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SUSAN SONTAG
they become too
painful.
Only deaths, inevitably offstage, seem to move
Quentin's life along: the Jews (the word Jews is never mentioned) died
long ago; his mother dies; Maggie kills herself with an overdose of
barbiturates; the law professor throws himself under a subway train.
Throughout the play, Quentin seems much more a sufferer than an
active agent in his own life-yet this is precisely what Miller never
acknowledges, never lets Quentin see as his problem. Instead, he con–
tinually exonerates Quentin (and, by implication, the audience) in the
most conventional way. For all troubling decisions, and all excruciating
memories, Miller issues Quentin the same moral solvent, the same
consolation. I (we) am (are)
both
guilty and innocent, both responsi–
ble and not responsible. Maggie was right when she denounced Quentin
as cold and unforgiving; but Quentin was justified in giving up on the
insatiable, deranged, self-destructive Maggie. The professor who re–
fused to "name names" before the House UnAmerican Activities Com–
mittee was right; but the colleague who did testify cooperatively had a
certain nobility, too. And (choicest of all) as Quentin realizes while
touring Dachau with his Good German girlfriend, anyone of us could
have been a victim there; but we could as well have been one of the
murderers, too.
The circumstances and production of the play are marked by
certain perverse strokes of realism that underscore the bad faith, the
have-it-both-ways temper of the play. That vast sloping stage painted
slate gray and empty of props, the mind of contemporary man,
is
so
pointedly bare that one can't help jumping when Quentin, sitting much
of the time stage front on a slate gray box-like form and chain-smoking,
suddenly deposits the ashes in some mysterious pocket ashtray in the
abutment. One is jarred again at the sight of Barbara Loden made up
like Marilyn Monroe, displaying the mannerisms of Monroe, and bearing
an extraordinary physical resemblance to Monroe (though lacking the
fullness of figure needed
to
c,omplete the illusion). But perhaps the
most appalling combination of reality and play lies in the fact that
After the Fall
is directed by Elia Kazan, well known to be the model
for the colleague who named names before HUAC. As I recalled the
story of the turbulent relations between Miller and Kazan I felt the
same queasiness as when I first saw
Sunset Boulevard,
with its dizzying
parody of and daring references to the real career and former relation–
ships of Gloria Swanson, the old movie queen making a comeback, and
Eric Von Stroheim, the forgotten great director. Whatever bravery
After the Fall
possesses is neither intellectual nor moral; it is the bravery
of a species of personal perversity. But it's far inferior
to
Sunset Boule-
