"—the past shall rise;
Thou shalt behold the present; I will teach
The secrets of the future." (Shelley, "Queen Mab")

"My play, isn't it?" (Edmund, Long Day's Journey into Night)

Edmund Tyrone in recounting his mystical peek behind "the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand" (812) locates the ontological basis of the play as Neoplatonism. To understand the subtle art with which O'Neill by means of Edmund's long monologue infuses the whole play allusively and philosophically with Neoplatonic concepts is to appreciate further the complexities of this greatest American play and to view its ending with appropriate perspective. The two strands of Neoplatonic philosophy and genre intertwine and link Long Day's Journey into Night to traditions of rhetoric in English literature and mystical experience and shine a spotlight on Edmund. Focusing on Edmund has two main purposes. It allows him to emerge with greater significance than almost all previously published scholarship has considered him. Also, it shifts his play in genre, causing it to be seen in a new light.[1]

In Long Day's Journey O'Neill subtly reveals the depths of his autodidactic erudition behind a seemingly transparent account of a day in the mortal life of the Tyrones. The evidence is everywhere in the details of the play that O'Neill was greatly accomplished not only as a psychologist and dramatist in portraying his characters but also as a comprehensive and careful reader, researcher, and writer. Since O'Neill intended the play eventually to be read but "never produced" (Gelb 14), he may have thought of it more as literature than a piece for the stage; and this view of his may account for its consequent deliberate richness in literary tradition. The veil as an evocation of Neoplatonism is one of those traditions, especially found in nineteenth-century English works. In particular, Neoplatonism cannot be separated from Shelley's poems, which so frequently contain the "veil" metaphor-symbol that the "veil" becomes a code word for Shelley and Neoplatonism.[2] Both the "veil" and the philosophy it evokes are essential avenues to understanding Long Day's Journey through Edmund's monologue and also through related patterns of incremental details in other portions of the play. In the following discussion the assumed concepts of Neoplatonism include mystical experience and a basic duality between the Real (permanent or immortal) realm of intellect, spirit, love, and perfection and the insubstantial (inferior, material, and transient) experience or experiences, realities with a small "r," of mortal life and consciousness, which are individual, subjective, shifting, and alterable. Therefore, mortal "realities" are multiple. They encompass and inhabit temporal shifts (past and present); unfulfilled or truncated imaginative projections (hopes and dreams); glimpsed, partial fictional constructs (through literary allusions); impermanent bodily conditions of wellness, sickness, and aging; and mental consciousness constantly affected by emotion, ambiguity, memory, loss, and physical substances, thus many temporary states of being, which are inferior to the changeless One. In the words of Shelley's famous line (460) from "Adonais," "The One remains, the many change and pass."

Long Day's Journey belongs to a heretofore-unrecognized subgenre of drama proposed in this essay. This counterpart in drama of the Künstlerroman in fiction calls for Long Day's Journey to be placed in a subgenre of its own, not in the genre of tragedy into which most scholars want to confine it. The Bildungsroman, preferred now instead of the earlier term "Apprenticeship Novel," is a subgenre of the novel in which, according to William Harmon's A Handbook to Literature, the protagonist is presented in his efforts "to learn the nature of the world, discover its meaning and pattern, and acquire a philosophy of life and `the art of living'" (40). This type of novel is quasi-autobiographical. A special type of Bildungsroman is the Künstlerroman, which presents "the protagonist [a]s an artist struggling from childhood to maturity toward an understanding of his or her creative mission" (289). Examples of the latter in English are Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A comparably named subgenre of plays does not appear to exist and is here proposed in order to classify plays such as Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, Athol Fugard's "Master Harold" . . . and the boys, James Baldwin's The Amen Corner, Ed Bullins's In the Wine Time, and, I suggest, Long Day's Journey. In these plays a sensitive young man who is interested in pursuing a life in art, usually writing (playing music in The Amen Corner), goes through personal struggles, involving family turmoil, crisis, and anguish that must be overcome or escaped from, through all of which he gains strength and is shaped for his future successful career, assumed to come in time subsequent to the end of the play. Since plays are shorter than novels, the childhood of the central character is alluded to, and the play concentrates on his young adulthood or transition to it. Because the term "Künstler" is known to denote the artist, substituting the equally recognizable French term "drame," which became "drama" in English, meaning a serious play, one "between tragedy and comedy" (Harmon 172), for "roman," novel, would create the word "Künstlerdrame," an immediately recognizable analogous neologistic term for a play which deals with the vicissitudes that go into the development of an artist. In Long Day's Journey, the finest example of this type of play, we have a portrait of the playwright as a young man, and his family is his donnée for the life work to come of the fictional Edmund, who is O'Neill's partially biographical stand-in.

Of the several previously published philosophical positions taken in or influences on O'Neill's work as a whole or Long Day's Journey in particular[3] only Mary McCarthy broaches the idea of O'Neill's Neoplatonism when she criticizes the dialogue ("you cannot write platonic dialogue in the language of Casey at the Bat"), as well as the whole play, in her "Dry Ice" review of The Iceman Cometh (McCarthy 579; qtd. in Manheim 189). No one else seems to have considered this philosophical position in O'Neill's plays, even though a few scholars have come close to doing so in briefly connecting O'Neill to Shelley. Harold Bloom, in the foreword to the Yale 2002 edition of Long Day's Journey, a reprinting, with minor additions, of relevant remarks in his introduction to his 1987 Modern Critical Views: Eugene O'Neill, generally identifies the "play's true argument" as Shelley's "formulation" (vii) but avoids speculating on the issue of O'Neill's direct knowledge of Shelley's works or specifying echoes of Shelleyan details in Long Day's Journey. Jean Chothia, in Forging a language: A study of the plays of Eugene O'Neill, had earlier recognized that "the image of the veil" in Edmund's long speech "echoes" Shelley (166) but does not mention the major poems in which Shelley uses the image and does not analyze the meaning of the allusion within the play or Edmund's self-reported mystical ecstasy.[4] In 1989 Frank Cunningham ended his essay on O'Neill's Asian thought with a linking of some of O'Neill's outcast characters to ideas in Shelley's Romantic optimistic philosophy as expressed in the latter's "The Triumph of Life" (Cunningham 37-38). However, these scholars also do not use the term "Neoplatonism" or connect this philosophy to O'Neill's play. The following partition of the material into a tripartite scheme is an attempt not to make artificial divisions but instead to present complex and related material in an organized manner.

I. The "Veil," Neoplatonism, Shelley, and O'Neill

Of all the literary allusions in Long Day's Journey the "veil" is different from the others in that it has specificity of reference to a philosophy and probably to the works of the poet Shelley instead of to a particular literary work, author, or character. Literary allusions other than the "veil" in this play are clear and have been well identified and discussed in O'Neill scholarship.[5] These references in aggregation give the play its belletristic quality, one of its perfections; supply additional realms of imaginative or fictional realities, mitigating the struggles of this particular mortal family, the Tyrones, by placing them within the struggles of all mortals; and also perform organic functions. For example, allusions to Shakespeare, Kipling, Dowson, Swinburne, and plays in which James performed are evident to the informed reader and theatergoer. In contrast, the specific source of and reference to the "veil" is somewhat problematic in that it has numerous possible well-known literary identifications with nineteenth-century English literature, particularly poetry, although the meaning always relates to some form of Neoplatonism. In fact, all identifications and uses of dual or multiple realities after Plato are different not only from Plato's original concepts but also from each other. Even in the poetry of Shelley, as recognized by James Notopoulos, his Platonism is "protean in character, even as was Shelley himself" (17).

The "veil" is a metaphor for a covering material or intangible phenomenon and a symbol to indicate boundary and concealment used frequently in both secular and religious Neoplatonic contexts in Romantic and Victorian works. Harold Bloom is correct in identifying O'Neill's "High Romantic inheritance" (vii), in part because all the major Romantic poets embody some form of Neoplatonism: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats, although Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are not known for use of the "veil" in major poetic works. In Canto the Third of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Byron mentions the "veil" in stanza 82, "the veil they rent, / And what behind it lay, all earth shall view" (lines 772-73), cryptically speaking of the removal of tradition by the French Revolution, the binary realities of old France and new France. The Victorian Poet Laureate Tennyson uses the "veil" memorably in several lyrics of In Memoriam A.H.H. In lyric XXX, speculating on the fate of those who have died, he and others celebrating Christmas without Hallam, the main subject of the elegy, think that the dead undergo successive changes and inhabit increasingly spiritual realities as they pass "`from veil to veil'" (line 28). In lyric LVI Tennyson expresses anguish with the famous lines "What hope of answer, or redress? / Behind the veil, behind the veil" (lines 27-28), hoping through his doubt for the presence of God and Hallam beyond the boundary between this life and a possible next one. In lyric LXVII the moonlight that falls on Tennyson's bed causes him to think of the moonlight illuminating Hallam's grave marker. When Tennyson awakes in the dawn, the "lucid veil" of moonlight, that which separates the night-day realities, "is drawn" (13-14) so that now the words on the marker are illuminated by dawn. Edward Fitzgerald, also a nineteenth-century Victorian poet, in stanza XXXII of "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam of Naishapur" ponders the purpose of human life but finds no answer in this world with the words "There was a Veil past which I could not see."[6] The Victorian novelist George Eliot in the short story "The Lifted Veil" presents a sensitive young man who sees beyond the veil in two respects: he has a vision of Prague before he ever visits the city, and he envisions his future hellish marriage with the present fiancée of his brother. In both instances he doubts the reality of his visions after having them and before they prove prognostications. Even the American Transcendentalist Caroline Dall writes in her diary on 18 March 1849 of the veil with its boundary between this life and what follows and its concealment of what lies beyond: "How little we know of God! and shall we ever know him wholly. I sometimes fancy that when the veil of matter is withdrawn and men look upon the Unknown for the first time, the disappointment to many will be very great" (114). In the above passages we see that the "veil" separates two different realities: pre- and post-French Revolution, simultaneous experience in two different cities, life and death, man on earth from a possible Creator in another realm, and the known mortal world from the unknown, perhaps immortal reality. Only in Eliot's short story does the speaker lift the veil or see through it in a mystical way. In the other instances the speaker does not himself lift, part, see through, or have knowledge of what is behind the veil, actions which frequently occur with Shelley's use of the "veil."

