by Mel Gussow
MG: That’s a strange thing, though, the producer owning the playwright.
AM: You know, the Dramatists Guild was created out of this situation. Their first thing was that no writer was permitted under Dramatists Guild rules to sell a play for any amount of money. He could only lease it for that run. I have the results of it now. I sold All My Sons in 1948 to a movie company and I didn’t realize until recently that they own the rights in perpetuity. This television version – I get nothing out of it. I have the stage rights, but not any film or television rights. That was a hangover from those days. I hear now that royalty terms are such that in effect young writers are giving this work away to producers. We’re slowly floating back to the original situation.
AM: Have you seen Fugard lately?
MG: Not recently. He’s been in South Africa finishing a play.
AM: I like him. I met a playwright in California who is a friend of my son’s. A South African, [Kendrew] Lascelles – and he’s been here for fifteen years. He writes plays about the whites of South Africa. There is usually a black or two in the plays. People don’t produce them. They’re a little verbose, but they could be edited. And I find them terrifying, maybe even a little more than Athol’s plays, because I can relate more to the white people. One or two of his short things have been done. He obviously comes from the Boer side of the country.
MG: I thought it was good that in his Nobel prize speech, Elie Wiesel talked about apartheid as well as the Holocaust.
AM: There are a lot more underdogs around these days. I’m glad he did it. It’s about time.
MG: I was thinking about your trip with Pinter to Turkey a year or so ago.
AM: I found that in certain select areas, if I go abroad or if I make a statement, sometimes it can have some result, and I feel I should do that. That was one of them. I just met two Turks in Russia. I was in Russia again just a month ago. I had met them in Turkey. One is a Turkish novelist named Yasha Kamal. The other is a composer; his name is unpronounceable. They said that as a consequence of our having gone there, the government released over thirteen hundred prisoners. Where I think it will do some good, I’ll do it.
MG: My reading of that piece you wrote about Turkey was that Pinter prodded you to take even more of a stand – to walk out on that dinner.
AM: I had to. I would have taken a stand, but I wouldn’t have done it in that form. I found out later that Pinter might do that at any dinner party.
MG: It doesn’t matter if it’s political or not?
AM: [laughs] He’s now very anti-American. He’s totally for disarmament in England and wants to drive out American forces. He blames everything on the Americans. But I still like him. He’s a wonderful spirit. What happened at that dinner, as I truthfully said, I was glad that he was erupting that way.
MG: That’s not something you do?
AM: I can if I’m outraged by something somebody says. If that newspaper columnist [Nazli Ilicak] hadn’t maintained that Turkey had a liberal democratic state, I don’t think I would have done that. Up to that point, nothing much had happened.
MG: What else makes you angry these days?
AM: Bullshit in general. I wish to God we had a political cabaret. I raised it with Greg Mosher [artistic director of the Lincoln Center theatre company], a place where somebody could write a sketch, have a day of rehearsal, do it, and have tables out there and serve coffee, or get a liquor license. I suppose there are such places. I just don’t know of them.
MG: Would you write for it?
AM: Yes! Of course, it’s gotten so now that it’s hard to satirize politics.
MG: Tell me about your meeting with Gorbachev.
AM: We had been for four days in a place called Issy-Kul. The meeting had been called by the man who is probably the most popular author in the Soviet Union. I had met him a year ago. I never wanted to go back to the Soviet Union, after one of these fucking meetings. It was just a waste of time. As a favour to Harrison Salisbury [an author and a former writer for the New York Times] I went. We were supposed to talk about our writings and our personalities. Bill Gaddis, William Gass. The Russians started talking about the black problem in the United States, and another guy was talking about pornography in American culture.
My turn came, and I looked at Harrison who had delivered a most wonderful speech about his youth, how he first got interested in Russia because he was brought up in Minnesota in a Jewish ghetto, with all Russia Jews. Gass talked about his upbringing. And what we’re getting from the Russians is boiler plate. So I said, ‘Look, I’m not going to talk about my life. It’s clear to me now that there’s not going to be candour. We’re talking about our lives. You’re talking about something I could have read in Pravda yesterday. So why should we come all this distance. I can’t tell you guys apart. Every time we ask a question, you all give the same answers. So what is the point? If you’re going to talk about the United States, I’m going to talk about Russia,’ and I pulled out a dossier which PEN had given me at the last moment about this poet that had been in jail for some years. ‘You want to talk about this woman? Her crime is she wrote some poetry that nobody liked. I had hoped that candour must break out some time. When? It’ll be after I am dead. But it will. And at that time there can be some kind of understanding between our two cultures.’
At which point, this guy [Chingiz Aitmatov] stood up. I realized I had met him many years ago in New York. He wrote The Ascent of Mount Fuji. He had come over for that production. He said, ‘Look he’s right. I agree with him.’ Months pass and Aitmatov calls me on the telephone. He said, ‘I’m inviting Fellini and Duerrenmatt and Peter Ustinov, people from all over Europe, and we’ll talk about how we’re going to get into the third millennium.’ I said, ‘I can’t come, I’m writing a book.’ But Harrison Salisbury [an author and former writer for the New York Times] said, ‘Look, this invitation has to be coming from the top of the heap, and I think you ought to go.’
