A Moon for the Misbegotten Study Companion - by Virginia Lloyd

A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill's brutally honest but loving remembrance of his brother, Jamie, is a continuation of the memory play Long Day's Journey into Night. Set over a decade later, in September 1923, two months before the brother's actual death, the play is a requiem for Jamie, called here Jim Tyrone. In the last years of his creative life, 1939-1943, when he completed his most autobiographical works, O'Neill told the tale of his tragic family in two stages. Long Day's Journey into Night explains the early fatal familial events leading up to the actual long day in 1912 and focuses primarily on the author's parents; A Moon for the Misbegotten takes place eleven years later after their deaths and concentrates on Jamie O'Neill. It shows what happened to Jamie in the years following the final heart-rending view of him at the end of Long Day's Journey into Night. This was a play of "old sorrow, written in tears and blood." A Moon for the Misbegotten is a joyous tribute to the regenerative power of love, a drama conceived and created in deep affection.

A single, simple idea from Long Day's Journey into Night seems to have inspired the original idea for its sequel. In his Work Diary entry for October 28, 1941, O'Neill states:

S(haughnessy). play idea, based on story told by E(dmund). in 1st Act of"L(ong). D(ay's). J(ourney). I(nto). N (fight). "—except here Jamie principal character & story of play otherwise entirely imaginary, except for J(amie).'s revelation of self.

In the early notes for the play, the author subordinates the "Shaughnessy idea," developing it as a minor theme, the Irish-Yankee conflict, and focuses on dramatizing an idealized, imaginative account of the period immediately preceding his brother's death. The decision to eulogize Jamie in the last play of the canon can be viewed as both a personal and a creative act of retribution. In previously completed and contemplated works depicting Jamie, the dramatist developed an idea contained in the 1918–1920 notebook for "a play of Jim and self—showing influence of elder on younger brother."* The struggle of the brothers for dominance is depicted in earlier plays in two ways: as the battle waged by one dual-natured ascetic/Mephistophelian figure (John versus his shadow self, Loving, in Days without End) and as a long-running rivalry between two separate antithetical characters (Dion Anthony and William Brown in The Great God Brown). Only after he revealed his brother's destructive attitude to him in the last act of Long Day's Journey into Night was the author purged of the bitterness, resentment, and hatred he felt for Jamie. In the sequel to this play, A Moon for the Misbegotten, he manifests his deep compassion and love for Jamie and an awareness of Jamie's desperate loneliness.

The two late autobiographical plays are linked thematically by the "S." (Shaughnessy) story of an Irish tenant farmer whose land is owned by James Tyrone Sr., which Edmund relates in Long Day's Journey into Night. Edmund outwardly and his father inwardly gloat that the "wily shanty Mick" wins a "great Irish victory" over Harker, his Standard Oil millionaire neighbor, by defending and exonerating his adventurous pigs in a trespassing dispute. The prototype for Shaughnessy is James O'Neill's tenant, John Dolan, whose name appears in the early notes for Long Day's Journey into Night. In Act IV, after Edmund returns from his walk, he tells his father that he went over to see Dolan. The pigs-in-the-pond incident mentioned briefly in this work is recreated in A Moon for the Misbegotten, labeled the "Dolan play," in the first 1941–1942 notes. Shaughnessy is now called Phil Hogan; his wealthy neighbor is named Harder, rather than Harker. Using their verbal Irish wit, Phil and his daughter, Josie, soundly defeat the pompous Yankee.

