Presence: Stories Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS DELUXE EDITION

  PRESENCE: COLLECTED STORIES

  ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005) was born in New York City and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall and Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). His other works include Focus, a novel (1945); The Misfits, a cinema novel (1961); and the texts for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. His memoirs include Salesman in Beijing (1984) and Timebends, an autobiography (1987). His short fiction includes the collection I Don’t Need You Any More (1967), the novella Homely Girl, A Life (1995), and Presence: Stories (2007). His later work includes the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), and Resurrection Blues (2006); Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000; and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). Among numerous honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award.

  BY ARTHUR MILLER

  PLAYS

  The Golden Years

  The Man Who Had All the Luck

  All My Sons

  Death of a Salesman

  An Enemy of the People

  The Crucible

  A View from the Bridge

  After the Fall

  Incident at Vichy

  The Price

  The Creation of the World and Other Business

  The Archbishop’s Ceiling

  The American Clock

  Playing for Time

  The Ride Down Mt. Morgan

  Broken Glass

  Mr. Peters’ Connections

  Resurrection Blues

  Finishing the Picture

  ONE-ACT PLAYS

  A View from the Bridge (one-act version)

  A Memory of Two Mondays

  Fame

  The Reason Why

  Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror)

  Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror)

  I Can’t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!)

  Clara (in Danger: Memory!)

  The Last Yankee

  SCREENPLAYS

  The Misfits

  Playing for Time

  Everybody Wins

  The Crucible

  MUSICAL

  Up from Paradise

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  Timebends: A Life

  REPORTAGE

  Situation Normal

  In Russia (with Inge Morath)

  In the Country (with Inge Morath)

  Chinese Encounters (with Inge Morath)

  Salesman in Beijing

  FICTION

  Focus (a novel)

  Jane’s Blanket (a children’s story)

  The Misfits (a cinema novel)

  I Don’t Need You Any More (stories)

  Homely Girl, A Life (a novella and stories)

  Presence: Collected Stories

  COLLECTIONS

  Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volumes I and II

  The Portable Arthur Miller

  Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 (Tony Kushner, editor)

  Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982 (Tony Kushner, editor)

  Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004 with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s and ’40s (Tony Kushner, editor)

  The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays

  ESSAYS

  Collected Essays

  The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert A. Martin, editor)

  Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000 (Steven R. Centola, editor)

  On Politics and the Art of Acting

  VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS

  Death of a Salesman (Gerald Weales, editor)

  The Crucible (Gerald Weales, editor)

  PENGUIN BOOKS

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  New York, New York 10014

  penguin.com

  Presence: Collected Stories first published in Great Britain by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 2009

  Published in Penguin Books 2016

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  I Don’t Need You Any More: Stories

  Copyright © 1951, 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1966, 1967 by Arthur Miller

  Published by The Viking Press, Inc. 1967

  “I Don’t Need You Any More,” “The Misfits,” “The Prophecy,” and “Fame” (as “The Recognitions”) first appeared in Esquire; “Monte Sant’ Angelo” in Harper’s; “Please Don’t Kill Anything” and “Glimpse at a Jockey” in The Noble Savage; and “A Search for a Future” in The Saturday Evening Post. “Fitter’s Night” and “Foreword: About Distances” first published in this volume.

  “Homely Girl, A Life”

  Copyright © 1992 by Arthur Miller

  First appeared in Grand Street and later published as an edition with illustrations by Louise Bourgeois by Peter Blum Books 1992

  Appeared in Homely Girl, A Life and Other Stories published by Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. 1995

  Presence: Stories

  Copyright © 2007 by The Arthur Miller 2004 Literary and Dramatic Property Trust

  Published by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2007

  “Bulldog,” “The Performance,” and “The Bare Manuscript” first appeared in The New Yorker; “Beavers” in Harper’s; “The Turpentine Still” in Southwest Review; and “Presence” in Esquire.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Miller, Arthur, 1915-2005, author.

  Title: Presence : collected stories / Arthur Miller.

  Description: Penguin Classics deluxe edition. | New York : Penguin Books, [2016]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016030438 (print) | LCCN 2016030917 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780143108474 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101992029

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION /

  Literary. | FICTION / Jewish.

