Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  It was the unpredictability of his life that wove romance around it. He was not in some dull salaried job where you could never hope to make a killing. Hope was his food and drink, and the need to project hopeful culminations for a selling trip helped, I suppose, to make life unreal. Fifty years later, in my Chinese production of Death of a Salesman, Ying Ruocheng, the actor playing Willy, was trying to imagine an equivalent to this romance of hope in some Chinese occupation, selling having always been a disreputable pursuit for Chinese, and certainly not something to be romanticized. He finally seized on the outriders who in the old times had accompanied caravans across China, protecting them from bandits. These hired guns had all kinds of adventures and formed a kind of bragging brotherhood, meeting in faraway places from time to time to trade tales of victories and defeats. With the coming of the railroads the need for their services vanished, and they ended up in local fairs firing at targets, swallowing swords, and drinking to forget (rather like our Buffalo Bill).

  Much more than a single model would ultimately go into Willy Loman. Indeed, since I saw so little of Manny he was already, in my youth, as much myth as fact. But there are images of such defined power and density that without offering concrete information to the writer they are nevertheless the sources of his art.

  Actually, a friend of his, another salesman whom he had brought home at the end of one of his trips, was more vivid to me than even Manny. One evening he was sitting in the Newman kitchen when I suddenly came on him, no doubt on one of my expeditions to see what was going on in that feverish household. I remembered him well from one of his previous visits, but I was certain he would not recall a kid like me. I started to pass him to go into the living room when he said, “Hello, Arthur, how are things?”

  I stopped and turned back to him. He had two vivid distinctions for me: although middle-aged, he was unmarried, and he had a wooden leg, which at the moment was propped across the seat of a chair. Unlike Manny, he was a listener, a quiet and unsmiling man with quizzical brown eyes, sparse hair, and a reflective air. Imagining his stump, I felt some of his pain and wondered if it was what gave him his somewhat tired and thoughtful look. I also knew that he was unable to drive and had to move by train, wrestling bags and dealing with porters, valiantly pressing his way across the country like a wounded soldier. Like any traveling man, he had to my mind a kind of intrepid valor that withstood the inevitable putdowns, the scoreless attempts to sell. In a sense, these men lived like artists, like actors whose product is first of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that either ignores them or denies their presence altogether. But just often enough to keep the game going one of them makes it and swings to the moon on a thread of dreams unwinding out of himself.

  “I’m fine,” I said, flattered. And not knowing what to do next, I stood there waiting as his tired eyes searched my face. Actually, I was feeling tense from trying to keep my eye from lingering on his fascinating artificial limb, its shoe stiffly pointing to the ceiling from the seat of the chair it was resting on.

  “You’ve changed, haven’t you?” he said. “You’ve gotten serious.”

  With one sentence he had handed me the dignity of a history of my own. Until that moment, like everything else around me, I had simply been inevitable, as enveloped by time and as helpless as a leaf on a river’s surface. “Changed” meant I was not as I had been before. Somehow this was hopeful, but why I could not imagine. For days and weeks afterward I replayed this moment in my mind, trying to understand how I had “changed.” I studied my face in the bathroom mirror, looking for some sign of my “seriousness” and trying to recall what I had looked like before I gained this little distinction. If I ever knew that salesman’s name I forgot it long ago, but not his few interested words that helped crack the shell of suffocating subjectivity surrounding my existence.

  Manny had managed to make his boys into a pair of strong, self-assured young men, musketeers bound to one another’s honor and proud of their family. Neither was patient enough or perhaps capable enough to sit alone and study, and they both missed going to college. Buddy joined the Seabees during the war and welded landing mats for aircraft on Pacific islands, married an older woman who had her own children, and died at forty of cancer, an entrepreneur at last, serving aircraft workers sandwiches from a small fleet of vans he had managed to buy or lease. Abby fought with the infantry at Anzio, one of the worst-conceived landings of the war, his outfit pinned down on the beach by German artillery fire from surrounding heights. He said he had lost his mind, finally, and had climbed out of his foxhole and walked around on the exploding battlefield as though nothing were happening, and was never even grazed. Like everything else he ever recounted, this story had some holes in it—certain dates he dropped seemed to place him elsewhere than at Anzio—but the possibility was very great that as a Newman he had indeed turned his back on reality and gone for a stroll on a battlefield.