In fact, Shelley is so associated with the "veil" from his ubiquitous use of it in his major works that first identification of him with the word is natural. Also, writers other than Shelley seem not to use the word with exactly the same distinctly conventional Neoplatonic meanings and surrounding rhetoric to which Edmund's use of the "veil" will allude. Shelley sometimes uses the "veil" to refer to a separation between dual mortal realities, for example, in "Julian and Maddalo" where the veil is the façade behind which his emotional agony is hidden: "`I must remove / A veil from my pent mind. 'Tis torn aside!'" (383-84). Other times the veil clearly separates the mortal and the immortal world. The following examples of the "veil" used in Shelley's major poems will also take us into the poetic rhetoric of his philosophy and subsequently into Edmund's monologue. In "Queen Mab" the Fairy Mab will "rend / The veil of mortal frailty" (I.180-81) to show the Spirit of Ianthe both the immortal world and perspectives on the mortal one. When Prometheus triumphs over the tyranny of Jupiter in Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, these lines are part of the description of the new earthly reality:

The painted veil, by those who were, called life,
Which mimicked, as with colours idly spread,
All men believed and hoped, is torn aside—
The loathsome mask has fallen, the man remains
Sceptreless, free, uncircumscribed—but man (3.4.190-94)

The desired new human world comes into being as "veil by veil, evil and error fall" (3.3.62), "veils being almost always with Shelley a symbol of the concealment of truth," according to Shelley's biographer Newman Ivey White (331). The magic veil of the Witch in "The Witch of Atlas" separates her perfection from mortals who cannot look on it and be satisfied with ordinary earthly life.

In "Epipsychidion," Shelley's poem about Emilia Viviani, his subject, whom he could not have in actual life, is intellectual and sympathetic perfection, a "Seraph of Heaven [. . .] / Veiling beneath that radiant form of Woman" (21-22), a "Veiled Glory of this lampless Universe" (26), "the veiled Divinity" (244). She is associated with light, love, intellect, and immortality, Shelley's abiding and unattainable ideal objects of desire, "the Vision veiled from me" (343). Thinking of an immortal place to which Shelley and his desired perfect soul-mate ideally could go to partake of happiness, he describes it as producing from the sea and the sky "Veil after veil, each hiding some delight" (472), and he envisions a cave where the moonlight of the previous hypothetical night stays to form "A veil for our seclusion" (556) from the daylight.

In "Adonais," an elegy about the Romantic poet John Keats, Keats-Adonais leaves the troubled earth of color, change, and decay to go to the immortal world of bright white light and permanence beyond the Earth's atmosphere.[7] White says that the last three stanzas of the poem "transmute the author's personal despondency into something like ecstasy" (White 412). Here, as Shelley feels himself getting close to death, within the entire last stanza of the poem is the famous and prophetic image of Shelley's piercing the veil that separates the two worlds, presented in the rhetoric of sea imagery that is also present in Edmund's monologue. In the final stanza of "Adonais," quoted here, the boat is Shelley's life, being borne afar where Keats-Adonais beacons to him from the riven veil of the sky:

The breath whose might I have invoked in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar:
Whilst burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are. (487-95)

Edmund may also have been thinking of his possible death from consumption as he recalls his sea experiences to his father.

Especially relevant to Edmund's monologue and the entire Long Day's Journey are two additional examples of Shelley's use of the veil, in "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni" and in the "Sonnet: Lift Not the Painted Veil." In "Mont Blanc" Shelley refers to the waterfall that masks the mountain peak as a "veil / Robes some unsculptured image" (26-27), the unknown immortal world; and in the next part of the poem he asks, "Has some unknown omnipotence unfurled / The veil of life and death?" (53-54) because he has had a glimmer of this "remoter world" (49). In this poem thoughts come from the immortal world, which the inaccessible mountain represents, a "Power" (16) behind the veil of the waterfall that hides the mountain and causes Shelley to wonder about the "wilderness [. . .] mysterious" (76) of the scene. Here the wilderness is the immortal world he cannot understand or experience except through thought. The "secret" and the "meaning" discovered behind the veil by Edmund may or may not be partly intellectual and not fully accessible to mortal man. Shelley's and Plotinus's experiences may differ in this respect as we shall see in the next section of this study.

The "Sonnet: Lift Not the Painted Veil" may be interpreted on two levels. It may caution one against lifting the veil, "a symbol of the world of mutability in contrast to the reality of the ideal world" (Notopoulos 231), to peer into what is beyond life, indicating that someone the speaker knew, probably himself, did lift it and then was disappointed with the mortal world. In this reading "the painted veil" is life, the boundary between the mortal and immortal worlds. To lift it is to glimpse the other side of life, an experience that, as in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," makes one dissatisfied with the world that human beings know:

Lift not the painted veil which those who live
Call Life; though unreal shapes be pictured there
And it but mimic all we would believe
With colours idly spread,—behind, lurk Fear
And Hope, twin Destinies, who ever weave
Their shadows o'er the chasm, sightless and drear.
I knew one who had lifted it. . . . he sought,
For his lost heart was tender, things to love
But found them not, alas; nor was there aught
The world contains, the which he could approve.
Through the unheeding many he did move,
A splendour among shadows—a bright blot
Upon this gloomy scene—a Spirit that strove
For truth, and like the Preacher, found it not. (312)

Another interpretation, given by White, of the dual realities that the veil separates in this sonnet fits perfectly with both Travis Bogard's and Egil Törnqvist's connecting O'Neill's dramatic technique and intention in Long Day's Journey and other plays with following Strindberg's piercing the surface of human interaction to present a deep, essential truth. White says of Shelley's sonnet that it "warns the reader against seeking behind `the painted veil' called Life the deeper realities which may not be found there, and instances one sensitive soul who lifted the veil in vain, seeking things to love" (289). Bogard explains O'Neill's use of the phrase "behind life" "to describe Strindberg's expressionist dramas. For a play to move `behind life' means that it expands inward, through the surfaces, and toward the core of life itself," reaching the motives, events, and suffering of the Tyrones in Long Day's Journey (431-32). Törnqvist had earlier discussed the term "behind life" as it relates to both Strindberg and O'Neill and used the figure of the veil without relating it to Neoplatonism:

It suggests the existence of an external, supernatural force ruling man's life, what Strindberg termed "the Powers" and O'Neill simply called "Fate" or "God." It also indicates the existence of an internal, psychological fate. In Strindberg's chamber plays the veil of the material world is often momentarily torn apart and beyond its floating shreds we divine both a supernatural world, a product of Strindberg's religious concern, and a subterranean one, a creation of the author's keen psychological insight. (34)

Later, in part three of this paper, we shall see that "suffering," especially that arising from family interaction, is only one of the several Neoplatonic realities in the play and is characteristic of the Künstlerdrame. Shelley's sonnet may also have been brought to O'Neill's attention or memory by Somerset Maugham's 1925 novel The Painted Veil. Its title alludes to Shelley's sonnet, quoted above, indicated by the quotation, given without identification, of words from lines 1-2 of the sonnet as an epigraph preceding the text of the novel and demonstrates that the "veil" tradition continued into the twentieth century (it continues in the twenty-first century also). Although Neoplatonism figures in this novel, the sentence that connects most specifically to its title concerns not mortal-immortal duality but two types of mortal reality, Chinese reality, unknown to Kitty Fane, the Western central character, as opposed to the European view of life that she knows: "It was as though the corner of a curtain were lifted for a moment, and she caught a glimpse of a world rich with a color and significance she had not dreamt of" (Maugham 104).

As can be seen from the preceding examples, veil experiences in the works of others and especially in the poetry of Shelley are expressed in similar rhetoric. Shelley's Neoplatonism in most instances posits two parallel realities, the mutable, largely unhappy mortal world of color and darkness and the permanent immortal world of white light, love, intellectual beauty, and all perfection.[8] Humans know only the disappointing mortal world, although they long for and occasionally experience happiness and perfection, characteristics of the immortal world. Shelley speaks of exceedingly brief experiences of the immortal world when the veil that separates the two worlds is momentarily drawn back. Although Shelley does not use the veil in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," he records in this poem his experiencing the immortal world; and his rhetoric of the mystical experience is also important for Long Day's Journey and will be brought into this discussion later. These epiphanic experiences enable Shelley to understand the universal scheme and his personal meaning and experiences in it, sometimes with satisfaction and excitement, sometimes with regret. Bright light, water (waterfalls or the sea), sometimes a veil lifted, parted, riven, or rent, and intense understanding comprise the usual descriptive rhetoric of the momentary experience when the mortal Shelley experiences the immortal world. In his prose essay "A Defence of Poetry" Shelley, echoing Wordsworth in the latter's prose manifesto on his new poetry, the preface to Lyrical Ballads, says that "Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar." He continues, "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own" (487-88). The argument that O'Neill's veil image is most probably an allusion to Shelley's Neoplatonism thus relies on a combination of the following characteristics found in Shelley's works: frequent use of the veil, dual or multiple realities, mystical experience, and profound unhappiness with mortal reality, the latter poignantly expressed in line 54 of "Ode to the West Wind": "I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" (223).

