I could not help thinking that this gleeful and all but total blindness to the play’s theme and its implications was one more proof that they could not be faced, that it was impossible to seriously consider innocence lethal. It was this kind of denial that had brought about the play’s tragic ending. I was soon widely hated, but the play had spoken its truth as, after all, it was obliged to do, and if the truth was clothed in pain, perhaps it was important for the audience to confront it uncomfortably and even in the anger of denial. In time, and with much difficulty, I saw the justification for the hostility toward me, for I had indeed brought very bad news.
But After the Fall’s reception was not as uniformly negative as I imagined in the heat of the moment. When I looked back, it was obvious that aside from Death of a Salesman every one of my plays had originally met with a majority of bad, indifferent, or sneering notices. Except for Brooks Atkinson at the beginning, and later Harold Clurman, I exist as a playwright without a major reviewer in my corner. It has been primarily actors and directors who have kept my work before the public, which indeed has reciprocated with its support. Only abroad and in some American places outside New York has criticism embraced my plays. I have often rescued a sense of reality by recalling Chekhov’s remark: “If I had listened to the critics I’d have died drunk in the gutter.”
An old friend looked down at year-old Rebecca in her stroller. We were the same age, nearing our fifties, had married in our twenties after leaving college, and had had our children at about the same time. Now here I was, the owner of a stroller again. After smiling at her, he turned to me and said, “Didn’t we do this already?”
Rediscovering fatherhood a second time, I was finding that like youth, it is wasted on the young. A child underfoot in middle age was a steady remonstrance against the prevailing pessimistic view of life in the warring sixties, for there is some absurdity in an older man as a new father, an unnaturalness through which he sees a small child’s movingly imperious demand that life return life to her clear, primordial gaze. I found in myself a certain protectiveness toward whatever around me seemed hopeful, and a suspicion of all easy negativism. I was not sure what the source of this feeling was, but I dreaded that life was very easy to kill. It may simply have come from knowing that I was growing old.
But I also knew times had changed when neither Bob nor Jane showed any interest in going to college, which seemed irrelevant to them. I recalled that in my last couple of years as a student I had been impatient to go out into the far more interesting world and had stayed in school mainly because there was no choice, what with jobs so hard to find. Though they seemed to be in danger of cutting themselves off from the culture of the past by this total rejection of academic work, I lacked conviction in opposing them, unsure that I understood their vision of the real. Even before the Vietnam War had taken its toll on their generation’s belief in America, they seemed to have lost something of the success drive that I had more than once lamented as a distorting pressure on my generation. And now I was worrying that they had turned their backs on it! But one dared not say this openly anymore. I relied on my faith in them. What would be would be.
Marcello Mastroianni came down to the Chelsea one afternoon to talk about his doing Quentin in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of After the Fall. A more unprepossessing human never lived; he really seemed to see himself with the same ironic humor he applied to everyone else, as though life in general was a nearly total misunderstanding. His first part had been as Biff in Salesman years before. I thought he would be wonderful as Quentin because he seemed to be trying to puzzle out what was happening to him while still regarding himself from a certain distance. I was curious about his attitude toward the play, which I suspected might seem rather strange to him, given what I had heard of his experiences with women.
“How do you connect with Quentin? Can you sympathize with what he does in the play?”
“Of course. The same thing happens to all of us one time or another.”
“So you understand him?”
“Oh, yes.”
I sensed some reservation and pressed him to let me have it.
“But so much trouble over a woman?”
“Why? What would you do?”
“I would”—he flipped out his hand to indicate a long distance—“take a walk.”
In fact, the American notion of having to relate one’s own personality so closely to a part was a strange idea. He was on his way home to talk to Fellini, who wanted him for a film, which he would of course accept sight unseen (and which would prevent him from playing Quentin for Zeffirelli). It turned out to be 8½. He had no idea of the story and was content to be handed the script on the first day of shooting. “An actor is first of all an animal; if he hasn’t that, he has nothing. I am happy to be so.” It was somehow a relief just talking to him, as though a weight had been lifted from the whole idea of performing.
The attacks on me for After the Fall were not easy to accept, but I found some small solace in recalling the incomprehensible hostility that the very announcement of a Lincoln Center repertory company aroused even before a program had.been chosen. I confess I am not sure I understand this yet. I thought it exciting that successful and talented people like Whitehead, Kazan, Bobby Lewis, and Harold Clurman should be lending their prestige and idealism to an untried enterprise. After all, most of their generation had left the theatre for TV and films, and they were among a very few who might hand on an American theatrical tradition. But the press, especially certain academic commentators in the more literate journals, was perplexingly and bitterly hostile, quite as though something underhanded were being plotted, while the professional theatrical writers stood aside, at best neutral if not mildly cynical toward this attempt at a new noncommercial theatre. So damaging was this negativism-in-advance that Clurman had received few scripts for consideration as future productions. I went to several schools to encourage young writers to send in their plays, but the propaganda was as successful as it was incredible.
