Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  Soon there was a short paragraph reporting him convicted and jailed. Then another, some months later, that he had died, cause unstated. I wondered if it was all the confusion brought on by too many options. Who would have thought that back in the fifties, working the Bay Ridge streets to head off another mindless gang war, he was actually living his best of times?

  * * *

  You know you have reached a certain age when irony dominates whatever you see. When I spoke and wrote against the Vietnam War, it felt like a rerun of the Spanish Civil War with new actors, a movie of defeat that I’d seen before. In the militancy of the sixties, the black awakening, the thrilling alienation of the times, I saw the seeds of a coming new disillusionment. Once again we were looking almost completely outside ourselves for salvation from ourselves; in the absolutely right and necessary rebellion was only a speck of room for worrying about personal ethics and our own egoism. At fifty and counting, I tried to block out the echoes of past crusades, but it was impossible.

  The Price was in part an exorcism of this paralyzing vision of repetition. Two brothers, one a policeman, the other a successful surgeon, meet again after an angry breakup many years before; the time has come to divide the family’s possessions after the father’s death. Grown men now, they think they have achieved the indifference to the betrayals of the past that maturity confers. But it all comes back; the old angry symbols evoke the old emotions of injustice, and they part unreconciled. Neither can accept that the world needs both of them—the dutiful man of order and the ambitious, selfish creator who invents new cures.

  Despite my wishes I could not tamper with something the play and life seemed to be telling me: that we were doomed to perpetuate our illusions because truth was too costly to face. At the end of the play Gregory Solomon, the eighty-nine-year-old used furniture dealer, is left with the family’s possessions, which he has purchased from the brothers; he finds an old laughing record and, listening to it, starts laughing uncontrollably, nostalgically, brutally, having come closest to acceptance rather than denial of the deforming betrayals of time.

  There are scenes in The Price that I especially love for the memories they bring back of David Burns, an inspired lunatic with an oblique sense of the ridiculous that threw all life into a long perspective. It was a troubled production, and rehearsal threatened to disintegrate one afternoon when Arthur Kennedy, Kate Reid, and Pat Hingle—three-quarters of the cast—got into an angry argument with the director, Ulu Grosbard. Suddenly Davey appeared onstage above the others, who were in the auditorium; he was wearing his hat, jacket, and tie, but his trousers were draped over one arm, and he was looking with alarm at his wristwatch.

  “My God, I forgot,” he called out to no one in particular, “I’ve got a baby in an incubator in Philadelphia!” and rushed off the stage like the White Rabbit. The argument ended then and there, swamped by this marvelously sculpted ridicule of man’s foolishness.

  In Philadelphia, I had to take over the direction myself, the growing differences having become irreconcilable. In New York, finally, with opening night forty-eight hours away, I was sitting in the front row rehearsing Pat Hingle and Kate Reid. It was about seven fifteen, and the preview audience could be heard out in the lobby. Arthur Kennedy came up behind me, leaned over, and whispered, “Davey’s been taken to the hospital with a kinked colon. He’s going to be operated on tonight.”

  I asked the stage manager if the understudy knew the part, and was assured he was ready and getting into costume. I nodded to Kennedy, stared up at Hingle and Reid working on the stage, and fell deeply and satisfyingly asleep. When I awoke, refreshed, the audience was already filing into the theatre and the curtain was coming down and Hingle and Reid had gone to their dressing rooms. The understudy, Harold Gary, was amazingly good; he had understudied Davey for twenty years, and this was his first chance to take over a role.

  Even close to death, Davey couldn’t resist comedy. Whitehead and I had rushed to the hospital and found him on a stretcher awaiting emergency surgery, his skin already turning a deathly white. Seeing us, he whispered, “Sorry, fellas,” and we reassured him that the part was his whenever he was able to return.

  An attendant came over to him and said, “We’re taking you upstairs now.”

  Davey drew his brows together as though he had to consider this proposal, waited a few inconclusive seconds, and finally nodded to the attendant. “I’ll go.”

