Feature: Jewish Book Week
Published: 24 February, 2011
by DAN CARRIER
ARTHUR Miller was always wary of allowing other people to delve too deeply into his life. That was – after all – his job and what enabled him to create Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, After the Fall, A View from the Bridge among dozens of other plays.
“He always hated the idea of biographies – he dismissed them as gossip. He didn’t want people intruding into his private life, and also his biography was the source he drew on for his plays,” explains Christopher Bigsby, the only man to get close enough to Miller to write an authorised biography. “The reason he resisted writing his own autobiography for so long was that he was afraid he would discharge in biography the elements he would draw on in his plays.”
So we had to wait until 1987 for his autobiography – Timebends: A Life – and this year for the second part of his authorised biography, written by Christopher Bigsby, professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia.
Professor Bigsby is not so much an authority on Miller, who died in 2005 at the age of 89, more like the closest we have to having the great man in the same room. As an academic, his knowledge of Miller is second to none – he is director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies and the first volume of biography (Arthur Miller 1915 to 1962) was shortlisted for three prizes, and won the 2010 American Studies Book Prize.
But what makes Bigsby so engaging to read and to listen to is that he was also Miller’s friend. He hasn’t just sat in the stalls – he’s watched him rehearse, seen him write, had breakfast with him before he wrote and then gone swimming with him in his pond in his beloved Roxbury in Connecticut and then had dinner with him and his wife of 40 years, Inge.
The first contact came in 1965 when Bigsby was moved to write to him after seeing the British premiere of After The Fall. The play was too much for the US critics, who panned it. But, as so often with Miller’s work, the plays which America rejected – or recoiled from – were lauded in the UK. After watching the iconic play, which featured a concentration camp tower on stage, he wrote to Miller who was in the UK for the opening but confined to a hospital bed with food poisoning: “I had just seen the play and I’d also just read an article about survivor guilt [which consumes Quentin in After the Fall] and told him that it rang bells with me with his play, and I got a letter back.”
But it wasn’t until 1977 that they met, when Bigsby visited him in Connecticut for a book and was told that the next time he visited he would be staying with Miller and his wife Inge at their home in Roxbury. And that is what he continued to do for the next 30 years and the reason that Miller spent his 80th and 85th birthdays in Norwich, where Bigsby lives and created the Arthur Miller Centre to celebrate American Literature at the university’s Sainsbury Centre.
Miller’s Jewishness has always given critics something to chew over – some attacked him for writing Jewish characters but not alluding to their Jewishness, others attacked him for making the Holocaust the subject of a Broadway play. He couldn’t win, and that is a theme which Bigsby will be exploring next at Jewish Book Week. Miller would often recount a host of his favourite Jewish jokes, and Bigsby recalls him telling the following story with great relish: “A woman is walking by the sea with her grandson. Suddenly a huge wave comes in and sweeps him out to sea. She looks up at the sky and says, ‘Lord, restore my grandson to me. He is the light of our lives.’ The next second another wave deposits the grandson beside her. She looks up at the sky again and says, ‘he had a hat’.”
Miller’s life is endlessly fascinating, not least because of the women he married – Marlyn Monroe gave him a kind of timeless tragic glamour but it was the infinitely more understated Inge who gave him back his strength and his international clout. Inge, the Austrian daughter of Nazi party members, took him to a concentration camp and it was she who accompanied him to Auschwitz trials, helping to nudge his politics into art.
Miller, says Bigsby, was a political writer because he was a political man – whether he was negotiating with the Viet Cong in Paris or standing up in a public hall in his home town to keep the power companies from destroying his neighbour’s peace and views which meant he managed to convey his politics without being “Political”. He didn’t write propaganda, but he was much more than an entertainer – and that created a problem for America. “America has a problem with good plays” he says, adding that if it wasn’t all singing all dancing or the next Death of a Salesman they weren’t interested.
“He wrote the kind of plays which relate private lives to public issues,” which, Bigsby says, is why we need him more than ever.
• Arthur Miller 1962-2005. By Christopher Bigsby. Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30
• Christopher Bigsby is at Jewish Book Week on Monday February 28 to talk about Arthur Miller. Royal National Hotel, Bedford Way ,WC1, 0844 847 2274, 6pm, £8
Philosopher’s sharp eye for design
THE concrete core of the Shard is rising above London – visible now from vantage points such as Parliament Hill and Primrose Hill, Dartmouth Park Hill and Whitestone Pond, the skeleton of the tower is changing the skyline.
