Not Your Average 80th Birthday

Friends and admirers gathered Wednesday night at the New York Public Library, the great temple of books at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, to celebrate the upcoming 80th birthday of Arthur Miller. Other festivities await the playwright in this country and in Britain.

“I’m feeling no different than I felt when I turned 79,” Miller said. Except that, “It all seems to be exploding now.”

After writing a screenplay of his famous stage drama “The Crucible,” Miller has been spending a couple of days a week on the Massachusetts movie set as Daniel Day-Lewis, Winona Ryder and Paul Scofield bring the script to life before the cameras. In addition, he has a new play “still baking in the oven” and three books heading to stores.

“Homely Girl: A Life and Other Stories,” a collection of three novellas set in pre- and postwar New York, is the first new fiction from Miller in many years. The book is being published by Viking in an attractive hardcover edition designed to mark his Oct. 17 birthday.

The two other titles are trade paperback reissues from Penguin Books. “The Portable Arthur Miller,” updated after being out of print for years, contains the full texts of “The Crucible” and his classic “Death of a Salesman,” as well as his most recent drama, “Broken Glass,” which won Britain’s Olivier Award this year for best play. “Timebends,” Miller’s autobiography, contains a new introduction in which the author evocatively recalls some of the “unimportant matters” that he omitted from his manuscript as it was originally published eight years ago.

These memories include “my adolescent lust for sports, especially playing football on the vacant lot on Avenue M and Gravesend Avenue in Brooklyn in the early ‘30s when the crisp fall air helped drive us headlong into each other’s scary elbows and hard-pumping knees, without helmets or shoulder guards on a ‘field’--an empty lot bordered by sidewalks--littered with the shards of bottles tossed there by passing drunks. . . . I imagine what lies behind all this is the young man’s search for an identity.”

Speaking from his home in Connecticut, Miller said he follows the same routine that he described to this reporter more than a decade ago. When not traveling to the Massachusetts set, for example, or to England, where his plays are frequently staged, he leaves his house around 8 or 9 each morning, walks a few hundred feet to a studio office, sits down and begins to write.

“I’m luckier now than I ever was,” he said. “I’ve got a wonderful family. I can still work. I don’t play tennis anymore--a trick ankle--but I’m in good shape.”

In a new introduction to “The Portable Arthur Miller,” literary scholar Christopher Bigsby observes: “Miller has written plays in every decade of this century since the 1930s. They add up to an alternative history of a troubled century. It is a history told through the lives of those who have endeavored to make sense of themselves as much as of the period in which they have lived.”

Miller, whose offstage history includes a confrontation in the ‘50s with the House Committee on Un-American Activities and a record of outspoken advocacy for human rights while president of the international writers organization PEN, is troubled by what he sees as a hostile standoff between voices on the left and right of the current political debate.

“There are philosophical differences, but I don’t know what the philosophy is anymore,” he says. “On the one side, you have people wanting to protect the public from itself. The other side wants to leave the public defenseless, saying the marketplace will protect us. I can’t imagine going along with that.”

In addition to the library tribute, Miller will be honored at another birthday celebration planned by PEN and at Oxford University, where he will receive an honorary degree next month.

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Losers and Winners: Nearly half the magazines that are members of the Audit Bureau of Circulation showed drops in circulation numbers compared to last year. According to this week’s issue of Capell’s Circulation Report, the declines amounted to the worst performance in a decade.

National Enquirer, TV Guide, Woman’s Day, the Star and Family Circle were among the big losers in newsstand sales, although Woman’s Day and Family Circle overcame these losses by increasing their mail-subscription numbers.

When circulation gains were viewed in percentages, three of the newer magazines did especially well: Family Life was the top performer (a 116% rise) on a list that also included Wired (90.2% increase) and Men’s Journal (47.1%).

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On the Racks: It may be the last thing New Yorkers need--another weekly guide to movies, plays, events and other entertainment. But here it is: Time Out New York, which arrived on newsstands Wednesday with actress Mira Sorvino on the premiere cover.

Launched and bankrolled by publisher Tony Elliott, and modeled after his original magazine, London’s Time Out, the New York entry is going up against such well-established players as the New Yorker, New York and the Village Voice, all of which have guide pages aplenty.

Then again, remember when people said there was no room in the market for Entertainment Weekly?