The Millers' Son

As Dolores pointed out in the comments to this post, Arthur Miller's claims to being a great moral example are severely compromised now that the story of how he institutionalized his son, who had Down's Syndrome, has been revealed. What really stings is the fact that Miller rarely visited and never talked about Danny; it's one thing to decide that doctors and professionals can take care of your disabled child better than you can, but another thing to pretend that he doesn't even exist.

Though it can never be easy to raise a disabled child, I feel it must be worse for people who work in creative fields--people who don't earn a steady salary and who need time each day to be alone with their thoughts. For someone who works a regular nine-to-five job, raising a disabled child may require cutting back on overtime hours, advancing more slowly up the career ladder, socializing less often with friends. But for a playwright like Miller or a globetrotting photographer like his wife, Inge Morath, it may require completely abandoning one's artistic vocation--an integral part of oneself. And most artists aren't even as successful/famous as Miller and Morath were when they had Danny; if Miller needed money he could always give lectures or something, but most other artists need to have a day job to pay the bills. It would be superhuman for anyone to work full-time, and raise a disabled child, and write great plays. It might be possible to do two of those things, but not all three...

Therefore, even though I'm not sure whether I want to have children and if I do have them it will be many years in the future, I already worry about giving birth to a severely disabled baby and being forced to give up writing and theatergoing and everything that I have worked so hard to achieve. Could I accept it without bitterness? Could I find the strength and selflessness that would be required of me?

Even if I didn't have playwriting aspirations--if I were just an intellectual young woman--these worries would still haunt me. I have written before that I think I am very much like A.S. Byatt's character, Frederica Potter. In Babel Tower, Frederica is the mother of a little boy named Leo. Previous books show Frederica as very cerebral and quite self-centered, so you assume she'll be a cold and distracted sort of mother, but I like that Byatt makes a less obvious choice. Although Frederica doesn't really do baby-talk and cuddles, she is nevertheless a very good mother--because she takes Leo seriously, listens to what he has to say, answers his questions with care and honesty. The mind is so important to Frederica that she cannot help but be concerned with what is going into the formation of Leo's mind and personality--as all parents ought to be.

This strikes me as a very truthful portrait of how cerebral women express their love for their children. And if I ever am a mother, I think I will be similar to Frederica. Thus, the idea of having a child who is mentally disabled--who may never learn to talk--with whom I could never share a mature conversation, or even the kind of conversation that adults have with curious five-year-old children--frightens me a lot. Because it wouldn't play to my natural strengths as a mother. Because to me, the reward for raising a child is watching him develop all the way to adulthood and feeling your relationship with him evolve.

Other people must have similar worries, and in fact, I just learned about a new play that addresses this issue. When Jason Grote tweeted that a play called Precious Little is the best thing he's seen in years, I quickly looked it up. It is by Madeleine George (who, let me note in passing, is another former winner of the Young Playwrights Contest) and deals with "a linguist who, in her early forties, decides to have a baby on her own and discovers through prenatal testing that the child may have a genetic abnormality... She tries to figure out whether she can deal with having a child who might never speak to her."

I'm intrigued already.

"Timebends," Crooked Lives, Warped Humor

I've finally finished reading Timebends, Arthur Miller's dense and twisty memoir. Despite its length, Miller still leaves some things out (he hardly discusses his first marriage, and, of course, never mentions his Down's-syndrome son — more on that in a later post). Nonetheless, it is very revealing, sometimes overly so. At one point Miller casually admits to having an Oedipus complex, as if it were no different than having a stomachache. Does he not know how weird this makes him sound? Or does he just not care? On the one hand, it's valuable that Miller reveals stuff like this; on the other hand, it's not fun to read a memoir if you're constantly raising your eyebrows at the author.

Miller spends a lot of the book trying to justify his actions, but sometimes this has the opposite effect--he makes some feeble excuses. You know, if he'd written, "It was the 1950s, I was going through a lot of angst, McCarthyism frightened me, my marriage wasn't working out, women found me attractive now that I was famous, so I'm not saying it was a nice thing to do, but I cheated on my wife," that would be honest and humble, and you could forgive him. But instead he makes it sound like the hardships of McCarthyism not only caused him to cheat on his wife, but justified it--because he deserved the succor that only contact with the "eternal feminine" could provide. (Can female artists ever think that "the eternal feminine" is anything but hogwash? You never hear us extol "the eternal masculine.") The New Yorker titled its review of Timebends "Apologia Pro Vita Sua," and I can't think of a better description.

I have never read this much non-fiction writing from one dramatist before, and it is good that Miller discusses his major plays in depth. And undoubtedly, he has a very clear vision of what theater ought to do. For him, plays must specifically engage with and respond to major social and political trends; otherwise they are worthless. He is right, up to a point--of course theater should be relevant! But his vision can get way too didactic and dreary; it leaves out everything that has to do with amusement and style and the thrill of live performance. In the last part of the book, he veers close to sounding like a grouchy old man who says "Entertainment? Bah, humbug!"

Yes, it makes sense to decry the mind-numbing, commercialized entertainment of the late twentieth century. But when I think about the playwrights who have brought me the most joy and whom I admire most--I don't believe any of them would ever have said "Bah, humbug!" to entertainment.

Then there is the related matter of Miller's humorlessness. Or perhaps I should say, his bizarre sense of humor: in Timebends he says he considers Death of a Salesman a funny title. ("Out of the laughter the title came one afternoon. Death Comes for the Archbishop, the Death and the Maiden Quartet--always austere and elevated was death in titles. Now it would be claimed by a joker, a bleeding mass of contradictions, and there was something funny about that, something like a thumb in the eye, too." A strange thing to say about a play that Americans have always considered "austere and elevated.")

