by Bill Moyers
Technique is an enormous element of it, because I do it eight times a week. I did it last night. I’ll do it about five hours from now. I have to be ready to do it, whether I feel like it or not. You simply find ways of just inducing the moment for yourself. It is a kind of sorcery, I guess, and the audience is in on it. I mean, that’s the interesting transaction. It’s not just what an actor does. It’s the audience agreeing.
Do you have any idea of what Arthur Miller might have wanted us to think and see at that moment?
I think he wanted to really throttle people with emotion. He felt that it was important that the people onstage be stretched to an emotional extreme, to have them tortured and to have the audience tortured, to take everybody through this cathartic experience. It’s wonderful to be a part of something that sort of reawakens Arthur Miller for you. This is a sixty-year-old play, and it’s fantastic to perform it and have this kind of impact on an audience today, to resonate with so much that’s on their minds. One tends to begin to take Arthur Miller for granted periodically. You need this restorative production every ten years or so to remind people that he’s our great play wright.
There’s a fascinating convergence on Broadway right now, a number of revivals that are throwing a searchlight on human greed. David Mamet has two plays back in which he portrays the free enterprise system as a verbal con game. Horton Foote is here with Dividing the Estate, about what happens when a family runs out of money. And then there’s you in All My Sons.
One of the reasons I wanted to do this, and why our kind of radical director from England, Simon McBurney, wanted to take it on, was how it spoke to our historical moment. All My Sons was written right after World War II and took up issues of death in war, war profiteering, accountability for mistakes made during wartime. These are our obsession right now, are they not? The father, Joe Keller—his sin was letting a moment pass when he should have stopped something bad from happening. And letting it pass in order that he should continue to prosper and thrive and benefit and profit from the war. That was his great sin. If nothing had gone wrong, if these engine parts had not malfunctioned, he would have won. And no one would have known about his sin. But twenty-one men died because of what he did. And he still pretends that it didn’t happen. When it’s revealed, he has to be held accountable.
Well, this is our era of accountability, is it not? Aren’t you dying to know who let these various moments of our time pass? Who allowed some memo to be circulated that turned us into a nation that tortures? Or who allowed faulty intelligence to pass across the desk without saying, “no, no, no, no—this can’t go any further than here, it’s wrong”? Somewhere along the line, people are accountable. Arthur Miller, this enormously principled man with this gigantic social conscience, constructs a story that moves us so much because it involves this father and his own two sons. And he learns that he is responsible, not directly but indirectly, for the death of one of his sons by suicide. This is such a colossal moment of accounting for him. Miller has him fall on his own sword, metaphorically. It’s the only way he can punish himself. It’s somewhat redemptive but terribly, terribly sad and tragic. You see, Arthur Miller really makes demands on us. He says we have to be accountable.
What’s the difference in doing All My Sons and 3rd Rock from the Sun?
Well, 3rd Rock was very much a theater experience. It’s what I loved about it. You would spend five days preparing a twenty-three-minute piece of comedy, and you’d perform it once for a live audience. It’s your only chance to get it right. And you count on giving them a great show and making them laugh really hard. It was very, very exhilarating, but it was like sketch acting, like revue acting. Everything was so fast and so buoyant. All My Sons—any play like this—is a different experience. We’re still discovering things after having done it eighty times. It’s like polishing a jewel and getting it just right. And of course you take away all the trappings of television—the cameras and stagehands and everybody running in front of the actors.
Did the popular success of 3rd Rock change how you thought of yourself when you went out on the street the next day?
Oh, yes. It radically changes everything. You become such common currency, because you’re in people’s homes every week. Those people know me as zany, which is fine. I have to say, doing an episodic comedy was the one thing I was hesitant about, because I was afraid it would define me, make it difficult for me to play other roles. But I think I managed to escape that, just because, well, I had a big backlog of very different roles beforehand. And as soon as it ended, I had the good sense to go right back to the theater. I didn’t even try to mess around with my public image. I just went back to the theater, where you can play very different parts and your audience for each of them is a tiny fraction of your television audience.
Do you have a favorite role out of all of those that you’ve done?
Well, there were many wonderful movie experiences: Garp, and I loved the Twilight Zone movie.