  He recovered and in a little while was starring in 70 Girls 70 with Carol Channing. In a gale of laughter from the audience at one of his finely honed deliveries, he collapsed and died, applause ringing in his ears. No great note was taken of his passing, but along with some others I have often thought that in another time and place he would have had the attention of writers and intellectuals who treasured the sublime.

  The Price ran a season and has played everywhere in Europe with some fine actors, especially in Solomon’s role. The most recent incarnation, with Raf Vallone, was a long Italian tour from Sardinia to Milan. A play is bread cast on the waters, this one especially; Lev Kopelev, the Russian dissident author, told me that during the Moscow production, Solzhenitsyn came repeatedly to watch and give his notes to the actors, evidently fascinated with some element in the play, precisely which I never learned.

  I thought the woman on the phone was kidding: “We’ve nominated you as delegate to the convention . . .”

  Some days later, the Roxbury Democrats, fifty or so people of whom only a handful were known to me, sat listening expressionlessly in the tiny wooden town hall as I explained that since I had no parliamentary experience they would be much better served by electing my neighbor, a dairy farmer named Birchall, a party regular with whom I was in a dead tie. I did not think by this time that my participation was really going to slow the war, but they had another ballot, and I won by one vote. It pleased me to think I had bred such confidence in the town, for I rarely left my land to mix into its affairs.

  Chicago, 1968, buried the Democratic Party and the nearly forty years of what was euphemistically called its philosophy. The images of that week in Chicago would remain forever.

  At two o’clock in the morning in front of the Hilton Hotel, I was standing around with Douglas Kiker of NBC. We were chatting aimlessly, like two Americans in a foreign country. Helmeted troops stood with rifles in a long line facing Grant Park across Michigan Avenue, where in the darkness one could make out a camping mass of the young, quiet now after the day’s beatings and arrests.

  A jeep moved slowly along the avenue. A wooden frame mounted on its front bumper supported a mass of barbed wire with which to ram a crowd. Kiker and I stopped talking at the sight of the slow pace of that jeep, which could turn at any moment and chase us down the street and tear into our flesh. Kiker said, “I was in Berlin during the uprising in 1953 and in Budapest when the Russians came in, but this is the most frightening violence I have ever witnessed.”

  I had never seen such whitened faces as on those Chicago police. The blood seemed to have drained into their clublike fists. Earlier, a hundred or more delegates had marched past the line of battle-ready troops, each of us carrying a lighted candle and wearing a convention badge, but the rigid, blanched faces of the police, staring at us relentlessly as we passed, warned us that we were not immune to their fury.

  The Connecticut delegation had been seated beside the Illinois people on the convention floor. In the center of some hundred of his men, just below the podium, sat Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. The Illinois delegates looked like a football squad, the men bursting out of their shirts, and their faces too were white with anger, and their heavy feet stretched the leather of their pointy dress shoes.

  Senator Abraham Ribicoff, former governor of Connecticut, came to the podium and began to speak. I had in my hand a sheet of paper slipped to me by an usher, on it a wild scrawl: “They are killing us in the streets, they are murdering us out here .. .“I had been going from leader to leader with it, trying to get permissi
on to use a microphone, and now at last Ribicoff, with all his importance to the party, was actually looking down at Daley over the rim of the podium and calling what was happening in the streets outside the hall “Gestapo tactics.” I looked at Daley, seated in his overcoat no more than twenty feet from me, flanked by his immense team, who kept scanning the periphery of their massed delegation with Doberman stares, as though for a cue to attack whoever might move in their direction. It was hard to meet the ferocity of their gazes. Then I saw Daley, glaring up at the podium, draw his index finger broadly across his throat, and I clearly heard him yell at Ribicoff, “Jew! Jew!” Daley seemed literally to writhe, but Ribicoff went on speaking anyway. My ears went deaf then, I suppose because everything I had feared in my life was dropping on my head like a load of coal.

