Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  If the long months of the Reilly case left a darkened picture of man, it was no less perplexing for being accompanied by the most unlikely examples of courage and goodness, of people rising to the occasion when there was little reason to expect they would.

  Once I had become involved in Peter’s defense, I was soon convinced that he would need a new lawyer. There was an unforgettable interview with T. F. Gilroy Daly in the dining room of an elegant Connecticut country club. On first sight I felt uncertain that he was the right man for the task ahead, but he seemed interested despite my warning that there would be little money in it. In short, I persuaded both of us that he should take the case.

  My doubts about Daly sprang from a belief that Peter’s first lawyer had been too high-minded a civil liberties type when it was a tough criminal attorney who was needed here. Daly had had some experience as a young staff member of the New York federal prosecutor’s office, but my initial impression was of a fashionable, very tall, blue-eyed horseman in a tweed jacket, a suburban lawyer who seemed restless and unhappy with himself; it even crossed my mind that he might not be overwhelmed with work at the moment. Out of Yale and the culture of toleration and wealth, he struck me as an unlikely gutter fighter—and I sensed that the gutter was where this case was going to be fought out in the end. With no idea that the proof of Peter’s innocence was already in the prosecutor’s safe, I knew that a new attorney would have to butt heads with some hard types in and out of uniform before it was all over.

  I watched Daly grow remarkably during the largely unpaid months and years of the case. His patina of horsey-set sophistication fell away; there built up in him a cold personal outrage at what had been done to justice in his state, a gutsy shrewdness sharpened his mind, and his spirit took joy in an enlivening, almost palpable focus upon a loving task. He won brilliantly and in the process, I think, changed his own life, for he became a federal judge of great distinction.

  Daly, Jim Conway, and I spent many evenings together at my place or around the Gibbons house, a former roadside hamburger stand turned into a grungy little home, the three of us trying to piece together what had happened on the fatal night. I got the aged Dr. Milton Helpern, perhaps the greatest criminal pathologist in the country, to examine the evidence, from which he concluded that Peter could not have done this murder and come away without a spot of blood on his clothes or his body, as even the police admitted he had. I located a New York physician, Dr. Herbert Spiegel, a noted specialist in hypnosis, who examined Peter and gave testimony in the second trial that helped mightily in clinching the acquittal. I also managed to bring the New York Times up to watch the formerly ignored court proceedings, which put the judge and prosecution on their mettle. But it was Daly and Conway’s incredibly subtle reconstruction of the night of the murder, along with Daly’s concentrated outwitting of the prosecution, that finally freed Peter Reilly.

  I should have exulted in this victory and I did, but the truer voice was sounded in a play completed during the struggle to free Peter, The Creation of the World and Other Business. Like The Price, written in the sixties during the war, Creation, reconsidering Genesis, is essentially the fratricidal enigma, but seen now as a given of man’s nature. In the setting of the original family, shorn of societal influence, the play seeks in fratricide, the first dilemma and the Bible’s opening event, for a sign of hope for man. The fundamental competition between brothers for a mother’s—and therefore God’s—love is discovered with amazed perplexity for the first time. The purely loving and practical Adam and Eve, looking down in disbelief at the murdered Abel and the unrepentant Cain, can only fear for their lives under a God who not only permits such monstrous acts but has apparently designed mankind so as to perpetuate them. In this play the catastrophe is built into man’s primal nature; in his very brotherhood he first tastes the murder of his own kind. Against that ticking bomb within us the defense, if there is a defense, is hardly more than Adam’s imprecation to his wife and remaining son—to an Eve filled with hatred for a defiant Cain: “Ask her pardon! Cain, we are surrounded by the beasts! And God’s not coming anymore! Boy, we are all that’s left responsible—ask her pardon!” Cain, smiling and justified, walks adamantly away into his exile, leaving his father to call after him on his darkening desert, “Mercy!” But Adam’s outcry is also integral to man.

  It was only in college that I discovered the Bible, but as a man-made collection of fascinating literatures by different authors. I asked wise-guy questions in the margins, like: Where’d the folks come from to whose company Cain was exiled? Was this a slip? Had the author of Genesis forgotten there were not yet supposed to be other people besides Adam and Eve in Paradise? Or was “God” so old when he “wrote” the Bible that his mind wandered?