Harker in Long Day's Journey into Night and Harder in A Moon for the Misbegotten are portraits of Edward Harkness, a Standard Oil millionaire whose property actually abutted the Dolan-O'Neill land. By portraying Harkness as the pro-British Harder in the play and pitting him against the Hogans, O'Neill is writing the final episode in the Irish-Yankee conflict begun earlier in the cycle play A Touch of the Poet.** O'Neill never forgave the snobbish Yankee New Londoners who rejected his Irish family, and he gets his revenge on them here. In A Moon for the Misbegotten he goes beyond his usual attack on Yankees for the indignities they inflicted on the Irish and assails one of his favorite targets, Standard Oil capitalists. As early as 1914 the author assaulted capitalism in a poem entitled "Fratricide." In it, he raised a question that is relevant today: Should young men be sent to war to protect the interests of wealthy American industrialists? "The army of the poor must fight" such a war the poem states; it asks, "What cause could be more asinine/Than yours, ye slaves of bloody toil?/Is not your bravery sublime/Beneath a tropic sun to broil/And bleed and groan—for Guggenheim,/And give your lives—for Standard Oil!" Phil Hogan expresses the author's revulsion, nearly three decades later, for this company when he tells Harder, "I couldn't bring myself to set foot on land bought with Standard Oil money that was stolen from the poor it ground in the dust beneath its dirty heel." O'Neill implies here that men are forced to surrender not only their lives but also their souls in the interests of wealth.

The first title O'Neill assigned A Moon for the Misbegotten, "The Man of Other Days," indicates that its initial focal point was, as the original idea states, Jamie's "revelation of self." The person to whom he reveals himself is the fictitious Josie Hogan. Like the Night Clerk in Hughie, she becomes in this work "The Good Listener" and the author's persona. In the 1943 draft and the published text of the play, Jim Tyrone describes all the details preceding and following his mother's death, an accurate account of the actual events, which Jamie O'Neill must have narrated to his brother.

O'Neill uses nearly the same words to describe his brother in the two late plays. In the 1912 Long Day's Journey into Night, Jamie is thirty-three; here Jim Tyrone is in his early forties. Jim's broad-shouldered, deep-chested, healthy physique "has become soft and soggy from dissipation, but his face is still good-looking despite its unhealthy puffiness and the bags under the eyes." Again the word "Mephistophelian" is used to describe his countenance. Beneath the cocky mask of the cynical "Broadway Wise Guy," "when he smiles without sneering, he still has the ghost of a former youthful, irresponsible Irish charm—that of the beguiling ne'er-do-well, sentimental and romantic." Hogan's youngest son, Mike, sees only the alcoholic failure, the spendthrift and wastrel, and expresses hatred for Jim, "with his quotin' Latin and his high-toned Jesuit College (Fordham) education .. . he's nothing but a drunken bum who never done a tap of work in his life, except acting on the stage while his father was alive to get him jobs." In early notes for the play, Jim attributes his downfall, in part, to his hatred for acting: "It took revenge on him, and made him a bum—on and off, a ham."

Jim uses alcohol for the same reasons his mother used morphine in Long Day's Journey into Night: as a way to escape the pain of reality and the knowledge of what he has become. In the earlier play he despaired when he discovered that his mother had started taking morphine again after her supposed cure, identifying with her and saying, "It means so much. I'd begun to hope, if she'd beaten the game, I could, too." Like her, Jim is one of life's tragic, self-destructive wounded, a lonely, frightened outcast.

Josie Hogan, twenty-eight, is another misfit, "so oversize for a woman that she is almost a freak—five eleven in her stockings and weighs around one hundred and eighty." Like Abbie Putnam, Cybel, and Sara Melody, she is given the physical qualities of the ideal O'Neill woman: large, firm breasts, a slender waist, and generous hips and thighs. She has a heavy jaw, high cheekbones, and blue eyes, thick black eyebrows and black hair. "The map of Ireland is stamped on her face." Josie affects the pose of a wicked wanton, the promiscuous "scandal of the neighborhood." Her father is aware of her ruse and, rightly, calls her his "Virgin Queen of Ireland." She pretends to be the whore because she is convinced no man could love her for her "beautiful soul." Loyal, loving, sensitive, "she is all woman."

Phil Hogan, fifty-five, is a wiry little man with a sturdy peasant physique, a fat face, a "big mouth, and little blue eyes with bleached lashes and eyebrows that remind one of a white pig's." He has a pronounced brogue and the verbal skill to sell "doctored up" animals to the uninitiated. Josie calls him the "damndest crook that ever came out of Ireland." With her, he engages in a long-running, good-natured quarrel in an attempt to hide the fact that he adores his daughter and loves her more than anything else in the world.

