CW: Would you be willing to talk a little more about your experience at Death of a Salesman? I'd love to hear that story.

GS: Well, I remember the first 20 minutes or so, it seemed like the actors were sort of hustling through their lines — almost like a staged reading. And I was starting to wonder what all the fuss was about. And then at one point, they just found it. You could feel it in the theater. It was as if they'd been waiting for the play to start talking to them, in a particular way, on that particular night, and, being a great play, it did. I also remember a very crazy moment — it's when Biff is being hugged by Willy and starts to cry. It was as if the actor playing Biff shrunk and got younger, and, it seemed to me, he literally climbed into Willy's lap. One of those strange optical-auditory miracles that are possible in the theater. And then, at the end, when the lights came up, you could see dozens of older guys just sitting there crying. If I'd ever thought theater wasn't "valid" or alive, that night proved me completely wrong. It was so powerful. I remember standing in the street afterwards, in the crowd of people milling around waiting for the actors to come out, thinking, This night is living proof of the power of art. People were moved, softened — made briefly better, I'd argue. Hoffman was incredible. I came away with the feeling that, for any artist, immersion is the thing — to be so deep into whatever it is you're doing that the separation between you and the object is gone. I also remember a woman in the crowd saying, as we left the theater, that she'd seen the original production with Lee Cobb, and that this was as good — and she also said something about the proof of a great play is that various great actors can make it sing in different ways… Something like that.

CW: I was interested in how masterfully he organizes and reorganizes his experiences/sense of himself, without allowing much slack. Everything fits into an evolving sense of the world, himself in the world, and his work in the world.

GS: The other cool thing about this book is the chronology. He will fully occupy one time and then fade into an earlier time very logically and seamlessly — I never had that feeling you sometimes get when things are out of chronology, of wanting to get back to the "main" story. He talks in the book about this idea (which he used to construct some of the plays) that a human being in any moment is actually existing in several different timeframes at once. Something happens to us, we contextualize it per some earlier experience, etc., etc. We tend to reduce this to "Oh, I am having a memory," but Miller's point, I think, is that we bring these past referents into the present moment so vividly that they are as real and effect-inducing as the present-time action. What has happened to us completely colors our current perceptions. Memory is character: what we remember and the tonality in which we remember it. And then he demonstrates that principle in the structure of the book. (I was reminded of the psychological truth of this idea by a recent re-reading of A Christmas Carol.)

CW: This book offers an amazing combination of accounts of Miller's own pursuits in art and life, a powerful engagement with the present, both the cultural moment and often the personal physical/intellectual moment, and some of the most incredibly bizarre and powerful events Miller was simply, randomly there for and blessed us by recording. What I mean to say is, can we talk briefly about Arthur Miller and Saul Bellow on a divorce retreat together in Nevada? And Saul Bellow starting off some mornings by wandering out behind a mountain and screaming into a canyon?

GS: Yes — this book is, I think, a great historical-cliché disruptor. What I mean is this: As a certain historical epoch fades away, it tends to get represented more and more broadly in the cultural product — even in very high-quality cultural product. So, a young person today might get her idea of "the 1960s" from Mad Men or some other show like that, in which some dramatic foreshortening is necessary and is, in fact, the whole point of the fun. Also, in such representations, there's a sense of overdetermination — what we now "know" of an era gets back-projected on to the depiction. Or she might think "Marilyn Monroe" and recall some iconic photo, or think "McCarthy witch-hunt" and think of some representation of that in some movie. This is all well and good. The danger lies, I think, in our forgetfulness re: details and our tendency to conceptualize earlier times as being simpler than, and somehow irrelevant to, our own. We look at some earlier culture wrestling with some issue and think, Oh, poor dears, too bad they were so dumb and black-and-white and moved so jerkily. To read a book like this is to be reminded that every generation is just as smart or dumb as the previous one; there's no big fluctuations in human intelligence or intention from generation to generation, I don't think. The value of this is to be able to say, for example, "OK, once upon a time, when the U.S. felt itself threatened by an outside and hostile force (communism), it responded excessively. Now when we feel ourselves threatened by an outside and hostile force (terrorism), might we be enacting some of the same behaviors?"

CW: Did you feel any tension between your own private sense of Miller and his work, and his take? Or, for that matter, your own private sense of Miller?

GS: Well, one thing that surprised me was how logically he talked about the construction of the plays. The little capsule summaries he gives make them sound kind of boring and "proof-like," which they never are, in performance — at least not to me. Which in turn just reminded me that anyone who talks about art is doing some after-the-fact approximating. What a writer like Miller does — the reason he's "Arthur Miller" — is make magic at the moment of the writing. That's it. All of the talk, before and after, is just talk. Still, it was interesting to see that this intellectual/political talk he does must have served as a kind of scaffolding. He thought about it that way to get himself into the place where the magic could happen, I guess.

But then this got me thinking about the way that this scaffolding can also become a sort of cage. If, in his youth, a person has (as Miller did) an intense engagement with the political and intellectual world of his time, it can be a kind of double-edged sword. Because this engagement is made of concepts and these expire. They get dated. The fight that formed the man becomes a fight that no one is having anymore, and that no one even remembers ever having had. That is, to have been so strongly imprinted with the fight against fascism and early pro-Soviet feelings and the Depression and so on makes for powerful plays and a strong sense of the world — but also might make, in later life, for a feeling that the world of one's youth is no longer to be found — that particular dialectic is no longer operative. In other words, the truths and debates and systems, mastery of which makes one "an intellectual," also can become limiting. It's a little like being really into the music of one's youth — you tend to judge all subsequent music against it, and by the ground rules that music set up — the assumptions and rhetoric and oppositions of that time get mistaken for the assumptions and rhetoric and oppositions of every time.

But on the other hand, what is an artist supposed to do? Resist his own time? I've sometimes felt, because of my background, a little under-informed about and under-engaged with contemporary political and intellectual issues. When I was young I didn't live anywhere that had any real artistic life going on, and I've always regretted that, sort of — like, "I was never part of a movement." And I think great works of art often come out of the sort of pressure-cooker environment that Miller describes NYC as being in the 1930s and 1940s. That's where a person gets the deep immersion in certain ideas and artistic assumptions and then — if he's lucky — he pushes those ideas and approaches forward, just a bit closer to the goal line. That's called artistic progress. I've often felt a little vacant vis-à-vis the artistic movements of my time, and like the ideas that underlie my work are primarily emotional — they come out of my direct experience, but maybe not informed enough by bigger theoretical and political and critical ideas.

(Also, a chance pleasure of reading this book when I did: I was just finishing up the magnificent A People's Tragedy, by Orlando Figes, a 900-plus-page detailing of the excesses of the Russian Revolution. So it was oddly satisfying to read Miller's convincing and articulate explanation of his generation's admiration — and whitewashing — of the Revolution, even as I was learning, from Figes, how messed up and horrific it was on the ground. And then satisfying to see Miller trying to come to grips with the new information about the Soviet Union, even as our country was crucifying people for ever having held those early/romantic views of communism. All in all, it reminded me of post-9/11 America — the mood in the air at that time, and of how quickly we might again degenerate into a witch-hunt mentality.)