38. Lies like truth
I was fairly serious myself. Even a little tiresome, especially when it came to the form of theater.
The revival of Death of a Salesman, a television film version of which Anna Graham Hunter was working on while she was being sexually harassed by Dustin Hoffman, isn’t something I think about a lot. Before reading Hunter’s article about her experiences with Hoffman I hadn’t thought about it in years.
I’d written about it, though—a long, scathing essay that I also hadn’t thought about for years. Re-reading it in the fall of 2017 I came away convinced that it must have been what had prompted David Mamet to write to me in the spring of 1986. At the end of the piece, I’d compared Arthur Miller’s tragic hero to some real estate salesmen in a new play of Mamet’s that had opened that season on Broadway.
This summer, when Bill and I were renovating the kitchen and a lot of things were being moved from one place to another and gone through, I came across Mamet’s letter and was disconcerted to find that he had been responding to something else entirely, not a piece in which I’d been scathing about Hoffman’s performance in Miller’s play but one in which I’d been scathing about Sam Shepherd and a style of acting that I thought his writing elicited.
I did a lot of scathing in those days, the way one does in one’s twenties.
I was writing for what was then a fairly new monthly arts review called The New Criterion which identified, as the kids say now, as neoconservative. I suppose it was, though I don’t think it was anywhere near as tiresome and doctrinaire as it became after the death of its founder and editor, Hilton Kramer.1 The New Criterion was a little tiresome in the sense that it was almost entirely humorless. Seriousness was its domain, in fact the phrase “high seriousness”—Mathew Arnold’s term for the sine qua non of great poetry—was Hilton’s mantra. The magazine was so serious that it had been launched with the idea that theater was not a high enough art form to merit coverage. This gave me a mission which was to prove that it was.
I was fairly serious myself. Even a little tiresome, especially when it came to the form of theater, one of whose primary purposes, I believed, was to get an audience thinking about how easy it is for human beings to be deceived. I thought the way theater did this was by constantly confronting us with a counterfeit version of reality. To borrow a famous phrase from Homer and Hesiod, by “telling lies like truth.”
In order to do this, though, theater had to present an audience with something that actually resembled reality. It seemed to me that the New York stage had ceased to do this much. (For several years I’d been exposed to London theater and what appeared on the New York stage was nothing like it.) I thought New York audiences were too often experiencing a form of theater that militated against the very thing that it was supposed to do.
The Dustin Hoffman revival of Death of a Salesman was a prime example of this.
It had been much hyped as a history-making tour de force because Hoffman was being billed as too young to play Miller’s 63-year-old tragic hero. (He was 43.2) What was going to allow him to inhabit the role of Willy Loman, according to the advance press, was Hoffman’s studious commitment to method acting.
Hoffman’s performance, when the production opened, was widely praised by a reverent critical community and a docile public.
To me, though—and you can spot me on this; the film version is available on Daily Motion3—Hoffman seemed to be playing his idea of an old man rather than any specific person. It was the same thing that makes his performance in Tootsie so offensive from today’s standpoint. Hoffman’s Dorothy Michaels is little more than a small-minded actor’s stereotypical notion of a woman. Hoffman had had no more interest in a man in his waning years than he’d had in women, and his performance in each instance had produced what amounted to a high-gloss cartoon: in one case a church-social matron given to brief bouts of middle-brow feminism, in the other a rigid, shuffling, perennially vexed blow-hard.
Looking at clips from that production of Death of a Salesman now, I can see that what makes Hoffman’s performance so inauthentic is that he never actually seems to be thinking about what he’s talking about. He’s always thinking about his performance.
What I wrote about that production wasn’t just snooty about Hoffman. It was snooty about the play, too. I argued that there was something phony about Miller’s whole premise and motivation, that he’d used a pseudo-literary idea to lend pseudo-literary importance to a character for whom he himself really had nothing but contempt. I pointed to all the ways in which Willy’s values and mindset clash with the outlook of an educated, left-leaning liberal intellectual such as Miller, how Willy’s whole sense of self is rooted in a pious faith in the greatness of America and the installment plan. I said that this wouldn’t have been clear to a 1949 audience but that it was clear in the 1980s, as was the fact that the real hero of the play is Biff, the son who rejects all Willy’s values.
I still believe what I wrote, but I think it’s one of those pieces of criticism that’s both true and not true. It’s one part of the truth. The play really does move people and you can’t get away from that. But there’s something else I believe that I didn’t say, which is that there’s something phony—even anti-theatrical—about the whole way Miller uses the figure of the salesman.
In American popular culture, the salesman is a con artist, a character with the potential to teach us something about how easily we can be deceived and how easy it is to manipulate the truth. A conman is how Miller saw the figure of the salesman in his heart of hearts, but he spends a whole play pretending that he doesn’t.
I didn’t write any of that, but I did say that Death of a Salesman allows the audience to feel superior to Willy and therefore virtuous for mourning his loss. And I compared Willy with the title character in Meredith Willson’s The Music Man (which there had been a little revival of that season) and with the real estate salesmen in Mamet’s new play. I said the proof of Miller’s contempt for Willy is that he didn’t even make Willy good at what he does.
This spring, when I came across the letter that Mamet had written to me, I didn’t look at it right away. I put it on top of a pile of things I was intending to read very soon and then didn’t touch it for weeks.
One day, though, Bill picked it up and opened it. He’d sat down in a chair beside where the letter was lying in plain view.
On perusing the letter, Bill said it was sort of charming—particularly the ending. He read out the last sentence.
“A lot of what you say about acting,” Mamet had written, “sounds, as we used to say in Chicago, like you’ve been reading my mail.”
Hilton, who was one of the last of the true gentlemen critics, struck me as neoconservative mainly in the sense that he thought there were Stalinists lurking under every bed when the lights went out. People used to ask if he was any relation to me. He wasn’t. (Sometimes I would say I was his mistress but preferred to keep my own name.)
I would love to know whether the same sort of fuss was made when the greatly missed and lamented Philip Seymour Hoffman played the role at the same age in a 2012 revival I’d kill to have seen.
Try looking at a scene that begins around 10 minutes in and/or one at around the 2-hour mark.