Miller on America - Interview

Literary Review, Fall, 2003 by Arthur Miller

From a public discussion with Arthur Miller in Paris in October 2002 on the occasion of the French publication of his book of essays Fenetre sur le Siecle (Buchet Chastel). Panelists included French television commentator and host Christine Okrent, Spanish writer Jorge Semprun, Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, and French writer and editor of the Nouvel Observateur Jean Daniel.

As a politically informed American writer, would you say that we are experiencing the failure of capitalism in the world today? Has American literature outlived ideology?

Miller: Major writers are trying to find the center of experience as it is lived in the U.S. today. When I began to write it was already the darkest time of the Great Depression. It was impossible to think of fiction or theatre without reference to the situation in the country. All people, not only on the left, thought that either capitalism was at its end or it would take tremendous revision to survive. We were swimming in social issues at the time. The main subject of conversation was money. How do I get some, more or less honestly? Then, Mr. Hitler, a product of Keynsian high capitalism, arrived. If capitalism ended in fascism, something profound had to change, and not only within the views of the left. By the end of the war a kind of openness developed. It was possible to write All My Sons and Broadway productions, and include speeches on how our soldiers were dying, while others were making fortunes on bad manufacturing. Then came a shift with the Chinese revolution in 1949. Suddenly, the U.S. was confronted with the idea that the people of the largest country in the world could choose to be communist. And that was the fear that fueled the rise of McCarthyism. Our writing has grown more and more existential and less and less ideological.

You prefer theatre over the novel? That's surprising to Europeans.

I have good reason. That's the way any brain is developed. I see experience in terms of dialogue and spoken language--prose that can be spoken. I see life in the form of scenes, confrontations between people. As a young man of seventeen or eighteen, I saw plays that excited the audience like no novel could. It was like being at a demonstration. In the end, I am like an actor, but I hide behind the typewriter.

Thinking of Waiting for Lefty and Waiting for Godot, is the writer politically committed a justified thing for a young writer today?

At the present, I don't think that young writers in the U.S. desire to find something that they believe. They feel condemned by their own small experience. They would like to be able to write with one eye on society as a whole, and would like to know how to be more philosophical. We live in an age of post-ideology. It's difficult to take the coat off the hanger and put it on someone on whom it doesn't fit. Engage? The other day, my four year-old grandson woke up his mother who was tired. She reminded him, "You have to take care of me too." He said, "Are you crazy? I take care of you day and night." He is engaged. Writers want to be engaged in their blood, and not be given a theme from a committee or philosophy.

We're heading toward a new period of literature. It's on the way. But we won't be able to look back in our history and find the answer. The experience of American people is too varied. We don't have one culture. We have one hundred. Hopefully American writers will be driven deeper into the human condition and be more committed to justice. But I don't know.

What do you see as the major differences between theatre in Europe and America?

The primary purpose of theatre is to give people pleasure, not pain. It's true that more and more theatre today serves to distract the people. It's extremely difficult to teach people and keep them amused. We either teach too much or amuse too much. This kind of theatre of distraction started in the Depression. We only had one playwright writing serious plays before that. Eugene O'Neill. Only one for twenty years. Then came the Depression, and then there were many. The theatre depends on external situations of the writer and the country. Suppose your country was under attack, you'd want to learn about the circumstances and ask why? And it's entertaining. When society feels safe and more people think of themselves as successful, young writers wonder what there is to write about. Literature thrives on trouble.

TV takes up more important issues than the theatre. The trouble is that the treatment of issues is so often very trivial because the writer isn't experiencing what he is writing. The influence of TV discourages playwrights from writing serious plays. The questions have been eaten up. They have to go deeper and deeper, and that takes a lot of talent. I wish TV treated things with more profundity. The absence of a real tragic feeling on w is obvious. Terrible problems are treated but they somehow always end up OK. The challenge is never mortal.

Anti-Americanism exists in the world. Some may say that you have contributed to it? How would you respond to that?