Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  With Soviet prestige still tremendous, Russian armies having, by common consent, saved Europe from a thousand years of Nazism, it was not easy to credit tales of Stalinist terror. People like Vercors, a slim and athletically handsome man, tolerant and just, simply went silent before reports of such events, which eviscerated the last fifteen antifascist years of all meaning. That Manichean world, with its simple and unflickering flame, the light against a surrounding darkness, was dying away just then. Truth was hung on the wall like a picture of an old country scene that was neither discarded nor looked at. The heroism of the Soviets and the allied left still went deep; during the war, in labor with Jane, our first child, Mary had wept, half-conscious and in pain, crying out, “Oh, those poor Yugoslavs!”—who at the moment were suffering the Nazi invasion of their snowy mountains.

  In a freezing theatre Louis Jouvet, in Ondine by Jean Giraudoux, had to play the whole evening in an armchair due to illness, wrapped in muffler and sweater. People were working their toes inside their shoes and blowing on their hands, and everyone sat in his coat. It was another moving page in the sad tale of the death of a country—the heat would never be turned on again in a French theatre, there was doom everywhere, and there really was such a thing as a defeated people. But Jouvet connected with the audience in a personal way I had never experienced before, speaking to each of them individually in their beloved tongue. I was bored by the streams of talk and the inaction onstage, but I could understand that it was the language that was saving their souls, hearing it together and being healed by it, the one unity left to them and thus their one hope. I was moved by the tenderness of the people toward him, I who came from a theatre of combat with audiences. They were communing with Jouvet, who I thought stepped out of the role now and then to admire the author’s turning of a phrase, something the audience applauded with delight. One element stuck with me, although at the time it was simply one more French strangeness—Jouvet’s emotions seemed real, concrete and continuous, but he was surrounded by the unreal, a fantasy. So that words were in themselves the event, they and his emotions. I had gone so far as to cut out some lines in All My Sons that were too flashy, too written, rather than a phenomenon of what I thought of then as nature.

  No day passed without the Marshall Plan somehow featured in a headline. But the French and British governments were furious that the Germans were also to receive American aid money and have their industries rebuilt before they had restored every single brick they had smashed in England and France. The Germans clearly were to be our new friends, and the savior-Russians the enemy, an ignoble thing, it seemed to me. The new tangle was beginning to coil around itself—in twenty years I would meet Theodor Adorno in Frankfurt and be told that at this very time the German schoolbooks that contained the story of Hitler were being withdrawn under American pressure and replaced with new ones that simply left a void in the Nazi years, that hiatus for which a new German radical generation would revile the United States.

  It seemed to me in later years that this wrenching shift, this ripping off of Good and Evil labels from one nation and pasting them onto another, had done something to wither the very notion of a world even theoretically moral. If last month’s friend could so quickly become this month’s enemy, what depth of reality could good and evil have? The nihilism—even worse, the yawning amusement—toward the very concept of a moral imperative, which would become a hallmark of international culture, was born in these eight or ten years of realignment after Hitler’s death. For myself I wanted to stand with those who would not give way, not because I was sure I was good but because of a sense that there could be no aesthetic form without a moral world, only notes without a staff—an unprovable but deeply felt conviction.

  My introduction to Italy was a prosciutto and pepper sandwich on Italian white bread, the best thing I had ever tasted in my life, bought from a stand in the Milan railroad station. Already I was more at ease with the Italians and Italy, where, compared to France, nothing was serious.

  Ezio Tedei, an anarchist short story writer who had spent fourteen years in a Mussolini prison, owned neither shirt nor socks nor underwear, went about Rome in the February cold in only trousers, shoes, and an ancient tweed overcoat, and slept outdoors on an open balcony loaned to him by the half-dozen poor families, with a total of some twenty children, who had simply taken over a palazzo that had belonged to a high Fascist official. After I had insisted on his accepting a shirt, shorts, razor blades, and socks, he appeared some days later in his customary nudeness, explaining that he had given my gifts to some people who needed them. He would sit writing at a desk on this balcony amid the comings and goings of countless families, oblivious to conversations and shouts a yard away from his ears. The elegant desk, liberated from some sequestered drawing room, had dozens of drawers and compartments where people kept bread and groceries and he his manuscripts and his treasured Parker pen.

