Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill
2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 35; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/eugeoneirevi.35.1.0079
ISSN2161-4318
Autores Tópico(s)American and British Literature Analysis
ResumoScholarship has not heretofore linked Thomas Wolfe and Eugene O'Neill and their masterpieces, Look Homeward, Angel and Long Day's Journey Into Night, yet significant inferences may be made from their intertextuality. Both works have been taken or mistaken for works of pure autobiography, but recent scholarship on O'Neill's play has put the focus on the ways O'Neill partially fictionalized his family into the Tyrones, using whatever would serve his art, which might include elements of his reading.1 The actual and intertextual connections between the novelist and the playwright, subtly ironic, invite speculation concerning bilateral influence, inspiration, and tribute in their two celebrated works. Wolfe seems to have admired O'Neill enough to have named his protagonist after him, and O'Neill, after Wolfe's death, seems to have closely echoed particular portions, specifically chapters 34 and 39, of Wolfe's long first novel in his greatest play. Uncovering these Wolfe–O'Neill biographical and textual intersections reveals not only an unrecognized possible source of some of O'Neill's raw material and his genius in transformative invention but also may explain some of the misconceptions and mysteries associated with Long Day's Journey Into Night. O'Neill's access to details in Wolfe's novel and his subsequent similar use of them suggest a canny transformation of his reading material and also document possible sources found in Wolfe's art instead of O'Neill's life for the Tyrone family drama. That scholars have not yet recognized these intertextualities may be attributed to their working in the separate areas of American fiction and drama.That Wolfe named his protagonist after O'Neill is evident in the special notice he takes of O'Neill in his novels, plays, and letters; biographies and related documents about Wolfe also clearly record Wolfe's admiration of O'Neill and other connections between the two writers. For example, Charmian Green writes about the influence of O'Neill's expressionism on Wolfe's play Mannerhouse and novel Look Homeward, Angel.2 Only a few such linkages of these writers appear in the O'Neill archive or scholarship. Louis Sheaffer and Arthur and Barbara Gelb mention Wolfe only in passing in their biographies of O'Neill. Sheaffer quotes Hamilton Basso's reflections on the similarity of authors and their characters, identifying Wolfe as “an obvious example” of “a person out of … his books.”3 Sheaffer and the Gelbs quote Wolfe's descriptions of George Pierce Baker, depicted as Professor Hatcher in the autobiographical Of Time and the River, only to provide a thumbnail sketch of Baker, not to link Wolfe and O'Neill.4 However, Wolfe was constantly conscious of O'Neill's alumni status in the course each took with Baker at different times. He followed his growing fame and his transformation of American drama into a serious art. Hoping to follow him in this respect, Wolfe also revealed a conflicted attitude, both admiring and envious, toward O'Neill.The connection seems to have mattered more to Wolfe than it did to O'Neill but may have been more important for the latter than previously noticed, especially regarding some of the negative characteristics and behaviors of the patriarch James Tyrone in Long Day's Journey relating to his stinginess in the play, which contradicts the generosity of James O'Neill as he was known to his friends and family.5 Although Green argues that O'Neill influenced Wolfe, she and others have not seemed to notice that Wolfe may have contributed posthumously to Long Day's Journey. If so, the name of O'Neill could be added to Robert Morgan's list in his introduction to Scribner's 2006 trade paperback edition of Look Homeward, Angel of prominent writers whom Wolfe influenced, making O'Neill the only playwright on the list.6Scattered throughout the lengthy novels of Wolfe are brief mentions of O'Neill's name as though American drama and O'Neill are inseparable. In Of Time and the River, volume 1, when Eugene Gant, the alias of Wolfe, begins graduate work in Hatcher's course, he recalls Hatcher's dropping O'Neill's name in class and his pleasure in receiving “a letter … from 'Gene O'Neill.” In volume 2 of the novel, Eugene Gant visits friends in upstate New York, reads his play to them, and is extravagantly praised with a comparison to O'Neill: “Eugene! … It's simply magnificent! … It's easily the greatest play any one in this country ever wrote…. There's nothing else to touch it … it's miles ahead of O'Neill,” revealing Wolfe's dream of competing with the established playwright whose name represents American drama to him in