This small but important step toward the approaching climax was simply skipped over, and I was mystified. “But,” Roberts explained, “how can he shout at his mother like that?”
This was only part of the trouble with the film and with Hollywood films in general, but it may have been related to the main and deeper difficulty: Fredric March was directed to play Willy as a psycho, all but completely out of control, with next to no grip on reality. March had been our first choice for the stage role but had turned it down—although he persuaded himself in later years that he had not been offered it formally. He could certainly have been a wonder in the film, but as a psychotic, he was predictable in the extreme; more than that, the misconception melted the tension between a man and his society, drawing the teeth of the play’s social contemporaneity, obliterating its very context. If he was nuts, he could hardly stand as a comment on anything. It was as though Lear had never had real political power but had merely imagined he was king.
But such were the times that even this weakened version was thought too radical. I was first asked by Columbia’s publicity department to issue an anti-Communist statement to appease the American Legion, which warned that my failure to take an ad in Variety castigating the Reds, a ritual of the period, would bring on a picketing campaign against the film nationwide. I declined the request. The next thing I knew, I was invited by Columbia to the screening of a twenty-five-minute short they had just completed, which they proposed to run as a preface to the Death of a Salesman film wherever it played.
This small masterpiece had been shot on the campus of the Business School of New York’s City College and consisted mainly of interviews with professors who blithely explained that Willy Loman was entirely atypical, a throwback to the past when salesmen did indeed have some hard problems. But nowadays selling was a fine profession with limitless spiritual compensations as well as financial ones. In fact, they all sounded like Willy Loman with a diploma, fat with their success, to which had been added, of course, Columbia Pictures’ no doubt generous pourboire for participating in this admirable essay of elucidation. When the lights came on in the screening room on Seventh Avenue, the two or three executives watching the film with me waited for my reaction in what I interpreted as a vaguely defensive if not chagrined silence.
Sitting there with these well-paid men, I was caught in a barrage of contradictory sensations, but over everything hung an inexpressible horror at the charade it all represented. The unseen presence in the room was the patriots’ threat to kill the film commercially with a yahoo campaign against me. Fear was the only genuine emotion here, but this of course could not be acknowledged. Instead, I was pressed to admit that the short was “not really bad” and that “it would help sell the picture.” But no one, probably right up to Harry Cohn, their employer, really believed I was a menace to the country, and certainly the film wasn’t.
“Why the hell did you make the picture if you’re so ashamed of it?” I asked. “Why should anybody not get up and walk out of the theatre if Death of a Salesman is so outmoded and pointless?”
I wasn’t sure, but I thought my tirade was a relief to them, and I muttered something about suing the company for destroying the value of my property with this defamatory short. I began to think as I became aware of a certain defeated lassitude in their arguments that privately they might even be admiring my stand. But that would only make it worse, and not only for them and for me but somehow for the country in which we were carrying on this massive pretense. If I shared some of their terror, I also had what they did not, a pride in my play that was not possible to betray and that finally was my anchor, for at bottom I was being asked to concur that Death of a Salesman was morally meaningless, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. And to that it was easy to say no. We all parted in polite good spirits, and if the short was ever shown I never heard about it. They had done their duty and could now report back that I was threatening a lawsuit, which was probably enough to get Columbia off the hook with the Legion—doubtless the whole point of the entire exercise, which must have cost the company a couple of hundred thousand dollars.
Thus, while I still held some cards in this game of Let’s Kill Miller, I had no illusions about the fact that powerful people had me in their sights and were only awaiting a clear shot. But I have a strong forgetter and managed to turn to my work despite what often felt like a glacial pressure to knuckle under. There were even times when the whole atmosphere turned truly comical. A man whose name I vaguely recalled from the distant past called me one morning, saying he had been an officer in the Lincoln Brigade, had known Ralph Neaphus in Spain, and had something important he wished to discuss with me. I supposed he must be in some political trouble and had the unfortunate idea that I was respectable enough to help him out of it, a big mistake that was still being made in those days. But when he sat on my living room couch with his black briefcase on his lap and announced with an uncertain look of cheerful affability that he wanted to sell me stock in some Texas oil wells, I knew that times were changing. He explained that he had taken up this line of work after being blacklisted from a union job but that gradually he had come to enjoy it and was starting to make some real money at it. Then came the kind of line that history itself sometimes writes to set the theme of a period. “I mean,” he said, with genuine earnestness now, “let’s not forget that when the workers take over the country they’re going to need oil. And even more than now because socialism will expand production!” Calvinism is immortal and is reborn in the strangest places; the important thing always is to be sure one is doing others some good.
