by Mel Gussow
MG: People do think of that.
AM: And yet there is no incest in it. She’s not his daughter.
MG: Symbolically she is.
AM: It must mean that I laid it in as though she were.
IM: The Italians love that play.
AM: I went down to see it again and by this time Duvall had left and [Richard] Castellano was in it. If you recall that open stage practically ran into the orchestra, so that the actors were looking right into the faces in the audience. Castellano said, ‘One night I looked out and there was this guy, he looked an Italian labourer and he was in tears. He was the last one to leave the theatre. We were taking bows, and from the back of that theatre I watched this guy because he was so overwhelmed. Two days later he was back in his seat. Again he was overwhelmed. He came three times and the third time, I thought I would find out about him. At the end, we took our bows and everybody left and this guy was staggering out.’ So Castellano went up to him and spoke in Italian and the man said, ‘I know this family, in the Bronx.’ He said the whole story is true, except for one thing, the end. He said, ‘Eddie took a nap and the boy came in and stabbed him.’
Alternative ending. It’s like A Doll’s House. For Nora to leave was unthinkable in Germany. Ibsen wrote an ending in which she didn’t go. She stayed. That’s a version they played in his lifetime. It was simply too much for them.
MG: That sounds like all the variant versions of King Lear after Shakespeare died.
AM: I wrote a radio play about that. That’s William Ireland’s version. William Ireland was a young boy in the time of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. His father was a book collector and a professional antique guy. He was an illegitimate son, so he lived in the basement. Chatterton had been a famous forger of poetry, and was his god. They got him a job in a law office as a very minor clerk, and he would wander through the bookstores, and quite by chance he came across a prayer book that had belonged to Queen Whatever. He brought it home and his father asked where he found it. For the first time, he was noticed by his father and was brought up to sit at the table for dinner with these great worthies of British culture. The kid got very excited. His father said, keep it up, if you see any other things, let me know. The son had become very good at copying handwriting. To make a long story short, he decided to discover something else, and he discovered a letter from Shakespeare to his wife and brought it home, and watched his father look at it. He went to some experts on handwriting and they said there’s no doubt about it – including the paper.
The father asked, ‘Where did you get this?’ The son said, ‘I was walking along and this carriage knocked me down. A great gentleman got out, picked me up and took me home and he gave me something to eat. He asked who I was and I said I was your son. He said he had a trunkful of Elizabethan documents, which he allowed me to look at. He asked me not to tell you about this because he did not want the notoriety. But he said he was going to let me take home a few things, from time to time.’ He called him Mr. H. The next thing was a copied sonnet. Now the kid is the celebrated centre of conversation at every dinner, and he’s accepted by his father, so he has to keep on producing. Now he’s going to give him the original copy of King Lear.
At the time, the Puritan attitude was getting stronger and stronger. He finally produced this manuscript, and first of all it had a happy ending. Secondly, he removed from it all the violence of language, which curses out heaven, the rough language which indicates anything more than a kind of friendly attitude among the people. He laundered the play, and it took him a while. He brings it home, his father looks at it. He brings in Boswell and a critic, [Edmond] Malone, who worked on original manuscripts. He had quite a circle of people and they all sat around while a reading was given of this play. Meanwhile its validity was almost beyond question because he had produced this other stuff.
Boswell got to his knees before the manuscript and said, ‘Forgive us, dear Bard, for all our transgressions against the beauty of your manuscript, fouled by these vile actors. Now we have purely Lear.’ The Prince of Wales was charmed. Sheridan said he would put it on soon. When that reading was over, the kid couldn’t be restrained. He said, ‘Mr. H. has promised me a hitherto unknown play.’
