by Mel Gussow
AM: Well I did The Price and The Archbishop’s Ceiling, which is now at the Royal Shakespeare Company, and The American Clock and The Creation of the World, and I did two other one-acts which we did at Long Wharf [Elegy for a Lady and Some Kind of Love Story]. And these one-acts. And I’ve been working on a long, big play [The Ride Down Mt. Morgan], which took a lot of time, and I took time out to do this book [his autobiography, Timebends] and to write these two plays. Those plays are all quite different. I’m trying to find one principle behind them. [He thinks.] They’re probably plays that are less subjective than the early ones, including The Crucible. But after Salesman, I went in the direction of a more objectified theatre. The Crucible was in part a reaction against some of the weeping surrounding Salesman. I wanted a more acerbic kind of a play. I wanted to create as much knowing as feeling.
MG: What do you mean by ‘the weeping surrounding Salesman?’
AM: I had a reaction against too much empathy surrounding the play. I wasn’t prepared for wiping people out the way that play did. It seemed to me there was more being said there than simply a sad tale.
MG: You mean there was more emotion in it than you felt?
AM: I felt emotion, but I didn’t think it was going to come pouring out that way.
MG: Why should that bother you?
AM: It did bother me in a way because I felt they weren’t seeing Willy, they were just feeling him. And they weren’t seeing the ironies, they were just feeling some tremendous welling up of pity. I suppose I reacted against that, and I wanted in The Crucible not to create somebody that they would just weep over, but that would arouse anger and awareness of what the terms were of these kinds of persecutions.
Incidentally, this may have nothing to do with it, but a week ago I was at my publisher, Aaron Asher, and in walked a lady, Yuen Cheng, who had spent six years in solitary confinement in Red China. She came out and wrote a fantastic book, which is called Life and Death in Shanghai. We both knew some of the same people in China. This woman was a very elegant lady who had been the wife of the Standard Oil Company’s chief in China. They tortured her. That would have killed me. I don’t know how she lived through it. Her book is a marvellous piece of literary work. I couldn’t put it down.
She didn’t expect to meet me there, and I didn’t expect to meet her. I was just delivering seven hundred pages of my book to Aaron. And she was doing a little publicity for her book, which they are also publishing. She said, ‘Oh, I meet you at last.’ She said, ‘When I got out in 1979’ – I think she said it was 1979 – ‘I was in Shanghai, and they had a production of The Crucible, and I saw that. I had been in prison since 1969. So the outside world had no meaning to me at all. I looked at that play and thought, how could he have known the Chinese situation?’
Now, you see: I’m glad of that because it means the play strikes the central nervous system of this kind of a social situation, no matter where it happens. And of course the Russians will say the same thing about this under Stalin. And that’s what I wanted from that play. I didn’t want them falling down in the aisle, weeping over John Proctor. I wanted them to see that nervous system, because that’s the emotion of the play, that’s the awesome fact of it, that human beings can do this thing.
MG: Can’t you have both?
AM: You can! Well, they’re weeping for John Proctor, but they’re also seeing him. That’s the ideal thing, what I’ve always tried to do, make them see and feel at the same time. I just felt that Salesman went overboard a little bit too much. Now I’ve seen productions which have attempted to right that balance. I’m not sure they have succeeded.
MG: Critics might think that since Salesman, there has been a certain intellectual coldness about your work. Why doesn’t he write plays with the emotional power of Salesman?
AM: That could be a failing, but it wasn’t what I wanted to do. I did not want to overemotionalize this. It’s not that I disown Salesman. I’m proud of it. But there were other things I wanted.
MG: The charge that I raised of intellectual coldness would be less against The Crucible than against After the Fall, and some of the other later work. How conscious was that on your part?
