Long Pauses

Tag: Author: Miller

  • Great Critics (And the Rest of Us)

    I was talking to a friend recently, encouraging him to post some of his film writing online, and he responded with a very simple, “Why?” He’s a bright guy, certainly bright enough to realize the value of critical thinking, literacy, analysis, etc. — all of those muscles that are exercised in the writing process. What he meant was, “Why add my voice to all of the noise when so many other critics say it so much better?”

    I’m editing the first chapter of my dissertation right now, trying, as my director recommended, to insert more of my own voice into the “critical discussion” of Arthur Miller. Yesterday I made the mistake of pulling Christopher Bigsby’s latest book from the library shelf. Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005) will, I assume, be Bigsby’s final statement on Miller. At 500+ pages, it covers the playwright’s entire career, from the student plays he wrote at the University of Michigan through his last major work, Finishing the Picture, and also includes essays on Miller’s fiction and “Arthur Miller as a Jewish Writer.”

    Bigsby has spent the last forty years proving himself again and again the best critic of 20th century drama. His first book, Confrontation and Commitment (1968), was one of the first — and remains one of the best — studies of the American theater during its transition in the 1950s and early-1960s from the social realism of early Miller and Williams to the more radical experiments of Edward Albee and LeRoi Jones, among others. Since then, he’s published books on Albee, Mamet, Stoppard, and Dada and Surrealism, and he’s edited ten or fifteen critical studies of modern American drama, contemporary English drama, the second Black Renaissance, and the radical imagination and the liberal tradition. And then there are the six major, Miller-related studies.

    Here’s an experiment. I’ll literally open the book to a random page, skim quickly over the text, and grab a line or two.

    On All My Sons:

    Joe is an accommodationist. His public denials are matched by his private ones. When Kate asks if Chris has discussed marrying Ann his reply is “he didn’t tell me any more than he told you” (106), though we have just witnessed such a discussion. Having practiced private deceits, he seems to have internalized his own denials.

    On The Crucible:

    To be a young girl in Salem was to have no role but obedience, no function but unquestioning faith, no freedom except a willingness to submit to those with power over their lives. Sexuality was proscribed, the imagination distrusted, emotions focused solely on the stirring of the spirit. Rebellion, when it came, was thus likely to take as its target firstly those with least access to power, then those for whom virtue alone was insufficient protection.

    On After the Fall:

    Quentin survives on something more substantial than the thin gruel of irony. The democracy of guilt holds no attraction for him. He finds in Holga the figure of his redemption, acknowledging the past and the insights of others but committing to the future. He is no longer the victim of history, his own or the world’s, but prepared to live with the knowledge of freedom and the uses to which a flawed humanity will put it.

    Reading Bigsby gives me two visions of my future. In one, I’m sitting in a book-lined office, working well into old age in a vain effort to write something as articulate and all-encompassing. In the other, I still have the books, but they’re at home. They’re my refuge from some day job. And when people ask me what I think about Arthur Miller, I tell them, “You want to know about Miller? Read Bigsby. He’s already said everything you need to know, and he said it better than anyone before or since.”

  • Kushner on Miller

    From The Nation:

    He made it clear in his plays and his essays that his critical thinking and social consciousness had their genesis in the red politics that were pervasive when he was growing up, a politics catalyzed by the suffering he witnessed and experienced in the Great Depression, a politics shaped in response to the toxic, obnoxious valorization of greed always, always re-emerging in American history as a bedrock tenet of the political right. Although he refused the mechanical determinism of the unthinking Marxist left, he created in his greatest play a drama in which it is impossible to avoid thinking about economics–money–in any attempt to render coherent the human tragedy unfolding before you.

