Timebends
By Arthur Miller
Grove, 640 pages, $25
Although ”Timebends” begins with Arthur Miller as a child, seeing the adult world from the floor, and ends with Miller, the good, gray playwright, in his Connecticut study, this is no conventional autobiography. As the title indicates, he goes back and forth in time, juxtaposing events from different periods of his life to give them extra meaning. ”Timebends” is a fascinating book less for what it says factually about Miller`s life than for its portrait of the autobiographer at work.
Miller once wrote that his first image of ”Death of a Salesman” was of a gigantic face that opened and let the audience inside the head. He has always been a man for revealing images, and for their dramatic extensions-complex but concretely realized characters, neat lines of action that are ambiguous in meaning, not in presentation.
At the same time, particularly in his prose pieces, he has circled events and people, trying to probe their moral, political, psychological and esthetic meaning, risking the loss of significance in ”portentous introspective palavering”-his phrase for what Paula Strasberg, Marilyn Monroe`s acting coach, heaped on her.
At his best, the playwright triumphs over the self-absorbed intellectual. Both Millers are at work in ”Timebends.” First of all, there is the playwright. There was a time in the mid-1940s, after the failure of his first play on Broadway, when Miller staked his future as a dramatist on a new work about a returning veteran who uncovers his father`s crimes. After ”two years of the most careful work . . . I had vowed to abandon playwrighting,” he writes, if ”All My Sons” was not a success.
In ”Timebends” he tells how Ward Morehouse, a reviewer who cared enough about the theater to go to New Haven for an advance look at the play, invited him and director Elia Kazan for a drink so he could ask, ”What`s it about?” Morehouse`s confused reaction echoed the earlier response of Herman Shumlin, who Miller thought would be the right producer for the play, since he regularly presented Lillian Hellman`s work. Shumlin sent word: ”I don`t understand your play.” Audiences had no such problem. ”All My Sons” was an immediate hit when it opened in 1947 and the Miller vocation was saved.
Two years later, when ”Death of a Salesman” burst on unsuspecting theatergoers, Miller found his name coupled with that of Tennessee Williams, both men elevated from promising to major American playwrights.
Miller`s later work inevitably disappointed true believers in
”Salesman,” but now, 40 years and 10 plays later (not counting the one-acts), Miller has a body of work that is almost continually in production. Not only do ”Sons” and ”Salesman” keep reappearing, but so do ”The Crucible,” ”A View From the Bridge,” ”After the Fall” and ”The Price.” In England last year, there were impressive revivals of ”The Archbishop`s Ceiling” and ”The American Clock,” works that were failures when they were first done here. There are a great many non-dramatic works in Miller`s bibliography, but the play`s the thing.
So much talk about success and failure may seem odd in a playwright who believes that the only plays that count are those with moral, social and esthetic substance, yet the financial and psychic rewards of commercial success are important to another Miller, the man who saw his comfortable childhood home dissolve after 1929 and who watched the Depression infect relationships within his own family.
Still another Miller is the man who became a celebrity to people who never saw a play or knew the name of a playwright. It is one of the oddities of American cultural life that successful playwrights find themselves drawn to beautiful movie stars-Clifford Odets and Louise Rainer, David Rabe and Jill Clayburgh, Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange. With Miller, it was Marilyn Monroe and, although his marriage to America`s suicidal sweetheart was an unhappy one, for a few years they were a very visible union of art and glamor.
Miller, the moralist occasionally given to pontificating, is a product of Marx and Freud. His early leftist allegiances led him to the House Un-American Activities Committee and a conviction for contempt of Congress, later reversed. By the time these confrontations came in the late 1950s, as his plays already indicated, he had tempered his political ideas with
psychological perceptions.
All these Millers and a few others can be found in ”Timebends,”
glimpsed through still another Miller, the man recalling his past. Autobiographers, for the most part, are impelled by the twin needs to understand their lives and to make them presentable. He says, for example,
”Cautiously at first, or so I fatuously thought, I let the mystery and blessing of womankind break like waves over my head once or twice, enough to shatter for me the last belief that social arrangements, including marriage, had something to do with inevitability.” Translation: He was cheating on his wife.
Miller is selective in his material, sometimes extending a minor encounter into an illustrative anecdote. On the other hand, central figures in his life are sketched in lightly. Although he deals with Monroe at length, an extended reprise of the Maggie-Quentin relationship in ”After the Fall,” there is never any clear sense of Mary Slattery, his first wife, and only intermittent glimpses of Inge Morath, his present wife.
The missing Morath is particularly unfortunate because ”Timebends” is about a man and a writer who finally comes to terms with himself and, tentatively, with the world in which he lives. His third marriage, which has lasted for more than 25 years, presumably has been instrumental in his discovery of community, connection. He has always seen himself as an outsider- in his own family, in college, in the theater, in Hollywood, in a society that seems always to be disintegrating around him-and, despite his tremendous success in the theater, he felt rejection as much as acceptance and tends, like most playwrights, to suspect academic, critical and, more justly, political plots against him-”this game of Let`s Kill Miller.”
He describes his mother as a mixture of ”credulousness and detachment”
and says he early learned this combination, the artist`s way of seeing. This double vision lets him reach for commitment and question it in the same gesture. It allows him to stand off and watch himself. One can believe in the pain, the guilt, the self-destructiveness in his personal and public life, in his marriage to Monroe and in the accusation and betrayal of the McCarthy period.
As ”Timebends” makes clear, his major plays grew out of personal and social crises, the author`s distress become art. In Section 5 of this book, for instance, he moves between his collapsing first marriage and the chaos and hysteria of the McCarthy years and describes the making of ”The Crucible,”
in which both are reflected.
There is much to enjoy simply and directly in ”Timebends,” but in contemplating Miller moving among the fragments of his life, remembering and misremembering, seeing and not seeing, the reader has to find his own perspective. Even when it invites doubt, it is a remarkable and rewarding book.
