by Mel Gussow
MG: Tennessee Williams did not survive. He kept writing and at a certain point they simply stopped producing his plays.
AM: That of course had to do with his personal existence. I’ve lived in the country because I love it, but I think it’s also because it sustains you to a certain degree. The weeks go by before I know that something has become tremendously important in New York. And then it has vanished. So I’m spared all that wasted energy of thinking that I’m missing something.
MG: But it must be much more than the fact that your plays have continued to be done in Europe and Latin America. There must be something in you, emotionally that has sustained you through your ups and downs.
AM: It’s a part of my personality, as much as breathing, to continue to attempt to project a symbol of what I’m thinking – or feeling. And I do that all the time. It’s not just what comes out. I’ve got innumerable starts that never finished. I can’t separate my very nature from the idea of struggling to create some kind of form that works. It goes on all the time.
MG: To project a symbol for what you’re thinking?
AM: Yes. Which a play is, after all. Most of the time I don’t find it possible to manage to do it. But the impulse is always there. It’s almost irrespective of the state of the theatre, the fact that it’s not welcoming new work.
MG: Tell me about your later false starts. Have there been many?
AM: Oh, yeah. I’m amazed, myself. I had some notebooks for some years, but they’re very spotty because I’d break off writing in them for a while, and then go back to it. But there are long scenes of plays I had totally forgotten I had begun. There must be a minimum of four a year. They would go as long as two acts, or three. I’ve got one now that I hope I’m going to be able to finish, although I have no assurance of it. The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. That must involve work over several years. I’m sure there must be a thousand pages of dialogue. I’m trying to discover what it is that’s obsessing me about it, so I could find a solid, central order of events.
MG: What is the play about?
AM: It’s a kind of picaresque play. It’s basically a comedic idea, but it’s really ironical. It involves a male character with three women around him. But beyond that I don’t want to talk about it.
I didn’t know Tennessee much all his life, even less so his last years, but, I think, for him it was something similar. He felt that his redemption lay in writing. I feel the same way. That’s when you’re most alive. Your most intensive functioning is because of the fact you have discovered an interplay of forces that seem to answer one another, and the call doesn’t go out into the darkness anymore. It seems to respond to itself.
MG: Does it help you to work out personal problems when you write a play?
AM: It’s not on that direct a level. You end up with the same personal problems that you ever had. If it were that direct, I would be just the most contented human being in the world. It would be like going to the office and working out my personal problems. A playwright especially – although a novelist does something similar – projects himself into a variety of contending characters. He’s got to be in all of them. You can’t write a character that is not resonating somewhere in you.
MG: In which of your characters do you find more of yourself?
AM: When Kazan was doing Salesman, I overheard him one day telling the actor who was the playing Bernard, the boy next door who becomes a lawyer – ‘That’s Arthur.’ Kazan made an assumption, which has a reality, that there is something in Bernard, vis-a-vis the Loman sons, which is that Bernard is more conservative, more devoted to surviving.
MG: The one thing about Bernard that always lingers in my mind is that he argued a case before the Supreme Court and doesn’t mention it – because he has done it.
AM: And that’s one of my other relationships to him. It could be merely that, or it could be anything.
MG: Here’s a theory: all the lawyers in your plays are closer to you than the other characters.
AM: The main lawyer that I know is Alfieri in A View from the Bridge.
MG: I was also thinking of Quentin in After the Fall. Someone said to me if you want to know Arthur Miller, read Quentin’s lines. Those are the lines that are closest to him – in an emotional if not autobiographical way.
AM: I would say that’s valid. It’s the one in which I was most directly trying to figure out my relationship to all kinds of moral problems that I thought everybody else faced, as well as myself. The death of love – and the rest of it. And it’s the most personal statement that I’ve made. However, there might be more of me, literally speaking, in Willy Loman. You’d have to be to write him that way. A person who didn’t share in some part of his heart some of those characteristics, or at least his joys and sorrows, would never think of writing about them. There would have to be in Shakespeare something of Iago, that ignoble son of a bitch. He would have to have passed through that phase.
