Conversations with Miller (Centenary Edition) Read online

  It would be easy to think of Williams and Miller as opposites, Williams as a hauntingly autobiographical playwright who could transform his dreams into plays that probed the human heart; Miller as more of an objectifier, a kind of American Ibsen. In Harold Clurman’s analysis, Ibsen had ‘a compelling force to combat meanness, outworn modes of thought and hypocrisy,’ and was ‘in quest of a binding unity, a dominant truth’. However, as Clurman added about Ibsen, his plays are also ‘deeply autobiographical . . . dramatizations of his emotional, spiritual, social and intellectual life,’ and it is that quality that gives his plays their ‘staying power’. All these things can be said equally about Miller.

  Miller is as admiring of Strindberg as he is of Ibsen. Even as he is aware of – and offended by – Strindberg’s misogyny, there is another side to Strindberg with which Miller can identity: Strindberg’s ‘vision of the inexorability of the tragic circumstance, that once something is in motion, nothing can stop it,’ that, as with the Greeks, it is impossible to avoid the power of Fate. Miller also expresses an admiration of and a compassion for Williams. Instead of rivalry, there was a sense that the success of each fed the other and that, in tandem, they elevated Broadway. The kinship is also personal. As Miller said, ‘Tennessee felt that his redemption lay in writing. I feel the same way. That’s when you’re most alive.’

  When Miller is not writing plays, he spends time building tables and other furniture. He loves carpentry and often uses it as a metaphor for playwriting: the objective is to build a better table, to write a better play. In one of our conversations, I suggested that he had already made a terrific table – Death of a Salesman – very early in his career and wondered, after that, what the incentive was. He said first of all that Death of a Salesman was his tenth play and added that each play has a different aim. A different wood? No, ‘same wood’ – the Miller wood, firm, solid, like mahogany, seemingly impervious to the weather (but perhaps not so impervious to critics). The same wood, but a ‘different aim – to create a different truth,’ and for Miller each play becomes ‘an amazing new adventure’. Some playwrights write the same play over and over again: not Miller.

  As he has said, ‘I have a feeling my plays are my character and your character is your fate.’ Ineluctably, he is drawn to his study, where he writes far more intuitively than one might suppose, an artist sustained not only by his ideas but by his moments of inspiration. He also said, ‘There’s an intensification of feeling when you create a play that doesn’t exist anywhere else. It’s a way of spiritually living. There’s a pleasure there that doesn’t exist in real life – and you can be all those other people.’

  Several years ago, Miller was in Valdez, Alaska to receive a playwriting award at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. While he was there, he and a local official went fishing for salmon in Prince William Sound, which is surrounded by a glacier. As they passed an iceberg, Miller’s companion leaned over the side of the boat, chopped off pieces of ice and brought them aboard. Miller touched glacial ice. ‘Eight-million-year old ice,’ he said in astonishment. ‘It doesn’t melt.’

  When I was in Valdez for that same conference a few years later, I, too, touched glacial ice – and thought about Arthur Miller. When he told me that story, I suggested that if ice can last that long, perhaps that says something about the survival of civilization and of art. Never one to sidestep a metaphor, he said, ‘You hang around long enough . . . you don’t melt.’

  Miller is very much a survivor, an artist who has gone his own way without regard for fashion or expectation. There are more plays and adventures to come. The work, at its best, is both timely and timeless, which is why the plays continue to be done.

  And there are also some good parts for actors.

  I first met Miller in 1963, when After the Fall began rehearsals as the first production of the Lincoln Center Repertory Theatre. After that, our meetings were brief and sporadic until 1984 when I wrote a profile of Dustin Hoffman for the New York Times Magazine. At the time, Hoffman was acting in Death of a Salesman, and I followed the show from Chicago to Washington, D.C. to Broadway, speaking to Miller along the way. In 1986 I brought Miller together at the Times with Athol Fugard, David Mamet and Wallace Shawn for a panel focusing on playwrights and politics. Statements from that panel are included in this book. Late that year and into 1987, Miller and I had a series of conversations, excerpts of which were used in an article that appeared in the Arts and Leisure section of The Times. The most recent conversations have not been published before.

