Arthur Miller, e Art of eater No.

Interviewed by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron

ISSUE 38, SUMMER 1966

A RT H U R M I L L E R .

Arthur Miller’s white farmhouse is set high on the border of the roller-coaster hills
of Roxbury and Woodbury, in Connecticut’s Litch eld County. e author, brought
up in Brooklyn and Harlem, is now a county man. His house is surrounded by the
trees he has raised—native dogwood, exotic katsura, Chinese scholar, tulip, and locust.
Most of them were owering as we approached his house for our interview in spring
. e only sound was a rhythmic hammering echoing from the other side of the
hill. We walked to its source, a stately red barn, and there found the playwright,
hammer in hand, standing in dim light, amid lumber, tools, and plumbing equipment.
He welcomed us, a tall, rangy, good-looking man with a weathered face and sudden
smile, a scholar-farmer in horn-rimmed glasses and high work shoes. He invited us in
to judge his prowess: he was turning the barn into a guesthouse (partitions here, cedar
closets there, shower over there … ). Carpentry, he said, was his oldest hobby—he had
started at the age of ve.
We walked back past the banked iris, past the hammock, and entered the house by
way of the terrace, which was guarded by a suspicious basset named Hugo. Mr. Miller
explained as we went in that the house was silent because his wife, photographer Inge
Morath, had driven to Vermont to do a portrait of Bernard Malamud, and that their
three-year-old daughter Rebecca was napping. e living room, glassed-in from the
terrace, was eclectic, charming: white walls patterned with a Steinberg sketch, a
splashy painting by neighbor Alexander Calder, posters of early Miller plays,
photographs by Ms. Morath. It held colorful modern rugs and sofas; an antique
rocker; oversized black Eames chair; a glass co ee table supporting a bright mobile;
small peasant gurines—souvenirs of a recent trip to Russia—unique Mexican
candlesticks, and strange pottery animals atop a very old carved Spanish table, these
last from their Paris apartment; and plants, plants everywhere.
e author’s study was in total contrast. We walked up a green knoll to a spare
single-roomed structure with small louvered windows. e electric light was on—he
could not work by daylight, he con ded. e room harbors a plain slab desk fashioned
by the playwright, his chair, a rumpled gray day bed, another webbed chair from the
thirties, and a bookshelf with half a dozen jacketless books. is is all, except for a
snapshot of Inge and Rebecca, thumbtacked to the wall. Mr. Miller adjusted a
microphone he had hung crookedly from the arm of his desk lamp. en, quite
casually, he picked up a ri e from the daybed and took a shot through the open louvers
at a woodchuck that, scared but reprieved, scurried across the far slope. We were
startled—he smiled at our lack of composure. He said that his study was also an
excellent duck blind.
e interview began. His tone and expression were serious, interested. O en a
secret grin surfaced, as he reminisced. He is a storyteller, a man with a marvelous
memory, a simple man with a capacity for wonder, concerned with people and ideas.
We listened at our ease at he responded to questions.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Voznesensky, the Russian poet, said when he was here that the landscape in this part of
the country reminded him of his Sigulda*—that it was a “good microclimate” for
writing. Do you agree?

A RT HU R M I L L E R
Well, I enjoy it. It’s not such a vast landscape that you’re lost in it, and it’s not so
suburban a place that you feel you might as well be in a city. e distances—internal
and external—are exactly correct, I think. ere’s a foreground here, no matter which
way you look.

I N T E RV I EWE R
A er reading your short stories, especially “ e Prophecy” and “I Don’t Need You
Any More,” which have not only the dramatic power of your plays but also the
description of place, the foreground, the intimacy of thought hard to achieve in a play, I
wonder: is the stage much more compelling for you?

MILLER
It is only very rarely that I can feel in a short story that I’m right on top of something,
as I feel when I write for the stage. I am then in the ultimate place of vision—you can’t
back me up any further. Everything is inevitable, down to the last comma. In a short
story, or any kind of prose, I still can’t escape the feeling of a certain arbitrary quality.
Mistakes go by—people consent to them more—more than mistakes do on the stage.
is may be my illusion. But there’s another matter: the whole business of my own role
in my own mind. To me the great thing is to write a good play, and when I’m writing a
short story it’s as though I’m saying to myself, Well, I’m only doing this because I’m
not writing a play at the moment. ere’s guilt connected with it. Naturally I do enjoy
writing a short story; it is a form that has a certain strictness. I think I reserve for plays
those things that take a kind of excruciating e ort. What comes easier goes into a
short story.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Would you tell us a little about the beginning of your writing career?

MILLER
e rst play I wrote was in Michigan in . It was written on a spring vacation in
six days. I was so young that I dared do such things, begin it and nish it in a week. I’d
seen about two plays in my life, so I didn’t know how long an act was supposed to be,
but across the hall there was a fellow who did the costumes for the University theater
and he said, “Well, it’s roughly forty minutes.” I had written an enormous amount of
material and I got an alarm clock. It was all a lark to me, and not to be taken too
seriously … that’s what I told myself. As it turned out, the acts were longer than that,
but the sense of the timing was in me even from the beginning, and the play had a
form right from the start.
Being a playwright was always the maximum idea. I’d always felt that the theater
was the most exciting and the most demanding form one could try to master. When I
began to write, one assumed inevitably that one was in the mainstream that began
with Aeschylus and went through about twenty- ve hundred years of playwriting.
ere are so few masterpieces in the theater, as opposed to the other arts, that one can
pretty well encompass all of them by the age of nineteen. Today, I don’t think
playwrights care about history. I think they feel that it has no relevance.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Is it just the young playwrights who feel this?

MILLER
I think the young playwrights I’ve had any chance to talk to are either ignorant of the
past or they feel the old forms are too square, or too cohesive. I may be wrong, but I
don’t see that the whole tragic arc of the drama has had any e ect on them.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Which playwrights did you most admire when you were young?

MILLER
Well, rst the Greeks, for their magni cent form, the symmetry. Half the time I
couldn’t really repeat the story because the characters in the mythology were
completely blank to me. I had no background at that time to know really what was
involved in these plays, but the architecture was clear. One looks at some building of
the past whose use one is ignorant of, and yet it has a modernity. It had its own speci c
gravity. at form has never le me; I suppose it just got burned in.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
You were particularly drawn to tragedy, then?

MILLER
It seemed to me the only form there was. e rest of it was all either attempts at it, or
escapes from it. But tragedy was the basic pillar.

I N T E RV I EWE R
When Death of a Salesman opened, you said to e New York Times in an interview
that the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we’re in the presence of a character who is
ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing—his sense of personal
dignity. Do you consider your plays modern tragedies?

