Foreword to On the Side of the Angels

2012

Miller’s mother Betty was a prolific writer of both fiction and non-fiction. For a new edition of her sixth novel, originally published in 1945, he provided this foreword.⁹⁹

I can’t remember exactly when I first became aware of the fact that my mother was a writer, although I knew that she was a devoted scribbler. During the war, when paper was in short supply, I would see her soon after my father went out to his work as a military psychiatrist, sitting at the dining-room table carefully opening envelopes with a paper knife and writing preparatory sentences for what she would type out some time later in the afternoon. I had no idea what she was writing about and I was completely unaware of the fact that she had already published several well-received novels. I assumed, albeit vaguely, that she was a typist of some sort but I had no idea for whom she was performing this service. I do remember the peculiar way in which she performed on the keyboard, poking at the letters, one by one, with her elegant index fingers. The fact is that she was almost entirely uncommunicative about her work, and even if she had disclosed what she was engaged in I doubt if I would have shown much interest since I was more or less indifferent to the idea of literature and I suspect that she regarded her work as something which had to be done under cover, and that family life intruded rather inconveniently.

It wasn’t until I was about 16, by which time I had begun to develop some sort of intellectual interests of my own, that the two of us engaged in discussion, and even then I suspect that her most intimate intellectual relationships were with women writers of her own age – Marghanita Laski for example, Inez Holden and Olivia Manning. So I only learnt what she felt about things by reading her books, and I have to admit that I didn’t do that till long after her early death from Alzheimer’s disease.¹⁰⁰

All the same, from the occasional conversations that we did have, and the subsequent reading of her books and many literary articles in journals such as Horizon, I see now that she had a considerable influence on my work in the theatre and that her own preoccupation with the seemingly negligible details of human behaviour became one of my articles of artistic faith. In one of my own productions, for example, I owe an undeniable debt of gratitude to this book, in which she describes the regrettable misbehaviour of what must have been some of my father’s medical colleagues once they got into military uniform during the Second World War. Professional men who had previously behaved with commendable propriety as long as they were dressed in civilian clothes occasionally took advantage of being in military disguise.

In my several productions of Mozart’s Così fan Tutte, an opera which is traditionally regarded as an exposé of women’s treacherous susceptibility to seduction, my mother’s book persuaded me to visualize the opera in terms which are just as critical of men.101 Under the influence of her book it became increasingly apparent to me that Mozart’s work was about identity rather than fidelity and about the dangers of pretending to be someone other than your previous self. Ferrando and Guglielmo trustingly lend themselves to a scheme which Don Alfonso assures them will reveal the inconstancy of their lovers, but what actually happens is something comparable to some of the things that go on in On the Side of the Angels. In the disguises which will allow them to deceive the girls, the boys discover unsuspected versions of their own personalities.

I wish I had the opportunity to tell my mother how much these productions of mine owe to her post-mortem inspiration.