Timebends by Arthur Miller

Author:Arthur Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 1986-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

Once again I was roaming Brooklyn Heights, crossing the liberating bridge on foot or bike, finding my way down to the Battery to watch people boarding the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. By now years of grimy rain had washed away the “Dove Pete Panto” graffiti, and I knew I would never rescue this man whom I had never seen from his fate as anonymous fish food at the bottom of the bay. That the trade union idea, into which my generation had poured so much idealistic hope, was in this case just another racket was a commonplace, but that it should be so systematically protected from one coast to another, and under the name of patriotism to boot, was something to gag on. It was not even a question of my personal credibility; the corruption on the waterfront had by now been documented in a Republican newspaper, the New York Sun, by an investigative reporter named Malcolm Johnson, who had laid out the whole skein of racketeering controls for all to see and had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize on the same day I received mine for Salesman. In fact, Joe Ryan himself would shortly be sent to Sing Sing for his crimes as head of the ILA. So there was no longer a duty to cry out the facts. That had been done. But the blind tides of traffic continued to roll mindlessly over the bridge, above the scenes my screenplay had portrayed and the conditions Johnson had meticulously exposed. The country clutched corruption to its breast while it sent its sons to cleanse the earth eight thousand miles away in Korea.

A perpetual night of confusion was descending, I thought. Years later I came to see this as a narrow view when I learned from new and younger friends—William Styron and James Jones in particular—that the early fifties was their budding time and America to them seemed destined to guide, if not to lead, the world. For them, as writers living in Rome or London or Paris, the heirs of a victorious war, it was an America that might on bad days win the booby prize but withal was still liberty’s home.

It did not look quite like that from the bridge where I did my walking. I thought of writing an article about my Hollywood misadventure to demonstrate the state of freedom in America, but it seemed an absolutely pointless exercise in self-pity when in the face of Johnson’s exposés a Brewer could still call my script an untruth and make tough Harry Cohn fold up and run with him, cloaking his retreat in the American flag. If I did speak out, I thought, I must do so where it would count and not be brushed aside like yesterday’s paper. I did not expect anybody to be outraged because a playwright had had his film script suppressed; on the contrary, I might even have to face new attacks for having conceived a story that might obstruct the smooth delivery of arms to Korea.

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