  Slowly, however, it began to matter less that humans had authored the Bible, for what remained was hypnotic. I wondered why. The stories are told with the spareness of electrical diagrams, perhaps that’s part of the fascination—you are left to fill things in, to create what has been omitted. Over the years the question of whether God exists gave way to another mystery—why are men, generation after generation, pressed to invent Him again? I more or less settled for the idea that God certainly is always about to exist, and this gives a legitimacy to jumping the gun somewhat and saying He already does. He may show up tomorrow, for all we know. Meantime, people have a ready vessel into which to pour their longings for the sacred, for transcendence, for oversight by a good guardian, for a reprimander and cautionary voice, and at best, for the concept of their having the obligation to make choices against evildoing, which is what helps keep the good alive. For the inventor of God, He is as animate as for the believer, maybe even more so, because he can never tear his invention out of his heart and set Him in stone, where He can be evaded if need be. It was the imperishability of this procedure that went into The Creation of the World and Other Business, a play that asks, among other questions, what sort of psychological situation must have given rise to the creation of God in the first place. And in the second place, right now.

  The ironies would roll on through the seventies and right down to the present moment. In 1986, along with fifteen other writers and scientists from America and Europe and Africa, I found myself standing in the offices of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, looking down into the witty eyes of Mikhail Gorbachev as he shook my hand and said, “I know all your plays.”

  I was tempted to say, “Not all,” for it was now eighteen years since I had been blacklisted on Soviet stages, for one thing because violent exception had been taken to In Russia, the first of three books Inge and I had jointly produced (her photographs, my text). One picture, of Comrade Ekaterina Furtseva, then minister of culture, had offended that lady, what with the deep lines of worry and exhaustion on her face, impossible to conceal short of airbrushing. (She had had a hard life; ousted as Khrushchev’s favorite some years before, she had cut her wrists.) But more than her vanity was involved; at about the same time, as international president of PEN, the writers’ organization, I had begun annoying the Soviets with protests against their treatment of writers and of course their anti-Semitism. To all this they had responded by closing down Galina Volchek’s production of Incident at Vichy. I was sure it was not coincidental that the play dealt with the Nazi roundups of Jews during the war. And it probably didn’t help that one of the characters is a Communist quite as deluded about the rationality of Marxism as the bourgeois victims are about their own ideologies.

  I had traveled a long and twisting road to this moment at the very apex of Soviet power, and the changes in direction had left me not so much disillusioned as smiling, painfully sometimes. For the political world, I have come to believe, is fundamentally beyond anyone’s control, yet we all go on as though it were a kind of vehicle that only needs a change of drivers in order to steer it away from its frequent hair-raising visits to the edge of the cliff. The immediate circumstances behind the meeting with Gorbachev
were especially curious yet somehow logical in terms of my life.

  Almost a year earlier I had gone with the greatest reluctance to a meeting of American and Soviet writers in Vilnius, Lithuania, at the vigorous urging of my good friend Harrison Salisbury, a co-leader of our delegation, who has a vast knowledge of the Soviet Union. Our group was varied, including Louis Auchincloss, Allen Ginsberg, William Gaddis, William Gass, and Charles Fuller. These periodic conferences among intellectuals from both sides were nearly all that was left of the promise of of détente. If such seminars had ever been politically significant, I had regretfully come to regard them as routine and finally got thoroughly fed up with being a sitting duck for Soviet attacks while having to observe the constraints of American politeness. In Vilnius, in 1985,1 had blown the cork when, conforming to the agreed-on plan, the Americans around the table talked about their lives and work only to find the Soviets, most of whom were critics, journalists, and officials of the Writers Union rather than creative writers, picking off the American Black Problem, the American Indian Problem, Pornography in American Literature, and so on. We had traveled too far to be set up like this; irritated by the futility of it all, I pulled out a PEN dossier on the persecution of the poet Irina Ratushinskaya, ill at the time and in prison for some poems she had written, and read it off.

