Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  The View auditions were held in a theatre whose back faced the vegetable stalls of Covent Garden. I would sit beside Peter Brook listening in some pain as one actor after another who seemed to have arrived fresh from Oxford recited the words of Brooklyn waterfront Italo-Americans. One day in desperation I asked Peter if we couldn’t interview some of the Cockney hawkers in the hive of working-class types behind the theatre, exactly the kind of men the play needed. “Doesn’t a grocer’s son ever think of becoming an actor?” I asked.

  “These are all grocer’s sons,” Peter replied, indicating the group of young gentlemen awaiting their turns at one side of the orchestra, “but they have trained themselves into this class language. Almost all the plays are written in that language and are about those kinds of people.” It was a moment that returned to me in China almost thirty years later when I insisted that the actors in my Salesman production not attempt to disguise their Chinese identities with Western wigs and makeup. They were shocked at first by this departure from the traditional conventions of a theatre that had little connection with actual life; people in China went to the theatre hoping to escape into poetry and music and interpretation, not for any imitation of reality.

  There being no way for them to learn a deep Sicilian-American accent, Anthony Quayle, Mary Ure, and the rest of the cast worked out among themselves an accent never heard on earth before, but as it turned out, it convinced British audiences that they were hearing Brooklynese. The actors also thought they were speaking it correctly, and I did nothing to disabuse them, for this newly minted language along with their mode of acting created a wholly fictional world, but one that was internally consistent and entirely persuasive even if its resemblance to the Brooklyn waterfront was remote or nonexistent. View came over under Brook’s direction as a heroic play of great emotional force, the working-class characters larger than life, grand and rather strange. The play began on a Red Hook street against the exterior brick wall of a tenement, which soon split open to show a basement apartment and above it a maze of fire escapes winding back and forth across the face of the buildings in the background. On those fire escapes the neighbors appeared at the end like a chorus, and Eddie could call up to them, to his society and his conscience, for their support of his cause. Somehow, the splitting in half of the whole three-story tenement was awesome, and it opened the mind to the size of the mythic story.

  And something else was novel about this production. On the day the set was first erected, a dozen or so wives and children of the stagehands, invited by Peter, sat watching while their husbands proudly described and demonstrated the mechanics of the scene changes; especially impressive was the rolling apart of the tenement. The families oohed and aahed. In New York I had never noticed the faintest interest of this kind on the part of the backstage people, and the realization was saddening. With us it was all pure bucks.

  It seemed an exotic play to the English at the time, especially when their own theatre was so middle-class and bloodlessly polite. The reception in the press was very favorable, and the acting community especially found it a sufficient challenge that within a few weeks a large meeting was held at the Royal Court Theatre to discuss what might be done about the condition of the British stage.

  I had not expected to be the one to whom most of the audience’s questions were addressed, for among those present on the stage were a number of top actors and directors, along with such local celebrities as Colin Wilson, an interesting rebel, rucksack and all, and Kenneth Tynan, the best critic of that period, if not of the whole postwar era. But in the fifties and into the sixties it was to America that England looked for vitality in the theatre, a small historical fact that American critics, especially of the learned academic variety, have almost succeeded in suppressing.

  The same basic question was asked by one after the other of the audience—why is the English theatre so uninteresting? Fresh as I was from our frustrating casting sessions, I thought the answer might be not only that it drew practically all of its themes and material from a narrow section of the middle class, but that even these, at least to my alien mind, seemed to have been filtered through a mesh of propriety; it was good taste constantly looking over its shoulder. The reception of Look Back in Anger showed that something was stirring, but as original a work as it was, it had appeared in England some two decades after very similar attitudes of rebellion had broken onto the American stage through a not dissimilar cordon of middle-class proprieties. Actually, questioning American values and society had been the hallmark of our serious drama for even longer, starting in the twenties with O’Neill, although he was not usually regarded as a social critic. In a word, I wondered if British theatre was still comfortably oblivious to its own social mythology.

  But when I thought about the problem later, it seemed to me more complicated; the class or caste system had to be involved. I recalled visiting the House of Commons one day in 1950, during the London production of Salesman with Paul Muni, and watching from the empty visitors’ gallery as Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden, then in the opposition to Labour, sat on the front bench looking up with rather lordly condescension at the lone Communist in Commons, Willie Gallacher of Clyde, who was addressing the members with his thumbs hooked in the pockets of his un-pressed trousers. Just as Gallacher was reaching the climax of his speech, I heard Churchill growl sotto voce but audibly enough, without moving his cigar-distorted mouth, “Take your hands out of your pockets, man!” And Gallacher instantaneously jerked out his thumbs—and no doubt hated himself for weeks after. That was class talking and being obeyed, and it was not something I had ever witnessed in America or thought possible, either the incredible command or the reaction to it.

