I Don't Want Change, I Want Swiss Cheese!

Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"Sometimes you are not happy to hear the truth, because it hurts inside," Georges Perrier, chef of the famous Philadelphia restaurant Le Bec-Fin, told the New York Times upon his retirement. "But I have to accept it." Perrier retired shortly after a newspaper review skewered the restaurant for a terminal decline in quality.

Impressive, in a way--or is that just the sort of ennui that once caused a Frenchman named Claude to tell me and my dad without a trace of irony, "I am too tired to go on lee-ving...."

In any case, Perrier's words would never have arisen in the throat of Willy Loman, the all-time maestro of self-deception. "I don't want change, I want swiss cheese!" Willy cries out to his wife in Act I. It's funny out of context, and I think I'll keep the line out of context as a souvenir, but it also speaks to the forlorn, bewildered, childlike beast that Willy Loman is--he is "a poor, bare, forked animal" with a simple and small desire, the desire of a mouse, in fact, a mere morsel of cheese! But like King Lear, he encounters a world bent upon frustrating even the most miniscule of human desires. His frustration exceeds his humiliation threshold and he seeks a way out in suicidality. His son Biff bears the burden of filial responsibility for his crumbling father, who he once adored, so Miller has his Lear and his Hamlet together in one ringing gong of a play.

Willy cannot feel the obvious, overt love of his sons or his wife, in part because of scarring abandonments in his deep past inflicted by his own father and brother. (A dreamed phantasm of his brother enters and re-enters Willy's thoughts, boasting of exploits with diamonds in the jungle and the Alaskan wild.) When Willy tells this phantasm that their father left when he was three or four, and asks his big brother for details about their father, the phantasm brother coldly specifies that Willy was three years eleven months when their father left as if the fact has no more meaning than to reflect the sharpness of his memory. He boasts afterward that with all his businesses he doesn't even keep any books, not noticing the mortal wound in the heart of the man in front of him, and not feeling a bit of fraternal responsibility to him. But the fact concerning their father's abandonment inspires a rare moment of lucidity and truthfulness in Willy. He seems grateful for this tiny bit of nutrition to his famished spirit, and he says to his brother beseechingly, "I never had a chance to talk to him [their father], and I still feel--kind of temporary about myself."

When Philip Seymour Hoffman (who was born to play Willy Loman) utters lines like these, you hear people in the Barrymore Theater actually sigh or gasp. By the end, you hear people sniffling all around you. It hurts like broken fingernails to watch Willy Loman setting himself on fire, refusing to be helped, and watching Biff (Andrew Garfield of The Social Network) immolate himself on his father's pyre. This is a devious shapeshifting rotating slithering demonic viper of a play, come to kill and eat its audience with its bare hands. It's wrought with bewildering skill, and is in some respects more O'Neill than O'Neill, more Aeschylus than Aeschylus. Arthur Miller done gone Greek on our ass with the pity and the fear.

Mike Nichols's production, which reproduces the original 1949 set to the molecule, left me bleeding all over my soul from its 100,000 viper bites of despair. (A fun night out at the theater! My wife joked at the intermission, "Well, at least it has a happy ending!" and I said to the woman sitting next to us, "Yeah, don't worry, I hear it all works out in the second half!") Hoffman is the master portraitist of self-deceivers, that tortured species which deserves its own private wing of heaven in which to recuperate from life. Hoffman unearths aspects of Willy Loman I've never noticed before: that he has charm and wit, and that his crazy volte faces from puffed up aspiration to sudden gloom have an inherently comic rhythm to them. Also, I appreciated that just as when I saw Hoffman on stage next to Robert Sean Leonard in Long Day's Journey into Night, Hoffman's head was one and a half to two times as large as Garfield's.

Even if watching a good production like this is fatal to a melancholic soul like me, I'll always have a soft spot for this play, if only because I won the Arthur Miller Prize for Fiction at the University of Michigan in 1992 and was given a copy of the play inscribed by the master himself, Arthur Miller. There were no more than 20 or so of these awards ever given. U of M also sent my award-winning juvenalia to Miller and I like to think he at least passed his eyes across the letters of my name.


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The Bible as Literature

The Book of Genesis by R. Crumb
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Harold Bloom says that Freud learned all his psychology from Shakespeare. Would it be radical to suggest that Shakespeare learned half of his psychology from the Romans and the other half from the Hebrew Bible?

