Timebends (26 page)

The play in this production was centered on Kate, the mother, which was an emphasis our original production had bypassed in favor of the father-son conflict. In London a few years later the same shift was made by Michael Blakemore directing Rosemary Harris in the role and Colin Blakely as the father, and it made me wonder whether it was a certain ambiguity in Kate Keller that had confused both Shumlin and the critic Morehouse. For while trying to put it out of her mind, she knows from the outset that her husband indeed shipped faulty plane engine elements to the army. Her guilty knowledge, so obdurately and menacingly suppressed,
can be interpreted as her wish to deny her son's death but also, and perhaps even primarily, to take vengeance on her culpable husband by driving him psychically to his knees and ultimately to suicide.

Parenthetically, Morehouse's visit to see the play a month before reviewing it on its Broadway opening, while unusual if not unique, indicated a relationship to the theatre on the part of some critics in those days that has largely gone by the board; there was, I think, less of an arm's-length attitude toward writers and actors and directors, leading in some instances to friendships such as George Jean Nathan's with Eugene O'Neill. I am not sure why there has been such a hardening of the pretense that the critic is somehow virginally distanced from the vulgar enterprise of theatre, that his responsibility ends with the delivery of his impressions of the play. This might be the case if it were absolutely certain that praise and blame were always deserved, always correct, but with their demonstrable prejudices for or against artists, themes, and styles, the critics are at least as fallible and as vulnerable to misjudgment as the works they criticize. Why, then, this antiseptic removal from the problems of the theatre's devolution? After all, even judges at law often address themselves to the mundane housekeeping problems of the courts over which they preside, as they ought to in a democratic society, acknowledging that they themselves may indeed contribute to injustice and may even be part of the problem of achieving justice. To a very important degree the theatre we have is the theatre the critics have permitted us to have, since they filter out what they consider we ought not see, enforcing laws that have never been written, laws, among others, of taste and even ideological content.

It is not a universal condition. In England, for example, critics routinely air their prejudices: a reviewer will tell his readers that he personally detests plays with heavy political content or that he is tired of absurdist styles or that he would like to see a return to more romantic approaches to sex and love—or the contrary. English critics put their cards on the table; they by no means pretend to the authority of sublime universalism, to the purity of no preferences a priori, and are consequently liberated from a posture of perfect objectivity that is not and never has been a real human response to art. It may be that such acknowledgment of membership in the human race is itself a result of a social situation very different from ours. There are still a number of British papers competing for readers' attention, and their critics are thus obliged,
if only implicitly, to defend their own validity. But in a New York theatre community on its knees before a single great newspaper, a certain ex cathedra tone, what might be called an automatic response mechanism, soon takes over the style of whatever critic happens to be on duty in any particular season, and we who work in the silly business are stuck with whatever his slant may be. It is a very old habit among us to move in droves, something Tocqueville noticed a hundred and fifty years ago; the American wants to be one of the crowd, and when condemnation is leveled against a play by the only newspaper whose authority he accepts, the critic's influence, along with outrageous ticket prices and the phenomenal expense of parking, becomes lethal. For all intents and purposes the contemporary American repertoire comes out of New York and represents the taste of whoever is writing the
New York Times
review, only slightly mitigated by other reviews. The
Times
did not invent the situation, but there it is, a dictatorship as effective as any cultural control mechanism in the world. Indeed, when the Soviets close down a show, it is a committee that makes the decision, rather than one man—at least since Stalin died.

