Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition)

by Mel Gussow

  AM: Yes. I knew the wife in the story slightly. I never met the man. He was dead by that time. It was my interpretation of what had happened to him. At an extremely young age he was a very successful businessman.

  He ended up owning a half dozen different businesses and became paranoid. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-seven, twenty-eight years old. He was certain that he would be robbed, that people were going to set fire to various things. He was a farmer, among other things, and he ended up hanging himself in his barn.

  MG: That’s not how the play ends.

  AM: I had not written it with the kind of total darkness that it would require. I couldn’t hang him with this play. In any case, he came very close to saving himself, and had he had a little better help he might have survived it. I never believed in the end of that play. Years ago, I rewrote the last three or four pages. I couldn’t find the requisite kind of ambiguity that was necessary because it’s an impossible philosophical situation. The play is basically trying to weigh how much of our lives is a result of our character and how much is a result of our destiny. There’s no possibility for me to come down on one side or the other. And I was not able to until I reread it again. I didn’t want it done with the other ending.

  MG: You’ve said that the play is ‘the obverse of the Book of Job.’ The central character believes that man experiences at least one bad thing in his life – and he keeps waiting for that one thing to happen.

  AM: That’s right. He’s waiting for that blow. Subsequently I thought that a lot of people feel that way.

  MG: You don’t feel that way, do you?

  AM: I used to, more than now.

  MG: After you first began to succeed?

  AM: Even earlier. Everybody I knew had faced a calamity, and some had survived it and some hadn’t. The idea was that no one could go through life unscarred.

  MG: This is one of the themes of Albee’s The Play about the Baby, that man has to experience tragedy in order to be human.

  AM: I haven’t seen the play yet, but I think there’s truth in that.

  MG: Have you faced your calamity?

  AM: [Laugh] Eight or ten times! I came to the edge of life a number of times, once with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then with my divorce. I was married seventeen years. That was a big blow, that I would come to that.

  MG: And Marilyn too?

  AM: Marilyn. After all, we were married for five years [1956-1961]. She never lived that many years with anybody else because nobody could hang in there that long. I wasn’t writing anything in those days. I would call it a calamity – to me. It was for her, too, I suppose, but she was more accustomed to it. Her life as a whole was full of calamity.

  MG: The woman who had no luck – even though she became a movie star.

  AM: That whole story of the movie star and the way it consumes people – it’s so banal by now. And it gets repeated again and again and again. You pick up a paper and this loving couple are suddenly at each other’s throats.

  It’s the oldest story. Success is the great man-eater. Surviving it is as hard as attaining it, if not harder. Early on I fastened my arm to the idea of the theatre, specifically tragic theatre, as a root that goes back to the beginning of time. By attaching myself to it, I felt safe. I could always revert to it, in worse times. Maybe I could add to it somehow.

  MG: If you hadn’t found that?

  AM: I don’t know what would have happened.

  MG: After The Man Who Had All the Luck failed, you were thinking of doing something else, like writing fiction.

  AM: Yes. The play closed in four days and was totally unremarked. I promptly said, I don’t belong in this and I wrote a novel, Focus, to start off my career as a novelist. The idea of spending all that time – and hope – on something that could be wiped out in a matter of days. By the way, Focus has been made as a film, with Bill [William H.] Macy. At the time of The Man Who Had All the Luck, I had hardly been close to the theatre. When I saw the play, I couldn’t recognize anything about it as something that I had written. It seemed utterly strange and alien. It wasn’t the failure of the play that sent me into writing a novel. It was the fact that I had no connection with what I saw on stage.

  MG: Meaning they did it wrong?

  AM: I’m not sure they did it wrong. Maybe there was no way to do it. They didn’t try to trivialize it or cheapen it in any way. Joe Fields was the director – the brother of Dorothy Fields, and I think his father or grandfather was Fields of Weber and Fields [the vaudeville comedians]. He walked around with books of French poetry in his pocket, and he wrote the crudest Broadway farces. He adored the play but he didn’t know how to do it, and I didn’t know any more than he did. I thought I should write novels because I didn’t think I could realize my work on stage. I decided I would never write another play.