  Occasionally, over the years I have also seen Miller in more informal circumstances. At one point, his daughter Rebecca temporarily moved into an apartment in our building in Greenwich Village, and one day, like any helpful father, Miller carried suitcases and other possessions up the staircase. One other thing must be said about him. For those who do not know him, he presents an austere, Lincolnesque image. Actually, he is down to earth and congenial; he likes to tell stories and can be wryly amusing.

  At the end of October 2000 I was a participant at an eighty-fifth birthday celebration of Miller at the University of Michigan. This was an international symposium entitled ‘Arthur Miller’s America: Theatre and Culture in a Century of Change.’ Because Miller had an accident and suffered a cracked rib, he did not attend, but he did a live television interview from his home in Connecticut with Enoch Brater, the director of the symposium. There were several days of panel discussions and speeches dealing with his plays, his autobiography, Timebends, and various film and opera adaptations. Many of these events were academic but all of them revealed the intensity and the depth of the interest in his work. I spoke about Miller and his legacy in the American theatre.

  After my talk, there were questions from the audience. I realized that there were several people in the house, experts on Miller, who were, coincidentally, experts on Samuel Beckett, and that I had shared many panels with them on that subject. I wondered if there was any connection between Miller and Beckett. A surprisingly lively discussion followed, as we agreed that despite their obvious disparities (of style, of subject matter) there was a certain kinship, in their political awareness and their social conscience. While Miller does not share Beckett’s pessimism, they stand on common ground in terms of their idealism. In my conversations with Miller, it has also been clear that he has gradually come around to an appreciation of Beckett’s contribution as a playwright. Miller once artfully characterized Waiting for Godot as ‘vaudeville at the edge of a cliff.’ As a writer, Miller is himself more experimental and less naturalistic than his public image.

  There is another point of commonality: the two are tall, thin, stalwart, great-looking men. I don’t think either one has ever taken a bad photograph (of course, Miller has his own personal photographer, his wife Inge Morath). Beckett and Miller never met, but if they had, what would they have talked about? Women? ‘No,’ came the correct answer from the audience. Probably each would have been far too discreet (although Beckett might have been interested in knowing about Marilyn Monroe). Perhaps they would have talked about the cause of human rights, about politics, or their fondness for clowns and comedians.

  In contrast to Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard and, certainly, to Beckett – the subjects of my previous Conversation books – Miller has written widely about his own work; he also wrote his autobiography. There is no shortage of Miller commentary. What the Conversation books have in common (besides a major playwright as subject) is that each is written from a single point of view over an extended period of time and there is an arc to the conversations. With Miller, my first impression was of a man with a certain emotional detachment from his plays and the events of his life. I soon realized that he is someone passionately committed to his work and his political and social beliefs. At the same time, he has maintained an ironic perspective on his own success and a residual faith in the possibilities of the art form that he has chosen to practise.

  On 11 September 2001, as terrorists attacked
the World Trade Centre, Arthur Miller and his wife were in Paris. They had flown over at the invitation of the French government, cosponsors this year of Japan’s Praemium Imperiale, a $125,000 award that was to be given to Miller in October. On that morning, a friend of Ms. Morath had called them from Germany to tell them the news. Naturally they turned on the television. Two weeks later when I telephoned Miller at his home, he said about the attack, ‘I could not absorb it while it was happening. It still is incomprehensible. It’s all terrible. What can I say?’

  Then he added, ‘From the news reports, it seems that the Bush administration has given up talking about a massive air strike. I have an idea. Maybe we should send over a fleet of bombers and drop 10,000 pounds of food on them’ – meaning the Afghans.

