Point to Point Navigation

FOURTEEN

Obituary Time. Arthur Miller is dead and I have broadcast five times today to the BBC, to Italy, to everywhere except our native land where he has always been underrated. I praised The Crucible as well as his political courage in the McCarthy years. I have been wondering what to call this memoir. Should it be Between Obituaries? Those of us whose careers began in the twentieth century are now rapidly fleeing the twenty-first, with good reason.

I first met Miller at Tennessee’s flat in New York shortly before Death of a Salesman was about to open. Miller had given Tennessee a copy of the play and had come to pick it up. They had little in common except the director Elia Kazan, who had successfully staged A Streetcar Named Desire and I think now, in retrospect, ruined Tennessee’s play in the interest of Broadway success. Kazan allowed Brando, as Stanley Kowalski, to upstage the play’s true protagonist, Blanche Dubois. The audience was mesmerized by Brando and so found Blanche—his foil—somewhat ridiculous. At the time even Tennessee agreed that Brando’s appearance in the theater was unique and there was no way that Jessica Tandy could compete with him. She seemed all tics and mannerisms while he was the male principle writ large. Tennessee, who loved glory almost as much as his inventions, made no fuss then or later.

With the best intentions in the world, Kazan managed to do quite a lot of damage to Tennessee’s plays while, simultaneously, making them into sexy melodramatic commercial hits. I think it was that season that someone asked me to define “commercialism” and I said that it is the ability to do well what ought not to be done at all. I admired and personally liked Kazan but I felt the timid Tennessee should have relied on his tricks less and on his own instinct more.

With an Italian playwright, Franco Brusati, I went to Philadelphia to see the tryout of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. In the first scene, Tennessee had written, as a stage direction, that the tension at a gathering of Big Daddy’s family, after his recent brush with death at the Ochsner Clinic, is so charged that it is like “a summer storm.” As a result of this one note, Gadge had the family arriving during a deafening summer storm with thunder and lightning. Tennessee only sighed. “I have tried to explain to Gadge the nature of metaphor. And failed.” Tennessee was always willing to sacrifice aspects of his art to success as represented by Kazan’s bold kinetic energy.

During our stay in Philadelphia, Tennessee was persuaded to write an unfunny joke for Big Daddy, played by folksinger Burl Ives. The joke had something to do with an elephant whose genital member was allegedly like that of Big Daddy or was it vice versa? I’ve forgotten whether or not this “surefire” audience-pleaser stayed in the play but the intended result—a hit—was duly achieved later on Broadway.

Currently, Tennessee and the theater are on my mind because I have, finally, after fifty years, got ready a play called On the March to the Sea which was given a “dramatic reading” at Hartford, Connecticut, and then recently at Duke University where we played fourteen performances with a first-rate New York cast. What is a dramatic reading and how does it differ from—well, an undramatic reading? There are no sets, no costumes. The actors (we had nine) sit in a row upstage center. Downstage there are five lecterns. When an actor hears his cue he goes to a previously assigned lectern and opens his script and pretends to read. Actually the play has been learned and rehearsed for a week or so before the “reading.” The model for all this was a famous Dramatic Reading years ago of Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell, with Charles Boyer and Charles Laughton. Mailer revived this staging for himself, Sontag and me, with, admittedly, somewhat different results from the Boyer-Laughton version.

Norman Mailer and me with Susan Sontag and Gay Talese in Don Juan in Hell to raise money for the Actors Studio.

At Duke our director, Warner Shook, also appropriated the form which works particularly well with a play that depends entirely on its language. Also, since there are no sets or costumes, this saves the producers a million or so dollars while making the company easy to tour. Since things went well at Duke the producer expects to keep the “reading” on the move with, one hopes, as many of the original actors as possible, hard to do since they tend to be in demand elsewhere. After certain performances at Duke, my contract called for me to chat back and forth with the audience on whatever happens to occur to us. I find this, as always, enjoyable and the public seems not to mind. As we are in North Carolina, language is a great local skill as it is in most of the South where the play is set in a small town during the Civil War. A half-mad and so half-sane Yankee colonel occupies the town and moves into the house of its leading magnate. Chris Noth played Colonel Thayer and he and the house owner, Harris Yulin, duel with each other as the narrative gets more and more surreal. Are they all dreaming? Or dead? The ending surprises and, I think, satisfies. I found it liberating to be writing Southern or “Southron” as the play has it. I evoke the cadences and language of my grandparents. Tennessee, a fair poet himself, was drawn to Southron locations because he found the naturalistic American speech of our day ill suited as a basis for poetry of the sort that he liked to evoke in dialogue. And so, deliberately, he mined the speech of his youth, of his Episcopal minister grandfather, of his garrulous metaphor-inclined mother, and of those crippled heroines often based on his sister, Rose, who had undergone a barbarous lobotomy; yet even the damaged Rose had a kind of magniloquence: once she mailed him some pot holders that she had made herself with the note, “I have created them in bright tragic colors.”

