by Mel Gussow
MG: He killed himself.
AM: Yes, he did.
MG: Do you know why?
AM: I don’t think anybody knows why somebody commits suicide. By that time, I hardly knew him. I was away. I once figured I spent, total in my life, maybe four or five hours with him, in his presence. But the impression was profound.
MG: We know why Willy killed himself.
AM: Yes, of course, that’s a different story. I’m sure he [Manny] would never recognize himself [in Willy]. Nor would any of the family.
MG: He was dead before you wrote the play?
AM: Long before.
MG: Do you remember the point at which you decided to write a play that would take off from him?
AM: While All My Sons had been a success, my work generally was far more lyrical than that. As I said, the challenge for me was whether I wanted to be able to beat the realistic theatre, or not. Once All My Sons went on, I felt I had a licence to do what I really wanted to do, which was deal with time the way I had never seen in theatre. Make things happen simultaneously, which I think is the way we perceive reality. The idea that you’re never thinking of only one thing, you’re thinking of two things, or more, at the same time. It was then that I began to think of Uncle Manny, because in one sentence he could raise two or three subjects and time periods. He was spread all over the map of his own mind. When I was writing the play, in the very first scene, Willy talks about imagining he was in a different car which he wouldn’t have been in for many years. He has his sudden switches from one reality to another – I got very excited about that. It was a way in to where I always wanted to be.
MG: In terms of the subject matter, it conjured up things from your boyhood?
AM: In a way. I invented a lot of that, but it was tinged with my early life in Brooklyn. Basically, it was a feeling of more than the biographical stuff. There was that sense that something marvellous was about to happen. The play, I think, is suffused, oddly enough, with hope. Everybody’s full of hope! All the time. As well as dread.
MG: Is that a fair picture of you at that time?
AM: Sure. Anybody who would ask if I had a happy childhood, I would have said, yes, sure, I was doing wonderful things all the time, like dreaming I would be a great ballplayer or a great singer, but I was held back by some mysterious force.
MG: At that point, did the idea of becoming a playwright ever enter your mind?
AM: Not as such. I didn’t know what that meant. I didn’t think about writing until I was sixteen. Before that, I never took writing seriously. I read a lot, of absolutely every kind, but actually to be a writer – it was simply too marvellous an idea. It was filled with glory. It never crossed my mind. I started to think about being a writer only after I left high school, and I had to go to work in various places. Going to work threw me into contact with all kinds of characters whom I would have loved to have been able to capture. That’s when the language became useful. It came out of the experience of being with people and trying to capture them. Before then, I had been in a different culture, where painting was important.
MG: At first, you wrote stories rather than plays.
AM: I started to write descriptions of people in prose. They were never very satisfactory. I couldn’t make the people live. It was only when I started to see some theatre. Nazimova was playing Ghosts at the Brighton Beach Theatre in Brooklyn, down near Coney Island. Somebody must have put me on to it. I don’t remember who. I went down there and I was simply bowled over. Not by anything more than the feeling of having been captured by that event, and taken out of myself and made into a different human being for those three hours. To walk away with those visions in your mind was realer than anything around it; I think that set me off more than anything.
MG: Were you aware of Ibsen then?
AM: I didn’t know Ibsen from a hole in the ground. It was a show, that’s all. It’s after I saw it that I began to go to the library and look up some of the other plays. But that’s when the idea arose really – that you could make portraits of people in words, and have them tell stories on stage that were coherent and shocking and wonderful, all with language. It always came out of the people. I was very good with dialect.
MG: You’ve always felt you were a good mimic.
AM: Yes. I used to believe, and I suppose I still do, that playwriting is an auditory art.
MG: Where movies are visual.
AM: And that’s why I’ve never been comfortable thinking of myself as a movie writer, even though I’ve done a couple of movies. It’s like writing about mutes. At any point, if you can eliminate the word, you move. At least, those were the movies I grew up with. I’ve seen some pretty good movies that have language. But they’re unusual . . . I just saw August Wilson’s play Jitney. The language is what’s keeping that afloat.
MG: And the people.
AM: Because the language is coming out of those people.
MG: That was his first play, and there was such vitality in it. Anyone should have been able to see that.
AM: You would think so. I enjoyed it. It gets moralistic now and then, but so what? Some of that acting was just terrific. The guy who plays the drunk, the way he moves his body, he hoists himself up out of a chair. It was an imitation of somebody he observed getting himself out of a chair. He’d raise himself up by the cushions and swing his body out.
MG: Have you ever had any black characters in your plays?
AM: Not often, because I never lived with them. I had the nurse in The Ride Down Mt. Morgan. It’s a very good part. In The American Clock, there’s a couple. But I would really have to bend a lot of reality.
MG: Even though you’re a good mimic, you’ve held to the people that you really know.
AM: I can do that lingo though. I suppose I would feel like an outsider, a tourist. As a tourist, you always think you’re experiencing something. Then when you leave the scene and the natives start to talk, you know that you ain’t seen nothin’. It’s a little like people writing about Jews who really don’t live in that milieu. You know that there’s a whole life in there that they never got to. It’s simply a limitation, which I respect.
