The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller: An Interview

Author(s): Robert A. Martin

Source: Educational Theatre Journal , Oct., 1969, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Oct., 1969), pp. 310-317
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3205471

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 ROBERT A. MARTIN

The Creative Experience of Arthur Miller:

An Interview

M ARTIN:
work? What do you
Some critics think
have said in particular
that Ibsen has most
played an important part. I influenced
can you in your
see it in All My Sons, but in nothing after that.

MILLER: I tell you the truth. I misled people inadvertently at the beginning
of my life because of the fact of All My Sons, which was a sport. I had written,
I don't know, a dozen or more plays earlier which hadn't been produced. I wrote
a verse, or near verse, tragedy of Montezuma and Cortez, for example, which had
no relation whatsoever to any Ibsenesque theatre. I wrote a rather expressionist
play about two brothers in the University when I was a student. It's true I wrote
a very realistic play, my first play, a family play.1 I wrote two or three attempts
at purely symbolistic drama, and, when it came time to write All My Sons, I was
nearing thirty. I had had no success whatsoever with any of these things. That
wasn't what bothered me. What bothered me was that I didn't believe in any
of these plays that I had written. I couldn't go in front of an audience, or in
front of another person, and say that I had been mistreated by the American
theater. And why? Because I had not spoken clearly. And so I said to myself,
"I am not going to waste my life as I have seen others do." I knew writers who
were then in their 40's and older, who went on and on writing things which
they lamented nobody would do. And I read them and said, "Well, I wouldn't
do them either. If I had the money, I wouldn't put it in this play. I see the intent
is very high, but the god damn play doesn't work." And I said to myself, "Well,
do something which is first of all clear." And I worked two years on hammering
that thing out. Now, inevitably it reflected the Ibsen kind of narration, but I
never cottoned to him in the way that is thought, not really.
MARTIN: Are you saying then that most of the plays you've written from All
My Sons through The Price are really expressions of what you, at another point,
called, "what's in the air?"

MILLER: Yes. In the air in that I never thought of the theater as journalism
in the sense of what's in the air. You know, "this is what people will be interested
in," because I don't know that. I have no way of knowing that. I'm always sur-
prised at what people are doing, and I'm always surprised at what they're in-

* Copyright ? 1969 by Robert A. Martin.

Mr. Martin is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Michigan where he teaches
American literature and drama. This interview was conducted at The University of Michigan
during one of Arthur Miller's periodic visits to Ann Arbor. It is part of a continuing series of
conversations, interviews, and letters which will serve as the background for a book by Prof.
Martin on Mr. Miller's plays and his theory of tragedy. As a student at Michigan from I934-
1938, Mr. Miller studied playwriting under the direction of Prof. Kenneth Rowe who later
served as chairman for Prof. Martin's dissertation.
1 The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944)-

310 /

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 311 / THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE OF ARTHUR MILLER

terested in. I know what interests me. When I do know it I write a play, and when
I don't know it I go for a long time without writing a play.
MARTIN: So most of your plays have been about things that are immediate?
MILLER: Well, I suppose they seem immediate because they're immediate to
me. I make them immediate, in other words, or in some cases I don't. For in-
stance, Incident at Vichy is for a large number of people simply "old hat." It's
something that happened 25 years ago and who the hell wants to talk about
that?

MARTIN: You mentioned earlier that the ideas for some of your work came
from stories told to you by someone. Is that true also of your plays?
MILLER: No. It is true of, for example, All My Sons. That play was based on a
real incident. There wasn't a son involved but the daughter of a manufacturer
in the United States who turned him in during the war. I never knew the
people involved, and it turned out that it wasn't a daughter, but a son in my
play. All I knew was just what I told you, that this had happened in the Middle
West. I never saw it in the paper or anything. But that was, I would say, the
only play.

MARTIN: And Incident at Vichy?