You played—
The man terrified of the monster on the wing of the plane. A great old classic Twilight Zone episode. But I think my favorite work has been on the stage: M. Butterfly. The Changing Room, which was my very first Broadway show. There were a couple of wonderful company productions I was in, like Trelawney of the Wells, and Comedians, and the two musicals I’ve done in the last few years, Sweet Smell of Success and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. That was such an unbelievable lark. Every actor should have the thrill of starring in a Broadway musical comedy.
Your villain in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels was so amazing—
So much fun.
I thought I would not be able to forget him as I watched All My Sons, but I was wrong. John Lithgow once again disappeared, taking the villain with him, and lo—Arthur Miller’s Joe Keller was back.
Bill, that’s the great challenge—to try to completely deceive an audience yet again. To make them forget what they ever saw of you, because of what’s happening right now.
Deception as a means of truth?
Yeah, that’s right. That’s what I do. I always say, “I lie for a living.”
As coincidence would have it, that night after watching All My Sons, in my library my eye fell on your book The Poets’ Corner. I opened it up to Randall Jarrell’s poem. I don’t think there’s enough appreciation for Jarrell in this country. He taught at my alma mater for a few years, at the University of Texas. A powerful war poet. That small poem in The Poets’ Corner is one of your favorites, right?
Oh, yes. When you think about the play All My Sons, it’s like a symphony. Randall Jarrell writes chamber music compared to that. It’s succinct, so I’ll read it for you.
Give us the context. It’s called—
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.” The ball turret was a little bulge near the back end of the fuselage of the old Flying Fortresses, the B-17s that were so important in World War II. They had machine guns, and you could spin around and shoot in all directions from that little ball turret. The ball turret gunner was absolutely the most vulnerable member of the crew of a B-17, because there he was—an inviting target, hanging right on the belly of the airplane.
THE DEATH OF THE BALL TURRET GUNNER
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
It’s a very womb-like image, and you ask yourself, what does a young man think of when he’s facing death? Probably his mother. It’s just incredibly evocative of the deaths of these soldiers in the play.
This pull of the sentence, where did it come from for you?
My dad was a Shakespeare fanatic. He created Shakespeare festivals and produced them in Ohio when I was growing up. And he was also a great storyteller and a reader of stories to all of us kids. It was in our house
hold where I did a huge amount of acting as a young kid. I was one of the princes in the tower. I was Mustardseed in Midsummer Night’s Dream. As I was growing up, Shakespeare just washed over me like a warm bath. I didn’t really intend to be an actor. I had other interests. I was much more interested in being an artist, but I went off to college and started acting, and I realized that I’d better give in to it. This is my destiny.
You include one of Shakespeare’s poems in your book.
I actually read it at my father’s memorial service. It’s one of my favorite pieces of Shakespeare. It’s a sustained poem, from Cymbeline. Well, some call it a song, and it’s Shakespeare’s great eulogy.
FEAR NO MORE THE HEAT O’ THE SUN
Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,
Nor the furious winter’s rages;
Though thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.
Fear no more the frown o’ the great;
Thou art past the tyrant’s stroke:
Care no more to clothe and eat;
To thee the reed is as the oak:
The scepter, learning, physic, must
All follow this, and come to dust.
Fear no more the lightning-flash,
Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;
Fear not slander, censure rash;
Thou hast finish’d joy and moan:
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
No exerciser harm thee!
Nor no witchcraft charm thee!
Ghost unlaid forbear thee!
Nothing will come near thee!
Quiet consummation have;
And renowned it be thy grave!
It’s clearly the play of the language that holds you.
You have no idea. The interesting thing about that poem is, it’s a colossal joke. That beautiful poem, which is spoken so deeply from the heart about mortality and the ephemeral nature of life—it’s actually spoken by two brothers over the dead body of a young man who was their dear friend. Lo, it turns out not to be a young man but a woman dressed as a young man. And to top it off, the young woman is not dead. It’s Shakespeare’s crazy joke, to write this beautiful piece of poetry in which these two guys are completely oblivious.
Makes me wonder if in that great poets’ corner in the sky, Shakespeare might be sitting next to Ogden Nash, comparing their views of life.
Boy, did Shakespeare love the twists and turns of language. The puns and the jokes and the ironies. Fantastic, and that’s a fabulous example of it. You can’t find a more moving piece of writing, and the fact that it’s all a misdirect is just wonderful.
Your grandmother Ina Lithgow would have liked it.