So I went. And we had an interesting time. Not just writers, scientists too. Fellini sent a wonderful letter. There was no phalanx and there was no attempt to move the discussion over into ideology. I thought that was encouraging. And at the end of the meeting we spent two hours and forty minutes with Gorbachev. Imagine the president of the United States greeting fifteen intellectuals. He’s a tough but contemporary man, sharp as a tack. When I met him, we shook hands and he says, I know all your plays. I was tempted to say, not all, because of the blacklist of the Soviets since 1970. There was a chance we could humanize the relationship. They simply have to modernize the country, which is still half in the nineteenth century. They have to free up the intellectuals and everyone else in order to create a computerized culture. They lock up the computers at night. After all, a computer is a printing press. There was a moral to the piece that I wrote about this meeting, which is that I think it is changing, but God knows how long it’s going to take. And that Gorbachev wants it to change. Why shouldn’t he? It doesn’t mean he’s a humanist because he wants it to change. It’s simply intolerable.
MG: With Reagan, this would have been a photo opportunity.
AM: I said that in this piece. Here we’re Joe, Moe and Harry, and we wrote this play or this novel. In Russia and in other parts of Europe, the writer is the eyes and ears of the country. They’re constantly astonished that a writer here is treated on the same level as an actor.
MG: At best, a celebrity.
AM: A celebrity, that’s a very good way of putting it. Gorbachev doesn’t give the American ambassador two and a half hours, unless there was some crisis. In Europe, if a guy achieves any distinction in the arts, he’s already a philosopher. I had some Chinese to my house once and I had my tractor out. Of course, in China a tractor would serve a commune of five thousand people. The idea that I could get on that tractor and ride!
AM: I can think of ten stories a week that would make wonderful plays, and never do them.
MG: What’s the starting button?
AM: For ex
ample, these two plays [I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara]. They’re both based on reality in one way or another, and a great affection. That’s another thing I’ve got to have, some kind of love involved. It may be the most circuitous way. I love those two people in the first play.
MG: Are they real people?
AM: They’re combinations of people. And the second one likewise. The background is a mixture of two or three backgrounds. The detective is somebody else. But in different ways they were both obsessed with the same thing. It’s that kind of confluence of things. In other words, how does one affect the fatefulness of life? Here’s a man who inadvertently taught his daughter to be a heroine. Inadvertently he reached his apotheosis through her. That’s a wonderful thing.
MG: Have you written before about fathers and daughters?
AM: No, except in A View from the Bridge, and that was once removed. I’d love to do more of that. It moves me a lot. You never know where it’s going to come out of. Maybe that’s why the plays endure. They have to deal with basic human dilemmas.
AM: I saw The Crucible in Soviet Georgia years and years ago, and they played it in their historic period. They had these pantaloons with pointy long shoes, and big mustachios. They injected a scene in the play where the whole town is running after John Proctor. The Russians love to have a big turntable, on which they put trees, a tremendous forest, and have a character running through it. It’s very scary, a wonderful effect. They do it whenever possible. They would do it in A Doll’s House, if they could.
There were two revolves, covered with enormous trees, and they worked out a ballet where Proctor was running in between these two revolves, which were turning in opposite directions, with a mob of people. There is no such scene in the play, of course. And indeed it was quite a striking scene. It had nothing to do with anything. They had these guys running with scimitars, real curved Turkish blades. [Laugh.] I’ll never forget that. It was like something out of Alexander Nevsky. It was quite a way from Salem, Massachusetts. They had a great time doing it, and the audience enjoyed everybody chasing everybody.
After finishing our conversation, we walked through the snow to his studio, a solid-looking, plain structure, hand-made by the playwright-carpenter. Inside, it was unadorned and filled with files, books and papers, a desk and a computer. Clearly it is a workroom in which he feels comfortable. On the wall were several paintings by his daughter Rebecca and a sign, given to him by Dustin Hoffman. It read ‘Boston. Providence. Route 1,’a reference to Willy Loman’s journey as a salesman. On the desk were four notebooks, filled with notes and scenes from his play in progress, The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. All his plays since Death of a Salesman had been written here. After showing me around, he opened the door to the terrace adjoining the studio and stepped outside. Facing the snow-filled vista, he seemed to luxuriate in the view and the brisk country air. He took a deep breath. Then, bringing everything down to basics, he said, ‘This is where I piss.’