AM: Well, you see, in After the Fall, for example, I was really trying to do something, which I didn’t know how to do on purely subjective levels. The play is about the kind of a person that is not Willy Loman. He’s somebody who is always trying to figure out what happened to him. Willy is doing that in a way, but he’d rather not know. He would rather just succeed. On any terms. It’s the difference between a more intellectualized human being and a less intellectualized one. And it would be false to him to pretend that he doesn’t know what he wants. I wanted to write plays in which people on stage knew as much as the people in the audience – if that were possible.
I’ve seen a production of After the Fall in Italy. Zeffirelli did it. And Visconti did in Paris. The Italian one with Monica Vitti was interesting. This was no great departure for them, apparently, from plays by Pirandello, from plays by numerous other European writers, where people were able to verbalize what they were feeling. Or even the French theatre of Giraudoux, where people could talk about what they were feeling. So Zeffirelli put Monica Vitti on stage with Giorgio Albertazzi who created an ambience of such intense search, that I looked at it and I thought, the emotion is all there. It’s just that when we – Americans, and the British – begin to try to think on stage, we get very remote. When the Italian does it, he never for a moment separates this from the fever of thinking.
Inge and I watched Fellini’s picture, La Dolce Vita, the other night. I have to tell you that we stopped in the middle. It was so boring. And I love Fellini. I love everything he does, and there are images in it that I will never forget. The opening scene with the big statue being carried by a helicopter across Rome. But the movie was spitballed together, in my opinion. I don’t think he had a script. There were the same characters running through it: totally undramatic. I never remembered it being that long in the first place. And we couldn’t keep our eyes open. It seemed to be going nowhere. And she was simply awful, that big blonde actress [Anita Ekberg]. You know what occurred to me, by the way. I think Fellini was taking off on Marilyn with that character. But Marilyn had a certain absolutely devastating charm. This one only had blonde hair.
You see this was an attempt by him to create an idea in images, and the idea was La Dolce Vita, this over-rich society where people are finally totally dispirited. They have no moral direction. Of course, it’s laughable in one respect. What they thought of as being over-rich [laugh] when they made the movie – it’s about on the level of the working class of New Milford [an affluent community next to Roxbury, where Miller lives]. It’s hardly there! I had to interpolate it. Oh I see what he’s getting at. He thinks that if a person has a Cadillac convertible . . . of course in Italy that size car would be an absurdity anyway. The symbolism had lost its punch because it was so grounded in the society.
MG: In its time, we thought it was the ultimate in decadence.
AM: You ought to see it now. It’s not up to the middle-class level today, even in Italy. The lower middle class is far beyond that kind of thing, as far as my observation goes. Anyway, that was an attempt to intellectualize emotion, and I don’t think it was happening in the film – now. I was not aware of the picture in relation to my play at that time.
MG: It was about the same period.
AM: It was. They were going to do After the Fall with Mastroianni in Rome. He came to see me at the Chelsea Hotel, and he said a marvellous line. I said, ‘What do you think of this situation?’ He said, ‘You mean in the play?’ I said, ‘Yes, what do you think of this woman?’ He said, ‘Me personally?’ I said, ‘Yes, what would you do?’ He said, ‘Oh, I would take a walk.’ [Laugh.] At that time he was very eager to do the play, but he said he could only do it for some months because Fellini had a picture for him. I said, ‘What picture?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, he just said there was a picture.�
�� I said, ‘You don’t know what the script is?’ He said, ‘You never know what the script is. I come to the studio and he says, all right, you go over there and you play this kind of a scene.’ And that was 8½.
MG: To get back to emotion versus intellect: through your choice of protagonist in After the Fall, you locked yourself into that conflict by having Quentin a lawyer rather an artist himself. You’re in an intellectualized framework rather than one that calls for an outpouring of emotion.
