Pater Familias

ART IS WHAT REMAINS WHEN THE POLITICS IS GONE. In TIMEBENDS, Miller tells of overhearing an English couple at an English production of THE CRUCIBLE in 1965. They did not think of the play in terms of Senator Joseph McCarthy. One of them remarked that the play might have something to do with an American senator whose name they couldn’t remember. Miller was happy that the political dimensions of the play had fallen away: “The play had now become art, cut from its roots, a spectacle of human passions purely.”

REDBAITING AND GUILT. If Arthur Miller thought of THE CRUCIBLE as being primarily about false accusations against a man who feels himself guilty of other sins, are there implications for Miller’s views on the consequences of Redbaiting? I think Miller says so in TIMEBENDS. He describes the hardships that Redbaiting imposed on its victims—the economic hardships, the destruction of careers, the criminal penalties. But he emphasizes the emotional pain and guilt for the victims. He makes an explicit connection between the Salem witch trials and the Red-hunt: “What was manifestly parallel was the guilt, two centuries apart, of holding illicit, suppressed feelings of alienation and hostility toward standard, daylight society as defined by its most orthodox proponents. Without guilt the 1950s Red-hunt could never have generated such power…..Even [the former Communist’s} naivete in seeing Russia not as an earthly empire but rather as a kind of spiritual condition was now a source of guilt and shame.”

THE CRUCIBLE–THE GUILT IN THE BACKGROUND. Miller’s master stroke in THE CRUCIBLE was to write a play about a profoundly guilty man who must face false accusations. THE CRUCIBLE provides a clear example of the difference between the political plot and the emotional story in a Miller play. TIMEBENDS shows that from the beginning the central image of the play for Miller was the emotions of the central character, John Proctor: “For even in the first weeks of thinking about the Salem story, the central image, the one that persistently recurred as an exuberant source of energy, was that of a guilt-ridden man, John Proctor, who, having slept with his teenage servant girl, watches with horror as she becomes the leader of the witch-hunting pack and points her accusing finger at the wife he has himself betrayed.”

IBSEN AND MILLER—THE MAIN PLOT IS IN THE BACKGROUND. Hilton Als says that one of the main things that sparked Arthur Miller’s interest in Ibsen was Ibsen’s “distinct lack of subtlety.” It is easy to think of both Miller and Ibsen in that way. I have thought of them that way in the past. But think of the strong melodramatic plots—often bluntly political– in Miller and Ibsen as the subplots. These black and white plots work in the theater to maintain interest—and to distract the attention. Think of A DOLL’S HOUSE as a detective story or a magic trick. The machinations of Nora trying to raise money to pay off a debt to a villain distract us in the foreground while—unnoticed—in the background is the trivialization of the wife and the marriage. I submit that Arthur Miller learned from Ibsen to present powerful and subtle emotions of people living in families while a melodrama holds our interest. Think of the family relationships as the main plot and the melodrama as the subplot.

ARTHUR MILLER—NOT A PLAYWRIGHT, BUT A MEMOIR WRITER? Hilton Als had a review in the New Yorker for October 27 of the current revival of ALL MY SONS which praises Arthur Miller’s autobiography TIMEBENDS. Als goes so far as to reject all of Miller’s plays, concluding his review with the judgment that: “What a pity that Miller had to write so many plays—a form that did not come naturally to him—in order to inspire our interest in his work in the one genre at which he excelled: the memoir.” I have checked out TIMEBENDS, and it is excellent. It also, I think, provides support for my view that Miller is very much misunderstood and underrated as a playwright.

GETTING HOLD OF THE BEANS BEFORE VALUING THEM. It has been observed that some of the mistakes that were made that led to the current crisis were intellectual mistakes made by brilliant people. In fact some of the mistakes occurred because brilliant people did not notice boring problems. It was intellectually interesting to construct and value fiendishly complicated instruments. Keeping track of them was boring, the kind of thing that clerks and bean counters do. I posted some two weeks after Lehman declared bankruptcy that hedge funds were still trying to determine what their exposure to Lehman was. An article in the Financial Times for October 27 reported that now, six weeks after the bankruptcy, the man in charge of administering (cleaning up) the London-based operations of Lehman says that they are still trying to get information about what securities around the world are being held for Lehman or its clients. He says, “…[W]e don’t know for certain what is out there in terms of assets. After six weeks you would expect that we’d have that information, but we haven’t.” All this is preliminary to tracing the lending and relending of rights in these assets, which is expected to take years to resolve. I wonder whether the intellectual debate over whether to use “market prices” (”marking to market”) to value these instruments didn’t divert attention from important back office issues.

MANDY PATINKIN’S PROSPERO. Hilton Als is right that Mandy Patinkin’s Prospero does not relate to the other actors on stage, but not for the reasons I expected. Patinkin portrays Prospero as an angry and all-powerful wizard, in complete command of his island world. A Prospero this powerful cannot have human contact. Prospero’s isolation results from the choices Patinkin makes and not from any limitations on his acting ability. Is this a valid interpretation? Of course. Prospero is after all in complete command of everything that happens in the play so that a consistent view of THE TEMPEST flows easily from Patinkin’s interpretation.

IS THERE AN HOMAGE TO FORGIVENESS IN THE TEMPEST? (AUDEN’S VIEW). I think the review by Hilton Als of THE TEMPEST is quite wonderful, and agree with many of his judgments, and yet I want to note another disagreement with him. He says that if all the actors had interacted, the production might have been “a kind of homage to forgiveness.” I think THE TEMPEST can be said to be about the difficulty of forgiveness. Auden in his LECTURES ON SHAKESPEARE (which Als cites) says: “THE TEMPEST ends, like the other plays in Shakespeare’s last period, in reconciliation and forgiveness. But the ending in THE TEMPEST is grimmer….[Antonio and Sebastian are] … spared punishment, but they can’t be said to be forgiven because they don’t want to be, and Prospero’s forgiveness of them means only that he does not take revenge upon them.” At the moment of forgiveness in the current production, Mandy Patinkin gives Antonio a kiss that is charged with ambiguity.

ANTONIO’S LONELINESS (AUDEN’S VIEW). The second chapter of “The Sea and the Mirror” consists of songs for the characters in the play (with the exception of Caliban, who is given all of the third chapter in a long prose speech modeled on Henry James). The songs are separated by a series of five line refrains by the villain of the play, Antonio. Each refrain is addressed to his brother Prospero and each concludes with the word “alone.” The first refrain is:

“Your all is partial, Prospero;
My will is all my own:
Your need to love shall never know
Me. I am I, Antonio,
By choice myself alone.”

PROSPERO’S LONELINESS (AUDEN’S VIEW). In chapter one of “The Sea and the Mirror”, which is addressed by Prospero to Ariel, Prospero says, “Now, Ariel, I am that I am, your late and lonely master …”