Months later he comes in with a five act tragedy and this is read and Sheridan says, ‘I will put it on.’ At which point, Malone said, ‘It’s all a fraud. Shakespeare could never have written this piece of garbage.’ Well, they threw Malone out of the club immediately. [Laugh.] He was spoiling everything. So they put the play on and Sheridan directed it and some of their best actors were in it. At the end of act one or act two, there were like twenty-six dead bodies on stage. Malone had organized a claque. They began to hoot and howl and everybody realized after watching this performance that it was simply absurd. They got the kid in the green room because now all these famous lords had put themselves on the line. Their expertise guaranteed this work, and they collared him and rammed him up against the wall and said, ‘Who is Mr. H.?’ ‘He has agreed to appear, tomorrow evening at my father’s house at five o’clock.’At five o’clock, a carriage drives up and out gets this gentleman, and he goes in the house. That’s the end of the story. Nobody knows what happened to Ireland. The theories are that he ran off with the servant girl whom he was living with in the basement. It was the scandal of the period.
MG: One thing it proves: occasionally critics can be right.
AM: [laughs] Or they can be wrong for a very long time. I made a radio play out of it. It’s called William Ireland’s Confession.
MG: Would you ever want to turn that into a stage play?
AM: There’s no good reason excepting I suppose it seems so obvious to me. It should be a farce. By the time the kid comes in with the second document, you’ve got to know more than the father knows. His innocence is far too stupefying. Its very predictability should be its comedy.
MG: It would give you a chance to write a comedy.
AM: Well, things may come to that. I love that story. It’s such a delight. It would be a wonderful movie. I’m amazed no one has done it. The basic psychological truth of it is his fantasy in both trying to be accepted by his father and to destroy him. Implicit in that was a tricking. If the boy were merely trying to be accepted, he would have stopped early. But of course the father was asking for destruction. Every time, he would say, ‘Well, produce something.’
MG: It has all your father and son themes. Do you think somewhere someone is inventing an Arthur Miller play?
AM: I’m sure they have already. More than one. That was one of my impulses for writing my autobiography because at least I want my version in circulation.
MG: When did you begin writing it?
AM: I think I really began many years ago. I would start reminiscences, which I would give to Aaron Asher [his editor] and then I wouldn’t write any more. Then he would ask me for more and I would give him another twenty pages. In the end, I never used any of that.
IM: Then people would come who want to write about you.
AM: My hair would stand up. I would realize this was inevitable.
MG: How would you respond to people who want to write a biography of you?
AM: I wouldn’t want it, because, for me to sit down and talk about my life – I can write it three times during the time it would take me to tell it. And it would never come out right anyway.
MG: In the 1940s and 1950s, there was an active Broadway theatre. But not today. Why is that?
AM: I’ll tell you what I really think. I think that we arrived at a certain point – historically. Once there was one audience in New York. The same guy who went to see O’Neill went to see the Ziegfeld Follies. The idea that there were two or more distinct audiences was not there. The only such distinction that I ever was conscious of, possibly, was when the Group Theatre was going. It was only a matter of perhaps five years when it was really producing stuff: you had a kind of left-wing audience. That was the only time I was conscious there was a split in the audience.
MG: Did the same audience go to see Salesman, Streetcar and Oklahoma?
AM: Oh, absolutely. As a consequence of that, one approached writing a play with no thought that there was going to be the support of a clique, that is, an aesthetic clique, a political clique, a group of like-minded people. So your play had to extend its embrace to every kind of person that would be interested in going to the theatre. He could be a dentist or a professor or a student. He could be on the left, he could be on the right.
MG: But a play can’t be all things to all people.