  Classification: LCC PS3525.I5156 A6 2016 (print) | LCC PS3525.I5156 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030438

  Cover illustrations: Riccardo Vecchio

  Cover design: Matt Vee

  Version_1

  Contents

  About the Author

  By Arthur Miller

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword: About Distances

  I DON’T NEED YOU ANY MORE

  Dedication

  I Don’t Need You Any More

  Monte Sant’ Angelo

  Please Don’t Kill Anything

  The Misfits

  Glimpse at a Jockey

  The Prophecy

  Fame

  Fitter’s Night

  A Search for a Fu
ture

  HOMELY GIRL, A LIFE

  Homely Girl, A Life

  PRESENCE

  Bulldog

  The Performance

  Beavers

  The Bare Manuscript

  The Turpentine Still

  Presence

  Foreword

  About Distances

  These stories were written over the past fifteen years; all but one, which is published in this book for the first time, appeared in magazines. They were not, of course, conceived as a series (although reading them together now I am surprised at a certain continuity). They were done for my own pleasure, if indeed that can be possible when one intends writing to be published at all. In comparison to playwriting, however, writing stories is undoubtedly more pleasurable if one connects that word to something done primarily for its own sake. After all, we in this country pay small attention to stories, which are squeezed in between the magazine ads, and are ranked more or less casual things at the lower end of the scale of magnitude, like bungalows in the architectural world.

  But I would just as soon see that attitude remain unchanged. The premium on grandiosity leaves us this form of art in which a writer can still be as concise as his subject really requires him to be. Here he need not say more than he knows for form’s sake. There is a short-story tone of voice which, amid the immodest heroics of the day, still invites whoever wishes to speak or blurt out his truth in a single breath. For a playwright it has certain affinities; its economy and formal decorum—at least it can have those qualities—offer a vessel for those feelings and tales which, unelaborated, are truer, and yet for one reason or another do not belong on stage.

  Of course, a playwright is expected to say that he enjoys writing stories because he is rid of actors, directors, and the nuisance of the theatrical machinery, but in all truth I rather like actors and directors. What I have found, though, is that from time to time there is an urge not to speed up and condense events and character development, which is what one does in a play, but to hold them frozen and to see things isolated in stillness, which I think is the great strength of a good short story. The object, the place, weather, the look of a person’s shift of posture—these things can have but secondary importance on the stage, where action makes truth evident; in life, however, and in the story, place itself and things seen, the mood of a moment, the errant flight of apprehension which leads nowhere, can all register and weigh.

  Some of these stories could never be plays, but some perhaps could have been. The latter were not written as plays partly because they seemed to me to reject the theatrical tone of voice, which is always immodest, at bottom. The playwright, after all, is a performer manqué; thoroughly shy and self-effacing philosophers do not write plays—at least not playable ones. That is probably why playwrights at middle age so often turn to fiction and away from the unseemly masquerade. All the world’s a stage, but the point comes when one would rather be real and at home. In my case, over the years I have found myself arriving at that point once or twice a week (although not always lucky enough to seize a subject at these ripe moments), and it is then that I have found short-story writing particularly fitting. The mask, in short, is of another kind when one sits down to write a tale. The adversary—audience and critic—will be taken off guard in the dentist’s waiting room, on a train or plane, or in the bathroom. They have less to resent. It is paradoxical but true, for me at least, that even as the short story falls, so to speak, into a well of silence once published, while a play is always accompanied by every kind of human noise, it is in the story that I find myself feeling some connection with the reader, with strangers. There is an aggressiveness in playwriting; if there is a friendly and familiar form of art it is the story. I feel I know Chekhov better from his stories than from his plays, and Shakespeare through his sonnets, which analogously at least are his stories. Certainly Hemingway is more palpable in his stories than in his novels, less covered up and professional in the icy sense. There is less to sweep one away in “The Cossacks” or “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” than in War and Peace, to be sure, but there is also less that one cannot possibly believe. Maybe that is the attraction—one stretches truth a little less in a story if only because the connective arcs of interpretation are shorter, less remote from the concrete; one can more quickly catch wonder by surprise, which is after all why one writes—or reads, for that matter.

