Customer Reviews

Presence: Stories

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While nothing Arthur Miller ever wrote will ever be as good as his magnificent play DEATH OF A SALESMAN, this latest collection off short stories, PRESENCE, published posthumously have all the depth and evocativeness we would expect from such a great writer. Six stories are included: "Bulldog," "The Performance," "Beavers," "The Bare Manuscript," "The Turpentine Still" and the title story "Presence."



All the stories are told almost entirely from the viewpoint of a male, often middle-aged or even old. (In "The Turpentine Still" the character is Levin who at the end of this longest of stories included is in his seventies.) He is often a writer ("The Bare Manuscript," "The Turpentine Still," and "The Performance") usually lives in New York and has left political leanings and tends toward introspection and sometimes melancholia. Some of these characters remind of us Mr. Miller but whether they are autobiographical does not matter.



In "The Bulldog," set in the late 1920's or early 30's since the narrator tells us that Satchel Paige was pitching for the Negro leagues, a youngster of thirteen living in New York answers an ad in the newspaper for a black brindle bull puppy for three dollars. He gets more than the puppy, however, as he has his first sexual experience with the woman who had run the ad in the paper-- "he felt like a waterfall was smashing down on top of his head. He remembered getting inside her heat and his head banging and banging against the leg of her couch"-- and the lad is "secretly" changed forever. In "The Performance" Harold May is a Jewish tap-dancer telling his story to an unnamed narrator. And what a story it is. He was hired to give a one-night-only performance before a mysterious German in Berlin who turns out to be Hitler, himself. May of course is conflicted as well as frightened and ruminates of just how normal the Germans appeared to be, "'these people had refrigerators.'" In "The Beavers" an unnamed man muses over the death of beavers and whether they were shot because the male beaver somehow overreached and went against the logic of nature by damning up an overflow pipe after having built a lodge already and created a pond in order to raise its family. Perhaps the beaver paralleled his own "sense of human futility." In "Presence" another unnamed male character taking a stroll on the early morning beach -- the beachfront houses were "sleeping" and the cars were "dozing"-- happens upon a couple having sex. He later has a short conversation with the woman of the duo-- after she and her lover have finished-- and has ambivalent feeligs about the entire episode.



The remaining two stories "Bare Manuscript" and "The Turpentine Still" are longer and the characters are more fully developed. In the first story, Clement is a writer who at twenty-two had achieved critical success with a first novel. Now suffering from a failed marriage (his wife understood him because they were "'charter members of the broken-wing society'") and writer's block, he employs a model to let him write a short story or first chapter of a novel-- anyone reading it would recognize immediately that he was writing about his early days with his wife-- on her naked body. In the most successful of the stories "The Turpentine Still" Miller has created a most sympathetic character in Levin who returns to Haiti thirty-three years after a previous trip with his now deceased wife and reminisces eloquently on the loneliness of old age and death: He plants tulips as he has done every year for years but wonders now if he will ever see them bloom. "The TIMES lay flat and virginal on the kitchen table, its news already outdated, and he wondered how many tons of TIMES he had read in his life and whether it had really mattered at all." And his mind "like a circling bird" always returned to thoughts of his departed wife. Finally Miller through this character expresses the immortality of those we remember: "It was so odd that he alone might be carrying the pictures of these people in his mind. Except for him keeping them alive in the soft knot of tissue under his skull they might have no existence."



These stories are a small abut valuable addition to the work of one of our greatest writers.

Each story is compelling and though each is short it leaves you satisfied. Each story weaves itself into you, getting under your emotional defenses. You find yourself marveling at the brilliant use of words. Powerful and thoroughly enjoyable.

I really enjoyed Foster Corbin's review of the final Arthur Miller book PRESENCE, a collection of six stories, but I don't actually agree with him about the ways the book works and doesn't work. What I liked about it is its variety; it seems in old age Miller was given a last outburst of creativity and imagination, and this final explosion of imagination led him to try some risky experiments. Each story is actually packed with incident, as though he had a zillion stories inside of him, in contrast to the years of the 40s and 50s when his writing was tortured and slow to come, years would pass before he felt able to conceive of a storyline big enough to hold down all the symbolism he wanted to pack into it. Now take a story like "The Rare Manuscript." Every page tells a different back story for the two main characters, Clement and Lena, and you get the feeling that Miller was enjoying the prodigality of his invention here, and that Clement's Peter Greenaway-esque desire to write all over Lena's nude body with a Magic Marker is an allegory for the experience of creativity itself. There's also an erotic strain that runs throughout the whole book; someone must have been feeding Miller those old monkey glands, for he is feeling his oats not only in "The Rare Manuscript," but in several other tales of adolescent need and desire.

What I don't like about it especially is that none of it makes any sense, and someone should have talked him out of publishing "The Performance," at least in its final form here. It must have seemed a good idea, a tap dancer versus Adolf Hitler! -- but it just falls flat.

Presence, by Arthur Miller (168 pgs., 2004, 2007). I can't remember if I ever knew that this most famous of American playwrights ever wrote prose. He did. This is his third published collection of short stories. How could I have missed coming upon the other two? I feel like an idiot. Not only did he write short stories, but he's published four fiction novels, three books of essays, & five non-fiction books (including an autobiography & three books of his travels). He's also has 20 full-length plays published & performed in addition to some half-dozen one-act plays. I never realized how prolific he was.
The first short story collection was published in 1967 & the second collection was published in 1995. I missed them both. I even missed reading his stories in the magazines in which they were originally published. For instance, of the six plays in this collection three were originally published in THE NEW YORKER, one in HARPER'S, one in ESQUIRE & one in the SOUTHWEST REVIEW.
This is a slim volume, but it packs a wallop of emotion. Many of these stories could have been turned into plays. "The Bare Manuscript," is one of the most original stories I've read. An author, who got famous young, is in a stalled writing career with a deteriorating marriage. He gets the idea to change the quality of the blank page in his typewriter. He decides to use living flesh. How he does this & the emotions that arise flesh out the rest of this story. The longest story in this collection is "The Turpentine Still." It contains 52 pages. The bare outline is boring. An American couple trying to jazz up their marriage journey to Haiti & want to help make it better. The visiting husband visits a very idealistic white ex-pat with a still idealistic native black Haitian & travels to see a nascent turpentine still & after returning to his wife from his visit to the still, wild passionate love is made. One year later, the native black Haitian is dead because of medical malpractice. Thirty-three years later, the husband is now a widower, still missing his late wife, bored & just waiting to die. He decides to return to Haiti & see what he can recover of his past visit. The emotional clout in this slim novella or long short story is powerful. Even though the title story "Presence," only contains eight pages, it is also emotionally riveting. After reading this volume, I have to search out more of Miller's prose.