The assertion may seem incongruous, but Hogan is a partial portrait of the author's father, James. Like him, he is miserly with his sons and carefully hides the whiskey he himself heartily enjoys. He is continually acting and posturing; in the second act he assumes the role of drunkard to trick Josie. Hogan has three sons, with whom he is always in conflict. His wife died giving birth to the third son; similarly, Ella O'Neill experienced a kind of psychological death after her third son's birth. Hogan, outraged because God did not spare his wife, left the Catholic Church, scorning it, its clergy, and its followers. He has a type of father-son relationship with Jim Tyrone, reluctantly sharing his whiskey with him and facilely dispensing words of advice.

Both of the Hogans attempt to cheer the grieving Jim Tyrone, who, like Jamie O'Neill, has an abnormal, obsessive love for his mother. In the notes for Days Without End, O'Neill discussed John Loving's Oedipal feelings for his mother and his inability to free himself from guilt and maternal domination. He stated that "Mother worship, repressed and turned morbid, ends by becoming Death love and longing." After Jim's mother dies, he longs only for death, which will reunite them. The circumstances of the fictitious mother's death approximate those of Ella O'Neill's. When James O'Neill died in 1920, Jamie, for his mother's sake, reformed and gave up alcohol. The two traveled to California, where she had a stroke. Fearing that she would die, Jamie went out and got drunk. Later the mother came out of the coma briefly and looked at him reproachfully. Seeing his condition, she closed her eyes "and was glad to die."

In the play, as in real life, the son accompanies the mother's body on the long train trip east. Believing that she has betrayed him by dying, he seeks revenge. He reserves a drawing room on the train, stocks it with a case of bourbon, and hires a fifty-dollar-a-night blonde whore for the trip. Later, after the mother is buried in New London, Jamie is filled with self-loathing whenever he is sober. In the year following her death, which precedes the action of the play, he attempts to alleviate his anguish, as he had on the train, through whiskey and the company of whores. When the play opens, he seeks a total, final oblivion in death.

The son cannot die—yet. As a lapsed Catholic, he is beset by feelings of guilt. He longs for the absolution found only in confession. The need reflects the important role Catholicism played, even unconsciously, in the lives of both the author and his brother. Their early religious training had been provided by their pious mother, even before they were sent to Catholic boarding school at the age of seven, supposedly the age of reason when one is capable of distinguishing between good and evil and of committing a sin. In the following years at school they were taught the catechism and the need to keep the ten laws of God and the six laws of the Church and its teachings. A serious infraction of the laws, mortal sin, supposedly brought spiritual death to the soul. Life was restored only through confession, penance, and absolution. The sin-confession-forgiveness syndrome is an invariable motif in the canon.

Throughout A Moon for the Misbegotten death imagery is used to describe Jim Tyrone. He is called "a dead man walking slow behind his own coffin" and a "damned soul" seeking "to confess and be forgiven." He has, he believes, broken the sixth commandment, "Thou shalt not commit adultery," and betrayed God and his mother. Having sinned against the mother, he thinks that forgiveness can come to him only through Josie, the mother figure. Nowhere in the canon is O'Neill's statement that "in all my plays sin is punished and redemption takes place" more effectively illustrated than in A Moon for the Misbegotten. In the early scenes of the play, however, Josie, who is deeply in love with Jim, wants a physical as well as a spiritual relationship with him. The memory of too many mornings after wretched nights with whores haunts Jim; he is repulsed by the physical and associates sex only with prostitutes and love only with the mother or maternal figure. When she finally realizes that Jim can accept only maternal love, Josie sacrifices her own desires, saying: "I have all kinds of love for you."

