Over the years, international and American prizes were conferred on him, often prizes he had never heard of and carrying cash sums that left him acutely aware of the fact that though now he had no need of money he had once struggled to survive first to get to university and then to have his plays accepted. Those prizes included the Prince of Asturias Award from Spain and the Jerusalem Prize from Israel. He seized the occasion of both awards, however, to stir the political waters. Spain had meant too much to him as a young man not to refer back to the Civil War in his acceptance speech, while the Jerusalem Prize served to focus his ambiguous feelings about Israel.
Arthur Miller concluded Timebends in 1987, with a vision of cold-eyed coyotes from Canada, loping through the Connecticut hills, oblivious to the man living in an old farmhouse who walked each day to a small cabin where he reimagined the world, discontent, as he explained, in his contentment. In the preceding pages he had returned in his memory to the time when he and Inge had planted trees together on the flowing hills, she pregnant with a child, Rebecca, who would one day meet her husband-to-be, Daniel Day-Lewis, when he was filming The Crucible. For Miller, time surged back and forth like a tide, a tide that also swept together fact and fiction, the one generating the other, the energy passing in both directions. Memory was a present fact, as it was for Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, as it would be for Mr. Peters in Mr. Peters’ Connections, both men tracking back through their lives, reexamining it for clues missed, moments not previously interrogated for their meaning. His book was not only an attempt to register the details of a life, unfolding, as it seemed, logically towards some destination (death, after all, not being that destination, merely a reminder of the urgency of identifying it). It was an attempt to register the shifting patterns of experience, to hear echoes, understand patterns suddenly apparent as though in an epiphany.
In February 2005 he returned to his Connecticut home to die. He travelled the two hours and more from the Manhattan where he had been born to privilege only to see that privilege dissolve. As a child he had dropped fireflies from the roof of his apartment building, watching the glow dwindle as they floated down. Now he chose his Connecticut home for the dying of the light. Inge’s ashes already lay nearby (she had died on 30 January 2002), her resting place marked by a simple black stone, found alongside the road where they lived as if placed there for that purpose. Her ashes were contained in an urn shaped by her sculptor son-in-law, Tom. Down the road was where Miller had written most of his plays, in the humid heat of New England summers and the sharp urgency of New England winters.
When he died, on 10 February 2005, the Independent, a British national newspaper, cleared its entire front page of news and ran a single story – the death of a playwright. Three and a half thousand miles away from Roxbury, people stopped for a moment and registered the passing of a man who once picked up a Russian novel to read on the subway and conceived the idea that one day he too might be a writer, and went on to be that and a great deal more, speaking out for those in need of help, challenging those who thought to invite his complicity in their crimes. He lies now only a short distance from where, one day, he sat down to write a play about a salesman who had only twenty-four hours to live, who had all the wrong dreams but who haunts the minds of millions around the world, and has done for well over half a century.
Christopher Bigsby
June 2005
Plate Section
Ground zero: Augusta and Isidore Miller before World War I.
Beautiful Mama, handsome Kermit, and me (left).
Navy days.
Kermit, the chief baby, and me.
In Harlem, before the Crash.
The Russian stage version of my years in the auto parts warehouse; character based on me is second from left. 1960s production of A Memory of Two Mondays, Moscow.
The Dolls’ house, 411 North State, Ann Arbor, forty years later.
Recording talc miners’ wives’ speech patterns while they wait for their men to surface, North Carolina, 1940.
On Brooklyn Heights.
The original All My Sons cast, 1947: Arthur Kennedy, Karl Maiden, Beth Merrill, Ed Begley, Lois Wheeler.
The powerful Israeli production of All My Sons, 1976, with Yossi Yadin, Lea Schwartz, and Hanna Marron, who had lost a leg in a terrorist attack.
The Salesman studio.
With Jane, Bob, and a new Ford.
The Miller family, Willow Street, 1953.
Kay Brown, agent, indisputably in charge of everything for nearly forty years, beginning with All My Sons.
Mildred Dunnock, Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy, Cameron Mitchell. The original Mielziner set caught Salesman’s reality-condensation with its six-foot bedroom, tiny kitchen table, and lone appliance, the hated refrigerator.
With Elia Kazan, rehearsing Salesman.
Amazingly, Lee was still in his thirties.
1965, sixteen years later: Cobb cutting the Salesman record album, with Dustin Hoffman playing Bernard and obviously studying his future model.
1984, the future arrives: Hoffman as Willy, with John Malkovich, Kate Reid, and Stephen Lang.
Ying Ruocheng, Salesman’s translator and a brilliant Willy, with Uncle Ben (Zhong Jiyao, wearing Ying’s genuine Texas hat), the boys (Mi Tiezeng and Li Shilong), and Linda (Zhu Lin, left ) in my 1983 Beijing People’s Art Theatre production, the first by a foreign director in post-Mao China.
Walter Hampden, Jed Harris, Kermit Bloomgarden. A moment of calm in the first Crucible production, Jed in a characteristically disarming attitude.