  But at some point, early on, I began thinking of myself as a playwright – with no evidence. My role, or my identity, was that of a playwright. I couldn’t identify myself as a novelist. I lived in a country with no theatre. But that identity never left me. Now when I sit down and think about writing and think, oh where am I going to put this play, what I am going to do with it if I write it? – it’s an absurd question. Somewhere, somehow, some place will do it. Maybe some guy out in Chicago will do it.

  MG: Then you heard the story that became All My Sons. Both those plays were based on overheard stories.

  AM: Correct. As a matter of fact, now that you say that, both of them came from the same woman, my ex mother-in-law, who was probably the least dramatic human being ever born. She had absolutely flat Ohio speech, without emphasis of any kind. She was a Catholic who simply accepted life as a disaster, the way some people did in those days, hoping for a better one in the afterlife. They lived to die. That was what was called religion.

  MG: And she told you the two stories.

  AM: And she dropped two stories on me.

  MG: What if she hadn’t?

  AM: I probably would have found something else. Your antennae are out there catching all these flies. Some you eat and some you don’t.

  MG: All you need is a good fly?

  AM: The right kind of fly, you go with it. I start plays all the time, and drop them because they don’t work. That’s a very common thing with me.

  MG: Many plays unwritten or half written.

  AM: Or just started. I started to do something just as sort of a joke about six months ago – I’m rewriting Hamlet. That the truth of the play is that his father never died, that the so-called uncle is his father, the king is really alive. That’s why they say, what is the matter with him, what’s got into that boy? If you look at that play, except for that first scene, nobody else sees or hears that ghost but him. The only time it starts to get real for him is when he discovers that he stabbed the old man – through a curtain, of all things. This is all a reverie of a seventeen-year-old boy.

  MG: As you say that, Shakespeare is turning over in his grave.

  AM [laughs]: If you look at the lines of the people talking to him, it’s as though they are wondering, what got into his head? And indeed he knows a hawk from a handsaw. The dream quality of the whole thing, and the youthful quality are essential. That scene talking to his actors, cooking up his performance – it’s right out of hallucination. I didn’t finish it. I never will. But I had a good time for about two days, piecing it together.

  MG: How did you come to start it?

  AM: I was reading Hamlet two years ago and what struck me powerfully was the surprise in the voices of the other people. Practically everybody is trying to figure out what he’s talking about.

  MG: Some director probably could stage it that way.

  AM: Yes, but the Hamlet would have to be, or appear to be seventeen. I don’t know if it’s ever been done that way.

  MG: In an essay, you said that perhaps you should have written The Crucible as farce, that that was the only way to handle the subject.

  AM: Well, when you conside
r that Ring Lardner Jr. sat in front of that committee and six months later he was in prison with one of the members of the committee [J. Parnell Thomas]. That’s out of French farce.

  MG: To you it was tragedy.

  AM: At that time it seemed like tragedy, and indeed it was. I was just thinking this morning about [Robert] Hanssen who has been caught as a spy. Nobody would think now of electrocuting him, although he could be. Remember [Aldrich H.] Ames who gave away the whole naval code so that the Russians knew where every ship was and what the ships were talking about to each other. He got twenty or twenty-five years. Because if you spy for money, it’s less alarming than if you do it for an idea. I think with all of them there is a feeling of infinite power. They are sitting there with their counterparts: there are two people. One of them is the real guy and the other guy is the fellow who is stepping into the cold shower, who is controlling the whole situation. It’s a kind of revenge. ‘You think you got me as your subject, you go on thinking that, because I’m controlling you.’ In the case of Ames, he was making forty or fifty thousand a year. He had a Jaguar and a Ferrari, a house in Mexico, another one – and nobody wondered about it! You’ve got to really be desensitized somehow to not have questioned this.

  MG: You asked for your FBI files under the Freedom of Information Act.

