Timebends (2 page)

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.
FIRST CRITIC Though
Death of a Salesman
was not a smash when it first opened in London.
THIRD CRITIC It's also his earnestness.

If in Britain we continue to admire Arthur Miller, it's because we have the virtuous habit of treating his plays as contemporaneous and find that they speak to us today not because of their “earnestness” but because they are serious – that's to say they're
about
something. They have an ambition to make theatre matter.

This ambition didn't come out of nowhere: when he was writing
Death of a Salesman,
Miller saw Tennessee Williams's
A Streetcar Named Desire
and it opened “one specific door, one that didn't deal so much with the story or characters or direction, but with words and their liberation, with the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition, that moved me more than all its pathos. It formed a bridge … to the whole tradition of unashamed word-joy that. . . we had turned our backs on.”

Inspired by Williams, in
Death of a Salesman
Miller created a new verbal language and a new theatrical one – even if the emblematic American profession of salesman was familiar to theatregoers from the character of Hickey in O'Neill's
The Iceman Cometh.
Miller provided Willy Loman with a vocabulary and syntax that blended the cliches of everyday life with self-deluding aphorisms – “America is full of beautiful towns and fine upstanding people” – with immigrant parables – “Why, boys, when I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out” – I and with slogans for success – “Be liked and you will never want”. These are repeated by Willy like a catechism for success and are bound together by Miller's own vivid imagery – “the woods are burning, boys” – and muscled rhetoric.

The sinewy and passionate language that he used with unembarrassed enthusiasm has always been attractive to British actors and audiences weaned on Shakespeare. And 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 in his plays
or, to be exact, the poetry of reality: plays about life lived on the streets of Brooklyn or the farms of Massachusetts 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.

Arthur Miller's work was felt in Britain like a distant and disturbing forest fire – a fire that did much to ignite British writers 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. Along with Tennessee Williams, Miller lit up the British theatre and demonstrated that it was an art to be fought for and to be unembarrassed about taking seriously. What these writers found in Miller was a visceral power, an appeal to the senses beyond and below rational thought, and an ambition to deal with big subjects.

It was characteristic of Arthur to express his subjects as “issues” – a leaning towards advocacy of moral conceits – and the “issue” which most concerned him was America's lack of a sense of its own history and the decay of the connective tissue between the past, the present and the future. “Whoever is writing in the United States,” he said, “is using the American Dream as an ironical pole of his story. People elsewhere tend to accept, to a far greater degree anyway, that the conditions of life are hostile to man's pretensions.” But for all his ability to articulate themes in his work, he was a playwright who knew that the shortest route to bad plays was to write plays ballasted with the baggage of big themes.

His plays show the difficulty and the possibility of people – usually men – taking control of their own lives, “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, beyond that, how you reconcile the individual with society. In short, how you live your life.

But he wasn't a political writer, nor was he a moralist; and he was only a realist in the sense that he was concerned with the realities of the forces that affect people's lives rather than the superficial appearance of reality. His plays ask whether we take responsibility for each other: are we social animals? “Joe Keller's trouble”, said Miller of the protagonist in
All My Sons,
“is not that he cannot tell right from wrong but that his cast of mind cannot admit that he, personally, has any viable connection with his world, his universe, or his society. He is not a partner in society, but an incorporated member, so to speak . . .” If there was a touch of the evangelist in his writing, his message was 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.

“There are things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth,” says Huckleberry Finn of his creator, Mark Twain. And 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 Mark Twain's genius. 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 in the ordinary human race in the front of his mind and his writing.

I had an e-mail shortly before Arthur's death from a mutual friend in New York who had just seen him in hospital, unable to talk after his recent treatment. It read: “When I saw Arthur Sunday I told him that I had had dinner with you last week in London and he gave a loving smile in return.” I e-mailed my friend back that I would call Arthur at the weekend when he'd been settled back in Connecticut. I heard of his death that Friday afternoon. On returning home I saw a note to myself on my desk: “Ring Arthur.”

Richard Eyre
May 2005

Some ten years ago—when I was merely seventy—a certain number of biographers' proposals arrived, causing contemplation of mortality and, almost as disheartening, the prospect of having to talk to someone endlessly about events in my past. I saw that there would be no stopping these people, especially once their attentions began tickling my vanity. But there was a way of at least delaying them until I was gone, and that was to launch a preemptive strike. Thus my autobiography was born.

I thought at first that some two hundred or so pages would be enough to cover what might be worth reporting of my existence, but I soon began to enjoy chatting to myself and the thing just went on growing, and gradually I became aware of at least one important motive behind it: the desire to share the past with younger people. As has been noted innumerable times, the past for Americans is not prologue to their own lives, but something disposable, like old houses in the middle of town where a new supermarket is to stand, or old people, or Christmas wrappings. (I suspect the past by now is an irrelevant bore to the young in several other countries too, especially where its hold is still strong.) Indeed, my own father, whom I visited one afternoon in the old persons' hotel where he lived for a while in his eighties following my mother's death, replied to my question as to how he was liking the place, “Too many old people here.” I felt the same way, in fact, so it was easy to share the absurdity of that remark. Old as he was, he much preferred being surrounded by
the young, with their plans for the future, their optimistic hopes, their restless irritation with constraints, and their good-looking girls.