With Jason Robards as Quentin and Barbara Loden as Maggie, Kazan created a production of great control and truthful feeling, surely one of the best things he had ever done. I had not made it easy for him; with stream-of-consciousness evocations of characters, abrupt disappearances, and transformations of time and place, the play often verged on montage. He never tried to simplify his job by thinning out the material, and he faithfully sought to bring out the play’s intentions. The audiences that packed the temporary theatre on West Fourth Street seemed deeply moved, despite all the surrounding antagonism. My one great regret was my failure to stop Loden from wearing a blonde wig, which seemed to invite identification with Marilyn. Later I had to ask myself if this blindness was my own form of denial, but as usual I was buried in the play’s structure, and the characters’ resemblance to real models was far from the center of my attention.
Whatever its failings, Lincoln Center was conceived as a theatre that would reach out to the general public. By confronting the unconverted rather than a congenial cultural clique, playwrights and actors would be called on to stretch and deepen their art. But the “revolutionary” critics and avant-garde establishment scorned the whole project as a creation of bankers and old theatre “pros.” Actually the real battle inside this theatre was between a banker, George Woods, and the old pros Whitehead-Kazan-Clurman, but it went entirely unreported, a matter of no interest to journalists and academics out to establish their own chic credentials; nor, it must be said, would Whitehead break ranks and go to the press with the facts, hoping instead to win a new theatre as a gentleman among gentlemen.
But he got his first real whiff of Chairman Woods’s angry opposition to the very theatre he was supposed to be leading when, rather than wait a year or two for the Vivian Beaumont Theatre to be finished, Whitehead asked the chancellor of New York University to lend, for a dollar a year, the land on which to construct a temporary theatre on West Fourth Street. Completed almost overnight by builders who speci
alized in steel industrial warehouses, this inexpensive structure had incredibly good acoustics and a bare concrete ambience that quite accidentally expressed the actual poverty of this maligned and ultimately doomed attempt at a public New York theatre. The metal roof would leak on opening night, and on that afternoon of the After the Fall premiere, Whitehead and I went out on Sixth Avenue to buy a pair of screwdrivers and screwed about six rows of seats into their brackets.
The fury against the whole attempt destroyed it finally, especially when the Lincoln Center board had no firm principles with which to resist criticism that was mindless enough to include the allegedly rotten choice of actors for the company. That the roster featured Jason Robards, Jr., the still unknown Faye Dunaway, David Wayne, Joseph Wiseman, Salome Jens, and the young Hal Holbrook did nothing to mute the abuse. Mistakes were certainly made, some of them bad ones in the selection of plays that were not right for the company, but probably the worst miscalculation was to give the appearance of making grandiose plans when in fact it was all an experiment that should have proceeded as quietly and privately as possible until the company had found its voice and some degree of self-assurance.
Despite everything, After the Fall continued to play to very high attendance. A beleaguered Whitehead and Clurman were soon knocking on my door for another play, and with my weakness for solidarity, as well as the tempting availability of what I knew was a superior acting company, I began Incident at Vichy and completed it in a short time. This, like the inception of A View from the Bridge in Marty Ritt’s invitation, seemed to indicate that had I been fortunate enough to live in a period when a high-level repertory or art theatre existed, I would certainly have written more plays than I had. The very prospect of struggling through the difficulties of casting and production in the commercial theatre, and the often frivolous junking of years of work after a single thoughtless review, have cast a pall of futility over the enterprise of writing plays, at least for me. And I am sure I am not alone in this.
The root of Vichy came from my friend and former psychoanalyst Dr. Rudolph Loewenstein, who had hidden out in Vichy France during the war, before the Nazis openly occupied the country. But all I recalled was the bare outline of his story: a Jewish analyst picked up with false papers and saved by a man he had never seen before. This unknown man, a gentile, had substituted himself in a line of suspects waiting to have their papers and penises inspected in a hunt for Jews posing as Frenchmen.
There was a second root in an old friend of Inge’s, Prince Josef von Schwarzenberg, senior surviving member of a very ancient Austrian noble line, who had “declined” to cooperate with the Nazis and had suffered for it during the war. He was a source for Von Berg, the prince in my play who steps in to take the place of a condemned analyst. It was not altogether a romantic idealization, for in some absurd yet logical way Josef von Schwarzenberg embodied an elemental resistance to the fascist spirit, which is fundamentally one of enforced vulgarity in all its forms. An elegantly tall bachelor allowed by the postwar Austrian government one wing of the Schwarzenberg palais in which to live out his life, Josef could look out his window and muse upon the massive five-story marble Soviet monument to the Russian soldier while hopelessly scolding his last remaining servant, who padded through the halls wearing white gloves as he served inedible spaghetti. Between subsidizing string quartets and scrounging gas money for his Peugeot, he managed to create an image of cultural integrity that seemed a moving proof against subornation by every kind of power. Schwarzenberg’s breath came faster and his hand shook excitedly as he listened to a Mozart sonata on his old record player or read a verse from some new poet’s work. He would rush off to mass with his papal decoration, the Golden Fleece, hanging from his neck, and then to Inge’s mother’s for a bowl of rice as he believed only she could cook it, then to a séance of mystical contemplation with Arnold Keyserling, about whose ideas he had immense curiosity, but as a Catholic, no belief. Having denied the Nazi movement the glory of his name, he never considered any other course; there had simply been no choice, and he could not imagine deserving the remotest sort of credit for his dangerous refusal. That he had spent much of the war doing menial work in France he hardly regarded as a punishment. What I found fascinating in Josef was a mixture of worldly discernment and a naive, almost thoughtlessly pure moral code that perhaps only one so protected in youth could possess, and that measured the corruption the world took for granted.
