Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  The Calders were hardly here anymore, and the men and women I had known who worked the land were almost all gone. Still, in the cold mornings there was the old softening whiff of a country spring in the air, a weather that had always triggered new works in me. But I was unready for even that much commitment, and in such a mood one invites new escapes: I must go to Paris, where Sidney Lumet was about to begin shooting a film of A View from the Bridge with Raf Vallone and Maureen Stapleton. Vallone had had a greatly acclaimed success with the play through two seasons there. Even better, I had accumulated enough royalties in London to buy a Land Rover and drive it down to Paris. That all this was a ruse to meet Inge I was perfectly aware, but sometimes even weak self-delusion is better than none. The truth was that I simply wished to praise the day and hope another one would follow, and Inge was a fine partner for that. Happy the man who need never assert more than he knows or less than he believes. I found in myself a novel respect for sheer fact, wanted to go with the facts and that was all. Perhaps I also longed to see Inge again because she so respected muddle, but being an artist herself, she could easily combine muddle with resolve. Besides, she seemed more and more beautiful, which is to say, undefinable. I knew, in short, that I was in trouble.

  The Pont-Royal, where I had stayed after the war, was under renovation now, and its old golden patina of French bourgeois elegance shone once again through the grime of the war years. Gone was the concierge with frayed cuffs rushing across Paris once a day to feed his rabbits. Gone too, by the first of the sixties, the vistas of avenues and streets: parked cars blocked the view of all the lower stories and the grand entrances. Cars were now the foreground of Paris, architecture the background, and people were fragments worriedly maneuvering through the maze of bumpers and fenders and fumes. But the oysters and the color of the Paris sky were glorious still.

  And Inge savored life as only one can who has nearly been killed. In this age survivors understand one another. It all seemed quite simple to her: there was little to expect from people, but what there was one had a right to demand and they an obligation to give.

  At Tempelhof, a gate had been bombed open, and she had simply walked out, heading south toward Austria, more because she had to have a destination than from any belief that the family had survived and still lived in Salzburg. It was the story one heard a hundred times then: the exploding end of the Reich, the rides on trucks, the streams of people pressing in both directions, the unexpected decencies and the usual betrayals. Until at last she stood on a little bridge and, starting to climb the rail to let herself drop to her death in the water, was stopped by an older man, a soldier on crutches, who lectured her never to give up and made her follow him, and finally after days and nights on the road they arrived in Salzburg.

  But her memory failed, she could no longer recall the house where she had lived, and now it seemed certain the parents could not possibly be living there still. The crippled soldier led her down one block after another, but nothing came to her until, at the edge of an affluent part of town, she had a warming sense of familiarity. But he scoffed at this—there were only prosperous people here to whom a scabby girl in rags could hardly belong—and they started to go on when suddenly she recognized a brass knocker and knew it was her house and rushed up to it and banged on the door, and there stood her mother, amazed. A miracle. They embraced, and she turned to thank the soldier and invite him in, but he was gone. She ran into the street, looked up and down, but there was nothing. As though she had dreamed of an angel. She was sure she hadn’t. Why had he hurried away? Had he seen that he could not fit in with these elegant folk? Maybe he hated wealthy people or feared them.

  It was not that she lacked all self-pity in the telling but that she seemed to take it absolutely for granted that you had to find the strength to save yourself; a bracing implication of self-reliance made for tragedy rather than mere pathos. She was neither optimist nor pessimist; sufficient unto the day was the evil thereof, and why go looking for more? She welcomed the good in people despite expecting the worst; indeed, a realistic philosophy had to allow for her soldier or it was false to life, and to mourn the world totally was to evade the terrifying contemplation of goodness. Such a war should not have tempered one such woman, but it had. It was hard to think of an American as cheerful as she.

  And so, some four years after Walter Wanger had asked me to write a film of The Fall —the story of a man who had failed to save a woman leaping from a bridge—a woman was telling me of a man who had held her back from just such a leap.

  How strange, though, that he should have vanished in air!

  One midday Marilyn showed up at the country house with her half sister, Berneice Miracle, and Ralph Roberts, an actor friend profoundly devoted to her, during the war an officer in Carlson’s Rangers, now a masseur, a powerful, gentle half-Indian giant with wide cheekbones. He drove them up in a borrowed station wagon to get the big TV set from the second floor, a gift from RCA a couple of years before, as well as some other things of Marilyn’s.

  Marilyn wanted to show Berneice the house and all the changes she’d made in it. She took her upstairs and down and then out on the lawn to see the endless view. She described how she had dormers put in and raised the roof over one wing to make a room above the kitchen, and so on. Roberts was meantime carrying things to the station wagon. I gave them some tea and left them, thinking she wanted privacy with Berneice, a demure young woman from Florida. I gathered that they had met for the first time only recently, and Marilyn presented her to me with a certain pride in her relatedness. As far as I could recall, Marilyn had never mentioned her before, and if I had ever known she was Marilyn’s mother’s daughter by her first marriage, I had put it out of mind.