With designer Boris Aronson, unhappy that his modernist set has been shouted down by Jed in favor of a conventional one, and Bloomgarden, doubtless scheming unavailingly to outwit the director.
Crucible in Shanghai, directed by Huang Zuolin.
Mary Warren turning on Proctor, original production, 1953: (counterclockwise from left) Donald Marye, Madeleine Sherwood, Dorothy Jolliffe, Barbara Stanton, Jenny Egan as Mary, Joseph Sweeney (back to camera), E. G. Marshall, Philip Coolidge (behind Marshall), Arthur Kennedy, Walter Hampden, Fred Stewart, Don McHenry.
Original cast of A View from the Bridge, 1955: Van Heflin, Gloria Marlowe, Richard Davalos, Jack Warden, Eileen Heckart.
Raf Vallone in Sidney Lumet’s View, a strong film shot in Brooklyn and Paris, 1961.
My father on a visit to the View location, apparently recalling something remote and important.
The best of times.
John Huston peering down the Misfits tunnel.
Montgomery Clift making it real before mounting a very bad bronco.
Some Misfits trying to seize a Nevada afternoon: Marilyn, Eli Wallach, Gable. Symbolically or not, the wall could be unbolted and the house dismantled in a matter of minutes.
Kevin McCarthy and Paula Strasberg during an early pause.
Inge Morath by Henri Cartier-Bresson at the time we met.
Preparing to plant six thousand pines and firs on a barren Connecticut hillside.
The Calders’ kitchen in winter: Louisa, sculptor Bill Talbot, and Sandy.
My shop: cherry dining table under construction.
Rebecca in swimming oufit, with gold chain and great hat.
After the Fall, early rehearsal: Kazan with Jason Robards; in background, Faye Dunaway, Jon Voight, Michael Strong, Barbara Loden, and other members of the young Lincoln Center Repertory Company, soon to be destroyed by the combined arrogance of bankers impatient for a big hit, a newly influential and resentful sixties avant-garde, and a press ignorant of public theatre’s necessities.
Midnight script talk with Robert Whitehead and Kazan, Chelsea Hotel, 1963.
Jason Robards as Quentin and Barbara Loden as Maggie: on some nights they discovered a reality between them that was almost too painful to watch.
Franco Zeffirelli’s production, with Monica Vitti and Giorgio Albertazzi, Naples, Rome, Genoa, 1964.
Bibi Andersson and Max von Sydow, Stockholm, 1964.
Luchino Visconti d
uring his Paris production of After the Fall, 1965.
Harold Clurman’s production of Incident at Vichy at Lincoln Center, 1964: Ira Lewis, Joseph Wiseman, Will Lee, David Stewart, David Wayne, Michael Strong, and Stanley Beck. Hal Holbrook as the German officer is off camera. I thought the storm against Fall clouded the reception of this remarkable ensemble performance coming so soon afterwards.
Clurman explaining; he thought that nothing would endure without some form of love in its creation. In heaven he would spend eternity explaining to God—with enormous enthusiasm—why He is quite right.
Anthony Quayle as the psychiatrist and Alec Guinness as Prince Von Berg, with the painter Lebeau (Dudley Sutton) and the Boy (Derek Carpenter): Peter Wood’s London production, 1966.
Vichy in Moscow’s Sobremenik Theatre, 1987, after twenty years’ suppression; its first production, in 1968, was closed down on opening night. Rehearsal photo: Grigori Ostrin as the Old Jew, Valentin Nikuli as the Prince, Igor Kvasha as Dr. Leduc; Marlen Khutsiev directed.
The best sleigh ride ever, Russia, 1965. Inge, laughing, not yet aware that her shutter has frozen.
At Ilya and Lyuba Ehrenburg’s table in their Moscow apartment, 1965. Surviving “the lottery” of life under Stalin, he returned from reporting the Spanish Civil War to find that almost all his fellow newsmen had disappeared after coming home, for they had “mixed with foreigners.”
Signing Yuri Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre wall, a few years before he chose exile abroad.
In Cologne, Heinrich Boll’s hometown, 1972, before his election as international president of PEN.
Rebecca Miller in her Brooklyn studio, 1987.
Inge and Henri Cartier-Bresson still arguing layouts: his apartment, Paris.
Addressing New York PEN Congress as president, 1966.
A breather at the ‘66 PEN Congress: with Saul Bellow and John Steinbeck after Bellow’s speech.
Pablo Neruda in Dauber and Pine’s now vanished bookstore, looking for Shakespeare sonnets and Whitman editions.
Democratic Convention, 1968: with fellow Connecticut delegate Paul Newman as our hopes for a Vietnam peace plank in the party platform were dying.
Reverend William Sloane Coffin, Jr., Steve Minot, and I getting ready to address a New Haven rally against the slaughter in Vietnam.