Inge and I had decided on one of our visits to her family in Austria to go to Radomizl, the Polish village near Kraków from which all my grandparents had emigrated. Inge’s father eagerly got out his military maps and under his magnifying glass found a Radomizl in the Ukraine. Soon after, the Polish ambassador to Austria, a theatre buff, invited us for lunch to rave about what he thought a fabulous production of After the Fall in Warsaw, and happily invited us to visit a Radomizl in western Poland, nowhere near Kraków. Now Josef showed up to announce that in a Bohemian province once owned by the Schwarzenbergs was a Radomizl that he remembered well from his youth, and that he insisted was the town of my origins. “But I’m sure it wasn’t in Bohemia,” I said. “But you can’t be sure,” he laughed, “so you have to choose your Radomizls, and you must choose mine! For all you know, we are related!”
We never made the trip to what now seemed an arbitrary hometown, a nowhere. And besides, if by chance I did hit on the right Radomizl, my relatives were not likely to have survived the Nazi conquest. All the Radomizls, and all the towns like them, were now judenfrei.
Harold Clurman’s production of Incident at Vichy in Boris Aronson’s almost mythic police station was quite beautiful, but such was the ongoing contempt for the Repertory Theatre of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts that it was given an unexcited if respectful welcome. Within a year the London West End production by Peter Wood, with Alec Guinness playing the prince, fared far better. I found it necessary, incidentally, to explain to the British actors—hardly twenty years after a war that had come closer to destroying England than any calamity in a thousand years—what the Nazi SS had been and what it had done. The past has simply ceased in our time, maybe because too much is changing too fast.
The play would have a curious history. The first of my works to be banned in the Soviet Union, during one of its anti-Jewish convulsions in the late sixties, it was optioned in France by three different producers, each of whom decided to relinquish the rights for fear of resentment at the implication of French collaboration with Nazi anti-Semitism. Finally, in the early eighties, Pierre Cardin produced it in Paris, but the defensive bitterness of the reviews was unmistakable. Norman Lloyd’s production on national public television, directed by Stacy Keach, is probably the most expressive one I have seen.
It was not until 1987 and the Gorbachev liberalization that Vichy finally made it onto a Soviet stage, produced by the same Galina Volchek whose 1968 Maly Theatre production had been shut down the night before the premiere, after six vastly successful previews. This time, a Moscow News reporter phoned me and in an excitedly happy voice asked such questions as “What do you think is the significance of this play being produced in Moscow after twenty years? What is the message of the play?” And finally, “We wish to assure you that your answers will be published unedited verbatim thank you very much.” And indeed they were.
I often learned something about the state of the world’s mind through the various receptions of my plays, and new perspectives about our theatre have come from the past thirty years of travel. In 1965, Laurence Olivier listened incredulously as I reported the Lincoln Center Repertory debacle. “But you’d hardly begun! We were seven years in Chichester building our company before we ever opened in London. And got roasted fully twenty-five percent of the time. And no one thought to suggest the whole thing ought to be scrapped. It’s incomprehensible!” But he reckoned without American instant culture.
Olivier was doing The Crucible in London, and for two months now we had been in correspondence about a diale
ct for the characters. His production, with Colin Blakely as Proctor and Joyce Redman as Elizabeth, had a nobility that was at once moving and austere. The actor playing the octogenarian Giles Corey made me wonder how such an aged man could still possess such energy, but he turned out to be in his twenties. What I would not forget was a long silence at the beginning of the second act when Proctor enters his farmhouse and washes up and sits down for dinner. It must have lasted many minutes as Elizabeth served him and then went about her chores, the absence of speech itself the proof of their hurt pride, their anger with one another, and somehow their mutual regard, too; and at the same time it drew the mounting fear of what was happening in Salem Town into this house. From such exactness, what passion!
On the plane going over I read in the Times that Vincent Riccio, a member of the New York State Legislature, had been indicted for keeping on his payroll a woman who had never done any work. A prison sentence was possible.
It was now more than ten years since Riccio and I had spent nights together in the Bay Ridge streets. I had read about his election to the legislature a while ago, and I thought there was something anomalous in the only Republican social worker I had ever heard of becoming a regular politician. He had always angrily condemned personal ambition in the social work hierarchy; was it because he had some of it himself?
Now I thought of him sitting on a car fender in the purple light of a Bay Ridge evening, a gutsy former navy boxer with slick black hair and overlarge dentures replacing his own knocked-out teeth; in between teaching the hoodlums how to block punches, he had tried with a finesse I envied at the time to lead them out of their forest ways to live among peaceful people. His accurate analyses of the social workers’ moral hypocrisies passed before me as I stared at the newspaper. Poor brain! How helplessly it dissolves when willing eyes meet and the nose warms to those old jungle scents.
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