  After half an hour I heard the tailgate slam shut and came down from my studio and said goodbye to Roberts and Berneice, who were just getting into the car. Standing alone in front of the garage, I faced Marilyn, and we grinned at each other and at the absurdity. I wondered what she remembered of our years and what she could not. And later I asked myself how much I had been unable to retain once denial had done its scrubbing job. She noticed the new tan Land Rover I had brought back from Europe a month before and assumed from it that I intended to live up here, which intrigued her. She wanted to know what that was sticking out of the back of the chassis, and I told her it was a power takeoff shaft to drive spraying equipment for fruit trees I intended to plant. She gave me a look of surprise in which I thought I saw some regret, considering all the hope we had put into this place; she had pressured me to buy more and more land, and I had resisted at first, saying it was unnecessary and would put us in debt, but it had turned out to be a clever investment as well as a beautiful one. Nevertheless, I had just had to sell some of my manuscripts to pay off our taxes. Yet here I was, apparently settled in, while she was in midair again, just as she had always been and as I could not be if I was to resume a working life. We had simply unveiled the austere perseverance of the past, and I knew now that one was never cleansed of it—not without the risk of suicide or murder in the attempt to escape it. What we are is what we were, give or take a few small crucial improvements if we’re lucky, and Marilyn and I had pressed it all to the limit.

  She seemed to delay leaving. Behind her the broad dogwood tree was losing the last of its dry little leaves, and the light on her was the gray color of its bark and of fall. She was wearing moccasins, which had always made her look fourteen, and a tan sweater, which she suddenly pulled up to reveal a dressing wrapped around her torso.

  “See my bandage?” She grinned mischievously, as though it proved some point she wanted to make.

  “What happened?”

  “I had a pancreas operation. That’s why I was in pain all the time.”

  I knew she did not mean to sound this rebuke—as though I, and probably Huston as well, had not taken her ill health seriously enough in our impatience with her endless delays on the picture; she was only trying to say that her behavior was
not due to trivial malice or bad character or addiction. But it made me wonder if she realized even now how close to the end she had brought herself. For in her voice and in the demonstrative way she held up the sweater she seemed to see the disease as a visitation and not a consequence of immense dosages of barbiturates; she did not know she was still endangered by her very self and by her anger, however rightful it might be; she was still utterly the child and the prey. I felt the old admonitions branching out inside me but corrected myself and let them subside. And despite these tattered old signal flags fluttering at each other, I think we both felt vaguely silly waving goodbye as the car pulled out of the driveway, whose specific curve we had laid out together with the architect almost five years before. Alone, I stood there staring down at the tiny black stones imbedded in asphalt and recalled how unhappy she had been that we were not going to have the elegant crushing sound of loose stones under a car’s wheels like they had in California; it snowed here, and the plows would have pushed them out into the road every winter. But of course you could always get more. And she was right, too—you could get more if you didn’t mind the waste. I went back into the house still arguing with myself about it. Nothing really ends.

  Too many honors are invented for the glorification of the donor for them to be accepted without a certain salt of skepticism, but this time it was easy to feel good about being in attendance. Among the crowd waiting in the Blue Room to go in to dinner were some of the best artists and writers in the country, as well as scientists, composers, and musicians. The White House dinner was in honor of Andre Malraux, currently De Gaulle’s minister of culture, whose work I had admired since the thirties, but it was also manifestly a show of American intellectual pride. To my great surprise and pleasure I learned that I would be sitting with Jacqueline Kennedy and Malraux. Marine ushers in blue dress uniforms deftly shepherded the happy crowd into a long line, as if we were schoolchildren, and guided us toward the dining room, where we would go to our assigned tables. I found myself at the very end of the line, as had been my fate since grammar school due to my height, and as I slowly moved forward, I saw one lone man remaining outside. Of towering height, wearing a ruffled pale blue shirt, he was almost demonstrably disdaining the occasion, standing with one knee raised and a shoe pressed against the immaculate wainscoting, studiously cleaning his fingernails with a file like an idler in front of a country store. He looked friendless, if not peeved. I only gradually recognized his face. He was Lyndon B. Johnson, the vice-president of the United States, and clearly not in his element tonight. It was the only time I ever felt sorry for a vice-president.

  Despite having been scorched by government power in the past, I was moved by Kennedy at last a president who understood that a country needed not only its showbiz stars but its brains and its imaginative people. But my recent immersion in Hollywood may have cautioned me against Kennedy’s high-speed, on-the-make inner spirit; his hard glazed eyes I found mechanized and a little frightening. He might have a quick mind, but I had to wonder about his compassion. Still, his excitement and happiness with the company he had attracted tonight swept everyone.