MILLER
I changed my mind about it several times. I think that to make a direct or arithmetical
comparison between any contemporary work and the classic tragedies is impossible
because of the question of religion and power, which was taken for granted and is an a
priori consideration in any classic tragedy. Like a religious ceremony, where they nally
reached the objective by the sacri ce. It has to do with the community sacri cing some
man whom they both adore and despise in order to reach its basic and fundamental
laws and, therefore, justify its existence and feel safe.

I N T E RV I EWE R
In A er the Fall, although Maggie was “sacri ced,” the central character, uentin,
survives. Did you see him as tragic or in any degree potentially tragic?

MILLER
I can’t answer that, because I can’t, quite frankly, separate in my mind tragedy from
death. In some people’s minds I know there’s no reason to put them together. I can’t
break it—for one reason, and that is, to coin a phrase: there’s nothing like death.
Dying isn’t like it, you know. ere’s no substitute for the impact on the mind of the
spectacle of death. And there is no possibility, it seems to me, of speaking of tragedy
without it. Because if the total demise of the person we watch for two or three hours
doesn’t occur, if he just walks away, no matter how damaged, no matter how much he
su ers—

I N T E RV I EWE R
What were those two plays you had seen before you began to write?

MILLER
When I was about twelve, I think it was, my mother took me to a theater one
a ernoon. We lived in Harlem and in Harlem there were two or three theaters that ran
all the time, and many women would drop in for all or part of the a ernoon
performances. All I remember was that there were people in the hold of a ship, the
stage was rocking—they actually rocked the stage—and some cannibal on the ship had
a time bomb. And they were all looking for the cannibal: It was thrilling. e other
one was a morality play about taking dope. Evidently there was much excitement in
New York then about the Chinese and dope. e Chinese were kidnapping beautiful
blond, blue-eyed girls who, people thought, had lost their bearings morally; they were
appers who drank gin and ran around with boys. And they inevitably ended up in
some basement in Chinatown, where they were irretrievably lost by virtue of eating
opium or smoking some pot. ose were the two masterpieces I had seen. I’d read
some others, of course, by the time I started writing. I’d read Shakespeare and Ibsen, a
little, not much. I never connected playwriting with our theater, even from the
beginning.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Did your rst play have any bearing on All My Sons, or Death of a Salesman?

MILLER
It did. It was a play about a father owning a business in , a business that was being
struck, and a son being torn between his father’s interests and his sense of justice. But
it turned into a near-comic play. At that stage of my life I was removed somewhat. I
was not Cli ord Odets; he took it head-on.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Many of your plays have that father-son relationship as the dominant theme. Were you
very close to your father?

MILLER
I was. I still am, but I think, actually, that my plays don’t re ect directly my
relationship to him. It’s a very primitive thing in my plays. at is, the father was really
a gure who incorporated both power and some kind of a moral law which he had
either broken himself or had fallen prey to. He gures as an immense shadow …. I
didn’t expect that of my own father, literally, but of his position, apparently I did. e
reason that I was able to write about the relationship, I think now, was because it had a
mythical quality to me. If I had ever thought that I was writing about my father, I
suppose I never could have done it. My father is, literally, a much more realistic guy
than Willy Loman, and much more successful as a personality. And he’d be the last
man in the world to ever commit suicide. Willy is based on an individual whom I
knew very little, who was a salesman; it was years later that I realized I had only seen
that man about a total of four hours in twenty years. He gave one of those impressions
that is basic, evidently. When I thought of him, he would simply be a mute man: he
said no more than two hundred words to me. I was a kid. Later on, I had another of
that kind of a contact, with a man whose fantasy was always overreaching his real
outline. I’ve always been aware of that kind of an agony, of someone who has some
driving, implacable wish in him which never goes away, which he can never block out.
And it broods over him, it makes him happy sometimes or it makes him suicidal, but it
never leaves him. Any hero whom we even begin to think of as tragic is obsessed,
whether it’s Lear or Hamlet or the women in the Greek plays.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do any of the younger playwrights create heroes—in your opinion?

MILLER
I tell you, I may be working on a di erent wavelength, but I don’t think they are
looking at character any more, at the documentation of facts about people. All
experience is looked at now from a schematic point of view. ese playwrights won’t
let the characters escape for a moment from their preconceived scheme of how
dreadful the world is. It is very much like the old strike plays. e scheme then was
that someone began a play with a bourgeois ideology and got involved in some area of
experience which had a connection to the labor movement—either it was actually a
strike or, in a larger sense, it was the collapse of capitalism—and he ended the play
with some new positioning vis-à-vis that collapse. He started without an
enlightenment and he ended with some kind of enlightenment. And you could predict
that in the rst ve minutes. Very few of those plays could be done any more, because
they’re absurd now. I’ve found over the years that a similar thing has happened with
the so-called absurd theater. Predictable.

I N T E RV I EWE R
In other words, the notion of tragedy about which you were talking earlier is absent
from this preconceived view of the world.

MILLER
Absolutely. e tragic hero was supposed to join the scheme of things by his sacri ce.
It’s a religious thing, I’ve always thought. He threw some sharp light upon the hidden
scheme of existence, either by breaking one of its profoundest laws, as Oedipus breaks
a taboo (and therefore proves the existence of the taboo), or by proving a moral world
at the cost of his own life. And that’s the victory. We need him, as the vanguard of the
race. We need his crime. at crime is a civilizing crime. Well, now the view is that it’s
an inconsolable universe. Nothing is proved by a crime excepting that some people are
freer to produce crime than others, and usually they are more honest than the others.
ere is no nal reassertion of a community at all. ere isn’t the kind of
communication that a child demands. e best you could say is that it is intelligent.

I N T E RV I EWE R
en it’s aware—

MILLER
It’s aware, but it will not admit into itself any moral universe at all. Another thing
that’s missing is the positioning of the author in relation to power. I always assumed
that underlying any story is the question of who should wield power. See, in Death of a
Salesman you have two viewpoints. ey show what would happen if we all took
Willy’s viewpoint toward the world, or if we all took Bi ’s. And took it seriously, as
almost a political fact. I’m debating really which way the world ought to be run; I’m
speaking of psychology and the spirit, too. For example, a play that isn’t usually linked
with this kind of problem is Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It struck me
sharply that what is at stake there is the father’s great power. He’s the owner, literally, of
an empire of land and farms. And he wants to immortalize that power, he wants to
hand it on, because he’s dying. e son has a much ner appreciation of justice and
human relations than the father. e father is rougher, more Philistine; he’s cruder;
and when we speak of the neness of emotions, we would probably say the son has
them and the father lacks them. When I saw the play I thought, is is going to be
simply marvelous because the person with the sensitivity will be presented with power
and what is he going to do about it? But it never gets to that. It gets de ected onto a
question of personal neurosis. It comes to a dead end. If we’re talking about tragedy,
the Greeks would have done something miraculous with that idea. ey would have
stuck the son with the power, and faced him with the racking con icts of the sensitive
man having to rule. And then you would throw light on what the tragedy of power is.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Which is what you were getting at in Incident at Vichy.