Robert Alter says of the Bible’s authors, "[T]he Hebrew writers manifestly took delight in the artful limning of ... lifelike characters and actions, and so they created an unexhausted source of delight for a hundred generations of readers." The Bible is generally more realist in style and more concerned with the minute details and subtle intricacies of mental life than say, Homeric epic, or the plays of Aeschylus, where emotions certainly occupy a central position but are seen at a longer psychic distance and are represented in more abstract ways.

When Cain is snubbed by God, who heeds Abel’s offering but not the older brother's, I can put myself in Cain’s shoes (sandals) more readily than I can in those of say, Menelaus, after Paris absconds with his wife. I understand Menelaus on a more intellectual level. When Cain is snubbed, the Bible says “his face fell” and that God asked him, “Why is your face fallen?” The narration and the figures in the stories themselves are remarkably attendant to the inner life, to discrepancies between the outward manifestations of thought and feeling and the inner facts, to discrepancies between intention and action, even between inner ideas and deeper levels of consciousness (i.e., the Bible depicts lies told to oneself; i.e., denial ain’t just the river where Moses turned up in an ark of bulrushes). Noah’s ostracism of his son and grandson and Sarah’s jealousy of Hagar are entirely modern-feeling accounts of guilt and jealousy and the way such emotions are handled in the psyche.

R. Crumb’s recently published illustrations of the Book of Genesis amplify this psychological pathos in a wonderful way without diminishing the Bible's subtlety. Crumb shows Cain sweating under the weight of his offering to God juxtaposed with the tiny lightweight lamb that Abel brings. You see how unfair and hurtful it was for Cain and understand what came next.

Some of the Crumb illustrations are funny and implicitly ask subversive questions about God, particularly in the earlier chapters, where God enters the story as a kind of lunatic artisan who likes to make things for reasons unknown to anyone, including, apparently, himself and who gets furiously dissatisfied with his creations and takes out all his frustrations on his children like the put-upon alcoholic Farrington in James Joyce’s story “Counterparts.” The things God yells about seem not to make any sense as in a real human temper tantrum. The opening passages of Genesis may lose some of their gravitas in this version, but the familial dysfunction at the heart of so many of the Bible stories is thrown into bold relief. Furthermore, the satire in these early parts lends a certain existential irony to the stories, which I appreciate, and which it might be argued is not even foreign to the biblical writers. Alter sees the Bible’s main agenda as the depiction of human character in all its variety and consistency, and that character's interrelation with forces beyond human control—fate, destiny, chance (or God, if you prefer)—to create what we call history. Sometimes the biblical heroes themselves don’t understand God’s designs, and sometimes laughter is the result, as when Sarah laughs at God’s annunciation of her pregnancy in old age and this laughter is commemorated in Isaac’s name, which means “he who laughs.” Sometimes the heroes object to God's designs, as when Abraham bargains for Lot’s life. Sometimes God seems like a personification of the sort of natural disaster that just befell Haiti as when God wantonly destroys Babel. It might be argued that the biblical writers purposely made God at times cruel and outrageous because fate is cruel and outrageous. And inasmuch as the Bible writers rationalized natural disasters as punishments for bad behavior (as Pat Robertson does even today) or otherwise rationalized them as in any way useful or necessary or morally ordained—well, then this benighted and primitive element of their worldview deserves satire.

On the whole, however, what’s so remarkable about the ancient writers of the Bible is not what's primitive about them, but what is modern. They have honored the complexity and majesty of the real world with the most meticulous artistry and have not only bequeathed their wise and beautiful stories to later readers but their techniques to later writers and artists.

I reread Genesis in Crumb’s illustrated edition (which uses Robert Alter’s translation, a major upgrade from any I’ve read, sensitive as it is the artistic aims of the original Hebrew) and afterward I read Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative, a masterpiece of literary criticism and a highly accessible one at that. If you want a pair of excellent guides to one of the great artistic creations in the history of humankind, I commend to you the Roberts Alter and Crumb.

Addendum: On Bloom’s notion that Freud got everything from Shakespeare; this is surely “the anxiety of influence” in action—a wonderful concept Bloom invented with a little help from Freud. (As that immortal rock band The Bettelheims said, “I get by with a little help from my Freud....”)


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