O'Neill himself used the "veil" in some of his poetry and plays written earlier than Long Day's Journey, indicating that he was familiar with the tradition of writers who used the word and its accompanying Neoplatonic concepts of dual or multiple realities. In his lighthearted "The Waterways Convention, A Study in Prophecy (With apologies to [Longfellow's] Hiawatha)" (1912) he describes the speaker at the convention:

Blessed with gift of divination
He removed the veil of Isis,
Peered into the misty future,
Sketched with rare prophetic sureness
The New London of the future. (Poems 34-38)

In the 1914 poem to his sweetheart Beatrice Ashe, "Full Many a Cup of This Forbidden Wine," O'Neill compares the "beams [. . .] upon the shadowed floor" to "filmy cloud-wisps" that "veil the wistful moon" (Poems 1-2), referring to the separation of earthly and lunar regions and realities. In the 1915 "Lament for Beatrice" he longs "To see your love glow in your eyes / Through silken veils of tangled hair" (Poems 9-10), the "veils of tangled hair" perhaps a symbol of difficulty that separates the two realities of his being unloved now and that of a formerly loving Beatrice. George Steiner reminds us "Freud's hypothesis of the sublimation of the sexual, of the libido, into art, into abstract lineaments of beauty, even into the pressures and warmth of thought, is deeply Platonic" (409). In the narrative that sets scene 4 of The Emperor Jones, wherein two realities are juxtaposed, the forest has a "veiled purpose" (1049). In the narrative that sets scene 7 O'Neill describes the river "in the moonlight" as "blotted out and merged into a veil of bluish mist in the distance" (1057). The river and the moonlight form the "veil of bluish mist," a boundary between the two mortal realities of Jones's solipsistic and limited awareness and the unknown from which he is separated and fleeing (he also repeatedly calls for help to "Lawd God" in yet another reality). One of the voices of the superficial church people that Yank hears in scene 5 of The Hairy Ape speaks of "rehabilitating the veil of the temple" (147). Margaret Barker has written of this veil of the temple as the boundary between earth and heaven (Barker 1, 8), the visible mortal world and the invisible immortal world.[9] Therefore, the idea that the veil could be "rehabilitated" reveals the ignorance of the speaker because ordinary mortals could not possibly accomplish this task. In act 1 of The Iceman Cometh Willie Oban sardonically contrasts the known words of the bawdy folk ballad of which he has just sung the first stanza with its unknown source: "The origin of this beautiful ditty is veiled in mystery" (587). All these uses of the "veil" prepare us for its significance in Edmund's monologue in Long Day's Journey. The word is conventionally and intentionally meant to evoke Neoplatonism, most likely Shelley's, of contrasting realities.[10]

That O'Neill both knew about, if not directly knew, and admired Shelley's poetry is evident in two of the plays wherein O'Neill specifically mentions Shelley. In the prologue of The Great God Brown Billy Brown tells Margaret, who is in love with Dion and will be glad to hear complimentary remarks about him, that Dion, whom Billy also admires and envies, his rival and other half, "can recite lots of Shelley's poems by heart" (477). In act 1 of Ah, Wilderness! Richard[11] defends his reading of poems by Swinburne, which are deemed inappropriate by his mother, by comparing him to one of the major, and thus acceptable, English Romantic poets, when he says that Swinburne is "The greatest poet since Shelley!" (16).[12]

Although Henry Pommer does not mention Neoplatonism, in fact denying the dual or multiple realities of this philosophy when he asserts that O'Neill's mysticism "intuited an essential oneness of reality" (27), he has pointed to the closest biographical connection of O'Neill to the "veil" and Neoplatonism.[13] In an essay titled "The Mysticism of Eugene O'Neill" Pommer quotes a passage from second wife Agnes Boulton's autobiographical Part of a Long Story which indicates that O'Neill early in his career thought of the "veil" in the same sense in which he uses it late in his playwriting in Long Day's Journey to describe what was a mystical experience for Edmund. Boulton writes as follows:

There was always in him a persistent sense of the reality that lies behind what is, what seems to be. He could find nothing of that in the God he knew and whom he had outgrown; nor could he really [my addition and emphasis: "really" is omitted in Pommer's quotation] find it elsewhere—either in love or in idea. [. . .]

At times, however, Gene must have achieved briefly a sense of that expanded consciousness in which the self, forgotten, becomes one with whatever is behind the veil; he speaks of it in a prose poem [. . .] which he gave me as a gift [. . .]. (Boulton 280; qtd. in Pommer 27)

Boulton goes on to speculate about O'Neill's personal experience in the continuation of this quotation, truncated by Pommer: "and perhaps, in those beautiful and moving lines that Edmund speaks near the end of Long Day's Journey into Night [. . .]" (Bolton 280). If the prose poem is lost, Long Day's Journey remains forever, documenting, through Edmund's long monologue, O'Neill's own mystical insight, written in rhetoric traditional for this type of experience. However, in the absence of biographical documentation to support Boulton's assertion of the personal mystical experience of O'Neill we must proceed with the notion of his having carefully researched such experience and the rhetoric of its expression for Edmund's monologue, knowing the importance it would have for the in-play stature and beyond-play development of this proto-artist-character.

II. Edmund and the Rhetoric of Neoplatonic Mystical Experience

Apart from its containing the veil symbol and its accompanying evocation of Neoplatonism, Edmund's monologue, his long speech to his father halfway through act 4 of Long Day's Journey, is significant for several reasons. Usually dealt with in some way in discussions of the play because it cannot be ignored but, except for D.L. Lloyd's essay, usually given relatively superficial attention by commentators, its status alone as one of the longest speeches in the play demands special attention.[14] Pommer's essay reveals the fact that this monologue was the first and only part of the play that O'Neill chose "to be published anywhere" (37) before the entire text of the play was to be given to the world after a publication delay of twenty-five years. By his advance release of the monologue O'Neill must therefore have thought it to contain important ideas. Also, the "veil" in Edmund's monologue provides the key to understanding the entire rhetoric of this passage, as well as the whole play, by associating it with similar mystical experiences of others in the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition, both secular and religious. Assuming deliberate literary research of O'Neill into the rhetoric of mystical experience for this play, one finds plenty of published descriptions of such experience available to him. Therefore, the monologue reasonably may be linked to well-known sources not previously noted in O'Neill scholarship, and O'Neill appears to be an expert synthesizer as well as researcher. Since the exact sources of O'Neill's information are presently unknown, materials from Plotinus, "the founder of Neoplatonism" (Brainard 207), Shelley, and William James serve here as good touchstones for demonstrating that Edmund's monologue seems intentionally to conform in its rhetorical details to the recognized elements of Neoplatonic mystical experience. Dominic J. O'Meara makes a statement concerning Plotinus that makes a valuable connection between this philosopher and the Künstlerdrame, supportive of the possibility that O'Neill may have consulted Plotinus for information on Edmund's mystical experience: "We should keep in mind that Plotinus' [sic] works are presumably directed towards a readership for whom an ethics of escape is appropriate and desirable, readers who are unclear about themselves, about their purpose in life, about the true object of their desire" (109).

Even though mystical experiences are different for individuals, as distinct as the differences between those of Shelley in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" and O'Neill's Edmund, the rhetoric of occasion, thought, diction, and aftermath of these mystical experiences is similar. In all descriptions of the mystical experience the participant is alone, lonely, deep in thought. A veil may be parted, or an unexpected change in consciousness occurs so that a sudden but momentary intense entry into another reality occurs. The participant's feeling is that of ecstasy, sometimes spoken of as a feeling of drunkenness. Associations with light or brightness or visionary sensations are made. In all instances the entry is into a reality that is most desirable. Following the experience comes a letdown and an inability to describe in language what has occurred. Portions of Edmund's long monologue, which only his father hears, are quoted here in order to provide the words conveniently for the reader to be able to understand the analysis to follow:

I lay on the bowsprit, facing astern, with the water foaming into spume under me, the masts with every sail white in the moonlight, towering high above me. I became drunk with the beauty and singing rhythm of it, and for a moment I lost myself—actually lost my life. I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself! To God, if you want to put it that way. [. . .] The passengers asleep and none of the crew in sight. No sound of man. Black smoke pouring from the funnels behind and beneath me. Dreaming, not keeping lookout, feeling alone, and above, and apart, watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea which slept together. Then the moment of ecstatic freedom came. The peace, the end of the quest, the last harbor, the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams! And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience. Became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on toward nowhere, for no good reason! [. . .] I will always be 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! (811-12) [15]

Edmund's pertinent rhetorical details, which echo those of others recorded as having had similar mystical experiences, are scattered throughout the speech: "drunk," "lost myself," "lost my life," "set free," "belonged," "without past or future," "peace," "unity," "wild joy," "Dreaming," "alone," "painted dream," "ecstatic freedom," "belonging to a fulfillment," "secret," "never belong."

For understanding the rhetoric and meaning of the words and phrases of Edmund's mystical experiences, temporarily deferring an explanation of the apparent contradiction between "belonging" and "never belonging" to the third section of this paper, comparisons of them to ideas and rhetorical details of the aforementioned writers will be helpful in analyzing the literary invention and meaning of O'Neill's passage. The obvious probability of O'Neill's research is underscored by the striking parallels, which are too numerous to be attributed to coincidence. This analysis will combine matters of occasion, thought, language, and aftermath because of the difficulty of separating them. Pierre Hadot is a leading twentieth-century French lucid exegete of the difficult writings of the ancient Plotinus and his own contemporary disciple and biographer, Porphyry, who relates mystical experiences of Plotinus when Porphyry knew him (perhaps an easier analysis than one of several O'Neill might have used, for example, William Inge's The Philosohy of Plotinus: The Gifford Lectures at St. Andrews, 1917-1918, published in 1929). Hadot describes the mystical "experience of union with the divine Intellect" of Plotinus thus: "It is compared with drunkenness produced by nectar; it is unusual; it appears suddenly and does not last. It transcends the inherent duality of consciousness of the self; it consists of a vision without discursivity of any kind, [. . .] a pure presence beyond all determinate forms and all distinct objects. This experience is seen as an identification with a reality that is at the same time different from and the same as ourselves. We become different while remaining the same" (241). Hadot reports on Porphyry's ideas of the Plotinian school concerning the uncommonness of the occasion of union with the "One": "This goal can be reached during life, but only very rarely. It is a precise experience, which is transitory and cannot last" (233). In "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" also Shelley says that the perfection of the immortal world visits him briefly and inconstantly. Edmund remembers only a few such mystical experiences, all when he was on, in, or near the water. One occurred, he says, when he was bound for Buenos Aires. Another happened when he was on the American Line. Others took place "several other times in [his] life, when [he] was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach" (812) To his family and maybe even himself Edmund seems the same, but he is different as a result of his mystical experiences.

Hadot discusses two Plotinian routes to mystical union with the immortal. One route is "contemplating the splendor of the sensible world [. . .]. The human soul thus becomes conscious of being itself related, a `sister' of the soul of the world, which it must take for its model" (234). In his analysis of Plotinus's writings Hadot says that "the soul of the world, the souls of the stars, and human souls are all one soul" (236) in Neoplatonic thought. Seeming to follow this Plotinian route for achieving mystical union as described by Hadot, Edmund contemplated and identified with his surroundings: the sea, the ship's sails, the ocean spray, the moonlight, the starry sky, the "Life of Man," "Life itself," the sun, the sand, the seaweed. He seems also to have experienced a second Plotinian model, described by Hadot, that of "enthusiasm" whereby "The soul feels the presence of another with which it is identified, and it is no longer itself. It is transported outside itself and does not know any longer what it is, no longer having the opportunity to consider what it is when it considers the Good" (246). According to Hadot, Plotinus says that the "consciousness of the self is all but lost" (240). Hadot writes of Porphyry's description of Plotinus's mystical experiences: "one of the traditional elements of Platonic spirituality [is] the desire to escape from the world" (231). Also, the notion that during mystical experience "The soul must detach itself [. . .] from all ideas and all intelligible forms" (246) is further characteristic of Plotinian Neoplatonism, according to Hadot. Edmund when he "dissolved" into his surroundings is free of himself, "set free" in a "moment of ecstatic freedom." Edmund remembers, "I lost myself—actually lost my life." In these instances he is free from the Tyrone family and other mortal suffering.

