Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition)

by Mel Gussow

  MG: While you’re doing it?

  AM: While you’re doing it. You get swept up in a free emotional life, being all those other people.

  MG: What happens when you’re stymied?

  AM: Then it’s agony. I wrote a play, which would be a four-act play, and I’ve got three of them. I broke off about 1984. Spent about two years on it. I’m hoping that when I pick it up again, it will all be clear. I don’t know whether it will. You start off, you think you’re going on a voyage, and the boat gets to the middle of the ocean and runs out of gas.

  MG: You only need one more act.

  AM: That’s the agony.

  MG: What is that play about?

  AM: It’s about marriages. I guess it’s about life being an ironical trap, which requires laughter. But there are many refractions of this work, of society, of sexual relations. It’s hard to describe it.

  MG: Is this your first comedy since The Creation of the World?

  AM: Well, it’s no more comic than some of the others I’ve written, but I’m laughing. But I used to laugh when I wrote Death of a Salesman.

  I’m not sure it’s going to be a comedy. I’m looking at it from the lip of the grave.

  MG: Sounds like Beckett.

  AM: That’s right. I’ve never met him. Have you?

  MG: Yes. He can be quite approachable – but he hates to talk about his work.

  AM: I don’t like it either. You know what you find yourself doing: You’ve got to capsulize. Otherwise you talk about a two-hour play for at least two hours.

  MG: Tennessee could talk openly about the most personal sexual matter, but when it came to his creativity, he would close down. His explanation was: that was too personal.

  AM: To objectify the whole thing: there’s a friend of mine who is a biophysicist who works over at Rockefeller. I always had a passing interest in science. I went up to visit his lab. He has computers there that can move things in all directions 360 degrees. I asked him how this is possible. He gave me some figures, which I can’t remember, of the number of inputs into that machine to fill up that space to make this happen. If you start to write, it’s coming out from when you’re three years old, when you had lunch yesterday, out of something somebody told you twelve years ago, out of some hope you had that arose from one word somebody said. The number of impulses are infinite.

  MG: But don’t you know the things that motivate you to sit down and begin to write something?

  AM: If I hear the way somebody speaks, above all if I feel affection for that, if I like it, I can start improvising on him or her. Maybe I have the vaguest idea that somebody’s going to live or die or whatever. Without that, I can’t begin. It’s a bit like music, I suppose, but musicians are more abstract than that. I write with my ears more than with my brains. I never write until I can hear it.

  MG: The general misconception about your writing process is that you sit down with a structure: this play is going to say thus and so.

  AM: That’s the last thing I would do. It’s a mistake because the structures are strong so you feel they must have been there from the beginning. For example, these two one-acts [I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara] and The American Clock. I know the feeling that it should give, that’s all. And The American Clock is a special case because it’s an episodic play. With I Can’t Remember Anything, I had no idea where it was going.

  MG: Where did that play start?

  AM: It comes from sound, those people going on at each other.

  MG: You heard two old people talking in a restaurant?

  AM: No, I know them better than that. I hear them. I start laughing. I know I can move in and start to shape. The same with Willy Loman. In the case of The Crucible, I can’t have heard any of it. What really set me off was reading dialogue from the trial. I went up to Salem to research the record, I wasn’t sure I would even write the play. Incidentally I have a feeling the Elizabethans must have worked that way. You hear it better in the minor writers. Fair Maid of the West was on at Stratford when I was there. This is the way they talk. With the British actors, it’s more in their blood, than in ours. The way they did it was with the gusto of real speech.

  MG: For you, language is most important.

  AM: Absolutely. It amuses me when a critic says I don’t have any sense of language. Could anyone read A View from the Bridge or The Crucible, and believe the same writer wrote both of them?

  MG: Which is your voice?

  AM: I’m a mime in those plays. My voice is probably more cultivated or educated, although when I speak in public I sound like Brooklyn.

  MG: With Tennessee Williams, his voice was clear through every play.

