An Unpublished Interview with Arthur Miller
At a Glance
Section titled âAt a Glanceâ| Metadata | Details |
|---|---|
| Publication Date | 2016-10-01 |
| Journal | The Arthur Miller Journal |
| Authors | Rupendra Guha Majumdar |
| Citations | 1 |
Abstract
Section titled âAbstractâ[Editorâs Note: Arthur Miller has the distinction of being one of the most interviewed literary figures of his time. During his long career, he was open to sitting down with print and broadcast journalists, theater critics, and scholars to discuss his views on his own work, the state of the theater, American and international politics, and social issues. The inaugural issue of The Arthur Miller Journal (Spring 2006) included one of Millerâs final interviews before his death, a conversation with his biographer Christopher Bigsby. I am pleased that this issue contains a previously unpublished interview with Miller by Rupendra Guha Majumdar of the University of Delhi. Conducted in Millerâs New York apartment on 27 April 1993, the interview is a lively exchange with Majumdar who was a Fulbright Fellow at Yale at the time. The edited conversation includes Millerâs views on his famous plays, nineteenth-century American writers, Eugene OâNeill, theatrical realism, and his plays of the 1990s. I have included Majumdarâs introduction that details the unique circumstances that led to the interview. The photos that Majumdar has provided include what may be the only Miller âselfieâ on record!Stephen Marino]When Arthur Miller graduated from Brooklynâs Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, his most satisfying accomplishment came as a football player on the second squad of the schoolâs team. He certainly was exposed to the football âheroesâ on the âAâ squad whose personalities he would use in fashioning Biff Loman in Death of a Salesman. Millerâs youthful athletic shape was recognizable in his robust appearance at seventy-seven. In fact, if it had not been for his white hair, he could have passed for a man in his early sixties, Willy Lomanâs age in the selfsame play. Over six feet tall, broad-shouldered, straight-backed, walking briskly, his speech equally focused, though with contemplative pauses, the hint of a smile on his faceâMiller presented the picture of a man on his intellectual toes, leading a very active social and professional life; a man respected by serious theatergoers the world over for many decades. This was what I saw when I met him in New York in 1993.Millerâs international image is rooted in his alignment with an American tradition further complicated by his being Jewish. This is similar to Eugene OâNeill and his Irish background. From the beginning of Millerâs career in the forties to the start of the twenty-first century, he acknowledged the vital presence of his (fellow-Connecticut) precursor, OâNeill, without having been, in any sense, under the latterâs artistic shadow. It is quite an amazing coincidence, therefore, that a character in OâNeillâs lone comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, set in 1906, and published and produced in 1933, not only should be called âArthur Miller,â but also turns out to be a football champion and university student.1I forgot to ask Miller about this piquant connection between his name and that of his precursorâs protagonist when I met him in Manhattan. I presume he must have been aware of it, because I later came across his own reference to the OâNeill play in his discussion of the Great Depression in the introduction to The American Clock (1980), set in 1930s America. Miller is likely to have had his share of surprise in meeting a stage doppelganger of sorts: yet the nostalgia for a lost frontierâsuggested in a title like Ah, Wilderness!âand the sense of alienation and transcendence that defines the problematic angst of many of OâNeillâs protagonists can also be seen in Millerâs heroes. Indeed, Miller himself upholds the ânoble questâ and the âfabulous appetite for greatnessâ that he attributes so magnanimously to his pathbreaking precursor, in his New York Times review (6 November 1988) of Selected Letters of Eugene OâNeill.2On 15 February 1993, I wrote Arthur Miller a letter from Yale University, where I was spending an academic year in the English Department as a postdoctoral Fulbright Fellow from Delhi University, India. I was partly inspired by his own letter to Eugene OâNeill (dated 22 February 1949), which I had discovered among the OâNeill Papers in Yaleâs Beinecke Rare Books Library. It was a letter in which Miller had invited his fellow Connecticut Yankee to be present at the staging of Death of a Salesman. I was also moved by my chance discovery, during a weekend visit to my old friend Gerald Weales, emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, that he had edited the 1967 Viking edition of Salesman. It was a truly fascinating revelation for me that the external examiner of my dissertation on American drama had also edited, long ago, the greatest play of the greatest living American dramatist of that time. I asked him whether he knew where Miller lived, without any real expectation of meeting him. Gerald remarked that he had the address somewhere and started rummaging through his books. He finally found what he was looking for, a battered address book whose pages he flicked to the letter M. âHere it is,â he said. I scribbled down the address. I could see myself already walking down a tree-lined Old Tophet Road in Roxbury, Connecticut, in the not-so-distant