    Consider the Lomans: What has brought darkness down upon this family? Their flaws are part of their tragedy, but only a part–every flaw is magnified, distorted, made fatal by, well, alienation, by the market, where the pressure is inhuman and the human is expendable. Consider the moment when the Nothing of tragedy is enunciated, and annunciated, in Death of a Salesman, Biff and Willy’s final fight (“Pop, I’m nothing! I’m nothing, Pop! Can’t you understand that? There’s no spite in it anymore. I’m just what I am, that’s all. Will you let me go, for Christ’s sake?”). It’s tragic negation, vast and shatteringly intimate; everything is annihilated, and at the same time something new is being born. It’s “nothing” of the tragedies of Euripides and Shakespeare, and in Miller’s postwar, marketplace masterpiece, one hears an echo of another “nothing,” tragic but also political–namely, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

  • Arthur Miller

    I am not sure what we are upholding any more—are we good by merely saying no to evil? Even in a righteous ‘no’ there’s some disguise. Isn’t it necessary—to say—finally to say yes—to something?
    — Quentin, After the Fall

    Last Thursday, while reading a recent interview with Norman Mailer, I was struck by how unlikely it was that all of the novelists and playwrights who have worked their way into my dissertation had also managed to not only survive the 20th century, but to do so productively. No small feat considering the World Wars and the Red Hunts and the fickleness of literary tastes. Arthur Miller, of course, passed away the next day. He was 89.

    I’m a few revisions away from finishing the Miller section of my project, and I’ve come away from the experience ambivalent about both his life and his work. I can’t find the exact quote right now, but I tend to agree with a comment made by Tony Kushner a decade or so ago, when he criticized Miller’s plays for their poetry-starved language. But, like Kushner, I’m still moved by so much of Death of a Salesman. You can’t not be moved by Salesman. It’s too perfectly plotted, too pathetically spot-on in its portrait of other-directed status-seeking and failure.

    I like moments in Miller’s other work, too. That I’m still frustrated and angered (rather than bored) by the inevitability of Proctor’s death, even after reading the damn play 15 or 20 times, is some testament to the craft of The Crucible. And After the Fall, though more uneven than any other landmark American play, still pleases me by virtue of its ambition if too seldom its execution.

    The Price is a perfectly structured character piece: two more brothers struggling with a father’s legacy, two more versions of Kermit and Arthur Miller, the good son who sacrificed his own dreams for the sake of the family and his younger sibling who found success only after leaving home. And I’m also really fond of a short play called A Memory of Two Mondays, an autobiographical piece about a young, would-be student who takes a job at an auto parts warehouse in order to save money for college. His (the young man’s, I mean) naive idealizing of blue collar workers is both genuine and admiring and condescending, and that tension makes the play one of Miller’s more insightful comments on America’s real political life.

    Given a lazy afternoon and a stack of Miller’s work to choose from, I would probably grab The Misfits, which is a compelling read, particularly if you’re able to divorce your impressions of it from the film and from Marilyn. Not likely, I know. But try sometime. The Misfits contains some of Miller’s most artful language. It’s also the first of his works that I would choose to teach.

    Miller positioned himself from the very beginning of his career as a left-leaning public intellectual. He wasn’t the first American playwright to do so, as some of the odes to him I’ve read this week have claimed, but he spent most of his life, I think, on the side of justice and often made real personal and professional sacrifices for the cause. His politics made him an enemy of the Right when he balked at the hypocrisy of anti-communist politicking, and an enemy of the Left when his “confused liberalism” (in the words of Eric Mottram) was deemed unsatisfactory at a time of revolutionary struggle. Miller, for his part, seemed most interested in simply understanding the human causes of human troubles. The work of the artist, you might say.

  • Media Blackout

    I’ve toyed with the idea of posting a prediction for tomorrow’s outcome, but the fact is that I’m just too riddled with anxiety. A prediction would require that I go sifting through polling data with a calculator and a map. And, even more exhausting, I’d have to think seriously about the fallout: the inevitable court challenges, the days (weeks? months?) of political posturing and legal maneuvering, the general acrimony, and the slack-jawed wonder I’ll feel when it’s all decided, finally, regardless of the outcome. I’ll make only one prediction: whoever wins — and excuse my Fre-, er, my Cheney — is fucked. I feel a bit like Ethel in Millennium Approaches: “History is about to crack wide open.”