  The theatre meeting took place, I recall, on a Sunday evening, and Marilyn sat in the first row. It was the first time I felt she was being treated as a human, an actress more or less like any other in the profession, in the midst of people concentrating on a serious issue, with no one staring at her or burbling over her. I was not sure how she felt about this casual acceptance, but I thought while driving home that if we could only survive into some such normal atmosphere we might make a good life together. She was quiet in the car, allowing herself a fine silence. A great star’s isolation from the calming inattention of ordinary people leaves a kind of unhealing wound. But at home in Roxbury after a time the people were unlikely to treat her very differently from anyone else.

  Invited—or summoned—to attend a movie benefit at which the Queen and her entourage would be present, we had two unmarked London police cars fore and aft on our ride to the theatre, and a Scotland Yard plainclothesman sitting beside our driver. Marilyn had been sewn into a spectacular red velvet dress with a Gay Nineties look that barely allowed her to sit. Earlier, at Olivier’s apartment, she had been warm and funny with him, and he was excited by her presence, even after all these months of conflict. About fifty open oysters were on a platter on the mantle, and I stood there eating away and hoping we would not have to leave for the theatre too soon.

  In the lobby some twenty or so notables were presented to the Queen, Prince Philip, and Princess Margaret. Among them was a quite small and shy girl with long hair piled onto her head; she stood just behind me, and I caught her name, Brigitte Bardot. The Queen had arrived in a blasting glare from the diamonds in her tiara, political theatre in the theatre. But we were all performing, she with her extended hand and we with our grateful smiles, bows, and curtsies. The world as theatre is not metaphor but naturalistic description, in this case of a ritualized formality regulated at every step of the way by precedent and rehearsal.

  Nearly thirty years later it would be a different story when I was waiting around at the Kennedy Center until it was time to emerge onto the balcony for the honors ceremony. In came the broadly grinning President and Mrs. Reagan, to shake hands all around with us honorees—Isaac Stern, Danny Kaye, Lena Horne, Gian Carlo Menotti—and our spouses. Reagan immediately began giving advice about how to survive shaking h
undreds of hands in a short time, something he had just had to do. He had come from a conversation somewhere else and was simply continuing it with us, and he had me hold out my hand so that he could press his forefinger against the inside of my wrist while grasping it, which allowed him to press down and slip his hand free whenever he decided to. “It’s hell when they hold on to you, especially some of those old ladies,” he laughed. “They can bring you to your knees.” An altogether different kind of theatre, that, but it was no less a performance, a relaxed, offhand American type of acting as contrasted with the Queen’s. She created far more awe—but awe is her line of work, and rather a triumph considering how few operational battleships she has anymore.

  Work on the film had its good weeks. I would sometimes bicycle the ten or so miles to the Shepperton studios to look in at the end of an afternoon, and find Marilyn laughing and kidding with the other actors. Now it was Larry who seemed preoccupied and not too happy. I had given up trying to keep score by this time, still convinced that when the picture was in the can we were going to start living. I even made a trip back to the States to be with my children over their school vacation and returned certain we were over the hump. But things had begun to change for the worse again, and Larry decided to invite us to the theatre, doubtless to break the renewed tension.

  Going out with Marilyn in London was still a major logistical operation. In this case, we were driven up to the stage door and slipped directly into our seats in the darkness just as the curtain commenced to rise, lest the performance be disturbed. Either I had not been paying attention or, more likely, Larry had not deigned to mention the name of the play or its director or actors, and with no program or possibility of glancing at a marquee I was totally ignorant of whom or what I was seeing as the curtain rose. The setting was the veranda of an elegant house in what looked like a Caribbean locale. I tried to make out what the actors were saying, but between the extremely British speech and a plot that was all words and very little action, I was soon barely able to keep my brain alive. Why had Larry invited us to this?

  Occasionally a surprisingly brilliant line would pop out, and suddenly I noticed that the leading woman was Vivien Leigh, his wife. So that was it! Now I listened more closely, but to hardly greater effect than before. It all seemed as lifeless and artificial as a glass flower. At the interval I leaned past Marilyn and asked Larry, “Who wrote this play?” The slightest grin tensioned his lips, and he would not reply. “Every now and then there’s a kind of Noel Coward line, but not often. Who’s the author?”

  “It is South Sea Bubble by Noel Coward.”

  “Really!”

  “Quite.” He laughed.

  “Great God, what’ll I say next!”

  “You already have!”

  We bent over laughing. Then I asked, “And who directed it?” I was unable to keep a hint of disappointment out of my tone, the direction seeming rather wooden to me, with Vivien rushing to the right and to the left and back again.

  Again Larry waited to answer, again with his grin wryly restrained.

  “Really, who directed it?”

  “I did.”

  I grabbed my stupid head and made to bang it on the back of the seat in front of me. But our friendship survived. This again was part of his dead past, a play without consequence except as an echo of a now vanished time.