  AM: I did, and there’s nothing there. It’s all blacked out. What you get is newspaper clippings. There was one thing which they forgot to black out, but it’s meaningless anyway. They reported I had a dinner party at my house in Brooklyn Heights and clearly from the report they had followed one of my guests home. Imagine the manpower. It’s like the Stasi in Germany where they had approximately half the population spying on the other half. God almighty, what an age! We deserved a Shakespeare, but we didn’t get one. The roaring conflicts! I feel now that the ’50s really did emasculate the culture, more than one is willing to confront. Not just the radicals. There weren’t that many anyway. But in general it set up a warning flag, a very profound one, to watch your step. It was more effective because it wasn’t overt. So it was very deep, psychologically speaking. The whole theatre turned into our version of the absurd, which was on the whole far less political than European theatre. Ionesco wrote plays that were pretty sharp.

  MG: You and Tennessee were thriving in the 1950s on Broadway.

  AM: Yes. But one got the feeling even then that there was a high pressure on the whole situation. I’ll never forget one afternoon I had to be at my lawyer’s office to sign some papers. Another lawyer, Eddie Costikyan, was brought in as a witness to my signature. In passing, I said, ‘The whole Broadway scene is corrupt. It’s corrupt because money rules everything.’ Money always ruled, but there were exceptions. There were crazy people like Billy Rose who would back [Clifford] Odets, and never expect to get his money back because Odets’s plays didn’t run that long. [Kermit] Bloomgarden when he started, Bob Whitehead, five or six in that whole gang. And now it’s just been bogged down by money people and investors who have no connection with the art. And Costikyan said, ‘That’s a communist position.’ I’ll never forget that. Imagine! He was, I suppose, a liberal man. That’s what I mean by the flag going up. Uh-oh!

  MG: And you survived that, too.

  AM: Yes. But I was depressed. No end to it. I never thought I would feel this way again, but they’re going to bring on a cultural crisis. It may be that’s what they want, in the belief that the majority of the American people will be with them.

  MG: Last October I was in Ann Arbor for your 85th birthday celebration at the University of Michigan. Because of your accident, you were not there.

  AM: I was in Norwich, England, and there was a broken sidewalk right along by the cathedral, and I was looking up at something in the cathedral, and I tripped on my left foot. I went down like a tree. [Hits the table.] Oh God, the pain. Interestingly, the doctor said, ‘This will be all right in three and a half weeks.’ I said, ‘Why a half?’ He said, ‘That’s how long it takes.’ I got back here, went to my doctor. He said, ‘It will be all right in three and a half weeks’ – and it was. I said, ‘It’s about the only thing you guys can predict.’ He said, ‘That’s right.’

  MG: That was the first time I was in Ann Arbor.

  AM: Back in the 1920s, Ann Arbor was the place where all the radicals who were thrown out of other universities ended up, from Harvard, Yale, Princeton. They had a terrific faculty. They were radicals not necessarily for political reasons. One famous guy was thrown out of Harvard for advocating birth control.

  MG: Your time at Michigan meant a great deal to you, didn’t it?

  AM: It was the greatest thing, it was the luckiest thing I could have done. There was, and still is, an atmosphere in that place, of democracy, in the best sense. It’s full of the voices of all kinds of people. In those days and today, they had a large number of Asian students, which you didn’t find in other places. And Arabs. In those days, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, it was all lily white. Wearing white buckskin shoes. The teach-ins originated at Michigan.

  MG: And that’s where you became a playwright. It was a turning point.

  AM: I don’t know what would have happened if I had not gone there. In those days, there were very few, if any, creative writing courses. Forget playwriting. Colleges didn’t think that was a serious affair, so to find a school that was interested in playwriting was really very, very, unusual. That was terrific for me. I also had one teacher who taught the essay. I got a lot out of that. One day he said, ‘Miller, I want to see you. Let’s go for a walk.’ The idea of going for a walk with a professor was quite unusual. We walked and he said, ‘You know, you could be a professional essayist. I think in about eight or ten years.’ Eight or ten years? I couldn’t wait eight or ten months!