    And speaking of the Rosenbergs, rather than making predictions (or reading any news that might spoil my distorted sense of guarded hope), I have instead been getting up each morning and working on my dissertation, burying myself in 1937-1956. The significance? In 1937 Arthur Miller was an undergrad at the University of Michigan, reporting on efforts to unionize General Motors plants in Detroit and Flint for the school paper. He was also writing his first plays, which are like Clifford Odets’ except without all the nuance. (If you’re not familiar with Odets, that was me being sarcastic.) Miller has characters say things like:

    I’m a Communist because I want the people to take the power that comes with ownership away from the little class of capitalists who have it now.

    Subtle, eh?

    In 1956 Miller was called to testify before HUAC. His hearing came nine years after the committee’s first trip to Hollywood, three years after Elia Kazan’s testimony, and three years after the Broadway debut of The Crucible, and things were beginning to change. Miller, in fact, could have gotten out of the mess entirely if he had just allowed Marilyn Monroe to have her photo taken with the committee members beforehand. But he didn’t. And he testified. And that testimony helped to secure his reputation as our moral conscience, or something. And I’m doing my damnedest to figure out what this can teach us about the American Left.

  • When (My) Worlds Collide

    “He just sits there drinking iced tea, never ordering a thing to eat. So he was married to Marilyn Monroe. Big deal.”

    “Um, that was Arthur Miller. Not Norman Mailer.”

    It’s a common mistake.

    I only watch one network television show — Gilmore Girls — and I watch it every damned week. Tonight’s episode, by my reckoning, counted officially as dissertation work. Norman Mailer was actually in the episode. Many, many times. And at one point Sookie yelled at him while waving about a paperback copy of Armies of the Night — the same edition, I might add, that I have meticulously underlined and annotated. I feel a bit dizzy.

  • Living with Miller

    According to Microsoft Word, I wrote the first fifteen pages of the first chapter of my dissertation in November 2003, before life and other projects got in the way. So now I have these fifteen pages (which read quite well, actually) and no idea what comes next. I mean, I know that I have to write about Arthur Miller, but I no longer remember what I had intended to say. And so I’ve spent the last five or six days reading. And reading. With more of the same to come.

    After living with Miller for the last few days — after rereading The Crucible and After the Fall and a three inch stack of photocopied criticism — I’ve come to one significant conclusion: I don’t like Miller. His early work shows an obvious knack for wrenching every last drop of sentiment and inevitable heartbreak from a tragic narrative, but, damn, they are really unpleasant to read. His language is starving for poetry.

    But Miller is a dramatist of ideas, one might argue, which is true. It’s also the reason that he is the starting point for my project. Certainly no other American writer of the late-1940s and early-1950s was so publicly interrogating the nation’s postwar, capitalist values. But like many of his critics, I find little value in his critique, which seems to offer only ahistorical, liberal platitudes in response to particular historical conditions. It’s no coincidence, I think, that Joe Keller, Willy Loman, John Proctor, and Eddie Carbone all die at the end of Miller’s most famous plays. Suicides, murder victims, and proud martyrs make for good tragic heroes but lousy politics.

    That’s why I’m more intrigued by Miller’s work of the 1960s. Gay and Roslyn ride off into an uncertain future at the end of The Misfits, as does Quentin in After the Fall. Miller’s turn toward existentialism and toward the possibility of a life lived in good faith has real political consequences that will be fun to explore in the chapter.

  • Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    Arthur Miller, Then and Now

    No new Cine Club notes this week, as we decided spontaneously last night (and with mixed results) to watch John Huston’s The Misfits (1961). I love parts of the film — Thelma Ritter’s jokes and Montgomery Clift’s performance, in particular — and I think it’s a fascinating film to talk about. Clark Gable is so perfectly cast as the anachronistic cowboy lost in a world of conspicuous consumerism. Gable himself is as out of place as the character he portrays — Gable, the classic Hollywood star duking it out with a raucous bunch of method actors.