all his lists of international plays and playwrights.7 In The Web and the Rock George Webber, Wolfe's autobiographical central character now renamed, derides a man who “sneered” at O'Neill. When George lists the voluminous quantities of plays he would devour in a fantasized library in New York, O'Neill is the only American writer in the list of eleven dramatists. When the character Esther Jack, alias for Aline Bernstein, George's (Wolfe's) lover and benefactor, takes him for the first time to her theater, the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, but must leave him temporarily to attend to performance matters, the ill-at-ease George overhears “theatre intellectuals” talking in the lobby. Their condescending remarks on an uptown play's being “a rather good O'Neill” elicits his heated, unspoken response: The remark about it's [sic] being “a rather good O'Neill” angered him because of its implied patronage; and although he himself had been skeptical and critical of the playwright, he now found himself rushing hotly to the man's defense, feeling that a genuine creative talent was being patronized and smoothly patted on the head and dismissed by some bloodless and talentless nonentity. In describing the revue on stage in the theater at that performance George notices one element as “a parody of one of O'Neill's plays.” Later he disapproves of the odious Seamus Malone, who “has not a word of approbation for any of the famous authors” including O'Neill.8 At the end of Wolfe's You Can't Go Home Again, ostensibly explaining himself to his editor, Fox, alias for Wolfe's first editor, Maxwell Perkins, George further censures the sneering of his early New York acquaintances who say, “O'Neill's reputation was grossly exaggerated; his dialogue was clumsy, and his characters stock types.”9Wolfe's plays, although not published in his lifetime and probably not available to O'Neill, also contain evidences of Wolfe's awareness that O'Neill was his model of a successful American playwright, a revered idol. For example, Pat Ryan, in the introduction to the volume that contains both the one-act and three-act versions of Wolfe's The Mountains, quotes from a deleted section of O Lost!, the original and uncut version of Look Homeward, Angel, that deals with the attempt of Eugene Gant, the protagonist, to write folk plays in a playwriting class where O'Neill was considered a model.10 In scene 6 of Welcome to Our City, Mrs. Rutledge, coaching plays for the local Drama League, announces her intention to produce O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon.11 In Gentlemen of the Press, Red, a writer for a small-town newspaper, who is satirized in the play, hopes to write “the hit of the century … the greatest story since The Count of Monte Cristo!”12 Wolfe was probably thinking of the famous stage vehicle of James O'Neill, Eugene's actor-father.Wolfe's letters also reveal his admiration for O'Neill and his plays, and those writing to Wolfe know that he is pleased to hear about O'Neill and to be linked to him. On November 13, 1921, he wrote from Cambridge to a friend that he was “stirred and moved” by “what is probably our greatest native play, Eugene O'Neill's Beyond the Horizon.”13 To Margaret Roberts, of the private school in Asheville, North Carolina, which Wolfe attended, he writes in February 1922: I agree with you about Eugene O'Neill. He's the beacon light in our own drama to-day: he's kept his ideals and now seems in a fair way to prosper by them. Two new plays of his are shortly to come to New York; “Anna Christie” is there now enjoying a popular success. I saw “Beyond the Horizon” not long ago. It is a fine play. O'Neill is still a young man, c. 35, I think. I don't believe he has reached his greatest development yet. When it comes!14 Roberts writes a challenge to Wolfe in December 1922: “Can you write a play as good as ‘The Hairy Ape’? O'Neil[l] is coming—and coming fast, don't you think?” In July 1924, she writes that Frederick H. Koch, founder of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, “is very enthusiastic about you, and to me he seemed whole heartedly so very much so. He says you are going ahead of Eugene O'Neal [sic]–and that your new play is a remarkable piece of work.”15 To Edwin Greenlaw, chair of the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Wolfe's alma mater, Wolfe writes in March 1922, “If we have three or four men of the caliber of Eugene O'Neill, each with a capacity for a different form, our drama has arrived.” To his sister Mabel Wolfe Wheaton, Wolfe writes on February 13, 1929: “On Sunday night I was lucky enough to be invited to the Dress Rehearsal of ‘Dynamo,’ O'Neill's new play, at the Theatre Guild.”16 To his mother in October 1925, Wolfe writes: “Kenneth McGowan [sic], who, in company with Eugene O'Neill, our foremost dramatist, and Robert E Jones, our best scene