Sensations similar to inebriation are reported by those experiencing mystical union with the immortal. According to Plotinus, Hadot reports, feelings of drunkenness (244) and of "unspeakable joy" (245) occur when one is in the "last phase" (244) of the mystical experience. Hadot also quotes Plotinus's commenting on his experience of union with the soul of the One in words pertinent to Edmund: "I have seen a beauty wonderfully great and felt assurance that then most of all I belonged to the better part" (240). Edmund recalls that he "became drunk" and felt "wild joy" and "the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams!" when he lost himself in the experience. This mystical drunkenness is the counterpoise to the alcohol-inspired drunkenness of the three male Tyrones and the servant Cathleen. In act 4 Edmund quotes Baudelaire on mortal reality: "If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually" (797), effectively foreshadowing the rhetoric of drunkenness and mention of transcending past and future time in the monologue to come.

Near the end of his monologue Edmund mentions the "secret" twice: "For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret." Hadot's analysis is also relevant here: "In Neoplatonism" the word "mystical" contains the idea of a `secret,'" meaning "`secret visions'" experienced by those who have peak "interior ascent" (238); this secret meaning comes from the "Eleusinian model," the "experiential knowledge of transcendent reality [. . .] ." (239). Hadot asserts that, in Aristotle's view, "the Eleusinian initiates do not learn anything intellectually (mathein) but they feel—they experience (pathein)—something" (Hadot 238-39). Barker's explanation that "knowledge of the secrets" beyond the veil "gave power over the creation" (8) is support for the traditional analogy of the artist as imitator of an original Creator. Therefore, Edmund in a way experienced "the timeless place which also revealed the past and the future" (Barker 8-9) for his creative years to come. Also, Edmund thinks that the secret and the meaning are gone once the veil fell because "in the last phase of the experience" the "Good" is experienced in a "non-thinking" way, according to Plotinus (Hadot 244), followed by discursive reason and ineffability. The effect of the experience, however, remains, and Edmund is "different while remaining the same." His knowing the "secret" and the "meaning" may indeed be retained on a subconscious level, the realm of creativity. The complete identification of the soul with the "Good" requires renunciation of thought, yet paradoxically Plotinus says that the soul becomes "divine Intellect" momentarily (Hadot 244). Even Lloyd Gerson, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Plotinus, is uncertain concerning the matter of intellect in relationship to mystical experience (54-55). Shelley's report of connection with the One through thought is perhaps thus simplified. And Edmund's rhetoric is a synthesis of O'Neill's readings.

The aftermath of the mystical experiences of Edmund with his apparent difficulty of description is also closely connected with Neoplatonic mysticism. As Hadot says of Plotinus, "[T]he experience itself [. . .] is inexpressible" (247). Chothia points to Edmund's "inarticulacy" (167) and calls the passage "verbally imprecise" (166), but this characteristic of the consciousness of inadequate description appears in others who relate their mystical experiences, for example, Shelley after his mystical experience, trying to relate insight into a reality that does not contain human language. In telling of such mystical experiences Shelley in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty" uses a series of similes whose subjects are intangibles to relate an approximate description of what it felt like to experience the indescribable:                                                           

Like hues and harmonies of evening,—
Like clouds in starlight widely spread,—
Like memory of music fled,— (ll. 8-10)
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
Thy light alone—like mist o'er mountains driven,
Or music by the night wind sent,
Through strings of some still instrument,
Or moonlight on a midnight stream (ll. 32-35)

Shelley in "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," calls on the "Power" to "give whate'er these words cannot express" (l. 72) to help free "This world from its dark slavery" (l. 70), Shelley's world reformer theme. Edmund also relies on imprecise comparisons to describe his mystical experiences. Since James claims Catholic faith, Edmund chooses concepts within an analogy and simile that James will understand: he felt he belonged "to God, if you want to put it that way" or "Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand." When Edmund's father says to him, "there's the makings of a poet in you all right," Edmund, like Shelley in his lament of verbal indescribability, replies, "I couldn't touch what I tried to tell you just now. I just stammered" (812).

In Shelley's dual realities the mortal world is the world of color and conflicting emotions; the immortal world of the One is of pure white light. The mortal world of color, found in Shelley's Neoplatonic poems, is imitated in Edmund's nature descriptions. For example, the "painted veil" in "Sonnet: Lift Not the Painted Veil," is echoed in Edmund's "watching the dawn creep like a painted dream over the sky and sea" before one of his ecstatic moments. Also the "colours idly spread" and "Fear / And Hope" which Shelley speaks of in "Sonnet: Lift Not the Painted Veil" (312) are brought together and echoed in Edmund's "painted dream" and mortal men's "fears and hopes and dreams."

As significant as relating Edmund's mystical experience to ancient and Romantic literary and philosophical figures who recount their own ecstasies similarly, an argument easily may be made that O'Neill was also familiar with and incorporated into Edmund's monologue ideas about mystical experience described at considerable length in the well-known 1901-1902 The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James because Edmund's monologue contains language and ideas remarkably similar to that of this classical work in the chapter titled "Mystical Experience." The mystical experiences that William James discusses are so similar to Edmund's experiences as to serve as validation of the particulars of his report and another possible literary source. James quotes the actual published words of many of those who have had such experiences: for example, the religious mystics St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross; the poet Tennyson; the investigators E.D. Starbuck and R.M. Bucke. James extensively defines the nature of the experience, summarized as follows. Again, the experience cannot be described: "This incommunicableness of the transport is the keynote of all mysticism" (311). James quotes from Starbuck's materials, "I say God, to describe what is indescribable" (303), and says that the mystical "state of consciousness becomes [. . .] insusceptible of any verbal description. Mystical teachers are unanimous as to this" (312). The mystical experience gives "insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect" (293). The experience is transient (293) and most of the time takes place "out of doors" (303). St. Teresa testifies that doubt of the experience does not exist, "even though many years should pass without the condition returning" (The Interior Castle; qtd. in James 314). The content here again is similar to what Edmund recounts. James quotes Tennyson in a letter to P.B. Blood, an investigator into experiences during "anaesthetics": "individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being" (qtd. in James 295 fn.3). R.M. Bucke in Cosmic Consciousness (1901) writes of the content of his own experience, partially quoted here: "Directly afterward there came upon me a sense of exultation, of immense joyousness accompanied or immediately followed by an intellectual illumination impossible to describe" (qtd. in James 306). In James's analysis "This overcoming of all the usual barriers between the individual and the Absolute is the great mystic achievement. In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed" (321).

Unlike one aspect of the aftermath of Edmund's mystical experience, in Shelley's poems which present his contrasting realities Shelley knows the differences between the two realities subsequent to his ecstatic experiences. Others who have mystical experience often remember the meaning also, although they cannot put it into words. On the other hand, Edmund consciously knows the "meaning," "the secret," only when he has the fleeting experience. Afterwards, as stated above, he seems to have lost the meaning, perhaps only in a strictly intellectual awareness; but, according to mystical tradition, he will retain its power on a subconscious or emotional level. William James names another characteristic of the mystical experience, especially significant for Edmund, that will "carry [. . .] authority for after-time" (293). He says that mystical states may be "windows through which the mind looks out upon a more extensive and inclusive world" (327) and that "They tell of the supremacy of the ideal, of vastness, of union, of safety, and of rest" (328). Edmund's mystical experiences at the least tell him of a reality better than he has experienced in the mortal world. That Edmund considers them "high spots" (811) in his memories equal to Tyrone's significant career successes emphasizes their importance. He says that he is "the secret," giving himself a self-confident power for the future should he overcome his physical illness. D.L. Lloyd recognizes that Edmund "gains a new perspective on life" (18), and Eugene Waith in "Eugene O'Neill: An Exercise in Unmasking" says that Edmund "does not fall back on self-deception, like his father, nor refuse to live in the present, like his mother. There is still the hope of forward movement. His reminiscences not only reveal him but place him in relation to his parents" (40).

Edmund's monologue thus subtly but importantly gives human and philosophical complexity and amplification to the character of this youngest member of the Tyrone family, who is trying to find his way in his family and in the world. Törnqvist's analysis of necessary but imperfectly understood (by the audience) early elements in an O'Neill play applies equally well to Edmund's monologue, even though it comes late in the play. In spite of its casual recitation during a desultory card game between two inebriated characters, who, by the way, retain coherence and intact and distinct personalities, characteristics which McCarthy points out complainingly concerning the characters of The Iceman Cometh (McCarthy 578), "we frequently sense that what the characters are saying is of greater significance than it appears to be at the moment when it is presented [. . .]" (Törnqvist 243). Also significant here concerning the late-in-play placement of Edmund's monologue is Gerson's analysis of the perspective of "Plotinian optics," worth quoting at length for clarity, for support of the monologue as defining the Neoplatonic basis of the play, and for the position taken in this study that the play is Edmund's, a Künstlerdrame:

In late antique and early medieval art, there is a habit of measuring perspective, not from the viewpoint of an ideal spectator, but from the central object in the piece. Plotinian optics corresponds to this practice of presenting perspective. [. . .] [T]his principle informs Plotinus's understanding of the organization of internal space in architecture. The progress of the soul toward the One is compared to a man entering a grand house, admiring its magnificent appointments, and then seeing the master of the house. As he fixes his gaze upon the master, "he mingles his seeing with what he contemplates, so that what was seen before (to horaton) has now become sight (opsis) in him and he forgets all the other objects of contemplation" ([Plotinus, Enneads] VI.7.35.7-16). I take opsis (vision) here to mean that angle of vision that belongs, no more to the spectator, but to the master of the house who has become the central piece from which perspective is measured. In another passage, again describing the progress of the soul to the One, Plotinus speaks of how a man enters a temple and passes through a series of rooms, each of which contains a statue of a god. At last he enters the immost [sic] shrine, and sees, not a statue, but the god himself, who is not an object of vision (horama), but another way of seeing (allos tropos tou idein) ([Plotinus, Enneads] VI.9.11.17-23). Although the objects seen are in a series rather than on the same plane, it remains true that the god, once seen, becomes the organizing principle of the whole piece. I take "another way of seeing" to represent the angle of vision belonging to the god. (347)

As a result of his mystical experience, his union with the Immortal, the per-spective of Edmund has changed, subconsciously if not consciously. With Edmund's monologue the perspective of the audience shifts to his perspective. In the play as a Künstlerdrame once Edmund's monologue is spoken, the play represents his angle of vision both retrospectively and going forward. Not knowing how to respond to Edmund's recital of his mystical experience, James merely compliments his poetic language, a response also frequently made by writers of critical material on Long Day's Journey. As he does with other allusions, O'Neill may have depended on an informed readership to understand the rhetorical details and significance of Edmund's monologue. Edmund soon must manage the drunken Jamie both for himself and the self-absented James and suffer the "performance" of Mary. The intellectual distance is thus drawn between father and son in the play at the same time that their shared peak experiences, especially Edmund's own, so important to him, signal probable future understanding and reconciliation. The different told experiences of realities of the two men lead us to a consideration of Neoplatonism and the Künstlerdrame in the play as a whole.