I watched my new play either in the wings on those occasions when I was obliged to speak after the performance to the audience, or in the back of the theater where, by watching the backs of heads, one can tell to what extent a play is holding the audience’s attention.

There was one awful price we had to pay for playing in Durham, the heart of the tobacco industry: the occasional uncontrolled thunderous cougher, one of whom nearly brought the production to a halt at the last performance.

Just before I arrived at Duke my nephew Burr Steers, a film director–writer, and I had gone to Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington to bury Howard’s ashes in a plot that we had bought some years ago. Barrett Prettyman, a constitutional lawyer, and his wife, as well as Barbara Epstein and the agent Alice Lee Boatwright joined us under a crimson cloth marquee.

The cemetery is vast with great original trees and graves that date back to before the Republic. Three pleasant young women (standing in for the Fates?) placed a metal box in a hole beside the gray marble slab with his name and mine inscribed side by side (his birth-death dates are now complete; mine not—yet). Then we walked over to the Saint-Gaudens statue of “Grief”: a partly veiled young man commissioned by Henry Adams in memory of his wife, Clover, who had killed herself. A semicircular seat faces the statue and it was here, Eleanor Roosevelt told me, that she would come and sit when Washington life became particularly unbearable for her.

Henry Adams, our neighbor now in Rock Creek Cemetery, was in life a neighbor of the Roosevelts who lived in the White House across the street from the joint mansion shared by Adams and John Hay, who had been one of Lincoln’s secretaries as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of state. Hay had suffered a good deal from that “very embodiment of noise,” as Henry James called Theodore.

Here I am next to Saint-Gaudens’s Statue of Grief which Henry Adams had commissioned in honor of his wife, Clover. Two or three yards away Howard is buried as I shall be in due course when I take time off from my busy schedule.

As we gathered about the Statue of Grief I recalled the row between Adams and Theodore over the gender of the veiled mourning figure. TR, as he was called by the press, maintained the figure was that of a girl. Adams, who had only commissioned the statue, said that it depicted a young man. TR, never more emphatically in the right than when he was wrong, refused to back down. I have been told that Henry Adams never again crossed the street to visit the first President Roosevelt although he enjoyed TR’s cousin Franklin even when he was a mere assistant secretary of the navy.

Eleanor liked talking about Henry Adams. “When Franklin and I were first in town, I would go out in my carriage with all the children, they were very little then, and we would stop in front of Mr. Adams’s house and he’d come out and roughhouse with the boys in the back of the carriage. They all had such a wonderful time and even Mr. Adams forgot to be so pessimistic. You know, he’d say things like ‘It makes no difference who is president.’ Well, it certainly does.”

While I recalled this story, Mrs. Prettyman was examining the handsome bare forearms of Grief and pronounced that their size and muscularity indicated that Grief was indeed male.

Jefferson once noted that although he could see the possibilities of some good, even utility, in most human emotions, no matter how negative, he found nothing redemptive or useful in Grief. I thought of that as I looked at the end of the semicircular bench where Howard and I were photographed the day we bought the nearby plot. Howard looks—for him—rather severe. Premonition of now? The gossipy biographer who took our picture asked him what he thought, as a Jew, of ending up in so Christian a cemetery: “Amused,” he said, and no more. Elsewhere, the writer goes on and on about my fear of death which strikes him, without evidence of any kind, as neurotic. I did point out that no one afraid of death would cheerfully show such a gossip his future grave. I suspect I had probably quoted Montaigne on the subject and this was scrambled in the writing as was so much else that he was told.