Monopoly in anything is not only an evil but an insidious one, and there was actually a moment, in 1967, soon after the
Herald Tribune
vanished, when Clifton Daniel, then the
Times
managing editor, convoked a meeting of some hundred authors, newspeople, producers, and actors in a midtown restaurant to discuss what might be done to mitigate the paper's awesome new power and its unhealthy, undemocratic potentialities. The
Times,
Daniel declared, did not create this monopoly and did not wish to hold the power it had been handed by history. After some wayward discussion, I suggested that since the nub of the issue was the danger of injustice in a single critic carrying all the immense prestige of the
Times,
perhaps the solution was to send two or three critics to write independent notices, maybe even on occasion asking an informed theatregoer to write his impressions of a show in a paragraph or two. As a playwright I naturally saw the risk of ending up with not one but three bad notices in the
Times,
but I was willing to take the chance in the interest of a more consensual criticism. Another benefit, I thought, was that differing reviews would make very interesting reading and would broaden the public's awareness of how fictional, rather than a matter of plain fact, all criticism really is, which is to say, how subjective. It was not, I said, that critics knew more than others but that they could write better about the little they did know, and this fact might emerge from such an
exercise in comparative criticism by two or three informed minds focused on the same subject.

Daniel thought for a moment and said that my idea was impossible, and when I asked him his reasons, he replied, “But who would be speaking for the
New York Times?”
There may have been one or two in the room who laughed, but not more, for we are so completely sold on the inevitability if not the rightness of the monopoly of power in everything that we are beyond the point where we even notice it anymore. I could only ask Daniel why we had assembled if not to find a way to dilute the dominance of the
Times.
Was his objection not simply a reaffirmation that the
Times
did indeed want to keep the power it had been handed by history? But the meeting simply wandered back down into the street.

All this in face of the fact that the
Times,
far more often than not, has been very kind to me and to my work. It was Brooks Atkinson's campaign for
All My Sons
that was responsible for its long run and my recognition as a playwright. And if I cannot prove it, I still believe that one of his motives in supporting the play and me was his concern that the New York theatre be made hospitable to work that was not socially trivial. Had he not respected the play, he would not have championed it, of course, but I think he used it as a lever to open the door to other voices that he hoped would come. In short, he was not oblivious to a responsibility for the whole theatre enterprise.

In any case, the audience confirmed his judgment, and by spring the production was a fixture on Broadway and received the Drama Critics Circle Award and a few others. After some weeks, realizing as I sat down to dinner with Mary in our Brooklyn Heights house that the Coronet Theatre was about to fill up yet again that evening with paying customers and that my words had a power beyond my mere self, I felt a certain threat along with the inevitable exhilaration. As a success I was occasionally greeted by people on the street with a glazed expression that was pleasant but made me feel un-nervingly artificial. My identification with life's failures was being menaced by my fame, and this led me, a few weeks after the opening of
All My Sons,
to apply at the New York State Employment Service for any job available. I was sent out to a factory in Long Island City to stand all day assembling beer box dividers for the minimum wage. The grinding boredom and the unnaturalness of my pretense to anonymity soon drove me out of that place, but the question remained as to how to live without breaking contact with what theatre folk called the civilians, the ones in the audience
who made the pants and filled the teeth. It was not merely a question of continuing to draw material from life but also a moral one. I had not yet read of Tolstoy at the height of his renown spending days in a Moscow shop making shoes, but I shared his impulse.

I was not the first to experience the guilt of success (which, incidentally, was reinforced by leftist egalitarian convictions), and though I suspected the truth, I was unable to do much about it: such guilt is a protective device to conceal one's happiness at surpassing others, especially those one loves, like a brother, father, or friend. It is a kind of payment to them in the form of a pseudo remorse. But this is not altogether a phantom exercise, for the psyche knows that those who have been surpassed may harbor thoughts of retaliation that can be dangerous in reality. So one speaks through such guilt—“Don't bother resenting me, I've failed too.” In due time my laments receded as my play began to be produced all over Europe and
Focus
was published in England, France, Germany, and Italy, but I counted myself lucky that
All My Sons
had created a decent number of enemies as well as a great many friends, and thus kept reality in equilibrium.

