Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition) Read online

  Mel Gussow

  CONVERSATIONS

  withMILLER

  With a Foreword by Richard Eyre

  and an Afterword by Nick Hern

  NICK HERN BOOKS

  London

  www.nickhernbooks.co.uk

  Contents

  Dedication

  Foreword by Richard Eyre

  Introduction

  ‘I’m rewriting Hamlet’ (21 March 2001)

  ‘The man up there isn’t me’ (24 October 1963)

  ‘It was just an image I had of this feisty little guy who was taking on the whole world’ (17 February 1984)

  ‘To be a playwright . . . you have to be an alligator. You have to be able to take a whack and be able to swallow bicycles and digest them’ (17 January 1986)

  ‘There’s nobody up here but us chickens’ (18 November 1986)

  ‘Some good parts for actors’ (12 December 1986)

  ‘The subject was right here. There was never a question in my mind about that’ (7 January 1987)

  ‘Tennessee felt his redemption lay in writing. I feel the same way. that’s when you’re most alive’ (9 January 1987)

  ‘As always, everything is at stake’ (15 January 1987)

  ‘You hang around long enough, you don’t melt’ (11 October 1996)

  ‘Anybody who smears herself with chocolate needs all the support she can get’ (1 July 1998)

  ‘Sometimes it takes a hundred years, and then you get it right’ (8 September 2000)

  ‘An unelected politician is of no significance – like an unproduced playwright’ (23 July 2001)

  Afterword by Nick Hern

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright Information

  For Ann

  Foreword

  Richard Eyre

  A large part of my luck over the past twenty-five years was getting to know the playwright Arthur Miller, so when I read in newspapers the question ‘Will Arthur Miller be remembered as the man who married Marilyn Monroe?’ I felt a mixture of despair and indignation. The motives of the questioners – a mixture of prurience and envy – were, curiously enough, the same as the House Un-American Activities Committee when they summoned Arthur Miller to appear in front of their committee. I asked Arthur about it some years ago. He said: ‘I knew perfectly well why they had subpoenaed me, it was because I was engaged to Marilyn Monroe. Had I not been, they’d never have thought of me. They’d been through the writers long before and they’d never touched me. Once I became famous as her possible husband, this was a great possibility for publicity. When I got to Washington, preparing to appear before that committee, my lawyer received a message from the chairman saying that if it could be arranged that he could have a picture, a photograph taken with Marilyn, he would cancel the whole hearing. I mean, the cynicism of this thing was so total, it was asphyxiating.’

  The question that lurked then – and lurks now – is this: why would the world’s sexiest woman want to go out with a writer? There are at least four good reasons I can think of:

  By 1956, when he married Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller had written four of the best plays in the English language, two of them indelible classics that will be performed in a hundred years’ time.

  He was a figure of great moral and intellectual stature, who was unafraid of taking a stand on political issues and enduring obloquy for doing so.

  He was wonderful company – a great, a glorious, raconteur. I asked him once what happened on the first night of Death of a Salesman when it opened on the road in Philadelphia. He must have told the story a thousand times but he repeated it, pausing, seeming to search for half-buried details, as if it was the first time: ‘The play ended and there was a dead silence and I remember being in the back of the house with Kazan and nothing happened. The people didn’t get up either. Then one or two got up and picked up their coats. Some of them sat down again. It was chaos. Then somebody clapped and then the house fell apart and they kept applauding for God knows how long and… I remember an old man being helped up the aisle, who turned out to be Bernard Gimbel, who ran one of the biggest department-store chains in the United States who was literally unable really to navigate, they were helping him up the aisle. And it turned out that he had been swept away by the play and the next day he issued an order that no one in his stores – I don’t know, eight or ten stores all over the United States – was to be fired for being overage!’ And with this he laughed, a deep husky bass chortle, shaking his head as if the memory were as fresh as last week.

  And I’ll never forget him telling me about a rehearsal of Death of a Salesman. Willy Loman was played by the great Lee J. Cobb, who was later to give a titanic performance in Elia Kazan’s film On the Waterfront. Kazan and Miller were great friends and close colleagues until Kazan named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, preserving his Hollywood career but losing all his friends. That was yet to come.

  The two men had cast Cobb as Willy Loman and late in rehearsals they were beginning to think they’d made a mistake. Cobb was very low key, barely projecting, and his characterisation was at best opaque. Then they had a run-through on stage. Somehow – and it often happens in the theatre – the writer and director’s anxiety communicated itself to the actor. Cobb knew what was at stake and pulled out all the stops and, as Arthur told me: ‘Kazan and I sat in the stalls and wept. I don’t know if it was relief or joy or the power of his performance, but it was a hell of a thing to watch.’

  Miller was a deeply attractive man: tall, almost hulking, broad-shouldered, square-jawed, with the most beautiful large, strong, but tender hands. There was nothing evasive or small-minded about him. As he aged he became both more monumental but more approachable, his great body not so much bent as folded over. And if you were lucky enough to spend time with him and Inge Morath – the Magnum photographer to whom he was married for forty years after his divorce from Marilyn Monroe – you would be capsized by the warmth, wit and humanity of the pair of them.