MILLER: And Incident at Vichy was based, yes, upon an incident that was
told to me.2

MARTIN: That brings me to another question. Yesterday we were talking about

contemporary themes in a play, and if you look at all of your plays, on a his-
torical basis at least, you can see that Death of a Salesman was about something
that was current. The Crucible was also about something that was current in a
slightly different way.

MILLER: Except, think of it this way. Suppose I hadn't written The Crucible,
suppose it didn't exist. Do you realize that there was no play on the American
stage at all, good, bad, or indifferent, about this subject? The point I'm making
is that the American writer did not respond to this subject. I don't know this,
but I can't off-hand recall a novel about it. I'm sure there must have been
something written, but I couldn't tell you what it was.

MARTIN: Are you talking now about the witchcraft trials or the McCarthy
hearings?

MILLER: No, the McCarthy affair or anything to do with it. In effect, if I

hadn't written The Crucible that period would be unregistered in our literature,
on any popular level. That is, on a level outside of scholars writing about it or
articles. But as far as literature is concerned, it didn't exist. So, therefore, when
one says "It was in the air," I made it in the air, and here's a good example of it.
2 Miller has also attributed the origins of two other of his plays to stories that were told to
him. In the "Introduction" to his Collected Plays (1957), he says of The Man Who Had All
the Luck (1944): "I had heard the story of a young man in a midwestern town" (p. 14). In
discussing A View from the Bridge (1955), he states: "I had heard its story years before, quite
as it appears in the play" (p. 47).

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 312 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

Now look at Death of a Salesman. I don't know of another play which dealt with
the question of what one could call the ordinary man's strangulation by the
system of values that was going on. You can say, "That was in the air." Well, it
congealed in my head, so to speak, and I nailed it to the historical wall. There-
fore, it isn't a question of reporting something, you see, it's a question of creating
a synthesis that has never existed before out of common materials that are
otherwise chaotic and unrelated.

MARTIN: If we move them from the background of The Crucible toward your
writing After the Fall, let me ask this. If you take what you feel is in the air and
"make it in the air," is it correct to say that the issues raised in After the Fall
are concerned thematically with an idea that's been in your plays for a long
time?

MILLER: Right.
MARTIN: If we move then from the background of The Crucible toward your
previous ones? There is a rather definite critical tendency to see After the Fall
as being more autobiographical. That is, it is about, according to certain critics,
Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. Can you actually separate the man who
writes a play about Salem in 1692 (which happens to have many parallels with
McCarthyism) from the man who writes a play about two marriages that failed
and a Congressional hearing? I think the autobiographical intrudes in After the
Fall more directly than in any of your plays, and consequently leads critics to
an autobiographical conclusion on the internal evidence of the play itself.

MILLER: Yes, that's right. The only thing is, let's suppose you pick up a novel
by anybody-Thackeray, Meredith, Jane Austen, Dickens-and you're not a
scholar in that period. Of course, this is a long time since they've written it,
but even if you went back 25 years we could say the same thing I'm about to
say. Unquestionably in Meredith's time, when he was alive, and in Dickens' time,
when he was alive, when it came to light that Dickens, indeed, had been ob-
sessed with prisons, for personal reasons, what did this do to the work? Well, what
the hell is the difference? I'm not reading Dickens now, if I do read him, because
he was obsessed with prisons. I'm reading him because the work itself has some
truth in it-for me, some generalized truth. Now if he had never been anywhere
near a prison, would that make it any less or more true, or more valuable as a
work of art? It wouldn't. It's only, it seems to me, an easy way out for people
who will not or cannot examine the work at hand. So what they do is examine
the author.

MARTIN: Would you say then, in spite of the resemblances in After the Fall
to your own life, such as two marriages, being called before a Congressional
committee, etc., that although they came from certain experiences in your life,
they have no direct relevance to the play? I think there is, perhaps, a case to
be made that the play represents some part of your own life. But let's assume
that it's a foundation, an experience. When it all goes into the play do you con-
sciously exclude part of it? Would you say, for example, that nothing in the
play is based on any conversation or any experience that you actually had?