future. But it did not exactly work out that way.In my letter to Miller, dated 15 February, I sought his opinion about a number of topics. Keeping drama in the forefront, I drew him back to an earlier period, the context of nineteenth-century American literature, New England Transcendentalism and its modern offshoots: Emerson, Melville, William Vaughn Moody, Eugene OâNeill, and others. I mentioned, in passing, that I had been teaching Death of a Salesman, along with OâNeillâs Desire Under the Elms, to postgraduate students at Delhi University for almost two decades. I added at the end that, as my Fulbright Fellowship was to end in June, it would be wonderful to meet him before returning to India, if it was possible to do so at his convenience. And if he could not oblige me, I would be satisfied in cherishing his letter of reply.3Personally, I had little hope of hearing from him. So I was very surprised one day, a month later, when checking my mailbox, to find a small white envelope with âArthur Millerâ printed on the back, dated 18 March and posted from Waterbury, Connecticut. The typed letter was brief and to the point: âDear Mr. Majumdar, I am leaving for England and a stay of perhaps two weeks, but if you wish you might call me around April 15th and we can make a date to meet. Sincerely, (signed) Arthur Miller.â I couldnât believe it. He had answered me after all. I received the letter on 19 March, the day New Haven was hit by a terrific blizzard (âthe storm of the century,â reported Channel Eight), and soon the entire New England coast was heavily snowbound. By the next day parked cars had almost disappeared under the white mass. Bulldozers endeavored to clear the sludge intermittently for some kind of passage. The local buses stopped plying. So did most taxis.The unceasing snowfall and consequent stalling of public transport made me and my wife, Karabi, tense, because in any moment we would be compelled to rush to the Yale New Haven Hospital three miles away, as we were expecting the birth of our first child. The âdue dateâ of 14 March had already passed. We did not have a car of our own, and most of our friends who owned cars had left town over the spring break. Ambulance service was not available on our health insurance plan for delivery cases, and calling one would entail, we were told, a payment of five hundred dollars for the single trip! Cabs too, we were informed, were disinclined to carry expecting mothers in their final stages of pregnancy to hospitals for the mess that might result inside the vehicle. What were we to do except pray for the snowfall to stop? And miraculously it did! On 22 March, three days after I received Millerâs friendly letter, our son Mrittunjoy was born in Yale New Haven Hospital. And we had had no trouble reaching the hospital in time. By bus!I had been unable to call Miller on 15 April, as the Fulbright Chapter of Connecticut had arranged a trip for us to visit the United Nations headquarters in New York on that day. On the 18th I accompanied my Yale friends, Susan and Bob, in their car to a nearby county to witness a spectacular mock Civil War extravaganza complete with period costume and setting, on a smoke-filled, canon-booming New England meadow. But the next day I called Mr. Miller in Roxbury, and there he was on the line, talking to me. It was eight fifteen in the morning. He came to the point. âYou are doing your postdoctoral research at Yale?â âYes,â I replied. He mentioned that he was just about to leave for New York. Could I call on Wednesday evening, 21 April, he asked. âSure,â I said. Two days later I had to call a couple of times before he was free to talk. After the initial chitchat, he asked me whether I had a car, because without one I couldnât possibly reach the remote destination. There was no train service and the closest bus went only to Waterbury, twenty-two kilometers east of Millerâs village, and it would not be possible for him to fetch me from Waterbury to his place.I told Miller that even though I was sans transport of any kind I was confident I could manage to get there some way or the other. He disagreed, suggesting that it would be better for us, after all, to meet in New York, where he had an apartment in the middle of Manhattan. He fixed the date for Tuesday, 27 April. I was somewhat disappointed about the venue being arranged by default! I had no problems with New York as it was fascinating in its own way, embodying both hypnotic and alienating forces in its carnivalesque landscape. But since I had contacted Miller, I had been eager to meet him in the rural setting of Roxburyâa landscape of undulating hills and meadows where he was said to have personally planted, with the aid of a tractor he rode, six thousand pines and firs; and where, within his carpentry outhouse, he had shaped household furniture like his cherry-wood dining table.This aspect of tending to outdoor chores with oneâs own hands, of appropriating nature without exploiting it, of participating in the labor necessary to produce the simple articles of oneâs daily use in the Thoreauvian tradition, is echoed in Millerâs mythic references to an age when self-reliance was both modestly affirmed as well as vainly displayed. The first kind is remembered in Willy Lomanâs father making flutes whose melody his son keeps spasmodically hearing in his inner ear; and the second in Uncle Benâs adventures, pioneer style, into the primeval forest from which he would emerge later with shining