  Despite rumors that he would land on the roof of the convention hall in a helicopter, the president of the United States had not dared to attend his party’s convention.

  In a second of silence in that immense gathering of people a strangely soft sound drew my attention to the visitors’ gallery high above it all. There stood Allen Ginsberg, unmistakable with his thick wiry beard and bald head and eyeglasses, his arms outstretched in a gesture of blessing, his baritone issuing a long humming ommmm to invoke the voice of God and peace. But it didn’t help much as the bricks of the edifice tumbled all around us.

  I had never had much hope that the convention would really allow the peace people to separate the party from support of the Vietnam War, but when it became obvious that Humphrey would be the presidential nominee, and without really promising to end the war, I thought the time had come to unify the Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy factions; the resulting strength of the challenge to Humphrey might at least create some leverage on future policy. I drafted a statement freeing the many delegates pledged to Gene McCarthy to vote as they wished. This meant that some might go over to the camp of the late Robert Kennedy, who had scrambled aboard the antiwar movement and declared his candidacy only after McCarthy had proved it had a future; it was widely hoped that Teddy would volunteer to take his brother’s place now. McCarthy said with some indignation that he would release his people to vote for George McGovern but never Ted Kennedy.

  I felt totally defeated by the absence of any spoken word commemorating the long fight to end the war, and by the abdication of the men who had led the struggle within the Democratic Party and were now allowing it to vanish like this, unmourned and unsung. What a moment for a great leader to rise and nail the flag of right reason to the pole! But no one did, and it all went away into nothingness.

  But in the sixties everything one thought one knew was up for grabs. Robert Lowell, his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and their eleven-year-old daughter came by for a few hours with our neighbors, Henry and Olga Carlisle, longtime friends of theirs. It was a gray November day, all the leaves were down. Still in the car, he feigned not to see me emerging from the house and kept fussing with his daughter as she got out. Finally we shook hands. His thinning hair was wetted down crossways on his scalp. He was quick to say that my speech at the Bled, Yugoslavia, International PEN Congress had moved him—I had praised his refusal, in protest against the war, of President Johnson’s invitation to a festival of the arts at the White House.

  He asked about the varieties of trees I was raising, and I got on the tractor to show him how I pruned the roots with a device I had fashioned and attached to the cultivator bar. He leaned far down to his daughter and gently said, “You can’t imagine me pruning tree roots, can you?” The girl barely shook her head, her expression uncomfortable.

  We walked down toward the pond side by side, he turning when I turned and halting when I did. He hardly paused in his talking.

  “I like Kazan, he has enormous charisma, but I wouldn’t let him put on my Greek trilogy; The Changeling is a masterpiece, and he ruined it for years to come.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a masterpiece.”

  “It is. Eliot said so.”

  I would have liked to argue T. S. Eliot’s theatrical credentials, but Lowell was forging ahead and would not have listened, could not. Everything Chinese was astonishing, even perfect. He had considered attending the White House function, falling to his knees at the appropriate moment, and praying for America’s mercy upon Vietnam. Roosevelt was a fraud and a liar; Kennedy read a lot.

  “Roosevelt,” I said, “regretted not having helped Spain, you know.”

  “He did?” This was the first thing that stopped him, and he looked eager and happy to hear it. “Why do you say that?”

  “It’s in Harold Ickes’s diary. He told Ickes it was one of the greatest mistakes of his life not to have supported the Loyalists against Franco.”

  Lowell brightened. He loved gossip, concealed facts, and I think he rather liked the idea of Roosevelt feeling a stab of remorse. Then he was off again, quite calmly referring to “my manic phase at the time”—presumably of the White House affair. He must be brave, I thought, to be able to endure the wreckage of his attention like this. It was as though uninterrupted talking kept reality both together and at bay.