  I noticed on one of our walks through Rome that here and there a heavy chain held the shutters of a window shut—the legal requirement, Ezio explained, for all bordellos. I wanted to visit one immediately, and he had a favorite to which we now proceeded. Just inside the entrance doorway to what must once have been a grand palace stood a column topped by a pair of copulating bronze lovers, the woman’s hair streaming out as though in a high wind. A deep crimson carpet led up a marble stair to what had been a grand ballroom with floor-to-ceiling baroque mirrors. Vast bushels of crystals hung from the deeply carved ceiling, lighted, albeit dimly, by dusty bulbs. Along one wall sat some twenty-five men of all ages, some of them reading newspapers, some playing chess, some asleep, some staring across the room at a line of a dozen women who stood leaning against the mirrored wall, women dressed in Moorish vests with veiled trousers, in pure white confirmation dresses, in ordinary housewifely costumes, in panties with and without bras; with long hair, short hair, piled-up hair; barefoot, in high heels, sandals, street shoes, or shoes sparkling with sprinkles of diamondlike glass. Our century of theatre and actors. Tedei and I sat with the men and waited. The chess games continued, the newspapers kept being folded and unfolded, and the women waited vacantly, as though on line at a bus stop. Apparent indifference united us all. Now a man stood up, with no more evident motivation than a single gull rising out of the flock to take the air, and walked across the parquet to a woman who disappeared with him through a doorway as though she were going to fit him for shoes. It was as stimulating as an auction of old costumes. I remembered Chekhov’s writing of his disgust with himself for having visited such a house, and my own sensation of vacancy and remoteness when, at sixteen, I was taken by my brother and his friends to an apartment on the Upper West Side for my first time. But I felt no disgust here. Tedei grinned like a proud host at one of his native city’s more interesting attractions; sex, it was obvious, at least just now after twenty-five years of fascism and a terrible war, was interesting, to be sure, but far less important than eating, having a roof over one’s head and clothes to keep the body warm. These women may have been a necessity, and they received the respect that necessities deserve, but that was all. The great neorealistic movies of postwar Italy that were coming out, Open City, Bicycle Thief, and the like, reflected this same integration of sexuality into life, a life that was grounded in necessity, the coherencies of food-gathering and the sustaining of family and friendships and human solidarity. In 1948 Italy did not yet know the problems of surplus, let alone glut, and the accompanying fantasies of unbounded, limitless self. Here in this grimy ballroom was a certain sharing of humility before the nature of mankind, a chastening acceptance.

  But the glimpse of the West’s future that I had imagined I would find in Europe was as confusing there as it was in Brooklyn. The Italian Communist Party might be the largest in Europe, but it was quietly advising people to vote for the Christian Democrats in the upcoming election lest America cut off its food shipments and the country starve, the Russians having nothing to send in the event of a Red electoral victory.
I was still under the sway of an apocalyptic idea of history and constantly had to remind myself that the crowds in the streets and the people we met, far from being the innocent victims of Mussolini’s stupidity and arrogant posturing, had for the most part supported fascism or not resisted it. Surprisingly few were, like Ezio Tedei, dangerous enough to have been put away, and he seemed even now a supremely innocent if not naive man awaiting a revolution whose signs I could find nowhere.

