Timebends (55 page)

If under the pressures to go to the right I moved even further left for a time, it is explicable, if it is at all, as a willful act of self-abandonment and defiance of my new-won standing in the world. Respectable conformity was the killer of the dream; I was sick of being afraid, of life and of myself and of what on many days seemed the inexorable march of the cheerful totalitarian patriots.

I attended a few meetings of Communist writers in living rooms, but I felt as unreal there as I had as a loner. Decent enough middleclass people, they were probably searching out much the same species of self-realization that would later be sought in one or another of the cults or self-improvement klatches. But in this time, self-cleansing came through sacrificing the present to the perfect socialist future in order to banish emptiness, contradictions, ambiguities, and arrive at a solid and straightforward moral position. A certain smugness and mutual congratulation on the left was hard to reconcile with all the uncertainties bedeviling me, distant as I felt from self-knowledge then. In any case, it was one of my paradoxes that I could call for community and human solidarity while finding it all but impossible to sit at any kind of meeting or really to accept the leveling implied. And when I was finally unable to return, I had to wonder what had happened to the possibility of a philosophical, transpolitical ideal of the kind attributed to an Ibsen or a Chekhov. What seemed to have displaced the nobility of the ideal was a tactical or strategic maneuvering, vis-á-vis oneself as well as the nation and the world. Later I came to think of the dilemma in terms of the absence of transcendence, but I was not yet at a point where politics was an evasion in a particular sense; it still seemed like the ultimate reality to which one ought to be attached. If I turned away from it here, it was as much from a sense of bewilderment and dissatisfaction with myself as from disillusionment with others.

By this time, the early fifties, the woods were filling up with ex-radicals disillusioned not only with the Soviets but with liberalism and even the promise of science itself as an enhancement of the spirit. Jews were embracing Catholicism, socialists were joining the Communist witch-hunt with no regard for its civil liberties implications, and lifelong pacifists were banging the Cold War drums. It all seemed another version of escape from the moral tangle we all knew life had become. Some distaste clung to the
spectacle of the born-again anti-Soviet ex-radical, in part because the time was so opportune for such conversions. Besides, I was taunted by my own tenuous hold on steadfast faithfulness in general, and my fears aroused the self-accusation of egoism that I had carried with me since early years. In any case, castigating the Soviets, fashionable as it had become, was not the issue, it seemed to me; the question was what one was
for.
How had these conversions transformed these people, lifted them from the dead flat plane on which most lived? If the left was telling its beads, repeating its ritual prayers to the always receding future of a classless and just society, the new orthodoxy of the right was demanding a confirmation of American society that I could hardly give, with such examples before me as the forbidden screenplay in the drawer, revealing not only the mass oppression of thousands of people under the bridge but now the repressive power of a right-wing union reaching across the country into the studios of Columbia Pictures.

I should have exulted in my aloneness and taken heart from Ibsen's signature line in
An Enemy of the People
—“He is strongest who is most alone.” But the Jew in me shied from private salvation as something close to sin. One's truth must add its push to the evolution of public justice and mercy, must transform the spirit of the city whose brainless roar went on and on at both ends of the bridge.

In the early fifties the so-called theatre of the absurd was still in the offing, and I would resist most of its efforts as spurious, but each generation of writers has an investment in its accomplishments that it is obliged to defend. Had I really obeyed the logic of my daily observations, however, I would have been an absurdist myself, for most of the time I was shaking my head at what was going on and laughing the dry laugh of incredulous amazement.

I had sold
Salesman
to Stanley Kramer, who made the film for Columbia. My sole participation was to complain that the screenplay had managed to chop off almost every climax of the play as though with a lawnmower, leaving a flatness that was baffling in view of the play's demonstrated capacity for stirring its audiences in the theatre. Stanley Roberts, the author of the screenplay, flew east to sit with me and bring me to reason, and I recall one response of his that may illuminate the problem.

In the first act, after Linda pleads with her sons to have compassion for their father, Biff relents and agrees to stay on in New York
and look for a job, saying that he will simply keep out of Willy's way. But Linda rejects this as inadequate; he must give his father psychological support. To Biff this means relinquishing his opposition to Willy's ideas about how he should live his own life, and he explodes, “I hate this city and I'll stay here! Now what do you want?” To which Linda replies, “He's dying, Biff,” and proceeds to describe Willy's preparations for suicide.

This small but important step toward the approaching climax was simply skipped over, and I was mystified. “But,” Roberts explained, “how can he shout at his mother like that?”

This was only part of the trouble with the film and with Hollywood films in general, but it may have been related to the main and deeper difficulty: Fredric March was directed to play Willy as a psycho, all but completely out of control, with next to no grip on reality. March had been our first choice for the stage role but had turned it down—although he persuaded himself in later years that he had not been offered it formally. He could certainly have been a wonder in the film, but as a psychotic, he was predictable in the extreme; more than that, the misconception melted the tension between a man and his society, drawing the teeth of the play's social contemporaneity, obliterating its very context. If he was nuts, he could hardly stand as a comment on anything. It was as though Lear had never had real political power but had merely imagined he was king.

But such were the times that even this weakened version was thought too radical. I was first asked by Columbia's publicity department to issue an anti-Communist statement to appease the American Legion, which warned that my failure to take an ad in
Variety
castigating the Reds, a ritual of the period, would bring on a picketing campaign against the film nationwide. I declined the request. The next thing I knew, I was invited by Columbia to the screening of a twenty-five-minute short they had just completed, which they proposed to run as a preface to the
Death of a Salesman
film wherever it played.

