by Mel Gussow
MG: And it’s also personal.
AM: Absolutely. That harks back to politics in Brooklyn in 1934.
MG: I would think, however, that your readers would be more interested in Brooklyn in 1934 and in Marilyn Monroe and Elia Kazan.
AM: They are. They’re all in there. They should be interested in other things, and they’ll want to be by the time they finish the book because they’ll see the links.
MG: What are you going to call it?
AM: I don’t know. I’m going slightly batty. I may end up just calling it Memoirs.
MG: Olivier called his book Confessions of an Actor because he thought that it might sell more copies.
AM: There were only two confessions, one is Rousseau’s, the other is the Christian [St. Augustine]. I don’t like that word anyway especially in our time.
MG: The word has other connotations.
AM: These are not confessions anyway. It’s not as though I was trying to get into heaven as a result of writing this book. The best I can say is that other people are going to be writing something, and at least I will have my own voice. The fantasizing about everybody is so intense.
MG: So much has been written about you.
AM: A goldmine for some scholar.
MG: You do have some notebooks as stimulus for your memoirs?
AM: Yes, but they’re of remarkably little help. After I wrote Salesman, we moved. I started to clear out a closet and I saw these notebooks hidden under some junk. I took them out and they were from my college years, which had ended in 1938 and now it was 1950 and I found twenty pages of dialogue about the Loman family. But it was in a totally different form. I had completely forgotten about it.
MG: Were the characters actually the Lomans?
AM: No. They were x and y. I was in that early stage of the thing.
MG: You never know what else might be in your study.
AM: I’m afraid so. I have a secretary up there now filing stuff which is lying in piles and packages. I dread having to look at it.
15 January 1987
‘As always, everything is at stake’
Following our last talk, Miller and I had a brief telephone conversation, dealing with art and politics and clarifying a few questions that had come up.
MG: How do you feel about the relationship between the arts and politics?
AM: Even more so today, the arts to me represent man in his vulnerability, in his natural state, whereas politics is about power. It involves impersonations, masks. But after all the speeches are over, the plays are still there. You can’t divorce them from life.
MG: Your quest is for human rights, for writers’ rights rather than for anything represented by political parties?
AM: In 1964 when I was head of International PEN, it was important to me that as writers we would no longer be above the battle for our right to be writers. There was terrible pressure to co-opt the writer into the system or to prevent him from making observations about it – here and behind the Iron Curtain. I became far more active in that field.
MG: Doesn’t that take away from your writing time?
AM: No. It adds to me, it deepens my feelings. I regard this as the essence of my artistic life.
MG: Why did they call you to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee?
AM: I was signing left-wing petitions for a hundred years before that. I took public positions which they hated. In 1955, I was writing a film about juvenile delinquency. An attack was launched on me by the New York World Telegram and the film was closed down. That was the temper of the times.
MG: What effect did that have on you?
AM: It made me very sceptical about easy claims of freedom. If you make waves, you’re against pretty powerful people. Life becomes far more real and less vague.
MG: With your opening coming up at Lincoln Center, what’s at stake for you?
AM: As always, everything is at stake. But I feel positive. Lincoln Center is a far more relaxed place than it was. It’s been through the mill. The burden of being the second Moscow Art Theatre is off it. It’s not the new Old Vic or the National Theatre.
MG: You said earlier that you laughed while writing Death of a Salesman. Why?
AM: When Willy is talking to his boss, he gives all the reasons why he should be on the road. In the old days, he had respect, people had some regard. ‘They don’t know me anymore,’ which for a salesman is lethal. It’s the cruel irony, it’s brutal and in some curious way, it’s comical.
11 October 1996
‘You hang around long enough, you don’t melt’
Just turned eighty-one, Miller was in the middle of one of his busiest seasons. Nicholas Hytner’s passionate film version of The Crucible, starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder, had opened in New York the previous week to generally favorable reviews. David Thacker’s television film of Broken Glass was shown in September on Masterpiece Theatre on Channel 13, and Thacker’s revival of Death of a Salesman, starring Alun Armstrong, was opening soon at the Royal National Theatre in London. In June, Miller had travelled to Valdez, Alaska, where he was honoured at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. We met for lunch at Union Square Café. I asked him if he was planning to go to London to see Death of a Salesman.
AM: I don’t think I’m going to go over. I’ve been on too many airplanes. Rebecca [his daughter, who had become an actress and, later, a film director and married Daniel Day-Lewis] went to California and back. On the way there, there was a three-hour delay, and on the way back here two and a half hours. I worry about the air in the goddamn plane. I understand they’re not changing the air as often as they used to, because it costs more money. They use up more fuel. If somebody gets on with tuberculosis, you’re breathing that air. I don’t like it.
MG: And it takes too long to go by ship.
AM: Anyway I get seasick. [He studies the menu.] For the first time in a long time, I’m looking at a hamburger, I haven’t had one in so long, and nobody’s watching me.
