nude spirit among them; we have been sick with appearances and are convalescing; we "wipe out and pass on" to some as yet unrealized region where our souls, maddened by loneliness and the ignoble inarticulateness of flesh, are slowly evolving their new language of kinship.12
  The romantic values of Tyrone's theater, in which the battle between good and evil is often conceived as a conflict of hero and villain, with the villain always losing, present a myth aligned with idealism. His sons adopt instead the pessimistic outlook of the decadent writers, and Mary has her own form of idealism in the remnants of her Catholic faith, which aims at separation from the fallen world. At the start, Tyrone believes he is the realization of an American success story, an embodiment of national ideals. He has freed himself from poverty by adapting to his American environment, refashioning himself as a hero, and fulfilling the promise by getting rich. In the process, he flatters himself for having married a woman who upholds idealism in her religious and cultural values, establishing a home sweet home, and earning friends and respect as a successful artist.
  Of course, his sons radically disagree, seeing him instead as a figure of greed, materialism, self-indulgence, egotism, and fakery—an embodiment of the sordid reality behind capitalistic enterprise. Mary, too, has lost her romantic belief in her husband, adopting a sometimes harshly realist view of his behavior. Productions that concentrate on Tyrone often seem to explore the possibility that the seed of tragedy in this family can be found in his success story, a version of the American Dream that the play might be construed to criticize—even in the rueful words of Tyrone himself ("What the hell was it that I wanted to buy..." []). The way Edmund hears his father's saga, with amused pity at the cruel joke that life plays on us, seems to promote this Tyrone-centered perspective on the play. What Tyrone has "never admitted... to anyone before" (), the recognition that he sold his soul by misusing his talent for profit, begins a sequence of revelations that all members of the family have lost their souls because of conditions in the modern world (materialistic values; chemical substitutes for vitality; abandonment of spirituality for sensuality, pride for self-hatred, beauty for decadence, and family for ego). These revelations might be the "secret" Edmund sees and enables us to see in his play. Perhaps by the end of the play, having witnessed the disconnection between the heroic and the pathetic in his family, Tyrone himself sees the need for that "new language of kinship" called for by O'Neill.14
  Productions that center on Mary tend to view her downfall as the most extreme and poignant of the four characters, thus conceiving the play more as a tragedy than a critique. Over the course of the play we assemble an image of Mary in the past as a victim, which is how she perceives herself. Formerly a figure of innocence and purity, faith in the church, love of music, and family unity, she then descended into a lonely, godless, inauthentic, and degraded world in which drug addiction barely masks the pain of alienation from her sense of self. Try as she may, she is unable to escape this overwhelming condition of downfall into a dark and deceptive world. A crucial question, to which different performers have given different answers, is how active she is in this descent. Is she weak, a liar, helpless in the face of circumstances that doom her? Is she, like Edmund, coping with the condition of a transformed modern world from which God and beauty and meaning somehow vanished, along with love? Or is she someone who uses a facade of innocence to mask her angry rejection of the demanding world and her preference for release into chemical solitude?
  O'Neill does not specify when Mary takes the first dose of morphine in this particular relapse. From the very beginning of the play, Mary is an object of scrutiny who is herself obsessively concerned about her appearance, but she might already have something to conceal. Did she use the drug the previous night in the spare room or that morning before breakfast in order to keep up an illusion of calmness in the face of stressful circumstances? Has she been discreetly and unobtrusively using the drug for days or even weeks to help her cope with Edmund's gradually worsening health? Or is the first act of the play the occasion when relapse becomes unavoidable? Each performer must develop a sense of the emotional logic leading to her break with the family's wishes, and the potential effect of a mind-altering substance must be factored into every moment of the performance.19 O'Neill's initial scenario of the play suggests that she has already reverted to her drug habit, driven by worry over Edmund's health. But an undated note in 1940, in the midst of drafting the play, gives a different sequence of events and a different pattern of causality, so that during the preceding night, "she had been frantic—given in—gone to bathroom, spareroom—then, thinking of Edmund, for his sake had conquered craving which was brought on by continual worry about him—at end, she tells Edmund this—he wants believe but can't help suspecting—it is this lack of faith in her, combined with growing fear, which makes her give in" (see the "Documentary Chronology").20 Even if this was the way O'Neill intended the drama to be perceived at one moment, we must take note of the fact that O'Neill does not make this dramatic logic explicit in the final version of the play. That Mary is doomed to return to the influence of morphine is inscribed in the dramatic logic of the character, but every performer of this role must discover a specific unfolding.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last five paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Surely he is a fine man as men go, and can look back to a long life in which he has kept an honorable faith and labored hard to get from nothing to the best attainment he knew. Surely the finest test of that attainment is the great affection and respect that all bear him who knew him. I don't believe he ever hurt a living thing intentionally. And he has certainly been a husband to marvel at, and a good father, according to his lights. I know those are the conventional virtues that are inscribed on tombstones—but he is the one person in a million who deserves them. Perhaps these virtues are so common in cemeteries because they are so rare in life. At any rate, looking at it dispassionately, he seems to me a good man—in the best sense of the word—and about the only one I have ever known.
  Then why should he suffer so—when murderers are granted the blessing of electric chairs? Mankind—and myself—seem to me meaningless gestures, to be mocked at with gales of dreary laughter.49
  This production's predilection for putting the actors in physical contact with each other continues with Edmund's encounter with Jamie near the end of act 4. Jonathan Haugen has taken the dissipation of Jamie Tyrone to an extreme degree, which makes Edmund seem all the more sober and able as he takes in the pathos of his ruined brother. O'Neill's patience with Jamie O'Neill and any sympathy for him vanished after their mother died in 1922. Jamie had been "on the wagon" since their father died in 1920 and became a close companion to his mother, but after her death, he took up drinking again with a morbid drive. His self-hatred turned to poison, and he died of alcohol-related illness in less than two years. He was 45. Eugene could not then or later forgive him for being not just "a little in love with death" but openly suicidal and abusive of all others in the process.
  Edmund has also been drinking excessively on this day, especially considering his physical condition, but this production seems to show him grow increasingly clear-headed and capable, especially in comparison to Jamie but also his mother and father.
  An excellent source for bibliography, information, documents, media, and many other sources on O'Neill is the website privately maintained by Dr. Harley Hammerman, eOneill.com.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a category for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A category could be '2nd Edition book'