MILLER
at’s exactly what I was a er. But I feel today’s stage turns away from any
consideration of power, which always lies at the heart of tragedy. I use Williams’s play
as an example because he’s that excellent that his problems are symptomatic of the time
—Cat ultimately came down to the mendacity of human relations. It was a most
accurate personalization but it bypasses the issue that the play seems to me to raise,
namely the mendacity in social relations. I still believe that when a play questions, even
threatens, our social arrangement, that is when it really shakes us profoundly and
dangerously, and that is when you’ve got to be great; good isn’t enough.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think that people in general now rationalize so, and have so many euphemisms
for death, that they can’t face tragedy?

MILLER
I wonder whether there isn’t a certain—I’m speaking now of all classes of people—you
could call it a so ness, or else a genuine inability to face the tough decisions and the
dreadful results of error. I say that only because when Death of a Salesman went on
again recently, I sensed in some of the reaction that it was simply too threatening. Now
there were probably a lot of people in the forties, when it rst opened, who felt the
same way. Maybe I just didn’t hear those people as much as I heard other people—
maybe it has to do with my own reaction. You need a certain amount of con dence to
watch tragedy. If you yourself are about to die, you’re not going to see that play. I’ve
always thought that the Americans had, almost inborn, a primordial fear of falling,
being declassed—you get it with your driver’s license, if not earlier.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What about Europeans?

MILLER
Well, the play opened in Paris again only last September; it opened in Paris ten years
earlier, too, with very little e ect. It wasn’t a very good production, I understand. But
now suddenly they discovered this play. And I sensed that their reaction was quite an
American reaction. Maybe it comes with having … having the guilt of wealth; it would
be interesting if the Russians ever got to feel that way!

I N T E RV I EWE R
Death of a Salesman has been done in Russia, hasn’t it?
 MILLER
Oh, many times.

I N T E RV I EWE R
When you were in Russia recently did you form any opinion about the Russian theater
public?

MILLER
First of all, there’s a wonderful naïveté that they have; they’re not bored to death.
ey’re not coming in out of the rain, so to speak, with nothing better to do. When
they go to the theater, it has great weight with them. ey come to see something
that’ll change their lives. Ninety percent of the time, of course, there’s nothing there,
but they’re open to a grand experience. is is not the way we go to the theater.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What about the plays themselves?

MILLER
I think they do things on the stage that are exciting and de and they have marvelous
actors, but the drama itself is not adventurous. e plays are basically a species of
naturalism; it’s not even realism. ey’re violently opposed to the theater of the absurd
because they see it as a fragmenting of the community into perverse individuals who
will no longer be under any mutual obligation at all, and I can see some point in their
fear. Of course, these things should be done if only so one can rebut them. I know that
I was very moved in many ways by German Expressionism when I was in school: yet
there too something was perverse in it to me. It was the end of man, there are no
people in it any more; that was especially true of the real German stu : it’s the bitter
end of the world where man is a voice of his class function, and that’s it. Brecht has a
lot of that in him, but he’s too much of a poet to be enslaved by it. And yet, at the same
time, I learned a great deal from it. I used elements of it that were fused into Death of a
Salesman. For instance, I purposefully would not give Ben any character, because for
Willy he has no character—which is, psychologically, expressionist, because so many
memories come back with a simple tag on them: somebody represents a threat to you,
or a promise.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Speaking of di erent cultures, what is your feeling about the French éâtre National
Populaire?

MILLER
I thought a play I saw by Corneille, L’Allusion Comique, one of the most exciting things
I’ve ever seen. We saw something I never thought I could enjoy—my French is not all
that good. But I had just gotten over being sick, and we were about to leave France,
and I wanted to see what they did with it. It was just superb. It is one of Corneille’s
lesser works, about a magician who takes people into the nether regions. What a
marvelous mixture of satire, and broad comedy, and characterizations! And the acting
was simply out of this world. Of course, one of the best parts about the whole thing
was the audience. Because they’re mostly under thirty, it looked to me; they pay very
little to get in; and I would guess there are between twenty- ve hundred and three
thousand seats in that place. And the vitality of the audience is breathtaking. Of
course the actors’ ability to speak that language so beautifully is just in itself a joy.
From that vast stage, to talk quietly, and make you feel the voice just wa ing all over
the house …

I N T E RV I EWE R
Why do you think we haven’t been able to do such a thing here? Why has Whitehead’s
Lincoln Center Repertory eater failed as such?

MILLER
Well, that is a phenomenon worthy of a sociological study. When I got into it, A er
the Fall was about two-thirds written. Whitehead came to me and said, “I hear you’re
writing a play. Can we use it to start the Lincoln Center Repertory Company?” For
one reason or another I said I would do it. I expected to take a nancial beating; I
could hope to earn maybe twenty percent of what I normally earn with a play, but I
assumed that people would say, Well, it’s a stupid but not idiotic action. What
developed, before any play opened at all, was a hostility that completely dumbfounded
me. I don’t think it was directed against anybody in particular. For actors who want to
develop their art, there’s no better place to do it than in a permanent repertory
company, where you play di erent parts and you have opportunities you’ve never had
in a lifetime on Broadway. But the actors seemed to be a ronted by the whole thing. I
couldn’t dig it! I could understand the enmity of commercial producers who, a er all,
thought they were threatened by it. But the professional people of every kind greeted
it as though it were some kind of an insult. e only conclusion I can come to is that
an actor was now threatened with having to put up or shut up. He had always been
able to walk around on Broadway, where conditions were dreadful, and say, “I’m a
great actor but I’m unappreciated,” but in the back of his mind he could gure, “Well,
one of these days I’ll get a starring role and I’ll go to Hollywood and get rich.” is he
couldn’t do in a repertory theater where he signed up for several years. So the whole
idea of that kind of quick success was renounced. He didn’t want to face an
opportunity that threatened him in this way. It makes me wonder whether there is
such a profound alienation among artists that any organized attempt to create
something that is not based upon commerce, that has sponsorship, automatically sets
people against it. I think that’s an interesting facet. I also spoke to a group of young
playwrights. Now, if it had been me, I would have been knocking at the door,
demanding that they read my play, as I did unsuccessfully when e Group eatre
was around. en every playwright was banging on the door and furious and wanted
the art theater to do what he thought they should do. We could do that because it
belonged to us all—you know—we thought of e Group eatre as a public
enterprise. Well, that wasn’t true at all here. Everyone thought the Lincoln eater was
the property of the directors, of Miller and Whitehead and Kazan and one or two
other people. Of course, what also made it fail was, as Laurence Olivier suggested, that
it takes years to do anything. But he also made the point that with his English
repertory theater he got encouragement from the beginning. ere were people who
pooh-poohed the whole thing, and said it was ridiculous, but basically the artistic
community was in favor of it.