  As I had expected, the Soviets fumed at this “interference in their internal affairs,” but I concluded by pleading for candor from both sides, something impossible when to all our questions about Soviet life we received the same canned answers and could hardly tell one Soviet writer from another.

  Further outraged, they blew up like birds under a beaten drum, but surprisingly one of them quietly and seriously proposed that I might be correct. This was Chingiz Aitmatov, a stocky man in his late fifties, at the moment possibly the most renowned novelist and playwright in his country. He was also an elected member of the Supreme Soviet from Kirghizia and would have the honor of addressing that body a day later, just before Gorbachev himself, a most prestigious spot on the program. He had written works that required some courage, confronting the deformations Stalinism had forced upon the Kirghiz minority, still a delicate subject regardless of the pro forma condemnations of the dead dictator in the press.

  Nearly a year later, Aitmatov phoned from his native Kirghizia to invite me there for what he assured me would be an independent meeting, not under the wing of the Writers Union or any other governmental arm but purely his own invention and responsibility. The idea was to discuss how the world was to get safely into the third millennium, and he had asked Fellini to come, and Dürrenmatt, and they were interested. “Let us talk freely about the future,” he said, and reeled off the names of others who had accepted: Peter Ustinov of England, the American Alvin Toffler and his wife, Heidi, the French Nobel laureate novelist Claude Simon. James Baldwin had also promised to attend, which indeed he did, along with scientists and artists from Italy, India, Ethiopia, Cuba, Turkey, and Spain. That our expenses and fare would be paid could only mean that the government was somehow behind it, but given Aitmatov’s unprecedented stand at Vilnius and his assurances now of a really open gathering—plus Inge’s eagerness to photograph in sequestered Kirghizia—I accepted. If Soviet intellectuals were ever to join the world community—from which, largely because of their own government’s paranoid supervision, they stood apart as strangers—one owed them what help one could give.

  It was in the final hour of our third and last day of discussions in a comfortable health resort on Lake Issyk-kul in Kirghizia that the invitation to meet with Gorbachev was announced. I assumed it would be a ten-minute hello, but it lasted two hours and forty minutes.

  Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev did not look baggy and bloated with drink; he wore a brown suit and beige shirt and striped tie, and had an eager grin and a certain contemporary wit in his eyes. An air of haste about him reminded me of John Kennedy, who also wanted writers to like him (so did Moshe Dayan, whom I had met years before).

  His welcoming handshakes completed, he led the way from an outer office into a conference room with a long table that might seat thirty. He sat at the head with no advisers or assistants or notes. Several interpreters sat along the walls wearing earphones connected to microphones in the tabletop. As I had noticed on entering this modern office building, which fronted cobblestoned Red Square and the ancient Kremlin, its finish was remarkably fine by Soviet standards, and an acoustical hush emphasized its solidity. Here was the heart of darkness or beacon of light and hope, as one chose, and Gorbachev’s sheer human ordinariness merely added to the mystery of power, for I sensed some personal need speaking from within him, beneath the command of authority.

  Confessing with an ironic grin that he himself had never been in Kirghizia, he asked what we had been talking about way out there on the lake, and each of us in turn made a brief and rather inadequate comment on the discussions. The truth was that they had not been very profound, though there was one potentially important aspect: for the first time, at least in my experience, the Soviets were not defensive toward Westerners. In fact, they were clearly disciplining themselves against this old and bad habit. Otero of Cuba was no doubt a Marxist novelist, and Afework, a lofty Ethiopian, worked at his painting under a new and raw Marxist military junta that was filled with uneasily suspicious men, but neither they nor Aitmatov nor his two assistants sought at any time to put their Marxist loyalties on record. We could speak about planetary pollution or anomie, about technological unemployment in both East and West, about Chernobyl or anything else, and the result was nothing worse than the suppressed friction in an ecumenical conference among Catholics, Protestants, and Jews. Which is to say that the issue of converting one another was no more, there were only the common problems. For me, the lifting of the usual paranoid fog was almost palpable. How long it would last I could not know, but that it had been tried was, I thought, a tremendously hopeful thing.

