Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  My one scary hour came with the climactic restaurant fight between Willy and the boys, when it all threatened to come apart. I had written a scene in which Biff resolves to tell Willy that the former boss from whom Biff had planned to borrow money to start a business has refused to so much as see him and does not even remember his working for the firm years ago. But on meeting his brother and father in the restaurant, he realizes that Willy’s psychological stress will not permit the whole catastrophic truth to be told, and he begins to trim the bad news. From moment to moment the scene as originally written had so many shadings of veracity that Arthur Kennedy, a very intelligent citizen indeed, had trouble shifting from a truth to a half-truth to a fragment of truth and back to the whole truth, all of it expressed in quickly delivered, very short lines. The three actors, with Kazan standing beside them, must have repeated the scene through a whole working day, and it still wobbled. “I don’t see how we can make it happen,” Kazan said as we left the theatre that evening. “Maybe you ought to try simplifying it for them.” I went home and worked through the night and brought in a new scene, which played much better and became the scene as finally performed.

  The other changes were very small and a pleasure to make because they involved adding lines rather than cutting or rewriting. In Act I, Willy is alone in the kitchen muttering to himself, and as his memories overtake him the lighting brightens, the exterior of the house becomes covered with leaf shadows as of old, and in a moment the boys are calling to him in their youthful voices, entering the stage as they were in their teens. There was not sufficient time, however, for them to descend from their beds in the dark on the specially designed elevators and finish stripping out of their pajamas into sweaters and trousers and sneakers, so I had to add time to Willy’s monologue. But that was easy since he loved talking to himself about his boys and his vision of them.

  The moving in and out of the present had to be not simply indicative but a tactile transformation that the audience could feel as well as comprehend, and indeed come to dread as returning memory threatens to bring Willy closer to his end. Lighting was thus decisively important, and Mielziner, who also lit the show, with Eddie Kook by his side, once worked an entire afternoon lighting a chair.

  Willy, in his boss’s office, has exploded once too often, and Howard has gone out, leaving him alone. He turns to the office chair, which in the old days was occupied by Frank, Howard’s father, who had promised Willy shares in the firm as a reward for all his good work, and as he does so the chair must become alive, quite as though his old boss were in it as he addresses him: “Frank, Frank, don’t you remember what you told me? …” Rather than being lit, the chair subtly seemed to begin emanating light. But this was not merely an exercise in theatrical magic; it confirmed that we had moved inside Willy’s system of loss, that we were seeing the world as he saw it even as we kept a critical distance and saw it for ourselves.

  To set the chair off and make the light change work, all surrounding lights had to dim imperceptibly. That was when Eddie Kook, who had become so addicted to the work on this play that his office at his Century Lighting Company had all but ceased operations, turned to me and said, “You’ve been asking why we need so many lights. [We were using more than most musicals.] The reason is right there in front of you—it takes more lights to make it dark.” With fewer lights each one would have to be dimmed more noticeably than if there were many, each only fractionally reduced in intensity to create the change without apparent source or contrivance.

  Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theatre in Philadelphia. Across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was playing Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and Kazan thought Cobb ought to hear some of it, wanting, I suppose, to prime the great hulk on whom all our hopes depended. The three of us were in a conspiracy to make absolutely every moment of every scene cohere to what preceded and followed it; we were now aware that Willy’s part was among the longest in dramatic literature, and Lee was showing signs of wearying. We sat on either side of him in a box, inviting him, as it were, to drink of the heroism of that music, to fling himself into his role tonight without holding back. We thought of ourselves, still, as a kind of continuation of a long and undying past.

  As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance. Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping. People crossed the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end to it. I was standing at the back and saw a distinguished-looking elderly man being led up the aisle; he was talking excitedly into the ear of what seemed to be his male secretary or assistant. This, I learned, was Bernard Gimbel, head of the department store chain, who that night gave an order that no one in his stores was to be fired for being overage.

  Now began the parade of the visiting New York theatre people to see for themselves, and I remember best Kurt Weill and his wife, Lotte Lenya, who had come with Maxwell Anderson’s wife, Mab. We had coffee in a little shop, and Weill kept shaking his head and staring at me, and Mab said, “It’s the best play ever written,” which I dare repeat because it would be said often in the next months and would begin to change my life.

  Of the opening night in New York two things stick to memory. At the back of the lovely Morosco, since destroyed by the greed of real estate men and the city’s indifference, Kazan and I were sitting on the stairs leading up to the balcony as Lee was saying, “And by the way he died the death of a salesman …” Everything had gone beautifully, but I was near exhaustion since I acted all the parts internally as I watched, and suddenly I heard, “. . . in the smoker of the New York, New Hahven and Hayven.” Surely the audience would burst out laughing—but nobody did. And the end created the same spell as it had in Philadelphia, and backstage was the same high euphoria that I had now come to expect. A mob of well-wishers packed the corridors to the dressing rooms. For the first time at a play of mine the movie stars had come out, but my face was still unknown and I could stand in a corner watching them unobserved—Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Fredric and Florence March, and faces and names I have long forgotten, putting me on notice that I was now deep in show business, a paradoxically uncomfortable feeling indeed, for it was too material and real to have much to do with something that was air and whispers.

