by Mel Gussow
MG: At this point, you hadn’t written A View from the Bridge.
AM: No. It was a one-act play in my mind. First I wrote A Memory of Two Mondays. Marty said, ‘Jesus, this would be wonderful, we can use up all our actors. Maybe you could do a curtain-raiser, because that only lasts an hour and twenty minutes, or something.’ Structurally, A View from the Bridge had one big arc, and it wasn’t to be broken up into pieces. And I wrote that very rapidly. I gave it to him. So A View from the Bridge was going to be a curtain-raiser.
MG: Some curtain-raiser.
AM: Marty burst out laughing when he read it. He said, ‘Now what do we do?’ In my mind, that was not written for Broadway. That was written for a theatre where people would do it in an impromptu sort of a way. As I said earlier, that’s the way Incident of Vichy got written. Same idea. And incidentally the way a lot of music used to get written. The head of an orchestra would call up a composer and say, how about it, we’ve got a few good bugle players here.
MG: That isn’t how plays usually get written.
AM: No! There’s a disconnection there. But I’m convinced they used to get written that way. I would love to know, for example, the connection between Chekhov and Stanislavsky before he was turning out these plays.
MG: He might not have written the plays were it not for the Moscow Art Theatre?
AM: I wonder. I don’t know.
MG: He was doing well with his short stories.
AM: Well, he was turning those out every couple of weeks. Pretty good stories. He didn’t have to go into this monstrous business.
MG: And he failed with his first few plays.
AM: Why bother with the goddamn things? There must have been some outside stimulation. I believe in that – for certain writers. Now, a guy like O’Neill was so hermetic. The Provincetown theatre was very instrumental in his work. He always had relations with directors, with Arthur Hopkins, with other such people who kept writing him notes.
MG: Have you had dry periods in your writing?
AM: Oh, I can go for a long time without being able to put anything down on paper. I’ll always be writing scenes. I have hundreds of scenes, but whether they are plays or not is a different story. I discard them, and I’ve got endless notebooks. I make reference to them somewhat in my autobiography. See, a play to me is an integral piece of work, with a beginning, a middle and an end, whether it be a plot or simply a feeling. An anecdote is not enough. I have some structural sense that has to be satisfied. I will say that when I wrote The Crucible I realized suddenly how these Elizabethan guys could turn out the number of plays they did. It’s such a simplistic idea, I don’t know why it never occurred to me. They were all working off known stories. Shakespeare didn’t invent any stories, except maybe for Winter’s Tale, but even that is taken from something. See it’s a great thing to be able to say, what’s going to happen now, and pick up a history. And even if you don’t use it, you see one road that you can move down, or discard. When I was doing The Crucible, I had an infinite number of story elements to choose from, or reject, or mould, or rework. I thought, Jesus, at this rate, you can do a play every three months!
MG: Having discovered that, with the exception of The Creation of the World, you didn’t do it again.
AM: No. I don’t know why.
MG: People assume that Salesman was very personal, they assume that through a certain transposition of time, The Crucible was also, and After the Fall because of the autobiographical elements. But other than that, people don’t know. Was The Price direct from life?
AM: Well, it’s not me. But the fratricide that goes on in a lot of these plays, the brother conflict . . .
MG: You had a brother conflict?
AM: You got a brother?
MG: Yes.
AM: How else can you have a brother? Look at Salesman. There are a pair of brothers who adore one another and also are at odds.
MG: Do brothers go through the plays?
AM: Well, in Creation of the World, there are fellas named Cain and Abel. [He laughs.] That’s a family play. And The Price, of course. I don’t think I would ever do that again. I haven’t done it in many years, using the family that way.
MG: Is The Price the closest to your own family?
AM: It isn’t really. It was based on other people. Actually I get along very well with my brother. But one lives on a metaphorical level as well as a real one. Everybody thought I was killing my father in that play. Quite the contrary. I never had a cross word with him.
MG: Then what are the personal elements in the plays?
AM: I don’t know how to phrase it. There are obviously certain elements that get repeated, that family I refer to, with a father-son business. I saw a production of All My Sons in England, directed by Michael Blakemore, with Rosemary Harris and Colin Blakely. And nobody like Rosemary Harris had ever played that part, except once in of all places, Jerusalem, where I happened to be when it was playing. In Jerusalem, as in London, a marvellous juicy actress, the one who got her leg shot off in the Munich Olympics. She was fantastically there, as was Rosemary Harris. Suddenly I looked at this. I had completely forgotten. The original title of that play was The Sign of the Archer. The Sign of the Archer had to do with the sign under which that son was born, and later he was the one who got killed, or killed himself. I realized watching the production in England that she had been the centre of that thing when I started.
MG: The wife?
AM: Yes. The mother. And Rosemary and Blakemore in London knew nothing of the history of the productions of that play and the movie, which emphasized Eddie [Edward G.] Robinson and Burt Lancaster and Arthur Kennedy and so on. Rosemary and Blakemore didn’t assume at all that the basic thing was a father and son play. They assumed something quite different, which my original title assumed, that when the curtain goes up, the wife knows the whole story. And Rosemary played it as though she knows it. There’s a kind of vengeance in that play by her on that man, the father, the husband, which is quite a different emphasis.