Ah. Ina B. Lithgow, my father’s mom. She lived to the age of ninety-five and used to recite long, long poems to us. I mean, really long. Epic poems by Longfellow and The Wreck of the Hesperus and The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere, and she knew them all by heart. In her eighties she could still remember them, start to finish, without missing a single syllable. I was astounded.
Is it true that you held forth with your first girlfriend with Walt Whitman?
You are intent on embarrassing! Yes, yes. I think, like many, many people— including Bill Clinton, I might add—that I recited from Leaves of Grass to my first girlfriend. It was on a fabulously romantic summer travel trip to France, and oh! I was such an insufferable young aesthete. Can you imagine me, reading poetry, on the banks of the Loire?
Actually, I can. But why not Elizabeth Barrett Browning instead of Whitman? You have an Elizabeth Barrett Browning poem in here.
Why don’t I read that, too?
Sure.
Talk about the ardor of language. This is “Sonnet 43,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, which you will certainly recognize.
SONNET 43
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints! I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Do you know people who still respond to such poetry?
Oh, I think that’s the magic of archaic language. It takes us back in time. That’s the beauty of Shakespeare—his turn of phrase in a language that’s four hundred years old. And it’s like music. I always feel that I’m an actor, Bill, I’m a performer. And an entertainer. Almost everything I do, in this respect, is using words. And there are these three aspects to a turn of phrase: the meaning, the emotion, and the music.
Arthur Miller will write a line: “Sure, he was my son. But I think to him, they were all my sons. And I guess they were. I guess they were.”
That’s very rough poetry, but in its way, it is poetic. It has meaning, music, and emotion. In Shakespeare it’s a line: “Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot.” The language, as I say, is from four hundred years ago, but the music of that language and the emotion and the thought are all just as compelling today. It’s just a very different kind of music. It’s like listening to Erik Satie and Bach, you know.
What about the music in Ogden Nash?
It’s comical music. Doggerel. And one of the reasons why I love Nash is—well, frankly, to the extent I write poetry at all, I write daffy doggerel for little children. But Ogden Nash is kind of my patron saint. His work is musical, all right, but it’s musical the way Spike Jones is musical. There is Ogden Nash’s comical poem:
NO DOCTORS TODAY, THANK YOU
They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonder-
ful, well, today I feel euphorian,
Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetite of
a Victorian.
Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,
Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to
buckle any washes?
This is my euphorian day,
I will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run
away.
I will tame me a caribou
And bedeck it with marabou.
I will pen me my memoirs.
Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!
I wasn’t much of a hand for the boudoirs,
I was generally to be found where the food was.
Does anybody want any flotsam?
I’ve gotsam.
Does anybody want any jetsam?
I can getsam.
I can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer,
I can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer.
I can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the
laces because I am wearing moccasins,
And I practically know the difference between serums and
antitoccasins.
Kind people, don’t think me purse-proud, don’t set me
down as vainglorious,
I’m just a little euphorious.
“Euphorious.” What a word! You feel it even if you don’t get it.
Right. He just loved music. He loved to—what should I say?—caricature language.
On the other side of the street, across from Nash in your book, there’s a very short one that takes us somewhere else, by Gwendolyn Brooks.
Oh, yes.
WE REAL COOL: THE POOL
PLAYERS. SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
“We die soon.” It’s a very scary, very spare poem. Those last three words—“We die soon.” They call to my mind a version of this poem in a New Yorker cartoon, of two inner-city kids sitting on a stoop. Little kids. One says to the other, “What are you going to be if you grow up?” Get that? “If you grow up.”
You can startle people with something so emotional they are almost scared. Scaring them, you make them feel the hurt. All of us need that emotional exercise. I think that’s what art is about. Certainly serious, dark art, as opposed to comic art, is to make you feel the pain.
Some of the shortest poems are the most powerful. Here’s one of my favorites in your book: “To a Poor Old Woman” by William Carlos Williams.
I’ll read it.
TO A POOR OLD WOMAN
munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her
Do you feel the pain and desolation of that? And yet she savors a plum in exactly the same way we savor a plum. We who don’t experience anything near the pain she experiences.
Dylan Thomas told us that “too much poetry to-day is flat on the page, a black and white thing of words created by intelligences that no longer think it necessary for a poem to be read and understood by anything but eyes.” So let’s finish as you take one of his classics off the page.