  The last I saw of Abby was a number of years before he died, in his early forties, like his mother, of hypertension. He had invited me to his bachelor apartment in Manhattan after I phoned him. I had not seen him since before the war. Wearing blue silk pajamas and slippers, he ushered me into his small living room overlooking lower Lexington Avenue. It was a late Saturday afternoon. All My Sons was running on Broadway, Focus had been published a year or two earlier, and I had a wife and two children. What he had came out of his bedroom on two pairs of spike heels, two startlingly beautiful young women who dashed over to him where he sat and kissed him on each cheek, pausing only long enough to nod to me as he introduced me with a display of pashalike satisfaction. Buttoning up blouses and straightening stockings, they hurried out of the apartment. They were late, they said, for work. “I love it with two,” he chuckled as the door slammed shut.

  He very much resembled our long-dead uncle Hymie the shot-spitter, with the same aquiline nose, the brown eyes witty with lust, the thick wavy dark hair, and the straight white teeth. He had always looked oiled. Had he arranged this demonstration of his sexual powers to stoke my envy? He certainly succeeded. We had made our date three days earlier, and he would have had time to attend to the staging. His face as he sat there smiling at me seemed to declare his superior potency. I realized that absurd as it might seem on the level of reality, on a deeper path we had been jostling one another for a very long time to see who would lead. And that was why I thought he had timed the girls’ presence. He must have deeply resented my success, as he doubtless saw it, with a prize-winning play. In short, he couldn’t write but he could certainly fuck. Of course his face showed nothing but his sweetly imagined superiority, which, however, I knew to be fragile. As always, his lifelong narcissism made me uneasy with him; to remain friends with such people one has to be false to oneself, since they must always be praised. The only mystery is why one bothers. But of course one doesn’t in the end.

  I had a purpose here that I had not told him about. Before very long we were talking about the war and his outbreak of temporary irrationality at Anzio. “They took me out of the line as soon as we broke through, and I made lieutenant in the military police. We were trying to track down missing freight cars full of tires that kept disappearing below Rome around Foggia, and I finally traced a whole new track these guys had laid out—the cars were driven off into a forest and unloaded and then put back on the main track.” He laughed his gutty laugh. “There was plenty of dough to be made, but naturally I didn’t.” By which I was to understand that he had come out of the war with money in his pocket, and simultaneously that he was far too honorable to accept bribes. In the delightful Newman physics two things could occupy the same space with ease. What the reality was only God knew, but in any case his basic message was clear: he was a success.

  And now, with a sudden turn toward philosophical unhappiness: “I don’t think I could ever stay with one woman. How can you do it?”

  “Who says you have to?”

  “I don’t know …” He glanced disconsolat
ely out the window. “I might want a kid sometime.” He turned to me, joyfully unhappy. “Can you figure it out?”

  “Not really. Once in a while everybody wants both.”

  “I don’t know if I could ride it out, though. I mean if I began to get bored … What do you do if she bores you?”

  “Wait till it passes.”

  He sighed. “That’s what I figured.”

  But he did marry and have a child before he ended.

  “What did your pop want?” I asked him. This was what I had come for.

  I was obsessed these days by vague but exciting images of what can only be called a trajectory, an arched flow of storytelling with neither transitional dialogue nor a single fixed locale, a mode that would open a man’s head for a play to take place inside it, evolving through concurrent rather than consecutive actions. By this time I had known three suicides, two of them salesmen. I knew only that Manny had died with none of the ordinary reasons given. I had also totally forgotten that ten years earlier I had begun a play in college about a salesman and his family but had abandoned it. I would only discover the notebook in which I had written it some nine years hence—long after the first production of Death of a Salesman —when my marriage broke up and I had to move my papers out of my Brooklyn house.