The woman has it within herself, quietly and without demonstration, to be a survivor. That interests me. In London I looked at the play quite differently than I had before. In Bridge, there’s a similar thing. The women know more. They’re less obsessional. The men are obsessed. The women have to preserve that nest. They’re a very conservative force. That production in England really made me think, how I had gotten misled. The mother’s obsessed with the stars. What had I changed the title to? All My Sons. It completely altered the central emphasis of the play.
MG: But wouldn’t the audience still come out with the feeling that it’s about the father and All My Sons?
AM: Yes, excepting that with Rosemary Harris, it wasn’t simply narrowed down to that conflict. She created an ambience there that you could cut with a knife. It was quite wonderful. It was far more interesting to me.
MG: It’s curious how much a title affects a public understanding of a play.
AM: It tells you what to look for.
MG: What if Death of a Salesman had a different title?
AM: In China for example, Zhu Lin is the woman who played Linda Loman, and she plays queens, princesses, powerful political figures in traditional Chinese plays. I saw her in one: tremendous grandeur. I talked to her, and I said, ‘How do you see this play [Salesman]?’ She said, ‘There are still women like this in China.’ I said, ‘In other words you think she’s quite manipulatable, and she’s following behind Willy.’ She said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘That’s not the way it is at all,’ and I gave her some cues, and it was interesting to watch. That’s the woman who tells the sons, look he’s going to kill himself. She knows the story. Once she caught on to that, Willy gets bigger, it makes everything bigger. Funny though, what interested me when I told her that and I saw the difference, I thought why is it nobody sees that? Anywhere. They all think Linda is sort of a wet rag. The lines aren’t that way. She’s got great indignation and wrath! She’s tough. With him, she’s got to manoeuvre a
nd manipulate him. She can’t confront him because he’d wipe her out. I wonder if the father-son business again sucked out all the energy.
MG: To go back a bit, could you talk about what you think is the subjectivity of the plays?
AM: What is subjectivity? I can’t define it. I can’t work simply out of knowing something. I could never have written The Crucible simply because I wanted to write a play about the blacklisting.
MG: Or a play about the real events in Salem?
AM: Never. The centre of that play is the guilt of John Proctor, and the working out of that guilt. Indeed it finally exemplifies the guilt of man in general. I believe in a seamless linking of the internal life of the person with the social situation. You can’t have a witch hunt over a period of time in a society that is not walking around riddled with guilt. The witch hunt and the Red hunt strummed the chords of guilt in people and made them the willing victims or its collaborators. McCarthy spoke of the New Deal as twenty years of treason. He wasn’t talking about Communism. He was talking about the New Deal, until finally I thought there were certain words that people weren’t using as much, the idea of revolution, organization, group – they could be very incendiary compositions. I suppose he was playing on a guilt which I can transfer even to sexual matters. It’s the hidden enemy. It’s subconscious and to exculpate that it hardly matters what the subject is.
The Chinese were the same way. The Chinese were probably the best single exposition of this. They literally would sit somebody down and have what they call a struggle meeting with them. What does that mean? Any secret idea he may have had, however remotely connected to social events, which was not an expression of willingness to give over his personality to a society, was the footprint of the enemy. In effect they would psychoanalyze somebody. And it took a person of extraordinary strength to deny his guilt, to deny that he had guilt. Nien Cheng is one of the few to have that strength and one of the reasons she had it was because she was an aristocrat. She did not come into the situation as a democrat. She came in with certain perceptions about society, namely that there are those more or less fit to govern, more and less able to succeed. The levelling idea had never been part of her life. You get somebody through some ideology or another that they do believe everybody is equal then it is a matter of guilt if it turns out that you really don’t believe that.
The conversation continued over lunch, and Inge Morath joined us.
MG: You said the other day that there was something you used to do outside that had become more difficult . . .
AM: There are certain walks you take over a period of years, coming up the same hill you realize you’re not coming up quite the way as you used to come up. But I’m in pretty good shape. I can’t complain.
IM: You come up a lot better than when you used to smoke so much.
MG: Did you smoke a lot?
AM: Yes. I would inhale a pipe and cigars. Now that I think of it, it was unbelievable. When I would sit in my studio out there, which is a twelve-by-fourteen building, I realize now what I was doing to myself: I would fill it full of smoke and in the winter time with the windows closed. More than once, I got dizzy. I had vertigo. I had to open the door and walk outside and go back in and smoke some more. But I recovered and if you recovered, it can’t be so bad.
MG: Do you exercise every day?
AM: I don’t do as much as I should, but I have a rowing machine upstairs and a bicycle and I try to walk. We just spent a week in Barbados where you get up in the morning and walk down to the beach and swim for twenty minutes. Then you do that a couple of times a day, which makes me realize how little exercise I’m doing. I split a lot of wood, which is terrific. That’s real good exercise. You breathe deeply as well as lift and move your muscles, tighten up your belly. It’s the breathing, that’s the thing. I like the breathing that comes as a result of effort, not just sitting there breathing.