  It was terrible to see her anger returning, not only at Olivier, who she was absolutely convinced was condescending to her, but also at Milton Greene, with whom she could barely speak anymore, and finally at herself. I found myself being swept into her disappointment, if only because I was powerless to change anything for her and she could not simply walk away from the film. Anger, relentless and unending, at last refused to give way to any ameliorating word. In my trying to gentle her torment, she thought her cause was being trivialized. And indeed, to me no film was worth this kind of destruction, while to her a performance was almost literally worth a life. In a sense, I thought later, that was the difference between the performer’s art and the writer’s; the performer is his art, the writer can step away and leave it for the world to make of it what it will. I was still certain her performance in this picture was wonderfully witty and that she was overlooking this in her anxiety, but she could not rest or really sleep, and the barbiturates were drawing a distorting film over everything.

  In such unremitting frustration, guilt emerged as the principle of life from which neither of us could escape. Each had failed with his magic to transform the other’s life, and we were as we had been before, but worse; it was as though we had misled one another. She had no resources to rally against our failure, lived as always without reservation, holding nothing back, none of her hopes and none of her despair, and finally none of her suspicions of everyone around her with the exception of Hedda and Paula, neither of whom would contradict her, the one out of love, the other out of manipulative ambition.

  By this time she had been in psychoanalysis for more than a year with a woman doctor in New York, and there would later be two more analysts, first Marianne Kris and then Ralph Greenson, both of them physicians of integrity and unquestionably devoted to her. But whatever its fine details, the branching tree of her catastrophe was rooted in her having been condemned from birth— cursed might be a better word—despite all she knew and all she hoped. Experience came toward her in either of two guises, one innocent and the other sinister; she adored children and old people, who, like her, were altogether vulnerable and could not wreak harm. But the rest of humankind was fundamentally dangerous and had to be confounded, disarmed by a giving sexuality that was transfigured into a state beyond even feeling itself, a purely donative femininity. But that too could not sustain forever, for she meant to live at the peak always; only in the permanent rush of a crescendo was there safety, or at least forgetfulness, and when the wave dispersed she would turn cruelly against herself, so worthless, the scum of the earth, and her vileness would not let her sleep, and then the pills began and the little suicides each night. But through it all she could rise to hope like a fish swimming up through black seas to fly at the sun before falling back again. And perhaps those rallies—if one knew the sadness in her—were her glory.

  But England, I feared, had humbled both of us.

  Another collision with government. I was in the music room one morning working on the original version of The Misfits, as a story, when as in a dream I saw a helmeted policeman walking his black bicycle toward the house along a path at the edge of the lawn. He stopped at the open French door and peered in, blinded by the sudden darkness of the interior. I got up and said hello.

  “Are you Mr. Arthur Miller?”

  “Yes.” Dread stabbed my heart—something had gone wrong with my children or with Marilyn!

  “I am to bring you to the Foreign Office, sir.”

  “You are to bring me to the Foreign Office.”

  “That is correct, sir.”

  “Where is the Foreign Office?”

  “The Foreign Office is in London, sir.”

  “Why do you want to bring me there?”

  “I have been ordered to do that, sir.”

  “Why? What’s the reason?”

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  The insanity of the moment caused me to wonder if I was to ride to London on his handlebars, which he still gripped. “But I’ve had no notice of this,” I said.

  “They would like you there today, sir. We have a car. Will you come now? It can be brought round in a few minutes.”

  There he stood holding his handlebars, a provincial policeman out of Agatha Christie, with his tall black helmet and innocent blue eyes—mindlessly carrying out his orders. I said I could use my own car and driver and agreed to leave shortly.

  A man was waiting by the curb when we arrived an hour or so later at the Foreign Office, but his job was merely to lead me through a maze of corridors, past dozens of suppliants of various races and costumes, and finally into an office with one window at he
ad level that opened into the grayish light of an airshaft. It was Dickens country. The officer greeting me had a Guards mustache, an eyepatch, and a bad limp and was held upright by a corset whose outlines I could make out beneath his expensive broadcloth shirt. A shot-down Spitfire pilot, no doubt, and now a cheerful man—to start with.

  “And how is the filming going? Are you liking it in Surrey? Saw a photo of you both on bicycles, good cycling down there, don’t you think? There’s a fairly decent pub on your road, I recall. Are you writing? Good! Hope it’s something we’ll get to see over here. I enjoyed your Salesman play, at the Phoenix, wasn’t it, Paul Muni? Extraordinary, yes.” And when that ran out, a slightly smiling, rather effervescent pause, as though we were both looking forward to a roast pheasant on a platter, and then the direct look in the eye. He had red hair.

  “Your passport will expire next month, Mr. Miller.”

  “Oh? I guess it does, I hadn’t looked lately.” So that was it: I had been allowed only a limited six-month passport because my trial in federal court for contempt of Congress was coming up in a few months. The long arm of the State Department and the Committee and all my admirers in the U.S. government was stroking my neck. “What about it?”