Timebends (104 page)

What principally seemed missing, to Miller, was the political passion of the past, stirred by the Depression, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Vietnam, the anti-nuclear campaign during the Cold War. There seemed a general moral and political flaccidity. He was repelled by a deepening conservatism. Reagan, Ford, Bush and, for a brief moment it appeared (when President Bush was taken to hospital) Dan Quayle, seemed to promise a dying fall to the American century. The unravelling of pre-war liberalism was intensifying and in its place there was really nothing more than an arrogant assertion of American supremacy. To him, the harassment of Bill Clinton marked one more stage in the Right's assault on a Left that had itself become enervated and defensive while the insistence that precise details of his sexual indiscretions should be widely circulated and discussed reminded him of the Puritans whose moral affront was fused to a lubricious fascination with the female body. Ironically, Miller found himself appearing on the same edition of
60 Minutes
as Monica Lewinsky, partly admiring this turn-of-the-century courtesan. The settling of the 1999 election in the Supreme Court seemed to him to mark a final decline of political faith.

Friends, too, were dying. The Protean Jerzy Kosinski, like
Melville's shape-shifting confidence man reinventing himself until suicide ended the charade; Alex North, who composed the music for
Death of a Salesman
and broke with Kazan; Joseph Rauh, who had represented Miller when he appeared before HUAC and again in his appeal against his sentence for Contempt of Congress, and whom Miller regarded as the most impressive and honest man he had ever known; Sandy Calder, sculptor and Roxbury neighbour (as well as being a model for a character in “I Can't Remember Anything”). Then Robert Whitehead, producer for so many of Miller's plays, and finally Kazan, whose 1999 Academy Award he supported, while others sat on their hands, knowing him to be the best of his directors even if the trust between them had been broken. With the loss of each of them, as it seemed to him, a part of his own reality disappeared. Who, after all, was he to call as witnesses to his own life?

In his 1998 play
Mr. Peters' Connections
he would stage the life of a man for whom the great causes have faded into memory and whose friends have gone, a man for whom the fixed points no longer seem in place. The once familiar now seems strange and those who have gone in some way appear more vivid than those who remain. It was, he confessed, to some degree a self-portrait, as well as an expression of his sense of a world lacking in purpose or direction except a backwards drift towards the fundamentalism and tribalism he had captured in his 1994 play,
Broken Glass,
set in 1938 at the time of Kristallnacht but staring into the heart of a contemporary darkness. The play was rehearsed as the former Yugoslavia slid into ethnic barbarism.

But in truth there was an energy to his writing which belies this seeming account of declining powers and a declining world, a momentum wholly at odds with his occasional moments of depression. A powerful current was flowing the other way. Ahead, in 1987, lay the most productive period of his life. The nineties saw
The Ride Down Mount Morgan,
his novella
Homely Girl, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass,
the movie version of
The Crucible,
filmed in the beauty of Hog Island, Massachusetts,
Mr. Peters' Connections, Almost Everybody Wins.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the millennium lay the film version of
Focus
and two further plays:
Resurrection Blues,
and
Finishing the Picture,
along with a sudden explosion of short stories. The revival of
A View from the Bridge
in 1998 won a Tony Award, while the revival of
Death of a Salesman
won four, plus a Lifetime Achievement Award for its writer. In 2001 the National Theatre production in England of
All My Sons
won four
Oliviers. This, in other words, far from being the story of dwindling energy and significance, is the story of a late flowering that hardly has its equal. At no time in his career had he staged so many plays, seen so many of his plays filmed, published so many stories.

He might feel disappointed at the reception of his new work but he had reached a stage when his confidence in that work was unaffected by critical response. Besides, in England he had already been undergoing a renaissance as he published
Timebends.
The Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company had both staged
The Archbishop's Ceiling
based not on the text performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, where he had been persuaded to simplify aspects of it in the name of making it more accessible, but on his original version. In 1987, BBC Radio broadcast
The Golden Years,
the play he had started writing nearly fifty years earlier when he was briefly employed by the Federal Theatre in 1939. Miller listened to the first responses as he was driven to Bristol where he was to give a public reading from
Timebends.
As he left the stage he had to exit the building through the bar where those who had not gone to his performance were drinking. They broke into spontaneous applause, not normal behaviour from British drinkers.

More significant, though, was a dynamic production, that same year, of
A View from the Bridge
at the National Theatre, with Michael Gambon as a fiercely convincing Eddie Carbone, so focused that when Miller walked across the stage in the interval, Gambon's leonine pacing back and forth never faltered. Then came the Young Vic's production of his adaptation of
An Enemy of the People
(which starred Tom Wilkinson and transferred to a West End theatre, much to Miller's amusement then owned by a Right-wing politician and popular writer, the later disgraced Jeffrey Archer) and
Two Way Mirror
with Bob Peck and Helen Mirren.

