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Bigsby on Miller

Kindly written especially for "Incident at Vichy" at the Finborough, by Christopher Bigsby, the world's leading expert on Arthur Miller.

When, after a false start (his first play ran for just three days), Arthur Miller began his career on Broadway he believed that from that stage he could enter into a dialogue with America and his first four plays (All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge) were not only set in America but engaged with its values. Apart from a trip to Europe in 1947, he had never left the country. In Italy he glimsed a group of concentration camp survivors waiting to go to Israel but could make nothing of them. ‘I was,’ he later said, ‘talking to burnt wood, charred iron, bone with eyes.’ An unpublished story did result from this trip but otherwise his mind was on his work. It was a failure of understanding, of imagination, for which he subsequently blamed himself.

Things changed, however, with the 1960s and in particular with his relationship to Inge Morath who would become his third wife. She had spent time as a war worker at Templehof airport, only escaping when the British bombed it. She had come to America as a photographer, working for the Magnum photographic agency. A commission took her to Nevada where Miller was filming The Misfits, starring Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe, and where his marriage to the actress was finally coming to a painful end. She and Miller met again in New York. They both had failed marriages behind them and were hesitant to marry but for Inge there was another barrier. Her parents had been members of the Nazi party, not for ideological reasons but because it was dangerous to be otherwise. She was also from Austria, the country which had gifted the world Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann. So, before she could marry an American Jew she took him to Mauthausen concentration camp near her Salzburg home. When he returned to America he added an element to his 1964 play, After the Fall, a play which featured a man with two failed marriages trying to justify a third when denial and betrayal had characterised his earlier ones. It was a play, though, which broadened out beyond the particular to include the House Un-American Activities Committee before which he had been summoned and asked to betray former friends. To this he now added another dimension. A concentration camp tower presides over the action, the ultimate expression of betrayal.

This was the time, too, of the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem while, in Frankfurt, he and Inge attended another trial, that of a number of Auschwitz guards. The ‘question in the Frankfurt courtroom,’ he would write, ‘spreads out beyond the defendants and spirals around the world and into the heart of every man. It is his own complicity with murder, even the murders he did not perform himself with his own hands. The murders, however, from which he profited if only by having survived.’ Beyond anything, the Holocaust seemed to challenge the idea of human agency, extended the spectrum of human behaviour into an impenetrable darkness. Here was man as victim, required to do no more than submit. Where was the scope for tragedy or even resistance?  Yet the essence of his work had always been that we are responsible for our actions, not willess products of history. The theatre of the absurd might offer irony as the only recourse – and for that reason he resisted it – but he was concerned to explore the possibility of an act which could nullify what seemed to him reductive. The result was Incident at Vichy.

Gathered in what is a form of limbo are a group of people rounded up and held for interrogation, as unsure as Kafka’s character in The Trial  what offence they might have committed, not realising that for some the offence is simply to exist. They have their own theories, and what they trust will secure them exemption from whatever fiat awaits them, believing themselves to inhabit a rational world in which an appeal must be possible. Desperate to be declared innocent they look for a free pass, literal and metaphoric. Are they their brother’s keeper or content if only they secure their own freedom?  And if they do survive what the cost not only to their sense of themselves but to our consciousness of our own arbitrary immunity, we who never faced such a dilemma, such a fate, but who are connected to them by our shared humanity, a humanity redefined, threatened, potentially negated? Is there any light, any redemptive action, possible that is not a sentimentality?  Are anyone’s motives pure? As Miller remarked, ‘It is immensely difficult to be human precisely because we cannot detect our own hostility in our own actions.’

It was a story that Miller had heard in part from his psychiatrist who recounted just such an account of a group of people detained in Vichy France. For a central character, he turned a man Inge had known, an Austrian prince who had resisted the Nazis. For Miller, though, the play’s implications reached out beyond this anteroom to death in Vichy France. It was all too easy to condemn others, to declare oneself or one’s country innocent, to deny responsibility. The Vietnam war, for example, was underway, and he would throw himself into the campaign to end it, while America’s history of racism had depended on personal and political denial of the cruelties it had embraced. There were those for whom the use of the Holocaust as metaphor was to deny it its particularity but to Miller, who with Inge had retreated from Mauthausen in tears, such evil did not end with the Liberation.

In 1965, Miller became President of the writers’ organisation, International PEN, and in that role would work to secure the release of writers held in prison around the world, to insist on literature as itself a moral force. Ahead lay plays set in Czechoslovakia, as it then was, and in South America. The man who had started believing he could enter into a dialogue with America ended by having a dialogue with the world.     

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