THE concept of Writer as Public Man appears to have been invented by the American chat show. In Ireland, writers are usually treated with a more casual approach less superstars than part of the furniture. When playwright Arthur Miller arrived in Dublin this week to participate in The Spirit of A Nation colloquium at Trinity College. The public reaction to his presence was closer to that reserved for visiting holy men. In his particular case, the holy man who had been married to Marilyn Monroe.
At 82, he is still America's most famous playwright and has been so for 50 years. He remains a large, rangy, fit looking man. Asking him about death would appear to be a waste of time. His expression is shrewd, slightly amused, softer than the tense, angular faced young playwright of the 1940s and 5Os. He seems almost serene, wearing a cream coloured summer suit, his tie casually knotted.
Interestingly, two of the giants of 20th-century literature - Miller and Saul Bellow - were both born in 1915, both sons of immigrants. Both passed their six-week wait for divorces as neighbours in Nevada. Yet while Bellow has become ethereal, almost spiritual, Miller has never lost his physicality.
Miller's voice remains strong and his demeanour is New York, very Jewish. A native of New York city who was raised in Harlem, he has lived in Connecticut for almost half a century and has been married to photographer Inge Morath for three decades.
Years of carpentry have left him strong capable hands. Is he still making furniture? "Yes, I just finished some garden benches." What is he writing at the moment? "Two plays, but I might not finish either of them." His continuing interest in them, not the dictates of mortality, will most likely decide whether or not he completes them.
Bright brown eyes peer at his interviewer. About the only concession Miller may have made to the years is mild deafness. People interrupt the interview; books are presented to be autographed, a woman is taking photographs and is hoping to sell them later. The camera is clicking in his face. Miller remains calm. A man presents his young son who wrote Miller a letter, to which the playwright responded. It is strange people appear more interested in holding his hand and thanking him for his work, for surviving, than in asking him any questions.
His four big plays; All My Sons (1947), Death Of A Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955) - have assured him of literary immortality. Miller's work, by virtue of his realism and speech-as- spoken, appears to have distanced itself from the lushness of Tennessee Williams. Funny, considering Miller and Williams together provided the bridge for Edward Albee and those who followed him. Just as he has outlived many of his contemporaries, his work has also managed to continue dominating the modern canon.
There have been lulls. Miller can remember times when his plays were being performed in half a dozen countries but not in New York.
I seemed to have been "revived" when in fact I had only been invisible in my own land."
Director Elia Kazan. Miller's sometime friend, sometime enemy, who directed Death of a Salesman, recalls that it was the only play at which he ever saw grown men cry. Miller wrote it in six weeks and won a Pulitzer Prize.
"America," announces Willy Loman in that play, "is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me boys." Loman is the victim of his own fragile ego, self-deceptions and inability to compete. His entire life has been dominated by the false values of contemporary society. His sons, particularly Bill, a golden boy whose aura fades before he gets to college, is another liar. Instead of describing the collapse of the American Dream, Miller presents the perversion of it.
In All My Sons, a man pays for his own part in a scandal involving aircraft parts with the death of his son. In A View From The Bridge, bighearted Eddie Carbone's desperate efforts to protect a young girl has tragic consequences for everyone. By the end of that play, Alfieri, the narrator, reflects on Eddie's life: "Most of the time we settle for half and I like it better. But the truth is holy, and even now as I know how wrong he was, his death useless, I tremble, for I confess that something perversely pure calls to me from his memory.
Although The Crucible exposes the corruption of a society and was inspired by the hysteria and hypocrisies of the McCarthy era and the witch- hunt which undermined a generation of film-makers and actors, Miller maintains: "I have always been interested in human dilemmas, the idea of a man caught in a situation, and these situations are often made by society as much as by him.
Hence the recurring themes of personal quest, self-knowledge and self realisation. The artist, according to Miller, is obliged to look at the individual and his society. How does he feel about Willy Loman, Eddie Carbone or John Proctor now? "I don't see them as mine anymore, they seem to belong to everyone.
Yet because of the Ibsenesque, responsible, and at times, fatalistic quality of his work, Miller as a writer has always been most associated with ideas and causes. A former president of international PEN (the association of poets, playwrights, editors, essayists and novelists), he also actively denounced the Vietnam war. He has been always been a campaigner and it is this moral integrity and responsibility which has sustained his work.
He stresses his lifelong love of language. "I have always worked with it, within it. Changing it, or at least for me, trying new styles. You know, that's why, for me, the thing I most love about The Crucible was coming up with that new language. Hearing American actors enjoying the challenge of it."
The ongoing interest in his plays pleases him, as does the recent film version of The Crucible, for which he wrote the screenplay -in itself a surprise as he has often expressed a wariness of cinema. "I think the movie is good - my son-in-law, the actor Daniel Day Lewis, is in it," he says with a smile.
Beyond the smile remains Miller's belief in his play, not only as drama. "As I watched The Crucible taking shape as a movie over much of the past year," he wrote in a recent essay, "the sheer depth of time it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly 50 years ago, in an America almost nobody remembers."
