Timebends (101 page)

It seems to me now that I have always been caught between two theatres, the one that exists and the one that does not. In the early eighties, working at a long play, two one-acts for the second, ideal theatre emerged.
Elegy for a Lady
intrigued me as an attempt to write a play with multiple points of view—one for each of the characters, plus a third, that of the play—in a sense a work without the first-person angle, like the neutrality of experience itself. A
man enters a boutique looking for a gift for his dying lover. The proprietress of the store is moved by his inability to decide what would be appropriate; he feels that every object she shows him will either painfully remind his lover of her coming demise or cast blame on him for not having acknowledged her and their relationship. At moments the proprietress seems actually to be the dying lover herself. A play of shadows under the tree of death. I thought it was like an Escher drawing in which water runs uphill, defying the eye's effort to trace the ordinary pull of gravity, a reminder of how our brains have created the “objective” physics of our lives.

I directed
Elegy
in a tiny space at the Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven on a double bill with
Some Kind of Love Story,
about an aging private investigator in a small town, inveigled into a case by a woman who seems both idealistically dedicated to clearing an innocent man and possibly implicated in his having been condemned. She is part whore and part challenge to his moral commitment to justice, and of course the reviver of his moribund sexuality. In both plays the objective world grows dim and distant as reality seems to consist wholly or partly of what the characters' needs require it to be, leaving them with the anguish of having to make decisions that they know are based on illusion and the power of desire.

Over the next years I would become more and more deeply absorbed by a kind of imploding of time—moments when a buried layer of experience suddenly surges upward to become the new surface of one's attention and flashes news from below. I tried to explore this process in
Danger: Memory!,
two one-act plays of the later eighties, especially in the one called
Clara.
A violent shock—Albert Kroll's discovery of his murdered daughter's body in her New York apartment-office—disarms him before the questioning of a detective investigating the case. Unavoidably, her character becomes an issue as clues to the killer's identity are sought. Kroll finds himself having to confront her idealism, which looms now as the path to her death since she persisted in working with ex-prison inmates to save them for useful lives. The likelihood is that the killer is one of these men, particularly one with whom Kroll knows she had fallen in love—a relationship he had failed to oppose despite Clara's having told him that the man had served time for murdering a former girlfriend.

Kroll, it now appears, had handed Clara some of his own early idealism as she grew up. He had lived a decent life, even a courageous one, with a certain instinct for being useful to others. He was
what Whitman might have thought of as one of his “Democratic men.” But in the past twenty years Kroll has changed, become like others, and as a minor executive n a construction company has had to deny to himself the shadiness of the operation. Not that he has become a bad man but simply that the ideal has flown, along with his youthful hopes for himself and his faith in people.

But in this bloodied room where his daughter died he is confronted with that ideal again. Must he disown it, suffer guilt and remorse for having misled his child? Or, despite everything, confirm the validity of the ideal and his former trust in mankind, in effect keeping faith with the best in himself, accepting the tragedy of her sacrifice to what he once again sees was and is worth everything? The play ends on his affirmation; in her catastrophe he has rediscovered himself and glimpsed the tragic collapse of values that he finally cannot bring himself to renounce.

Albert Kroll, not surprisingly to me after more than four decades of play writing in and around New York, was understood by no one but some of the so-called second-string critics, a few television critics, three British reviewers for London papers, and the audiences that continued to pack the Lincoln Center Mitzi Newhouse Theatre despite the main critics' incomprehension of even the bare facts of the story. That Kroll might be bringing onto the stage a slice of our historical experience over the past decades since World War II was not to be noticed, apparently. Nevertheless,
Clara
evoked an unprecedented number of letters from younger playwrights; the play had indeed landed, if on a field largely unknown to the New York press. Never before had this kind of excitement been expressed to me, anc it justified the whole effort. These writers understood that I had cast off absolutely every instrumentality of drama except the two essential voices of the interrogating detective and Kroll—the voice of realism and the flesh against the immortal spirit that transcends gain and loss; the death-in-life, and the life-in-death.

Down deep in His heart God is a comedian who loves to make us laugh.

In 1978, knowing I was in Paris, Jacques Huismans, head of the Belgian National Theatre, insisted I come up to Brussels for the twenty-fifth anniversary production of
The Crucible,
since it was his theatre that had been the fist in Europe to put it on. Nearing the French-Belgian border, I realized that I had left my passport
in Paris but was allowed across by a forgiving douane who loved theatre. Inge, like any good European, could not conceive how I could leave a passport behind, and I was struck by the contrast between my latterday easiness about documents and the very different emotions of twenty-five years before, when I had been forbidden by the State Department to leave my country.

At the reception in my honor, given by the consul general of our embassy, he naturally offered to be of any service during our stay in Belgium, and I asked if he could possibly issue a new passport in a day since we were planning to leave for Germany the following night. He was happy to do the favor and thought it could be ready the very next morning, an extraordinarily short time for that procedure.

When I walked through the door into his reception area the following day, the dozen or so men and women working at their desks turned and applauded. Amazed, I almost burst out laughing and thanked them, but it was the bending of time that had tickled me, for in that instant I could see myself and Monty Clift in 1954, on the day he accompanied me downtown for the passport renewal so that I could come to this selfsame Brussels for
The Crucible's
European premiere. I recalled the refusal I had been given at the end of that week by Mrs. Ruth Shipley, head of the Passport Bureau. Where was Mrs. Shipley now? Well, I was certainly here, and these embassy Americans were applauding, and
The Crucible
was alive and kicking.

The consul general came out and asked if we could talk in his office for a few minutes; with an expectant grin on his face, he said he wanted to explain his special effort in getting me the passport so quickly. A tall man in his fifties, he sat at a wide desk with the flag behind him and the gray Belgian light coming through the broad, curtained window, and told his tale.