  Finally, edging my way onto the stage, where I hoped to find a place to sit and rest, I saw as in a glorious dream of reward and high success three waiters in rich crimson Louis Sherry jackets arranging plates and silver on an extraordinarily long banquet table stretching almost the entire stage width. On its white linen tablecloth were great silver tureens and platters of beef, fowl, and seafood along with ice-filled buckets of champagne. Whose idea could this have been? What a glorious climax to the triumphant evening! Anticipating the heady shock of cold champagne, I reached for a gleaming glass, when one of the waiters approached me and with polite firmness informed me that the dinner had been ordered by Mr. Dowling for a private party. Robert Dowling, whose City Investing Company owned the Morosco along with other Broadway theatres, was a jovial fellow turning sixty who had swum around Manhattan Island, a feat he seemed to memorialize by standing straight with his chest expanded. I liked his childishness and his enthusiasms. I said that Mr. Dowling would surely not begrudge the play’s author a well-earned glass of wine in advance of the celebration, but the waiter, obviously on orders, was adamant. I was dumbfounded, it must be somebody’s joke, but a bit later, as Mary and I were leaving with the cast and their friends, we all stopped for a moment at the back of the theatre to watch with half-hysterical incredulity as this rather decorous celebratory dinner proceeded literally inside Willy Loman’s dun-colored Brooklyn house, the ladies in elaborate evening gowns, the men in dinne
r jackets, the waiters moving back and forth with the food under a polite hum of conversation suitable for the Pierre Hotel dining room, and the diners of course totally oblivious to the crowd of us looking on laughing and cracking jokes. It reminded me of scenes from Soviet movies of the last insensible days of the czarist court. Dowling, an otherwise generous fellow, was simply exercising the charming insensitivity of the proprietor, something Broadway would begin to see more and more of, but never perhaps on so grandly elegant and absurd a scale.

  Secretly, of course, I was outraged, but sufficient praise was on the way to put offense to sleep. An hour or so later, at the opening-night party, Jim Proctor grabbed my arm and pulled me to a phone. On the other end was the whispered voice of Sam Zolotow, that generation’s theatrical inside dopester and a reporter for the Times, who was actually reading our review directly off Brooks Atkinson’s typewriter as the critic wrote it—I could hear the clacking of the typewriter on the phone. In his Noo Yawk voice he excitedly whispered word after word as Atkinson composed it under his nose—“Arthur Miller has written a superb drama. From every point of view, it is rich and memorable . . .”—and as one encomium was laid upon another Sam’s voice grew more and more amazed and warm and he seemed to reach out and give me his embrace. The conspiracy that had begun with me and spread to Kazan, the cast, Mielziner, and all the others now extended to Zolotow and Atkinson and the Times, until for a moment a community seemed to have formed of people who cared very much that their common sense of life in their time had found expression.

  Driving homeward down lower Broadway at three in the morning, Mary and I were both silent. The radio had just finished an extraordinary program, readings of the play’s overwhelmingly glowing reviews in the morning papers. My name repeated again and again seemed to drift away from me and land on someone else, perhaps my ghost. It was all a letdown now that the arrow had been fired and the bow, so long held taut, was slackening again. I had striven all my life to win this night, and it was here, and I was this celebrated man who had amazingly little to do with me, or I with him.

  In truth, I would have sworn I had not changed, only the public perception of me had, but this is merely fame’s first illusion. The fact, as it took much more time to appreciate, is that such an order of recognition imprints its touch of arrogance, quite as though one has control of a new power, a power to make real everything one is capable of imagining. And it can open a voraciousness for life and an impatience with old friends who persist in remaining ineffectual. An artist blindly follows his nose with hands outstretched, and only after he has struck the rock and brought forth the form hidden within it does he theorize and explain what is forever inexplicable, but I had a rationalist tradition behind me and felt I had to account to it for my rise.

  I came to wish I had had the sense to say that I had learned what I could from books and study but that I did not know how to do what I had apparently done and that the whole thing might as well have been a form of prayer for all I understood about it. Simply, there is a sense for the dramatic form or there is not, there is stageworthy dialogue and literary dialogue and no one quite knows why one is not the other, why a dramatic line lands in an audience and a literary one sails over its head. Instead, there were weighty interviews and even pronouncements, and worst of all, a newly won rank to defend against the inevitable snipers. The crab who manages to climb up out of the bucket causes a lot of the other crabs to try to pull him back down where he belongs. That’s what crabs do.