In England, Europe, and Latin America, this book has been one of my best-reviewed and widely noticed works, while in my own country it was as often as not passed over when it was not aggressively dismissed by a few critics, even hated by two or three. I can think of two reasons. One is a protracted animus in some American commentators for anyone who was attracted by Marxism and what once seemed the promise of a more benign Russian socialist civilization, and more important, failed to lie on his back afterwards wailing his guilty remorse for his error. The second is the absence in this book of a forthright investigation of Marilyn Monroe's sexuality. Without a complete roster of his or her sexual proclivities, it seems, nothing worth knowing can be said about a human being, and the kiss without the tell simply doesn't register as interesting, let alone honest. I can't think of how to apologize for either failing, but much as I would have liked the book to have met anyone's legitimate expectations, you can't have everything.

This book is not an attempt at history, of course, if only because I strove to hew to my own awareness in what were the crucial decades of the century, and to keep to a minimum the after-the-fact wisdom that can only cloud the picture of my evolution, and presumably that of others.

Much is usually made of the impact of the Depression on my generation, and in fact it was the single major preoccupation of the people I knew. I am sure it was also at the center of the worries of the whole country over the decade between the crash of 1929 and the start-up of business and industry as we approached the forties and the burgeoning Second World War. But for the radical youth especially, and the intellectuals as a whole, there was another shadow over our heads as dark and as menacing, and that was the Spanish Civil War, which lasted almost four years, until the Fascist victory in 1939.

If I cannot attest to what was going on in Hitler's mind, I do recall the atmosphere I lived in at the time; the refusal of England, France, and the United States even to sell arms to the legitimate Spanish Republican government so it could fight off a rebellion of its army seemed to prove that the Western governments were not going to resist Hitler's and Mussolini's expansion of Fascist control over all Europe. In the face of Germany's raging anti-Semitism
and its assaults on culture and human rights, the nonintervention policy under which Western governments agreed to isolate Republican Spain—even as Hitler was sending in German air force units and Mussolini was arming Franco—made the remark of Anne Morrow Lindbergh that “Fascism is the wave of the future” ring with frightening plausibility. It has not been a good century for prognostication, but the prediction of the left—among others—that Spain was a rehearsal for the new European war was on the mark. Indeed, shortly after Franco had won Madrid, Franklin Roosevelt whispered into the ear of Harold Ickes, his Secretary of the Interior, who had been pleading with him in vain to aid the Republic, “Spain was the greatest mistake I ever made.” This according to Ickes's autobiography.

The future cannot be known, of course, but our current feeling of impotence before the future was not quite the case before World War II. If the good life, and for some people reason itself, had disintegrated with the stock market in 1929, the idea of progress, I believe, marched right on. (The 1938 World's Fair motto, “A Century of Progress,” certainly did not seem boastful to most Americans.) For radical or conservative the question was not whether America would continue to increase its wealth or whether the unemployed would ever work again, but when and by what means. Europe might be a rusting ship tied up at a pier, its voyaging days over, but bad as things were, we had not yet made port, and were still on our way to somewhere wonderful.

It is different now, of course; despair has become a veritable obligatory style, the American future lost in its past. The armies of the right call up a “Christian” outrage at a government that they see as elitist, secular, and liberal, and the left struggles with a confused distrust of government that seems destined to corruption by big business; these two mutually hostile camps leave any conceivable coexistence within an organized society in question. One did not imagine that so much of social existence and even lawfulness depended so heavily on mere good faith. Not since the sectarian fights within the radical left wing movements of the thirties has such violent hatred and paranoid suspicion ruled mainstream political intercourse, this time presided over by right wing radicals calling themselves conservatives, and liberals trying to sound as conservative as possible.

A doctor's ability is judged on his ability to forecast the course of disease, the lawyer's wisdom on his foresight as he weighs
probabilities; but what gauge can we rightly apply to politicians and political savants? Amnesia would seem the best one available.

To be swayed by any of the current dogmas, one needs to forget that neither right, left, or middle, despite claims to the key to wisdom, had been able to predict with very few exceptions, the single most important event of the past half century at least, the crash and dissolution of the Soviet Union, no doubt. Politically, this is a comet from outer space smashing into the earth, but its implications are packed in the dry ice of purposeful inattention by all sides. Nobody seems to have been embarrassed by the implications of this catastophic failure. All our political science departments, our big business pundits, our journalists and editors should have been hung out to dry. Instead, there is an oblong nothingness greeting this evidence, which would seem to indicate that our understanding of the political life of our societies is about where it was under Charlemagne. What should have overtaken us is the realization that what we have called insight and wisdom is another disguise for unacknowledged ideology, a state of mind in which conviction comes first and the facts last, if they come at all. As a forger of ideologies, the intellect in the last years of the century gets an A +, but as an observer of paradoxical reality it has been disgraced as never before in history—because it had never before presumed so much authority. All that remains is to admit to hubris, and perhaps in uncustomary humility we may then begin to dissipate our current sense of being condemned to wandering around in circles in a north Atlantic fog. But there is little danger of that happening.