In 1987 Miller would have had every right to believe that his work was done. Few writers had had careers as long. There was never a day his plays were not performed somewhere in the world. It was not uncommon for him to have several running simultaneously in major theatres in Russia, Israel, Hungary or Britain. In Moscow he watched performances of three in a single day. At home his plays of the 1940s and 1950s were studied in schools and universities. He had been writing for over fifty years while it was forty-three from his first Broadway play, a disaster that had sent him briefly to the novel, before All My Sons announced the arrival of a man who would dominate the American theatre for the best part of a decade before contracting a high-maintenance marriage and writing no more than The Misfits for the next nine years. It was also, however, nearly twenty years since he registered a real success, with The Price, and he had had to learn, at least in the American context, to adjust to a certain disregard as if he had outlived his time.
Danger: Memory! prompted poor reviews, while Up from Paradise, the musical version of The Creation of the World and Other Business, despite a brief run in Cleveland, appeared to have no takers, certainly not in New York. Even the film he was working on, Almost Everybody Wins, a development of “Some Kind of Love Story” (which itself would form part of Two Way Mirror, initially Two by AM), was proving difficult and would be a disappointment.
All of which sounds as if his career was fated to be an unfinished symphony. The oddity, however, was that he was still respected as a major icon of American cultural life. His plays may have been thrown out of embassy libraries when HUAC sent its team of moronic philistines abroad, but they were certainly still on the shelves of municipal libraries around the country. The early ones were regularly produced. It was his later work that had become invisible, stealth plays that were seldom picked up by the radar. The greater oddity, though, was that his reputation was higher than ever outside America, each new play being picked up with enthusiasm, often by directors and actors working for major companies even as he fought to bring his work into New York, settled for minor venues and watched as it encountered critical disdain and runs were startlingly abbreviated.
In 1988, for the New York Times, he wrote a review of Eugene O’Neill’s letters. In the 1930s he had seen little relevance in him. He was drawn instead to what had seemed the focused political and social anger of Clifford Odets. In 1947, however, he had been embarrassed that All My Sons had beaten The Iceman Cometh to the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Now, he recognised a kindred spirit. Here, after all, was a man whose tragic vision had seemed out of phase with American positivism and who had left his final plays for production outside the country. Tennessee Williams, too, seemed to have suffered a similar disregard. His own fate, therefore, appeared of a piece with that reserved for other American playwrights as European drama and the American avant-garde attracted attention, at least for a while.
The disregard, and something more, focused on his new plays whose runs were often so short that they barely registered on the national consciousness. Even Timebends itself, an international success, never made its way to the best-seller list in his own country and provoked severe criticism by those disinclined to accept a man whose youthful commitments seemed to colour responses decades later. The New Republic published an attack in an issue whose cover featured a caricature that Miller himself described as ‘vile’. Vanity Fair and Commentary joined in, the latter a long-term source of antagonism, as did Richard Gilman in Theatre Magazine. Robert Brustein, from the heights of Yale, then Harvard, hesitated between condescension and dismissal. If there was a wave of the future, Miller was not, it appeared, riding it. His two one-act plays, Danger: Memory!, in 1987, were, he felt, savaged. Subsequent plays were dismissed or mauled, sometimes closed down not because of a lack of audience response but the peremptory economics of Broadway. Broken Glass, in 1994, would close after two months with sold-out houses, albeit with audiences often not paying the full price for their tickets. The Last Yankee managed thirteen performances. In 1998, Patrick Stewart stood on the stage following performances urging audiences to tell their friends about The Ride Down Mount Morgan, since the advertising budget seemed to him inadequate – an intervention that earned him the ire of the producers. In many ways Miller’s fate was tied up with that of a Broadway which he saw as a natural home long after it had ceased to be such for him or most serious writers, unless the play had been validated in England or in regional theatre.
By contrast to the reception of Timebends, when Elia Kazan’s autobiography was published, it was praised for its truthfulness, though on certain events their accounts differed significantly. To Miller, Kazan, an Olympic womaniser, was a pragmatist who had sacrificed others to serve his Hollywood career and his book an extended self-justification. He was the figure behind Lyman Felt in The Ride Down Mount Morgan, the play he had now been writing for several years and briefly tried out as a novel. Felt is a man of high talent, charm, and the capacity to love. He also, apparently, has no moral core, believing in the integrity of his feelings, elevating betrayal into a moral principle. Beyond offering a partial portrait of Kazan, Miller was responding to developments in society, as the self was placed at the centre of attention.
Arthur Miller sought no consolation in a God, whom he defined as one who was not there when you needed him. That did not mean that he was devoid of belief. It was, he insisted, and spelled out in After the Fall, for man to create the God whose absence he decried. If there was to be a pattern, a shape, a coherence, then that would not be gifted by orthodoxy, or ideology, as he had once believed it might. It would not lie in a series of contingent events but in the mind and imagination which alone gives form to the formless, hence the power and significance of art. Nor does this exclude the moral once it is understood that morality is not the product of metaphysical edict but of what he liked to call human charity.