AM: To me, that is very exciting. I don’t know why we can’t admit that into the aesthetic realm. I don’t see the conflict really. It’s just a different kind of feeling. It’s on a different level, but if you recall these two one-act plays, they’re not unconscious people in those plays. In I Can’t Remember Anything, the Sid Caesar character is an educated, feeling person. And she is too. She says, her mother was head of the Boston College for Women. She’s a cultured, cultivated woman. But the feeling is tremendous. Why not? Now, the second play, where the man’s child is murdered, is trying to reach toward some centre, a spiritual centre so to speak, an irony which requires something more than the kind of dialogue that there is in Death of a Salesman. I think what we did in the theatre was to separate the subjective from the objective. I think it’s a question of perspective too. After the Fall is being done more now. I think it meets a certain kind of feeling people have now, a feeling that they’ve got to look at their lives.
MG: Do you have any second or third thoughts about After the Fall, things you might have done differently?
AM: I never can think of doing anything differently. It’s like your face. You can’t think of changing your face.
MG: Tennessee was always rewriting his plays.
AM: I can’t imagine doing that. They belong to a moment, a time and a development of your spirit. It’s just inconceivable to me to try and go back over a play. Tennessee wasn’t rewriting his longer plays, was he?
MG: He kept changing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and he wrote Summer and Smoke at least twice. He didn’t rewrite Streetcar.
MG: To many people, After the Fall would be considered a problematic play, if not a failure. Admitting all the departure from the truth of Marilyn Monroe, the play dealt with something extraordinarily personal to you. I thought perhaps you might want to treat those elements again, and in your memoir [Timebends] you talk about some of them – about Marilyn – perhaps with a different approach and a greater degree of honesty.
AM: I talk about her in the book. I talk about that play too, and the way it started. The seed for that play came years earlier when we were married. Walter Wanger [the film producer] came to me to write a screenplay about Camus’s The Fall. I didn’t do it. I didn’t feel like writing a screenplay. But the moral dilemma in Camus’s book interested me. A man, a so-called self-described judge penitent who is now ceasing to lay moral judgment on the world, witnessed a woman committing suicide and failed to stop her. My question was: supposing he succeeded in stopping her? After the Fall was primarily to me almost totally a work in which I was trying to discover by what means, by what cathexis, anybody could seize the reality of his life, which can only be the question of how responsible he is for his life. That’s what that play is about, and it’s utilizing this experience for that end.
MG: Isn’t it also about how responsible a man is for someone else’s life?
AM: Yes. How can you separate them? It’s impossible to separate them.
MG: The title is ‘after’ Camus’s Fall, as well?
AM: His fall too. What happens after, supposing he had done this, and after the fall from . . . innocence – that is the innocence of one’s own responsibility? Once that innocence is finished, on what basis do you create the illusion of life? That’s what that play’s about.
MG: Would it have been a different play if Quentin had been a writer rather than a judge penitent?
AM: I don’t know. How could it have been? You see, there’s been a lawyer in every play I’ve ever written, and I never knew that until some PhD wrote about it. The law is, of course, a metaphor for the moral order of man. The lawyer in my plays always brings in the question of the continuity of the world. It’s one thing for you to make an excuse for yourself, but if that were applied broadly to the world, could it go on? That’s what the lawyer’s doing.
MG: The various lawyers in your plays play different roles. In A View from the Bridge, the lawyer Alfieri is telling the story.
AM: He is also telling the hero that if he does what his emotions are moving him to do, he’ll destroy himself. That lawyer is, you might even say, the rational principle, the principle of rationalizing one’s life, and how limited it is once the emotions start to go. He’s giving him all the reasons why he shouldn’t be doing this.
MG: In A View from the Bridge the lawyer is somewhat removed from the immediate situation, whereas in After the Fall he is the protagonist. I wonder if he were not the protagonist, perhaps some greater flow of emotion – if not autobiography – might have been at work.
AM: The play was lambasted because there was too much autobiography. That was the echo I got from the reviews. Rather than too little. I think what was missed completely because of the Marilyn connection was what the play was about. To me, that was the impulse for the play. When I started to write that play, Marilyn was alive. She wasn’t dead. As far as I knew, she was perfectly OK. I didn’t know the character was going to die. By the time I was halfway, two-thirds through, I realized there was no way out for this person.