  There was a so-called Ring around Rome where thousands of homeless families were living in lightless caves dug into precipices and hillsides. We climbed up and sat with them, skin-and-bones people living in their own filth, lugging pails of water up from hydrants far down below in the streets. From some of the caves they had a view of brand-new apartment houses going up across a highway as the rain of February swept across their faces. This was the Rome of Bicycle Thief. Of course it could not have dawned on me that in forty years New York would admit to even more homeless than Rome had after the devastation of war. Nor would I have easily believed then in the erosion of outrage, including my own most of the time, to the point where I am used to this catastrophe as a merely sad consequence of life in imperial New York, the world’s most exciting city.

  South of Foggia the red flag flew over one city hall after another, and Longhi and I would sit with peasants who drew out from under their beds maps of the latifundia, the estates that would be divided up among them once the Communists had won the oncoming national election. They had their names written on parcels on these maps and were already sure where each one’s boundaries were going to be and with their dark fingers were glad to trace them for me. Moving up and down the country that winter, almost three years after the end of the war, I realized one day that we had not seen a single fat Italian. Where were the ample mamas and the belly-heaving papas? It was all over in Italy, finished. People everywhere were asking if we thought Italy could be admitted as the forty-ninth state in the American Union, and they weren’t kidding either.

  Still, it was not sad in the way France seemed to be; Italian energy was like a weed that took root anywhere, no matter what. In a small town in the southeast, every afternoon about four, Vinny’s maiden aunt Emilia, a schoolteacher in her fifties, would rush out into the square, where loudspeakers erupted with speeches phoned in from the Christian Democratic Party headquarters in Foggia, the provincial capital, while a few yards away another loudspeaker bawled out a fiery speech by the Communists, wired from Rome. The cacophony was spectacular. A passionately sincere string of a woman, Emilia would try to herd strollers to collect around the Demo-Christian loudspeaker and turn their backs on the Communist one. By five-thirty the loudspeakers cut out so that the evening promenade could begin; the party lines melted as people did as they had done for a thousand years, walked around and around the piazza, the marriageable young stopping to chat and look one another over like penguins. Emilia was fascinated to learn that I was a Jew, having taken for granted that they no longer existed—not because of what was not yet called the Holocaust but out of some unexamined belief that they had all been converted after the resurrection of Christ or had somehow vanished into the pages of the Bible. “But,” she smiled reassuringly, “you believe in Christ, too, of course.” I thought, when I informed her otherwise, that a flicker of terror passed over her devout eyes as she stared at me, but we were soon friendly again, it being part of her faith that not everything in life was supposed to be comprehensible. I, on the other hand, still imagined that nothing was beyond the reach of the mind.

  One afternoon a church procession appeared on the street and stopped what little traffic there was, and as we waited while the golden crucifix and the saint’s statue were carried past by chanting choirboys, I wondered if indeed the old ways were as dead as people thought. A middle-aged man in front of us stood with bowed head, his hat over his heart, and after the procession passed, Longhi delicately asked him what sacred occasion was being celebrated. “Who the hell knows?” he replied, stuck his hat back on, and hurried impatiently across the street. That, to me, was Italy then, a touching performance wrapped around a cynical joke. The French took collapse far more to heart, as though they had been cheated unfairly of some victory or had bad consciences for having collaborated. The Italians seemed to understand that as usual they had kidded themselves with Mussolini’s grandiosity. And anyway the main idea was to live, not die for something.

  On the lovely Adriatic breakwater in Mola di Bari, just above the heel of the boot, was a different sort of procession at around five in the afternoon. Longhi had a number of addresses from Red Hook longshoremen’s families to look up here, and he went from house to house, a one-man Red Cross, bringing news of Brooklyn, making notes on the ages of the children and how the women were faring. The husbands’ second families back in Brooklyn were of course never mentioned, but their existence was understood. These women’s dramas were being ground out grain by grain between the molars of economic necessity, and if some of the “first wives” were now grim and aging, others were still in their thirties, and their doe’s eyes revealed how fearful they were of ultimate abandonment. But Vinny loved few things more than to reassure women, and they adored looking up at him, so unusually tall for an Italian and so full of good, healthy food.