The greatest used furniture dealer in human history, David Burns, hypnotizes Kate Reid, Arthur Kennedy, and Pat Hingle in The Price, 1967, Ulu Grosbard, director.
Directing Up from Paradise, my musical version of The Creation of the World and Other Business, with Seth Allen and Kimberly Farr.
Sister Joan as her “mother” in the 1980 American Clock, with John Randolph.
Peter Wood’s American Clock in Britain’s 1986 National Theatre production: Judith Coke, Barry James, and Adam Norton.
Vanessa Redgrave and Melanie Mayron in Playing for Time, my 1980 teleplay based on Fania Fenelon’s memoir of the Auschwitz women’s orchestra. A stage version followed.
Clara, Lincoln Center, 1987: Kenneth McMillan and James Tolkan; Gregory Mosher directed.
With Alan Ayckbourn, who directed A View from the Bridge at the National in 1987, and Michael Gambon, who played Eddie Carbone.
Roger Allam, Jane Lapotaire, and John Shrapnel in the RSC’s Archbishop’s Ceiling, 1986; Nick Hamm directed.
A Note on the Author
ARTHUR MILLER was born in Manhattan, New York City in 1915. After graduating from the University of Michigan, he beganwork with the Federal Theatre Project. His many award-winning stage plays include The Man Who Had All The Luck (1944); All My Sons (1947); Death of a Salesman (1949); An Enemy of the People (1950), adapted from Ibsen; The Crucible (1953), made into a film in 1996; A Memory of Two Mondays and A View From the Bridge (presented as a double-bill in 1955); After the Fall (1964); Incident at Vichy (1964); The Price (1968); The Creation of the World, and Other Business (1972); The American Clock (1980); The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977); the double-bill Danger: Memory! (1987); The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991); Broken Glass (1994); Mr Peter’s Connections (1998); Resurrection Blues (2002), and Finishing the Picture (2004). His prose writing includes Focus, a novel (1945); The Misfits, first published in 1957 as a short story and made into a film and published as a novel in 1961; a collections of shortstories, I Don’t Need You Any More (1967); and three works of non-fiction, In Russia (1969); Chinese Encounters (1979); and ’Salesman’ in Beijing (1984), an account of directing his best-known play in China. He died in February 2005 aged 89.
By the Same Author
FICTION
Presence • Focus • Jane’s Blanket
DRAMA
Finishing the Picture • Resurrection Blues • Mr. Peters’ Connections
Broken Glass • The Ride Down Mt. Morgan • Playing for Time
The American Clock • The Archbishop’s Ceiling
The Creation of the World and Other Business • The Price
Incident at Vichy • After the Fall
A View From the Bridge • The Crucible • An Enemy of the People
Death of a Salesman • All My Sons
The Man Who Had All the Luck • The Golden Years
ONE-ACT PLAYS
The Last Yankee
Danger: Memory!: I Can’t Remember Anything/Clara
Two Way Mirror: Elegy for a Lady/Some Kind of Love Story
Fame/The Reason Why • A Memory of Two Mondays
A View From the Bridge
SCREENPLAYS
The Crucible • Everybody Wins • The Misfits
ESSAYS
On Politics and the Art of Acting
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944-2000
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller
COLLECTIONS
Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944-1961 • The Portable Arthur
Miller
Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volumes I and II
NONFICTION
Timebends (autobiography)
Salesman in Beijing (with Inge Morath)
Chinese Encounters (with Inge Morath)
In the Country (with Inge Morath)
In Russia (with Inge Morath) • Situation Normal
ALSO AVAILABLE BY ARTHUR MILLER
Presence
Collected Stories
In his plays Arthur Miller took on the big themes of his day, putting stories of the Depression, wartime deceit and the McCarthy era on stage with an energy and passion not seen before and rarely since. In these stories he turns his attention to more intimate themes, yet still brings to bear the profound insight, humanity, empathy and wit of his plays. Including the early ‘I Don’t Need You Anymore’, the original story of ‘The Misfits’ on which the film was based, and the beautiful late story ‘Presence’, this collection offers a fresh perspective on the great writer and his work.
‘These stories are not just good, but good in a way that may well come as a revelation to Miller fans . . . A fascinating and salutary companion piece to his stirring public utterances’****
DAILY TELEGRAPH
‘Reveals a maturing talent that never stopped growing and evolving’
SUNDAY TIMES
‘‘An essential addition to the body of Arthur Miller’s work, but it is more than that: it is an arresting self-portrait, unmediated by directors, actors, gossip columnists or biographers. The only thing wrong with it is that there isn’t more of it’’
GUARDIAN
First published in Great Britain 1987 by Methuen London
This electronic edition published in 2012 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Copyright © 1987, 1995 Arthur Miller
Foreword © Richard Eyre 2005
Afterword © Christopher Bigsby 2005
The right of Arthur Miller to be identified as the author of this
work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission from the Publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc,
50 Bedford Square,
London WCIB 3DP
All rights reserved
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages
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