This small masterpiece had been shot on the campus of the Business School of New York's City College and consisted mainly of interviews with professors who blithely explained that Willy Loman was entirely atypical, a throwback to the past when salesmen did indeed have some hard problems. But nowadays selling was a fine profession with limitless spiritual compensations as well as financial ones. In fact, they all sounded like Willy Loman with a diploma, fat with their success, to which had been added, of course, Columbia Pictures' no doubt generous pourboire for participating
in this admirable essay of elucidation. When the lights came on in the screening room on Seventh Avenue, the two or three executives watching the film with me waited for my reaction in what I interpreted as a vaguely defensive if not chagrined silence.

Sitting there with these well-paid men, I was caught in a barrage of contradictory sensations, but over everything hung an inexpressible horror at the charade it all represented. The unseen presence in the room was the patriots' threat to kill the film commercially with a yahoo campaign against me. Fear was the only genuine emotion here, but this of course could not be acknowledged. Instead, I was pressed to admit that the short was “not really bad” and that “it would help sell the picture.” But no one, probably right up to Harry Cohn, their employer, really believed I was a menace to the country, and certainly the film wasn't.

“Why the hell did you make the picture if you're so ashamed of it?” I asked. “Why should anybody not get up and walk out of the theatre if
Death of a Salesman
is so outmoded and pointless?”

I wasn't sure, but I thought my tirade was a relief to them, and I muttered something about suing the company for destroying the value of my property with this defamatory short. I began to think as I became aware of a certain defeated lassitude in their arguments that privately they might even be admiring my stand. But that would only make it worse, and not only for them and for me but somehow for the country in which we were carrying on this massive pretense. If I shared some of their terror, I also had what they did not, a pride in my play that was not possible to betray and that finally was my anchor, for at bottom I was being asked to concur that
Death of a Salesman
was morally meaningless, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. And to that it was easy to say no. We all parted in polite good spirits, and if the short was ever shown I never heard about it. They had done their duty and could now report back that I was threatening a lawsuit, which was probably enough to get Columbia off the hook with the Legion—doubtless the whole point of the entire exercise, which must have cost the company a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

Thus, while I still held some cards in this game of Let's Kill Miller, I had no illusions about the fact that powerful people had me in their sights and were only awaiting a clear shot. But I have a strong forgetter and managed to turn to my work despite what often felt like a glacial pressure to knuckle under. There were even times when the whole atmosphere turned truly comical. A man
whose name I vaguely recalled from the distant past called me one morning, saying he had been an officer in the Lincoln Brigade, had known Ralph Neaphus in Spain, and had something important he wished to discuss with me. I supposed he must be in some political trouble and had the unfortunate idea that I was respectable enough to help him out of it, a big mistake that was still being made in those days. But when he sat on my living room couch with his black briefcase on his lap and announced with an uncertain look of cheerful affability that he wanted to sell me stock in some Texas oil wells, I knew that times were changing. He explained that he had taken up this line of work after being blacklisted from a union job but that gradually he had come to enjoy it and was starting to make some real money at it. Then came the kind of line that history itself sometimes writes to set the theme of a period. “I mean,” he said, with genuine earnestness now, “let's not forget that when the workers take over the country they're going to need oil. And even more than now because socialism will expand production!” Calvinism is immortal and is reborn in the strangest places; the important thing always is to be sure one is doing others some good.

These were the days when a frightened and despairing Louis Untermeyer shut the door of his Remsen Street apartment and did not come out again for a year. And I would not realize until thirty years later, when I learned it from Harrison Salisbury of the
New York Times,
how wonderfully mirrorlike the reflection of paranoia was on the other side of the world. The Stalin censorship at this very time had been screwed down so tight that it had become impossible to report more than official handouts, and the Western press departed Moscow in total frustration, leaving the city to a handful of agency reporters. Salisbury, then the
Times
Moscow correspondent, was determined to stay on and penetrate the frozen Soviet terror. To report any real news at all, he had to resort to a kind of impromptu code in his dispatches. In America, damages might be limited by constitutional safeguards, but the main question of political discussion in both countries was reduced to loyalty; in the eighties, Salisbury learned—thanks to the Freedom of Information Act—that he himself had been .under heavy FBI suspicion as a Red agent, in part because he had insisted on remaining in Moscow after so many of the other reporters had left. Such were the times.

But how to say all this, how to find the form for outcry? Little in current novels and nothing in the theatre so much as hinted at the burgeoning calamity, and the movies were dancing the country
into happy time. Beneath the bridge, though, there was no attempt to disguise that a new era had come to pass, or at least that a certain continuity with the past was being disassembled and smashed.

Barred from the waterfront for lack of a Coast Guard pass under the new Korean War regulations, Mitch Berenson had to find a job in private industry. For the first time in his adult life, all of which he had spent as an organizer, he found himself confronting a strange dog-eat-dog society for which he was as ill equipped as a seminarian who had quit the priesthood. He had literally no conventional social history, no conventional employment background, no social security card, and no training. He had surfaced into a raging competitive torrent where he quickly had to learn to swim or sink.

Certain he had wasted his life (he could not know that in a few years Tony Anastasia, doubtless as a consequence of his and Longhi's influence, would build the first medical facility on the waterfront for longshoremen, the Anastasia Clinic), his mood was oddly ebullient nonetheless. For if he lacked all experience in a competitive society, he now discovered with growing surprise that his life as an organizer had certain tangencies to that of an entrepreneur. Both had to decide where to go in the mornings, whom to call or see, and in general what to do with time. Routine was as alien to him as to any capitalist, spontaneous risk-taking everything; the awful truth dawned that selling a revolution was not totally unrelated to selling anything else.