In 1989 the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies opened at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, an event marked by a high-level seminar of writers, directors and actors, a gala performance of his plays and a celebratory dinner with fireworks lighting the sky beyond the forty-foot windows of Norman Foster's Sainsbury Centre. The following year his first, failed, play,
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
was finally redeemed with a production by the Bristol Old Vic, which moved to London, while the National Theatre's production of
After the Fall
featured Josette Simon, a black actress, in the role of Maggie, a conscious attempt to see the play as more than Miller's account of the collapse of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.

Meanwhile, eastern and central Europe was embracing his work. In 1988 three of his plays were running in Budapest; in 1990 three were running in Moscow. In 1991 four of his plays were staged in Tel Aviv, while in 1995 he would have twenty-seven productions of his plays in Germany. Whatever was happening in America, he was one of the most produced playwrights around the world, Britain's National Theatre staging him more frequently than any other dramatist with the single exception of Shakespeare. Partly because of these productions he travelled widely, often attending rehearsals and, in the case of the Stockholm production of
Death of a Salesman
even assuming the role of director, regretting that he had not done so more often.

Towards the end of the century, however, the pendulum swung. In 1998 New York's Signature Theatre staged a season of his plays, including the première of
Mr. Peters' Connections.
In 1999 the Goodman Theatre production of
Death of a Salesman
reached Broadway and became the hottest ticket in town. On the other side of the millennium came a startling revival of
The Crucible
and two new plays, both of which opened in America. And though neither transferred to Broadway – still, in Miller's mind, the ultimate destination – America seemed at last to be reclaiming as its own a writer whom the rest of the world had been celebrating for half a century.

Over the years, international and American prizes were conferred on him, often prizes he had never heard of and carrying cash sums that left him acutely aware of the fact that though now he had no need of money he had once struggled to survive first to get to university and then to have his plays accepted. Those prizes included the Prince of Asturias Award from Spain and the Jerusalem Prize from Israel. He seized the occasion of both awards, however, to stir the political waters. Spain had meant too much to him as a young man not to refer back to the Civil War in his acceptance speech, while the Jerusalem Prize served to focus his ambiguous feelings about Israel.

Arthur Miller concluded
Timebends
in 1987, with a vision of cold-eyed coyotes from Canada, loping through the Connecticut hills, oblivious to the man living in an old farmhouse who walked each day to a small cabin where he reimagined the world, discontent, as he explained, in his contentment. In the preceding pages he had returned in his memory to the time when he and Inge had planted trees together on the flowing hills, she pregnant with a child, Rebecca, who would one day meet her husband-to-be, Daniel Day-Lewis,
when he was filming
The Crucible.
For Miller, time surged back and forth like a tide, a tide that also swept together fact and fiction, the one generating the other, the energy passing in both directions. Memory was a present fact, as it was for Willy Loman in
Death of a Salesman,
as it would be for Mr. Peters in
Mr. Peters' Connections,
both men tracking back through their lives, reexamining it for clues missed, moments not previously interrogated for their meaning. His book was not only an attempt to register the details of a life, unfolding, as it seemed, logically towards some destination (death, after all, not being that destination, merely a reminder of the urgency of identifying it). It was an attempt to register the shifting patterns of experience, to hear echoes, understand patterns suddenly apparent as though in an epiphany.

In February 2005 he returned to his Connecticut home to die. He travelled the two hours and more from the Manhattan where he had been born to privilege only to see that privilege dissolve. As a child he had dropped fireflies from the roof of his apartment building, watching the glow dwindle as they floated down. Now he chose his Connecticut home for the dying of the light. Inge's ashes already lay nearby (she had died on 30 January 2002), her resting place marked by a simple black stone, found alongside the road where they lived as if placed there for that purpose. Her ashes were contained in an urn shaped by her sculptor son-in-law, Tom. Down the road was where Miller had written most of his plays, in the humid heat of New England summers and the sharp urgency of New England winters.

When he died, on 10 February 2005, the
Independent,
a British national newspaper, cleared its entire front page of news and ran a single story – the death of a playwright. Three and a half thousand miles away from Roxbury, people stopped for a moment and registered the passing of a man who once picked up a Russian novel to read on the subway and conceived the idea that one day he too might be a writer, and went on to be that and a great deal more, speaking out for those in need of help, challenging those who thought to invite his complicity in their crimes. He lies now only a short distance from where, one day, he sat down to write a play about a salesman who had only twenty-four hours to live, who had all the wrong dreams but who haunts the minds of millions around the world, and has done for well over half a century.

Christopher Bigsby
June 2005

Ground zero: Augusta and Isidore Miller before World War I.

Beautiful Mama, handsome Kermit, and me
(left).