III. Tyrone Neoplatonism, Edmund, and the Künstlerdrame

Concepts of Neoplatonism underlie and pervade all aspects of the play, even though this philosophy is not specifically alluded to until Edmund recounts his mystical experiences at length in act 4. The multiple Neoplatonic realities that come forward after details of Edmund's monologue are revealed may be identified in several ways. One way is to see them temporally. The action of the play presents past and present mortal reality simultaneously as it moves into the unknown future, much like an Ibsen play. Zander Brietzke thoroughly analyzes this set of realities in The Aesthetics of Failure: Dynamic Structure in the Plays of Eugene O'Neill (148-54). Other divisional realities may be seen as generational, ethnic (American and Irish), and class (upper-class Harker, middle-class Tyrones, lower-class Shaughnessy, servant-class Cathleen and Bridget). Stephen Black identifies the shifting "multiple versions of reality" as "post-structuralist" (63). In Neoplatonic terms the play gives us a mortal past and present reality with its different interpretations, all rather sad, by the individual Tyrone family members, and a suggested mortal future for Edmund; a second mortal reality of pretense and lost possibilities; and a third, ultimate, reality beyond these two that is unknown except for the brief times that Edmund, the only one in the play to do so, has experienced mystical epistemology.

As a Künstlerdrame the play is about the struggle of Edmund within his family to survive and overcome their intentional and unintentional thwarting and achieve a future purpose, but as a mortal he shares all mortal vicissitudes with them. Doris Alexander recognizes that the play goes beyond the Tyrone family and is about the human family and the fate of all mortals. In her recent monograph Alexander, correcting some of the earlier biographical identifications of the O'Neills with the Tyrones, writes that the play is about approaching life's end: "Of course, the night is obviously death" (68). The meaning of the "Night" of the title is multivalent. On the literal level the meaning is that of the night that follows the day begun in act 1. On a second level the meaning is that of the night of Mary's falling again into morphine addiction and Edmund's receiving a diagnosis of potentially fatal consumption. Törnqvist suggests that the end of the "long journey," in other words, the night, represents "the dark interior of the family and its individual members" (243). Yet another meaning is that of the metaphor of mortal life reduced to one day with death and a possible unknown reality at the end.

The dark theme of Long Day's Journey, usually discussed as tragic by commentators, resides in the disappointing mortal experiences of the characters set against unachievable or lost possibilities of love, happiness, success, and perfection, part of the "meaning" in the monologue of Edmund, the Neoplatonic immortal world and his connection with it. Of the troubled relationships in the play, characterized by abrupt emotional shifts, love-hate and satisfaction-regret (for example Mary and James's pride in their love for each other and in James's post-marital absolute fidelity juxtaposed with the wishing of each one in different ways that the marriage had turned out to be happier than it is), one recalls George Steiner's statement that "desire and love among mortal men and women are informed by transgression and the immemorial remembrance (unconscious) of loss" (405) and Harold Bloom's ending comments in his introduction to the play about O'Neill's matchlessness in portraying the "nightmare realities that can afflict [. . .] family life in the twentieth-century Western world" (xii). In the Künstlerdrame the family is a crucible from which the artist must escape in order to emerge with his or her own perspective on it and other things. "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty," Shelley's poem about the mortal world juxtaposed with the immortal world and the poet's momentary experience of the immortal world of perfection, explains unhappiness and imperfection in the human reality, "This dim vast vale of tears" (17), because it is inferior to the immortal world. Whereas Shelley presents mortal reality from the point of view of knowing what immortal reality is, contrasting the two worlds, Edmund is the only character in the play who occasionally has known of an ultimate reality and meaning beyond the mortal human world. So O'Neill, the artist, gives us mortal reality in the play from Edmund's vantage point, as elucidated above by Gerson's "perspective" analysis of Plotinus, of one who knows its suffering and limitations but also knows there is a reality or a meaning beyond the apparent. This latter reality is specified importantly in Edmund's monologue halfway through the fourth act instead of earlier for structural reasons, important in Edmund's growing closeness to his father in act 4 and in putting previous matters of the play into perspective.

Edmund's mystical experience, with its different reality, necessarily reveals that life has meaning beyond ordinary human knowledge and the suffering seen onstage. As the four Tyrones in act 1 have a wider perspective on the Shaughnessy-Harker episode than its participants, each with his own reality, altered on Shaughnessy's part to fit his objectives, both in the confrontation and also in the reporting of it, so Edmund, having a wider perspective than anyone else in the play, in act 4 sees beyond mortal life as he recalls his mystical experiences. The act 1 perspective of all the Tyrones on the Shaughnessy-Harker confrontation, twice removed (told by Shaughnessy, retold by Edmund), foreshadows Edmund's distanced perspective, which is disclosed in act 4. The audience's learning of Edmund's knowledge, gained through mystical experience, mitigates the despair, usually focused upon by commentators, of the ending of the play and indicates that another dimension exists besides the two, present and past mortal biography, that are evident. William James quotes St. John of the Cross on the lasting efficacy on the soul of the mystical experience, a benefit which applies to Edmund: "A single one of these intoxicating consolations may reward it for all the labors undergone in its life—even were they numberless" (qtd. in James 317).

As Shelley presents three realities in "Adonais," two earthly ones and one of a spiritual-intellectual realm, three major realities can be seen in Long Day's Journey.[16] The rare and unsustainable consciousness of meaning and joy known through mystical experience, such as that recounted only by Edmund, is one reality broached. The second, first mortal, reality recognized by the audience is ordinary, present, dysfunctional, suffering human life, exemplified by the Tyrone family and its servants. This reality is unacceptable especially to Mary and sometimes to Edmund, but also to James and Jamie, who complain explicitly about the difficulty of mortal life. Mary says to Edmund, "None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it, and once they're done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever" (749). She urges James to "not try to understand what we cannot understand, or help things that cannot be helped—the things life has done to us we cannot excuse or explain" (764). She longs to escape her life under its close family scrutiny and suspicion, to "forget for a while" (740). The costumed James she fell in love with was "like someone from another world" (778), a fictional world, and she wants "to remember only the happy part of the past" (784). James "had life where [he] wanted it" only "for a time" (809), and then, he laments, "life had me where it wanted me" (810). Edmund laughs "At life. It's so damned crazy" (810). The fog "hides [Mary] from the world and the world from [her]" (773) and makes Edmund feel that he is "in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself" (796). He tells James, "I'm talking sense. Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it? It's the three Gorgons in one" (796), symbolizing the other three Tyrones.[17] Upon returning from Mamie Burns's house, Jamie remarks, "All I wanted was a little heart-to-heart talk concerning the infinite sorrow of life" (816). He also quotes Swinburne's "A Leave-taking": "all the world is bitter as a tear" (825). As in The Iceman Cometh, all the characters either cannot accept life as it is at all (Mary's and Edmund's past attempted suicides, Edmund's when he "was stone cold sober" and "stopped to think too long" [807]) or cannot live comfortably with it so that they resort to an inauthentic or altered reality, the third major reality and the second mortal one, through several strategies. Black specifies these strategies as "psychological defenses," "useful fictions," "alcohol and drugs," and "virtue" (69). Barbara Voglino discusses the strategies as "games." Even Shaughnessy drinks to alter reality before he confronts Harker about the pigs, and Cathleen needs her drop to soften reality before going back to Bridget, who also needs her glass to quiet the awful reality of her rheumatism and her temper and to put up with the reality of the family's lateness for the meals she prepares in the kitchen. James does not realize the inherent contradiction, Neoplatonically, in his words when he tells Mary in act 3, "I'm glad I came, Mary, when you act like your real self [emphasis added]" (783).

The "literal" mortal reality is so unacceptable to the characters with its various disappointments and losses, illnesses, deaths, torturous relationships, even environmental assaults (the literal fog bringing the consequent annoying, warning foghorn and ships bells) that the strategies before mentioned are used to counter or nullify it. Of the two mortal realities, the one in which all mortals, including the Tyrones, live out their mostly suffering lives and the individual invented ones of past and present situations of the characters in this play, the invented or reinterpreted or denied realities are by far dominant and present the greatest number of rhetorical repetitions. Although O'Neill is sometimes considered weak in memorable dialogue while obviously strong in the fineness of his dramatic structure, wonderfully analyzed by Törnqvist in A Drama of Souls, that dialogue in Long Day's Journey is as subtly brilliant in its rhetorical cohesiveness as is the overall dramaturgy of the play.

Thus, O'Neill should not be faulted for "ordinary-sounding" dialogue in Long Day's Journey, which, on the contrary, is extraordinary for its character appropriateness, multiple rhetorical patterns, and perfect economy juxtaposed with pertinent revelation of information. Excessive wit in everyday life is unrealistic and would be inappropriate in this play written in the style of dramatic realism. O'Neill's inclusion of so much relevant literary allusion and quotation posits numerous fictional realities other than the Tyrone realities presented and remembered by the family, and these fictional realities are important foils and adjuncts to those dramatized in the Tyrone living room. The wit in Long Day's Journey resides not in constant clever repartee, although some effective wisecracks are lobbed throughout the play, but in the superb choices of literary allusions and quotations, precisely fitting the characters and their dialogic contexts, and especially in the language repetitions.

