Delving further into the nation’s political system, Miller surprised and shocked his listeners when asked to deliver the Jefferson lecture in 2001, with the acerbic “American Playhouse: Politics and the Art of Acting.” While pointing out humorous connections between American presidents and actors, Miller ultimately calls for the public to question the authenticity of its political leaders and demand a more substantive theater as a corrective to the distorted politics of the time. He would later expand this to a book-length piece, but included here is the original speech that contains the essential argument. In “Clinton in Salem,” Miller draws interesting connections between what he saw as the circus surrounding then–President Clinton’s sexual disgrace and the Salem witch trials, concluding that with changing social mores the general public was less prone to the real political manipulation behind the event.
The Holocaust
Two major catastrophic events of the twentieth century that impacted Miller and his work were the Great Depression and the Holocaust. While he speaks at length about the Great Depression in his autobiography, Timebends: A Life, “The Nazi Trials and the German Heart” offers a fuller explanation of the impact he felt from the Holocaust, which would change his opinion of human nature forever. Miller points out how the apparent ordinariness of the defendants at trial should warn us against the banality of evil and to be more vigilant in the future, as there is no one who is not capable of killing another under certain conditions; though these are conditions, he insists, which we can also strive to eliminate. Our moral response to the Holocaust, as Miller had insisted in the piece he originally wrote for the New York Times Magazine in 1965 (“Our Guilt for the World’s Evil,” reprinted here under the title “Guilt and Incident at Vichy”) should color our responses to continued injustices from juvenile delinquency and civil rights to the treatment of Vietcong prisoners.
Politics Abroad
After his marriage to photographer Ingeborg Morath in 1962, Miller was encouraged by his new wife to get more involved in politics on a worldwide level. In 1965, he was elected the President of PEN, an international literary organization formed to defend writers from intimidation. Through this, he went on missions to several countries to solicit better rights for authors. He grew more and more interested in political and social policy beyond American shores, and this “Politics Abroad” section reflects some of this wider interest. Aside from longer works of reportage on China and Russia that he published with his wife (as an accompaniment to her photography), his essays appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, The New Republic, and Esquire. Miller liked to use his observations of other nations to better assess the strengths and weaknesses of his own. Several of his essays deal with the negative effects of censorship and demand the necessary freedom of artists to create, while others work to point out the intrinsic similarities between different nations and people bound by a common humanity. Miller remains ever critical of the misuse of power and the treatment of any individual as less than equal in his quest to assert the right to freedom for all within an equitable social contract, in which the rights of the individual remain balanced against the needs of the larger society.
“Dinner with the Ambassador” tells of Miller’s 1985 trip to Turkey with fellow playwright Harold Pinter on behalf of PEN, during which he speaks out against the complacency of the United States against unjust foreign censorship, as writers in Turkey are being imprisoned and tortured while the U.S. ambassador makes polite conversation at a local dinner party. He warns that by suppressing knowledge of such occurrences, America becomes as guilty of censorship as Turkey. “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” describes a postcard he had received from Vaclav Havel and his wife sent from the Czech Republic. He uses this image to reflect on the foolish injustice within any nation that treats such decent and engaged writers as if they were criminals, for that nation endangers the health of its own cultural life in the doing.
Noting similarities between the racism of South Africa and New York City, after having the opportunity to interview Nelson Mandela in 1991, in “The Measure of the Man” Miller expresses his admiration for the African leader’s lack of rancor regarding his past treatment and ability to see past color and class—traits he views clearly as worthy of emulation. Meanwhile, “The Parable of the Stripper” relates an ironic anecdote during which the members of a group of Yugoslavian artists, committed to equality for all, each expose their own innate tribalism when asked to identify the ethnicity of a stripper. “Uneasy About the Germans: After the Wall” allows Miller to discuss two notions close to his heart—his strong belief in the democratic system and his insistence that the past should never be forgotten. Not that he sees any signs of it failing, but Miller voices a suspicion of the authenticity of Germany’s embrace of democracy, given both its historical proclivity toward more authoritarian regimes, and the fact that, rather than fought for, this political system was imposed upon its citizens. Albeit hopeful that Germans can better internalize this transformation, he asks that both they and others remain vigilant.