The most developed section in the first scenario, entitled "The Man of Other Days," is the "extraordinary love scene" between Josie and Jim in Act III. In this version he is not repelled by sex. On the contrary, he reveals a physical desire for Josie, making the fulfillment of it a precondition for the Dolans' retaining their farm: "I wouldn't accept if Harder offered a million. Won't sell if—if you don't repulse my advances, so to speak." He alone, except for her father, knows "lots of men haven't had" her as she claims. As Act III evolves and Josie's role in the play expands, the original theme, Jim's revelation of self, becomes part of a larger, more comprehensive plan. The extraordinary love scene shows these two misbegotten creatures to be kindred souls. The new title given the work, "The Moon Bore Twins," indicates a shift in focus to their strange symbiotic relationship. Their explorations of the inner self, which culminate in the confession of opposing dreams and total self-revelation, bring not only self-awareness but love-awareness. Their love is not altogether hopeless here, and Jim even proposes to Josie: "I—I'd like to marry you—but I've nothing to offer." Josie realizes that a future with Jim is impossible. To conceal her sorrow, she says jokingly that she "will accept Mulroy today—he's been begging me to marry him since he tried to seduce me. . . . he'll give me children I can love—the first will be a son and I'll call him Jamie." Later, on November 12, 1941, after he decided to portray Josie and Jim as doomed lovers who are destined to be parted, the dramatist assigned the play its final title,
A Moon for the Misbegotten, noting in his Work Diary that it was "much more to the point."

Two weeks later, on November 26, when he began the dialogue and first draft, O'Neill states: "getting great satisfaction (from) this play—flows." He completed this draft on January 20. There is no indication in the early version that O'Neill intended to make this drama an epitaph for his brother; the work became one later in the second, 1943 draft when the author set the play in September 1923, shortly before Jamie's death. From its inception to the completion of the first draft, the drama provided a reminiscent view of the brother, a vehicle designed, as the author states, for "Jamie's revelation of self." Only when O'Neill started the second draft in January 1943 did the major theme of the published version emerge: Jim's attempt to find, through confession, forgiveness for the desecration of his mother's memory and his life of dissipation and to achieve, through the absolution of the mother-substitute and priestess, Josie, moral regeneration and redemption.

Several causes can be cited for O'Neill's decision to change the theme of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943 by adding a new spiritual dimension to it and to the characterizations of Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan. As the Work Diary entries indicate, his physical condition had deteriorated; the tremor of his hand became more pronounced. To the man who could express his thoughts only by writing them—as though his arm were the channel, his hand the extension, of his creative mind—this debilitating condition signaled his demise as an artist. A Moon for the Misbegotten was important to the dramatist for two reasons. On the personal level, he would never be able to express, in some future play, his own forgiveness, his love, and spiritual wish-fulfillment for his brother. On the creative plane, the ghost of the doomed Mephistophelian-ascetic Jamie O'Neill, which had haunted him and his plays for so many years, would finally be laid to rest.

The final version of the play has many rich levels of meaning. There are several motifs in addition to the forgiveness-redemption theme: the Irish-Yankee conflict, the parent–child conflict, the attempt to reject reality for the comforting world of illusion supported by alcohol and pipe dreams. O'Neill tells his story in a simple, straightforward style; he uses none of the earlier technical devices, save monologues and the protective masks that are removed, layer by layer, act by act.

The play is set on a day in early September 1923 at the Hogan farmhouse. The structure is described as "a fine example of New England architecture," an ugly, dilapidated "clapboarded affair." Windows are broken; shutters and curtains are nonexistent. A one-story addition, Josie's bedroom,, "has been tacked on at right." A flight of three unpainted steps extends from the ground to the door leading into this room. Josie, barefooted and wearing a cheap blue cotton dress, comes out of the house and conspires with her brother Mike, twenty, in his effort to run away from his father and the farm. Described as "slyly cunning," "primly self-righteous," and "one of the elite of Almighty God in a world of damned sinners," Mike is "a New England Irish Catholic Puritan, Grade B, and an extremely irritating youth to have around."

Josie gives him a small role of bills taken from their father's purse and advice on how to behave when he arrives at their brother Thomas's home in Bridgeport. The ungrateful youth berates his sister for being a disgraceful loose woman and for concocting a scheme "to hook" Jim Tyrone when he becomes wealthy after his mother's estate is settled. Hogan's great fear when he discovers that the son has run off with his money is that the "pious lump" will "drop it in the collection plate next Sunday, he's that big a jackass." Informed of Mike's suggestion that Josie seduce Jim Tyrone, Hogan points out the merit of the plan: "Sure, you're two of a kind, both great disgraces. That would help make a happy marriage because neither of you could look down on the other." Josie reminds him that Jim gets "drunk every night of his life." Hogan is certain that she has the strength to reform him; one taste of her club would make him "a dirty prohibitionist" in a few weeks. Josie says that she would only conspire against Jim if he broke his promise to allow her father to buy the farm on "easy time payments." Hogan admits that no one but their "damn fool" neighbor Harder would even want the property.