These were the days when a frightened and despairing Louis Untermeyer shut the door of his Remsen Street apartment and did not come out again for a year. And I would not realize until thirty years later, when I learned it from Harrison Salisbury of the New York Times, how wonderfully mirrorlike the reflection of paranoia was on the other side of the world. The Stalin censorship at this very time had been screwed down so tight that it had become impossible to report more than official handouts, and the Western press departed Moscow in total frustration, leaving the city to a handful of agency reporters. Salisbury, then the Times Moscow correspondent, was determined to stay on and penetrate the frozen Soviet terror. To report any real news at all, he had to resort to a kind of impromptu code in his dispatches. In America, damages might be limited by constitutional safeguards, but the main question of political discussion in both countries was reduced to loyalty; in the eighties, Salisbury learned—thanks to the Freedom of Information Act—that he himself had been .under heavy FBI suspicion as a Red agent, in part because he had insisted on remaining in Moscow after so many of the other reporters had left. Such were the times.
But how to say all this, how to find the form for outcry? Little in current novels and nothing in the theatre so much as hinted at the burgeoning calamity, and the movies were dancing the country into happy time. Beneath the bridge, though, there was no attempt to disguise that a new era had come to pass, or at least that a certain continuity with the past was being disassembled and smashed.
Barred from the waterfront for lack of a Coast Guard pass under the new Korean War regulations, Mitch Berenson had to find a job in private industry. For the first time in his adult life, all of which he had spent as an organizer, he found himself confronting a strange dog-eat-dog society for which he was as ill equipped as a seminarian who had quit the priesthood. He had literally no conventional social history, no conventional employment background, no social security card, and no training. He had surfaced into a raging competitive torrent where he quickly had to learn to swim or sink.
Certain he had wasted his life (he could not know that in a few years Tony Anastasia, doubtless as a consequence of his and Longhi’s influence, would build the first medical facility on the waterfront for longshoremen, the Anastasia Clinic), his mood was oddly ebullient nonetheless. For if he lacked all experience in a competitive society, he now discovered with growing sur
prise that his life as an organizer had certain tangencies to that of an entrepreneur. Both had to decide where to go in the mornings, whom to call or see, and in general what to do with time. Routine was as alien to him as to any capitalist, spontaneous risk-taking everything; the awful truth dawned that selling a revolution was not totally unrelated to selling anything else.
As an organizer Mitch had earned twenty dollars a week, if he got paid, at all, and this meagerness in his pockets had bred a certain aristocratic superiority toward money, which he had never imagined accumulating and which therefore had no emotional value for him; when he was desperate enough he could always hit one of his friends all over the city, men beside whom he had fought union organizational battles over the years.
But he had to have a job now, and it occurred to him that the only boss he had ever known at all well was Krauss, a sweater manufacturer on the Lower East Side, who, however, hated him for having led a long strike against his plant nine years before. Every morning for more than fourteen months he had marched his chanting workers around and around in front of the miserable factory, forcing Bernie Krauss to fight his way through to his office. And every morning Krauss had paused long enough to shake his fists at Berenson and scream, “You goddamned Bolshevik, may you rot in hell with cats up your ass!” Berenson would spread out his arms, giggling, and reply, “Bernie! Settle!”
So he was anxious as he approached the factory, but as he opened the street door the smell of charred wool and burnt wood distracted him. There, amidst puddle and stench, sat Bernie Krauss, a man of fifty now and aging fast, overweight and bald and looking as blank as death. But when he saw Mitch Berenson standing before him, the old resentment began to flow into his eyes.