  24 October 1963

  ‘That man up there isn’t me’

  It was the first day of rehearsal of After the Fall, Miller’s first new play to open in New York since A View from the Bridge in 1955. After the Fall also marked the beginning of Lincoln Center, New York’s major centre for the performing arts, and of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre, under the leadership of Elia Kazan and Robert Whitehead. While construction was taking place on the site on Manhattan’s upper west side, the play was to be staged in a temporary theatre downtown in Washington Square.

  Kazan had directed Miller’s first Broadway successes, All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, but there had been a break between the playwright and director after Kazan had testified as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. As Miller was to write in his memoir, Timebends, Kazan’s testimony ‘had disserved both himself and the cause of freedom.’Now the two were working together again – on a play that dealt partly with that era, the Red witch hunts of the 1950s. One of the two principal characters in the play was a self-destructive film star based on Marilyn Monroe, Miller’s second wife. Just as Miller was finishing the play, Monroe died, apparently from an overdose of sleeping pills. All these events were in the air: so much was at stake in terms of the play-wright’s reputation and the future of Lincoln Center.

  Before the rehearsal began (in a Manhattan ballroom), Miller said, ‘The play is about a lawyer in New York today. The form is extremely free and very subtle. It’s a gathering of connections. It’s the happiest work I’ve ever written, and by that I don’t mean it’s funny.’In response to the suggestion that it was drawn from his life, he said, ‘All my plays are autobiographical,’ and added unconvincingly, ‘This less so.’

  Miller, Kazan, Whitehead and Harold Clurman, the literary adviser of the repertory company, sat at a table. Kazan was in his shirtsleeves, the other three were in jackets and ties. They faced the actors in the company, who included Jason Robards and Barbara Loden in the leading roles of Quentin and Maggie, Faye Dunaway and Hal Holbrook. In photographs of the event, I can be seen in the back row, covering the rehearsal for Newsweek magazine. Television newsmen were also in attendance.

  Kazan said, ‘This is the firs
t rehearsal of the Repertory Company of Lincoln Center. In a moment, Arthur Miller will read you his play, After the Fall. Holding a script, Miller began, ‘The action takes place in the mind, thought and memory of Quentin.’He stopped there and said, ‘That’s all I’m going to read.’ Those of us who were outsiders were asked to leave, and then Miller returned to the reading, which, with a break for dinner, went on into the evening.

  Some weeks later when the cast had moved into the ANTA Washington Square Theatre, I met Miller for the first time – on the set of After the Fall, a sparse arrangement of modular units. Miller was in a particularly relaxed mood. He was reclining on a block that represented the marital bed of Quentin and Maggie. Leaning back, with his hands clasped behind his head, he looked like a man at peace with himself and his past.

  After the Fall did not live up to expectations, partly because Maggie was so close to the image of Marilyn Monroe without delving deeply into her character and the relationship between her and Miller (or his surrogate in the play). Quentin, a lawyer not an artist, also remained at a distance, proof that the playwright believed it when he said, ‘That man up there isn’t me.’

  Encouraged by his associates at Lincoln Center, he followed After the Fall with Incident at Vichy, his first exploration of the Holocaust. Clurman directed it at the Vivian Beaumont, the new Lincoln Center theatre.

  In 1972, Miller had written what was ostensibly his first comedy, The Creation of the World and Other Business, his version of the Book of Genesis, with Adam and Eve as the principal characters. The composer Stanley Silverman had written several songs for the show, and then asked Miller if he would be interested in collaborating on a musical version. Gradually the two began adapting the show into Up from Paradise. On April 18, 1974, we met at a rehearsal, and Miller talked about the origins of the production.

  AM: Students at the University of Michigan were going to do scenes from a play of mine that had never been performed. Then they started fiddling with this and they thought they would do it on an experimental basis. As soon as we started musicalizing it, the whole form began to change. It became possible to use narration and dialogue, a kind of statement and response. There was a whole new spirit. Stanley started writing more music to words I had written, and we backed into it. Before you know it, we were rehearsing ten hours a day.