  None of which is to denigrate drama or the theatre, but merely to point to some of the differences. It has always been a curious thing to me, for example, that I should find dialogue so much harder to write in a story than in a play, and from time to time I have imagined various explanations for this strangeness. Perhaps, I thought, I know that no actor is going to speak these lines, so there is an absurdity in writing them. Then, it seemed there might be some sort of half-conscious objection to putting dialogue into a form where it was not absolutely necessary, and thus a feeling of arbitrariness had intervened. But I think now that there is a conflict of masks, a clash of tonalities. The spoken line is “speech,” it is something said to a crowd and must therefore be peculiarly emphatic and definite, and implicitly must call for reply; every line of stage dialogue is one half of a dialectical conflict. But this kind of pressure laid upon dialogue in a story distorts everything around it. It is as though one were being told an incident by a friend who suddenly stands up, and casting his gaze beyond the room, continues his tale by imitating the voices of the participants in it. The sudden injection of formality, of this kind of formality, is the threatening imminence of the actor. This, perhaps, is why it is impossible to lift scenes of dialogue and put them on the stage. They may seem perfectly stageworthy on paper, and on occasion they really are, but for the most part the novelist’s dialogue is pitched toward the eye rather than the ear and falls flat when heard. Conversely, the dialogue in a story needs to sacrifice its sound in order to be convincing to the eye. And this is another enticement stories have for a playwright—as one writes dialogue for the eye, the stage becomes a wonderful thing all over again and the thirst returns for playwriting, and the “right” to tell a story through sounds once more. That is odd and ironical to me because as a schoolboy I was first taken with books in proportion to the amount of dialogue a quick flip of the pages revealed. It was for the sake of the dialogue, I supposed, that the rest of the book was written; certainly it was for the dialogue that the book was read. This was when the author, I thought, stopped chattering and got out of the way; his own comment was like opinion as opposed to fact.

  A primitive notion, but it reflects a truth nevertheless. All these forms we have inherited—story, novel, play—are degrees of distance writers need to take between themselves and the dangerous audience which they must cajole, threaten, and, in one way or another, tame. The playwright is all but physically on stage, face to face with the monster; the writer of fiction, however meager his covering, is most safe in this sense, but out of hearing of the applause, out of sight of the mass of strangers sitting spellbound in a theatre, sucked out of themselves by his imaginings. Thus, when a novelist takes to writing a play, or a playwright a story, he is shifting his distance toward or away from the terrible heat at the center of the stage. Sometimes a Dickens, a Mark Twain, striving to rip clear all masks, will come forward in person to the lecture platform, and a Sinclair Lewis as a member of Actors’ Equity, a Hemingway as a personality in his own right, his work to one side. But there is no end to masks; the one we put down only leaves the one we have on. The problem is, therefore, not one of sincerity—who can know that of himself? It is rather the rending of a particular vision at its proper distance, the discovery of the tone appropriate to one’s feeling for a thing, a person, an event. No single form can do everything well; these stories are simply what I have seen, at another distance.

  I DON’T NEED YOU ANY MORE

  To the memory of Pascal Covici

  I Don’t Need You Any More

  Several times
in the previous days he had been not exactly warned but instructed, in a certain thickly absolute way, that God forbade swimming on Friday this week. And this was Friday now. He had been watching the ocean many times a day, and sure enough it had been getting rougher and rougher all the time and the color of the water was getting funny. Not green or blue but kind of gray and even black in certain places, until now, when the water was running with sins, the waves were actually banging down on the sand so hard that the curb on which he was sitting shuddered up faintly through his spine. Some connection ran under the beach and came up here where the street ended.

  The waves were skidding in like big buildings that swayed drunkenly and then toppled over on their faces and splattered all over the hard sand. He kept his watch along the curved faces of the breakers for a sign of the bearded sins he knew were floating around in there like seaweed, and for a second now and then he got a glimpse of them. They were like beards, except that they were yards long and you couldn’t see the man’s face from which they grew. Somehow there were several beards, but they all belonged to the same face. It was like a man in there floating just a foot or so underneath the water or sometimes moving as fast as a fish and then floating again in another spot. It was because today and tomorrow were Tishebuf or Rosh Hashonoh or Yom Kippur or one of those holidays which Grandpa and the other old men somehow knew had arrived—days when everybody got dressed up, and he had to wear this tweed suit and tie and new shoes, and nobody was allowed to eat all day except him, because he was still only five and had not had Hebrew lessons yet. He would also have piano or violin lessons when he would be six, and once he started playing the piano or the violin he would not be allowed to eat on this holiday either, like his brother couldn’t. Meantime, though, he could go to the synagogue and visit with his brother and father, but he didn’t have to. It was better to, but if he got impatient and wanted to go outside in the fresh air he could and not be blamed or even noticed. He could do practically anything because he was still only five.