  It’s been surprising for me – and sometimes shocking – to discover that my high opinion of Arthur Miller is not held by those who consider themselves the curators of American theatre. I once heard a discussion on a US TV channel between three US theatre critics about the differences between American and British theatre. This is how it went:

  First Critic: ‘Arthur Miller is celebrated there.’ Second Critic: ‘It’s Death of a Salesman, for crying out loud. He’s so cynical about American culture and American politics. The English love that.’ To which the first critic replied sagely: ‘Though Death of a Salesman was not a smash when it first opened in London.’ This feeble exchange was followed by a pained complaint from a third critic: ‘It’s also his earnestness.’

  Is it ‘earnestness’ that makes Miller’s plays such a indelible part of our repertoire? It’s not a quality that I’ve noticed much in the British theatre of the last fifty years. I think it’s rather that we have the virtuous habit of treating his plays as if they were new, and find that they speak to us today not because of their supposed earnestness but because of their seriousness – that’s to say they’re about something. They have energy and poetry and wit, and an ambition to make theatre matter. What’s more, they use sinewy and passionate language with unembarrassed enthusiasm, which is always attractive to British actors and audiences weaned on Shakespeare.

  In 1950, at a time when British theatre was toying with a phoney poetic drama – the plays of T.S. Eliot and Christopher Fry – there was real poetry on the American stage in the plays of Arthur Miller or, to be exact, the poetry of reality: plays about life l
ived on the streets of Brooklyn by working-class people foundering on the edges of gentility and resonating with metaphors of the American Dream and the American Nightmare – aspiration and desperation.

  The Depression of the late twenties provided Arthur’s sentimental education: the family business was destroyed, and the family was reduced to relative poverty. I talked to him once about it as we walked in the shadow of the pillars of the Brooklyn Bridge looking out over the East River. ‘America,’ he said, ‘was promises, and the Crash was a broken promise in the deepest sense. I think the Americans in general live on the edge of a cliff, they’re waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don’t care who they are. It’s part of the vitality of the country, maybe. That they’re always working against this disaster that’s about to happen.’

  He wrote with heat and heart and his work was felt in Britain like a distant and disturbing forest fire – a fire that did much to ignite British writers who followed, like John Osborne, Harold Pinter and Arnold Wesker; and later Edward Bond, David Storey and Trevor Griffiths; and later still David Edgar, Mike Leigh, David Hare. His plays continue to inspire today’s emerging playwrights and directors. Only recently the most successful play in the West End was A View from the Bridge – a play first staged sixty years ago.

  What writers and directors and actors and audiences find in Miller today is a visceral power, an appeal to the senses above and below rational thought and an ambition to deal with big subjects. His plays are about the difficulty and the possibility of people – usually men – taking control of their own lives, as Miller says, ‘that moment when, in my eyes, a man differentiates himself from every other man, that moment when out of a sky full of stars he fixes on one star.’ His heroes – salesmen, dockers, policemen, farmers – all seek a sort of salvation in asserting their singularity, their self, their ‘name’.

  They redeem their dignity, even if it’s by suicide. Willy Loman cries out ‘I am not a dime a dozen, I am Willy Loman…!’; Eddie Carbone in A View from the Bridge, broken and destroyed by sexual guilt and public shame, bellows: ‘I want my name’; and John Proctor in The Crucible, in refusing the calumny of condemning his fellow citizens, declaims ‘How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!’ In nothing does Miller show his Americanism more than in the assertion of the right and necessity of the individual to own his own life – and, as well as that, how you reconcile the individual with society. In short, how you live your life.

  If there’s a hint of the evangelist in Arthur’s writing, his message is this: there is such a thing as society and art ought to be used to change it. Though it’s hard to argue that art saves lives, feeds the hungry or sways votes, Death of a Salesman comes as close as any writer can get to art as a balm for social concern. When I saw a New York revival about fifteen years ago, I came out of the theatre behind a young girl and her dad, and she said to him, ‘Dad, that was like looking at the Grand Canyon.’

  If Death of a Salesman is like the Grand Canyon then The Crucible is like the Statue of Liberty – a monument to freedom. I directed the play first in 1970 in Edinburgh and shortly after it opened I was invited to speak to the Sixth Form at Fettes College. Many years later I met one of the schoolboys. He was called Tony Blair. He told me that the play had woken him up to the latent tyranny of a repressive society and the dangers incurred in dissent. He also said that my ‘enthusiasm and evangelism’ had made him want to be an actor. Thirty years later when I directed The Crucible on Broadway I told Arthur this story. ‘He succeeded,’ he said.

  My production of The Crucible on Broadway was the first since its opening in 1954, and Arthur was closely involved with rehearsals. I never got over the joy and pride of sitting beside him as this great play unfolded in front of us while he beamed and muttered: ‘It’s damned good stuff, this.’ We performed it shortly after the Patriot Act had been introduced. Everyone who saw it said it was ‘timely’. What did they mean exactly? That it was timeless.