    Also, it’s impossible for me to watch Marilyn Monroe in this picture and not imagine then-husband and screenwriter Arthur Miller by her side, feeding her lines and exploiting her beauty. The Misfits borders on pornographic in its treatment of Marilyn. Her body is oggled constantly by every man she encounters, by the camera in leering close-ups, and by the audience. In Miller’s short story treatment for the film, Marilyn’s character, Roslyn, personifies that same strange blend of sexpot beauty, schoolgirl innocence, and sympathetic fragility that Monroe exudes on screen, but on paper Roslyn can exist as metaphor, just as the horses that are so viciously and unnecessarily broken at the end of the story/film can exist as metaphors. When captured on film, however, the real seems to overpower the symbolic, and we’re forced to watch a real woman (with whose tragic end we are all familiar) be exploited and real horses be broken, which is a different thing entirely. (I’m sure that there is a film theorist, probably French, whose work would help me explain that better.)

    And speaking of Arthur Miller and his exploitation of Marilyn Monroe, it turns out that my favorite TV actor, Peter Krause, is getting poor reviews for his turn as Quentin in the current Broadway revival of Miller’s After the Fall. Seems a horrible bit of miscasting to me. The role was originated by Jason Robards in 1964, under direction by Elia Kazan. Robards was, by turns, desperate and terrifying and imposing and, when necessary, sympathetic. Krause is so good at provoking our sympathy; I wonder if the reported lifelessness of his performance was a deliberate attempt to moderate that somewhat. For what it’s worth, I’d still really like to see the production.

  • My Dissertation (in the News)

    “A World in Which Everything Hurts,” a profile of Arthur Miller in The Forward, gets bonus points for mentioning, in a single paragraph, three of the authors I’m writing about in my dissertation:

    In contrast, for example, to Tony Kushner, whose humanism seems to spring from a secular engagement with Jewish religion and history, Miller seems to come to his universalism only through the abandonment of the Jewish tradition. And in his rejectionism, he fails to display the depth or nuance of Philip Roth, whose own critique of Jewish life — however damning — reflects an intense, intimate confrontation with his subject.

    Another key figure from my project, Norman Mailer, shows up in The New York Metro, discussing the upcoming Republican Convention with his son, John Buffalo Mailer. Apparently I’m right on track in looking back to the fall of the New Left (and books like Mailer’s Armies of the Night) in trying to make sense of the contemporary Left’s problems:

    The march on the Pentagon even ended up having a final effect that was impressive. I think it was the beginning of the end of the war in Vietnam, and for a very simple reason: Lyndon Johnson saw 50,000 mostly middle-class people come to Washington to stage a set of demonstrations that were going to be opposed by troops and police. LBJ knew people well. From his point of view, most middle-class people were hardly full of physical bravery. If they were going to pay their own money and come by car or bus or train to march into the possibility of being hit over the head with a cop’s club, then there had to be millions of people behind them.

     

  • A Writing Exercise

    I spent my lunch hour over in the library, where I went snooping for some old Arthur Miller essays. Most have been collected in fine editions, of course, but I like to put my hands on the originals — to grab those bound periodicals from the stacks and flip through their fragile pages, discovering the context within which the words that inspired my work were first published. It’s the wannabe historian in me, I guess.

    Unfortunately, Miller’s essays are just old enough that, except for a piece in the July 3, 1954 issue of The Nation — a fascinating McCarthy-era adaptation of Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” — I was forced to leave the stacks and venture down into the microfilm room. Contrary to popular opinion, I actually like the microfilm room (though I’ll be the first to admit that it absolutely pales in comparison to the real thing). I like browsing through the rows of tiny carboard boxes, threading the microfilm through the reader, whizzing my way through pages and pages of history at the touch of a button. It makes me feel, well, scholarly.

    I spent my lunch hour whizzing mostly through Life, Harper’s, Esquire, and the like. 1958 was an interesting year for Miller. He was married to Marilyn Monroe then, making him America’s most recognizable “serious” artist. In the year-end, double-issue of Life that year, an issue devoted to “Entertainment” that featured a multi-page pictorial of Miss M, Miller contributed a few hundred words: “My Wife Marilyn.” It’s accompanied by a charming portrait of the two together — the Jewish intellectual and his bombshell shiksa wife. The photo is so impossibly metaphoric, so iconic even, that I can’t look at it and see two real human beings. The image, refracted through my mind’s eye, is too blurred by celebrity and tragic history.