I N T E RV I EWE R
How about the actors themselves? Did Lee Strasberg in uence them?

MILLER
I think Strasberg is a symptom, really. He’s a great force, and (in my unique opinion,
evidently) a force that is not for the good in the theater. He makes actors secret people
and he makes acting secret, and it’s the most communicative art known to man; I
mean, that’s what the actor’s supposed to be doing. But I wouldn’t blame the Repertory
eater failures on him, because the people in there were not Actors Studio people at
all; so he is not responsible for that. But the Method is in the air: the actor is
defending himself from the Philistine, vulgar public. I had a girl in my play I couldn’t
hear, and the acoustics in that little theater we were using were simply magni cent. I
said to her, “I can’t hear you,” and I kept on saying, “I can’t hear you.” She nally got
furious and said to me, in e ect, that she was acting the truth, and that she was not
going to prostitute herself to the audience. at was the living end! It reminded me of
Walter Hampden’s comment—because we had a similar problem in e Crucible with
some actors—he said they play a cello with the most perfect bowing and the ngering
is magni cent but there are no strings on the instrument. e problem is that the actor
is now working out his private fate through his role, and the idea of communicating
the meaning of the play is the last thing that occurs to him. In the Actors Studio,
despite denials, the actor is told that the text is really the framework for his emotions;
I’ve heard actors change the order of lines in my work and tell me that the lines are
only, so to speak, the libretto for the music—that the actor is the main force that the
audience is watching and that the playwright is his servant. ey are told that the
analysis of the text, and the rhythm of the text, the verbal texture, is of no importance
whatever. is is Method, as they are teaching it, which is, of course, a perversion of it,
if you go back to the beginning. But there was always a tendency in that direction.
Chekhov, himself, said that Stanislavsky had perverted e Seagull.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What about Method acting in the movies?

MILLER
Well, in the movies, curiously enough, the Method works better. Because the camera
can come right up to an actor’s nostrils and suck out of him a communicative gesture;
a look in the eye, a wrinkle of his grin, and so on, which registers nothing on the stage.
e stage is, a er all, a verbal medium. You’ve got to make large gestures if they’re
going to be seen at all. In other words, you’ve got to be unnatural. You’ve got to say, I
am out to move into that audience; that’s my job. In a movie you don’t do that; as a
matter of fact, that’s bad movie acting, it’s overacting. Movies are wonderful for private
acting.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think the movies helped bring about this private acting in the theater?

MILLER
Well, it’s a perversion of the Chekhovian play and of the Stanislavsky technique. What
Chekhov was doing was eliminating the histrionics of his actors by incorporating them
in the writing: the internal life was what he was writing about. And Stanislavsky’s
direction was also internal: for the rst time he was trying to motivate every move
from within instead of imitating an action; which is what acting should be. When you
eliminate the vital element of the actor in the community and simply make a
psychiatric gure on the stage who is thinking profound thoughts which he doesn’t let
anyone know about, then it’s a perversion.

I N T E RV I EWE R
How does the success of Peter Weiss’s Marat/Sade play t into this?

MILLER
Well, I would emphasize its production and direction. Peter Brook has been trying for
years, especially through productions of Shakespeare, to make the bridge between
psychological acting and theater, between the private personality, perhaps, and its
public demonstration. Marat/Sade is more an oratorio than a play; the characters are
basically thematic relationships rather than human entities, so the action exempli ed
rather than characterized.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think the popularity of the movies has had any in uence on playwriting itself ?

MILLER
Yes. Its form has been changed by the movies. I think certain techniques, such as the
jumping from place to place, although it’s as old as Shakespeare, came to us not
through Shakespeare, but through the movies, a telegraphic, dream-constructed way of
seeing life.

I N T E RV I EWE R
How important is the screenwriter in motion pictures?

MILLER
Well, you’d be hard put to remember the dialogue in some of the great pictures that
you’ve seen. at’s why pictures are so international. You don’t have to hear the style of
the dialogue in an Italian movie or a French movie. We’re watching the lm, so that
the vehicle is not the ear or the word, it’s the eye. e director of a play is nailed to
words. He can interpret them a little di erently, but he has limits: you can only in ect
a sentence in two or three di erent ways, but you can in ect an image on the screen in
an in nite number of ways. You can make one character practically fall out of the
frame; you can shoot it where you don’t even see his face. Two people can be talking,
and the man talking cannot be seen, so the emphasis is on the reaction to the speech
rather than on the speech itself.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What about television as a medium for drama?

MILLER
I don’t think there is anything that approaches the theater. e sheer presence of a
living person is always stronger than his image. But there’s no reason why TV
shouldn’t be a terri c medium. e problem is that the audience watching TV shows
is always separated. My feeling is that people in a group, en masse, watching
something, react di erently, and perhaps more profoundly, than they do when they’re
alone in their living rooms. Yet it’s not a hurdle that couldn’t be jumped by the right
kind of material. Simply, it’s hard to get good movies, it’s hard to get good novels, it’s
hard to get good poetry—it’s impossible to get good television because in addition to
the indigenous di culties there’s the whole question of it being a medium that’s
controlled by big business. It took TV seventeen years to do Death of a Salesman here.
It’s been done on TV in every country in the world at least once, but it’s critical of the
business world and the content is downbeat.

I N T E RV I EWE R
A long time ago, you used to write radio scripts. Did you learn much about technique
from that experience?

MILLER
I did. We had twenty-eight and a half minutes to tell a whole story in a radio play, and
you had to concentrate on the words because you couldn’t see anything. You were
playing in a dark closet, in fact. So the economy of words in a good radio play was
everything. It drove you more and more to realize what the power of a good sentence
was, and the right phrase could save you a page you would otherwise be wasting. I was
always sorry radio didn’t last long enough for contemporary poetic movements to take
advantage of it, because it’s a natural medium for poets. It’s pure voice, pure words.
Words and silence; a marvelous medium. I’ve o en thought, even recently, that I
would like to write another radio play, and just give it to someone and let them do it
on WBAI. e English do radio plays still, very good ones.

