"After the Fall"

A sermon by Dave Weissbard

delivered at

The Unitarian Universalist Church

Rockford, Illinois

02/21/05

          Arthur Miller died 11 days ago. At least one critic has referred to him as “the Shakespeare of the 20^th century.” It is clear that Miller was one of the most insightful and accessible playwrights of our time. People who saw his plays frequently could relate his characters to the people in their families – and interestingly that is as true in Russia and China and France and England and Belgium, as it is in the United States.

          One of the sermons I delivered in seminary and then to my first congregation 40 years ago, addressed the theme of Miller’s then current play “After the Fall.” It is a theme to which I have returned many times over the years, although I was surprised to discover that I have never gone back to the play in any depth since 1965.

           [A friend called yesterday to suggest I go with him to the movies last night. When I declined since I was preaching this morning, he said, “But it’s just an old sermon.” I pointed out that I had done as much reading this week – in Miller’s autobiography, the script, and a number of appraisals of his works by literary critics -- as I normally do in preparation of a sermon. I can’t remember when I have just pulled a sermon out of the file and preached it again just as it was.]

          This morning, I’m going to say something about Miller’s life; look, with Karen’s help at “after the Fall”; and then say something about how I understand the importance of the play’s message for us.

          Arthur Miller was born in New York City, on October 17, 1915, the third child of Isidore and Augusta Miller. His father, an illiterate Jewish immigrant from Eastern Europe, was a very successful coat manufacturer. With the crash of the stock market, they moved from a luxurious apartment in Manhattan and a chauffeur-driven limousine, to a tiny dilapidated rental house in an unfashionable section of Brooklyn.

          Miller was not much interested in academics in high school - he was a jock. There was a problem affording college, but even more problematic were his grades. The University of Michigan said it would accept him if he could get letters of reference from his teachers attesting that he was smarter than his grades. The teachers had no such impression.

          He worked as a laborer in a variety of jobs to save money, and he continued to apply to the University. Finally, on his third attempt, he was accepted for the class of 1938. He began as a journalism student, but switched to a major in English. In order to raise some money, he wrote a play, “No Villain” in six days his sophomore year, which won the coveted Hopwood Award in Drama. The play was produced in Ann Arbor and Detroit. He won the same award the following year for another play. He almost left school in 1937 to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade fighting fascism in Spain, but decided to stay in school. Throughout his life, he was actively involved in liberal causes. He tried the following year to win the prize again, but his entry received only second place – but it did win a Theater Guild award for just as much money.

          After graduating, Miller joined the Federal Theater Project in New York City, where he wrote radio plays and scripts, having turned down an offer from 20^th Century Fox. In 1940 he married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Grace Slattery. He supplemented his income by working at the Brooklyn Naval Yard. He and Mary had two children.

          Miller’s play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” opened on Broadway in 1944. Most of the critics hated it and it closed after four or six performances. He swore off play writing for a couple of years, and then wrote “All My Sons” which appeared and won the New York Drama Critics Award in 1947. It was followed in 1949 by “Death of a Salesman,” which received a Pulitzer Prize, as well as several others. In 1950 he met Marilyn Monroe, who shook him up, and upon whom he made a big impression.

[He told her she looked sad, which no one else had ever noticed, or at least commented on.] “The Crucible” came along in 1953, and in 1955, “A View from the Bridge.” His plays were never instant hits with most of the critics.

          In 1956, Miller divorced Mary and married Marilyn Monroe, who had recently divorced Joe DiMaggio and converted to Judaism. That year Miller had a major run-in with the House Un-American Activities Committee, the activities of which were certainly Un-American. [The chair offered not to call Miller to testify if Marilyn would have her picture taken with him. Miller refused to name names and was charged with contempt. A court subsequently threw out the conviction.] Marilyn went into a severe depression after a miscarriage, and became drug dependent. Miller and Marilyn were divorced after a stormy five-year marriage. Two years later, in 1962, he married Inge Morath, an Austrian photographer, and Marilyn committed suicide. He and Inge were married for 40 years, until her death in 2002. They had two children, one of whom had Down’s syndrome and is not mentioned in Miller’s autobiography. In 1962, his plays “After the Fall” and “Incident at Vichy” were produced. One of Karen’s theatre teachers taught that there are three types of plays: those that are about escape, those that are about seeking security (like Tennessee Williams’ plays); and those that are about identity, like Miller’s.

          Miller continued to write, although none of his subsequent plays had the stature of his earlier ones. The early plays have continued to be produced and appreciated around the world, so Miller remained a major literary and political figure until his death of heart failure on February 10^th. He had been about to marry for the fourth time, and felt he still had more stories to tell.