MG: As you say that, you haven’t often written about Jews. Some people are Jewish in the plays, but . . .
AM: I’ll tell you: I never saw it as a dramatic issue, for some reason. I suppose it’s partly because my father was a completely agnostic person – except he’d show up at the High Holidays for an hour or two to pay his obeisance. But religion played no part in my upbringing and indeed the culture played no part because nobody spoke Yiddish. I often wish they had. I wish I had learned Yiddish. My grandfather, who came from Europe, occasionally lapsed into Yiddish, but they were Germanic cultured, so the ideal was German. That’s what they thought they were supposed to be doing. I was in fact surprised later in life at all the Jewish culture there was, which had completely passed me by.
MG: So it’s never been a major part of your life.
AM: No, it hasn’t.
MG: Whereas Harold Clurman used to go to the Yiddish theatre. That’s what he grew up on.
AM: By the time the ’20s came around, most of that feeling of vitality had ebbed. My father loved Jacob Adler, he loved him playing Lear. He used to talk about it all the time.
MG: You didn’t see that?
AM: I wish I had, but I was too young. I was still nine, ten. You would never take a kid like that to the theatre. I didn’t have that experience.
AM: I miss old Bobby Lewis [the director and teacher, and an early member of the Group Theatre]. He was terrific.
MG: He would say whatever he damned pleased.
AM: He had less bullshit about him than any theatre person. He told it like he saw it. He directed Brigadoon and it was a tremendous hit, the first time he had a big commercial hit. He went off to Europe and enjoyed himself. He came back to check up on the show, and, he said, ‘The show was dreadful. It was full of holes. The actors were mugging all over the stage. It was horribl
e. But the audience loved it, because by that time it was something you loved.’
MG: That’s one of the weaknesses of live theatre: performances change.
AM: When Lee Cobb played Salesman, I went back there after about two or three months. The play was a good ten minutes longer. He was pausing all over the stage, and redirecting all the other actors, so that he would be where he could be most effective. An inch below the Group Theatre’s philosophy [the idea of a theatre collective serving a social purpose] was [the producer] David Belasco. Many years ago I read that Stanislavsky thought Belasco was the genius. I saw a reprint of a letter that Stanislavsky wrote saying, that’s what you’ve got to see, that’s how to do it.
MG: Each to his own genius. Some people thought Jed Harris was a genius.
AM: He may have been before he got to me. Well, Jed thought he was a genius. That’s a good start. And he would not stand contradiction on that issue.
MG: Who was a genius in the theatre?
AM: Kazan was for a while. But I wouldn’t call him a genius, because a genius has implications of some gift from above.
MG: Harold Clurman thought he was.
AM: Yes. Harold was something special.
MG: I watched him teach some of his classes. He would change the title every year, but it would always be a course in Harold.
AM: Bobby used to imitate Harold at breakfast. He would say, ‘Harold would look down at a plate and see an orange and try to figure out how to get into it.’ [Laugh.] Oh God. I love those people. They weren’t like everybody else. They were desperate about themselves, but it was overwhelming. It transcended the money.
MG: I remember being with Harold at an ITI [International Theatre Institute] Congress in Stockholm, and we were sailing up the fjords past the greatest scenery in the world and he was talking about the Group Theatre. I said, ‘Harold, look around you.’ He said, ‘I’ve seen it,’ and went back talking about the theatre.
AM: Bob Whitehead put him in a car someplace in France. Bob was driving the car through the most gorgeous French countryside. Harold was sitting next to him, saying, ‘What’s the next city?’ I suppose some people still love the theatre the way they did. Jim Houghton [head of the Signature Theatre] does. Of course, the Group had a lavish way of expressing everything.
MG: It didn’t last too long.
AM: No. How many years? Four, five?
MG: And only one playwright, Clifford Odets. But how important it seemed.
AM: Because it raised ideal issues both theatrical and moral, it was in such contrast to the show shop that Broadway is. What they actually did in terms of the work was so small.
MG: The Actors Studio has lasted longer.
AM: I always felt that was a training ground for television and films, if that.
MG: I recently wrote a piece in the Times about who would be considered the greatest actor in the English-speaking world. So many of the candidates were British. The Americans were on a different plateau.
AM: You see, very few, if any, ever kept at it. One shot and then they’re off to the movies. Our theatre has been a jumping-off spot for films and now television. When I talk to younger people, they have no vision, good or bad, of a professional theatre where a producer is first of all a passionate figure, and he creates a production with a director, regardless of the size of the damn thing, or the number of characters.
MG: In one of your books of essays, you said that Kazan was not a villain but a victim.
AM: I always felt that. But he won’t accept that. He was not forced to do what he did [testify as a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee]. He did it voluntarily, out of conviction, if anything as an heroic figure against the Left. Somebody said the other day that Kazan should have just stood up before that audience on television [when he was given an honorary award at the Academy Award ceremony] and said, I’m sorry, I felt I had to do this. It’s a kind of tragic pride that he won’t. I don’t think there was a word said about the House Un-American Activities Committee. What about those guys? When I was called to testify, the Congressman from Pennsylvania [Francis E. Walter] called Joe Rauh my lawyer and said, if I were to agree that Marilyn would take a picture with him, he would call off the hearing. And then he proceeded to behave as though I were a menace to the United States.