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 313 / THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE OF ARTHUR MILLER

MILLER: No. You see, the thing to me that is of interest, that is at stake, so to
speak, is the synthesis made of the material, rather than whether this is or is not
actually a fact in the person's life. I've had people tell me that they knew some
character in one of my plays (not After the Fall), and I'd say, "Really, who and
where is he?" Well, it turns out that I'd never been in the place where they were
talking about. I'd never heard of these people. I take it as a species of compliment,
really, that it was so real that they could see this character and say, "That must
have been the fellow."

Ibsen wrote Hedda Gabler for example. In the first performance somebody in
the audience detected that the age he had given Hedda was chronologically im-
possible. I've forgotten how it worked exactly with the mathematics involved,
but it's as though he had said that she was 24 years old and an experience that
she refers to is an historical event in Norway that happened 40 years ago. So she
would have had to be 60 years old in order to have shared it. Do you see what I
mean? Well, why did that happen? It happened because he slipped, you see. He
was talking about the real woman. Now, who the hell cares? That play is either
a play that's integral to itself or it isn't. It has no value, or isn't devalued,
because it was about this woman or it wasn't about the woman. Look at When
We Dead Awaken or The Master Builder. Ibsen himself happened to have been
involved with a young girl.

MARTIN: So it makes no difference whether the playwright is in the play or not,

if the play has a universal truth?

MILLER: Of course not. It's an absurdity because that's looking at it like a first-
person narrative the other way. Now consider the tortures of Tolstoy in relation
to his own wife; it wouldn't take a genius to see them in Anna Karenina. You
can see his whole inability to settle on what a woman was or his own sensuality,
which was what drove him finally near madness.

MARTIN: In an article you published in Life (February 7, 1964) you wrote of

After the Fall that "the play is neither an apology nor the arraignment of others
-quite simply, overtly, and clearly, it is a statement of commitment to one's
own actions." In the context you're talking about Quentin, but I was wondering
if you had any sense of a personal commitment to one's actions that was intended
as a reply to some of the criticism of After the Fall?

MILLER: Yes. I wanted there to direct attention to what the play was dealing
with in order to arrive at some judgment as to what I'd written as opposed to
what was attributed to me personally. Because otherwise there is no way to say
anything at all about the play. It's a circular argument. In other words, what
do you say to Stephen Crane who writes The Red Badge of Courage. Supposing
he'd done that last week and you say, "What division were you in?" He says,
"I wasn't in any division." "Well, where did you find out about the Army?"
He says, "I never did." "You didn't do any research?" "No." "Well, then this
can't be true." "Well, I don't know," Crane says, "does it seem true?" That's
the only answer.
MARTIN: Yes, and I think that's the right one.

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 314 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

MILLER: What other answer can there be? See, we're living in an age of such
journalism. We're flooded with publicity and reportage in a way that is obvious
no other civilization ever was. Between the television, and the movie magazines,
and the newspapers, we've lost any respect for the imagination of man or any
sense of what it means to synthesize experience.

MARTIN: Is this all related to why it's so hard to write a tragedy? If we have
lost our ability to synthesize, then what can you as a playwright say about the
individual human condition in a society that to many people seems to be flying
apart?

MILLER: Well, a worship of fact-by fact I mean in the crudest sense-is always
an obstruction if one is looking for the truth. There's a difference between the
facts and the truth; the truth is a synthesis of facts. We now see the reflection of
a technological age where facts are king. That is to say, the president doesn't
make a speech until he finds out through polls what people are thinking, then
he addresses that poll. He's not addressing people any more. The idea of assert-
ing a synthesized meaning any more from experience is suspect. And that's why,
I think, we've gotten to the point where someone could write in the New York
Times, as one critic did in reviewing a book by Harold Clurman, that it's much
harder to write a good review than a good play. It's come to that. You see, the
critics now, by virtue of their frequency in the press and their command of the
publicity apparatus, as opposed to the rarity with which a playwright can
possibly produce a play, have come to the point where they are the center of
the situation. They're no longer waiting upon the work of art; the work of art
is simply an excuse for them to write a criticism, to express themselves, because
that criticism verges more closely upon what we call fact. It's more objective;
it isn't this suspect subjective thrust. It is an objective thing. We respect that
much more, believe in it much more. Maybe it is all a fear of feeling; the equal
validity of felt knowledge.

