Timebends (103 page)

What was missing, too, were the prurient details of his relationship with Marilyn Monroe for which he feared those marketing and buying his book would be looking. Indeed, he had been angry when a cover design was proposed which featured her image, while he carefully policed the excerpts chosen for newspaper serialisation, afraid that the hunger for details of America's snow queen would distort the truth of both their lives. Her myth, he knew, had the power to refract the light.

In retrospect, he published
Timebends
on the very cusp of change. As if to underscore his points about a forgotten Depression, the economy obliged that same year with a collapsing stock market, which the chairman of the New York Stock Exchange described as the nearest thing to a meltdown he wished ever to see. The Cold War, meanwhile, was running down. In November 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, though he was one of those sceptical about a united Germany, never forgetting what a once powerful German nation had done to those he still regarded as his own. His early life had been dominated by the fact of fascism and he feared its reappearance. Two years later, in 1991, came what turned out to be the first Gulf War, whose ferocity appalled him, though not as much as the second, whose specious justifications left him coldly angry. That same year, 1991, Pan American World Airways closed down, a minor event but even so enough to feed into what would become
Mr. Peters' Connections
as an image of the dissolution of the familiar, a reassuring sense of order.

He remained fascinated, if frequently appalled, by world events, which he did more than observe from his Connecticut home. His sense of the writer was not of a reclusive artist drawing his privacies around him. He spoke in person to Nelson Mandela and Fidel Castro, as he had earlier to Mikhail Gorbachev, meanwhile firing off pieces to the Op Ed page of the
New York Times
mocking the values and policies of those whose disregard for the disadvantaged seemed to him an affront to the America he wished to celebrate. For the fact is that he was a patriot, though not one whose patriotism involved the flying of flags and the endorsement of an imperial posture. He took America's promises to its citizens entirely seriously and was the more dismayed when they were so consistently broken.

He was engaged as a citizen and believed that he had a responsibility to be a resistant force. At the same time, his plays of the 1990s and the new century, from
The Ride Down Mount Morgan,
to
Resurrection Blues,
were themselves interventions in what he believed should be a national debate about values. Theatre, for him, was not, and never had been, a retreat from the world but a confrontation with it. His plays were by turns comic and profoundly serious as he registered tremors in the culture, as he observed those whose lives lacked transcendence precisely because they no longer knew where to seek it, believing themselves and their desires to be pre-eminent and the material world as marking the limits of human meaning.

In 1987 Miller would have had every right to believe that his work was done. Few writers had had careers as long. There was never a day his plays were not performed somewhere in the world. It was not uncommon for him to have several running simultaneously in major theatres in Russia, Israel, Hungary or Britain. In Moscow he watched performances of three in a single day. At home his plays of the 1940s and 1950s were studied in schools and universities. He had been writing for over fifty years while it was forty-three from his first Broadway play, a disaster that had sent him briefly to the novel, before
All My Sons
announced the arrival of a man who would dominate the American theatre for the best part of a decade before contracting a high-maintenance marriage and writing no more than
The Misfits
for the next nine years. It was also, however, nearly twenty years since he registered a real success, with
The Price,
and he had had to learn, at least in the American context, to adjust to a certain disregard as if he had outlived his time.

Danger: Memory!
prompted poor reviews, while
Up from Paradise,
the musical version of
The Creation of the World and Other Business,
despite a brief run in Cleveland, appeared to have no takers, certainly not in New York. Even the film he was working on,
Almost Everybody Wins,
a development of “Some Kind of Love Story” (which itself would form part of
Two Way Mirror,
initially
Two by AM),
was proving difficult and would be a disappointment.

All of which sounds as if his career was fated to be an unfinished symphony. The oddity, however, was that he was still respected as a major icon of American cultural life. His plays may have been thrown out of embassy libraries when HUAC sent its team of moronic philistines abroad, but they were certainly still on the shelves of municipal libraries around the country. The early ones were regularly produced. It was his later work that had become
invisible, stealth plays that were seldom picked up by the radar. The greater oddity, though, was that his reputation was higher than ever outside America, each new play being picked up with enthusiasm, often by directors and actors working for major companies even as he fought to bring his work into New York, settled for minor venues and watched as it encountered critical disdain and runs were startlingly abbreviated.

In 1988, for the
New York Times,
he wrote a review of Eugene O'Neill's letters. In the 1930s he had seen little relevance in him. He was drawn instead to what had seemed the focused political and social anger of Clifford Odets. In 1947, however, he had been embarrassed that All
My Sons
had beaten
The Iceman Cometh
to the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Now, he recognised a kindred spirit. Here, after all, was a man whose tragic vision had seemed out of phase with American positivism and who had left his final plays for production outside the country. Tennessee Williams, too, seemed to have suffered a similar disregard. His own fate, therefore, appeared of a piece with that reserved for other American playwrights as European drama and the American avant-garde attracted attention, at least for a while.

The disregard, and something more, focused on his new plays whose runs were often so short that they barely registered on the national consciousness. Even
Timebends
itself, an international success, never made its way to the best-seller list in his own country and provoked severe criticism by those disinclined to accept a man whose youthful commitments seemed to colour responses decades later. The
New Republic
published an attack in an issue whose cover featured a caricature that Miller himself described as ‘vile'.
Vanity Fair
and
Commentary
joined in, the latter a long-term source of antagonism, as did Richard Gilman in
Theatre Magazine.
Robert Brustein, from the heights of Yale, then Harvard, hesitated between condescension and dismissal. If there was a wave of the future, Miller was not, it appeared, riding it. His two one-act plays,
Danger: Memory!,
in 1987, were, he felt, savaged. Subsequent plays were dismissed or mauled, sometimes closed down not because of a lack of audience response but the peremptory economics of Broadway.
Broken Glass,
in 1994, would close after two months with sold-out houses, albeit with audiences often not paying the full price for their tickets.
The Last Yankee
managed thirteen performances. In 1998, Patrick Stewart stood on the stage following performances urging audiences to tell their friends about
The Ride Down Mount Morgan,
since the advertising budget seemed to him inadequate – an
intervention that earned him the ire of the producers. In many ways Miller's fate was tied up with that of a Broadway which he saw as a natural home long after it had ceased to be such for him or most serious writers, unless the play had been validated in England or in regional theatre.