  AM: Because he was really close to home always.

  MG: What’s the difference with you?

  AM: I haven’t been that close to home always. All My Sons is taking place in Ohio. If anybody will listen carefully, it’s lower middle-class Ohio speech. Salesman is Brooklyn. But of a certain specific level of Brooklyn. Biff says, ‘I’ve been remiss.’ How can anybody in Brooklyn say ‘remiss?’ Of course it’s a sign of a certain elevation on his part.

  MG: Which of your plays is closest to home?

  AM: I would say Salesman. It represented my youth as a writer. Memories. I left home when I was eighteen or nineteen. I lived in the middle west. My home ceased to interest me.

  MG: Do you think of your life and work in periods?

  AM: I suppose I’m more interested in the irony of existence. In Clara, the second of these two plays, the death is there, but it’s there before the play begins. It’s an adjustment to death, it’s a way of carrying death.

  MG: As you get older, do you think of death being closer?

  AM: I think it becomes slightly less awesome. When you’re twenty-nine or thirty or earlier, the idea is impossible. But I’ve had so many friends die. I know I can’t do things now that I could do before. I was just out in the yard two days ago running a machine, which I had to walk behind. I never thought twice about it before. I had to pull it up a hill and I had to stand there and catch my breath and I thought, I would never have thought about this. I would have done it and then done something else. Now I have to stop and think, well, that’s that one. I feel good because I was able to do it at that moment. I guess it’s some stupid kind of optimism, which overcomes what’s left of the brain. There’s no other adjustment to it that I can accept. You can get blue and discouraged.

  MG: Would you ever get so depressed that you would think about killing yourself?

  AM: I guess I don’t think that I have the right to feel I’m that important, that I would take the world on my shoulders quite that way. I want to be able to do something about it.

  MG: What if, like Hemingway, you were unable to write anymore?

  AM: I think he was ill, physically ill. He did a lot of drinking, and brain cells are destroyed by alcohol.

  MG: Do you have any bad habits?

  AM: [pause] Yes, I waste a lot of time. The worst is, I enjoy wasting it.

  MG: What do you call wasting time?

  AM: Reading newspapers. When I think of the pile of New York Times I have read, that would send me out of this world in a spirit of great disgruntlement. That’s a bad habit. Every day I go through the goddamn paper. My wife says, ‘Well, what is in it?’ I look up and say, ‘I don’t know.’ Think of it: I could have learned Persian or Greek. I could have read Homer three or four times. I could have at least learned Yiddish.

  MG: But from reading the newspapers, you find out what’s going on today.

  AM: What they tell you is going on. What they think is going on. I often wonder, is that the novel of our time? The Times has these long pieces. There are continuous stories. Someone is indicted. He has got to have a trial. It goes on and on. It’s a continuous thread.

  MG: Can you go cold turkey for a period of time and not read anything?

  AM: I’ve got to know what’s going on.

  MG: Is conversation a time waster?

&nb
sp; AM: No, I don’t think so. I never had a wasted conversation. I always get something out of that. I fool around on my place. I repair machinery that I should send out to somebody to do. I stare out the window a lot more than I should, and create business for myself. That gets me to a different subject and this is a category of a dream. If I had a theatre that I was connected to, a theatre of my peers, a working theatre, with a good group of actors, I probably would have written a number of more plays. I had one experience like that in my life and that was before Lincoln Center collapsed. I had done After the Fall, and Harold Clurman came to me and said, ‘Look, we’ve got to have another play. Do you have anything else?’And I wrote Incident at Vichy. And it worked out magically: there was a part for every actor in the company. That never occurred to me. There was an excitement about it. You didn’t have to run around finding producers. If there had been some relationship, roughly of that kind . . . In England, there’s an approximation of that. They have ten, twelve playwrights floating around, these two great theatres [the National and the RSC]. It’s very important. It’s a defence against the outside. ‘We’re all in this together.’