In the McCarthy time he had also had some problems with the State Department. In fact, he had been fired from it and had had to sue to get his job back, an expensive legal proceeding that had forced him to mortgage his family home and scratch around for a living for six years, so tough had it been to land a responsible position after being canned by the government.

Refused any explanation for his separation from the Foreign Service, he had finally forced a departmental hearing and there learned the reason. His first post in the service had been Cairo, and as a young unmarried man he had shared an apartment with another young Foreign Service officer who turned out to be a homosexual.
This meant that he, the consul general, must also have been homosexual. The fact that the department itself had given him the list of apartments available for sharing did not count at all, not while Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn, himself a closet homosexual, of course, were baying at the moon against “perversion” in the State Department.

The hearing officer was Graham Martin, a tough right-wing character who would later become our last ambassador to South Vietnam, supervisor of the frantic evacuation of the Saigon embassy. He had turned to Scott McLeod, the man in charge of security in the department and the consul general's chief nemesis, and asked him if that was the extent of his evidence of unreliability. McLeod confidently replied that it was. Martin then and there ordered the consul general restored to his rank with back pay plus interest.

The consul general grinned with pleasure as we shook hands and parted. “I just thought you'd like to know why I was especially pleased to hurry your passport,” he said. I felt good to have lived this long.

Glamour is a youth's form of blindness that lets in light, incoherent color, but nothing defined. Like the rainbow, it is a once uplifting vision that moves away the closer you come to it.

My father, on the other hand, got more glamour-struck the older he became. He loved to stand in front of a theatre where a play of mine was on and every once in a while stroll in to chat with the box office men about business. “How do you know they're giving you the right count?” he would ask me. Indeed, how did I?

In 1962, after our divorce, Marilyn took him as her escort to John Kennedy's birthday party in Madison Square Garden and introduced him to the president. My father would treasure a news photographer's picture of the occasion: Marilyn stands laughing with her head thrown back while Kennedy shakes hands with him, laughing with spontaneous, innocent enjoyment at what I am sure must have been one of my father's surprising remarks. I was not aware that for the rest of his life, which lasted some four more years, he spent considerable time on the lookout for his name in the gossip columns and entertainment news, until one day he gravely asked me—he was about eighty then—“Do you look like me or do I look like you?”

This was serious. “I guess I look like you,” I said. He seemed to like that answer.

How strange it was—not only had I competed with him but he with me. And the fact that this vaguely disappointed me signaled that even now I saw him partly shrouded in his myth.

He was an American and saw all things competitively. Once our old basset, Hugo, an immense dog whose incontinence was matched only by his lassitude, rose like a senator from one of his naps and unaccountably attacked a rag doll, throwing it up in the air and growling menacingly at it and charging at it again and again until he settled down once more into his habitual torpor with one ear covering his eyes. My father had watched in surprise all this uncustomary activity and then said, “Well… everybody has to be better than somebody.”

In his last years my father would sit on the porch of the Long Island nursing home wearing a crumpled white linen cap and looking out on the sea, and between long silences he would speak. “You know, sometimes I see a little dot way out there, and then it gets bigger and bigger and finally turns into a ship.” I explained that the earth was a sphere and so forth. In his eighty years he had never had time to sit and watch the sea. He had employed hundreds of people and made tens of thousands of coats and shipped them to towns and cities all over the States, and now at the end he looked out over the sea and said with happy surprise, “Oh. So it's round!”

He died the day I was to make the opening speech at the 1966 New York PEN Congress. My mother had died five years before, and I had only felt the shock of grief for her when suddenly, looking up at the coffin and hearing the voice of Rabbi Miller—no relation, an old, bent man whom I had known in my youth but had not seen since some other funeral two decades ago—I was surprised by the simple, lucid tenderness of his voice, his nearly cheerful calm as he seemed really to believe he was sending her off. Unexpected tears moved up 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. I wished I had felt freer to acknowledge my love for her, but I was so much the incarnation of her own thwarted ambitions that the knowledge cramped any open flow of feeling. Our relation was unfinished, and her death too soon.

Despite my father's death I decided to go ahead with my PEN speech, and it surprised me, in a remote way, that I could do this. But I felt uplifted by what was clearly a new life being born around me in this congress, here in one of the most perfect spring weeks I had ever seen in New York. It was not only that many of the
greatest writers in the world had come but that they showed such a serious desire to confront real issues, primarily the defense of culture. For the first time in my experience it was no longer a simple question of left and right. The Cold War was far from being over, but with amazing unanimity writers of the most conflicting political commitments refused to reduce to polemics what turned out to be really informative discussions about the conditions of writers and publishing in every kind of society.

The novelist Valery Tarsis, who had not long before left Russia after being psychologically tortured in an institution, stood on the platform, declared the Cold War ineffective, and demanded the atom bombing of the Soviet Union. The audience was stunned at first, but when as chair I condemned the speech as outrageous, both in content and as a violation of PEN's purposes, there was heartening applause from all sides, and the anti-Communist Writers-in-Exile Center itself quickly and strongly disowned the speech. The step I had once vaguely hoped for, way back in my first talk with Carver in Inge's apartment, had been taken, and real life rather than sterile ideological combat was on the agenda.

I thought the most encouraging and useful session was the un-programmed one among the Latin American writers. I had noticed that they were gathering in knots in corridors and at the backs of the rooms during formal sessions, to whisper excitedly in Spanish and embrace like newfound friends. Many of them lived a few hundred miles from each other but had never had the money to travel, and here in New York they were meeting for the first time, by virtue of funds especially raised for this purpose by the American Center.