They’ve got a very good guy playing Willy at the National Theatre: Alun Armstrong. I was at the Reinhardt seminar in Austria, and David Thacker came with four of the cast, the two boys, the actress playing Linda and Alun Armstrong, and we worked every afternoon in a hotel room. Armstrong has a combination of confrontational naturalism and a style that you can’t put your finger on, that’s bigger than just standing there being real. I’m dying to go over and see him. I could just take a breath and grind my teeth and get there.
MG: Each Salesman is different?
AM: They all are. You get different personalities. They are literally different people. [Pause.] If somebody like Gambon played it . . . which he could easily do! Luckily the British don’t know these accents so they feel free to create them. It’s just as well. The only thing they’re making clear, I guess, is that it’s not English. But Gambon was phenomenal in A View from the Bridge. If he played Salesman, you could see the difference immediately.
MG: But there’s the heart of the play.
AM: They can’t change that. [We order.] I’m going to have a marvellous hamburger. [To the waiter: Without telling anybody, put a little bacon in it. Maybe you got a tomato, sliced tomato.] Somebody sent me a little magazine, with all kinds of oddments in it. In that magazine is a reprint of an article of 1906 from a doctor telling you what your diet should be. And he says, there is no food value in vegetables, there’s some food value in bread, but without butter it isn’t worth eating. You can just see these people studying this diet as assiduously as we study these diets now. And they probably all lived about as long as we do. But it was very funny.
MG: When Shaw was asked the secret of a long life, he said it was eating only vegetables and exercising. When Churchill was asked the same question, he said it was smoking three cigars a day and drinking a quart of scotch.
AM: Your genetic inheritance is about ninety-eight per cent. The older I get, the more I resemble my father – physically. It’s quite obvious. I didn’t
use to think I did at all. He was totally unathletic and I was always playing one game or another. I thought I was far stronger than he was. I probably was at some point. Not anymore – trying to climb out of a taxicab . . . !
MG: You turn eighty-one next week.
AM: The seventeenth. It all went by, and I’m still here, to my amazement.
MG: And still working.
AM: I am. I was working yesterday on a revision of a play. I’ve been doing it so long that the routine is there.
MG: Is this the play you’ve been on the last few years?
AM: No, this is another one. I have a new, new, play, which I haven’t been able to get back to because I went to Alaska. And that was fun. I caught about twelve salmon in about an hour. They’re all in the freezer now. They sent them to me. That trip was fantastic. Have you been there? Don’t go except in the warm weather. I was fishing with the head of Prince William Sound. He’s the guy that’s in charge of the safety regulations after the oil spill [of the Exxon Valdez ship]. We caught some fish and then he leaned out on the side of the boat as we were passing floating ice. He had an ice pick and he chopped pieces of ice off the glacial ice – which is blue ice – and he threw it in the bucket. That ice is probably millenia old. It’s been compressed. The Japanese import it. They bring it to Tokyo for their drinks because it makes such great ice cubes. I thought that was just great, leaning over the side of the boat, chopping up some eight-million-year-old ice.
MG: If ice can last that long, perhaps that says something about civilization – and about art.
AM: Eight-million-year-old ice! It doesn’t melt.
MG: Can we draw a metaphor from this?
AM: You hang around long enough, you don’t melt.
MG: You keep gathering honours.
AM: It’s lovely, but it’s enough already. However, when I was in Alaska they did a production of two one-act plays of mine. Absolutely thrilling! Elegy for a Lady and I Can’t Remember Anything. They did them together, which I’ve never seen done before. The point was the acting was simply remarkable. A lot of those people came out of Seattle, but they normally work in Anchorage, which was amazing to me because it was a very sophisticated production. I wouldn’t have thought that would happen up there. So, it was very pleasant, but it’s also an awfully long ride on an airplane.
MG: What do you think of the film of The Crucible?
AM: I wrote the script, but I didn’t quite believe that it would come off like this as both faithful to the fundamental drift of the play and achieving the so-called moral size of the whole work. It never descended to the melodrama.
MG: In some productions, it becomes melodramatic?
AM: They don’t know how to do it. That’s a question of the actors’ awareness, I think. These people could embrace that element and understand it. Winona was raised on a cooperative hippie farm. I said to her, ‘That must have been interesting.’ She said, ‘It was dreadful.’ Her father is a writer. And Daniel is the grandson of a poet [Cecil Day-Lewis], and he never had much of a formal education, but his mind is very wide and deep.
MG: I thought he added a real edge to the character that hasn’t always been apparent.
AM: I think so.
MG: The danger is that Proctor would seem so heroic.
AM: I hate that. I wrote the thing about a damaged man. That seemed to me to be perfectly clear.
MG: That doesn’t always come through in productions.
AM: That’s because the easiest thing is to reach for tears and to reach for sympathy. Once you leave that door slightly open, they rush right through it, and it’s very difficult to avoid. But Nick [Hytner] was tremendously disciplined that way. He comes out of the theatre: I don’t know how many productions he’s done of big plays, so this was no special challenge that way. We were really lucky. If I had a different director, he would have probably been tempted by the naturalistic conflicts and simply intensified those, and never arrive at what I really wanted. Nick understood this without any discussion. He said, ‘Of course that’s the way it’s got to be.’