I N T E RV I EWE R
You used to write verse drama too, didn’t you?

MILLER
Oh yes, I was up to my neck in it.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Would you ever do it again?

MILLER
I might. I o en write speeches in verse, and then break them down. Much of Death of
a Salesman was originally written in verse, and e Crucible was all written in verse,
but I broke it up. I was frightened that the actors would take an attitude toward the
material that would destroy its vitality. I didn’t want anyone standing up there making
speeches. You see, we have no tradition of verse, and as soon as an American actor sees
something printed like verse, he immediately puts one foot in front of the other—or
else he mutters. en you can’t hear it at all.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
Which of your own plays do you feel closest to now?

MILLER
I don’t know if I feel closer to one than another. I suppose e Crucible in some ways. I
think there’s a lot of myself in it. ere are a lot of layers in there that I know about
that nobody else does.

I N T E RV I EWE R
More so than in A er the Fall?

MILLER
Yes, because although A er the Fall is more psychological it’s less developed as an
arti ce. You see, in e Crucible I was completely freed by the period I was writing
about—over three centuries ago. It was a di erent diction, a di erent age. I had great
joy writing that, more than with almost any other play I’ve written. I learned about
how writers felt in the past when they were dealing almost constantly with historical
material. A dramatist writing history could nish a play Monday and start another
Wednesday, and go right on. Because the stories are all prepared for him. Inventing the
story is what takes all the time. It takes a year to invent the story. e historical
dramatist doesn’t have to invent anything, except his language, and his
characterizations. Oh, of course, there’s the terri c problem of condensing history, a
lot of reshu ing and bringing in characters who never lived, or who died a hundred
years apart—but basically if you’ve got the story, you’re a year ahead.

I N T E RV I EWE R
It must also be tempting to use a historical gure whose epoch was one of faith.

MILLER
It is. With all the modern psychology and psychiatry and the level of literacy higher
than it ever was, we get less perspective on ourselves than at almost any time I know
about. I have never been so aware of clique ideas overtaking people—fashions, for
example—and sweeping them away, as though the last day of the world had come.
One can sometimes point to a week or month in which things changed abruptly. It’s
like women’s clothing in a certain issue of Vogue magazine. ere is such a wish to be
part of that enormous minority that likes to create new minorities. Yet people are
desperately afraid of being alone.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Has our insight into psychology a ected this?

MILLER
It has simply helped people rationalize their situation, rather than get out of it, or
break through it. In other words—you’ve heard it a hundred times—“Well, I am this
type of person, and this type doesn’t do anything but what I’m doing.”
 I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think the push toward personal success dominates American life now more
than it used to?

MILLER
I think it’s far more powerful today than when I wrote Death of a Salesman. I think it’s
closer to a madness today than it was then. Now there’s no perspective on it at all.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Would you say that the girl in A er the Fall is a symbol of that obsession?

MILLER
Yes, she is consumed by what she does, and instead of it being a means of release, it’s a
jail. A prison which de nes her, nally. She can’t break through. In other words,
success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. ere’s no country
I’ve been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so
o en ask you, “What do you do?” And, being American, many’s the time I’ve almost
asked that question, then realized it’s good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just
to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what
he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We’re ranking everybody every
minute of the day.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Will you write about American success again?

MILLER
I might, but you see, as a thing in itself, success is self-satirizing; it’s self-elucidating, in
a way. at’s why it’s so di cult to write about. Because the very people who are being
swallowed up by this ethos nod in agreement when you tell them, “You are being
swallowed up by this thing.” To really wrench them and nd them another feasible
perspective is therefore extremely di cult.

I N T E RV I EWE R
In your story “ e Prophecy,” the protagonist says this is a time of the supremacy of
personal relations, that there are no larger aims in our lives. Is this your view too?

MILLER
Well, that story was written under the pall of the ies, but I think there’s been a
terri c politicalization of the people these past four or ve years. Not in the old sense,
but in the sense that it is no longer gauche or stupid to be interested in the fate of
society and in injustice and in race problems and the rest of it. It now becomes
aesthetic material once again. In the ies it was out to mention this. It meant you
were really not an artist. at prejudice seems to have gone. e Negroes broke it up,
thank God! But it has been an era of personal relations—and now it’s being
synthesized in a good way. at is, the closer you get to any kind of political action
among young people, the more they demand that the action have a certain delity to
human nature, and that pomposity, and posing, and role-taking not be allowed to strip
the movement of its veracity. What they suspect most is gesturing, you know, just
making gestures, which are either futile, or self-serving, or merely conscientious. e
intense personal-relations concentration of the ies seems now to have been joined to
a political consciousness, which is terri c.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you feel politics in any way to be an invasion of your privacy?

MILLER
No, I always drew a lot of inspiration from politics, from one or another kind of
national struggle. You live in the world even though you only vote once in a while. It
determines the extensions of your personality. I lived through the McCarthy time,
when one saw personalities shi ing and changing before one’s eyes, as a direct, obvious
result of a political situation. And had it gone on, we would have gotten a whole new
American personality—which in part we have. It’s ten years since McCarthy died, and
it’s only now that powerful senators dare to suggest that it might be wise to learn a
little Chinese, to talk to some Chinese. I mean, it took ten years, and even those guys
who are thought to be quite brave and courageous just now dare to make these
suggestions. Such a pall of fright was laid upon us that it truly de ected the American
mind. It’s part of a paranoia which we haven’t escaped yet. Good God, people still give
their lives for it; look what we’re doing in the Paci c.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Yet so much of the theater these last few years has had nothing to do with public life.

MILLER
Yes, it’s got so we’ve lost the technique of grappling with the world that Homer had,
that Aeschylus had, that Euripides had. And Shakespeare. How amazing it is that
people who adore the Greek drama fail to see that these great works are works of a
man confronting his society, the illusions of the society, the faiths of the society.
ey’re social documents, not little piddling private conversations. We just got
educated into thinking this is all “a story,” a myth for its own sake.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think there’ll be a return to social drama now?

MILLER
I think there will be, if theater is to survive. Look at Molière. You can’t conceive of him
except as a social playwright. He’s a social critic. Bathes up to his neck in what’s going
on around him.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Could the strict forms utilized by Molière appear again?

