Americans, including writers and artists, are supposed to be compulsively sociable, but I lived for six years as a close neighbor of Arthur Miller's in Roxbury—a rural village then populated with but six hundred souls—before we ever laid eyes on each other. Even then we met in, of all places, the lobby of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten in Munich, where we had converged on separate literary missions. Arthur was aware, as I was, of the oddness of our not having met, for in Munich his first words to me were those which Stanley might have wished he had actually used upon encountering Livingstone, i.e., “At Last!” This was in 1961, a short while after he had married Inge Morath, who was accompanying him and who helped make our brief sojourn in Bavaria such a pleasure. Like Eckermann on his first visit to Goethe,* I think I was prepared to find something about Arthur that was fairly Olympian. I am regrettably susceptible to unsubstantiated opinion, and in New York several years before this an academic gentleman of forlorn mien told me, after I said I was an unfulfilled neighbor of Arthur's, that when I finally met him I would be encountering a man of “sadness and incredible dignity, like Abraham Lincoln.”
This asinine impression derived more, of course, from the general gravity of the Miller oeuvre than from the man. Arthur, I discovered, has as much dignity as the next person but the primary characteristic he shares with Lincoln is that of great height; as for sadness, Arthur manages to conceal his with deftness. The salient feature of Arthur's personality is, as a matter of fact, humor, and his comedic gift is the quality that makes him such buoyant company.
It is a sense of humor born out of the memory of neediness and hard times, and is one that haunts his otherwise intense and rather somber view of life. In the past thirty years I've spent many hours listening to Arthur, at each other's houses in Connecticut or on certain peculiarly conceived trips that have taken us to the globe's far corners—Chile, for example, or Egypt. When I remember Arthur settling back in a deck chair on a luxurious boat cruising the Nile—exclaiming expansively, “What is it that the working class is complaining about?”—I realize that the laughter induced in me by the mock-plutocratic tone has an ambiguous quality owing to my knowledge of his working-class experience and allegiance. Likewise, an exquisitely American perception of the dynamics of class and power overlaid his response to the colossal Pharonic effigies sculpted into the cliffs of Abu-Simbel. They were created, Arthur observed, in precisely the same spirit as that which caused to be erected the various facades of the National City Bank Building and bore the identical intimidating message for their beholders: “We're in charge here. Keep the hell out.” Traveling with Arthur as I have over so many thousands of terrestrial miles has not been like traveling with your run-of-the-mill CEO, say, or a politician. His curiosity is unquenchable, his ability to make associative connections is formidable, and it is all held in equipoise by a marvelous sense of the absurd. However, his pleasure in travel seems provisional. One feels his longing to get back to the Connecticut countryside and to his fine but sensibly proportioned house, where he can look at the woods and fields which he has been looking at serenely for over forty years.
Critics have adduced many subtle reasons (and will continue their analyses for generations) to explain Arthur's mastery as a dramatist, but few are likely to come up with the crucially simple truth that he is a consummate storyteller. Having watched him on numerous occasions, clad in his gentleman farmer's rumpledness, sidling into my crowded living room, I have etched on my mind his expression of richly amused dejection, that of a man experiencing both pleasure and anguish, one deathly afraid of bores and of being bored yet warily hopeful for that blessed moment of communion that sometimes happens. And after a while it usually does happen. Arthur has found an audience—or, more significantly, they have found him, which is the rarest tribute of all since only a great storyteller can exert such magnetism without a trace of self-devotion. As the yarn unwinds, Arthur's eyes sparkle and his voice becomes sly, conspiratorial, reflective, studded with small abrupt astonishments, the denouement craftily dangled and delayed: he is also an actor of intuitive panache. Is it a performance? Perhaps. But whatever it is unfolds with eloquence, and his listeners are lost in it, and it is then that I am able to perceive, simultaneously, the inspired vision of the playwright and the energizing charm of the man.
[From Arthur Miller and Company, ed. Christopher Bigsby. Methuen, 1990.]
* Johann Peter Eckermann (1792–1854), best known for his Conversations with Goethe, published between 1836 and 1848.—J.W.