AM: Of course, it can’t be, but the assumption on the part of the writer, the director and the actors was that the material was available to every man or woman. What happened sometime, I would place it maybe 1954, ’55, ’56, I became conscious that there was an alienation in one part of the audience, which was fatal. Tennessee was still producing work, and I was, but the feeling was that ‘there was nothing to see.’About this time, the Off Broadway theatre began to become fairly active. It was nothing like what it would become, but for the first time you heard about Paul Libin who did that production of The Crucible at the Martinique which was part of the McAlpine Hotel. The idea of creating a new environment, that was a new thing. What I’m driving at is that if you’re writing a play and you cannot rely upon the support of like-minded folks, you’ve got to prove the story in a different way. You can’t make assertions based on some cultural unity. You’ve got to make it explain itself all the time. The result was that you got larger stories, stories that would carry a person from point A to point F. They would not be satisfied sitting there and listening to some talk. It activated our theatre. When I went to Europe, the first time in 1947, I was struck by one thing, the verbalization of theatre in Europe, the comparative lack of action. I saw Ondine [by Jean Giraudoux] in Paris in 1947, and I know enough French to know what was happening there. This was a popular play, with [Louis] Jouvet. He sat in this chair for fifteen minutes talking to this wraith, and the story was going nowhere. It was motionless.
MG: But it played in New York. Giraudoux, Anouilh, Eliot were all done on Broadway.
AM: Listen, they played it, but put it this way: if an American playwright had the success of Giraudoux in New York, he would be called a failure. I saw The Madwoman of Chaillot [by Giraudoux]. It was absolutely marvellous. But I don’t think it ran that long. In those times, you were a success if you ran at least two seasons.
MG: The next wave of serious playwriting came Off Broadway: Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit, Jack Gelber – and only Albee was successful on Broadway.
AM: And Albee was always essentially a non-Broadway writer, though Virginia Woolf happened to be successful there. My point is that the relationship to the audience was very different. Past that nebulous point, the audience was atomized. The most hip, the most sophisticated was drawn away, the less sophisticated, the squarer audience remained.
MG: The more sophisticated went to the movies as well as Off Broadway. Art movies came along.
AM: Yes. About ’47 or ’48, neo-realism started in Italy. This man was running a little business, the World Theatre, and was regarded as a daring entrepreneur to bring in these pictures with subtitles, no less. The Bicycle Thief [Bicycle Thieves in the United Kingdom] and Open City and so forth. That kind of sophistication began. When I was a student in the ’30s, I would go to the art cinema league, an organization on campus, and we brought in foreign pictures, but it was regarded as a very arcane thing to see a picture that wasn’t made in America – even to most intellectuals. It wasn’t an art form yet.
In France, there was a boulevard theatre, like our Broadway. There was also Sartre, with Huis Clos and maybe Caligula [by Albert Camus]. They were separate theatres. The bourgeoise did go to both. I noticed that in the boulevard theatre there was an atmosphere of the expensive restaurants. I was in England in ’57 when Peter Brook did A View from the Bridge. There was a big mass meeting at the Royal Court Theatre. I was on the platform with five or six others, all English. The question came up: how come the American theatres had such vitality and the British theatre was so stultified? There was one play: Look Back in Anger, which had opened three or four months before this meeting.
The homogenized audience, the unified audience was breaking up somewhere around the same period. In England, the solution to the problem was a subsidized theatre: the Old Vic, numerous others, based on an earlier tradition they had. With us, the playwright was confronted with the Off Broadway situation. Only rarely could he hope to make a living because of the size of those houses. In England, he wouldn’t get rich on the National Theatre, but its impact on the culture was far greater. He had access to great stars, accomplished actors. Most of our Off Broadway plays were done, I think, by much younger people, not yet proven.
In the ’40s and the early half of the ’50s I think you were receiving a stimulus from the audience. You did get the illusion, although I used to complain even then that we had a very fragmentary audience. In fact, I wrote an article for the Times saying that ordinary people could not get to the theatre for whatever reason. It was an upper-middle-class audience, but nevertheless it was a far broader audience. An excitement came out of the feeling that you were talking to the country. I always suspected that it was an illusion. You only had to go to the movies to see another audience. You never saw a black person in the Broadway theatre.