By contrast to the reception of
Timebends,
when Elia Kazan's autobiography was published, it was praised for its truthfulness, though on certain events their accounts differed significantly. To Miller, Kazan, an Olympic womaniser, was a pragmatist who had sacrificed others to serve his Hollywood career and his book an extended self-justification. He was the figure behind Lyman Felt in
The Ride Down Mount Morgan,
the play he had now been writing for several years and briefly tried out as a novel. Felt is a man of high talent, charm, and the capacity to love. He also, apparently, has no moral core, believing in the integrity of his feelings, elevating betrayal into a moral principle. Beyond offering a partial portrait of Kazan, Miller was responding to developments in society, as the self was placed at the centre of attention.

Arthur Miller sought no consolation in a God, whom he defined as one who was not there when you needed him. That did not mean that he was devoid of belief. It was, he insisted, and spelled out in
After the Fall,
for man to create the God whose absence he decried. If there was to be a pattern, a shape, a coherence, then that would not be gifted by orthodoxy, or ideology, as he had once believed it might. It would not lie in a series of contingent events but in the mind and imagination which alone gives form to the formless, hence the power and significance of art. Nor does this exclude the moral once it is understood that morality is not the product of metaphysical edict but of what he liked to call human charity.

He understood the Jewish sense that everything could be swept away. As he explained in
Timebends,
he saw Americans learn this as a social fact in 1929, but the precariousness he acknowledged was more profound than that. What he discovered from a visit to a concentration camp, and from his attendance, in Frankfurt, at a trial of Auschwitz guards, was how thin was the membrane that separates from pure anarchy, a Jewish inheritance that would become the inheritance of all. He watched occasional evidences of a resurgent anti-Semitism, aware that being Jewish was not a choice. In a fascinating way, Jews were sometimes “them” and sometimes “us” in his essays, as if he wanted simultaneously to embrace and distance himself from an identity into which he had been inducted as a child.

In 1948 he had not only attended a rally in Madison Square Gardens celebrating the establishment of the new state, but was one of the featured speakers.

He was present at the Waldorf Astoria when Andrei Gromyko arrived to mark the Soviet Union's support. He might not have been a practising Jew but the idea of a homeland where, as he remarked, even the prostitutes were Jewish, appealed. Over the succeeding years he watched with a mixture of pleasure and deepening dismay as the country established itself, survived attacks, but also began to behave like other states, impervious, at times, as it seemed to him, to the suffering of others. He signed protests, bewailed the treatment of the Palestinians and when, in 1998, he wrote a poem marking the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Israel it expressed precisely that sense of admiration, understanding, ambiguity and betrayal that he had felt over the years.

There was something in the tight Jewish community which appealed even as he resisted claims to a special status that cut them off from a wider community whose too total embrace they rejected as another form of annihilation. He had married outside the faith, as had his first wife. They did so at a time when religion had seemed irrelevant, and not only to them. Radical politics had stood in its stead. And though that would collapse of its own weight, he could never return to the embrace of the shul. As a teenager he had briefly looked for meaning there, only to be turned aside by those who failed to recognise his need if not his faith. It was ironic that Marilyn Monroe should have made a show of converting to marry him (a conversion which hardly went further than learning how to cook certain Jewish foods), when he himself felt little more than a respect for Jewish cultural tradition and an awareness of an embattled identity in a country that itself never ceased debating the issue of national identity. What he did register, though, beyond the warm embrace which he simultaneously wished to submit to and resist, was a powerful sense of contingency, of threat, not least because what Nazism had revealed about human nature was not negated by its seeming defeat.

There is an urgency to Miller's work which goes beyond that which he felt as he drove back from Salem hearing the newscaster recite the names offered up by Elia Kazan, defending himself at the cost of others (though Miller was never in any doubt that the fault lay not with those who acquiesced but with those who illegitimately demanded acquiescence). That urgency comes from the fact that for the individual and state alike – and, beyond that, humanity in general
– the sand in the hourglass runs fast and true. If meaning is to be identified, created, embraced, time is short. Willy Loman has just twenty-four hours. For John Proctor, the world turns in a second.

Timebends
carries the conventional sub-title,
“A Life”,
but the life concerned is not merely Miller's own, nor yet that of a generation or even that of a culture with which he conducted a never-ending debate. It is the life of humankind, restlessly feeling its way between its proclivity for self-destruction and its capacity for selflessness. In his shuttling back and forth through time he was trying not only to account for himself and his actions, but for a history that constantly disappointed but had to be re-engaged.

Arthur Miller was seventy-two when
Timebends
was published. He confessed that to end it was like the ending of a life. For the first time he felt truly old. There were, after all, grandchildren, and would be more, in whom, incidentally, he took infinite pleasure. His society seemed to have taken an inward path, the “me decade” having given way to a decade in which greed seemed to be sanctified and a national hero was made of Oliver North who had traded arms to Iran to fund the Contra guerillas in Nicaragua, an act only called scandalous by those out of step with a new pragmatism, those for whom patriotism meant something more than expediency masquerading as duty.