Dialogic excellence in Long Day's Journey is seen in the rhetorical pattern of "lies," "lying," "liar," one of the most repeated of many language patterns, as the Tyrones accuse each other and deny painful truths in order subjectively to deny or modify past and present, painfully unacceptable, objective mortal reality and thwart the same strategy in others.[18] The words accusatory or in defense of deception are used most often by Mary and James, only rarely by Jamie, and, significantly, least often by Edmund. Mary "knows he is lying" (736) when Jamie pretends to have spoken negatively about Dr. Hardy's medical abilities instead of revealing that actually he was discussing her possible morphine relapse with Tyrone. "What is a lie?" (751), Mary asks later, trying to discover what topic was under discussion before she entered the room, refusing to answer Edmund's charge against Jamie's recognition of her relapse, "He's a liar! It's a lie, isn't it, Mama?" (751) and Edmund's "You're a liar" (751), addressed to Jamie, the only occasion in the present time of the play that Edmund denies painful truth. In act 2, scene 2, Mary admits to lying about the influence of the past on the present and the future: "We all try to lie out of that but life won't let us" (765). Soon afterwards she denies not having wanted to bear Edmund with "It's a lie" (766). She advises Edmund to cancel his appointment with Dr. Hardy: "He'll only tell you some lie. He'll pretend he's found something serious the matter because that's his bread and butter" (769). She again admits to lying to herself after she advises Edmund against visiting Dr. Hardy, wanting him not to believe that his illness is her excuse for relapsing, "I've become such a liar. I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself" (769). At the end of the act she once more admits her own self-deception in her speaking of not wanting to be left alone and lonely by the men as they go off to town: "You're lying to yourself again. You wanted to get rid of them" (771). After Cathleen leaves her to return to Bridget in the kitchen, Mary berates herself, "You expect the Blessed Virgin to be fooled by a lying dope fiend reciting words! You can't hide from her!" (779). When Edmund tries to inform her of Dr. Hardy's diagnosis, she denies Edmund's illness by calling the doctor "That lying old quack!" (787) and charging him with "ignorant lies" (788). Related to "lying" is Mary's "kidding herself" (729) and "deliberately fooling herself" (729) as reported by Jamie.

James equals Mary in the number of speech acts relating to lies. To Jamie's accusation that James's priorities place land acquisition above spending money on Edmund's best hospitalization possibilities, James counters with, "That's a lie! And your sneers against Doctor Hardy are lies!" (730). He lies consciously for Jamie in order to get him employment: "[. . .] I have to humble my pride and beg for you, saying you've turned over a new leaf, although I know it's a lie!" (730). When Jamie says his father "forced" him on the stage, James answers, "That's a lie!" (730). Accused by Jamie of obtaining a cheap doctor for Mary when Edmund was born, James counters, "That's a lie" (735). Later Jamie accuses him of trying to obtain cheap medical care for Edmund, and James retorts, "You liar!" Jamie adds, "All right. Prove I'm a liar" (761). Defending his Catholic allegiance against Jamie's pointing out James's infrequent, and thus nominal, religious observance, James tells him, "[. . .] you're a liar!" (759). When Edmund teases James by saying that others thought Shakespeare "was a souse," James quickly defends his favorite author: "They lie!" (799). Later during his card game with Edmund when the latter suggests that the doctor and his so-called good reputation obtained for Mary at his birth was derived from drunken bar patrons, James is put upon to defend himself again: "That's a lie!" (802). Edmund continues to blame James for stinginess, and James angrily interrupts the accusation, "And I say you're a liar!" (802). Edmund accuses James of neglecting out of stinginess and ignorance to send Mary to therapy early in her addiction; James responds, "You lie again!" (802). Insecure that he will be sent to a good sanatorium for his tuberculosis cure, Edmund again charges James with stinginess, assuming Edmund will die anyway. James answers: "That's a lie! You're crazy!" (804). Edmund further confronts James with "moaning poorhouse" to avoid a good hospital to which to send Edmund, causing James to repeat, "It's a lie!" (805). To Edmund's charge that James can afford good treatment for him because he has property worth "a quarter of a million," James says, "Lies! It's all mortgaged!" (805). Before James can defend himself against spending money to buy property from McGuire the very afternoon during which he claimed "poorhouse," Edmund prevents him: "Don't lie about it!" (805). O'Neill's stage directions are that James, "lying feebly," protests that McGuire lied, not he, "He's a liar if he said—." But Edmund interrupts again, pressing for the truth: "Don't lie about it!" (805). Concerning his own father, who returned to Ireland after abandoning his family in America and died by mistaking poison for something edible, James says, "There was gossip it wasn't by mistake but that's a lie" (807), a statement that Edmund quickly doubts. When James accuses Jamie of contributing to Edmund's poor health by influencing him wrongly in life attitude, Jamie denies the charge in one of his rare uses of the "L" word, "That's a lie!" (732). By act 4 Jamie does not need to lie or charge others; he escapes through the altered reality of alcohol and then complete stupor.

Edmund differs from the others in his ability to face the truths of mortal existence, even if he uses alcohol to assist him. His only significant attempt at denying truth, but only to Jamie, not to himself, occurred in the past as he tells Mary of the time he first learned from Jamie of her addiction: "I called him a liar! I tried to punch him in the nose. But I knew he wasn't lying" (787). Therefore, we see that Edmund is not accused of lying and is mostly the challenger of lies and liars within the family, almost a one-man truth squad in exposing his father while Mary and James use the lie to hide from the truth, thus splitting their present and past realities into double versions of each, Neoplatonism with a vengeance. Edmund's facing of unpleasantness, even his own serious illness, reveals his strength despite his status as the youngest and the physically sickest of the four Tyrones. Early in the play we are prepared for his future fortitude by Jamie's telling Tyrone, "His quietness fools people into thinking they can do what they like with him. But he's stubborn as hell inside and what he does is what he wants to do" (733). His mystically-gained insight, his having known the meaning of his life from the perspective of his mystical experiences, which provide him with a lingering subconscious optimistic authority and empowerment, and his function as a seeker of unaltered truth and, especially late in the play, as a family mediator, although at various times throughout the play he both accuses and defends each of the other family members, endow him with raissoneur qualities. Unlike the drug and alcohol-altered mortal reality of the other Tyrones, he is the only character whose altered mortal reality, when it was expanded through mystical experience, is beneficial. Desiring comfort from Mary and suffering from lack of it, he holds his own with her, James, and Jamie and has a strong desire to survive his illness and an inner resolve. He assures Mary, "I'll soon be all right again" (741), and he holds out "hope" (759) that Mary will recover. Mary predicts his future when he is "all well [. . .] healthy and happy and successful" (770). These statements look positively for Edmund beyond the last page of the play or the fall of the theater curtain. Unlike Jamie, he does not seek power over or power parity with James, only a defense of truth. O'Neill does not burden him or detract from his possible potential by loading him with the marital baggage of Eugene O'Neill that the name "Eugene Tyrone" would carry.

In addition to dialogue patterns revealing Neoplatonism O'Neill creates a dense web of incremental and symbolic details to support this underlying philosophy, an equally remarkable achievement of the play beyond its overall structure. For example, when Jamie and Edmund are said to grin "like Cheshire cats" (724) early in the first act of the play, O'Neill foreshadows with this allusion to Alice in Wonderland his presenting details of altered reality in the material to follow. Also, O'Neill cleverly foreshadows the crucial veil image of Edmund's monologue in act 4 in earlier details. Both similar and ironically in contrast to the veil is O'Neill's use of the fog, described as a "curtain" and a "wall," and the quotation from Dowson, containing the "gate," all Neoplatonic images. In act 3 the fog outside the windows is "like a white curtain" (772). In act 4 it is a "wall" (792). Both are analogous to Edmund's "veil" (between the mortal and immortal realities) and separate the Tyrone family reality from the outside mortal world, and to Mary's morphine "blank wall she builds around her [. . .] like a bank of fog in which she hides and loses herself" (801), separating her from the other Tyrones. When Edmund returns from being out in the fog, in which "[e]verything looked and sounded unreal" (795) and he could not see the house, the location of the family reality, he says he wanted to be "in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself" (796). The fog, which conceals and separates, here is the opposite image of the veil that is desirably "drawn back by an unseen hand" in Edmund's monologue. Edmund says that he "lost the feeling of being on land. [. . .] It was like walking on the bottom of the sea" (796). The land and the sea are opposing metaphor-symbols in Romantic and Victorian poetry for mortality and immortality respectively (as in Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode" and in Arnold's "Dover Beach"). James also worries about keeping "land beneath [his] feet" (806) and would be willing to forego "having an acre of land" (810) if he had achieved his artistic potential, the land symbolic of his mortal life. Dowson's poem "Vitae summa brevis spem nos vetat incohare longam," which laments the brevity of life and is quoted by Edmund in act 4, uses the "gate" in the same way other writers use the veil, to separate Neoplatonic mortal and immortal, "misty dream," realities:

They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream. (795)

Edmund's special position philosophically throughout the play, emanating from the optimistic authority of his mystical experiences, which permanently layer his perceptions of mortal and immortal reality, make him the focus of hope at the end of the play, a positive view of Edmund recognized also in Black's and Lloyd's essays. Edmund's attempted suicide, mentioned in act 4, is not dated so that in the play it could have taken place before his travels and consequent mystical experiences. At the end of the play Jamie, who wanted to be a newspaperman, is lost to self-loathing cynicism, alcoholism, and the surety of financial dependence on James. James's life is nearly over, his potentially successful career as a great Shakespearean actor lost to easy, quick profits from a popular stage sensation. Mary, her prime of life also gone, seems hopelessly lost to morphine addiction, suffers from her loss of religious faith, and retreats to a past-altered reality. Only Edmund with his youth, intellect, strength of personality, ambition to grow from his position as a literary contributor to the local newspaper, and wisdom learned through suffering and mystical experience has his life ahead of him if he can regain his health. James encourages him when he tells Edmund that both Dr. Hardy and the specialist "promised" (804) a cure in six months to a year. Also Edmund has proven himself up to challenges in the past by memorizing the lines of Macbeth in a week to win a bet with James. Therefore, he is the character to carry forward positively. Even though the "night" of the title means mortal death on one level, the end of the play momentarily arrests mortal life in its flux. Although mortal past and present belong to all the Tyrones, who will go on, at least for a time, with all the vicissitudes of mortal existence after the play ends, the mortal future belongs most potentially to Edmund. Frederic Carpenter correctly points out that philosophically the play focuses on Edmund, who will take "a journey beyond night." Carpenter then conventionally defines the genre of the play by giving a traditional characteristic of tragedy: Edmund's "tragedy is not that of defeat but of a suffering which leads to illumination" (Carpenter 158). In tragedy, however, illumination, anagnorisis, marks an end effectively to those who experience it. Since Long Day's Journey is a Künstlerdrame, the reverse is true instead: Edward's illumination by means of mystical experience through entry into an immortal realm is followed by a return to mortal suffering, especially within the family, but this suffering will then supposedly be transcended through art, dark mortal experience rendered into brilliant permanence.