MILLER
I don’t think one can repeat old forms as such, because they express most densely a
moment of time. For example, I couldn’t write a play like Death of a Salesman
anymore. I couldn’t really write any of my plays now. Each is di erent, spaced
sometimes two years apart, because each moment called for a di erent vocabulary and
a di erent organization of the material. However, when you speak of a strict form, I
believe in it for the theater. Otherwise you end up with anecdotes, not with plays.
We’re in an era of anecdotes, in my opinion, which is going to pass any minute. e
audience has been trained to eschew the organized climax because it’s corny, or
because it violates the chaos which we all revere. But I think that’s going to disappear
with the rst play of a new kind which will once again pound the boards and shake
people out of their seats with a deeply, intensely organized climax. It can only come
from a strict form: you can’t get it except as the culmination of two hours of
development. You can’t get it by raising your voice and yelling, suddenly—because it’s
getting time to get on the train for Yonkers.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Have you any conception of what your own evolution has been? In terms of form and
themes?

MILLER
I keep going. Both forward and backward. Hopefully, more forward than backward.
at is to say, before I wrote my rst successful play, I wrote, oh, I don’t know, maybe
fourteen or een other full-length plays and maybe thirty radio plays. e majority
of them were nonrealistic plays. ey were metaphorical plays, or symbolic plays; some
of them were in verse, or in one case—writing about Montezuma—I turned out a
grand historical tragedy, partly in verse, rather Elizabethan in form. en I began to be
known really by virtue of the single play I had ever tried to do in completely realistic
Ibsen-like form, which was All My Sons. e fortunes of a writer! e others, like
Salesman, which are a compound of expressionism and realism, or even A View om
the Bridge, which is realism of a sort (though it’s broken up severely), are more typical
of the bulk of the work I’ve done. A er the Fall is really down the middle, it’s more like
most of the work I’ve done than any other play—excepting that what has surfaced has
been more realistic than in the others. It’s really an impressionistic kind of a work. I
was trying to create a total by throwing many small pieces at the spectator.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What production of A er the Fall do you think did it the most justice?

MILLER
I saw one production which I thought was quite marvelous. at was the one Ze relli
did in Italy. He understood that this was a play which re ected the world as one man
saw it. rough the play the mounting awareness of this man was the issue, and as it
approached agony the audience was to be enlarged in its consciousness of what was
happening. e other productions that I’ve seen have all been really realistic in the
worst sense. at is to say, they simply played the scenes without any attempt to allow
the main character to develop this widened awareness. He has di erent reactions on
page ten than he does on page one, but it takes an actor with a certain amount of
brains to see that evolution. It isn’t enough to feel them. And as a director, Ze relli
had an absolutely organic viewpoint toward it. e play is about someone desperately
striving to obtain a viewpoint.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you feel in the New York production that the girl allegedly based on Marilyn
Monroe was out of proportion, entirely separate from uentin?

MILLER
Yes, although I failed to foresee it myself. In the Italian production this never
happened; it was always in proportion. I suppose, too, that by the time Ze relli did
the play, the publicity shock had been absorbed, so that one could watch uentin’s
evolution without being distracted.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What do you think happened in New York?

MILLER
Something I never thought could happen. e play was never judged as a play at all.
Good or bad, I would never know what it was from what I read about it, only what it
was supposed to have been.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Because they all reacted as if it were simply a segment of your personal life?

MILLER
Yes.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think contemporary American critics tend to regard the theater in terms of
literature rather than theater?

MILLER
Yes, for years theatrical criticism was carried on mainly by reporters. Reporters who, by
and large, had no references in the aesthetic theories of the drama, except in the most
rudimentary way. And o in a corner, somewhere, the professors, with no relation
whatsoever to the newspaper critics, were regarding the drama from a so-called
academic viewpoint—with its relentless standards of tragedy, and so forth. What the
reporters had very o en was a simple, primitive love of a good show. And if nothing
else, you could tell whether that level of mind was genuinely interested or not. ere
was a certain naïveté in the reportage. ey could destroy plays which dealt on a level
of sensibility that was beyond them. But by and large, you got a playback on what you
put in. ey knew how to laugh, cry, at least a native kind of reaction, stamp their feet
—they loved the theater. Since then, the reporter-critics have been largely displaced by
academic critics or graduates of that school. uite frankly, two-thirds of the time I
don’t know what they really feel about the play. ey seem to feel that the theater is an
intrusion on literature. e theater as theater—as a place where people go to be swept
up in some new experience—seems to antagonize them. I don’t think we can really do
away with joy: the joy of being distracted altogether in the service of some aesthetic.
at seems to be the general dri , but it won’t work: sooner or later the theater
outwits everybody. Someone comes in who just loves to write, or to act, and who’ll
sweep the audience, and the critics, with him.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think these critics in uence playwrights?

MILLER
Everything in uences playwrights. A playwright who isn’t in uenced is never of any
use. He’s the litmus paper of the arts. He’s got to be, because if he isn’t working on the
same wavelength as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking
about. He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he’s great; consequently, for him
the total atmosphere is more important in this art than it is probably in any other.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What do you think of certain critics’ statement that the success of a really
contemporary play, like Marat/Sade, makes Tennessee Williams and his genre
obsolete?

MILLER
Ridiculous. No more than that Tennessee’s remarkable success made obsolete the past
before him. ere are some biological laws in the theater which can’t be violated. It
should not be made into an activated chess game. You can’t have a theater based upon
anything other than a mass audience if it’s going to succeed. e larger the better. It’s
the law of the theater. In the Greek audience fourteen thousand people sat down at the
same time, to see a play. Fourteen thousand people! And nobody can tell me that those
people were all readers of the New York Review of Books! Even Shakespeare was
smashed around in his time by university people. I think for much the same reasons—
because he was reaching for those parts of man’s makeup which respond to
melodrama, broad comedy, violence, dirty words, and blood. Plenty of blood, murder
—and not very well-motivated at that.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What is your feeling about Eugene O’Neill as a playwright?