  “I mean if you had to say the one thing he wanted most, the one thing that occurred to him most often, what would it be?”

  My cousin Abby, big, dark, filled with the roiling paradoxes of love for me and competitive resentment, of contempt for his late failed father and at the same time a pitying love and even amused admiration for the man’s outrageousness—my cousin sitting there had also entered my dreams not long before, and possibly it was the dream that had caused me to ring him up after so many years.

  A vast purple plain blends on the horizon into an orange sunset sky. My bare white foot is lowering into a shallow hole at the bottom of which is a little pool of crystal clear water beneath whose surface are stretched five silvery strings, thick as harp strings. My foot descends and touches them, and the air fills with a bloom of music that even ripples the water. Now in the near distance appears a white concrete wall on the purple plain, and as I approach I see two goatlike fawns walking on their hind legs. They are playing handball against the wall. They are my cousins, Abby and Buddy. The smack of the hard black ball against their forehooves is tremendous, thrilling.

  “He wanted a business for us. So we could all work together,” my cousin said. “A business for the boys.”

  This conventional, mundane wish was a shot of electricity that switched all the random iron filings in my mind in one direction. A hopelessly distracted Manny was transformed into a man with purpose: he had been trying to make a gift that would crown all those striving years; all those lies he told, all his imaginings and crazy exaggerations, even the almost military discipline he had laid on his boys, were in this instant given form and point. To be sure, a business expressed his own egotism, but love, too. That homely, ridiculous little man had after all never ceased to struggle for a certain victory, the only kind open to him in this society—selling to achieve his lost self as a man with his name and his sons’ names on a business of his own. I suddenly understood him with my very blood.

  It was an accidental meeting almost a year earlier that had set me up for the particular question I asked and for the resonances of the answer my cousin gave. On a late winter afternoon I had walked into the lobby of the old Colonial Theatre in Boston, where All My Sons had just opened, its Broadway premiere a few weeks away, and I was surprised to see Manny among the last of the matinee audience to leave. He had a nice gray overcoat on his arm and his pearl gray hat on his head, and his little shoes were brightly shined, and he had been weeping. It was almost a decade since I had last laid eyes on him. Despite my name on the marquee he clearly had not expected to see me here.

  “Manny! How are you? It’s great seeing you here!”

  I could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day’s business. Without so much as acknowledging my greeting, he said, “Buddy is doing very well.” Then I saw a passing look of embarrassment on his face, as though, perhaps, he had not always wished me well.

  We chatted for a moment, and he went out of the vast lobby and into the street. I thought I knew what he was thinking: that he had lost the contest in his mind between his sons and me. An enormous welling sorrow formed in my belly as I watched him merge into the crowd outside. Years later it would seem a spectral contest for a phantom victory and a phantom defeat, but there in the lobby I felt some of my boyhood need of his recognition, my resentment at his disparagements, my envy of his and his sons’ freed sexuality, and my contempt for it too. Collected in his ludicrous presence was all of life. And at the same time in some isolated roving molecule of my mind I knew I had imagined all of this and that in reality he was not much more than a bragging and often vulgar little drummer.

  But it was the absence of the slightest transition to “Buddy is doing very well” that stuck in my mind; it was a signal to me of the new form that until now I had only tentatively imagined could exist. I had not the slightest idea of writing about a salesman then, totally absorbed as I was in my present production. But how wonderful, I thought, to do a play without any transitions at all, dialogue that would simply leap from bone to bone of a skeleton that would not for an instant cease being added to, an organism as strictly economic as a leaf, as trim as an ant.