Jim Tyrone enters, showing that he has had "enough pick-me-ups to recover from morning-after nausea and steady his nerves." The three engage in witty repartee. Jim informs the Hogans that they are about to have a visitor: one of the "Kings of our Republic by Divine Right of Inherited Swag." Harder, "Standard Oil's sappiest child," wants to know why Hogan's "fine ambitious American-born pigs" are wallowing in his ice pond.

Harder is an immature young man, spoiled and "coddled from birth." His English tweed coat, breeches, and riding boots inflame the native hatred of the anti-British Irish. "Ill-equipped for combat with the Hogans," he has never "come in contact with anyone like them." A hilarious scene follows, which concludes with Hogan's demand for reimbursement for medical and funeral expenses for his pigs. "I'll paste your ugly mug on the front page of every newspaper as a pig-murdering tyrant! Before I'm through with you, you'll think you're the King of England at an Irish wake!" The Yankee's "retreat becomes a rout." The triumphant Hogan plans to return to the Inn with Jim to celebrate the great Irish victory by getting "drunk as Moses."

In the following act, at eleven that night, Josie sits on the steps in her "Sunday best," heart-broken because Jim failed to return two hours earlier as he has promised. Her father comes home, pretending to be drunk in an effort to trick her, and tells her that Jim has agreed to sell Harder the farm for ten thousand dollars, five times the price the Hogans were to pay. The father reminds Josie of her vow that morning to seduce Jim if he reneged on his promise. Humiliated and seeking revenge, she agrees to play the whore and "to get him in bed." Hogan vows to return at sunrise with witnesses. When Jim finally arrives at the end of the act, he has consumed so much alcohol that he has "the old heebie-jeebies." He questions the wisdom of the visit to Josie.

There is no lapse between the second and third acts. Guilt-ridden, the sodden Tyrone sings, sneeringly:

And baby's cries can't waken her
In the baggage coach ahead.

When Josie, who usually abstains from alcohol, pours generous drinks for both of them, Jim suspects that she is trying to seduce him. He recalls his nights with prostitutes, the "many dawns creeping grayly over too many dirty windows." He longs for a night with her "different from any past night.". When she discovers her father's subterfuge, Josie kisses Jim passionately and suggests that they go inside. A frightful change comes over him; he looks at her "with a sneering cynical lust" and addresses her as if she were a whore: "Come on, Baby Doll, let's hit the hay." All her adult life Josie has pretended to be a slut; being treated now like one by the man she loves hurts and humiliates her. Told that Jamie seeks a higher kind of love, Josie kisses him now with maternal passion, sacrificing all physical desire and offering him the kind of love he needs.

All of Jim's defenses crumble. Sorrowfully, he makes his confession of wrongs against his mother, his cruel act of revenge on the train. With a "brooding maternal tenderness," Josie assures him that his mother "loves and understands and forgives." She feels the mother "in the moonlight, her soul wrapped in it like a silver mantle." Josie then promises Jim a dawn that "will wake in the sky like a promise of God's peace in the soul's dark sadness." The scene demonstrates that the "moon" for the misbegotten is forgiveness, the gift Josie accords Jim. The moon is associated here with his dead virginal mother. In mythology, the moon signifies the chaste Diana; as a Christian emblem, it represents the Blessed Virgin Mary. Josie, as intermediary and priestess, had to be a virgin, for she is identified in Jim's mind with his pure mother. The virgin mystique had to be manifested to sustain the son's belief that he has been forgiven.

The last act takes place at dawn of the following morning. Josie has cradled the sleeping Jim in her arms throughout the night. They make a pieta-like "tragic picture": "this big sorrowful woman hugging a haggard-faced, middle-aged drunkard against her breast, as if he were a sick child." Hogan comes in from the barn where he has been sleeping, wondering what has taken place. Josie informs him that a "great miracle" has occurred: "a virgin who bears a dead child in the night, and the dawn finds her still a virgin." He vows to avenge any wrong done to her, but she assures him that she was the one at fault: "I thought there was still hope. I didn't know he'd died already—that it was a damned soul coming to me in the moonlight, to confess and be forgiven and find peace for a night." Weary of her father's duplicity, Josie vows to leave him: "You can live alone and work alone your cunning schemes on yourself." Docilely, the old man goes into the house when ordered to do so.