designer, runs the Provincetown Theatre, wrote me the other day asking for my old play and for my new one.”17 Wolfe's plays were never accepted for professional production, but his association with these two theaters and with Macgowan, with whom O'Neill worked closely, is evidence for O'Neill's probable awareness of Wolfe even before publication of Look Homeward, Angel and Wolfe's subsequent celebrity. To Aline Bernstein, Wolfe writes in August 1928 of his German experience, again mentioning his idol: “There is a year when everyone … goes to see a Play by O'Neill.”18As one of the founders of and the principal designer for the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York's Lower East Side, Aline Bernstein was probably the catalyst of an actual meeting between Wolfe and O'Neill. When she met Wolfe shipboard returning from Europe in 1925, she had with her a manuscript of Welcome to Our City, which he had submitted. Bernstein's biographer notes that O'Neill's “earliest efforts” had been presented at the Neighborhood Playhouse.19 She also indicates that Wolfe's first residence in New York, where he went to teach when he left Harvard, was in Greenwich Village at the time O'Neill was there, making sightings possible between the two writers.20 David Donald, in his 1987 biography of Wolfe, Look Homeward, refers to Aline's “elegant parties where she welcomed luminaries like Eugene O'Neill, Alexander Woollcott, Thomas Beer, and Carl Van Vechten.”21 Klein relates the details of a face-to-face meeting between Wolfe and O'Neill. She writes that Wolfe would join Aline at the Neighborhood Playhouse for rehearsals in 1925, the first months of their relationship, and her description reveals Wolfe's conflicted feelings toward his idol: They snatched their hours. Sometimes he joined her uptown for the Hamlet rehearsals, where again pride and envy battled in him when he saw Aline dealing easily with problems and talking easily with stars and producers. One afternoon she introduced him to Eugene O'Neill, who was on the advisory board for the production. Aline saw instantly how her lover struggled to seem cordial despite the resentment he felt toward the other man's already luminous success.22 This Hamlet, for which Bernstein designed the modern-dress costumes, was produced at the Booth Theatre in 1925, opening on November 9 and closing by the end of the year.23 It was directed by James Light, “O'Neill's friend from Provincetown days,” and produced by Horace Liveright, an important early publisher of O'Neill's plays and a friend of the playwright, who must have put him on the advisory board for Hamlet, probably for mutual advantage.24 With the foregoing preponderance of evidence, pointing to Wolfe's idolatrous admiration for O'Neill as a playwright, one could justifiably infer that he chose for his autobiographical protagonist in Look Homeward, Angel the name of “Eugene” consciously or unconsciously both to identify himself with the successful Eugene O'Neill and to honor the playwright he had intended to follow into success in the theater.25O'Neill in turn seems to have found in Wolfe's novel a literary source for important elements in Long Day's Journey. Many influences and intertextual threads have been discerned in O'Neill's works written before Long Day's Journey but none with the unusual novel-play linkage. Joyce Kennedy argues that O'Neill borrowed the name of Emily Dickinson's sister Lavinia from the Emily Dickinson legend to create the name and character of Lavinia for Mourning Becomes Electra. She cites O'Neill's ownership of Emily Dickinson's Complete Poems, Genevieve Taggard's biography The Life and Mind of Emily Dickinson, and Dickinson's and O'Neill's parallel rise to fame, among other details, as support for her assertions.26 Alexander documents O'Neill's wholesale appropriation of Bernard Shaw's Captain Brassbound of Captain Brassbound's Conversion for his creation of Captain Brant in Mourning Becomes Electra, labeling it “this extraordinarily complete literary theft.” She claims that “probably O'Neill never became aware of the theft, for the character he brought up out of memory filled the needs of his own play with extraordinary precision.” She further exonerates O'Neill's borrowing by referring to the unknown processes of literary association, especially by the well-read mind: “No one at this point can trace exactly the chain of association that caused O'Neill to create what was really an almost total recall of a character from another work.”27Alexander also discusses the intersection of fact and fabrication that went into O'Neill's process of invention in Long Day's Journey. She cleverly delineates what details O'Neill put into the Tyrone family characters that were not present in his family members. These details come mostly from family facts, somewhat displaced. For example, Mary's wedding dress is derived