  In his comments, Gorbachev stressed the “new thinking” that he said was rapidly spreading in Russia—a transideological if still nominally Marxist pragmatism instead of an outmoded dogmatism. Pointedly, he kept returning to Lenin rather than Stalin for inspiration. “Politics needs to be nourished by the intellectual in each country because he is more likely to keep the human being at the center of his examination. Any other concentration is immoral. I read and reread Lenin,” he said at one point, “and in 1916 he wrote, ‘There must be a priority given to the general interest of humanity, even above that of the proletariat.’” He paused then and grinned. “And I wish ‘the other world’ would also realize this.” He seemed to be hinting that the general welfare should even come before the needs of the Party. If he was indeed saying this aloud in public, he had to be taken seriously as a remarkable new force, for to question the absolute priority of Party interest had always been sacrilege. But when I returned home and wrote an account of the meeting, which contained information new at the time, I could not find a newspaper or national magazine that would print it, so total was the editorial cynicism toward any possibility of change in the Soviet world. Nor was my authorship the issue; Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and other probes into the technological world to come, met with the same press blackout. In the end, Newsweek published a boiled-down version on its “My Say” page of purely personal opinion. It was not only the Soviets who ought to be hearing what they preferred not to. Denial was in the saddle, as ever.

  In my turn I repeated to Gorbachev what I had been saying at Issyk-kul, that our sacred ideologies were keeping us from irreverent facts. Marx ruled Russia, and Adam Smith the American administration, one philosophy a century old and the other two, and neither had dreamed of the computerized, televised, half-starved and half-luxuriating world we had now, a world with a shrinking proletariat and a burgeoning middle class (despite Marx), and a growing mass of the starving or the merely hungry and deranged wandering the cities of capitalism (despite Adam Smith). If only it were possible to allow the facts of
life to rule rather than to serve what each side wished to prove ideologically . . .

  Our history is the baggage of our brains, and I was carrying a lot of it in my head as I watched the chairman; it went all the way back to the handball game on East Fourth Street, Brooklyn, when that college boy first whispered to me about Marxism. By this time—having just spent my seventy-first birthday in Kirghizia, and already nearly twenty-five years married to Inge—I bore an old man’s skepticism toward genuine changes of heart as I listened to Mikhail Gorbachev impressing us Westerners with the liberality of his mind. But I thought I knew what he wanted, and it was encouraging because there had to be more than his personality behind this new toleration; the leadership must have realized that technological advancement was impossible under a government with a paranoid fear and suspicion of its own people as well as foreigners. My real question was not whether he wished to liberalize the regime but whether it was possible without legalizing a genuine opposition, be it inside the Communist Party or without. I judged that he had before him the Chinese dilemma—which I had seen in operation in two visits there, especially during my two months of directing Salesman in Beijing three years earlier—namely, how to unleash a nation’s ingenuity and still keep it under one-party control.

  But I had also had the personal experience of dealing with other Soviets who “wanted to change,” and I had learned some hard lessons in the process. In that room with the chairman, my thoughts went back and forward and back again to 1967 and a Moscow hotel room where I had come to negotiate the entry of Soviet writers into International PEN.

  It all began in 1965 with a call on the crackling French telephone in Inge’s apartment in Paris, where we had come for the Luchino Visconti production of After the Fall with Annie Girardot. I had found it unfocused. His acutely thought-out movies notwithstanding, Visconti seemed to have missed the verb of the play, regarding it as a sort of exposé of primitive American sexual perplexities. There would be a far more incisive production, directed by Franco Zeffirelli, a year later in Rome, with Monica Vitti and Giorgio Albertazzi. Zeffirelli was not afraid to allow Quentin the full anguish of a man not at all trying to explain himself but searching for himself, a different attitude entirely, and one I thought moving and persuasive. His set was a series of six or eight concentric steel rectangles growing progressively smaller upstage—it was like looking through the back of a bellows camera toward the lens in the far distance—and the black velour between each square allowed actors to enter and exit up the whole of the very deep stage while silent lifts in the floor raised and lowered pieces of furniture to create and erase the locations in Quentin’s mind almost instantaneously, as in a dream or reverie. The production toured the main Italian cities, and its reception confirmed the play for me.