by Mel Gussow
MG: You’re a moralist playwright rather than a social one?
AM: I suppose that’s true. I’m not drawing morals. It’s just that man is a moral creature. He’s either fighting it or he’s with it or he has an ambiguous relationship with it, but it’s always there. If I may say so, I think that’s why these plays have not faded with the problems they dealt with.
MG: In the same way, would you say that Ibsen was a moralist playwright?
AM: Yes. And he was my inspiration for a long time. Take a thing like An Enemy of the People, which is his most poster-type play. The man in that play couldn’t help it. It’s a philosophical, moral problem, namely how much right does an individual have to contradict the beliefs and sense of reality of a society? In that play, he went so far as to say, the majority is always wrong. And that in nature, in the world of biology there are higher and lower species. That’s why some people thought the character was fascist, and why he finally made a speech to a trade union group saying he was not an elitist in that sense. What he was trying to say was that there was a greater or lesser degree of sensitivity to the question of accepting given truths.
MG: Would you go as far as Ibsen in saying that the majority is always wrong?
AM: I think so. What he meant basically was by the time they are on to an idea, it probably has begun to cease to be true.
MG: In dealing with venereal disease in Ghosts, the problems may have faded.
AM: However, if you do Ghosts now and talk about inherited character failings or inherited spiritual damage, which is what derived from the idea of syphilis, it gets a little ridiculous – until you can discount their relative ignorance about the way that disease is transmitted. Occasionally, he stepped over the boundary and made it a little too much of a medical and social problem.
MG: In reviewing a biography of Strindberg, you expressed a kinship with him. I was not aware of that connection.
AM: He meant a hell of a lot to me. You see there were so many Strindbergs, partly because his whole personality was being shattered and put together again. There was no question about it: he was as crazy as could be. I could identify five or six different Strindbergs. The misogynist is pathological. I couldn’t identify with that. But there’s another part of him that has to do with the vision of the inexorability of the tragic circumstance, that once a destructive apparatus gets into motion, it’s almost impossible to stop it. I can relate to that. Once that is really moving – get out of the way. The structure of his plays is based on that vision. The trouble is that so much of him is just . . . sick. It comes out as sickness. I can’t relate to that. Inevitably he hated Ibsen as being fundamentally somebody who had collapsed in front of the bourgeois demands upon him. But Ibsen had Strindberg’s picture over his desk, because there’s a truthteller in him.
MG: Could you choose between the two? Which one is more important to you?
AM: I can’t. Ibsen is far more invulnerable. He protected his flanks all the time. He was far more political. Strindberg would damage himself. It would never occur to him to shave something or to protect himself. Occasionally when he was in the middle of one of his so-called ‘swings,’ as he veered toward centre he would get a little careful and kid the reader a little bit. But not for long. I put it in terms of power. Ibsen was one of those philosophers who was trying to run the world. He wanted to change society. Strindberg also wanted to, but in a way that would require such a revolting confrontation with perversity, that effectively it was impossible. I read him the same time I read Ibsen. What I got from him is what you get from some of the Greek plays, that when Fate begins to move, it may take a long time, but it will get you in the end.
MG: You do want to change things with your plays, don’t you?
AM: Sure. That’s implicit in them. In All My Sons, I was dealing with corruption involving twenty fliers and a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of stuff – well, this is child’s play now. If you say, do you want to change things? I could die laughing. A change from terrible to impossible! Look at the number of people who have been sent away to prison for violations of regulations in relation to war production. Profiteering and so forth and so on. If anything, our sensitivity toward this has increased since All My Sons.
MG: Do you ever think about what your legacy would be?
AM: [quickly] Some good parts for actors.
MG: Some good parts for actors?
AM: This is not said speciously. I look at the plays that I’ve done, that is those plays that continue to have their life, and if you look hard enough you’re going to find that they’ve got pretty good parts for actors. Now there are exceptions. But actors and directors have got to decide to do these plays. They’re not deciding because the play has quote great moral importance. Even literary importance. They’re deciding because they’ve got a hell of an idea of how to do this part. Look at a play that never ceases to be done. With the long nose. What is that about? Does anybody really believe in that romance anymore? But there’s a fantastic role there for a romantic type actor. When does he get a chance to do that? So one after another rises to his maturity and says, ‘I’m going to play that guy.’ Similarly with Shakespeare, it would be interesting to find out which of the plays is done most, in terms of numbers of performances. I don’t know but I would be inclined to think it would be the ones with the big interesting central parts.
I think Willy Loman is going to be around a long time because that’s a challenge. You can do it in a number of different ways. And it takes a big actor to do it. An actor of lesser capacity is going to fail. That production of View from the Bridge with Michael Gambon. Now, why is he doing it? It has to be that he looked at that and said, ‘Now I can do that the way no one else has done that.’ If periodically people keep doing that, that means those plays will last.
MG: Do you want your epitaph to be: ‘He gave good parts to actors’?