  On the opening night I sat backstage with Arthur. ‘I’m eighty-six and I’m opening a play,’ he said with rueful wonder. With Inge’s recent death, he’d taken a battering, but when he appeared on the stage at the end of the show and the audience received him and his play with unmodified rapture, he seemed to be twenty years younger. ‘At least the play’s still living,’ he said.

  And it is still, even if he isn’t.

  Huckleberry Finn said of the author of Tom Sawyer: ‘There are things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’ The same could be said of Arthur Miller, which is perhaps why it’s not a coincidence that my enthusiasm for his writing came at the same time as my discovery of the genius of Mark Twain. And it’s not a surprise that what Arthur Miller said of Mark Twain could just as well have been said about him:

  ‘He somehow managed – despite a steady underlying seriousness which few writers have matched – to step round the pit of self-importance and to keep his membership of the ordinary human race in the front of his mind and his writing.’

  This essay was first delivered as a talk on BBC Radio 3 on 18 August 2015.

  Introduction

  Once when I asked Arthur Miller what he thought his legacy would be, he answered without hesitation: ‘Some good parts for actors.’ He explained that when actors and directors decide to do his plays it is not because the plays have ‘great moral importance’ or ‘even literary importance’. It is the challenge of the role, for example, the many different ways an actor could approach Willy Loman. Gradually he allowed that there was, of course, another level to the question, that there was more to be seen in the plays, that they deal ‘with essential dilemmas of what it means to be human’. Then he made it clear that they were always intended to be generic as well as specific.

  As he said, he could not have written The Crucible simply because he wanted to write a play about blacklisting – or about the Salem witch hunts. The centre of the play is ‘the guilt of John Proctor and the working out of that guilt,’ and it exemplifies the ‘guilt of man in general.’ In other words, there is a moral as well as social and political base to his work, and it is that sense of morality, of conscience, that distinguishes him from other important playwrights.

  Miller is one of four major American playwrights of the twentieth century, the others being Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee. O’Neill began as the pioneer experimentalist; his principal contribution was in his depiction of the disparity between reality and illusion. Williams was the great poet of our theatre, while Albee with searing intensity probes marriage, family and the failure of the American dream. Miller’s individual significance is for his moral force and his confirmed sense of justice, or, rather, his sense of correcting injustice wherever he finds it – in business, art, politics, the courts, the court of public opinion. He does this in his life as well as in his plays. Through PEN and other organizations, he has been an outspoken advocate in protecting civil liberties and helping to free dissidents – and also in fighting censorship.

  His plays, especially Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, continue to speak to theatregoers around the world, in China and Russia as well as on home ground. They are unified by recurrent themes and motifs: embattled fathers and sons; fraternal love and rivalry; the price that people pay for the choices they make in life, the cost of ambition, compromise and cowardice; suicide as sacrifice; the loss of faith. Perhaps above all, the plays are about the law, in Miller’s words, as a ‘metaphor for the moral order of man.’

  It is no coincidence that lawyers figure prominently as characters in almost all his plays: Alfieri in A View from the Bridge; Quentin, Miller’s surrogate and the protagonist of After the Fall; Bernard in Death of a Salesman, the young man who is arguing a case before the Supreme Court and does not need to tell Willy – or anyone – about it. Interestingly, Bernard is one of the characters that is closest to Miller himself. In a sense, Miller is lawyer as playwright, aware of all sides of a dispute but clear about where he
stands: for an essential moral truth.

  Were his plays only works of social consciousness, they might have faded along with the plays of Clifford Odets. In play after play, he holds man responsible for his – and for his neighbour’s – actions. Each play is a drama of accountability. Watching All My Sons, it is impossible not to be aware of contemporary parallels – of accidents in nuclear plants, of defective tyres and cars being shielded by the companies that produce them, of drug manufacturers who put products on the market before they have been adequately tested. There are other through-lines in his art, for example, the theme of power and the loss of power. In The Crucible, power rests with public opinion and the judges who run the system, but also with the individuals who first cry witch. The author is searching for an ultimate authority that will eventually rectify wrongs.

  In Miller’s plays, man loses his confidence, his position, or, like John Proctor, he loses his good name. How does he behave, how will he react? Can the character gain – or regain – the courage to go on, or will he find solace in embracing defeat? Willy Loman is confronted by a loss of faith, a loss of pride and an end to possibilities. He has always thought that if he works hard and is a good salesman he will succeed, and that his sons will succeed after him. It turns out that this is a dream based on false values. For Willy, as for Miller, the Great Depression was a turning point, in itself the end of an American vision of prosperity. The second great public event in Miller’s life was the Washington witch hunt, conducted by Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. This signalled the blinding of an American vision of individual freedom.

  After O’Neill, the American theatre was dominated for many years by Williams and Miller. A Streetcar Named Desire in 1947 and, two years later, Death of a Salesman, were revelatory occasions, and, as we know, they are not only great plays but paradigms of two extraordinary careers, and both were directed by Elia Kazan. For Williams, his move from his home in St. Louis to New Orleans, where he found new freedoms, changed his life and inspired his art. For Miller, the University of Michigan offered a somewhat related experience. It was there in an academic environment, away from his home in New York, that he began writing plays and expanding his vision.