MILLER
O’Neill never meant much to me when I was starting. In the thirties, and for the most
part in the forties, you would have said that he was a nished gure. He was not a
force any more. e Iceman Cometh and e Long Day’s Journey into Night, so popular
a few years ago, would not have been successful when they were written. Which is
another example of the psychic journalism of the stage. A great deal depends upon
when a play is produced. at’s why playwriting is such a fatal profession to take up.
You can have everything, but if you don’t have that sense of timing, nothing happens.
One thing I always respected about O’Neill was his insistence on his vision. at is,
even when he was twisting materials to distortion and really ruining his work, there
was an image behind it of a possessed individual, who, for good or ill, was himself.
 I don’t think there is anything in it for a young man to learn technically; that was
probably why I wasn’t interested in it. He had one virtue which is not technical, it’s
what I call “drumming”; he repeats something up to and past the point where you say,
“I know this, I’ve heard this ninety-three di erent ways,” and suddenly you realize you
are being swept up in something that you thought you understood and he has
drummed you over the horizon into a new perception. He doesn’t care if he’s
repeating. It’s part of his insensitivity. He’s a very insensitive writer. ere’s no nesse
at all: he’s the Dreiser of the stage. He writes with heavy pencils. His virtue is that he
insists on his climax, and not the one you would want to put there. His failing is that
so many of his plays are so distorted that one no longer knows on what level to receive
them. His people are not symbolic; his lines are certainly not verse; the prose is not
realistic—his is the never-never land of a quasi-Strindberg writer. But where he’s
wonderful, it’s superb. e last play is really a masterpiece.
But, to give you an example of timing: e Iceman Cometh opened, it happened,
the same year that All My Sons opened. It’s an interesting sociological phenomenon.
at was in ’ , soon a er the war. ere was still in the air a certain hopefulness
about the organization of the world. ere was no depression in the United States.
McCarthyism had not yet started. ere was a kind of … one could almost speak of it
as an atmosphere of goodwill, if such a term can be used in the twentieth century.
en a play comes along which posits a world really lled with disasters of one kind or
another. A cul-de-sac is described, a bag with no way out. At that time it didn’t
corroborate what people had experienced. It corroborated what they were going to
experience, and pretty soon a er, it became very timely. We moved into the bag that he
had gotten into rst!
But at the time it opened, nobody went to see Iceman. In a big way, nobody went.
Even a er it was cut, the thing took four or ve hours to play. e production was
simply dreadful. But nobody made any note that it was dreadful. Nobody perceived
what this play was. It was described simply as the work of a sick old man of whom
everybody said, “Isn’t it wonderful that he can still spell?” When I went to see that play
not long a er it opened, there must have been thirty people in the audience. I think
there were a dozen people le by the end of the play. It was quite obviously a great
piece of work which was being mangled on the stage. It was obvious to me. And to a
certain number of directors who saw it. Not all of them. Not all directors can tell the
di erence between the production and the play. I can’t do it all the time, either,
though Iceman was one where I could. But as for the critics I don’t think there is
anybody alive today, with the possible exception of Harold Clurman, whom I would
trust to know the di erence between production and play. Harold can do it—not
always, but a lot of the time—because he has directed a good deal.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Could this question of timing have a ected the reaction here to A er the Fall?

MILLER
Look, A er the Fall would have been altogether di erent if by some means the hero
was killed, or shot himself. en we would have been in business. I knew it at the time.
As I was saying before, there’s nothing like death. Still, I just wasn’t going to do it. e
ironic thing to me was that I heard cries of indignation from various people who had
in the lifetime of Marilyn Monroe either exploited her unmercifully, in a way that
would have subjected them to peonage laws, or mocked her viciously, or refused to
take any of her pretensions seriously. So consequently, it was impossible to credit their
sincerity.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
ey were letting you get them o the hook.

MILLER
at’s right. at’s exactly right.

I N T E RV I EWE R
And they didn’t want uentin to compromise.

MILLER
I think Günter Grass recently has said that art is uncompromising and life is full of
compromises. To bring them together is a near impossibility, and that is what I was
trying to do. I was trying to make it as much like life as it could possibly be and as
excruciating—so the relief that we want would not be there: I denied the audience the
relief. And of course all these hard realists betrayed their basic romanticism by their
reaction.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you think if you had done it in poetry that would have removed the threat more?

MILLER
Yes, I suppose so. But I didn’t want to remove it. It would have seduced people in a way
I didn’t want to. Look, I know how to make ’em go with me—it’s the rst instinct of a
writer who succeeds in the theater at all. I mean by the time you’ve written your third
play or so you know which buttons to push; if you want an easy success there’s no
problem that way once you’ve gotten a story. People are pretty primitive—they really
want the thing to turn out all right. A er all, for a century and a half King Lear was
played in England with a happy ending. I wrote a radio play about the boy who wrote
that version—William Ireland—who forged Shakespeare’s plays, and edited King Lear
so that it conformed to a middle-class view of life. ey thought, including all but
Malone, who was the rst good critic, that this was the real Shakespeare. He was an
expert forger. He xed up several of the other plays, but this one he really rewrote. He
was seventeen years old. And they produced it—it was a big success—and Boswell
thought it was the greatest thing he’d ever seen, and so did all the others. e only one
was Malone, who on the basis of textual impossibilities—aside from the fact that he
sensed it was a bowdlerization—proved that it couldn’t have been Shakespeare. It’s
what I was talking about before: the litmus paper of the playwright: you see, Ireland
sensed quite correctly what these people really wanted from King Lear, and he gave it
to them. He sentimentalized it; took out any noxious references.

I N T E RV I EWE R
And did it end with a happy family reunion?

MILLER
Yes, kind of like a Jewish melodrama. A family play.
 I N T E RV I EWE R
To go back to A er the Fall, did the style in which this play was presented in New York
a ect its reception?

MILLER
Well, you’ve hit it right on the head. You see, what happened in Italy with Ze relli
was—I can describe it very simply: there was a stage made up of steel frames; it is as
though one were looking into the back of a bellows camera—you know, concentric
oblong steel frames receding toward a center. e sides of these steel frames were
covered, just like a camera is, but the actors could enter through openings in these
covers. ey could appear or disappear on the stage at any depth. Furthermore,
pneumatic li s silently and invisibly raised the actors up, so that they could appear for
ten seconds—then disappear. Or a table would be raised or a whole group of furniture,
which the actors would then use. So that the whole image of all this happening inside a
man’s head was there from the rst second, and remained right through the play. In
New York the di culty was partly due to the stage which was open, rounded. Such a
stage has virtues for certain kinds of plays, but it is sti —there is no place to hide at all.
If an actor has to appear stage center, he makes his appearance twenty feet o the le
or right. e laborious nature of these entrances and exits is insuperable. What is
supposed to “appear” doesn’t appear, but lumbers onstage toward you.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Did that Italian production have a concentration camp in the background? I
remember a piece by Jonathan Miller complaining of your use of the concentration
camp in New York.

MILLER
Oh yes. You see in Italy the steel frame itself became the concentration camp, so that
the whole play in e ect was taking place in the ambiance of that enclosure. is steel
turned into a jail, into a prison, into a camp, into a constricted mechanical
environment. You could light those girders in such a way that they were forbidding—it
was a great scenic idea.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Why did you choose to use a concentration camp in the rst place?