AM: I wouldn’t mind! There are lesser things you can do with your life. I would hope that there would be more seen in them, that they are an image of some kind of the human circumstance. But I think that offering good parts goes with it. There are probably a lot of good parts in very inferior work, which don’t get done. I think there’s a limit to the truth of that statement, but I think you have to have that in order for the thing to live. And why not? After all, it’s an art where the actor is expressing himself as well as the author and the director.
MG: What that statement doesn’t do is distinguish you from other playwrights. Tennessee could have said the same thing, and in fact it’s true. Obviously actresses will always want to play Blanche.
AM: There is another element, of course. I’m too modest to say what it is. My plays are dealing with essential dilemmas of what it means to be human. I would hope they are, anyway.
MG: There are cycles. You’re evidently going through a revival. Wherever you turn, you see yourself. There has to be a reason for that – not just good parts for actors.
AM: I wondered about that the other day and I wondered whether a point had come where these plays had detached themselves from their time. They’re now freewheeling.
MG: They’re out there in space somewhere?
AM: Yeah, they’re out there in space now. They’re what we call [laugh] artworks. I’ll never forget sitting in a theatre when Olivier directed The Crucible in the ’60s. Inge and I were sitting there. Positively marvellous production. At the Old Vic, I guess it was. A woman in front of us turned to her companion at the intermission and said, ‘Didn’t this have something to do with what’s-his-name, that senator?’ I thought, it’s like being born again. The point would come when nobody would remember McCarthy’s name. It’s like seeing Essex and Elizabeth in a play and saying, ‘Now what was that story again?’ You’ve got to remember that this was Essex and Elizabeth in their time. That was the big shocker! That was the most important statement being made in England, and who the hell remembers it?
MG: Is the revival of your work like being born again?
MG: And during the same time there will be productions of Salesman and The Crucible around the country.
AM: They’re going on now, they’re going on all the time. But not in New York. I say to myself, OK, if that’s happening to me, what does that say about what it’s doing to the new, unknown or the hardly-known writers, who are thinking in some misconceived part of their brains of aiming their career toward a profession of playwriting. It’s absolutely killing. It’s a marginal occupation.
MG: It wasn’t always.
AM: It was not. And I still say, under the right circumstances, every theatre in the so-called Broadway area could be full within two or three years, if the price of tickets was brought down and a couple of other things were done. This is not some natural consequence. This is a result of a certain set of sociological courses which can be remedied.
MG: Even if they were remedied there is a question whether the playwrights would be there – and if the actors would be there to do the plays.
AM: Well, then you would have to start from that. Look, I have these two short plays [I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara]. Those four actors seem to be as good as anybody you’d want. They’re as good as anybody in England. I think we’re richer than that goddamn situation on Broadway allows us to be.
MG: Recently you had a one-act performed by Wallace Shawn.
AM: That was not a play. I had my pocket picked on a bus on First Avenue and I wrote a little piece of prose about it, which I didn’t bother to try to get published. A man sat down near me, looked like he had just come out of a hospital. He kept writhing in his seat, looking very uncomfortable. He picked my pocket while he was doing that. I wrote a sort of half-wry thing. Wally read it. I wasn’t there to hear him read it. People told me it was wonderful. He’s a very good performer. The whole thing was in first person, and his wryness must have been terrific in it.
MG: Last January we had that panel of playwrights, and we talked too little about the creative process.
AM: A writer talking about his work is unable to talk about the centre of it, which is the obsessional part of it, because if he talked about it, it wouldn’t be obsessional anymore. That’s the part: you can’t see your own ears. You look in a mirror and you see your eyes, and if you look at your ears you don’t see your eyes. You can’t look at them both at the same time. And that’s the part: you can’t look at it.
The phone rings. It’s the playwright Honor Moore, who lives nearby.
MG: Many writers and artists live near here.
AM: When I moved here, there was me and Alexander Calder. It was all farms, every house here but ours.
MG: And now?
AM: I’m trying to think of the farms. I know two and there are probably another six. It’s become one of those semi-suburban areas. The economics editor of Time lives here, and he has a computer tied into the telephone. He showed me how it works.
MG: Do you have a computer?
AM: I work on a word processor now. I wrote this book [Timebends] on it, only because when I got through about two hundred and fifty pages and realized the size of this thing, I thought I was going to drown in paper. Honor was the one who sold me. I went through hell learning how to use it. I was ready to throw it out fifteen times. Now I’m very good at it.
MG: Have you written a play on it yet?
AM: No. I wrote a hundred-and-fifty-page outline for a television version of The American Clock on it.
MG: As you know, I’ve just been talking to Martha Clarke. Her work, combining dance and theatre and extraordinary visual images, is so very different from yours.
AM: Well, you know there’s drama and there’s theatre, and they’re not necessarily the same thing. It’s neither better nor worse, just two different beasts happen to be taking place on the stage. My concept – I didn’t invent it – the idea of a play being the story of birds coming home to roost, which is basically the classical theatre. That’s gone by the boards. Plays today are incidents, not a long articulated arch where the past is being grappled with.
MG: That’s still true in your work, even in the one-acts. They’re memory plays.