MG: In New York, when I asked you if you had any bad habits, you said, yes, wasting time, specifically reading the New York Times.
AM: I got rid of the worst thing that I did, which was killing me, and that was the smoking. I would have been dead by now. I never had a pipe out of my mouth. I would go to the dentist and he would look in my mouth and say, ‘Well, you’ve got the pre-cancer situation.’ It was really the end of the road.
MG: And suddenly you stopped?
AM: One morning. I had tried fifty different times but I couldn’t do it. I did it one morning, as a result of a tremendous revelation that came to me. You see, I had a routine. I would go up to the studio after breakfast and light a pipe. One morning I forgot to light the pipe. Twenty minutes had passed after the normal juncture at which I would light the pipe. This had happened before and when it did happen I would immediately reach for the pipe and light it. This time when I reached for the pipe I realized that I didn’t want to smoke. What I had was a fear that I would lose the habit. It had never been so clear to me. I thought, well I’m going to smoke when I feel like it, not when I’m afraid I’m going to lose the habit. And that’s going to happen in five minutes. I went back to work and about a half hour later I realized I hadn’t smoked yet this morning. In that morning I had perhaps one real urgent desire to smoke. It was now eleven-thirty. Normally I would have lit four or five pipes. So if I could defeat just one real desire to smoke, this is within reason. With no faith whatsoever that I was going to succeed, I went through the day without smoking. The next day was easier because I probably had less poison in me. That poison is an irritant which makes you want one more. That’s the last time I smoked. The reason I didn’t make anything of it is that I had no faith in it. Before I would moralistically talk to myself, give myself all kinds of lectures the way everybody does who smokes. Never worked. It was purely a separation of one impulse from another. One impulse was the desire to smoke, the other was that if you didn’t smoke now, you might not really want to smoke.
MG: In the early days, did the smoking fuel the writing?
AM: Shakespeare never smoked.
MG: How do we know?
AM: If he did, Raleigh handed him a pipe every now and then. In fact, it was unheard of when I was a kid. Very few people I experienced would carry cigarettes in their pockets, even smokers. You didn’t walk around in the street smoking cigarettes. It would be something you would relax with. I had uncles who smoked. But you didn’t carry cigarettes. It would be the equivalent of carrying a bottle of whisky in your pocket. Very strange behaviour. Then they started these campaigns: reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet. That was the slogan. I don’t drink a lot. I do drink some.
MG: Did you ever?
AM: No.
IM: I don’t think your work depends on this kind of stimulus at all.
AM: I know a lot of writers who either stopped smoking, or never smoked. Bellow did once.
MG: Certainly there are writers who are fuelled by drinking or smoking.
AM: Yes. Those who were injured by alcohol would say, you lost as much as you gave, in terms of debilitation and energy. What about the great novelists? I wonder about Dickens. I don’t know what his intake of stimulants was.
MG: I can’t imagine that Dickens or Balzac would have had time to take anything. They were creating every second of the day.
IM: Balzac drank too much coffee. He killed himself.
MG: Artists today, if they can’t create, may be driven to something else. When you can’t write, what do you do – since you’re not a drinker or smoker? You just take a walk?
AM: I do a lot of woodwork. I build things like the table you’re eating on now. And the big dining-room table in there and all this furniture. I drive myself crazy doing that. Split wood and annoy my wife.
MG: And that gets the creative juices going?
AM: I wish I knew what gets me going. More than anything I would guess is a sudden joy in hearing some kind of language that gets me excited. You see, I’m part mime. I used to be able to do any kind of accent, except Danish. It’s the only language nob
ody every gets, except Victor Borge, who is Danish. They do clicks.
IM: He does Chinese pretty well.
AM: I can do Chinese. What is it that Chinese professor at Columbia says: ‘coochural’ [cultural]? ‘American coochure’. The l’s are a problem in the middle of a word. When I was directing Salesman [in China], I could tell when they were wrong in their readings even though they were speaking Chinese. The first time they did that, I said, ‘You’re being very sentimental there.’ And they really got nervous. I could tell after going through three rehearsals of the same scene.
When I saw View from the Bridge in Russia, back in 1960, I knew immediately they had screwed around with the text. I know no Russian but I could tell from the relationships that they had jumped various parts of the script. They admitted that. In the case of View from the Bridge, I never knew those people [the Italians in the play], but I spent time in Italy after World War II and I love the way the Italians speak English. I had gone to high school and grammar school with a lot of Italian kids, so that the lingo was in my head. I had been told some of the story, the fundamentals of the story, long before, and it always struck me how Greek that story was. It was a Greek tale, but how to do that?
Then I saw Ulu’s production [Ulu Grosbard] of the play with [Robert] Duvall, which was a phenomenal piece of work, really a great production. Watching it, I realized that down deep was a whole story of incest. The incestuous expression came out of some deep recess of my head; I was totally unaware of it. Without that, I wonder if I would have written the damn thing. I’m sure now people don’t think of it in those terms. I did, but only when I saw it five years after I had written it.