The mortal world is imperfect, but the play, the work of art, is perfectly conceived and expressed through Neoplatonic concepts and the Künstlerdrame genre. Life itself going forward is the philosophical theme of comedy, even though individuals and generations give way to mortal death. Edmund's mystical insight that he "belonged [. . .] to Life itself" carries him beyond the particular and individual life he lives within the Tyrone family. It provides the perspective that enables him to rise above the lack of maternal attention, his father's holding specific values that Edmund does not share, and his brother's modeling influence, as destructive as his verbal camaraderie is supportive. Edmund is the "secret" and the "meaning" and must make his own mortal reality, although this work of art immortalizes him in his crisis state as one of the numerous immortal fictional lives O'Neill gave to the world through all his characters. Edmund's seemingly contradictory statements in his monologue, that he belonged "to Life itself," remembering "the joy of belonging to a fulfillment beyond men's lousy, pitiful, greedy fears and hopes and dreams" and that he "will always be a stranger who never feels at home [. . .] who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death" make Neoplatonic sense because the two statements refer to two different realities. The dual notions of belonging and not belonging may allude to or be explained by Wordsworth's Neoplatonic "Immortality Ode" in which the young child is seen as a stranger to transient mortal life, having come in pre-existence "from God, who is our home" (65) and to whom in the immortal world he will return upon death. Whereas Wordsworth's child is gradually socialized to the mortal world through, in part, "sallies of his mother's kisses," apparently notably absent for extended periods in Edmund's life when Mary is aloof, Edmund continues to feel estranged except while present in his mystical experiences.

Not feeling at home or not having a home in the mortal world is another major recurring Neoplatonic rhetorical motif in the play.[19] For example, James's mother, "a stranger in a strange land" (807), was twice evicted from her American home onto the street. Mary complains about "never having a home" (777), about never feeling "at home in the theater" (775), about her having "never felt at home" (775) with the actors in James's company, about the Tyrone house, "I've never felt it was my home" (738). She is "sick and tired of pretending this is a home" (752), cannot expect the servants "to act as if this was a home" (756), believes that "[i]n a real home one is never lonely" as in her, ironically impermanent, "father's home" (756), which she left to marry James. She says that James "doesn't understand a home. He doesn't feel at home in it" (749), does not "know how to act in a home" (752), and prefers "the Club or a barroom" (756). She defends Jamie's behavior by saying that he has not "been brought up in a real home" (762). Edmund charges James with providing Mary with "No home except this summer dump" (803). James says that Edmund was "homeless [. . .] in a foreign land" (807). The Neoplatonic idea is that no mortal home is adequate or permanent. Wordsworth knows as an adult of his immortal home, "that immortal sea" (167), as does Edmund, also through occasional mystical experience while on or near the sea.

Even O'Neill's early dramatizing of Coleridge's work confronted Neoplatonic elements, mystical experience, and one's life as a donnée for the artist. Bogard writes of O'Neill's "solitary, dedicated, even obsessive life in art" (xv), that his plays were efforts to determine his identity by making his creative works a mirror into which he could study and discover himself, and Bogard excludes O'Neill's 1924 adaptation of Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" from the canon of plays written after 1922 that contain "autobiographical elements" (xii). However, Coleridge's work is about a mariner, like that of Edmund in his past, who has a quasi-mystical (in part because it lacks ineffability) experience while on the sea. He is alone, lonely after the death of his shipmates, and deeply troubled and in trouble when suddenly he has a revelation leading to feelings of love, cosmic unity, and moral regeneration. No veil is present rhetorically, and the mariner not only remembers details of the experience; but it also becomes the guiding principle of his life, a fine example of the lasting authority and power of truths learned through mystical experience. He is a poet-storyteller with "strange powers of speech," obsessed with repeatedly telling his own story, mesmerizing the wedding guest he stops in the poem, and feeling relief with each retelling of his story. "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a Neoplatonic work in which there are multiple realities: the Catholic theology of an afterlife from which come such details as the angelic spirits, Mary, Queen of Heaven, and saints; esoteric mythology in the realm of the Polar spirits; and, of course, the earthly voyage and mortal characters. Notopoulos points out that Coleridge in his gloss to the poem identifies one of the sources of the polar spirits as the "Platonic Constantinopolitan, Michael Psellus" (159).

In the mystical moment when the veil is withdrawn, Edmund knows that he is the secret and the meaning. The importance of this secret is contrasted to the triviality of Jamie's confession of drunkenness to which Edmund sarcastically remarks, "Thanks for telling me your great secret" (813) and to Mary's inability to keep "secrets" (827) from Mother Elizabeth. O'Neill made his art the meaning of his life and his life the basis of his art, telling his own story over and over, like the Ancient Mariner, albeit in transformation. As the Shaughnessy story is Edmund's, "the Kid's story" (724), Long Day's Journey is Eugene's quasi-autobiographical Künstlerdrame. Edmund, an aspiring writer, may seem not to have gained every answer from his mystical experience, but one could also assume his learning that his life in the unhappy mortal world is up to him to create and from which to create art is a part of the aftermath of his mystical experiences. O'Neill, his creator, places the thought, "the secret," one's work in art built on one's existential life in the suffering mortal world, in Edmund's monologue as a plan for the work of a lifetime for a character who may not be entirely autobiographical but is an immortal fictional double. The Gelbs say that "O'Neill had, in fact, been writing disguised versions of his family mythology since the beginning of a career that began off Broadway in 1916 with the one-act sea play, Bound East for Cardiff" (Gelb 5) and that "it was, after all, his family's legacy that gave him the soul-wrenching vision that inspired him to blaze forth as the greatest of American dramatists" (Gelb 22), a clear though unnamed description of Long Day's Journey as a Künstlerdrame. The "haunted Tyrones" (714) of the dedication that precedes Long Day's Journey are transformed into muses of invention. O'Neill fully enacts Shelley's dictum of depicting the "pains [. . .] of his species" as reflected in the mortal vicissitudes of the Tyrones. O'Neill became, in the words of Shelley's "Sonnet: Lift Not the Painted Veil," "A splendour among shadows, a bright blot / Upon this gloomy scene [. . .]." The last scene of the play juxtaposes the immortal brilliance of O'Neill's subtly complex literary achievement and the night tableau of the mortal Tyrones, each with layered multiple Neoplatonic realities. For Mary "Only the past when you were happy is real" (777). Her last words speak for us all. Human happiness is impermanent. In the mortal world we can be "so happy" only "for a time"[20] (828). The family origins of this truth, hard to accept in the mortal world of struggle outside of mystical experience, is always found in the artful perfection of the whole play. Written in his last years, Long Day's Journey takes O'Neill back by means of the Künstlerdrame genre to examine and record the Neoplatonic underpinnings of his entire canon of work.

NOTES

1. I gratefully acknowledge the suggestions for some of the secondary sources used in this study that were made by my colleagues Bruce Krajewski (for his introducing me to Hadot and Plotinus), Joyce Palmer, Stephen Souris, and Florence Winston; for the careful reading of the manuscript and helpful suggestions made by the latter three; and for the expert assistance of Suzanne Sweeney, TWU Librarian, in obtaining library materials quickly for me.

2. James Notopoulos says that Shelley "leans more toward Neoplatonism than Platonism" (89). Although his monumental study The Platonism of Shelley: A Study of Platonism and the Poetic Mind is of great value, a more concise, direct, and admirably detailed understanding of Shelley and his Neoplatonism in specific poems can be had from Earl Wasserman, The Subtler Language (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959).

3. For example, Frederic Carpenter specifies the "Transcendental idealism of Edmund Tyrone" (158); Doris Alexander, ("Eugene O'Neill and Light on the Path," Modern Drama 3 [1960]: 260-67), Henry Pommer, and Carl Rollyson, Jr. ("O'Neill's Mysticism: From His Historical Trilogy to Long Day's Journey into Night," Studies in Mystical Literature 1.3 [1981]: 218-36) discuss O'Neill's mysticism in general terms; Egil Törnqvist in A Drama of Souls mentions Edmund's "pantheistic experiences" (100, 117); Michael Manheim in Eugene O'Neill's New Language of Kinship suggests existentialism as the "appeal of his last works" (11).

4. This identification of the allusion is reprinted in Bloom's above-mentioned collection. See Jean Chothia, "Long Day's Journey into Night: the Dramatic Effectiveness of Supposedly Neutral Dialogue," Modern Critical Views: Eugene O'Neill, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987) 129.

5. Except the Frankenstein allusion, discussed in note 13. See especially Chothia, Forging a language 175-81; Albert Wertheim, "Gaspard the Miser in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night," American Notes and Queries 18 (1979): 39-42; Normand Berlin, "O'Neill's Shakespeare," Eugene O'Neill Review 13.1 (1989): 5-13; Laurin Porter's three essays, "Modern and Postmodern Wastelands: Long Day's Journey and Shepard's Buried Child," Eugene O'Neill Review 17.1-2 (1993): 106-19, particularly 115; "Teaching Long Day's Journey into Night and Shepard's Buried Child," Eugene O'Neill Review 25.1-2 (2001): 80-84, particularly 82; and "Musical and Literary Allusions in O'Neill's Final Plays," Eugene O'Neill Review 28 (2006): 131-46; and Steven F. Bloom, "`The Mad Scene: Enter Ophelia': O'Neill's Use of the Delayed Entrance in Long Day's Journey into Night," Eugene O'Neill Review 26 (2004): 226-38. Another known published identification of the veil allusion, "the veil of Maya," is made by D.L. Lloyd (17), who argues that O'Neill went from his previous Nietzchean, Dionysian and Apollonian polarities and atheism to theism with a "Christian flavour" (18). Other than stating in his final endnote that "loss of self," a characteristic of mystical experience to be discussed in the second part of this paper, "is more marked in Eastern mysticism than in Western mysticism" (21), Lloyd offers little justification for identifying O'Neill's use of the veil in this context as deriving from Hindu myth. I disagree with Lloyd's identification of the "veil" as an allusion to Maya; with his inclusion of matter in the "numinous" realm, a characteristic that is certainly not Shelleyan; with his assertion that Edmund experiences the human world directly in his mystical experience instead of the immortal world; with his interpretation of Edmund's "vision" as religious in the ordinary sense; and with his view that Edmund's memory of his mystical experiences changes him in the play, not the experiences themselves, thus limiting Edmund's strength to act 4 instead of seeing it in the whole play and contradicting Lloyd's own correct understanding that mystical experience itself, not only the memory of it, brings both immediate and enduring benefit to the participant. However, Lloyd's essay is important in calling attention to the characteristics of mystical experience, especially the permanent effect it has on those who have it, a matter that has been largely ignored in subsequent literary criticism of Long Day's Journey. Also Lloyd should be credited with the idea that dualistic reality is introduced specifically into the play through Edmund's monologue, though he identifies the dualism differently from the Neoplatonic mortal and immortal worlds.