MARTIN: I wanted to ask you about a remark by Leslie Fiedler. He says that
you and Paddy Chayefsky "create crypto-Jewish characters; characters who are
in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish-American, but who are
presented as something else-general-American say, as in Death of a Salesman,
or Italo-American, as in Marty." Fiedler calls this "a loss of artistic faith, a failure
to remember that the inhabitants of Dante's Hell or Joyce's Dublin are more
universal as they are more Florentine or Irish."3 And other critics have suggested
that Willy Loman is really a Jewish character. Do you have any particular point
of view about being Jewish yourself? Have you ever thought of a play about a
Jewish family that is clearly Jewish?

MILLER: My first play, written at The University of Michigan in 1934, I think,

was about a Jewish family. It was produced by the Hillel Foundation and got me
three awards. I've written about twenty full-length plays and maybe fifteen one-
acters and can't go through them all now, but I imagine two or three of those
were about Jews as Jews. This is Fiedler's problem, not mine. Where the theme

3 Leslie Fiedler, Waiting for the End (New York, 1965), p. 91.

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 315 / THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE OF ARTHUR MILLER

seems to me to require a Jew to act somehow in terms of his Jewishness, he does

so. Where it seems to me irrelevant what the religious or cultural background of a
character may be, it is treated as such. In A View From the Bridge they are
Sicilians because the social code which kills Eddie Carbone is made in Sicily
and it must be localized before it can be extended to all people. I see nothing
in Salesman, All My Sons, After the Fall, or The Crucible which is of that
nature. Incident at Vichy deals directly with the anti-Semitic problem so there
are Jewish characters. Similarly, Gregory Solomon in The Price has to be Jewish,
for one thing because the theme of survival, of a kind of acceptance of life,
seemed to me to point directly to the Jewish experience through centuries of
oppression. For me it is the theme that rules these choices. Fiedler's opinions in
this instance seem to me irrational. He reminds me of the time somebody in
Commentary magazine accused me of changing my name from some other name.
MARTIN: You mean your own name rather than a character in a play?
MILLER: Yes, Miller. This kind of thing can get pretty vile, you know. My
family's name has been Miller as far back as I know anything about. My mother
thought one side was named Mahler in Europe, but she wasn't sure. Miller
happens to be a fairly common name for Jews and others in Europe. It is all
part of the same parochialism which is expressed now in sophisticated terms.
The Jews in Fiedler's novels-or novel-I only read one, were not Jews to me so
much as figments; they are outside my experience, which may be my lack. But
their being Jewish certainly doesn't help their universality.

MARTIN: So then a Jewish writer couldn't write another Ulysses . . . ?

MILLER: Neither could a Gentile, could he? I understand what this kind of
critic is saying; that a Jewish writer cannot obtain any universality unless he
writes about Jewish people as such. But I write about what reflects my experi-
ence. I come from people who rarely, if ever, spoke Yiddish. I had no doubt I
was Jewish, but I simply wasn't brought up the way Fiedler evidently thinks I
should have been.

By the way, since Joyce has come up-in order to universalize the Irish he used
a Jewish hero. Now that's odd, isn't it?
MARTIN: Then all the names for your characters, Loman, Keller
MILLER: Well, they're as Jewish as Miller.
MARTIN: But they're not intentionally a neutralization?
MILLER: No, but there's another thing too. You see, I don't believe and never
did, because of the peculiarity of my own experience, in the uniqueness of the
Jew in terms of his relationship to society. There are differences, but I would
have to labor-belabor-a play, put it that way. I would have to really work at
it, provided we're talking about anything fundamental.
MARTIN: Anything in your plays, then, that reflects a Jewish characteristic is
only incidental?
MILLER: Not incidental--organic, as Jewishness is in me. Why don't they say
that John Proctor is "really" Jewish? Well, you see, I could answer that. I could