  This book begins with the last of our conversations, in 2001, when Miller was past eighty-five – and then flashes back to 1963.

  Mel Gussow

  September 2001

  Both Arthur Miller and Mel Gussow died within months of each other in 2005.

  21 March 2001

  ‘I’m rewriting Hamlet’

  On a rainy, windswept day, I met Miller at his apartment on the East Side of Manhattan and we walked several blocks to the Cinema 70 café, where he had his favourite lunch, a turkey club sandwich. The following Monday he was giving a speech at the John F. Kennedy Center in Washington, as part of a series of lectures sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The title of the talk was ‘On Politics and the Art of Acting’, and our conversation began with that subject.

  AM: I’m going to talk about Bush, Gore, Clinton, Roosevelt and several others as performers. Roosevelt was probably the greatest performer we ever had as president. One of the best in our time was Reagan, who, without thinking about it, perfected the Stanislavsky method by making a complete fusion of his performance with his personality. He didn’t even know he was acting.

  MG: Sometimes he would talk about his personal experiences and it would turn out that they would be scenes from movies in which he had acted.

  AM: He couldn’t tell the difference between what happened in the movies and what he did.

  MG: And he acted better as president than he ever did on screen.

  AM: He was perfect for it. On the other hand, in Bush’s campaign for president, every time he approached the podium, he would give a furtive glance left and right, as though he were an impostor. What the body language tells us! There’s a story that Bobby Lewis [Robert Lewis, the director and teacher and one of the founders of the Actors Studio] used to tell. When he was a very young actor, he was an assistant to Jacob Ben-Ami, who was a famous Yiddish actor. It must have been in the late ’20s and Ben-Ami was in a play downtown [Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse]. One scene in it became the thing to see. Ben-Ami stood on the stage with a gun to his head for many minutes, trying to get up the courage to shoot himself. Finally, with the tension at its peak, he lowers the gun. He can’t do it. It was sensational, because people really thought he might blow his brains out. Bobby watched that every night from the wings. He asked Ben-Ami, ‘How do you do that?’ Ben-Ami said, ‘I can’t tell you now, because it will get out and it will ruin my performance. At the end of the run maybe I’ll tell you.’ The run ended and Bobby said, ‘Well, you promised to tell me.’ He said, ‘My problem in acting that scene is that I’m absolutely not suicidal. I can’t imagine the circumstance in which I would take my life. So how could I ever approach how this man must be feeling? I thought, where am I trying to do something, and I can’t do it? It’s when I’m about to jump into a cold shower. So what am I doing up there? I’m trying to take a shower.’ [He laughs.]

  So in my speech, I say, which is the one we’re voting for: the guy who is seen with the gun to his head or the guy taking the cold shower? What I’m saying in effect is that acting comes with the territory. When you walk out of your house to face the world, you begin to act a little bit.

  MG: Your point is that we all play roles?

  AM: Sure. Where’s the everlasting truth? It’s only in art – when the artist approaches the paper or the canvas. Tolstoy said that we look in a work of art for a revelation of the soul of the artist. For an artist to put his soul in a work of art, he can’t act. It has to be for real. Characteristically, in all ages, the artist has the hardest time.

  MG: In one of our earlier talks, you said that Tennessee Williams said his redemption lay in his art, and that you agreed with him.

  AM: Absolutely. And the one good thing about growing older – or old – is that art literally is the only thing that endures out of an age. When I think of the few plays that have endured and the millions of speeches and exhortations that have disappeared. I can’t remember the authors. I can’t remember the pieces.

  MG: There are a few speeches that have lasted: Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream,’ Roosevelt’s Pearl Harbour radio broadcast.

  AM: That’s a form of art, though . . .

  MG: And in some cases the speaker didn’t write it.

  AM: Roosevelt didn’t. He had Bob Sherwood [Robert E. Sherwood] write it.

  MG: A playwright.