He understood the Jewish sense that everything could be swept away. As he explained in Timebends, he saw Americans learn this as a social fact in 1929, but the precariousness he acknowledged was more profound than that. What he discovered from a visit to a concentration camp, and from his attendance, in Frankfurt, at a trial of Auschwitz guards, was how thin was the membrane that separates from pure anarchy, a Jewish inheritance that would become the inheritance of all. He watched occasional evidences of a resurgent anti-Semitism, aware that being Jewish was not a choice. In a fascinating way, Jews were sometimes “them” and sometimes “us” in his essays, as if he wanted simultaneously to embrace and distance himself from an identity into which he had been inducted as a child.
In 1948 he had not only attended a rally in Madison Square Gardens celebrating the establishment of the new state, but was one of the featured speakers.
He was present at the Waldorf Astoria when Andrei Gromyko arrived to mark the Soviet Union’s support. He might not have been a practising Jew but the idea of a homeland where, as he remarked, even the prostitutes were Jewish, appealed. Over the succeeding years he watched with a mixture of pleasure and deepening dismay as the country established itself, survived attacks, but also began to behave like other states, impervious, at times, as it seemed to him, to the suffering of others. He signed protests, bewailed the treatment of the Palestinians and when, in 1998, he wrote a poem marking the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel it expressed precisely that sense of admiration, understanding, ambiguity and betrayal that he had felt over the years.
There was something in the tight Jewish community which appealed even as he resisted claims to a special status that cut them off from a wider community whose too total embrace they rejected as another form of annihilation. He had married outside the faith, as had his first wife. They did so at a time when religion had seemed irrelevant, and not only to them. Radical politics had stood in its stead. And though that would collapse of its own weight, he could never return to the embrace of the shul. As a teenager he had briefly looked for meaning there, only to be turned aside b
y those who failed to recognise his need if not his faith. It was ironic that Marilyn Monroe should have made a show of converting to marry him (a conversion which hardly went further than learning how to cook certain Jewish foods), when he himself felt little more than a respect for Jewish cultural tradition and an awareness of an embattled identity in a country that itself never ceased debating the issue of national identity. What he did register, though, beyond the warm embrace which he simultaneously wished to submit to and resist, was a powerful sense of contingency, of threat, not least because what Nazism had revealed about human nature was not negated by its seeming defeat.
There is an urgency to Miller’s work which goes beyond that which he felt as he drove back from Salem hearing the newscaster recite the names offered up by Elia Kazan, defending himself at the cost of others (though Miller was never in any doubt that the fault lay not with those who acquiesced but with those who illegitimately demanded acquiescence). That urgency comes from the fact that for the individual and state alike – and, beyond that, humanity in general – the sand in the hourglass runs fast and true. If meaning is to be identified, created, embraced, time is short. Willy Loman has just twenty-four hours. For John Proctor, the world turns in a second.
Timebends carries the conventional sub-title, “A Life”, but the life concerned is not merely Miller’s own, nor yet that of a generation or even that of a culture with which he conducted a never-ending debate. It is the life of humankind, restlessly feeling its way between its proclivity for self-destruction and its capacity for selflessness. In his shuttling back and forth through time he was trying not only to account for himself and his actions, but for a history that constantly disappointed but had to be re-engaged.
Arthur Miller was seventy-two when Timebends was published. He confessed that to end it was like the ending of a life. For the first time he felt truly old. There were, after all, grandchildren, and would be more, in whom, incidentally, he took infinite pleasure. His society seemed to have taken an inward path, the “me decade” having given way to a decade in which greed seemed to be sanctified and a national hero was made of Oliver North who had traded arms to Iran to fund the Contra guerillas in Nicaragua, an act only called scandalous by those out of step with a new pragmatism, those for whom patriotism meant something more than expediency masquerading as duty.
What principally seemed missing, to Miller, was the political passion of the past, stirred by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, the anti-nuclear campaign during the Cold War. There seemed a general moral and political flaccidity. He was repelled by a deepening conservatism. Reagan, Ford, Bush and, for a brief moment it appeared (when President Bush was taken to hospital) Dan Quayle, seemed to promise a dying fall to the American century. The unravelling of pre-war liberalism was intensifying and in its place there was really nothing more than an arrogant assertion of American supremacy. To him, the harassment of Bill Clinton marked one more stage in the Right’s assault on a Left that had itself become enervated and defensive while the insistence that precise details of his sexual indiscretions should be widely circulated and discussed reminded him of the Puritans whose moral affront was fused to a lubricious fascination with the female body. Ironically, Miller found himself appearing on the same edition of 60 Minutes as Monica Lewinsky, partly admiring this turn-of-the-century courtesan. The settling of the 1999 election in the Supreme Court seemed to him to mark a final decline of political faith.