MG: People have said that one of the characters closest to Tennessee was Blanche.
AM: I believe that Stanley was part of him, too. It can’t be a one for one thing. To me, Willy always was struggling with illusions toward rather than away from life. He’s trying to assert, in this kind of insane, crazy way he’s got, a kind of loving ethos. He really wants the boys to love him, and he wants to love them. He’s not a purely aggressive capitalist. If he were, he probably would have succeeded.
MG: The common assessment is that he’s a man who has based his entire life on false values.
AM: That’s part of it. Yes he has, but the other side and what’s moving about him is the embrace of the promise of life, as he was given it.
MG: That’s the side you would feel closest to?
AM: Yes. Very much so.
MG: Perhaps one correlation between you and Willy could be this need on his part always to be on the road, selling, doing something, not to retire, not to retreat.
AM: The difference between me and that kind of person is that I’m trying to create something with an intrinsic value. I rely on the grace of time to disclose what that value is when it doesn’t appear at the moment the play is finished. For example, I did The Archbishop’s Ceiling at Kennedy Center in Washington, and stopped it there because it wasn’t right. It wasn’t correctly cast and I had made foolish revisions. I went back in the ’70s and simply used the original script and disposed of the revisions. Now it’s at the RSC. It’s fine if it’s recognized when it happens. I want to believe that it’s there, and it might take five years or ten years, or it might be never.
It’s not that my plays are perfect, by any means. But you know there is something holy in a first impulse. That’s where the vision is clearest and cleanest, especially in the theatre which is so filled with compromises, necessary ones in terms of casting, for example. Or you’re not lucky and you get a director with the wrong kind of sensibility. Or the theatre’s too big. Or it’s raining that night. There are all these variants that are always there. They were there for Molière, they were there for Shakespeare. They will always be there. You’re driven back into a corner where you say, ‘This is what I meant.’ Let the variations happen around this, and don’t start with a lot of compromises.
MG: It would seem that time has caught up to your plays, except for After the Fall. When you brought it back, people still did not recognize it for what it attempted to do.
AM: Well, they recognized it more. There was a larger reception for it. I regard it as a very successful run. I don’t think that every play has to have a mass audience.
MG: Is there another play of yours that you think will have its day?
AM: Not really. I wrote a play about Montezuma and Cortez [The Golden Years]. There’s a certain amount of purple writing in it because it’s written in a kind of archaic verse, a Jacobean form. It turned up at the BBC. They’re going to do it on the radio, and I said, ‘Why do you want to do this?’ They said that there are some great parts in this thing and we’ve got all the actors we want, wonderfu
l stage actors to play these parts. [Ronald Pickup played Montezuma and John Shrapnel played Cortez in the BBC production, Nov. 6, 1987] The play was written originally as a response to Hitler, but the character of Montezuma is a man who cannot decide whether the illusion is real or reality is an illusion. They had a god who, according to the legend, disappeared into the ocean and walked across the water. His symbol was a cross. He was white and he had a beard. It fit the conquistadors perfectly. However, the evidence was that they were raping, killing, stealing and melting down holy gold things and giving out that they were going to take over the empire. With all the evidence he had, he was up against an illusion, or a belief, or a fate, which corresponded to his need to believe that he was the last king of Mexico. The god coming back was an epiphany. This was now his final recognition as the ultimate ruler of the world. The point is: now they say, this is what we’re interested in because the whole idea of the illusion is absolutely postmodern.
I read the play again, not knowing if I should even let them do it. I got caught up in it. It’s an absolutely marvellous story. Who knows? I wouldn’t object to it. They probably have more space for it theatrically over in England. The other plays are best left in the drawer, although now they want to publish them as my early work, and they have an introduction written by a scholar at the University of East Anglia. [The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck were published by Methuen in one volume in 1989, with an introduction by Miller and an afterword by Christopher Bigsby, an academic and author]. I don’t know if people are forgiving enough. I was learning. They were exercises, in a way.