“Wait, take it easy, Krauss. I just came to ask you for a job.”
“A job! Me you’re asking for a job?” Krauss would have risen in fury, but he had just had a fire and the insurance company was refusing to pay for more than a fraction of his stock, claiming that the rest was not sufficiently damaged, so his spirits were low.
By the end of the afternoon Krauss had hired Berenson as a salesman and in no time at all was offering him a partnership. Berenson first turned the fire hose on the undamaged sweaters, reporting to a grateful fire department that he had quenched a new smoldering blaze, and thereby getting the insurance company to pay up. Next, he sold a bill of goods to Gimbels in Philadelphia, which, as was the frequent practice, they promptly canceled, causing the naively outraged Berenson to return to Philadelphia and make a speech of such powerfully eloquent indignation that the stunned executives rescinded the cancellation—an unheard-of triumph in the sweater business—and offered him a job at Gimbels.
Within five years Berenson was a millionaire several times over, having designed housing for the elderly that was immensely popular. Still chewing the cheapest cigars he could find and driving a wreck of a car, he all but ran the small suburban village he had moved to. “What I found out,” he said to me once, “is that the thing really is a democracy. The people really make the basic decisions in the end. It takes too long and they get fooled too often, but it does work finally, and it’s beautiful.”
Almost inevitably he turned to mysticism once he had proven his power but had lost the heartwarming Marxist prophecy of doom and the redemptive promise that accompanied it; he had won the world and lost a religion, had become a normally happy, uneasy man.
At the end of his final lecture to our sophomore psychology class, the venerable Professor Walter Bowers Pillsbury looked out over the faces of the undergraduates and created an uncustomary pause. As the distinguished author of our textbook he had great authority in his field, but for me his fascination came from his having been institutionalized for some years himself. A tall, white haired, tragically dignified presence out of an earlier America, he wore dark ties and stiff collars, and his gaze went deep. In the silence we all realized he was saying his farewell not only to us but to his career, for he was nearing retirement age. He said, “I do not presume to give you advice about your mental health, but there is one truth I hope you will always try to keep before you: never think about any one thing for too long.”
In 1935, when I was trying to concentrate my mind on my new craft and the country seemed scatterbrained in the face of its awful problems, this seemed silly advice. But now, in the early fifties, some fifteen years later, the old man’s voice kept returning to me as I realized that there was something obsessional in my thoughts about my marriage and my work; great swellings of love and hope for my future with Mary were followed by a cycle of despairing resentment that I was being endlessly judged, hopelessly condemned. In an attempt to break out, I had begun analysis with Rudolph Loewenstein, a Freudian of great skill, but it was ultimately impossible for me to risk my creativity, which he was wise enough not to pretend to understand, by vacating my own autonomy, however destructive it might continue to be. And so I have never pretended to a valid estimate of analysis even though it gave me a good man’s friendship, above all, and a way of assessing human behavior perhaps more dispassionately than before. But I could not escape the fear of being bled white by a gratifying yet sterile objectivity that might be good for critics but not so good for writers whose fuel is the chaos of their instinctual life.
I have always resisted a final judgment on psychoanalytic claims for two reasons in particular. I had entered analysis in order to save a marriage, a distorting premise that raised the suspicion of self-examination for the sake of marital concord. But I was also being nagged by a suspicion born of that particular historic moment. While the country seemed to be happily exulting in Joe McCarthy’s homegrown American paranoia toward all that was unfamiliar, including the mind itself, I was rooting about in my cobwebs, clearly a self-indulgence, even if only, as I hoped, a temporary one. Nor could I dispel my commonality with the flocks of liberal and left people excitedly discovering analysis just as a sharp and threatening turn in history was flinging us into space. My difficulties were surely personal, but I could not help suspecting that psychoanalysis was a form of alienation that was being used as a substitute not only for Marxism but for social activism of any kind. My conscience, in short, was at odds with my improvement.