Reluctantly, Josie wakes Jim, hoping he will "remember one thing and forget the rest." He assumes, at first, that he is in the arms of a prostitute and that the night has been like all the others. The "dreamy peaceful hang-over" perplexes him. He says, "It's hard to describe how I feel. It's a new one on me. Sort of at peace with myself and this lousy life—as if all my sins had been forgiven." The sight of Hogan's "real, honest-to-God bonded Bourbon" jogs his memory. He tries to conceal his shame by pretending that he does not remember what happened the previous evening, but seeing Josie's sorrow, he says, "Forgive me, Josie. I do remember! I'm glad I remember! I'll never forget your love! . . . I'll love you always."

Josie watches Jim's receding figure in the final scene. Her father begs her gently, "Don't darlin'. Don't be hurting yourself." His lying scheme, he tells her, had been concocted not to obtain money but to ensure her happiness. Hogan's overwhelming love comforts Josie, and the two resume their old teasing banter. Before following him into the house, she stares once more at the road and says: "May you have your wish and die in your sleep soon, Jim, darling. May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace."

During the "extraordinary love scene" in Act III in which Josie relinquishes physical, personal love for the spiritual, maternal type, she says, "Maybe this is the greatest of all—because it costs so much." The same point could be made about the play itself. It is not the greatest in achievement, for it ranks in the second category with Mourning Becomes Electra and A Touch of the Poet after the masterpieces Long Day's Journey into Night and The Iceman Cometh; it did, however, require the greatest effort to complete. With his health failing, his hand trembling so that he could scarcely write, O'Neill found it difficult to finish A Moon for the Misbegotten. In January 1943, while working on the first act of the second draft, he noted in his Work Diary: "What I am up against now—fade out physically each day after about 3 hours—page a day because (I) work slowly even when as eager about play as I am about this—Park(inson's disease). main cause—constant strain to write." The dramatist completed the second act in March, the third in April, and was still reshaping the fourth on May 3, 1943, when he recorded the last entry on his creative efforts in the Work Diary.

Personal, as well as, artistic considerations motivated O'Neill to undertake the second draft of A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1943. In a letter to Dudley Nichols dated December 16, 1942, he points out the major flaw in the 1941–1942 script: "Managed to finish the first draft but the heart was out of it. . . . There is a fine unusual tragic comedy in `A Moon for the Misbegotten' but it will have to wait until I can rewrite the lifeless post-Pearl Harbor part of it." O'Neill's primary goal in rewriting the play was to bestow on Jamie, posthumously, through Josie, the care he himself denied Jamie in his final months and the absolution his brother sought. In spite of his disparaging remarks about Jamie in Long Day's Journey into Night, the dramatist sincerely loved his brother and was distraught by the humiliation and pain he endured in his last illness, which began long before the date stated in A Moon for the Misbegotten: September 1923. Frances Cadenas, a friend, in her letter of July 18, 1923, to the playwright, describes the critical condition of Jamie, who, because of the pain in his hands, was unable to write.*** Similarly afflicted later as he created A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill could not fail to identify with his brother. Probably the remembrance that he himself lacked heart and did not visit Jamie when he was ill and in need of comfort prompted the dramatist to provide his brother, in an artistic endeavor, with the personal and spiritual consolation he lacked in real life, the forgiveness extended to Jamie, through Josie, in the last line of the play: "May you rest forever in forgiveness and peace."

Through Josie, one of his most beautiful creations, O'Neill provides a valuable lesson. She sacrifices her own desires and gives Jim the spiritual love and forgiveness he needs. In modem society the individual seems to have lost the ability to love another selflessly. Josie's actions demonstrate that in a world lacking religious certitude one can, through sacrifice, bring a kind of redemption to another. Jim's search to be forgiven and to belong resembles that of every individual. The play takes on universal dimensions. Through his final view of the homeless, alienated Jim Tyrone, O'Neill seems to be saying here, as in other plays, that man can belong only in death. A Moon for the Misbegotten is a coda in the canon; it presents O'Neill's final message: before finding release in death, man must be reconciled with God, his fellow man, and himself.