MG: Did Marilyn die while you were writing the play?
AM: Yes. I was almost finished with it.
MG: But in the play she was dying.
AM: Oh, yeah. There was no way around it. But of course Marilyn herself had nearly died many times. I can’t say that was a deep analysis of some sort.
MG: When you realized that the character in the play would have to die, was there a feeling that you yourself should take still another step in preventing the real person’s death?
AM: [quietly] Couldn’t. That’s why she died. There was no way anyone . . .
She had the best analyst, Dr. [Ralph] Greenson. He went far beyond the normal professional relationship. She also had Dr. Marianne Kris, who was supposedly one of the great analysts. The point had arrived where I didn’t know how to do that. That’s the tragedy. There’s no way to intervene at a certain point. [Emphatically.] A person’s got to save himself. And sometimes you do and sometimes you don’t.
MG: The theme of so many books and stories about Marilyn is: if only she had called me, I could have saved her.
AM: That’s one of the attractions. Because she was so moving a person. Sure, everybody wants to do that, but some pretty devoted and, I think, able people couldn’t do it.
MG: After she died, did you question yourself and wonder if there wasn’t something you could have done?
AM: I did. But I couldn’t. There was no way. She was beyond help. It’s a failing in me, no doubt, but it is also a failing in every other human being she ever came in contact with, including, as I say, some of the most competent and devoted doctors. That’s what tragedy is, and that’s why it’s so unacceptable most of the time. There’s a denial of it that goes on. People deny that an effect has a cause.
MG: Inevitably people are going to think that a tragedy is irreversible.
AM: Theoretically it’s possible to imagine that something can be reversed. But I’m afraid in reality our choices are very limited. It’s not something you can just call up. That’s the way it is. That’s the way it is not only for ill people but for so called healthy people who have to die, some of them when they never should have died, at the time when they’re most productive and most wise – that seems a shame. But that’s the way it is. I think it’s a weakness of the civilization in a way that we create so much tragedy every day and deny its existence.
MG: Have you felt other times about other people that are close to you that there’s an inevitability about it?
MG: But each person can take responsibility for his life. To re-evoke your Mastroianni statement, with Marilyn, in a metaphorical if not an actual sense, you took a walk. You left. For the sake of your own sanity?
AM: There was simply nothing but destruction that could come, my own destruction, as well as hers. The point comes where you cannot continue anymore. There is no virtue in it, there is nothing positive, and your hope is that she can find some other means of saving herself. For me and anybody I knew it wasn’t possible. Maybe there was a way in which she could do it.
MG: For you, it was a life-changing and life-seizing thing to leave.
AM: I spent five years trying to make that thing happen, and I couldn’t. So, that’s that.
MG: During the time you were with her, were you writing plays?
AM: Well, I did The Misfits, which took a lot of time, as any movie script does. You write it and you are involved in the production. That took about two and a half years. Before and after, I felt that the theatre didn’t interest me. I couldn’t get excited about it. I had written A View from the Bridge before this. I would probably never have written A View from the Bridge had I not been asked by Marty Ritt [Martin Ritt, later a film director], who was then an actor in a Broadway play called The Flowering Peach [by Clifford Odets], which Robert Whitehead produced. The play was failing. It had only x weeks to go, and they had a good cast, according to Marty. He called me up. I had never met him. He said, ‘We’ve got a theatre. We can use the theatre on Sunday nights. Do you have any oneact plays?’ I said, ‘No I don’t.’ He said, ‘We’ve got a wonderful group of actors here. We’d love to do something of yours, something we could do modestly.’ I said, ‘Well, there is one story that I’ve always wanted to write, but who the hell is going to put on a one-act play?’ This was 1954 or ’55. The Off Broadway theatre was still in its youth, and it wasn’t that easy to generate productions anyway. They had done The Crucible Off Broadway at the Martinique Theatre. That was, I think, one of the earliest such productions.