Finding the Way to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’: Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House

For O’Neill scholars and theater practitioners who think they know everything about Long Day’s Journey Into Night, I have news for you: there is a new book you need to read. William Davies King’s Finding the Way to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’: Eugene O’Neill and Carlotta Monterey O’Neill at Tao House is a fascinating and unique examination of O’Neill’s masterpiece and the remarkable place in which it was written, Tao House, in Danville, California. This is one of the most enjoyable scholarly books that I have ever read. It is a page-turner. In the wake of King’s critical edition of Long Day’s Journey Into Night (Yale University Press, 2014), his dramaturgical work on Long Day’s Journey, and his own intertextual play, Into Night: A Day at Tao House, King is uniquely equipped to guide us on this journey to Tao House, where Gene wrote those final masterpieces while his health was failing him and America was headed to war.King’s monograph maps an artistic and psycho-geographical journey toward dramatic literature’s masterpiece, written in O’Neill’s final home. But it does more than this. It also illuminates the often-overlooked role of O’Neill’s third wife, Carlotta Monterey O’Neill, as a central collaborator to the Nobel Prize winner’s success. The riveting narrative highlights her work as his typist, business manager, and intellectual partner.The unconventional structure of Finding the Way to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is bold and inventive. The book alternates every other page with the O’Neills’ diary entries and King’s analysis. By creatively placing Carlotta’s and Gene’s accounts next to each other and juxtaposing them with the book’s striking critical analysis, King creates an alternative historical record that resonates with tensions and polysemy. This groundbreaking format, moreover, allows the reader to follow their own path: you can stick with the interchange of Gene and Carlotta’s daily accounts from beginning to end; devote yourself to King’s incisive scholarly analysis; or embrace the interplay of the Tao House voices with King’s investigation. I found myself flipping back and forth, wanting to know how King was going to finish his point, only to be interrupted by Carlotta narrating how many times Gene was trimming the hedge. But then the opposite was also true: I needed to know how Gene was outlining Long Day’s Journey Into Night (or what he was calling “The New London Play”) while writing The Iceman Cometh, or how Carlotta was typing each morning, even as her eyes were hurting.Different fonts are used for each person’s diary entries: American Typewriter for Gene and Times New Roman for Carlotta, while King’s annotations are in italics or brackets. The entries speak for themselves when placed side-by-side. Gene writes in clipped sentences with abbreviations in his work diary, signaling his commitment to playwriting rather than establishing a historical record: “July 29 L.D.J.I.N. (II-2) cool.” Carlotta, however, pens much more:Carlotta’s entries make it clear that she is “on duty,” as she often put it, with exhausting work that included typing, preparing meals, attending to Gene’s various maladies, and running the household. While the hard work at Tao House took its toll on both of them, the duo remained devoted to Long Day’s Journey.This is a densely rich monograph. It consists of an introduction, a summary of Long Day’s Journey Into Night, nine compact chapters, holographs of O’Neill’s uniquely hand-scripted (and minuscule) text, photos, architecture plans, a postscript, two appendices (one that clarifies the people frequently mentioned in the diaries, and another that details the days of working on Long Day’s Journey, which includes not only Gene’s tally, but also Carlotta’s). It concludes with a dynamite bibliography.The first four chapter titles—and, a bit oddly, the eighth chapter—playfully cite Long Day’s Journey Into Night. In the first chapter, “Long . . . How Difficult it is to be Long,” King examines how O’Neill turned away from the eleven-play Cycle to begin other pieces, such as The Iceman Cometh and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, a play in which O’Neill experiments with what it means to “belong” as well as to “be long,” thus “emphasizing the experience of elongation” (19). After working four-and-a-half years on the Cycle, O’Neill ditched the project, which he perceived as “stale,” to turn to Iceman. Then, and only then, could he devote himself to his masterpiece, a play he could only write at Tao House at this particular moment in his life with Carlotta at his side. In writing Long Day’s Journey, Gene turns back in time to 1912, the year when he was suffering from tuberculosis, just as his writing life was being consumed by a misdiagnosed tremor and other ailments. King clarifies: “Gene sensed he was nearing the end of his career, perhaps even the end of his life, on that June day in 1939, when he cut ties to the interminable Cycle. His body was sending disturbing signals, in the form of an uncontrollable tremor in his hands, that it was giving up on him as a writer, and writing possessed his life” (19). Time was of the essence while writing Long Day’s Journey, a play that tracks time by containing the action within just one day.The second chapter, “. . . Day’s . . . Diary of a Day’s Journey,” ruminates on the significance of the days leading to O’Neill’s pivot to his masterpiece. King provides background on the O’Neills’ arrival on the West Coast (first in Seattle, where he received the news of winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, then northern California) and the construction of Tao House—a project that Carlotta oversaw. Recovering from a ruptured appendix and subsequent complications, O’Neill was unable to write for some months. Then, in June 1937, King observes, O’Neill had an epiphany, which he wrote in his Work Diary: “‘New Idea for Play—1 day—symbolical idea—work on notes for it—grand to feel creative mind alive again.’ That phrase, ‘1 day,’ meaning that the play would take place all in one day, makes clear the rebound from the epic Cycle” (29). Explicating the significance of the temporal motif, King also maps the influence of Shakespeare and Joyce, who wrote literary works that occur within a single day.Chapter 3, “. . . Journey . . . The Arrival of Iceman,” charts the writing of Long Day’s Journey after The Iceman Cometh. But the chapter is also about Carlotta’s talents as a homemaker in conceiving of and creating Tao House. This is where King honors Carlotta’s work, observing that “Tao House was her masterpiece, just as Long Day’s Journey was his” (51). King confronts biographers who have cast Carlotta in a harsh light, especially in portraying her as the nagging wife and Gene as the blameless victim: “Carlotta left plenty of evidence that her character was flawed, and those flaws worsened as she aged. But evidence is available to show that Gene’s character was also deeply flawed, and that it worsened with age” (53). From the diaries we also learn that Gene was suffering from back pain, and getting “shots” from Dukie (the nickname for his doctor, Charles A. Dukes) for pain and stress. Distraught with the news of the war in Europe, Gene took a two-month hiatus from writing Long Day’s Journey. The journey, King shows, was long indeed, taking 147 days to write; but the emotional journey was epic as well.With chapter 4, King takes us “Into . . . the Makings of a Carlotta.” Born Hazel Tharsing, Carlotta Monterey crafted her persona to benefit her budding career as an actress and model. King mentions, but does not dwell upon, Carlotta’s three marriages before Gene and their first meeting in 1922 on the set of The Hairy Ape (she played Mildred). Instead, King draws our attention away from the salacious and toward the evidence of the couple’s joint work produced in California: “The Tao House years brought out the best of what the marriage of opposites could be, and they also produced the finest inscription, the one affixed to Long Day’s Journey, which forever puts Carlotta in the play, as a muse or guardian spirit, an example, a beacon” (97). Rather than see Carlotta as merely a beauty queen and seductress who ensnared Gene, King points out that O’Neill benefited from Carlotta’s support and money.Chapters 5 (“A House / A Marriage”) and 6 (“The Tao of Tao House”) focus on how vital Tao House and Carlotta were to Gene’s writing of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. In 1937, work on Tao House began, and its Chinese influences came largely from Carlotta, who oversaw the project, and whose interests in Asian history, art, and architecture shaped its creation. Tao House embodies this influence, with its Chinese characters on the front gate door (that incorrectly bid welcome), the Asian decor, and the feng shui layout of the home. The hybrid style, King writes, is not unlike a fretful blended family: “The house seems to struggle with itself, to colonize and yet be invaded. It’s an uneasy marriage. It is multicultural and yet doggedly individualistic. In a word, it is California” (131). Carlotta had a role to play not only in the design of the home but also in the creation of Long Day’s Journey. And, in addition to being a contained space of creativity, King shows, Tao House was also a performative memory machine.King charts the architectural and artistic taoist flows of their home, noting the irony that “on the whole, and certainly in the end, family was not a generator of tao for the O’Neills” (147).Chapter 7 examines the “Wrong Ways” of the thousand days spent at Tao House, 147 of which were devoted to writing Long Day’s Journey. King chronicles Gene’s heartbreaking deterioration: his prostatitis (infection of the prostate gland), depression, a debilitating tremor, and other physical maladies. “Without losing sight of the play as an achieved masterpiece, we can also read it as a realized nightmare, the neurotic breakdown of a damaged man. Catastrophe is not just imminent, it is commencing here, and this is a disaster zone in the making” (183). Indeed, disaster is not an exaggeration, as the marriage fell apart, their cherished dog Blemie died, and writing became nearly impossible.In chapter 8, “. . . Into Night . . . The Way to War,” King posits that we can think of Long Day’s Journey Into Night as a war play, having been written not only on the cusp of World War II but also because it “can be seen as a way of facing the war, even fighting it” (223). Gene’s “war obsession,” as he wrote to his son Eugene Jr., was “like acid eating my brain” (229). King shows that Gene turned this obsession into documenting his childhood trauma—with all its emotional battlefields—into Long Day’s Journey, which is set on the cusp of another war: World War I. While writing Long Day’s Journey, Gene struggled with health problems, something Carlotta observed years later in her diary, as she was rereading their entries: “I find them interesting because they show the ghastly decline of his strength and health—that creeping destruction!” (224). King highlights how while writing Long Day’s Journey Gene also jotted down ideas for three other plays that addressed the unfolding war, especially the rise of fascism: “The Visit of Malatesta,” “The 13th Apostle” (later changed to “The Last Conquest”), and “Blind Alley Guy” (231).The final chapter, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night . . . The Way to the World,” investigates the “marital dysfunction and the misery of ill health” that occurred after Gene and Carlotta moved away from Tao House to New York, Marblehead, and, finally, Boston (263). Archival evidence shows with brutal honesty that things between the couple were abusive and disastrous; a divorce seemed imminent. Yet, Gene’s poor health made it impossible to live without a caretaker—without Carlotta. “In a gesture of re-commitment, he rewrote his will to leave her everything, including his literary estate. She became the authority over his authorship” (263). Carlotta cultivated his papers at Yale, and, disregarding the twenty-five-year waiting period, she oversaw the publication of Long Day’s Journey, which came out two years after Gene died. Her insistence on including Gene’s inscription to her, King writes, reinstalled Tao House as part of the play, as he signed it “Gene / Tao House” (263). A particularly moving passage is when King narrates his encounter with the original Long Day’s Journey manuscript in the O’Neill Collection at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library: “The handwriting is unbelievably small and faint. You can almost see the tiny granules of graphite holding unsteadily to the paper to give minimal shape to a word. A breath—entropy itself—will bring this manuscript closer to the illegible, to oblivion” (267). Here we can see how King attends to details with lyrical prose. The chapter concludes with analysis of O’Neill’s final play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, which King sees as a play in which Gene seeks atonement for his portrayal of Jamie in Long Day’s Journey.King’s meticulous historical research and beautifully written prose reveal a behind-the-scenes account of O’Neill’s struggle to write “a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood,” just as his body made that writing nearly impossible. Tao House, designed and managed by Carlotta, made that masterly work possible. It is a book that I simply could not put down. Finding the Way to ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is a major scholarly contribution to US drama and history and a book you will want on your shelf.