  It was painful to think what would have happened had his courageous pacifist view prevailed and kept us from entering the war against Hitler, during which he had gone to prison as a conscientious objector. As I sat on the grass with him looking at the pond, trying to follow his rush of barely connected unequivocal ideas, he seemed to symbolize our time, its immensities, its free-floating streams of aspiration and its murdered rationality. It suddenly occurred to me that we resembled one another—we were about the same age and about the same height, wore the same tortoiseshell glasses, and were balding in the same way—but I had no demon in me that was so careless about surviving. His views, however they functioned in his work, were so absolute as to be pretty useless in reality, while I could not long commit myself to anything I did not consider somehow useful in living one’s life. He flew high toward his visions, I felt bound to persuade an audience equipped with nothing but common sense at best. Despite everything, I still thought writing had to try to save America, and that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.

  * * *

  The undeclared war began to seem, as in Orwell’s 1984, a permanent television show, but secretly it throttled, choked, numbed. And it changed the dramatic problem oddly: in former time you had to bring the unconscious to the surface by the end of the third act, but we were already in the third act. I had seriously begun to question whether a play that gradually unveiled a submerged theme could ever be written again. If not, we were really moving into a new kind of culture. The fact was, we were too conscious, too aware that we were lying to ourselves in the matter of this war, knew we were bartering away reality itself rather than face our national self-deception. What was left to reveal, except the lack of courage to stop the lies?

  I kept being reminded of my former friend Sid Franks, the policeman: “I can’t read fiction because I keep asking myself how the author can know what the characters are going to do. Anybody can do anything, and I’m talking about anybody and anything. And as far as plays—why is it that whenever it gets really interesting they pull the curtain down?” He had been ahead of his time; “serious” plays were all but nonexistent now, and the ruling style was one of ironic surprise—anybody was indeed shown to be capable of anything, the mere suggestion of improbability being in itself an invitation to portray just that and nothing more. It was the cop’s chuckling aesthetic, common in every precinct station in the world.

  I dallied with a comic Oedipus: a contemporary man discovers that his wife is his mother, but instead of tearing out his eyes he sits down and complains, “Jesus, what a situation. We’d better ask the doctor if it’s going to affect the children.” Where the sublime has been stripped from the violated order of things, there can be nothing but anecdotal plays, for the pressure to transcend and steal a glimpse of God is no more.

  I was really surprised, on seeing Hair, to
find that it was a protest against the Vietnam War, nothing in the reviews and publicity having prepared me for this. Of course, the war was what shaved off the guru’s flowing hair and symbolized anti-life, but it was so submerged in the seeming chaos of the production—people masturbating, copulating, and singing and dancing with avowedly mawkish amateurishness—that war became desublimated and ridiculous and lost its killing power. But every style of art pays a price for being what it is; the audience happily enjoyed the uninhibited mockery of the sacred—the flag and other psychic props of war—all done in delightful high spirits rather than hatred.

  I wondered if Hair’s appeal did not stop at the belly without rising to the brain; on the other hand, when since the failure of Lysistrata to do so had theatrical propaganda really slowed let alone stopped a war?

  Some local students phoned one evening asking if I would donate a tree to be planted on the lawn of their high school as a “peace tree.” The caller’s voice was hushed, nearly conspiratorial. I agreed, provided they came and helped me dig one from my tree farm, and even though I suspected that most people would be sympathetic, if silent, I knew that I would now be open to attack. A day later the caller rang again and said that a peace tree on the lawn of another area school had been sawed down during the night, and the students now feared that planting mine would further arouse the local patriots, who in the press reports would appear to outnumber the cowed majority. I was sorry and slightly relieved at the same time.

  It was hard to know where the majority really stood. A friend in nearby Torrington, who was in charge of labor relations for a large metalworking company, appeared at the plant one morning wearing a black armband as part of the nationwide campaign for a pause in our bombing of Vietnam, the so-called Moratorium. Workers on the shop floor solemnly asked him who had died, and he explained. When he returned the next morning, every machine on the floor had an American flag defiantly draped over it. Still, I continued to believe that there must be a way to enlighten such workers, whose sons were the ones doing the fighting.