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 316 / EDUCATIONAL THEATRE JOURNAL

say that John Proctor is Jewish. I could make a whole thesis about the Jewishness
of the Puritan ideology, which, after all, is based not on the New Testament but
on the Old. The names did not come from the New Testament, they came from
the Old Testament. For all I know this very well may have helped to attract me
to the period. But I fail to understand what this has to do with The Crucible's
value as a play.
MARTIN: Then what you are intentionally trying to do in a play is to write
about man in the universal sense and not in any particular sense.
MILLER: I am trying to write about man as I see him. I've written short stories,
for instance, about Jewish people. In a book of short stories I've had published,
I Don't Need You Anymore, the lead story is about a little Jewish boy.
MARTIN: As you said that I was just thinking of Newman in Focus who looks
Jewish but who isn't.
MILLER: Yes. I take all this as an accusation that somehow I'm "passing" for
non-Jewish. Well, I happen to have written the first book about anti-Semitism in
this country in this recent time.4 I've written numerous stories about Jews as
Jews. In this book of nine short stories (and some of these stories go back
fifteen years) four of the nine stories are about Jewish people who are obviously
Jewish people. And this is no new discovery on my part. In other words, some
of these stories were written, as I say, in 1951 and 1952, which is roughly when
I started publishing stories.
MARTIN: It occurred to me when I read Fiedler's comment that anyone who
tried to write plays reflecting only his particular ethnic and cultural background
probably wouldn't have much to say that would be dramatically relevant.
MILLER: No, I don't think so either. But it's different in different cultures and
with different writers. In this country, I would have to be belaboring something.
I'm talking now from my experience, from what I know. To me it's simply an
aspect of the narrowed vision. They were probably brought up with people who
were in a different position vis-a-vis the immigration in this country, and they
can't conceive that anybody would have been brought up any differently. My
mother was born in this country. My father came over when he was five years old.
He grew up to be six feet two inches tall with blue eyes and red hair and every-
body thought he was an Irishman. So, consequently, I didn't get exactly that
kind of an identification.

MARTIN: Would you say then that being Jewish isn't important to you as a
playwright?

MILLER: It gets important to me as I try to decide the genesis of some of my

ideas and feelings historically. For instance, the persistence in my work and in
myself of a refusal to adopt a nihilistic attitude. I realize that a non-Jewish
writer could have the same aversion, and obviously some do, but there would
be possibly different reasons for it. My feeling is that when you sell nihilism,
so to speak, you are creating the grounds for nihilistic destruction, and the first

4 Focus, (1945).

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 317 / THE CREATIVE EXPERIENCE OF ARTHUR MILLER

one to get it is the Jew. It even happens in the most strange situations. You
see, the Jew is always the one, or most of the time, who stands at the crack of
the civilization, in geology it's the shearing point. For instance, in Harlem, the
militant Negroes have adopted a terrific anti-Semitism. Why? Because there are
a lot of Jewish storekeepers in Harlem. They are the face of the white society;
it's what they see there. Now these Jewish storekeepers, in terms of the whole
bourgeoisie, are in fact the most powerless part of the bourgeoisie because nobody
would have a store in Harlem if he could help it. It's not exactly the most gracious
life you could imagine. A Jew who could develop a business in a neighborhood
with less social stress and strain, who wouldn't be afraid to go to work in the
morning and go home at night, I'm sure would do it if he could manage it.
I think, therefore, that part of my struggle with nihilism may well express my
Jewishness. For example, much of this struggle in After the Fall, comes from
some very old and imbedded sense that nihilism ends up with a club in its
hand. That's one of the arguments that I have with a lot of the contemporary
celebration of nihilism and I would love to say to some of these guys, "Watch out
now, this is liable to get real." The roots of my aversion may well be Jewish,
but my concern is for the country as a whole.

-i

Othello, Champlain Shakespeare Festival. See Theatre in Review.

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