MILLER
Well, I have always felt that concentration camps, though they’re a phenomenon of
totalitarian states, are also the logical conclusion of contemporary life. If you complain
of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social
responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed
to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an
organized social level is the concentration camp. Camps didn’t happen in Africa where
people had no connection with the basic development of Western civilization. ey
happened in the heart of Europe, in a country, for example, which was probably less
anti-Semitic than other countries, like France. e Dreyfus case did not happen in
Germany. In this play the question is, what is there between people that is
indestructible? e concentration camp is the nal expression of human separateness
and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment … one of the prime themes
of A er the Fall.
Even in Salesman what’s driving Willy nuts is that he’s trying to establish a
connection, in his case, with the world of power; he is trying to say that if you behave
in a certain way, you’ll end up in the catbird seat. at’s your connection; then life is
no longer dangerous, you see. You are safe from abandonment.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What is the genesis of e Crucible?

MILLER
I thought of it rst when I was at Michigan. I read a lot about the Salem witch trials at
that time. en when the McCarthy era came along, I remembered these stories and I
used to tell them to people when it started. I had no idea that it was going to go as far
as it went. I used to say, you know, McCarthy is actually saying certain lines that I
recall the witch-hunters saying in Salem. So I started to go back, not with the idea of
writing a play, but to refresh my own mind because it was getting eerie. For example,
his holding up his hand with cards in it, saying, “I have in my hand the names of so-
and-so.” Well, this was a standard tactic of seventeenth-century prosecutors
confronting a witness who was reluctant or confused, or an audience in a church
which was not quite convinced that this particular individual might be guilty. He
wouldn’t say, “I have in my hand a list”; he’d say, “We possess the names of all these
people who are guilty. But the time has not come yet to release them.” He had nothing
at all—he simply wanted to secure in the town’s mind the idea that he saw everything,
that everyone was transparent to him. It was a way of in icting guilt on everybody, and
many people responded genuinely out of guilt; some would come and tell him some
fantasy, or something that they had done or thought that was evil in their minds. I had
in my play, for example, the old man who comes and reports that when his wife reads
certain books, he can’t pray. He gures that the prosecutors would know the reason,
that they can see through what to him was an opaque glass. Of course he ends up in a
disaster because they prosecuted his wife. Many times completely naive testimony
resulted in somebody being hanged. And it was because they originally said, “We really
know what’s going on.”

I N T E RV I EWE R
Was it the play, e Crucible itself, do you think, or was it perhaps that piece you did in
the Nation—“A Modest Proposal”—that focused the Un-American Activities
Committee on you?

MILLER
Well, I had made a lot of statements and I had signed a great many petitions. I’d been
involved in organizations, you know, putting my name down for een years before
that. But I don’t think they ever would have bothered me if I hadn’t married Marilyn.
Had they been interested, they would have called me earlier. And, in fact, I was told on
good authority that the then chairman, Francis Walter, said that if Marilyn would take
a photograph with him, shaking his hand, he would call o the whole thing. It’s as
simple as that. Marilyn would get them on the front pages right away. ey had been
on the front page for years, but the issue was starting to lose its punch. ey ended up
in the back of the paper or on the inside pages, and here they would get right up front
again. ese men would time hearings to meet a certain day’s newspaper. In other
words, if they gured the astronauts were going up, let’s say, they wouldn’t have a
hearing that week; they’d wait until they’d returned and things had quieted down.

I N T E RV I EWE R
What happened at the committee hearing?

MILLER
Well, I was indicted for contempt for having refused to give or con rm the name of a
writer, whether I had seen him in a meeting of communist writers I had attended some
eight or ten years earlier. My legal defense was not on any of the Constitutional
amendments but on the contention that Congress couldn’t drag people in and
question them about anything on the Congressman’s mind; they had to show that the
witness was likely to have information relevant to some legislation then at issue. e
committee had put on a show of interest in passport legislation. I had been denied a
passport a couple of years earlier. Ergo, I tted into their vise. A year later I was
convicted a er a week’s trial. en about a year a er that the Court of Appeals threw
out the whole thing. A short while later the committee’s chief counsel, who had been
my interrogator, was shown to be on the payroll of a racist foundation and was retired
to private life. It was all a dreadful waste of time and money and anger, but I su ered
very little, really, compared to others who were driven out of their professions and
never got back, or who did get back a er eight and ten years of blacklisting. I wasn’t in
tv or movies, so I could still function.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Have your political views changed much since then?

MILLER
Nowadays I’m certainly not ready to advocate a tightly organized planned economy. I
think it has its virtues, but I’m in deadly fear of people with too much power. I don’t
trust people that much any more. I used to think that if people had the right idea they
could make things move accordingly. Now it’s a day-to-day ght to stop dreadful
things from happening. In the thirties it was, for me, inconceivable that a socialist
government could be really anti-Semitic. It just could not happen, because their whole
protest in the beginning was against anti-Semitism, against racism, against this kind of
inhumanity; that’s why I was drawn to it. It was accounted to Hitler; it was accounted
to blind capitalism. I’m much more pragmatic about such things now, and I want to
know those I’m against and who it is that I’m backing and what he is like.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Do you feel whatever Jewish tradition you were brought up in has in uenced you at
all?

MILLER
I never used to, but I think now that, while I hadn’t taken over an ideology, I did
absorb a certain viewpoint. at there is tragedy in the world but that the world must
continue: one is a condition for the other. Jews can’t a ord to revel too much in the
tragic because it might overwhelm them. Consequently, in most Jewish writing there’s
always the caution, “Don’t push it too far toward the abyss, because you’re liable to fall
in.” I think it’s part of that psychology and it’s part of me, too. I have, so to speak, a
psychic investment in the continuity of life. I couldn’t ever write a totally nihilistic
work.

I N T E RV I EWE R
Would you care to say anything about what you’re working on now?

MILLER
I’d better not. I do have about ve things started—short stories, a screenplay, et cetera.
I’m in the process of collecting my short stories. But I tell myself, What am I doing. I
should be doing a play. I have a calendar in my head. You see, the theater season starts
in September, and I have always written plays in the summertime. Almost always—I
did write View om the Bridge in the winter. So, quite frankly, I can’t say. I have some
interesting beginnings, but I can’t see the end of any of them. It’s usually that way: I
plan something for weeks or months and suddenly begin writing dialogue which
begins in relation to what I had planned and veers o into something I hadn’t even
thought about. I’m drawing down the lightning, I suppose. Somewhere in the blood
you have a play, and you wait until it passes behind the eyes. I’m further along than
that, but I’d rather leave it at that for now.

* A resort in Latvia.

Author photograph by Nancy Crampton.