from the debutante gown of Carlotta, O'Neill's third wife, not from Ella's wedding dress.28 I suggest that O'Neill, in some important instances of creating Long Day's Journey, may have gone not to his own life but to a constellation of details in two concentrated sections of Wolfe's novel.O'Neill would not, of course, have known the extent of Wolfe's admiration of him, as indicated above, when he composed Long Day's Journey because the allusions to and comments about O'Neill in the letters and plays of Wolfe were published after O'Neill's death. However, his apparently having met Wolfe personally before the latter attained celebrity would have encouraged him to read this author's first novel when the book and its author became famous. Also, all of Wolfe's novels, the later three of which contain references to O'Neill, had been published before 1940, when O'Neill was writing his play, and only two years had elapsed since the 1938 early death of Wolfe at age thirty-eight of tuberculosis, an event that would have been fresh in O'Neill's mind, especially since he himself had escaped death by that disease.29 If, as Kennedy suggests, O'Neill was conscious of Emily Dickinson's public recognition when he borrowed from her life and legend for Lavinia, he must also have been aware of Wolfe's soaring reputation after the publication of Look Homeward, Angel. It seems likely he would have been at least curious about and interested in a best-selling work by a young author whom he had met. Carlotta and Eugene O'Neill owned a copy of Look Homeward, Angel. The Beinecke Library at Yale possesses the copy inscribed in Carlotta's handwriting: “Eugene and Carlotta O'Neill, Nov. 1929.”30 Croswell Bowen quotes O'Neill's reply to Olin Downes, New York Call music critic, when Downes asked him if O'Neill's reading had affected his writing: “‘Oh, yes, very much indeed, from the beginning,’ O'Neill said.” He also, according to Bowen, had told Dr. Lyman, his doctor at the Gaylord Farm Sanatorium, where he was treated for tuberculosis as a young man, “I intend to use whatever I can make my own, to write about anything under the sun in any manner that fits or can be invented to fit the subject.”31Whereas Wolfe borrowed phrases, lines, and sentences from other writers to enhance his narrative, using the quotations and echoes at times like decorations and also as uninhibited and irrepressible mental associations resulting from his immense reading, O'Neill's inferred borrowings for Long Day's Journey from Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel are put to coherent, essential, substantial, and artistic employment. O'Neill seems to have borrowed characterization as well as specific language and situations, in each instance surpassing in artistic coherence Wolfe's often-unregulated invention. Wolfe's formlessness as a writer, both in his novels and plays, contrasts with O'Neill's mastery of selection, transformation, compression, and emphasis, evident in the material similar enough to that of Wolfe's two pertinent chapters to argue conscious or unconscious borrowing for Long Day's Journey. In addition to details of characterization O'Neill seemingly echoed epithets, allusions, and exact dialogue from Look Homeward, Angel.Ben and Eugene Gant of Look Homeward, Angel are parallel in many respects to Jamie and Edmund Tyrone of Long Day's Journey: in brotherly dynamics and older-brother advice, in conspiracy against their parents, and in the cynical older brother's self-hatred. In the novel, Eugene Gant is proud of his having gone off on his own one summer during his college years, although he nearly starved to death at one point, reminiscent of Edmund's Argentinian adventure. However, Ben yells at Eugene, whom he calls “the Kid,” after he has come back from his adventurous summer where he lived as a pauper instead of asking for parental help: “Fool. You come back, looking like a dead man, as if you'd done something to be proud of. What've you done except make a monkey of yourself?”32 Similarly, Tyrone compliments Edmund's having “had the guts to go off on his own, where he couldn't come whining to me the minute he was broke,” and Jamie sneers, “And what did his going away get him? Look at him now!”33 The gist of Eugene Gant's self-congratulatory speech to Ben is thus transferred to Tyrone and later, in act 4, augmented by Edmund's own reference to his sojourn from home and being on his own: “God, Papa, ever since I went to sea and was on my own, and found out what hard work for little pay was, and what it felt like to be broke, and starve, and camp on park benches because I had no place to sleep, I've tried to be fair to you” (LDJ, 805). Jamie's critical retort to his father's pride in Edmund's display of independence echoes Ben's scorn of Eugene's summer of problematic independence. Ben urges Eugene to push his own needs instead of waiting for