AM: I can’t wait to see what an audience makes of those. I’ve often said this: there are very few playwrights that stay in the theatre as long as I have. There are some others. Beckett is another one. But for the most part, it’s a young man’s game. Maugham was very successful; he left. A lot of people left.
MG: How long have you been in the theatre?
AM: Really I started writing plays in the ’30s, but I didn’t get produced until the ’40s. I’ve been obsessed with it all that time. That’s a long time to be obsessed with the same thing, but I can see why. You throw yourself at the mercy of actors.
MG: And also directors.
AM: And directors. And the weather.
MG: And then the critics.
AM: Critics are the least of it. I’ve never really been surprised by critics.
MG: What’s kept you going for so many years?
AM: An unanswered question. I don’t know. You get a vision of a form, which is almost like a building or a structure like a tree, and you are compelled to complete that form, to literally make it. Like that table in there, that dining-room table that I built. It’s not unlike it. You can envisage an object. If you have the technique or the talent, if you can think of it, you can make it.
MG: With a carpenter, at a certain point his tables get better and better. He knows more about what he is doing. In a sense, you started out with Death of a Salesman.
AM: It was about my tenth play.
MG: It was your third on Broadway and your second Broadway success. Success came early. Where’s the thrill once you’ve done it, once you’ve made a terrific table so early in your life?
AM: You’ve got different aims.
MG: Different woods?
AM: Same wood, different aims, to create a different truth. You can’t deal the same with a situation as in The Crucible or The Price or The American Clock or The Archbishop’s Ceiling or the way you deal with Death of a Salesman. I have to have a different tone of voice for a different subject. And one to me is as valid as the other.
MG: Aren’t you always competing with yourself?
AM: I’m not, in my own mind. I’m doing a different kind of work. The aim is different, the design is different, the sound is different. It’s an amazing new adventure. The idea of repeating the same thing would be suicide, although there have been some wonderful artists who have done just that. They’ve written the same thing again and again.
MG: Who are you thinking of?
AM: Look at Bach: I defy anybody but a real specialist to tell some of those things apart. That’s a powerful form – and he’s always filling it with high emotion. He invented so much of that form, and once it’s invented, it’s sufficient.
MG: Do you feel that about writers, too?
AM: There are others. Cheever, I think, was repeating a lot of stuff, but beautifully. You get stylists like Hemingway, with understatement. The same emotions are coming off the same page.
MG: Do you hear your voice through all the plays?
AM: Dimmer or louder, yeah. I think there’s one thing to be said about them: they’re unmistakably mine. [Laugh.] For good or ill. And I’m happy about that. In other words, I didn’t work under such a cover of anonymity that my spirit is not in them. That’s one of the reasons I’ve written so few of them. I really have to be moved to do it. Just to sit down and fill up the pages – I wish sometimes I could do that. I’m convinced some very good wo
rk has been done that way. I think some of the Elizabethans did that, more than once. And they stole from one another.
MG: That isn’t how you work?
AM: We have different ideas. You know John Golden, who started producing at the turn of the century? I met him, in 1945 maybe. I had written [the novel] Focus, and he called me one day and asked if I would be interested in writing for the stage. He had an office on top of his theatre, the John Golden Theatre. He had a barber chair in an anteroom where every morning a barber would come and shave him. On one wall, as big as this, there must be five hundred plays. It says ‘John Golden’s Plays.’ I saw this and I said, ‘I didn’t know you were a playwright.’ He said, ‘The plays I produced.’ I took one down and there it said, ‘John Golden’s Plays, ‘Turn to the Right,’’ which was one of his big hits, and I look in vain for the author. He said, ‘You see what we do, we buy the play from the writer, and then we fool around with it. I do a little writing myself. And the director makes some changes and the actors throw in a few things here and there. We give the author $500. You fellas have a much harder job. Everything has to be new.’ He says in those days – he’s talking primarily about pre-1920, ‘For example, if I had a show in which a woman put a candle in a window so that her long-lost son would see it and find his way home, there must have been fifty plays with a candle waiting for the son to come home.’ I said, well what did the audience make of this and he says, ‘They liked it! It was familiar. They knew what the story was going to be.’
I started thinking about this, and I thought of the movies. There was a run of Warner Brothers gangster movies. Then RKO made gangster movies. Then MGM. Every major star had to be a gangster for a while. Eddie Robinson, Clark Gable. They were basically the same movie. William Powell and Myrna Loy: very sophisticated movies. Jean Arthur and God knows who – it was the same movie. To be cruder: if you start reading around the Elizabethan times you begin to hear the echoes of one after another. Now come back to the nature of the critic and the audience: God forbid the critic should have heard a line reminiscent of another line in a different work, he’s got to raise this not only as a question of the author’s originality, but perhaps even his sincerity. This has nothing to do with sincerity. It was a performance. Like a violinist. How sincere is he when he plays some concerto? Who knows? He may just be counting his money when he’s doing it. Now it has become much more of a testimonial of some sort. It’s almost like the job of a minister. He must be sincere when he delivers a moral lecture.