NOT MILLER

A long, long time ago, I read an article about the writer and playwright Arthur Miller. I don’t know whether this is a true story or not, or whether I’m just remembering it wrong, but I thought I’d tell it to you anyway, just the way I remember it. He was at a point in his life where he was rather on his financial uppers, as it were. His writing was not working for him and he had come to the conclusion that if success continued to elude him, he would have little choice but to try to find something else to do with his life, in order to be able to just put bread upon his table.

In a last, desperate roll of the dice, he entered a playwriting competition with the solemn promise that if it failed to win a prize, he would give up his writing all together and move on with his life. I’m probably remembering this wrongly, but I think that the play he entered did actually win, even though it was not particularly well received, but it led to him writing “All My Sons”, which is now widely regarded as an American classic, and the cultural history of the world came that close to never having had “Death of a Salesman”, “A View from the Bridge” or “The Crucible” purely because of the whims of a judging panel for a contest.

There is a point to this story, but I’m feeling rather too embarrassed to admit to what it is because I know that however I put it, it’s going to sound as if I mean one thing when I really genuinely am not.

In the summer I wrote a piece explaining about my own entry into a playwriting competition, and quite recently the long-and-shortlisted of that particular contest were announced and, like on all the previous occasions, my humble entry came nowhere. There was no sign of it to be seen on any of the lists. It did, as they say, simply not make the cut.

I suppose that I never really expected it to, if I’m being totally honest. I will admit that I did occasionally fantasise that it might just surprise me, but I think that I knew, in my heart of hearts that once again nothing would come of it and all my efforts and hard work would end up being in vain.

I had, however, like Miller did, decided that if this entry did fail, I too would give up the ridiculous notion that I could consider myself to be a writer of plays. Now I am genuinely not trying to equate myself with the great man here, and the thought that you might think that I was was the very thing that was making me cringe the most before I started to write this effort today, because that truly, truly is not the point I was making.

I merely wanted to say that sometimes you really do have to read the writing on the wall, and all of those failed plays “wot I have wrote” really do take an extraordinary amount of effort to create and, quite frankly, I don’t think that I have the energy to do it any more. Perhaps because they’re really not very good, but, possibly more significantly, because there are other people who can do it far, far better than I could ever hope to, whose thoughts and ideas will grab a hold of your mind and make it soar and bloom and almost explode with delight and wonderment, whilst I’m still tearing and shredding at the human spirit and trying to find out what makes it tick when things get unremittingly bleak.

The difference is, of course, that having indeed failed to make the grade, and thus consigning my playwriting to history and my own feeble efforts to the cardboard box of doom, I have to face that choice that Miller escaped by the skin of his teeth, namely what on earth to do next…?

Miller, after all, had the talent to go on to stand amongst the giants of literature, and still come unstuck every so often over a distracting smile from a beautiful woman, but then, later on, turn those wretched experiences into creative gold. He became one of the giants because he was able to, because of his massive intellect and extraordinary genius, and remains a truly remarkable figure in the history of American history and culture.

Whilst I could never really have hoped in a thousand years to match his achievements and skill, I still nurtured the tiniest of hopes that perhaps some of my own particular smorgasbord of playwriting wordsmithery might one day be found appealing enough to be at least slightly appreciated by somebody somewhere, but it seems that this was not to be. The glittering prizes glitter upon other mantelpieces, and the words that will be studied and learned by eager young performers will be those of others, whilst my own lie a-mouldering and forgotten by the crucible of time.

I suspect that it is better that way. Recognition in all its forms would no doubt tear me to shreds. Standing upon any podium, whilst it remains a nice idea when it pops into my head from time to time, would be likely to bring out the very worst in me and make me appear, at the very best, to be a “smug git” because, let’s be quite frank about this, that’s very much what I am. Sometimes the mere fact that someone has actually taken the time to listen to me can puff up my own sense of self-importance so much that I can get positively giddy on it, and I can rapidly find myself sliding down a slippery slope of arrogance and stupidity simply because I’ve had a rare moment of apparent cleverness.

Truly, I really hate myself sometimes.

Meanwhile I must ask myself what was the purpose of all that playwriting anyway? For a while I did actually enjoy it for its own ends, but I don’t think that I was ever really any good at it. It was just something I occasionally liked to do. Perhaps plays really weren’t ever the way I should have been directing my energies towards anyway. After all, plays really are about performance, and performance requires people, and motivating people into action really has never been my strongest suit, and so it was all bound to end in abject failure and disaster, even before I opened up my first file and wrote “Act One, Scene One” at the top of the page.

Maybe instead of all that nonsense, I should  stick to my unloved dalliances in the act of bloggery. At least with this I know my place, but even this simple pleasure with its many traps and pitfalls has been transforming into something less personally rewarding over these past few weeks. Perhaps, in the end, it’s the writing itself that’s the problem. Maybe it isn’t my strongest suit after all, but, having utterly failed at pretty much every other creative outlet I’ve ever put my mind towards attempting, I’m beginning to wonder what’s left.

Perhaps I really am just best putting my feet up and watching the telly like the vast majority seem to and letting all those other creative minds do my thinking for me. It would certainly be less soul-destroying, even if it did leave me kicking my heels and wondering quite what to do with all my free time.

Arthur, we always knew how lucky we were that you did what you did, but I wonder if you ever knew how really lucky you were to have found a sense of purpose and been good enough at it to succeed at it…?

Maybe there’s a play in that, somewhere…?