MG: These were not in your Collected Plays.
AM: That was the finished work. The others – God knows I spent a decade writing them. I’d like to write a play again, whether it be Mt. Morgan or something else. I was at rehearsal yesterday [for I Can’t Remember Anything and Clara] and I’m a sucker for actors. This group has a kind of depth that I think is marvelous. Kenny McMillan is extraordinary. He can be going in one direction, and it’s pretty damn fine but it lacks one thing and the director will say, Kenny, and then he turns on a whole new faucet. The emotional equipment of that man is unbelievable. And [James] Tolkan. They’re as good as there are.
MG: Would you ever write a play for McMillan?
AM: It moves one to do that. The theatre’s competing with big business. You can’t really hope to snare a guy of that accomplishment. Or Geraldine Fitzgerald. She’s fantastic. But I assume the next time around, I’ll call on one of them and they’ll say, oh, gee, I’m going to be nine years on television. The theatre’s a fifth wheel. You’ve got to face that.
MG: What are you learning about those plays by seeing them?
AM: One obvious thing: when you’ve got two people on the stage for an hour, you’ve got a lot of talking because there are no entrances or exits and we’re not going anywhere. So it can be talking, or it can be a play; it can be a struggle – with stakes. I’m thinking of yesterday where Gerry [Geraldine Fitzgerald] and Mason Adams were just talking and Greg said, ‘Well, that’s very good talking, but you know there’s a play going on under this talking.’ [Laugh.] They looked up in shock, and they went back and they did the play [he slaps his hands], and that was quite marvellous. I wish I had a film of that happening, because it’s the same exact dialogue, the actors are in the same places and they’re the same people. You see what one level is, and you see what the other level is. It’s very hard to explain that to anybody, unless they saw it. One is absolutely riveting. The other is kind of mildly interesting.
I’m writing the subtext as much as I can, and the words are there to illuminate that. But the tension! How they can keep this up for an hour. Because it goes from one point to another point, and I must say that Greg is a tough nut. I hope he lasts long enough to do that. I’m not sure that I have the energy to start at one o’clock and go to four with one play and then up at four-thirty to eight with something else.
MG: The two plays are linked about memory.
AM: They’re both plays about trying not to remember. Memory is the danger, and there are two tactics people take consciously to forget pain. One is obviously more comedic than the other. One is by declaring that one can’t remember anything, and the other – Clara, the play about the murdered girl – is about attempting to remember, but being prevented by one’s own culpability. They’re face to face or back to back.
MG: Which approach would you take?
AM: I think I do both of them. I’m quite aware that it’s much easier to remember pleasure than it is to remember pain, unless you’ve got some disease. I feel I do both things, those that make one feel the agonies of guilt and the things you just find yourself bearing.
MG: In the first play, what’s the attitude towards memory?
AM: The woman uses her absence of memory as a defiance. She’s saying rather defiantly, ‘I can’t remember anything and I’m not going to remember anything – and what’s wrong with that?’
MG: Perhaps we could talk about your family, and what your children are doing.
AM: I’ve got three grandchildren, my son’s children. He does film and television production. He does commercials and shows and so on. My daughter Jane lives in New York with Tom Doyle, who is a sculptor. She has been married to him forever. And Rebecca is my youngest daughter, and she does that sort of thing [he points to a painting on the wall].
MG: Are you close to them?
AM: Oh, yeah. Unfortunately I don’t get out to California enough [where his grandchildren live].
MG: Who are your friends now?
AM: A lot of painters and writers. Cleve [Cleveland] Gray is a very close friend of ours, and Francine [du Plessis Gray, his wife]. They’re of all generations. Honor Moore is a good friend. People in the magazine world. Saul Steinberg was an old friend of Inge’s. [Alexander] Calder was a very close friend.
MG: What about your old theatre friends?
