C
Catholicvegan
Guest
He passed away at his home in Roxbury, CT. He was 89 years old.
msnbc.msn.com/id/6953165/
msnbc.msn.com/id/6953165/
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
You should upgrade or use an alternative browser.
- Status
- Not open for further replies.
M
Matt25
Guest
signonsandiego.com/news/features/20040321-9999-news_mz1a21miller.html
Liberal causes
While his popular reputation waxed and waned, Miller did anything but retire from public life. He continued to defend liberal causes and intellectual freedoms. As president of PEN International, the writers’ organization, he championed dissident artists and intellectuals in China, the Soviet Union, Turkey and Czechoslovakia (where one of those dissident playwrights, Vaclav Havel, later became president). He reported from the violence-wracked 1968 Democratic convention and was a delegate to the Miami convention that chose George McGovern as its candidate in 1972. He defended performance artist Karen Finley and three gay colleagues against the congressional smut brigades that rescinded their grants and eventually eviscerated the National Endowment for the Arts.
He and Morath, along with his friend, the novelist William Styron, and others, visited Cuba. Miller’s balanced response – disappointment in Castro’s oppressive regime; skepticism about the ethics and practical effects of the U.S embargo – ap
peared in the liberal journal the *Nation *just two months ago.
There remains one area of his life Miller famously won’t discuss – his affair and four-year-long marriage to Monroe. One reporter for the *New York Daily News *learned that the hard way. Asking a smarmy question about whether the playwright still dreamed about Monroe, Miller, then 80, decked the questioner with a glancing blow that sent him skidding across the buffet table at a Town Hall celebration.
But if that incident, reported in the *New York Times, *suggests unresolved feelings about his troubled second marriage, Miller is about to approach the loaded subject again in the new play. “Finishing the Picture,” says the Goodman’s publicity material, is the story of a film director who nearly shuts down a picture when an unstable movie star creates havoc – in Nevada, where, in fact, Monroe filmed the Miller-scripted, marriage-ending “The Misfits.”
In person, Miller is courtly, far from the finger-waving moralist described by the right-wing cultural press. And he’s far more adventurous artistically than his reputation would have him. Miller has a simple explanation for the latter misapprehension: “Maybe I wasn’t seen as experimental because most of my experiments worked.”
On the current political scene, he notes a shift. “Even the Republicans don’t seem to be quite as happy with this kind of music. I think that what’s at the bottom of the disillusionment now is that nobody likes being lied to.”
And thus, Arthur Miller gently nudges the conversation back to “Resurrection Blues.” He points out that "the play, of course, is dealing with delusionary matters that have come to seem so persuasive and ordinary.
“It’s all a poem,” he says, quoting the character Henri, the dictator’s cousin in “Resurrection Blues.” Henri has left his pharmaceutical company to become a philosopher and now insists that all too many wars are fought over fictions. Miller wrote Henri’s key speech long before weapons of mass destruction turned up nonexistent in Iraq.
“The Vietnam War,” according to Henri, “was set off, mind you, by a night attack upon a United States warship by a Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s now quite certain that the attack never happened. This was a fiction, a poem; but 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese had to die before the two sides got fed up reciting it.”
Liberal causes
While his popular reputation waxed and waned, Miller did anything but retire from public life. He continued to defend liberal causes and intellectual freedoms. As president of PEN International, the writers’ organization, he championed dissident artists and intellectuals in China, the Soviet Union, Turkey and Czechoslovakia (where one of those dissident playwrights, Vaclav Havel, later became president). He reported from the violence-wracked 1968 Democratic convention and was a delegate to the Miami convention that chose George McGovern as its candidate in 1972. He defended performance artist Karen Finley and three gay colleagues against the congressional smut brigades that rescinded their grants and eventually eviscerated the National Endowment for the Arts.
He and Morath, along with his friend, the novelist William Styron, and others, visited Cuba. Miller’s balanced response – disappointment in Castro’s oppressive regime; skepticism about the ethics and practical effects of the U.S embargo – ap
peared in the liberal journal the *Nation *just two months ago.
There remains one area of his life Miller famously won’t discuss – his affair and four-year-long marriage to Monroe. One reporter for the *New York Daily News *learned that the hard way. Asking a smarmy question about whether the playwright still dreamed about Monroe, Miller, then 80, decked the questioner with a glancing blow that sent him skidding across the buffet table at a Town Hall celebration.
But if that incident, reported in the *New York Times, *suggests unresolved feelings about his troubled second marriage, Miller is about to approach the loaded subject again in the new play. “Finishing the Picture,” says the Goodman’s publicity material, is the story of a film director who nearly shuts down a picture when an unstable movie star creates havoc – in Nevada, where, in fact, Monroe filmed the Miller-scripted, marriage-ending “The Misfits.”
In person, Miller is courtly, far from the finger-waving moralist described by the right-wing cultural press. And he’s far more adventurous artistically than his reputation would have him. Miller has a simple explanation for the latter misapprehension: “Maybe I wasn’t seen as experimental because most of my experiments worked.”
On the current political scene, he notes a shift. “Even the Republicans don’t seem to be quite as happy with this kind of music. I think that what’s at the bottom of the disillusionment now is that nobody likes being lied to.”
And thus, Arthur Miller gently nudges the conversation back to “Resurrection Blues.” He points out that "the play, of course, is dealing with delusionary matters that have come to seem so persuasive and ordinary.
“It’s all a poem,” he says, quoting the character Henri, the dictator’s cousin in “Resurrection Blues.” Henri has left his pharmaceutical company to become a philosopher and now insists that all too many wars are fought over fictions. Miller wrote Henri’s key speech long before weapons of mass destruction turned up nonexistent in Iraq.
“The Vietnam War,” according to Henri, “was set off, mind you, by a night attack upon a United States warship by a Vietnamese gunboat in the Gulf of Tonkin. It’s now quite certain that the attack never happened. This was a fiction, a poem; but 58,000 Americans and 2 million Vietnamese had to die before the two sides got fed up reciting it.”
- Status
- Not open for further replies.