Miller's own outrage at the Salem story intensified his resentment of McCarthyism and efforts made by the committee requesting him to write an anti-communist document. He refused and for a time lost the right to travel outside the US - "I was denied a passport for four-and-a-half years," he says. Although never drawn to communism - political differences had ended his friendship and working partnership with Kazan - Miller, nevertheless, had to appear before the House of Un American Activities Committee. "I'd read about the Salem trials when I was at college. But it was not until I read a book published in 1867 - a two-volume, thousand-page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem - I knew then I had to write the play that became The Crucible."
Two years ago, the publication of a small, snappy prose work confirmed that Miller may be less angry, but is far from complacent. Published as a novel, Plain Girl is only 48 pages long. Most of the criticism was directed at its length. Far more significant is the fact that at 80 he had written his best short story, only his 10th ever and his first for almost 30 years.
Far from dealing with a big issue, it is the story of a rich girl whose main problem in life is that she is not beautiful. "Not being beautiful may not sound too serious, but it matters to her. I liked writing it," he says. "I liked the fact it was well-received. I saw it as a piece of fun, relaxed, easy with none of the pressure of writing dialogue for the stage.
He has always had faith in the short story form. "Stories," he once said, allow one to "see things isolated in stillness. In the forward written in 1966 to I Don't Need You Anymore, he observed: "There is a short story tone of voice which amid the immodest heroics of the day, still invites whoever wishes to speak or blurt out his truth in a single breath."
MILLER wrote his own story -his story and America's as well. Timebends was published in 1987 and was widely celebrated as an outstanding memoir. Its tone is not nostalgic Miller does not revisit Memory Lane as much as dissect it. Of his relationship with his mother he recalls "only feeling the shock of grief for her" when he looked up from her coffin and heard the rabbi's voice. "Unexpected tears moved into my eyes as I imagined her a young woman in that casket - a life of expectations and pride in her children, but not in herself. . . our relation was unfinished, and her death too soon."
With his father it was different. "We were very close, sure, it was different, male to male. But as you know, he was uneducated, we didn't have an intellectual relationship." Isidore Miller was very proud of his son and was interested in his work. "And I was proud of him, he was a kind man."
There is endless humanity, if little comfort, in Miller's book. Was he surprised by its success? "I was more surprised by the book. When I decided to write it, I counted on it being about 150 pages. It's a lot longer."
It is. Running to 600 pages, the book does exactly what its title suggests, it bends time. It is circular, random, relentless, candid, exact, eloquent. "I could have made it much longer, I cut stuff out. The publishers didn't want a multi-volume autobiography."
Central to the book is Miller's relationship with Marilyn Monroe. In it he recalls the day he remarked to her: "You are the saddest girl I ever met." He describes her as a doomed child. But Monroe's tragedy also appears to have become that of anyone who came near her. Miller was prepared to sideline his work in order to help her. Of the many cruel ironies surrounding the film version of The Misfits was Miller's intention to write it as the work which would finally liberate Monroe from her playgirl image.
It seems Monroe's agonies tested Miller yet also brought him to an understanding of himself. After The Fall (1964), in which Quentin seeks to comprehend his failed relationships, is probably Miller's most autobiographical dramatic work.
Most of all though, Timebends is the story of two Arthur Millers: the student at the University of Michigan who wanted to be a playwright and won some prizes, and the other Miller, the famous one who emerged from the success of All My Sons and has stayed famous.
But it wasn't always easy. Arthur Miller was not always celebrated in his own country. "No, I wasn't. I'm glad you mention that. It was a long struggle."
In Timebends, he recalls on accepting the presidency of PEN. being told how important it was, particularly because "I was an American." Miller's reply at the time was terse. "In the first place, I am not an "American". My government doesn't like me, never did. I don't represent the American people either."
Nowadays, it is different. "The government doesn't mind me now," he laughs, "I don't seem to bother it anymore.
ON a July day, as an audience listens to the former Senator George Mitchell celebrate his American heritage, a strong sense of patriotism is in the air. Miller's address touches on his early struggle to find a dramatic language beyond the narrow commercial realism of the American theatre in the 1930s.
It is not a celebratory speech, it is informed. Sentimentality has never interested him. I ask him how important is it for him to be an American playwright? "I'm a writer. Am I an American writer? I see myself as a writer." But is America a good place for a writer, considering his subjects have come from his society?" "No, I think it's the human dilemma that gives the subject. But America has so much to offer. What other country can you think of would have a constitution which includes the words "in the pursuit of happiness"? Can you imagine that in Germany, or France, or Britain?"
In Timebends, he wrote "we have no theatre culture". Does he still feel that? "It's pretty much a mixed bag at the moment. There's a large number of small theatres. There are a lot of writers, but try finding an actor over the age of 35. They have to get out, they can't afford to work there. That's why we don't have any continuity, there always has to be new generation."
He thinks theatre and language are at the mercy of pictures and sounds.
How important is David Mamet? "Oh, he's good. Very interesting, he's lyric, aggressive, he's trying to find his own way past the naturalism of American theatre." Miller is wary of generalisations: "But, like I said, there's a lot going on, some of it good, some of it bad."
His interest in new work remains. "I'm going to Galway to see a new Irish play," he says and later, having attended the Druid Theatre production of Martin MacDonagh's The Lonesome West, reports: "It's wonderful, extremely funny and touching." He's doing something."
His life has run parallel with the story of America this century. He seems to have remembered everything, but then, much of his life is history. Miller's response to this is to pause, smile slowly and concede: "Maybe. But yes, I remember a lot."