7 January 1987
‘The subject was right here. There was never a question in my mind about that’
On December 15, 1986, rehearsals began for I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara at Lincoln Center. Miller stopped by [artistic director] Gregory Mosher’s office, took an apple off the table and then sailed into the rehearsal room. He seemed to be on a high. ‘It’s like the day of creation,’ he said, and added about the actors, ‘They’re about to take it away – and I’m just a bystander.’ Under Mosher’s direction, the actors started reading the plays. Miller watched intently and only occasionally interrupted to offer a comment. Three weeks later on January 7, I met him at the Mitzi Newhouse Theatre, the smaller of the company’s two theatres, and we walked to the nearby Ginger Man restaurant for lunch. Wearing a tweed jacket, tall, straight-backed, he had an air of being on top of the world. We entered the restaurant, and he immediately started talking about Geraldine Fitzgerald, Mason Adams and the other actors in his one-acts.
AM: The tragedy of our theatre hit me all over again when I saw these actors here. In England I have three casts working and you think, what actors, what a fund of actors. I came back here and saw these four people, and I realized that we have actors just as fine. When you see productions like All My Sons on television or The American Clock in London, it just makes you feel that there’s still a reason to do this whole bloody thing. It’s very moving to me, apart from the fact that it serves me.
MG: Which play were they doing today?
AM: I Can’t Remember Anything. Incidentally every time I tell somebody that title, they laugh, thinking I’m making a remark about a title I can’t remember. Then they think, jeez that’s me, I can’t remember anything. I’m afraid the whole country’s memory is sliding.
MG: I wonder if we could talk about your autobiography [Timebends] again, your reasons for writing it, the problems you had while writing it.
AM: Actually the autobiography is a kind of shuttle form, that is, I might be talking about my young years in Harlem, where I was born, then shoot ahead thirty years, because some theme in Harlem moves me to that. So it’s not a consecutive autobiography. If it were, it would probably have to be five thousand pages. The selectivity is based on the themes that directed my development. I follow those themes rather than dates.
MG: What themes?
AM: One would be the collapse of what seemed to me to be an ordered society, which I was born into in 1915, and continued as far as I knew until 1929 [the year of the Wall Street Crash]. Now, that smashing of the society was very important to me as a dramatist because it goes into the forms of my plays. They begin with an equilibrium, either openly or implied, and proceed to tip that equilibrium.
MG: Everything starts out placidly?
AM: You start at dead level, like in Salesman. Willy already is in a bad state right at the beginning, but always implied in everything is his reversion to some period when nothing disturbed the equilibrium. This is the basis of all his reveries when the boys were young.
MG: Washing the car, playing football. Was there a point when you were growing up that you felt that your world was ending? Was it the Crash itself?
AM: It wasn’t just my father’s catastrophe, but suddenly a catastophe of the great leaders of society like J. Pierpont Morgan. The public was very hostile to big business at that moment. The head of the stock market was soon in Sing Sing. Mayor [Jimmy] Walker turned out to be a charming petty crook.
MG: What did it mean in your own family?
AM: First, the denials, which were inevitable. ‘This was all going to pass’ – that was the slogan of the administration, too. ‘Prosperity is just around the corner.’A few people, then some more, began taking to suicide. Then one man – I didn’t know him personally, but my parents did – and this was a shocker. People who only a year ago were seemingly solid citizens now were jumping out of buildings or taking gas. The value system collapsed. That vision of the fragility of relationships goes right down into After the Fall, and it occurred at a particularly sensitive moment. I was just turning thirteen [the family moved to Brooklyn in 1928], and here I was without leaders anymore, in or out of the house. This was, I think, symptomatic not just of me, but of that whole generation. They did two things: they didn’t believe anymore in reassurances, and they believed totally in Roosevelt.
MG: Did that trigger your desire to be an artist?
AM: It’s hard to imagine that a whole world shook, and indeed it was literally a world, Europe as well as here. And the only stable area ideologically and spiritually seemed to be the Soviet Union, where there was no unemployment, where there was no collapse. This was the advertised truth. And indeed they were recruiting people in Detroit to come over and build factories and work in the factories. I went through the two concomitant things, as did the whole generation. The main thing to me was that the most solid seeming faces of the society turned out to have no reality. So what did you do? It made you want to search for ultimate values, for things that would not fall apart under pr
essure. And that I think is the moralistic side of my work.
You begin to believe that the society, as vital and important as it always has been to me, was second to what people carried around in them, what they believed about themselves and about life as far as stability was concerned, and being able to function. The symbolic figure of the Depression was the man sitting in the Automat at eleven o’clock in the morning with his cup of coffee – and he has nowhere to go. He’s not starving to death. He’s had a job all his life, or a business. He has no appointments, and no foreseeable ones either.
MG: It sounds like an Edward Hopper painting.
AM: It’s exactly like out of Hopper. You see, Hopper’s work is out of that Crash. It was that sense of stasis, the sense that the damn thing was never going to move again. All these great institutions were gone. There were people who made money in the Depression time but that was a very small minority. They were guys who were able to think in those terms. But I suppose I was typical of that time. The idea of nihilism, of cynicism, was not attractive to me. To most of us at the time – you couldn’t afford it. [Laugh.] Everybody was trying to figure out why there were no jobs. You were absorbed in trying to fix the thing. You had to have money to be a nihilist.