Unlike Long Day's Journey into Night, A Moon for the Misbegotten was staged before O'Neill's death. The Theatre Guild assembled a company to tour the midwest. Supposedly a pre-Broadway production, it premiered in Columbus, Ohio, on February 20, 1947. The Irish in the audience were repulsed by the coarse shanty-Irish Hogans. In Detroit the company encountered censorship problems, and the play was labeled a "dirty show." A Moon for the Misbegotten was not presented on Broadway until May 2, 1957, four years after O'Neill's death and a few months after the success of Long Day's Journey into Night. The latter enabled audiences and critics to perceive the autobiographical nature of the late plays. They understood and acclaimed the 1957 production and subsequent revivals in 1968, 1973, and 1984.

A Moon for the Misbegotten is O'Neill's most Irish play. Called a "strange combination comic tragic" work by its author, it reveals the dual light-dark nature of the Irish. The hilarious pigs-in-the-pond incident in Act I shows the jocular, light-hearted side of the Celts. As the play unfolds and Jim Tyrone reflects on his past life, the dark introspective nature of the Irish is manifested. It is unfortunate that O'Neill did not retain the scene of "opposing dreams" from the first, 1941–1942 draft. In earlier plays Jamie O'Neill is depicted as a Mephistophelian character. The dual-natured Mephistophelian-ascetic Dion Anthony in The Great God Brown is perhaps the most accurate portrait of Jamie in the canon. In "The Man of Other Days" Josie describes man's opposing dreams (actually opposing natures) as "deadly enemies. It's a fight to see which will own your life." Reluctantly, Jamie reveals his first dream, a Lucifer dream, of "the cynic who believes in nothing." His second dream is "kid stuff—dates back to school—catechism—the man who loves God, who gives up self and the world to worship of God and devote self to good works." This identical dichotomy appears in the notes for Long Day's Journey into Night in the description of the mother, who in Act III recalls her girlhood desire to be a nun. Her dual nature emerges in this act: the "vain happy chattering girlishness—then changing to a hard cynical sneering bitterness with a bitter biting cruelty and with a coarse vulgarity in it—the last as if suddenly poisoned by an alive demon." Her ascetic-Lucifer dichotomy emerges in her elder son. In the last line of A Moon for the Misbegotten, O'Neill truly forgives his tragic brother for all past misdeeds; nowhere in the canon does he absolve his mother, the most miscreated of the misbegotten O'Neills.

*Psychiatrists find that a child turns to a sibling when parents are absent or indifferent. The young Eugene formed a close bond with Jamie, who was ten years older. By age fifteen Eugene has been taught important lessons in life: how to consume vast quantities of alcohol, how to romanticize sordid encounters with prostitutes, how to get the better of a tight-fisted father. Jamie was a disastrous role model; he was a hopeless alcoholic, a failed writer, a pathetic cynic, dependent on his father for financial sustenance and on his mother for emotional support.

**In this play the name Harford, probably another deliberate variation of Harkness, is given to the wealthy Yankee family.

***Mrs. Cadenas told O'Neill that after receiving his letter that morning she went to see his brother at Riverlong in Paterson, New Jersey. The doctor had diagnosed the illness as "alcoholic neuritis and that is what is causing the intense pain and possibly affecting his eyes":

Jim's story is that he does not feel any better, and that the pain is not only in his limbs but in his hands this week. He does not like the place, the food is wretched, and that he cannot sleep during the night or day. The method of treating this neuritis is giving him ten drinks of whiskey during the day and some other kind of a drink before the whiskey which burns like fire and acts as a purgative. . . . He cannot read or write so he asked me to write for him and to tell you about his condition. He also expresses a great desire to see you.... If there is any change I shall telegraph you at once. I'm sure a letter from you would be very bracing. He has a male attendant who reads to him.

The Plays of Eugene O'Neill: A New Assessment, Unger, 1987