Where certain modern playwrights are unwilling to offer prose commentaries about their own works, Arthur Miller (like his fellow socialist Shaw) will append lengthy prefaces to his published plays and has written (in 1987) an autobiography, Timebends, which provides a powerful interweaving of his personal, dramatic and political lives. Miller's latest book, his first in five years (and, it has to be said, a very short one), reflects on three of his plays, Death of a Salesman on its fiftieth anniversary in 1988; a meditation on the sources of his 1968 play The Price; and by far the most substantial piece, a public lecture at Harvard on "The Crucible in History" about why he sought in the writing of this play a parallel between the past of the Salem Witch trials and the paranoia of early 1950s America as Senator Joe McCarthy pursued his anti-Communist drive through the House Un-American Activities Committee.
That latter period has now, too, passed into history and can seem to present-day audiences as remote as the original activities in Salem. What provokes Miller to consider it anew is the threat of historic amnesia, the recurrent tendency of people to forget "precisely what is is vital for them to remember". At the time, Miller was engaged to be married to Marilyn Monroe. The initial publicity for this book has quoted Miller's claim that the Chairman was willing to cancel the playwright's appearance before HUAC if Monroe would agree to have her picture taken with him. The offer, Miller tersely notes, was declined; and he proceeds to itemise what this act of integrity cost him, in terms of lawyer's fees and a fine, a suspended sentence and "a year of inanition in my creative life". While not doubting Miller's motives, I would be curious to know what Marilyn Monroe thought, whether they discussed it and what was said. But this remains the only reference to Monroe in the book and tells us little more than that Arthur Miller was married to the most beautiful woman in the world, which we already knew.
Despite writing elsewhere in the book that sex is "deeper than politics", Miller does not explore the proposition here as he does in The Crucible itself, where sexual betrayal motivates the former house servant Abigail's denunciation of John Proctor's wife. The close personal and professional relationship illuminated in this lecture is with Elia Kazan who, we are reminded, directed the first stage productions of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman. Although his relationship with Kazan (as with Monroe) is discussed in Timebends, Miller is moved to further reflection on Kazan's decision to offer names to the Committee (which ruptured their working relationship) by the uproar in 1998 when the director was awarded an honorary Oscar. As Miller writes: "Half a century had passed since his testimony, but Kazan now bore very nearly the whole onus of that era, quite as though he had manufactured its horrors all by himself, when in fact he was surely its victim".
Miller curses the "whole hateful procedure" which would drive such a man to such a pass, and makes explicit what he merely hinted at in Timebends: that the meeting with Kazan, where the latter confessed what he had done and sought to justify it, occurred while Miller was en route to Salem to research The Crucible and that Kazan's palpable suffering contributed profoundly to the creation of the play. If Miller throughout is wary of identification as a Marxist, what emerges more strongly at the close of The Crucible piece is his sense of his own Jewishness and the extent to which the anti-semitism of the Right impacted on his early consciousness.
This also emerges in the figure of the 90-year-old Russian-Yiddish antiques dealer he discusses in The Price, and lends a prophetic, apocalyptic tone to the closing lines of his otherwise unremarkable few pages on Salesman: "a little mercy is eminently in order given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when in fact they are all trembling in a fast wind blowing mindlessly round the earth." Miller's prose writings have their own deeply achieved validity and interest. As ongoing acts of historic witness, they complement rather than merely comment on his enduring dramatic works.
Anthony Roche is a senior lecturer in the English Department at UCD and editor of the Irish University Review