New York, that riverbed through which so many subterranean cultures are always flowing, was swollen with rivulets of dispossessed liberals and leftists in chaotic flight from the bombarded old castle of self-denial, with its infinite confidence in social progress and its authentication-through-political-correctness of their positions at the leading edge of history. As always, the American self, a puritanical item, needed a scheme of morals to administer, and once Marx’s was declared beyond the pale, Freud’s offered a similar smugness of the saved. Only this time the challenge handed the lost ones like me was not to join a picket line or a Spanish brigade but to confess to having been a selfish bastard who had never known how to love. Whether psychoanalysis could have meant some glorious liberating conjunction of sensuality and responsibility I would never find out, if only because I was being forced back into defending the narrowing space where I could simply exist as a writer; I had to save myself in society before I could reorder my brains, for society was not being passive with me.
Again, it was not just the things I read in the papers that informed my feelings of anxiety and threat. Cock-a-doodle Dandy, a new play by Sean O’Casey, was announced for New York production, and the American Legion promptly threatened to picket the theatre. This alone would have been enough to make any producer think twice about the play’s commercial possibilities, but in addition the chief backer, Mrs. Peggy Cullman, had not long before converted to Catholicism, and after reading the script, she decided it was anti-Catholic and withdrew her money. No doubt it was anticlerical, although not anti-Catholic, but the Legion was probably more interested in O’Casey’s custom of wearing a hammer-and-sickle button in the lapel of his rumpled jacket, proclaiming that Communism had captured his Irish heart. He sounded like no other Communist I had ever hea
rd of, and I rather suspected he was putting on the conservatives, especially the British, who of course remained irritatingly oblivious, while the Irish in Ireland, whence he had exiled himself, affected to forget his existence as they had that of Joyce before him, preoccupied as they were with emigrating from the country. In any case, given the gorgeousness of some of his plays and his wonderful autobiography, I was outraged that this genius should be hounded by Legion thuggery. When the producer of the play appealed for help from the Dramatists Guild—the Legion’s threats having dried up his money sources, menacing the production altogether—I cooked up a motion and presented it to my fellow Guild officers one afternoon. In attendance were Moss Hart, our natty chairman, whose beautiful pipes I envied, although they were too dainty and small for my taste; Oscar Hammerstein II, whose avuncular presence belied his sharp libertarian views; and Robert Sherwood, playwright, Roosevelt speechwriter, and activist for civil liberties, some of whose early work outspokenly raised the question of the individual being flattened by the steamroller of modern civilization. Also present, among a few others who escape memory, was Arthur Schwartz, producer and composer of numerous hit musicals like The Little Show, The Band Wagon, Flying Colors, and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and a man of quick humor and a caring charm.
I proposed we announce immediately that in the event the Legion picketed O’Casey’s play, we would call upon playwrights to form a counter-picket line in support of freedom of the theatre. An embarrassed shock went around the table, but Hammerstein looked seriously interested, and if no one was ready just yet to rush out and carry a sign up and down Shubert Alley, it did seem to me that our discussion was moving toward some statement in O’Casey’s defense. At this juncture Arthur Schwartz, visibly upset to the point of unwanted vehemence, warned that if one penny of Guild money was spent to defend a Communist, he would lead whatever members would follow him out of the Guild to form a new playwrights’ organization. The sudden prospect of such a split brought all discussion to a dead halt, and the subject died then and there. I now had no reason to doubt that should the Legion decide to picket my next play to death, I could look for no meaningful defense from my fellow playwrights, for these were the most powerful names in the theatre and they were either scared or bewildered about how to act. Such were the times. Indeed, it was not at all difficult to imagine an ideological committee of Legionnaires especially empowered to move their lips through all new plays and decide which should or should not be permitted on the New York stage. I had already had a taste of the Legion’s power, for they had not only threatened the movie version of Salesman but had managed in two or three towns to close down the road company production with Thomas Mitchell as Willy, Darren McGavin as Happy, Kevin McCarthy as Biff, and June Walker as Linda—what the Boston critics had called the best Irish play ever. In one Illinois town the picketing was thorough enough to have left but a lone customer in the theatre. Mitchell insisted on playing the show just for him, but I never found out what he thought of it.
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