    I’m most intrigued, though, by the April 1956 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, in which Miller published his seminal essay on “The Family in Modern Drama.” For a cultural studies guy like myself, the issue is a gold mine. Miller’s essay is sandwiched between a two-page spread from General Electric — “Progress is Our Most Important Product” — and Averell Harriman’s analysis of “The Soviet Challenge and American Policy.” It’s like a snapshot of my dissertation project. Miller’s liberal critique of American profiteering is impossible to imagine removed from its Cold War context.

    I think I’ve found the introduction to my first chapter.

  • Day of Wrath (1943)

    Day of Wrath (1943)

    Dir. by Carl Th. Dreyer

    Images: Elegant, slow tracking shots, often in combination with pans in the opposite direction. Three times during the film, the camera tracks along the row of accusers, as in The Passion of Joan of Arc. Bodies are often half-hidden in shadows while faces, particularly the eyes, remain exposed. Favorite image is high-angle shot of Martin and Anne in a rowboat. Much of the frame is devoted to the water passing underneath, a Tarkovsky-like image of nature.

    • • •

    I can’t imagine how it must have felt to sit in a crowded theater, watching Day of Wrath during its original release in 1943. Set in 17th century Denmark, when rising religious fanaticism gave church leaders the authority to execute those of “questionable” morality, the film must have mirrored, much too closely for comfort, the Nazi atrocities being waged just outside the theater door. In his liner notes of the Criterion DVD release, critic Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests that Dreyer cast the blonde actress Lisbeth Movin in a deliberate attempt to diminish the allegorical implications of Anne’s plight, thereby diffusing a potentially dangerous situation. As with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953), however, it’s nearly impossible to separate fact from fiction here. Day of Wrath is a damning critique of hypocritical authoritarian power told in very human terms, a modern fable that interrogates faith and sin, love and family, desire and its consequences.

    As a fan of Arthur Miller, I must admit that comparing his play to Dreyer’s film pains me. The former was written for more explicitly allegorical purposes — a direct attack on McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). As such, its characters are comparatively two-dimensional. With rare exceptions, they operate, rightly or wrongly, as stock mouth-pieces for Miller’s political and social commentary. Dreyer’s characters, by comparison, are afforded a more recognizably human complexity and moral ambivalence. For instance, we sympathize with Herlof’s Marthe (Anna Svierkier), the old woman accused of witchcraft in the film’s opening scene, not because she is a pious, honorable, and innocent martyr (like Miller’s Rebecca Nurse), but because of her human failings. She has experimented with witchcraft, she does lack Christian faith, and most importantly, she genuinely fears her death — the pain and suffering awaiting her at the stake — rather than her eternity. Dreyer stages Herlof’s Marthe’s scenes in a manner reminiscent of many in Kubrick’s Paths of Glory: they are stark, honest, and completely free of easy sentiment.

    The family drama at the center of Day of Wrath is likewise composed of characters with whom we must sympathize despite their obvious moral lapses. Reverend Absalon Pedersson (Thorkild Roose) is, by most standards, a man of admirable faith and conviction. His piety, however, is cooled by intellectual distance. He respects his family and his God, but is incapable, until the very end of the film, of understanding the human cost of his actions. Anne, Absalon’s young wife, is his most obvious victim. She has been robbed of her youth, of joy, and of children by a man who has never even considered her need for love. Yet, despite her victimization, it is impossible to take any vindictive pleasure from her murderous curses. When she takes Absalon’s son, Martin (Preben Lerdorff Rye), as a lover, we are again forced to balance our own sympathies for the young lovers with the troubling moral consequences of their symbolically incestuous act.

    Day of Wrath‘s brilliant final scene must have offered little hope to those first audiences. Even Martin has turned from Anne, leaving her resigned to a fate that has always remained beyond her control. It’s a stunning image — the young widow leaning against her husband’s coffin, whispering a confused confession to her accusers. The critical (but superficial) question of Anne’s guilt or innocence is left unanswered, which makes a fitting conclusion to a film that brutally interrogates our lives, but refuses to offer trite solutions.