AM: I was just in England. For a play like The Archbishop’s Ceiling, they have an extraordinary group of accomplished actors. The young man playing the lead, Roger Allam, left a big hit to go into this. I asked him and he said, ‘I thought it would be interesting.’ What an answer! He felt that he had at his disposal certain choices. This thing is only going to run until March. With American Clock there must have been twenty actors plus a live orchestra on stage. There’s a certain kind of playfulness in the audience. Maybe it’s because they’re younger or maybe it’s because they didn’t pay forty dollars to get in. It has to do with the environment. Different environments create different emotions, and in this particular one, you get the feeling they’re open, they’re interested, they’re not there for some ancillary reason.
AM: In writing my book [Timebends], I got very discouraged about history, not that I had many illusions about it. But history is a story. I tell a story in a certain way. I have a viewpoint toward a lot of events, but there are numerous other ways to treat the same material. What’s real? Well, you are real in relation to that object, to that event. The event as I tell it is tempered by me. Who am I?
MG: When you finish your autobiography, what you say will be regarded as the truth.
AM: As far as I know, but another guy can come in and say, well. look, I was there and it’s all different.
MG: Then you have the case of Lillian Hellman. People say that what she said in her memoirs wasn’t true.
AM: She became involved with writing fiction and putting it in the first person.
MG: Your autobiography is all true?
AM: I hope so. I was at the Chicago convention in ’68 [the Democratic national convention]. I was a delegate from the town of Roxbury, so I was sitting on the floor. I was aware of what was going on outside, as many delegates were. On television screens you could see where the cops were hitting the kids. But I could see where delegates could go through the same experience and think that was a minor detail. The main thing was that Humphrey got nominated.
MG: In your book, you’re obviously trying to set the record straight about many things.
AM: It’s not so much setting the record straight. A lot of it is told for the first time. For instance, there’s a whole section on postwar Europe that I was involved in. I was in Italy in ’47 when it was generally thought that Italy was going to become a communist state, just before the big national election.
MG: What were you doing there?
AM: I just wanted to see what was happening in Europe. I had not been in the war and I had never been to Europe before. A man I knew [Vincent Longh
i] was trying to run for Congress. His idea was to go to Calabria in Sicily and visit the homes of immigrants, people who came here. I thought, here’s my chance. I spent about a month in Europe. It was very meaningful. So it’s not setting the record straight. It’s my life, my times – I saw it.
MG: In terms of setting the record straight, I would think that one area would be your relationship with Kazan, the ambiguities of that relationship.
AM: There remain ambiguities. There’ll always be. Bob Anderson [the playwright Robert Anderson] told me that Kazan had to redo a lot of his book [A Life] because his publisher wanted certain things. Whatever’s vital in my life, I hope is there in my book, but it’s a big life and I can’t cover everything. It’s a hard thing to do, because a lot is interesting only to me. I think there is some insight into the time. It’s basically a mystery, of how theatre changed. I know it changed. I know some of the symptoms of how it changed, but it’s beyond me to tell you why.
MG: If you had been coming out of college fifteen or twenty years later, you might not have gone into the theatre. You might have been a novelist.
AM: It’s questionable. The simplistic idea that writing, especially writing for the theatre, is an autonomous act, can’t be supported. When I was coming up in the ’30s, the theatre for some reason was seized upon by the left, as an exciting art form. Odets was a terrific dynamic image. And the Group Theatre was. And there were others. Eva Le Gallienne was going then. You could see Ibsen as a social critic. At the time, society was the subject. It was in crisis. You couldn’t sit down with anybody, no matter what his viewpoint was, without talking about Roosevelt. What’s going to happen next? When is the unemployment going to go down? The theatre became an extremely exciting thing for a young writer. Hundreds of people walking around trying to write plays about this moment, this hour. I was a carryover from that, and I’m convinced that Tennessee was. As a response to society, it’s the movies that have dealt with the big social problems. You see, the movies turn it into a social problem. I’ve never dealt with social problems. I’m dealing with a moral question of a human being in a society. If I were dealing with social problems, you wouldn’t be looking at The Crucible today. And it is being looked at all over the world.