Recalling again that notion of the “life-lie,” “The Sin of Power” Miller tells us, “is to not only distort reality but to convince people that the false is true.” Miller argues this is something of which both Soviets and Americans are guilty, although he maintains that Americans remain freer to challenge this and should do so to the best of their ability to ensure the rights of the individual cannot be trampled. In 2000, Miller was part of a group of “cultural visitors” invited to Cuba, and he wrote of this experience in “A Visit with Castro.” He likens Castro to an outmoded Don Quixote, who has clearly lost touch with reality, and whose enchantment with power has perverted his original ambition. The American embargo, he concludes, rather than helping the situation, is actually assisting Castro in keeping things the way he wants. Written in 2003, “Why Israel Must Choose Justice” was Miller’s acceptance speech for receiving the Jerusalem Prize, in part for his “activities in defense of civil rights.” It created controversy for its hard-line approach to Israeli politics of the time, calling for the state of Israel to reconsider its settlement policy, which Miller viewed as working against the spirit of her original charter and felt could only undercut Israel’s future safety. Just as Israel was created for Jews as an act of justice and repayment for the suffering of the Holocaust, Miller felt that Israel’s response toward the Palestinians should reflect its baseline humanistic values rather than become so aggressively territorial.
Satire
Miller’s use of satire points to an aspect of Miller that is all too often overlooked; the man could be very funny. Feeding off Jonathan Swift’s 1729 satire of the callous attitude toward Irish famine, by which he instructs the Irish to eat their own babies, Miller’s “A Modest Proposal for the Pacification of the Public” mocks the way 1950s paranoia caused civil rights to be trampled and people condemned on flimsy to no evidence, by suggesting that everyone should be sent to jail at the age of eighteen for two years until they can prove their patriotism, and determines different levels of “treachery.” “Get It Right: Private Executions,” meanwhile, is a pointed dig at supporters of the death penalty, and no doubt dropped the seed that would later become the comical satiric play Resurrection Blues. In it, he suggests criminals should be executed in large sporting arenas, and admission charges could help pay for the prison system and provide compensation for victims. His “hope” is that growing tired of such spectacles, people would reassess the efficacy of maintaining the death penalty, since it has clearly not reduced the number of murders committed and only adds to the death total. “Let’s Privatize Congress” berates Congress for its many hypocrisies over issues such as health care, the environment, and education, and the rise of private economic interests in the country’s governance. By making Congress a private enterprise, he jokes, representatives can have their salaries paid by whichever business wants their vote, and we will have full transparency and avoid the costs of expensive campaigns and the
“inconvenience” of voting.
• • •
While described by some as the “moral conscience” of America, it is evident from his essays that while Miller attempts to take the moral path, he is also fully aware of his own potential biases, which he examines through his writing with true surgical precision. Forthright and willing to tackle even the most sensitive issues with a calm deliberation, he writes to make sense of the world for himself as much as for his reader. Quite often we see how his initial stance becomes adapted by the essay’s conclusion as he draws in an accretion of detail to support this alternate view. While only including selected essays, the breadth and scope of this collection is underscored by the varied approaches and topics covered. Whether he is winking at us in playful humor or seriously addressing a concern in measured prose, Miller is always, as fellow playwright Edward Albee observed at Miller’s memorial service in 2005, “a writer who mattered. A lot.”
SUSAN C. W. ABBOTSON
ON THE THEATER
CONCERNING TRAGEDY
Sorting Things Out: Foreword to The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller
1977
I find it hard to read through these essays without wanting to make changes on each page and often in each sentence. Nothing written about the theater ever comes out right, the thing is forever escaping its commentators.
I am a little surprised that I have written so much on the subject in the past thirty years, and it is hard now to remember what drove me to it. I think it may have been the feeling that it was being trivialized in most published commentary at a time when I thought it the most important thing in the world. It could be of some great importance, I still think, if we ever get it beyond the childish delights of the commercial hit-flop situation.
I have not so much changed my opinions about certain issues as added to what I believed, but I have often wished that I had never written a word on the subject of tragedy. I am not a scholar, not a critic, and my interest in the phenomenon was and is purely practical, so that having delivered myself of certain views I only unwittingly entered an arena of near-theological devoutness which I had not known existed. The damage having been done, however, there is no further reason to withhold new thoughts, which may or may not line up with those of the ancients and their modern heirs.
I have not yet seen a convincing explanation of why the tragic mode seems anachronistic now, nor am I about to attempt one. But it has often seemed to me that what tragedy requires—of the artist first and of the audience thereafter—is a kind of grief without which the tragic area somehow cannot be approached. Instead of grief we have come to substitute irony and even comedy, black or otherwise. I am too lazy to go back to Aristotle, but I do not recall his mentioning grief; most probably because he took for granted that his hero’s catastrophe would entail that emotion all by itself.
It is probably not that we have lost the capacity to grieve, but that we have misplaced the ritual through which grief can be shown to others and shared. Of course the waning of organized religion is a factor, but I wonder if it is not more a result than a cause. And I wonder, too, if we are awkward about grieving because the loss of one person evokes in us only the paradoxical fact of death without the straightforward and clear image of a sacred identity that has vanished. Rather, we know that nothing and no one is truly sacred, but that a biological set of forces have been used up so that there is something faintly fatuous, something perhaps operatic, in the kind of grief-outbreak which underlies the real tragedies as they approach their moments of terror and death.