  MG: Instead of writing more plays, what did you do?

  AM: It all collapsed. I didn’t write. I was terribly discouraged, partly because of the collapse of that theatre, partly because I sensed before the theatre opened that there was a hostility, a negative cynicism, maybe because [Robert] Whitehead was a Broadway producer.

  MG: I always thought that Harold Clurman should have been head of the theatre instead of only being its dramaturg.

  AM: First of all, they wouldn’t have given it to him. If they had given it to him, he might have risen to it, but he had a tendency to move away from any real responsibility.

  MG: If Clurman had either been head of that theatre or been named the chief drama critic of the New York Times, he might have changed the theatre. In the case of Lincoln Center, the board wanted instant success.

  AM: With Kazan and Clurman and Whitehead, the idea was to have a pure repertory theatre – which I’m not for, by the way. We should choose actors on an impromptu basis. For a repertory company, you have to have five Oliviers and a couple of Richardsons.

  12 December 1986

  ‘Some good parts for actors’

  Arthur Miller and his wife Inge Morath live in Roxbury, Connecticut, in a rural area populated by many people in the arts. I had been visiting Martha Clarke, the director and choreographer, who lives nearby in Sherman, Connecticut. She is a friend of mine and also of the Millers. On a brisk winter morning, the Millers met me at a dance studio where Martha was in rehearsal with a new theatre piece. I followed the Millers back to their home, a large, sprawling house on top of a knoll. Several years ago, there was a fire on the property and parts of the house had to be rebuilt. In the house are sculptures by Alexander Calder (and a Calder portrait of Miller) and drawings by Saul Steinberg, both friends of the Millers; Morath’s photographs, and various tables and cabinets built by Miller, who prides himself on the craftmanship of his carpentry. There was a chill in the air and Miller made a fire in the fireplace.

  At this point, Sid Caesar was scheduled to star with Geraldine Fitzgerald in one of the one-acts, I Can’t Remember Anything (subsequently he withdrew from the cast and was replaced by Mason Adams). Miller is a great fan of Caesar – and of Caesar’s comedy – and our conversation began with him.

  AM: I’ll tell you how I met him. I did an article for Esquire three years ago. They asked me to write about the McCarthy period as I experienced it. I went to the Museum of Broadcasting to look at tapes of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which I remembered vaguely, but I had forgotten the series of events. I sat there watching. The door opens and in walks Sid Caesar, whom I had never met. He had written a book and was giving a lecture in an auditorium a few yards from the room in which I was sitting. He was going to talk to a whole roomful of young comedians. I said, ‘Are there that many young comedians?’ He said, ‘The number’s enormous and they’re very good. I’m not ready yet. Do you mind if I sit down and wait?’ He asked what I was doing, and I explained. It’s interesting: he had been on Your Show of Shows [Caesar’s popular weekly television series] during this period, and he didn’t recognize McCarthy. I said to myself, he was probably just too busy, which was a wonderful comment on Caesar’s life. So there was McCarthy, and Caesar watched him as if for the first time. On this black and white tape, McCarthy was in the process of showing a map of China. He blacked it out and over this vast geographical area it said ‘Communist’ – and he combined it with the Soviet Union. Without a break, McCarthy said, ‘Edgar [sic] R. Murrow is a member of the American Civil Liberties Union,’ and paused. Caesar said [about McCarthy’s blacking out of the map], ‘Oh, I get it. You just start painting and you paint the walls and the furniture and books and the ceiling and the floor and everybody sitting in the chairs.’ It was wonderful. [Laugh.]

  MG: At the time, probably more people in America were watching Sid Caesar’s show than the McCarthy hearings.

  AM: He obviously hadn’t been watching them. He was absolutely candid and funny as hell. He told me a couple of stories about himself. I never dreamed I would have him in a play. Anyway, I hadn’t written these plays then. So when Greg [the director Gregory Mosher] called me up to tell me that Sid Caesar was going to be in my play, my heart stopped, and I thought, is he really going to be able to do this? Then I thought of the way he sat there talking to me. He seemed to be a very deep man, like someone who suffered a lot.