           Going back to “After the Fall,” on which we are focusing this morning: it was an unusual play for its time. In a sense, it is very simple: the main character, Quentin, a lawyer, spends three and a half hours telling a “listener” (who may be a judge, God, a rabbi or a psychiatrist, but is, in reality the audience) what he is all about. Quentin is wrestling with whether to marry for the third time. The play is an experience in free association. People pop in and out as his chain of thought calls them in – it is not in any way sequential – it does not follow any logical order – it does not start with his childhood and work up. It takes place on a mostly bare stage with the ruins of a concentration camp tower behind it. Quentin’s parents bear more than a passing resemblance to Miller’s parents, Quentin’s first wife, to Miller’s first wife; his second wife, Maggie is a lot like Marilyn Monroe and, in fact, commits suicide as Marilyn did; Quentin’s about-to-be-third wife is German, as was Miller’s. It is strange that Miller was so put off by people interpreting the play as autobiographical.

Miller insisted:

The game of identification is always played by those who cannot or will not grapple with the objective meaning of the work at hand.

          The fact is that Marilyn Monroe was a cultural icon and many people were furious at Miller for what they interpreted as a besmirching of her iconic status. I say, “what they interpreted as” because it never seemed to me that Miller was unfair in his depiction of her, and as time has passed, that has become the dominant view. In his autobiography, Miller insisted:

If Maggie was any reflection of Marilyn, who had many other dimensions, the character’s agony was a tribute to her, for in life, as far as the public was concerned, Marilyn was practically barred from any conceivable connection with suffering; she was the “golden girl,” the forever young goddess of sexuality, beyond pain and anxiety, a mystically anaesthetized creature outside the reach of ordinary mortality, and hence of real sympathy.

          Benjamin Nelson says essentially what Miller maintained right along:

The issue should not be whether a play is autobiographical but how it utilizes biographical material.

If you read Miller’s autobiography, Timebends: a life, the autobiographical dimensions of most of his works become clear, but as I observed earlier, people the world over have resonated with the universality of the characters and situations as they were depicted by Miller.

          With Karen’s help, I want to share with you some segments of “After the Fall” to give you a flavor of it.

          The first is from the beginning where Quentin is talking to the listener:

You know, more and more I think that for many years I looked at life like a case at law, a series of proofs. When you’re young, you prove how brave you are, or smart; then what a good lover; then a good father; finally, how wise, or powerful or what-the-hell-ever. But underlying it all, I see now, there was a presumption. That I was moving on an upward path toward some elevation where – God knows what – I would be justified or even condemned – a verdict anyway. I think now my disaster really began when I looked up one day – and the bench was empty. No judge in sight. And all that remained was the endless argument with oneself – this pointless litigation of existence before an empty bench. Which, of course, is another way of saying – despair. And, of course, despair can be a way of life, but you have to believe in it, pick it up, take it to heart, and move on again. Instead I seem to be hung up, waiting for some believable sign, and the days and the months and now the years are drawing away.

          The seeds of Quentin’s troubles begin with his relationship with his mother who was very dissatisfied with his father and tried to live out her life as she would like it to have been through her younger son. He feels guilty when he finds it hard to grieve after her death.

          Quentin had married young and after several years of marriage, he and his wife Louise have grown apart - if they were ever really together. Quentin has lost his job for agreeing to represent his friend Lou who was identified as being a Communist. The problem in the marriage is a basic lack of ability to communicate with each other. Louise sums it up this way:

          I don’t find Quentin to be justifying his failure with Louise. He is rather clear that both of them failed in the process of communicating and that the space between them has become a gulf that cannot be bridged.

          Quentin and Louise are divorced and he falls for and marries Maggie, the former receptionist at his office who has become a singer and sex symbol. She is almost the opposite of Louise because she is almost totally dependent upon him and not separate at all. While she credits Quentin with having given her the confidence years before to pursue her career, she really sees herself as a total victim – she does nothing – everything is done to her. Maggie is unreasonably demanding, smothering in her neediness, and when Quentin cannot provide her with everything she needs, she begins suicide attempts to get her own way. She is under a psychiatrist’s care. Quentin decides that he is powerless to help her, although he feels responsible. He tells Maggie:

          Quentin and Maggie are divorced. As I said earlier, I didn’t and still don’t read his treatment of Maggie as unsympathetic, or as a distortion of the person responsible biographers have depicted. [Miller was furious at how he felt Norman Mailer exploited her memory and distorted her reality in his book about her.] I believe it is true that the only hope for either of them to survive was to separate.

          The result of the two failures at marriage was to make Quentin hesitant to try a third time when he falls in love with a German anthropologist. He believes his relationship with her has led him to find a new dimension of himself, but he is afraid of failure again. Holga says to him:

          At the conclusion of the play, Quentin is still facing the problem he was facing at the beginning: “Does he dare risk love again?”