Friends, too, were dying. The Protean Jerzy Kosinski, like Melville’s shape-shifting confidence man reinventing himself until suicide ended the charade; Alex North, who composed the music for Death of a Salesman and broke with Kazan; Joseph Rauh, who had represented Miller when he appeared before HUAC and again in his appeal against his sentence for Contempt of Congress, and whom Miller regarded as the most impressive and honest man he had ever known; Sandy Calder, sculptor and Roxbury neighbour (as well as being a model for a character in “I Can’t Remember Anything”). Then Robert Whitehead, producer for so many of Miller’s plays, and finally Kazan, whose 1999 Academy Award he supported, while others sat on their hands, knowing him to be the best of his directors even if the trust between them had been broken. With the loss of each of them, as it seemed to him, a part of his own reality disappeared. Who, after all, was he to call as witnesses to his own life?
In his 1998 play Mr. Peters’ Connections he would stage the life of a man for whom the great causes have faded into memory and whose friends have gone, a man for whom the fixed points no longer seem in place. The once familiar now seems strange and those who have gone in some way appear more vivid than those who remain. It was, he confessed, to some degree a self-portrait, as well as an expression of his sense of a world lacking in purpose or direction except a backwards drift towards the fundamentalism and tribalism he had captured in his 1994 play, Broken Glass, set in 1938 at the time of Kristallnacht but staring into the heart of a contemporary darkness. The play was rehearsed as the former Yugoslavia slid into ethnic barbarism.
But in truth there was an energy to his writing which belies this seeming account of declining powers and a declining world, a momentum wholly at odds with his occasional moments of depression. A powerful current was flowing the other way. Ahead, in 1987, lay the most productive period of his life. The nineties saw The Ride Down Mount Morgan, his novella Homely Girl, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass, the movie version of The Crucible, filmed in the beauty of Hog Island, Massachusetts, Mr. Peters’ Connections, Almost Everybody Wins. Meanwhile, on the other side of the millennium lay the film version of Focus and two further plays: Resurrection Blues, and Finishing the Picture, along with a sudden explosion of short stories. The revival of A View from the Bridge in 1998 won a Tony Award, while the revival of Death of a Salesman won four, plus a Lifetime Achievement Award for its writer. In 2001 the National Theatre production in England of All My Sons won four Oliviers. This, in other words, far from being the story of dwindling energy and significance, is the story of a late flowering that hardly has its equal. At no time in his career had he staged so many plays, seen so many of his plays filmed, published so many stories.
He might feel disappointed at the reception of his new work but he had reached a stage when his confidence in that work was unaffected by critical response. Besides, in England he had already been undergoing a renaissance as he published Timebends. The Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company had both staged The Archbishop’s Ceiling based not on the text performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he had been persuaded to simplify aspects of it in the name of making it more accessible, but on his original version. In 1987, BBC Radio broadcast The Golden Years, the play he had started writing nearly fifty years earlier when he was briefly employed by the Federal Theatre in 1939. Miller listened to the first responses as he was driven to Bristol where he was to give a public reading from Timebends. As he left the stage he had to exit the building through the bar where those who had not gone to his performance were drinking. They broke into spontaneous applause, not normal behaviour from British drinkers.
More significant, though, was a dynamic production, that same year, of A View from the Bridge at the National Theatre, with Michael Gambon as a fiercely convincing Eddie Carbone, so focused that when Miller walked across the stage in the interval, Gambon’s leonine pacing back and forth never faltered. Then came the Young Vic’s production of his adaptation of An Enemy of the People (which starred Tom Wilkinson and transferred to a West End theatre, much to Miller’s amusement then owned by a Right-wing politician and popular writer, the later disgraced Jeffrey Archer) and Two Way Mirror with Bob Peck and Helen Mirren.
In 1989 the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies opened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an event marked by a high-level seminar of writers, directors and actors, a gala performance of his plays and a celebratory dinner with fireworks lighting the sky beyond the forty-foot windows of Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre. The f
ollowing year his first, failed, play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was finally redeemed with a production by the Bristol Old Vic, which moved to London, while the National Theatre’s production of After the Fall featured Josette Simon, a black actress, in the role of Maggie, a conscious attempt to see the play as more than Miller’s account of the collapse of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
Meanwhile, eastern and central Europe was embracing his work. In 1988 three of his plays were running in Budapest; in 1990 three were running in Moscow. In 1991 four of his plays were staged in Tel Aviv, while in 1995 he would have twenty-seven productions of his plays in Germany. Whatever was happening in America, he was one of the most produced playwrights around the world, Britain’s National Theatre staging him more frequently than any other dramatist with the single exception of Shakespeare. Partly because of these productions he travelled widely, often attending rehearsals and, in the case of the Stockholm production of Death of a Salesman even assuming the role of director, regretting that he had not done so more often.
Towards the end of the century, however, the pendulum swung. In 1998 New York’s Signature Theatre staged a season of his plays, including the première of Mr. Peters’ Connections. In 1999 the Goodman Theatre production of Death of a Salesman reached Broadway and became the hottest ticket in town. On the other side of the millennium came a startling revival of The Crucible and two new plays, both of which opened in America. And though neither transferred to Broadway – still, in Miller’s mind, the ultimate destination – America seemed at last to be reclaiming as its own a writer whom the rest of the world had been celebrating for half a century.
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