  Malraux spoke in passionate bursts of French at a speed that defied comprehension by the president’s wife much of the time and by me at any time. He was a star fencer flicking his foil before you had a chance to get set. He smoked almost violently and had a fascinating and disconcerting tic that made you wonder how he ever relaxed enough to sleep. The French ambassador, Hervé Alphand, deftly managed to loft an occasional translation toward me. Some two years later I was reminded of the subtlety of his performance and of Malraux’s unrelenting intensity by another Frenchman, Cartier-Bresson. Sitting on the dock of my pond in Connecticut, Henri would read aloud for half an hour at a time to Rebecca, Inge’s and my daughter, from his pocket edition of the memoirs of Saint-Simon, the superb chronicler of the machinations at the court of Louis XIV. It was his way of amusing himself and at the same time his admired Inge’s daughter, even if she could understand nothing of what he was saying, let alone in French, since she was hardly more than a year old. Watching him down there by the placid water patiently turning the tiny pages while Rebecca cooed and kicked at the sky, I thought of our one American approximation of a royal court, and of Kennedy himself, who by this time had been murdered.

  When it happened, we were in a large Connecticut hardware store. A radio was playing. “The President has been shot,” came the voice through the shine and glitter of housewares. At first none of the two or three other customers seemed to hear. I felt an urge to laugh, maybe at the absurdity. The two clerks continued waiting on people. Nobody had been listening. For about a minute I couldn’t locate the radio in all the clutter of mixers, irons, appliances. My mind kept saying, No, it’s going to change, it’s a mistake. Then I found the radio. Gradually the others were turning toward it. I knew what was in Inge’s mind—that it was all happening again.

  Like the headline about the bombing of Hiroshima, done and done. A tree struck by lightning, with split, still-living limbs swaying aimlessly against the sky, and the question “Why?” fluttering toward the blackened grass, and then the silence.

  Driving back to the house with Inge, I thought of Roosevelt, who had also died unexpectedly, but the shock was of a different order. Roosevelt had so dominated my generation that we wondered who could take his place in the conduct of the war. Radio reporters describing the cortege passing down Pennsylvania Avenue suddenly broke into helpless sobbing, as though their own father had gone. The loss seemed far more intimate. Or was it simply that I had been younger then? Kennedy, on the other hand, was a contemporary of mine, and his death pushed a finger through the delicate web of the future. Even in the thirties, as bad as things got, there was always the future; certainly in all my work was an implicit reliance on some redemptive time to come, a feeling that the cosmos cared about man, if only to mock him. With Kennedy’s assassination the cosmos had simply hung up the phone.

  An image remaining to me from his inauguration ball, which I attended with Joe and Olie Rauh, was of Frank Sinatra and his pack in a special box overlooking the festivities. Lounging in magisterial isolation above the excited crowd, Sinatra seemed not so much to rise to the honor of presidential favor as to deign to lend his presence to the occasion. A singer for all seasons, he proceeded to do the same for Ronald Reagan, as high above politics as royalty while transitory presidents arrived and departed. Could this signify that the business of America was not business, as an innocent Calvin Coolidge had said, but show business, symbolic display, the triumph at last of metaphor over reality and the domination of the performer with his pure and pointless charm?

  But maybe my lack of reverence was due to the fact that I could remember Sinatra in the late thirties, a skinny kid with a chicken neck, surrounded by screaming girls at the Paramount stage door after his first sensational breakthrough. We too were the same age.

  It was hard to understand why, but a strange futility had crept into the very idea of writing a play. I am not sure whether it was the age we were entering or my own evolution, but wherever I looked there seemed to be nothing but theatre rather than authentic, invigorating experience. Practically everything—plays, department stores, restaurants, a line of shoes, a car, a hair salon—was being reviewed as though it had become a self-conscious form of art; and as in art, style was the thing, not content. One did not, after all, select a restaurant for nutrition but for taste and service, or a brand of shoes for durability or even comfort but for fashion. The tradition that a play of any significance had to address human destiny seemed ludicrously presumptuous, was going the way of values themselves. In the theatre, it was said, we were in the age of the director, with the playwright his assistant, in effect—but didn’t this flow from the fascination not with what was being said but how? The very existence of the playwright was under challenge now; it was as though he represented the concept of predictability itself, with his preset speeches and plots that ended in some appr
oximation of order. One avant-garde critic, to much applause, announced that it was much harder to write a good review than a good play. Only in spontaneity could truth be found, the mind being a congenital liar, and words but persuasive deceits. Gesture, preferably mute, was truth’s last refuge, and even there it could only be a suggestion open to all kinds of interpretation, the more the better.

  It was also taken for granted now that the audience was mortally bored, distracted, its attention splattered everywhere but on the stage it was facing. Nor was this purely an American phenomenon, as I would shortly learn, for they were also having trouble holding public interest in theatres across Europe. For one thing, nobody seemed to want to hear a story anymore; a story, I theorized, meant some continuity from past to present, and in our gut we knew there was no such continuity in a life where absolutely anything was perfectly possible for every kind of character. The only reliable recurring element in existence was the perverse, and the only sane reaction to it was bitter laughter, cousin to disgust.

  In Peter Brook’s Paris studio one afternoon in the mid-sixties, I watched his troupe of some two dozen actors perform for a class of deaf-mute schoolchildren. The troupe moved austerely through a series of dancelike formations, each actor carrying a baton to create patterns of contact and disconnection, design and confusion rearranging itself into new designs. It was pleasant to look at, communicating some aspect of longing, perhaps, but I could not be sure.