  AM: Whatever doesn’t turn into art vanishes. What have we got of Rome or Greece or Assyria – some carved stones done by sculptors, some poems scribbled on papyrus?

  MG: What about the horror of the Talibans destroying those Buddhist statues?

  AM: Isn’t that something! You know, the Chinese revolutionaries in the ’60s did that. They attacked temples and destroyed a lot of art in China.

  MG: To take it a step further, what about societies that destroy the artist? I’m thinking of the House Un-American Activities Committee and the blacklist.

  AM: The way I put it: art is civilization’s revenge on people who think the artist is just this idiot who doesn’t know how to tie his shoes. Art is the one reassurance that I have about the continuity of the human race.

  MG: Does the artist have an obligation to write about political events?

  AM: I can’t speak of obligations in relation to art because if the artist doesn’t naturally feel what he or she is doing, the thing is not going to work. But I have to say that the great challenges in the past were the challenges of the society’s mal-direction. Whether you look at all the Greek plays or at Shakespeare, they were very politicized stories. The most important art we’ve got comes out of such confrontations. You’re eschewing the source of great energy if you think that art is purely a conversation with yourself, which is what it became in many cases. But we’ve still got people who know this. There’s always an attempt on the part of Phil Roth or Robert Stone or Don DeLillo, a number of very good writers who are trying to grapple with this monster that we’re all being devoured by.

  MG: You’re naming novelists, not playwrights.

  AM: I think most of the playwrights of any seriousness know that the challenge is to bring the great beast down. Like Tony Kushner who wrote the big play that dealt with Roy Cohn, Angels in America. I’m sure he’s still at it. He’s devoted to that kind of reality.

  MG: That’s one thing that keeps you going as a writer.

  AM: Yes. Trying to bring order to this chaos, which is next to impossible.

  MG: How is your new play going?

  AM: I’ve got two of them I’m working on at the same time. One of them is half finished.

  MG: Resurrection Blues?

  AM: I wrote one version of it, but I want to look at it again. I let it lie for a while. There’s something not right about it. There’s wonderful stuff in it. The form of it is cracked somewhere.

  MG: Cracked?

  AM: Split, somehow. It’s a good cartoon for the play, in painting terms. I’ve got to change some of the colours in it.

  MG: What’s the other play?

  AM: The other play is about an old man, not me, who is nearly blind. He’s pursued by his life and he’s trying to get out of it. It keeps tackling him again and again.

  MG: Trying to get out of it by suicide?


  AM: No, no, not suicide, not at all. He’s trying to outlive it. It’s got a lot of different scenes, but it’s basically taking place in a house out in the country.

  MG: And it’s not about you.

  AM: I couldn’t be the way this guy is. He’s a former builder of tract houses, a hundred houses at a time. The usual businessman whose desire was to be a poet, or an actor. I think I’ll be able to finish that play soon.

  MG: I just read The Man Who Had All the Luck [which failed on Broadway, in 1944].

  AM: They’re doing it in Williamstown this summer. Scott Ellis is directing it. They did a reading at the Roundabout Theatre down on 23rd Street. I said, I’m not sure the damn thing is going to work. They cast it gorgeously. Then Scott said, ‘Can I do it in Williamstown?’ I said, ‘Certainly – with these people.’ They’re all excited about it. There really is nothing like it, for good or ill. It’s basically the story of a young man, who for reasons he could never put his finger on, always succeeds. The point comes where he becomes more and more certain that anything he’s managed to accumulate, including his family, will be struck down by retribution from some source.

  MG: Was that something you felt at the time?

  AM: That was based on someone I knew about in the middle west, a man who hung himself. He couldn’t stand the tension. I guess it reflected the fact I already had a great levelling instinct.

  MG: What do you mean by levelling instinct?

  AM: That no one, including me, should ever regard himself or be regarded as being more important than anybody else, nor be paid more or be given more homage.

  MG: The original story was told to you by your first wife’s mother?