6. In later editions of the poem, for example in Victorian Poetry, ed. E.K. Brown (New York: Ronald Press, 1942) 369-80, stanza XLVII is changed so that it also refers to the boundary between this life and a possible next one: "When You and I behind the Veil are past" (374).

7. I am indebted to Earl Wasserman's The Subtler Language for my understanding of these details.

8. Notopoulos distinguishes between Shelley's "natural" (intuitive), "direct" (reading of and about Plato), and "indirect" (reading or hearing about material influenced by Plato) Platonism. It is impossible to know which of these could be applied to O'Neill. One could argue for all three. Notopoulos notes that Shelley probably read sixteen hours a day. He continues, "as Professor Lane Cooper once remarked, that one `cannot be a reader of books without reading someone who has read Plato, or at second hand or third remove has received the Platonic stimulation'" (78). We know that O'Neill, a great reader (Edmund also has a book with him throughout acts 1 and 2), knew Greek thought and myth (seen most obviously in Mourning Becomes Electra), probably read Shelley's poetry, and certainly knew "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," examples of indirect knowledge of Platonism. Notopoulos describes Shelley's "natural" (intuitive) Platonism thus:

[. . .] the life of man in the world of time and space is an unsubstantial shadow, a "painted veil" as Shelley calls it, of an ideal world. Life, as man knows it, is all change; we come into being and perish; the processes of nature reveal the same experience: the seasons come and go, and though they bring similar experiences they are not the same; what once was joy has turned into sorrow, hope into disappointment. [. . .] Man shifts and flounders in this unsteady, contradictory world of illusions. In contrast to this world there is a permanent reality, eternal, unchanged through every change. This eternal reality is beyond time and space; it transcends generation and decay. All the eternal values of life, truth, beauty, goodness, perfection, are essences of the Ideal world. Beautiful objects in the world of time and space pass and fade, but Ideal Beauty knows naught of the seasons. (18)

9. Professor Barker's description of mystical experiences of those who saw beyond the veil as learning secrets in an instant which gave them power over the original Creation and knowledge of past and future includes concepts that could be applied to Edmund, a writer in the bud, as stand-in for O'Neill, who wrote of matters some of his exegetes say he could not have known. Also, Barker says that "early apologists, both Jewish and Christian, maintained that Plato learned from Moses, that he was Moses speaking Attic Greek" (Barker 10). This paper was Barker's "Presidential address to the Society for Old Testament Study in Cambridge January 1998, first published in the Scottish Journal of Theology 51.1 1998" (Barker 10).

10. O'Neill's literary link to Shelley is either "direct" or "indirect." The young Eugene had striking biographical parallels with Shelley, who did not live past his youngness: rebellion against the father (resolved in O'Neill's life but not in Shelley's); youthful passionate attachments to young women; hasty, regretted, and short-lived first marriage; attempted suicide; second marriage to a bohemian writer; need to have someone, usually a woman, of complete sympathy closest to him; sensitive, nervous constitution with frequent illnesses; vigorous auto-didacticism; loss of religious faith, in fact, outright atheism; sympathy for anti-capitalism and association with figures of the radical left; expulsion the first year in attendance from a top university; love of being on the water; writer of poetry and drama.

11. Although Richard, quoting "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam," probably does not understand the meaning of "Wilderness" in "Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness—," O'Neill probably understood the word to mean the mortal world with all its difficulties, disappointments, mutability, and incomprehensibility, the uncharted world in which the adolescent Richard must eke out an existence of sometimes sudden joy and oftentimes pain, embarrassment, and uncertainty in the wilderness of mortal experience, not the wilderness-immortal world of Shelley's mountain in "Mont Blanc." Although the play, often seen as the other side of the coin of Long Day's Journey, takes a philosophically comic view of life and follows the plot of traditional New Comedy as analyzed by Northrop Frye, the title reveals O'Neill's characteristically dark attitude towards man's earthly home and fate, also the view of Shelley. At the beginning of act 4, scene 2, Richard in his long soliloquy speaks of his surroundings in some of the same language that Edmund will use in Long Day's Journey. The two speeches are noteworthy for both comparison and contrast. Richard, waiting for his girlfriend, Muriel, rhapsodizes: "Gee, I love tonight. . . . I love the sand, and the trees, and the grass, and the water and the sky, and the moon . . . it's all in me and I'm in it . . ." (87). Edmund speaks similar words in part of his long monologue, but his are descriptive of mystical experience, absent with Richard: "I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky!" (811-12). Also, Edmund is more experienced and mature than Richard, and O'Neill is further along in his career than when he wrote Ah, Wilderness!, so Edmund goes on in his monologue to analyze his Shelleyan mystical experience. O'Neill seems to have borrowed details from Richard's speech to construct the rhetoric of Edmund's monologue after having researched the rhetoric of mystical experience, a further argument for O'Neill's following literary tradition rather than recording his own mystical experience through Edmund. The clearest detailed source for an understanding of Shelley's Neoplatonism is Earl Wasserman's The Subtler Language, to which I am indebted in all my discussions of Shelley's Neoplatonism, where he provides brilliant analyses of the elegy "Adonais" and the lyric "Mont Blanc: Lines Written in the Vale of Chamouni."

12. O'Neill thus must have known the poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, but he apparently had not read his wife's, Mary Shelley's, famous novel Frankenstein because Jamie makes a mistake in his own declaration that Edmund is his, Jamie's, Frankenstein. In the novel Dr. Frankenstein is the creator of the monster, not the one created. O'Neill also misused "Frankenstein" as an allusion in scene 5 of The Hairy Ape when he describes the crowd's entering the scene from church as "gaudy marionettes, yet with something of the relentless horror of Frankensteins in their detached, mechanical unawareness" (147). In a college anthology of the 1950s, although this inaccuracy is footnoted by the editors and excused ("In many other literary references the monster is erroneously called `Frankenstein,' as here" [The American Tradition 867 fn]), Bogard does not seem to notice O'Neill's error when he analyses the Frankenstein allusion in Long Day's Journey in the revised 1988 edition of Contour in Time (445-49). O'Neill's nodding on this fact is perhaps the only "defect" to be found in his otherwise perfect play. O'Neill and others who call the monster by its creator's name probably are perpetuating the error popularized by films on the subject, which unknowingly presented or unfaithfully revised Mary Shelley's original novel. Only in an ironic meta-dramatic sense is Edmund Jamie's Frankenstein: if Edmund is a stand-in for Eugene, Jamie helped to form Eugene, singly and as an important catalyst in the family dynamic, who then as a playwright created the monstrous Cain-like Jamie of Long Day's Journey, who hated as well as loved his two brothers.

13. Perhaps he meant oneness of substance, not reality, because monism and Neoplatonism are not antithetical; in fact, monism implies optimism (See William James 319).

14. Portions of this part of the paper were presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia, 30 December 2006, under the title "Edmund in Paradise; O'Neill, Looking Homeward: Long Day's Journey into Night and Neoplatonism," one of the papers on a panel sponsored by the Eugene O'Neill Society, "Long Day's Journey into Night and the Teleology of Perfection."

15. The examples of "veil" use set forth in the first section of this study are from the literature of high culture as are the other literary allusions in the play. In the literature of popular culture on Christian subjects, usually Biblical and Neoplatonic, even if not so labeled, but not necessarily on mystical experience, O'Neill also could have known contemporary or slightly earlier examples of titles using the "veil," such as Francis Clement Kelley's 1929 When the Veil is Rent (1929; Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2003) and Horatius Bonar's 1875 The Rent Veil, referring to the veil of the great temple. O'Neill would not have alluded to works such as these with Edmund's veil image because he would expect his audience to recognize literary allusions from high culture, not popular Christian books written by Catholic clergy, and because Edmund is not religious in the ordinary sense nor is his mystical experience, although both are spiritual. However, O'Neill may have known such works himself: a curious similarity to and thus possible source of Edmund's words at the end of his long monologue about stumbling in the fog is found in Kelly's book, an allegorical treatment of a soul's progress to redemption after death: "I walked on, stumbling constantly, how long I did not know. It seemed like hours and hours. The fog never lifted" (Kelley 44). Soon after Edmund speaks of stumbling, Jamie is heard stumbling and falling on the house steps in the fog.

16. The realities are (1) all mortal life, (2) the division of mortal life into human and non-human, (3) immortality of the spirit. I am indebted to Wasserman for his brilliant analysis of these three realities in his chapter on "Adonais" in The Subtler Language.

17. A reason for O'Neill's use of the name "Edmund" instead of "Eugene" for the almost autobiographical youngest Tyrone could be related to his identification of the other three Tyrones with the three Gorgons. Perseus, who conquered the Gorgons, had to become invisible to accomplish this feat. Symbolically, O'Neill's achieving invisibility by using the mask of "Edmund" enabled him to subdue his family demons in writing the play as he had earlier transcended family dysfunction to become a great dramatist.

18. For a related discussion of lying in O'Neill's plays, see Brad Field, "Correctives in O'Neill," Eugene O'Neill Review 17.1-2 (1993): 93-105.

19. Pointed out by Zander Brietzke, "Too Close for Comfort: Biographical Truth in Long Day's Journey Into Night," Eugene O'Neill Review 25.1-2 (2001): 35 fn.10.

20. Similar words are used in act 4 by Nina ("I'll play the game . . . it will make him happy for a while [. . .]" and Darrell ("I shall be happy for a while!") in their drive for happiness, characteristic of all the characters in Strange Interlude (697 and 713 respectively). The words "happy" and "happiness" appear on at least sixty-five pages, often multiple times on each page, for mortal happiness is elusive and short-lived in this play also.

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