  MG: How does it feel to be back at Lincoln Center?

  AM: Well, I love it there. First of all, they’ve got sixteen thousand seats to sell [for the run of the play] and they’ve got twenty-three thousand applications for the seats. That means we don’t have to be in desperate anxiety about the critics. We’re only there for eight weeks and that’s just fine. The plays get launched. We’ve got a superb cast: Ken McMillan, James Tolkan and Geraldine Fitzgerald – and Sid Caesar. If we had a production on Broadway and we said we’re going to run as long as we can run, I question whether I would be able to collect those actors.

  MG: When you opened Lincoln Center with After the Fall, so much more was at stake. There was such anticipation.

  AM: To put it in a nutshell, I talked to Olivier about it two years after that. The National Theatre was not yet in its new building. It was in those barracks and at the Old Vic [with temporary office accommodations near Waterloo Station]. When I saw him, he said, ‘What the hell is the matter with these people in New York? We were seven years at Chichester before we opened, and I would say that at least twenty-five per cent of the time we were blasted out of the water, but nobody thought we would have to close down.’ Of course, the principle behind the National Theatre was never adopted in New York. There was no budget here to pay the actors. We had eleven or twelve of them. You couldn’t hang your firm’s name on the back of an actor the way you could put one on the back of a seat or on a wall of the theatre. No one was about to subsidize an acting company. That’s the heart of it.

  MG: In England, it’s not unusual to have a repertory company.

  AM: Here it had to be invented. I remember [Robert] White-head trying to tell that board, especially [the chairman] George Woods, that the more successful this kind of theatre became, the more money it was going to lose. To Woods, this was simply mathematically impossible. If we do four productions, you’ve got four sets to store, all those costumes to store. You’ve got to have people keeping those costumes up, people working on wigs. You’ve got a staff. In a Broadway theatre, you’re doing the one thing, and when you stop doing it, you close. After the Fall played to something like ninety-two per cent capacity. Incident at Vichy, likewise. There was no dearth of customers. There was simply no economic way to pay for it any more than you could do with the symphony orchestra or the opera. You sell every seat in the opera and you still can’t pay for it.

  There is a reason why Lincoln Center theatre floundered: because G
eorge Woods never believed in it in the first place. And he was the head of it. Why didn’t he believe in it? Well, there may have been good reasons. Maybe such a thing is not possible in this country. Whatever they are, Woods shouldn’t have remained head of a ‘repertory company.’ But he did, and at the right time he drove a spike in its heart. Economically there was absolutely no reason to stop it, because the thing was making its way. The money made on tickets was as much as you could expect. Could you imagine building these buildings, setting up this company and designing it so that the first production would be Rex Harrison in a British commercial production of Caesar and Cleopatra. What I missed was the indignation from anywhere. The young people of the then avant-garde sneered at the whole thing. You think they would say, ‘Look this is our building.’ I made a few speeches, I said, ‘This is your building, why are you sitting there sneering at all this?’

  MG: The few public attempts at repertory in America have been failures, for example the Brooklyn Academy of Music company. Perhaps the repertory idea in America is doubtful.

  AM: If you look back at where it started, you realize it’s more than doubtful. I suppose the whole idea must have started in the seventeenth or eighteenth century in Europe where some lord or baron or duke had his little court and had some players. First of all, there was a limited number of players. And they would say, let’s do Plautus this week and we’ll do a play by Jack Jones the next week. So you had the same group of people, of necessity. There was an integral reason in that society for that kind of organization. Of course we don’t have anything like that. Why impose it upon us? What’s the virtue? There’s also a feeling that theatre should be a moneymaking operation, that it’s a very lucrative business.

  MG: I wonder if we could discuss the arc of your work after After the Fall.