  And more important than even that, a play that would do to an audience what Manny had done to me in our surprising meeting—cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding another, display past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop.

  The past, I saw, is a formality, merely a dimmer present, for everything we are is at every moment alive in us. How fantastic a play would be that did not still the mind’s simultaneity, did not allow a man to “forget” and turned him to see present through past and past through present, a form that in itself, quite apart from its content and meaning, would be inescapable as a psychological process and as a collecting point for all that his life in society had poured into him. This little man walking into the street had all my youth inside him, it seemed. And I suppose because I was more conscious than he, I had in some sense already created him.

  * * *

  But the business at the moment was All My Sons.

  The play had already run in New Haven and had shown its impact, but Elia Kazan continued rehearsing sections of it every day even now, driving it to ever more intensified climaxes, working it like a piece of music that had to be sustained here and hushed there. To keep the cast from routinizing their characters’ conflicts, he would stimulate arguments among them by seeming to favor one over the other, seeding little fungi of jealousy that made them compete all over again for his affection. A small, compact man who walked on the balls of his feet, he had the devil’s energy and knew how to pay attention to what the writer or his actors were trying to tell him; he could make each actor think he was his closest friend. I think his method, if it can be given so self-conscious a name, was to let the actors talk themselves into a performance. Far more by insinuation than by command, he allowed the actors to excite themselves with their own discoveries, which they would carry back to him like children offering some found object to a parent. And he respected rather than scoffed at actors’ childishness, knowing that it was not a grown-up occupation and that the sources of their best inventions were in their earliest years. Instinctively, when he had something important to tell an actor, he would huddle with him privately rather than instruct before the others, sensing that anything that really penetrates is always to some degree an embarrassment. Unlike Harold Clurman, who adored talking and led his actors by sending them a message of his own amiable helplessness, calling to them, in effect, fo
r rescue, Kazan grinned a lot and said as little as possible. A mystery grew up around what he might be thinking, and this threw the actor back upon himself.

  Kazan came from close-knit people of intense feelings, people of clannish propriety and competitiveness who knew that no feeling is alien to man. His most reassuring side, for me, was a natural tendency to seek out the organic and hew to its demands. I believed by this time in a kind of biological play writing—nature abhors the superfluous, and whatever does not actively contribute to the life of an organism is sloughed off. This same predilection may be why Kazan was not suited to Shakespeare and would have his difficulties with Tennessee Williams, who sometimes showed a weakness for verbal adornment for its own sake. In a play, as in personal relations, Kazan knew that the making and the breaking was done by the needs of people and not by their avowals and disavowals. In the same spirit he listened to music, classical and jazz, seeking to experience what was naked in it and expressive of the composer’s secret outcry. He had cast Ed Begley to play the father, Keller, in All My Sons not only because Begley was a good actor (although not as yet of great distinction) but because he was a reformed alcoholic and still carried the alcoholic’s guilt. Keller is of course a guilty man, although not an alcoholic; thus traits could be matched while their causes were completely unrelated. As Kate Keller he cast a long-unemployed leading lady, Beth Merrill, not only because he thought she could act but because she had a certain pathetic pretension as the last of David Belasco’s stars, whom that outlandish genius had forbidden to show herself on the street, putting a chauffeured car at her disposal lest she lose her mystery for the public. Indeed, I had come to the theatre the afternoon I met Manny because we were having a bit of a crisis with her: she had been deeply insulted by what she considered a lack of attention and was talking of quitting. But when I looked in on her in her dressing room after the matinee, she was feeling splendid, and I noticed an immense mass of flowers nearby, which I soon learned Kazan had sent her, in true Belasco style. Kazan had also put on a tie and jacket to present this offering, sensing her longing for some sign of class, however spurious, in the surrounding environment, for we all dressed like steamfitters. On the first day of rehearsal she had glanced at her fellow actors, who looked like street people, and with a grimace of pain had asked Kazan, “Is this the cast?”