We were living then in a converted brownstone on Pierpont Street whose normal quiet was blasted one afternoon by a yelling argument in the hallway outside. Thinking violence was about to break out, I opened the door to find a small young man in army uniform sitting on the stairs with a young and beautiful woman whom I recognized as our upstairs neighbor. They went silent on seeing me, so I figured everything was under control and went back into our apartment. Later the young soldier, by now out of uniform, approached me on the street and introduced himself as a writer. His name, he said, was Mailer. He had just seen my play. “I could write a play like that,” he said. It was so obtusely flat an assertion that I began to laugh, but he was completely serious and indeed would make intermittent attempts to write plays in the many years that lay ahead. Since I was at a time when I was hammering out my place in the world, I made few friends then, and Mailer struck me as someone who seemed to want to make converts rather than friends, so our impulses, essentially similar, could hardly mesh. (I am at the age when it is best to be charitable.) In any event, although we lived for years in the same neighborhood, our paths rarely crossed.

With
All My Sons
more and more firmly established, the question was, as always, what to do next. Though I had resolved never to change my level of living, it soon seemed illogical for Mary and our two young children, Jane and Robert, to be stuffed into a small apartment, so I bought an old but handsome house with two duplex apartments on Grace Court close to the river. We moved into the upper one, the other continuing to be held by longtime tenants, the Davenports. Henry Davenport was president of the Brooklyn Savings Bank. Each evening he and his wife unfailingly dressed for dinner, she in an evening gown, and he, ruddy-faced and slender, in black tie and velvet dinner jacket and pumps, looking exactly like the Harvard overseer that in fact he was. The street was lined with waiting limousines when they had one of their infrequent dinner parties, and he adored phoning upstairs to the Drama Critics Circle Award winner to report that his window would not open or his faucet leaked. I could not wait to sell the house and buy another, but that would take another play and, with luck, more money.

It occurred to me three or four times a day that if I did no work I would still be earning a lot of money and by the end of the week would be richer than at the beginning. My mind worked at this anomaly, trying to get used to it. If I simply went outside and walked around the block the cash would still come in. Even if I took a nap or read some stupid magazine for half an hour or went to the movies. The word
royalty
took on a more exact meaning. I had been scratching on the glass from the outside for thirty-one years,
until now I was scratching on it from the inside, trying to keep contact with the ordinary life from which my work had grown. For the slow dread was descending on me that I might have nothing more to say as a writer.

As always the world and I were full of problems, but
All My Sons
had exhausted my lifelong interest in the Greco-Ibsen form, in the particular manner in which I had come to think of it. Now more and more the simultaneity of ideas and feelings within me and the freedom with which they contradicted one another began to fascinate me. I even dabbled with the notion of studying music in the hope of composing, for the only art in which simultaneity was really possible was music. Words could not make chords; they had to be uttered in a line, one after the other.

I began to walk endlessly, often across the Brooklyn Bridge into lower Manhattan. Success seemed to have deepened a sense of my own contradictions, and my new feelings of power made me wish to acknowledge them. The beauty in the tension of opposites I saw everywhere—the pull of gravity actually strengthening the bridge's steel arches by compression. (This was before the reconstruction lay crude reinforcing girders laterally over the roadways, destroying the birdlike air of winged flight to the bridge's outline.) I was growing rich and attempting to think poor, to persist in a sternly leveling view of myself, even as my spirit was opening to its own sensuality. But to frankly acknowledge one's inner paradoxes is already a sensual action and a defeat for monolithic puritanism. I knew that with
All My Sons
I had won a new freedom to create, and I would stand on the high point of the bridge's arch facing the wind from the ocean, trying to embrace a world larger than I had been able to conceive of until this time. If I had no subject, I had an indescribable feeling of a new form; it would be both infinitely compressed and expansive and leisurely, the story both strange and homely. It would be something never seen on any stage before. The very thinking of it filled me with sexual desire, with love for my wife and, incredibly, for all women at the same time. I began to think that true art must be an overflowing of love. But of course love can be faked through techniques and stylistic persuasiveness, and I would have none of that. I longed for a way to deliver onto the stage all the raw complexity I felt swirling within me. The problem with
All My Sons
was not that it was too realistic but that it left too little space and time for the wordless darkness that underlies all verbal truth. But again, this was something that perhaps only music could suggest.