Philosopher Alain de Botton is a ferocious critic of the building – and says it represents much that is wrong with planning and design in Britain. The philosopher has written widely about how the quality of the environment is a key factor in people’s happiness – and misery. Speaking at Jewish Book Week on Sunday, he is due to discuss his Living Architecture project that gives people the opportunity to take holidays in striking examples of modern architecture. He will be joined by architect Alex Lifschutz who has worked on the new Jewish Community Centre, currently being built in Finchley Road.
“This is the Turkey Twizzler of architecture,” Mr de Botton says of renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano’s Shard, whose foundations are sunk into a tight site in London Bridge. For a man intrinsically connected with modern architecture, such criticisms may come as a surprise.
“It is egocentric, bullying its way above everything, and for me represents big money applying influence. It is about 70 years out of date,” he says.
Mr de Botton believes the developer’s time and cash would have been better spent looking at the older buildings in London Bridge and working out a better way to use them.
“It sits in an area that is run down and poor, and they should have just done up the buildings there,” he says. “There is lots of redundant space in that area. But they have said: I’ll just build my thing and forget about everyone else. It is frankly sub-standard stuff.”
In his book The Architecture of Happiness, Mr de Botton asks what makes a beautiful building, and suggests we overlook this at our peril.
He believes that Modernism in Britain has been unfairly given a bad name.
“Britain industrialised so quickly – that has left people with a sense of nostalgia,” he says of the fact developers revel in building Poundbury-style (a model village), neo-classical developments, while home buyers still want “traditional” architecture.
He claims the development of our cities happened so quickly, and in such a piecemeal fashion, that it has left us with a yearning for something that collectively we feel we have lost, and that has been further sold to us through picture-postcard fantasies of the archetypal English village, with cricket green, parish church, pub, duck pond and thatched cottages.
“It was just that it was so fast-paced it has left people nostalgic,” he says. “People want to go back in time.”
He says the concept of beauty being in the eye of the beholder is “...a gift to property developers,” an excuse for saying standards in house-building are subjective.
“They say: if you do not like this, you are a snob. I think this is a dangerous way to talk about architecture. But I would say this is a little like literature: some people may say William Shakespeare wrote rubbish plays or Ian McEwan writes rubbish books but most reasonable people know they have something, and the same thing can be said about architecture.”
Now he is running the Living Architecture project, that gives briefs to renowned Modernists to build private holiday homes so people can feel what it is like to live in an outstanding contemporary building.
“It’s an attempt to help to change taste in the UK,” he says. “People have been very conservative in the UK when it comes to housing. People accept modern life in all areas – they do in areas such as clothes, music and food – but not in buildings. Hopefully, the Living Architecture project will help change the debate.”
• Community Buildings: Building Community is the subject of Alain de Botton’s and Alex Lifschutz’s discussion at Jewish Book Week on Sunday February 27 at Royal National Hotel, Bedford Way,WC1, 0844 847 2274, 11am, £8 (£5 conc)
Cornucopia of literary luminaries
Jewish Book Week prides itself on a plethora of different events and talks, using Judaism as a starting point to discuss a huge range of different topics.
Now in its 59th year, its remit covers more straightforward considerations of identity and religion through to quirkier topics, such as the relationship between collectors and their collections: ceramacist Edmund de Waal retraces his family’s history through an inherited collection of Netsuke – tiny Japanese figurines.
Highlights include historian Simon Sebag Montefiore talking about his new biography of the city of Jerusalem, Dorian Lynskey presenting his book on the history of protest song, while a film telling the story of Belsize Park-based 107-year-old pianist Alice Sommer Herz is being screened.
Columnist Johan Hari talks with Israeli Gideon Levy, who is heavily criticised by right wingers from his country for his views on the topic of Gaza, while Linda Grant discusses her new novel with Baroness Joan Bakewell.
Janet Suzman tells the story of Russian war reporter Vassily Grossman, while Clive James interviews Pascal Bruckner on what he terms “the foolish pursuit of happiness”.
New Labour politico Peter Mandelson speaks about his memoirs, The Third Man, and historian Niall Ferguson talks about his biography of banker Sir Seigmund Warburg.
Journalists Gary Younge and Jeffrey Kaye are joined by Hannah Pool to discuss the politics of identity.
• Jewish Book Week runs from February 26-March 6 at the Royal National Hotel, Bedford Way, WC1. Tickets: 0844 847 2274. Sunday-Thursday 10am-10.30pm, Friday 10.30am-2.30pm, Saturday 7.30pm-11pm. More details at www.jewishbookweek.com