If we are this way—rationalized and beyond the reach of public grief—it is interesting to wonder why it has happened. And inevitably there arise the images of the carnage of two world wars, the many revolutions and counter-revolutions, the Nazi Holocaust—this, after all, has been the most spendthrift of all centuries with human lives. Perhaps the public psyche has simply been overloaded and, like an electrical circuit, has blown its fuse and gone cold under the weight of too many impulses. So that the tragic proposal is simply presumptuous—this making so much out of one death when we know it is meaningless. In other words, in an important respect we have ceased to feel.
I would agree, except that we can still respond to the old tragedies as much as people apparently did in early times. Is this merely nostalgia? It doesn’t seem so in the theater.
My own view, or at least my leaning, is toward a less alarming explanation. Clearly, however tragedy is defined or explained, it must allow the hero to speak for himself. This may sound so rudimentary as not to be worth discussing, but in contemporary drama few major characters are allowed this privilege, it being assumed that something like naturalism is one thing we can’t have. What we have instead are forms of authorial ironical comment or directorial interpretation of the character’s situation total enough to wipe out his autonomy entirely. We are being spared the incoherence of the character’s feeling for the coherence of our own interpretation, which allows us to observe the outlines of suffering without very much participation in it. Thus, it is absurd to attempt the kind of protest that tragedy always has entailed, a cry against heaven, fate, or what you will. That cry may still be implicit, but it has been stylized into a glance upwards or even a grin and a cough. From one or another philosophical points of view this makes lots of sense, but is it really the viewpoint of the sufferer or of the one observing him? If we could get this sorted out, we might well see tragic emotions forming again.
What I think has been forgotten is that the objectivity of a Shakespeare is expressed through his form—the balancing of responsibility between various persons, interests, and forces—but that the sufferings that result are not at all objectified, dried up, or gentled. It may be we have lost the art of tragedy for want of a certain level of self-respect, finally, and are in disgrace with ourselves. Compared to the tragic emotion, the others are covered with a certain embarrassment, even shame, as though suffering were a sign of one’s failure or a loss of dignity, like being caught with a hole in one’s stocking at an affair of state. People not free enough to weep or cry out are not fit subjects for tragedy, at least not on the stage, and weeping without self-respect is mere self-pity.
As for the sociology in these pieces, I still support its main point, the need to subsidize the American theater. I have had far more experience with such theaters abroad than I had decades ago, and I would add now that a mixed private and public theater would be the most useful rather than a monopoly by either type. A subsidy is a form of power that always tends toward bureaucratization and needs challenging from outside the organization. We are still, at this writing, paying less for the upkeep of theater art than any other viable nation.
Finally, there is a question of tone in these pieces—an overemphasis here and there on what has already been proved. I would ask the reader to remember that an unspoken gentleman’s agreement was prevalent in the 1940s and ’50s, if not earlier, under which every playwright had to present himself to critics and the public as a pure entertainer, a man in an aesthetic daze who barely knew the name of the president or how to negotiate a subway turnstile. This image was good for business, conforming to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of the separation of church and state, poesy and instruction, form and meaning. A play, needless to say, could not teach without exploding into its several parts, so that the most authentically aesthetic of experiences was necessarily the one without any perceptible reference to society or life as it was lived. The exception was George Bernard Shaw, but only because he was funny, and funny in a definitely aristocratic manner that gave him license to preach the virtues of a socialism of wits and a capitalism whose horrors were familiar, somehow warm, and somehow bearable after all.
Thus, the lessons of a play, its meaning and theme, had to spread out like a contagion if they were to be aesthetic, in which case few would be aware they were even infected. In a word, what I was trying to do was to objectify the social situation of our theater, an
d even of some of the creative procedures that produced one style of playwriting or another, rather than leaving these matters—as our critics normally did—to temperament and taste without deeper reason or cause.
Nevertheless and notwithstanding, the theater is first of all imitation, mimickry. If anything contrary is found in these pieces, it was not intended to be there. We need food, sex, and an image. The rest is commentary on these.
Tragedy and the Common Man
1949
In this age few tragedies are written. It has often been held that the lack is due to a paucity of heroes among us, or else that modern man has had the blood drawn out of his organs of belief by the skepticism of science, and the heroic attack on life cannot feed on an attitude of reserve and circumspection. For one reason or another, we are often held to be below tragedy—or tragedy above us. The inevitable conclusion is, of course, that the tragic mode is archaic, fit only for the very highly placed, the kings or the kingly, and where this admission is not made in so many words it is most often implied.
I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon classic formulations, such as the Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.
More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.
Collected Essays Page 3