I tell you I’ve never had a production in my life on the stage or anywhere without a problem. I kept going like this: I’d say, it’s going to blow up, somebody’s going to get sick, break a leg. We’ve got to arrive at some crisis. It never happened. This is the only one. The Crucible on Broadway was one crisis after another. Nothing went right. Nothing.
MG: You always liked the Off Broadway production better.
AM: The Off Broadway production had one great thing about it: energy. They weren’t as good a cast. We had some wonderful actors in the original Broadway production – Walter Hampden, Arthur Kennedy, Beatrice Straight – but they weren’t permitted to act. It was directed by Jed Harris, of whom George Kaufman said, ‘Everybody has to have Jed Harris at least once, like the measles.’ On Broadway, it was too studied. It was done like a Mozart sonata. Jed Harris kept reminding the actors they were in a classic play. To him, a classic play meant that nobody faces each other when they speak. It was like some French tragedy, where they stand there and they address the audience. That’s no exaggeration. They had to hit marks like they were being photographed. Arthur Kennedy [as Proctor] had to come to a certain point and stop. The woodenness of the whole thing sunk it.
Two years later they did it Off Broadway, and it ran for two years. The spirit is throttled – or it’s flying.
MG: One thing the movie has is a dramatic sweep. It was wise to film it on location on Hog Island.
AM: That was a blessing. Whatever tendency there might have been to a static, photographed stage play, you couldn’t do it there. The environment kept moving in on you.
MG: How would you compare the Hytner movie to the Yves Montand version, The Witches of Salem [Les Sorcieres de Salem]?
AM: Fundamentally, that was a photographed stage play. That was Jean-Paul Sartre. I never thought he was very adept at screenwriting [despite his admiration of his other writing]. It was simply this scene and that scene and then the next scene. The idea of really making it a filmic event never happened. The other thing about it which was half amusing: Sartre was a Marxist at the time. He subtly shifted everything so that the rich peasants were persecuting the poor ones. I would say that half of the people who were hanged were large landowners. Also they were all Catholics. I think to the French the idea of a peasant that wasn’t a Catholic was beyond belief. So there were crucifixes inside all the houses. The whole thing was an absurdity, but it had some wonderful actors in it. [Mylene] Demongeot [Abigail], Yves Montand [Proctor], Simone Signoret [Elizabeth] – she was marvellous. But he hadn’t solved the problem of making a film out of it.
MG: How did the screenplay for the Nick Hytner version compare to the play? I thought the language somehow seemed to be smoother than when spoken on stage.
AM: It is. There were a few changes which I made in order to carry the audience with it. There were a few antique uses of language which were eliminated, or I phrased them differently so that an untutored audience could follow it.
MG: Such as what?
AM: I can’t remember. I wrote this thing five years ago. It took close to two years to make the film, from the time that Nick came aboard. Before that, there were three years at least trying to find a director because nobody wanted to do it.
Our hamburgers arrive. He says to the waiter, ‘He gets the cheese. I get the bacon,’ then to me, ‘Just don’t tell anybody.’
I’d have to look at the script. There’s less dialogue than there was in the play because the camera is doing so much of the work. However, I would say all the main confrontations in the play are in the movie, things like when Abigail warns the girls not to tell what they were doing out there in the woods. She’s got a couple of long speeches which are the climax of those scenes. And, of course, all of Proctor’s stuff. It’s basically the play, but so much of it is told through camera action.
MG: I thought Scofield was extraordinary [as Judge Danforth].
AM: H
e’s a fantastic actor. He is probably the greatest actor speaking English. I often thought of all the agonies actors have gone through. He walks on the set and says, where do you want me – and he does it.
MG: With the film of The Crucible and Broken Glass on television, you’ve had the English helping you in America. Until now, many Americans haven’t seen the English productions of your plays. What do the English bring to your work?
AM: Maybe because of the large amount of work they do on classical plays, there’s an assumption that fundamentally a play is a metaphor, that it’s not simply a series of actions by characters. It is that, but there was a reason for writing the play that transcends that. The English start with the assumption that the play has a metaphorical life. I think that Americans are far more naturalistic in the way the theatre is approached, and that attitude leads to some very powerful realistic acting, which the English envy.
MG: Is it a false assumption that your work is basically naturalistic?
AM: Which it isn’t, and never was. But I don’t know how to explain that. The only answer I have is that maybe as a result of doing so many classical plays in the normal course of a director’s career or an actor’s career, which is a very rare thing in the U.S., the English have taken for granted that the play is there to make some transcendent point, or to set up some transcendent situation. Americans are far more involved simply in behaviour, both from the directorial point of view and the actor’s point of view. It’s not just the English. They sent me a tape of the Swedish production of The Last Yankee. On one side of the stage there’s this gigantic rose, six feet high – and nothing happens to it. It’s just there. There’s no dialogue about it. From everything I can make out from this tape: it becomes something that’s reverberating in terms of its colour and its size, over the action. What’s at stake here is life. I don’t think anybody here would ever dream of such a thing. That’s their interpretation of what it’s about. I’m using that as an extreme example of something we would never think of doing. They understood that the Yankee is trying to bring life to his wife, that he is trying to save her from death. That rose has some of that indication.