  At around five we saw a promenade at the seafront consisting of an unusual number of single men walking together, some arm in arm, a common custom, but not dressed like other Italians; they wore dark New York overcoats and gray New York hats with brims turned up all around, and buttoned white shirts without ties, and pointy, thin-soled, brilliantly shined city shoes. In one of the cafés facing the sea we accosted four who were having their coffee. At first they spoke Italian, but Vinny’s witty grin brought acknowledging smiles and they happily lapsed into Brooklynese. Clearly they were on the lam, “the boys” waiting out some threat of prosecution in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, or LA, condemned to watch the profitless sun going up and down in this beautiful but boring exile until the fix was in and they could hit the States again.

  Italy was giving me courage for the play forming in my head, A View from the Bridge, but I was not yet sure I dared write as intimately about Italians as it would demand. All I was sure I understood was that the difference between America and Europe was that Europe was full of relatives and in America the pull of the blood connection was gone. In Rome, Vinny felt compelled to visit a cousin, a captain who worked at the top staff level of the War Department of Italy. Formal, foot-clomping guards in white spats and white gloves crisscrossed balletically in front of the entrance of what amounted to their Pentagon, rifles in firm grips held before them. At the tiny information wicket Vinny asked to see Captain Franco Longhi, but the attendant behind the thin bars was sorry, there could be no visitors here without previous notification.

  “Captain Longhi is my cousin.”

  The face of the man behind the window went still. “Your cousin?”

  “I’m from America. Brooklyn.”

  “Brooklyn!”

  Instantly he was on the phone, and I thought I saw his eyes growing moist. In a moment we were in an elevator and, emerging from it, were greeted by three or four colonels, a couple of generals, and weepy women secretaries looking on with hands clasped under their chins as Captain Longhi embraced Vinny—Italians instantly divide up into audiences and actors—and all work halted here in the heart of the Italian military as we sat around on desks for at least half an hour listening to the cousins exchanging news of various relatives, some of whom had died in this or that Italian battle or of old age and disease. A general finally ordered the captain to take us to lunch, and over our salad he asked Vinny if he had an in with the Parker Pen Company in America; the one thing you could surely sell in Italy in 1948 was a genuine Parker pen. There were unfortunately a lot of fakes made in Naples, but people were on to them now . . .

  “This is the way the world ends” kept revolving in my head as we walked on the Neapolitan promenades, which, with
their baroque lampposts, were either tilted toward the bay or had been bombed to rubble even as the facing hotels kept enough lights on to invite nonexistent guests. The young whores roved in chattering packs and reached down between our legs and laughed, calling us fags for not taking them on. In daylight, women balancing laundry baskets on their heads walked through the street crowds near the foreigners’ hotels and with magical hands snatched the hats off passing strangers, quickly popping them into their baskets and leaving the victims to turn around and around looking for a hat that had vanished in air. Once I was sitting in a carriage alone, waiting for Vinny to change some money in a nearby bank, when a young guy came over and began pulling our valises literally from under my feet, quite as though he had some instruction from us to take them. I complained in English, and he looked up with a certain civilized recognition but went right on trying to pull the bags out of the carriage until I kicked his hands with the heel of my shoe, at which he looked up at me again and shrugged and went his way, no hard feelings. Another performance.

  And the wicked Neapolitan stories then. Of the parish priest who came upon a long line of neighborhood people in front of a house and followed it up the stairs into a second-floor apartment. Entering, he found one of his elderly parishioners charging people a few cents each to go into the bedroom to get a look at his unmarried young daughter in bed with her new baby, which was black. There were many black American troops in Naples then, and a black baby born to a white woman was both scandalous and somehow unbelievable, like a miracle. The priest, of course, exploded in outrage. “It’s bad enough your daughter is not married, but you are brazen enough to profit from her misfortune before the whole neighborhood!” The girl’s father took the priest aside and whispered, “Don’t worry, Padre, it’s not really her baby.”