But love, is love enough? What love, what wave of pity will ever reach this knowledge: I know how to kill. I know. I know – she (Maggie) was doomed in any case, but will that cure? Or is it possible that this is not bizarre. . . to anyone? And I am not alone, and no [one] who lives would not rather be the sole survivor of this place than all its finest victims! What is the cure? Who can be innocent again on this mountain of skulls?

I tell you what I know! My brothers died here, but my brothers built this place. Our hearts have cut these stones. And what’s the cure? [his family appears in the background] No, not love. I loved them all, ALL! And gave them willingly to failure and to death that I might live, as they gave me and gave each other, with a word, a look, a truth, a lie . . . and all in love!

[Holga appears and says “Hello.”] But what will defend her? That woman hopes! Or is that exactly why she hopes, because she knows? What burning cities taught her and the death of love taught me: that we are very dangerous! And that . . that’s why I wake each morning like a boy -- even now, even now! I swear to you, I could love this world again! Is the knowing all? To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many , many deaths.

Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love – as to an idiot in the house – forgive it, again and again . . . forever?

   And Holga says, “Hello.” And Quentin, who began the play by saying, “hello,” says hello back to her, and they walk off together.

          Two and three weeks ago I spoke of the conception of Northrup Frye, adapted by James Hopewell for congregations, that literature or churches can be identified by two continua – the east-west one of which runs, in Frye’s terms, between comedy and tragedy. The comedic, carried to the extreme, is the naive view that every life will always have a happy ending. The tragic, carried to the extreme, is that nothing ever ends happily. The north-south continuum runs between the ironic (called the empiric by Hopewell); and the romantic. The ironic has to do with accepting life as it is, while the romantic expects some sort of hero or deity, an outside force, to intervene and make things whole.

          In my theological school faculty, as in the congregations I’ve served, there were two rather distinct groups: the optimists who rather naively counted on everything turning out ok, and the pessimists who saw little hope on the horizon.

          What I found and find in “After the Fall” is an insistence by Miller, that we dare not pretend to live in a fairy tale Garden of Eden, because that is not the real world. But we also cannot survive altogether without hope. The Garden of Eden story is not about “sin” as a curse, but about human beings coming to know the difference between good and evil, and therefore having to take responsibility for their actions.

          The traditional Christian view was that humans were inherently evil and that the only hope for good lay outside our nature. The traditional Unitarian view was that we were inherently good and that evil came from outside us. What I believe Miller was saying was that we are, in fact, mixed.

          Miller wrote that he believed that the first real story in the Bible is that of the killing of Abel by Cain, because it involved choice and knowledge. He suggests that the Bible is about the human struggle for goodness and love in the face of the realities of our lives. In the Hebrew Scriptures, it is in the form of the history of a people’s struggle to keep a covenant they have made with God, or ultimate reality -- a struggle which is not easily won. In the Christian scriptures, a blood sacrifice or, in the Liberal view, an example, is offered that helps us seek redemption.

          The play took place in front of the concentration camp tower because Miller believed that we have to face the evil that we have demonstrated we are capable of doing. Today it might be located in view of the prison at Abu Grab. The rosy view of human nature that tries to view us as innocent drives us back into the unreal fantasy garden, both as individuals and as nations. The other extreme of hopelessness, however, is also debilitating because it leaves us without the tools, the ability to have an impact through being in touch with reality, but not overwhelmed by how things are. Miller has suggested that:

People are threatened with freedom . . . The fall is the fall from the arms of God, the right to live, to eat, to be conscious that there exists all the world. It’s the fall from non-conscious existence and from the pleasant and unconscious slavery of childhood and so on. The fall is the threat of freedom, of having to make choices, instead of having them made for you. . . . The more I investigate my own feelings, the less capable I am of conceding that in truth there is no hope to the extent that one logically should lie down and let evil triumph, because there is too much evidence I see of the will to live. It’s everywhere . . . life is just overwhelming.

 The answer lies where we balance realism and hope, accepting responsibility for what we can do, and acknowledging that we do not have ultimate control of everything that happens. Just as the Germans were responsible for doing what they could to oppose Hitler, we are responsible for opposing what is happening in our names at Guantanamo and in Iraq, in our prisons and to our atmosphere. And we are responsible for what we do in our relationships with the people we love, and those whom nobody loves.

          In his autobiography, Miller says, “The play was about how we – nations and individuals – destroy us by denying that this is precisely what we are doing.” This is as true in 2005 as it was in 1964. As Quentin says, the answer lies in knowing and accepting the responsibility for our actions.  

To know, and even happily, that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after many, many deaths.

Is the knowing all? And the wish to kill is never killed, but with some gift of courage one may look into its face when it appears, and with a stroke of love – as to an idiot in the house – forgive it, again and again . . . forever?

The challenge is for us to create lives in which we balance despair and grief with love and hope. So may it be.