Last night I introduced [Vaclav] Havel at a Czech Center ovation to him. The Czechs were making a tribute to [the Secretary of State Madeleine] Albright. They asked me if I would introduce Havel. I didn’t have a prepared speech. I said, some memories come back about the ’60s when he and I would have to walk in the street to talk. We were afraid of the microphones in the hotel. I said, I had run across repression myself. After all, my passport was withheld for four and a half years and I couldn’t travel. But I’m sure this went by in a fog. I don’t think it meant anything. That’s what history becomes.
MG: What is the point of history?
AM: I wonder. I’ve been through a lot of stuff that I don’t correctly remember anymore. If I made notes, or put it in my journal, it’s there. But often times I go back over that journal, and I’ve forgotten half of what I put in.
I was talking to Bill Styron once about the ’50s. Of course, that was when he blossomed. He was in Paris with the Paris Review and having a great time. The ’50s that I knew were as far away as if it were happening in China. In The Creation of the World and Other Business, God’s got a line, ‘Oh you can say anything, nobody remembers anything.’ It’s practically true. There are a couple of images each generation throws up. Those images may tell some of the story. It’s all gone. In the case of The Crucible, that stuck, which I’m very happy about. I get letters occasionally from people, schoolteachers mostly, in isolated parts of the country, who run up against the same thing. It never gets in the press. They teach the play because it’s their voice. But aside from that, who would be thinking about this? Nobody.
MG: Did you read the Joyce Carol Oates novel, Blonde [about Marilyn Monroe and Miller]?
AM: I haven’t yet. I mean to do it. It’s supposed to be very good. She’s a good writer.
MG: But the idea of taking Marilyn Monroe – and your life with her – and using it for fictional purposes, don’t you find that offensive?
AM: It’s probably just as good a way of preserving it. Look at Shakespeare and those kings. It’s through art that the generations converse with one another. I regard the Bible as a work of art, but if anyone met an actual Moses, they would flee.
MG: You’re going to be eighty-five next month. You don’t feel your age, do you?
AM: Well, I do because I get sleepier after lunch. I used to eat my lunch and go back to work. Now I eat my lunch and collapse.
MG: You work in the morning?
AM: It’s my only hope. I will say that certain changes occur. Sometimes for weeks at a time I get energized in the afternoon, and I’m half asleep in the morning.
MG: Do you sleep well?
AM: Nooo, I don’t.
MG: And that’s where Mr. Peters came from? Lying awake at night? Is there any other play you’re thinking of bringing back?
AM: Well, if we ever dare do it right, After the Fall would be something to do. [Pause.] Sometimes it takes a hundred years – and then you get it right.
23 July 2001
‘An unelected politician is of no significance – like an unproduced playwright’
During the Harold Pinter festival at Lincoln Center in July, I moderated a panel of playwrights (Edward Albee, John Guare and Arthur Miller), speaking about Pinter. Miller focused on Pinter’s politics, talking about their shared experiences helping dissidents in repressive countries. He told the story again about his adventure with him at dinner at the home of the United States ambassador to Turkey. Each time that he tells it, he adds new information, this time about an airline losing Pinter’s suitcases.
I said that one principal difference between Pinter and the playwrights on the panel was that they were not actors.
Miller responded with a long and very amusing story about his acting debut at the University of Michigan. It was a play that took place on a ship, and Miller was supposed to go on board to arrest someone. On opening night, he forgot all his lines. He had to be prompted repeatedly by a fellow actor, who said, ‘Don’t you want to come aboard?,’followed by ‘Don’t you want to arrest me?’ This was the beginning and the end of Miller’s acting career. I told Miller that in his early days in rep, Pinter had once acted in a production of All My Sons. With a laugh, Miller said, ‘That’s the first I heard of it.’ I called him the next day to thank him for his participation in the panel and to say how much I – and the audience – enjoyed his stories. He said, ‘I was just getting started.’
The first major American revival of his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, had just opened at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Mass. Miller had sat in on rehearsals, and had talked to the director Scott Ellis and the actors. He was going back in several days to see the play onstage. I was planning to see it that weekend. We met for lunch. It was a hot day and Miller was wearing a brightly coloured short-sleeve shirt. Looking forward to a full season, Miller was in high spirits – with his play in Williamstown, All My Sons returning to the National Theatre in London and The Crucible (directed by Richard Eyre and starring Liam Neeson) coming back to Broadway. That evening he was going to a public reading of After the Fall at the Roundabout Theatre.
MG: Why do you think The Man Who Had All the Luck failed in its first production in 1944?
AM: I’m beginning to understand why. The American theatre then was almost totally naturalistic, in the most prosaic sense of the word. There were some playwrights like Elmer Rice who tried to escape from straight naturalism. But it was a great struggle to get people to accept anything but kitchen sink drama. My play didn’t fit the categories.
MG: But what happens onstage really happens.