the unlikely offer of family money: “No, ‘Gene. Get it out of them any way you can. Make them give it to you. Beg it, take it, steal it—only get it somehow. If you don't, they'll let it rot. Get it, and get away from them. Go away and don't come back. To hell with them!” he yelled. (LHA, 432) Jamie similarly advises Edmund not to let the stingy Tyrone get away with sending him to a cheap sanatorium.Notable toward the end of the first relevant passage from Wolfe's novel are two further elements of characterization that parallel that of the Tyrone brothers in O'Neill's play. Eugene Gant plays the peacemaker role as he tries to buffer Ben's attack on their mother. After Ben's tirade against Eliza, Eugene tries to mollify the situation: “Let's stop it!” said Eugene wearily. “Let's stop it! None of us is going to change! Nothing's going to get any better. We're all going to be the same. We've said all this before. So, for God's sake, let's stop it! Mama, go to bed, please. Let's all go to bed and forget about it.” He went to her, and with a strong sense of shame, kissed her. (LHA, 433) Edmund in similar, but physical instead of verbal, fashion stands up for Mary, punching Jamie for calling her a “hophead” and slapping him “across the mouth” (LDJ, 824) when Jamie compares her narcotized entrance at the end of the passage to that of the mad Ophelia. Also, the cynical Ben denigrates himself in chapter 34: “I've had nothing out of life. I've been a failure. I've stayed here with them until I'm done for. My lungs are going: they won't even take a chance on me for the army. They won't even give the Germans a chance to shoot at me. I've never made good at anything.” (LHA, 433–34) Near the end of Long Day's Journey the self-hating Jamie echoes Ben's speech: “That's where I've got—nowhere”; he recites from Rossetti: “Look in my face. My name is Might-Have-Been; / I am also called No More, Too Late, Farewell” (LDJ, 817, 822). Jamie's similar speech transcends Ben's with O'Neill's rich layer of poetic quotation.Other details echo Wolfe's novel. Eugene Gant, who “grew up here among the dopefiends” (LHA, 433), is echoed by Edmund's proximity to Mary's drug addiction. In other portions of the novel Ben has liaisons with older, overweight women, his mother's boarders at Dixieland, Eliza's boarding house. Eliza later calls Mrs. Pert, known as “Fatty,” the last lover of Ben before his early death, a “whore.” O'Neill may have transferred Ben's intimate female choice to Jamie and created the humorous depiction of his evening with fat Violet, the prostitute in Mamie's brothel. Whereas Wolfe's treatment of Ben's sad liaison with Mrs. Pert is backgrounded, O'Neill brings memorable, extravagant humor to Jamie's report of his brothel evening.Eliza Gant also seems a likely source for the miserliness of Tyrone. She makes a habit of dressing in worn-out clothing at home, turning off the light, and speculating in real estate. Eliza's “tattered old sweater and indefinable under-lappings” (LHA, 432) exemplify her cheapness in appearance throughout the novel. Never does Wolfe depict her as looking nice or even normally acceptable in dress, even though she owns lots of property and runs a boarding house. Eliza's excessive economy with her clothing resembles that of Tyrone, who, the playwright says, “believes in wearing his clothes to the limit of usefulness” (LDJ, 719), making Ella ashamed for him to be seen trimming the shrubs in them.Eliza's preoccupation with turning off light bulbs is obvious in both chapters 34 and 39. In chapter 39 the narrator describes her in terms close to those used in O'Neill's dialogue: “As her land investments grew in amount and number, she became insanely niggardly in personal expenditure. She would fret loudly if a light was kept burning in the house, saying that ruin and poverty faced her” (LHA, 492). In chapter 34, when she comes upstairs to Ben and Eugene's room to put out the lights, she addresses Ben, worried he will “break us up” with “that porch light on, too … burning up all that electricity.” She complains about not being able to afford the electric bills: “You're not the one who has to pay the bills…. You've squandered every penny you've earned because you've never known the value of a dollar.” She reminds her sons that if not for her “accumulating a little property,” they would have no place to live (LHA, 432). Bursting into tears, she cries, “Ingratitude! Ingratitude!” (LHA, 433). Similarly, Tyrone lectures his sons on the value of a dollar, on everything he has done for them, and on their sneering ingratitude toward him as an improper return. Arguing with Jamie, Tyrone complains, “I wouldn't give a damn if you ever displayed the slightest sign of gratitude,” and he quotes, “Ingratitude, the vilest weed that grows” (LDJ, 731).34 Although Tyrone defends himself in much the same way Eliza defends herself, unlike