AM: The ones I knew when I was working a lot in the ’50s are either dead or inactive. The actors of course vanish into space. I know the actors from whatever play I’m on. Some of them are business people, professional types. I have a few friends that keep coming back. I’ve never had that many friends.
MG: Who reads your plays first when you finish them?
AM: That’s an interesting question. I don’t know anymore. First of all, it depends on whether it’s a play that requires enormous forces. For example, I wouldn’t do it, but if I wrote an historical play that needed twenty-five people in it, I probably would have to go to an Off Broadway institutional theatre of some kind. I can’t imagine, quite frankly, a Broadway management wanting to do one of my plays anymore.
MG: I was thinking, when you finished a play who you would show it to – your wife or your agent or a friend?
AM: I guess my agent would be the first. Luis Sanjurjo [who has since died]. He’s a wonderful combination of savvy and education. Imagine being able to talk to an agent about something.
MG: Who haven’t you met that you would like to meet?
AM: I’ll tell you the one guy I’m sorry I never met and I could have: Sartre. I have an affinity for him. See, he did a screenplay for The Crucible [filmed as Les Sorcieres de Salem, or The Witches of Salem, with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret]. He wrote some interesting commentary about the theatrical problems in this century. It was very impressive. This was back in the ’50s, I think. He foresaw something – he wasn’t referring to television when he said that a play now has to be short and make a single striking point. That’s a paraphrase. The idea being that the attention span was diminishing – for everything. And he wrote endlessly, one immense essay after another. He had a large library of works. He assumed there was some attention span out there. There were a number of remarks like that which made it seem to me that he had his finger on something about the modern circumstance. Our problem in New York is an economic problem and consequently a way of organizing the audience, but the truth of the matter is that the theat
re is facing some kind of unprecedented problem, even in places like Poland, before all this trouble, where truckloads of people were not drawn to the theatre the way they had been.
MG: Does this mean that you’re going to write shorter plays – more one-acts?
AM: You know the Greek plays were one-acts, and I kind of like the idea of the form, one smashing explosion. I always have. The play that I’ve been working on [The Ride Down Mount Morgan] is not that at all. It’s a very big multi-scene play, big in terms of length but also in terms of movement.
MG: How do you feel about American novelists?
AM: Phil Roth, I think is a wonderful writer, and he’s a good friend, and Bill Styron is a very good friend of mine. And Bill Gaddis and Bill Gass. I can’t think of all I like. A man named [Robert] Stone. I thought his last novel was terrific.
MG: Do you read much fiction?
AM: I read a lot. One of the great things about living in the country is that I have a lot of time to do that.
MG: Are there things you’ve left out of your book [Timebends]?
AM: My problem is how to digest stuff. I made eight trips to Europe and Africa as the president of PEN, and in those trips I had to deal with a hundred people who were involved with trying to get writers out of prison. I met one of them in the hall at Lincoln Center yesterday, Wole Soyinka. That would be a book all by itself. Because of those trips, there have been very intimate changes within me of the vision as to what man is about and what is life. When I was in Turkey with Pinter last year, we were within a few hundred miles of the Soviet border, talking with a couple of writers, one of whom was badly tortured. This guy is younger than me but not much. He’s obviously a leftist, and he was telling me about the Soviets trying to annex provinces of Turkey that were on the border. This guy suffered as a leftist. His bones were cracked by the Turkish military. He ends up on a beach castigating American imperialism. A refraction of that conversation goes right through my life. It isn’t simply a political conversation. The power of alienation – that’s what he’s talking about. He’s got to keep intact his alienation. And the problem in our current time is from what are you going to be alienated? How far? What are the real values that you want to cling to? Truth is a meaningless term now. One is that the United States has armed that dictatorship in Turkey. There are large numbers of arms along the border. The real menace that he’s talking about, that they feel very deeply, is from the enemy of the United States, in whose name he was tortured. That’s not politics, it’s metaphysics.