Yet there is also a suggestion that Miller finds humor vulgar and embarrassing. On the last page, he writes, "If only we could stop murdering one another we could be a wonderfully humorous species." As if humor were a frivolity that has no right to exist until all the world's problems have been solved. As if we were not already a wonderfully humorous species, despite all the tragedies that remain with us. As if humor were not a way of dealing with those tragedies. If we lived in a perfectly harmonious world, I daresay we would not need humor--it would not even tempt us. Doesn't some of the best humor result from righteous anger in the face of adversity? The world is imperfect, and therefore the world is humorous.

Very few of my favorite artists lack a sense of humor--especially when it comes to playwrights. (For some reason I seem to find humorlessness easier to take in novels, e.g. Atonement, a great book but entirely solemn.) This is why something like Synecdoche New York leaves me feeling almost betrayed--because Charlie Kaufman's other screenplays show that he has a profound and original sense of humor, but it was hardly evident in Synecdoche.

Oddly enough, in the first part of that movie, Caden, the protagonist, directs Death of a Salesman using a "concept" that he hopes will make it even more depressing: Willy and Linda are played by young actors, and Caden wants the audience to realize that the young people will inevitably grow up to become like Willy and Linda, though they seem so full of promise. And the rest of the movie proves Caden's thesis--a perfect storm of humorlessness, really.

Now, before I go to Japan, I am trying to finish up the Anthony Lane compilation as well as read The Complete Short Fiction of Oscar Wilde. In other words, I require not one, but two, preternaturally witty Brits to serve as palate-cleanser after the humorless American. Wilde, the man who said "Style, not sincerity, is the important thing," is a very good antidote to 600 pages of Miller.

Miller vs. Williams

There is not a lot of material in Arthur Miller's Timebends about Tennessee Williams, the other great American playwright of the era. Nonetheless, in one short paragraph, Miller seems to get at something essential about the difference between his worldview and Williams'.

In the late 1940s, Miller became interested in the corruption and brutality that resulted from the Mob control of the Brooklyn waterfront, and sometimes told Williams about what he'd discovered. He writes, "Tennessee, I thought, regarded my interest as remote from him as a writer and yet quite parallel to his lifelong sense of living among the unjust and the cruel. He sat listening to my descriptions of waterfront indignities [... and] seemed moved, although it was particular persons and words that touched him more than any general condition of men."

Miller seems to slightly disapprove of the fact that Williams was more moved by specific stories than by the "general condition" of injustice. But mightn't that be better, for a playwright? We are in the business of dramatizing the lives of "particular persons," after all, not writing journalistic exposés of corruption and exploitation.

I'm not saying it's bad to have a well-developed sense of morality--only that playwrights need to make sure that it doesn't overwhelm the stories they're trying to tell. IMO, Williams' characters are more vivid and memorable than Miller's, and this passage from Timebends suggests why. Though both playwrights often wrote about cruelty, Williams took each instance of cruelty on its own terms, as a matter for human drama; while Miller saw each instance of cruelty as just one more exhibit in the long history of Man's Inhumanity to Man...

Arthur Miller, and My Grandfather

I am currently in the middle of reading Arthur Miller's autobiography, Timebends. I cannot honestly say that Miller is one of my all-time favorite playwrights, but at the same time, very few playwrights of his stature have written such a thorough autobiography, and he worked at such an interesting time in the American theater, that I felt it would be good to read it.

Timebends is an appropriate title for this work--its chronology jumps around so that, for instance, Miller talks about the triumph of Death of a Salesman in chapter 3, but doesn't describe the first play he ever wrote until chapter 4. And I guess it's appropriate that Miller uses this technique: as The New Yorker recently reminded us, "We are now so familiar with the theatrical trope of flashing back and forth in time within a character's mind that we've forgotten we owe the device to [Death of a Salesman]." The book is dense (six hundred pages) and it takes a while to get used to the time-bendy rhythm of it; admittedly, the first part of the book, about Miller's childhood, can get tedious.

Fortunately, I have an additional reason to want to learn about Arthur Miller's boyhood, apart from the fact that he was a playwright. You see, my maternal grandfather and Miller were born about a year apart, and both grew up in New York City Jewish families. (There are some differences of course: Miller's was an upper-middle-class family that lost everything in the Depression, whereas my grandfather's family was never well-off.) When they grew up, they looked a little bit alike--tall, lanky men in thick-framed eyeglasses--and both broke out of the narrow ethnic community where they'd been raised, and married Catholic women. I get the impression that their personalities were similar, too. Both Miller and my grandfather were very serious men, I think; both felt guilty for surviving the Holocaust, even though neither of them were ever in any real danger; both were proudly liberal, and very concerned with the moral and intellectual side of things. At the same time as Miller was defending human rights as president of PEN, my grandfather (who owned a Manhattan greengrocery) was driving around in a truck that said "We boycott the produce of South Africa because of its cruel racial laws."

My grandpa, or "Papa," as I called him, died about five years ago, without ever having told me, or even his own children, much about his youth. (My mother was in her forties before she learned that Papa grew up in Manhattan, not in the Bronx, as she had always thought. I am not kidding.) So when I read Timebends, and learn about the games Miller played as a boy and the way life was for Jews in 1920s New York, I'm not just learning about the formative years of an important American playwright. I'm also wondering if my grandfather played these same games, saw these same sights, had similar experiences during his own formative years.