diamonds in his hands. Miller was what his protagonist Willy could not or did not want to beâadept at tools. The said carpentry shop at Millerâs house in Roxbury epitomized this pristine activity for me, and I wanted to see the playwrightâs handiworkâhis tables and bookshelvesâjust as much as I wanted to hear him speak and to meet him in person.On the appointed day of our meeting on 27 April, I caught the early morning Metro North train from New Haven for the two-hour ride to Grand Central and hopped onto a bus that traveled the eastern flank of Central Park. I got off somewhere near Sixtieth Street and briskly walked farther east toward Second Avenue. I located Millerâs high-rise apartment building and then waited beside a nearby basketball court, framed with a tall chain-link fence. Local lads were playing the game. Some construction work was going on in front of the building, which was in my direct view. The appointment was for two oâclock. I was a little early, as usual. Soon I walked into the lobby of the building to discover a white-haired, sturdy old man in uniform standing behind the reception counter. I mentioned my purpose to him and sat down on a lone sofa in the corner of the hall, from where I could see anyone entering through the door. Miller was not in, but he was expected any moment, as I was told by the receptionist with whom I chatted intermittently. He had been working in the building, he said, since the Second World War.One hour passed. No sign of Miller. Another thirty minutes went by. I was beginning to get restless and a little irritated. But I reasoned that there would be no point in walking off in a huff. Iâd just lose a good opportunity of meeting a great man. And I would also let down Professor Weales who had given me the opportunity. So I kept waiting. At three thirty in the afternoon a tall, bald, handsome, casually dressed man walked in asking the receptionist immediately whether anyone had come to meet him. I had already risen from my seat on recognizing him, and walked halfway down the floor. He turned to me with a smile and we shook hands, as he apologized profusely for being so terribly late. He had been delayed at a function, and provided the finer details as we went up the elevator to his apartment on the seventh floor.The first thing he did on entering the apartment after unlocking it was to switch on the answering machine resting on a small side table, and listen patiently to the long string of messages addressed to him. I couldnât help remembering the frightened reaction of Willy Loman on being accidentally accosted by the impersonal voice of the tape recorder in his boss Howardâs office. One would see Miller almost as an antithesis to Willy, in his quiet charm and smooth way of life within the slipstream of a metropolis that had so overwhelmed his beleaguered salesman. An image of Willy filtered through my mind, back slightly bent, shuffling along, portrayed so brilliantly on film by Dustin Hoffman. At one point, in the later part of our conversation, Miller mentioned Hoffman as a superb actor. Millerâs wife, Ingeborg Morath, was not present in the apartment. She was probably in Roxbury. It was she, I suppose, who had picked up the phone and spoken in a European accent when I had called Miller earlier on from Yale.The setting of Millerâs urban residence in Lower Manhattan, perched within a forest of skyscrapers, could also be straight out of the Salesman scenario, without, of course, the vivid expressionistic touches by Jo Mielziner that imbued the first moments of the staged play in 1949 with the atmosphere of a Roman amphitheater waiting for the dayâs sacrifice of gallant warriors.4 Willy counterpoints, in his imagination, the overwhelming physicality of the city with nostalgic memories of the pastoral options of survival that he had forfeitedâdespite the leads provided by heroic father figures in his own pastâwith the notes of a mythical flute trilling plaintively in his mind during such moments. Miller, no doubt, had been sufficiently educated by the bourgeois lessons of Willyâs life, not to be merely nostalgic about such cherished polarities of life, but to recognize the deeply emotional allegiances to both urban and idyllic contexts of growth. Nor did he have to, presumably, withstand the conflicts that usually result from the failure of reconciling the two spheres. On the contrary, he appeared to have synthesized the two by alternating between them constantly, shuttling between his cozy little pad in Manhattan and his sprawling country home in Roxbury, discreetly unlisted in telephone books, cradled by the silent, fir-lined Shepaug River.INTERVIEW BY RUPENDRA GUHA MAJUMDARArthur Miller unlocks the door to his seventh-floor apartment in Manhattan, New York, and enters the lobby followed by Rupendra. It is not a big apartment, nor lavishly furnished. A small sofa set occupies the central floor of the room, which has a mantelpiece on the left and two windows at the rear. Doors lead to other rooms on sides, left and right. An old transistor radio rests on the mantelpiece. The telephone, with an adjoining answering machine, rests on a table right rear corner. A lamp stands next to it. Rupendra moves towards the sofa as Miller switches on the answering machine and listens to the soft toned messages one by one. After they are over, he comes to the sofa and sits down, lights his briar pipe, unhurriedly takes a drag or two, and appears relaxed for a conversation.And we leave it at that.