Wolfe's static depiction of Eliza, the attacks on Tyrone's stinginess increase in viciousness and humor and with literary allusion, richly layering the context of dialogue and thus characterization. That O'Neill develops Tyrone's fictionalization beyond that of the generous patriarch James O'Neill that his friends knew may be explained partly by the influence of Wolfe's novel and could be a cause of their puzzlement and pain in his dramatic depiction when the play was made public before O'Neill specified and thus before their deaths.The business about the lightbulbs is the most recognizable element that O'Neill echoes obviously from the first Wolfe passage because it resembles the novel in exactness and occurs in the dialogue, the action, and the mise en scène. In contrast to the aforementioned use of turning off lights in Look Homeward, Angel, the lightbulb motif in Long Day's Journey not only helps unify the play and humorously characterizes Tyrone for stinginess but also is raised by O'Neill's inventive genius to the symbolic level, which Egil Törnqvist has carefully analyzed in A Drama of Souls.35In chapter 39 of Look Homeward, Angel, Eliza's obsession as a real estate speculator and a stingy mother and boardinghouse proprietor, in spite of her love for her family, resembles Tyrone's land speculations and his penurious ways as a theatrical entrepreneur, although he too loves his family. The counterpart to “Old Man Doak,” who sells properties to Eliza, is McGuire, who tempts Tyrone with purchases of land. Both men are the object of scorn by the two pairs of sons and the spouse of the real-estate-obsessed parent. As Ben remarks, “You've pinched every penny and put all you've had into real estate which has done no one any good” (LHA, 433). Eliza's property investments go nowhere in Wolfe's novel, which at times lacks coherence as well as form. For example, apart from a wish to accumulate wealth and power, Eliza seems to operate with no deeper evidence of motive. Wolfe does not get into her mindset. In contrast, Tyrone's interest in property relates to an important history within his birth family, which factors into many aspects of his current family's situation whereas Eliza's real estate dealings seem isolated from the important incidents of the novel. Eliza Gant lacks James's conflicted personality and thus his complexity.Other minor, but significant, similarities to Wolfe's material are noticeable. Ben and Jamie disrespectfully refer to their fathers as “the old man.” Eliza's concern with Eugene's health is echoed by Mary's similar concern for the ailing Edmund. Jamie is devastated and embittered by Mary's relapse as Ben is “bitter” toward Eliza's entrenched behavior. Eliza must cope with the periodic chaotic dissolution of her alcoholic spouse in a way that loosely resembles Tyrone's history of dealing with Mary's addiction. O'Neill, through Mary, humorously intertextualizes Eliza's Dixieland when she criticizes Cathleen's calling James to lunch from a distance: “I've told Cathleen time and again she must go wherever he is and tell him. The idea of screaming as if this were a cheap boardinghouse!” (LDJ, 748).If O'Neill consciously borrowed some of Wolfe's elements, he succeeded with masterly inventiveness in intensifying them, giving them emphasis in his characterizations, transferring Eliza's traits to those of James, and creating memorable humor as comic relief. In so doing he makes strategic selections from Wolfe's unregulated writing and raises them to high art, thus ironically demonstrating the qualities Wolfe could not emulate from his literary idol. One reason Wolfe failed repeatedly to write acceptably for the theater is that he could not compress his invention. O'Neill, though he was no stranger to producing lengthy works, could revise and cut skillfully. While O'Neill might echo some elements in Wolfe's storytelling, his humor, unifying motifs, and perspective in depicting his family in 1912 are superior to Wolfe's bitter misanthropy, isolated spots of memorable narrative, and unrelieved somberness of unpleasant autobiographical memory.Whether O'Neill's echoes of Wolfe are conscious or unconscious is impossible to know. Reading or viewing O'Neill's play does not make one think of the material from Look Homeward, Angel, but reading the two chapters of Wolfe's novel immediately flashes one's thoughts to O'Neill's play, leading to new admiration for O'Neill's consummate art. Had he lived, Wolfe, in paying tribute to O'Neill by naming Eugene Gant for him, might have felt honored to find some of his material embedded in O'Neill's masterpiece where it achieves brilliance and immortality. This recognition of O'Neill's intertextuality helps shed new light upon the workings of O'Neill's inventive genius and upon material formerly in darkness in Long Day's Journey.
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