O’Neill’s play is somber but not unrelievedly dark. There is little happiness in the Tyrone household that day in August 1912—except for the spurious happiness produced by drugs, alcohol, or morphine. There are, however, as there must be in any genuine tragedy, moments of sudden insight that light up the darkness like a lightning flash. Most of these occur in the third act, which is where they should occur, of course, in a well-made play. Old Tyrone sees into his own soul as clearly as he ever has and shares his morbid vision with his oldest son. The latter, James Jr., also sees clearly, for perhaps the first time, the destructiveness in his love for his younger brother, Edmund. And Edmund—who is O’Neill himself, the author revealing to us, the audience, the devastating truths that he had first come to understand so many years before—sees his family shorn of illusions, hating one another, loving one another, struggling to be free in the prison of their own days.
Probably the most memorable figure in the tragedy is Mary Tyrone, the haunted wife and mother who bewails her lack of a proper home and drowns her sorrow in drugs. Does she, too, see into her own soul? Critics dispute about that; some say yes, some say no. Mary’s last words, at any rate, are enigmatic, which may suggest that what O’Neill wished us to feel was the puzzlement that he probably felt about his mother. How could she have become the woman she was? How could she have let it happen to her? Why did she not have the strength to withstand the drug? Yet she has all his sympathy, too, as she has the sympathy of her husband and her older son.
In The Iceman Cometh O’Neill had proclaimed that life is too hard to try to live it without illusions. The older you are the more likely you are to understand that. Long Day’s Journey goes far beyond Iceman in showing us—just for one day—life completely shorn of illusions, stripped bare for all to see.
The old Greeks knew another thing about tragedy: Viewing it provides a kind of catharsis, which relieves us of the dreadful necessity of enduring tragedy ourselves. The more deeply we feel the fate of Oedipus, Aristotle suggested, the less likely we are to suffer as he did. This is the keynote, the unforgettable effect, of Long Day’s Journey into Night. Here the artist reaches down deep into his own pain to find a kind of salvation for us. It is no wonder that we almost worship great artists and writers who give us such gifts.
NANCY MITFORD
1904–1973
Madame de Pompadour
Nancy Mitford was born in London in 1904, the daughter of a nobleman and sister of a remarkable collection of brilliant women. Almost in her nonage she began to write novels, the first of which to succeed was The Pursuit of Love (1945), in which the lovely Linda describes the scabrous love affairs of her six cousins. This was followed by Love in a Cold Climate and Don’t Tell Alfred.
The novels were slight, as was Noblesse Oblige: an enquiry into the identifiable characteristics of the English aristocracy (1956), which, with Encounter (1955), introduced the tongue-in-cheek concept of “U” and “Non-U” vocabulary, although these books were a lot of fun. Much more important, I think, were her four biographies of notables of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France. I read them all some years ago, and the one I remember best is the life of Madame de Pompadour, the first mistress of Louis XV. Hers was an extraordinary life.
The next-to-last Louis, like his grandfather (Louis XIV) and son (Louis XVI), was in almost constant need of female companionship and maintained a “Deer Park” where his provider of sexual services, the venerable Duc de Richelieu, produced and trained a new bedmate every night of the year. Mme de Pompadour had begun in February 1745 as a casual sexual playmate, but her health was not up to the constant calls upon her body, and she promoted herself before the lazy monarch to the position of private secretary, in which she almost single-handedly ruled an empire that, at the time, was the richest in the world. Her taste was excellent, and she in effect designed the style we call Louis Quinze, but she also protected the king from the never-ending turmoil of the court that threatened them both. She was an intellectual and although she could not have a salon she directed the intellectual and literary affairs of the kingdom, as well as its political and military affairs, from her outpost at Versailles.
None of this lasted very long. Nine years later, in February 1754, she was very ill, and the king, during her last days, hardly left her room. He wished to be there when she died, but her confessor refused to allow this. She died in the company of a single priest, who, as he was leaving the room, heard her say “Wait for me, Abbé, I am going with you,” which were her last words for she died a few moments later.
The book is wonderful and beautiful, as was its subject. Nancy Mitford spent the rest of her life in Paris and died there in 1973.
C.S. LEWIS
1898–1963
Out of the Silent Planet
Perelandra
That Hideous Strength
Many people are unaware that C.S. Lewis produced three of the finest science-fiction novels. They comprise a trilogy, with profound and moving theological overtones—or undertones.
Lewis, born in Belfast in 1898, was an Oxford don, an authoritative scholar of medieval literature and of the literature of the English Renaissance. He wrote several definitive studies in his field. He was also an eloquent and, in the case of one book, The Screwtape Letters (1942), a bestselling Christian apologist. The Screwtape Letters is a very good book and a pleasure to read. So is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, though it is written for children. But neither is as good as the trio of science-fiction novels Lewis wrote between 1938 and 1946, when that genre, which has now been exploited beyond all expectations, was young.
The first book in the series, Out of the Silent Planet, introduces us to Ransom, the ordinary Englishman who might be C.S. Lewis himself and who might be Christ—if Christ had been an Englishman. Ransom is called to an adventure that he does not quite understand, but he knows he must go. He leaves the Earth—the Silent Planet, because it is shrouded in a cloud of evil that we may, if we wish, take as Original Sin—and embarks on a space voyage that is quite unlike any space voyage in any other science-fiction novel, and also quite unlike the real thing. Nevertheless, you may agree with me when you read Out of the Silent Planet that Lewis’s imagined voyage is better than the real thing, and even—strange as it may be to say so—more real.
Ransom has various adventures on Mars (Malacandra), his first port of call, and eventually learns that he must travel to Venus, or Perelandra, as the third planet in the solar system is called. Perelandra is also the name of the second novel in the trilogy.
On Perelandra, Ransom has further adventures of a profound allegorical significance. There is a Lady, not otherwise named, who lives on an island floating on the Venusian sea. There is a rival for her favors, Dr. Weston, a dark and evil being. Ransom knows that eventually he will have to fight Dr. Weston, and he does so. He triumphs, but he is wounded in the heel, and the wound cannot be cured. Recapping the story fails to convey the excitement of this trial and this battle between evil and good.