Miller wrestles with his muse

THROUGHOUT his long and vital career, Arthur Miller returned repeatedly to short fiction. He enjoyed the genre not only as a kind of restorative solitude apart from the theater’s collaborative demands, but also as a kind of artistic laboratory in which discrete themes that deeply mattered to him could be isolated and worked through.

He used the short story, in other words, in much the same way that a great painter uses drawings. Each is a work of art on its own, and yet part of its power comes from a certain lack of resolution, an “open endedness” that draws an important share of its power from what it suggests.

“Presence” collects the last half-dozen of Miller’s published stories and, taken together, they give us a glimpse of an artist hard up against his ninth decade, still deeply preoccupied by that most particular and elemental aspect of the human condition -- the workings and uses of desire.

In the 1940s, when he had his first real theatrical success with “All My Sons,” Miller told an interviewer: “In all my plays and books I try to take settings and dramatic situations from life which involve real questions of right and wrong.”

In an era in which high literary culture seems to value irony, detachment and -- best of all -- ironic detachment above all else, Miller’s declaration is apt to be read as a quaint and sentimental artifact of that blue-jeaned, work-booted and horn-rimmed period of socially conscious art that accompanied the Great Depression.

And yet, consider the opening paragraphs of two obituaries published when the playwright died in February 2005. This is how the New York Times began its piece:

“Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89.... The author of ‘Death of a Salesman,’ a landmark of 20th-century drama, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays.”

The National Review’s obituary began this way:

“Attention must be paid to the attention that’s been paid to Arthur Miller, playwright, darling of the Left, husband of Marilyn Monroe, self-appointed public moralist, and did I mention that he was married to Marilyn Monroe? The outpouring of sanctimonious twaddle that greeted Miller’s death ... was partly queasy-making, partly comic.... The emetic side came from the pent-up liberal self-righteousness that erupted everywhere like a nasty boil. The comedy -- if such ghastliness can really be called comic -- followed from the yawning disproportion between cause (Miller’s modest artistic accomplishment) and effect (wailing and gnashing of teeth as if a hybrid of Sophocles and Mahatma Gandhi had suddenly passed away).”

Miller himself once remarked that among American writers, “fashion and rejection are experiences felt by all. Know that, or go mad.”

It’s clear from those two obituaries, though, that the divisions in American culture that energized the best of Miller’s 17 works for the stage remain as fashionably current as tomorrow’s headlines. The stories collected in “Presence” invite us, however, to consider the inner and emotional landscape that Miller’s characters traverse and, like all his work, are replete with autobiographical inspirations.

Four of these late stories are of particular interest. Of the other two, “Beavers” is, frankly, bad. It’s a didactic, faux-philosophical piece in which the owner of a country house is forced to kill two young beavers, which have moved into the pond where he and his wife swim. The experience launches the householder into a reverie on work and aspiration that manages to be labored and pointless -- confusion masquerading as insight. The other, “The Performance,” is the mildly interesting story of an American tap-dancer, a Jew, whose troupe performs before Adolf Hitler on the eve of World War II.

The other four stories explore various aspects of desire and fulfillment and their operations in the life of the artist or artist-to-be.

In the title story, an old man comes upon a young couple making love among the dunes on a beach and recovers not simply memory, but an ineffable joy in physical love’s possibilities. In “Bulldog,” an adolescent boy, acting on a whim, loses his virginity when he answers a newspaper ad offering puppies for sale. Things don’t work out with the dog, but the protagonist’s unlooked-for sexual transition with the older Lucille is genuinely transformative.

In “The Bare Manuscript,” Clement, a successful writer, now totally blocked, agonizes over his situation: “Self-awareness had gnawed away at his early lyricism. His reigning suspicion was simply that his vanishing youth had taken his talent with it. He had been young a very long time. Even now his being young was practically his profession, so that youthfulness had become something he despised and could not live without. Maybe he could no longer find a style of his own because he was afraid of his fear, and so instead of brave sentences that were genuinely his own he was helplessly writing hollow imitation sentences that could have belonged to anybody.”

His solution is to hire a 6-foot model, who comes to his office, strips and allows him to write drafts directly on her naked body with a marker. She is a physical manifestation of the muse he once found in Lena, the woman he passionately courted and who now is his partner in marriage and disappointment. He recalls a premarital conversation with Lena’s Polish immigrant mother, Mrs. Vanetzki:

“ ‘I love this crazy girl,’ Clement said.

“ ‘Ah, love.’

“Lena nervously giggled through her cigarette smoke.

“ ‘Isn’t there such a thing?’ Clement asked.

“ ‘Whoever is not realistic, America kills,’ Mrs. Vanetzki said. ‘You are an educated young man. You are handsome. My daughter is a mixed-up person. She will never change. Nobody changes. Only more and more is let out, that’s all, the way a ball of string unwinds.’ ”

A reader comes away from this collection thinking that, between the desolation of “The Bare Manuscript” and the consolation of “Presence,” a deeply passionate artist ended his life wrestling with the power of the muse. And, because his work was so thoroughly laced with personal experience and recollection, it’s difficult not to recall what he once wrote concerning his tumultuous relationship with Monroe:

“It was impossible to guess what she wanted for herself when she herself had no idea beyond the peaceful completion of each day. When she appeared the future vanished; she seemed without expectations, and this was like freedom. At the same time, the mystery put its own burden on us, the burden of the unknown.”

timothy.rutten@latimes.com