  The fear once more was in me that I would not write again. And as Mary and I drove home, I sensed in our silence some discomfort in my wife and friend over these struggling years. It never occurred to me that she might have felt anxious at being swamped by this rush of my fame, in need of reassurance. I had always thought her clearer and more resolved than I. Some happiness was not with us that I wanted now, I had no idea what it might be, only knew the absence of it, its lack—so soon. In fact, the aphrodisiac of celebrity, still nameless, came and sat between us in the car.

  And so inevitably there was a desire to flee from it all, to be blessedly unknown again, and a fear that I had stumbled into a dangerous artillery range. It was all an unnaturalness; fame is the other side of loneliness, of impossible-to-resolve contradictions—to be anonymous and at the same time not lose one’s renown, in brief, to be two people who might occasionally visit together and perhaps make a necessary joint public appearance but who would normally live separate lives, the public fellow wasting his time gadding about while the writer stayed at his desk, as morose and anxious as ever, and at work. I did not want the power I wanted. It wasn’t “real.” What was?

  Outlandish as it seemed, the Dowling party in the Lomans’ living room came to symbolize one part of the dilemma; the pain and love and protest in my play could be transformed into mere champagne. My dreams of many years had simply become too damned real, and the reality was less than the dream and lacked all dedication.

  From time to time in the following months I would stand at the back of the theatre watching sections of the performance, trying to understand what there was about it all that bothered me. It was marvelously effective—although I could drive a truck through some of Lee’s stretched-out pauses, which were tainting his performance with more than a hint of self-indulgence. With Kazan off to a new project, Lee had taken to re-directing Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchell and to enjoying rather than suffering the anguish of the character. But these problems only reinforced my belief that with my complicity the production concept itself had somehow softened the edges of my far more aseptic original intention. I knew nothing of Brecht then or of any other theory of theatrical distancing; I simply felt that there was too much identification with Willy, too much weeping, and that the play’s ironies were being dimmed out by all this empathy. After all, I reminded myself, I had written it for three unadorned black platforms, with a single flute in the air and without softening transitions—a slashing structure, I had thought. But at the same time I could not deny my own tenderness toward these characters.

  I put myself to work on The Hook, the screenplay about Panto’s doomed attempt to overthrow the feudal gangsterism of the New York waterfront. After reading the script, Kazan agreed to direct it but felt we must first go to Hollywood together and try to get the backing of a major studio. Kazan was then under contract to Twentieth Century Fox, but they would have nothing to do with this grimy story and its downbeat ending. So we decided to approach, among others, Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures and himself a tough graduate of the Five Points district of the lower Manhattan waterfront who would be likely to know what the script was about.

  Departing on the Super Chief on a morning in the spring of 1950, Kazan and I were back in the conspiracy again, two minority men plotting to hit the American screen with some harsh truths. If we were already out of date and the country was now about to spend its idealism on the battle with Communism in Korea, the news had struck us only abstractly. I had been out of touch with Longhi and Berenson for some months now and would not learn for half a year to come that they had been barred from the waterfront under a new Coast Guard security system that required individual passes for anyone wishing to enter a pier.

  Riding west on the Super Chief, we studied the script on our laps. The movie, Kazan thought, should take off from the tradition of Open City and the other neorealist Italian films. But was it really possible that the studios would put up money for a film that would so violently cut against their notions of entertainment? There had indeed been social problem films made in Hollywood, rather generalized and packed with abundant goodwill, but this was not a problem picture; it was closer to fact since the union involved had to be the ILA and none other, the port had to be New York, the deaf and blind cops had to be New York cops. The odds against us were almost hopeless, but if we could manage somehow to make this picture, we would be bringing ourselves some glory and even in a small way helping the future to arrive. In 1950 the future was even
less definable than before, but one belonged to it anyway, as even slack, unfilled sails belong to the wind.

  Chapter Four

  My feel for the reality of longshoremen’s lives had been enriched by the Italian trip, which gave me their earlier European background. But I had also spent almost two years during the war in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where probably a near majority of the workers were Italian. Working thirteen out of fourteen nights, from four in the afternoon to four in the morning, I had made connections with their family-centered concerns. But they could also be elaborately treacherous to one another, and the Yard was full of Sicilian dramas, guys caught in the arms of somebody’s wife and escaping over rooftops, or maneuvering a friend out of the way the better to get to his girlfriend. Ipana Mike was my boss, so called because he had no front upper teeth. He wore his cap sideways, ate six spinach sandwiches on Bond bread at midnight (by which time the bread was green and wet), and was constantly on the phone with his girlfriends, one of whom was a packer on the night shift at Macy’s; I often had to go outside the Yard to call her and help arrange their trysts. From her hot arms he would hurry home to his wife, who was keeping his bed warm, and sometimes by noon he was sniffing up a third woman on her lunch hour from the Abraham and Straus department store. Mike was a busy man, apart from helping to win World War II.