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Celine: [...] It was extreme poverty. Tougher than poverty, because in poverty you can let yourself go, degenerate, get drunk, but this was poverty which keeps up, dignified poverty. It was terrible. All my life I ate noodles. Because my mother used to repair old lacework. And one thing about old lace is that odors stick to it forever. And you can't deliver smelly lace! So what didn't smell? Noodles. I've eaten basinfuls My mother made noodles by the basinful. Boiled of noodles. noodles, oh, yes, yes, all my youth, noodles and mush. Stuff that didn't smell. The kitchen in the Passage Choiseul was on the second floor, as big as a cupboard, you got to the second floor by a corkscrew staircase, like this, and you had to go up and down endlessly to see if it was cooking, if it was boiling, if it wasn't boiling, impossible. My mother was a cripple, one of her legs didn't work, and she had to climb that staircase. We used to climb it twenty-five times a day. It was some life. An impossible life. And my father was a clerk. He came home at five. He had to do the deliveries for her. Oh, no, that was poverty, dignified poverty.
evocative
Celine: [...] My mother worshiped rich people, you see. So what do you expect, it colored me too. I wasn't quite convinced. No. But I didn't dare have an opinion, no, no. My mother who was in lace up to her neck would never have dreamed of wearing any. That was for the customers. Never. It wasn't done, you see. Not even the jeweler, he didn't wear jewels, the jeweler's wife never wore jewels. [...]
Celine: Oh, she couldn't, it wasn't within her reach. She'd have thought it all coarse, and then she didn't read books, she wasn't the kind of woman who reads. She didn't have any vanity at all. She kept on working till her death. I was in prison. I heard she had died. No, I was just arriving in Copenhagen when I heard of her death. A terrible trip, vile, yes— the perfect orchestration. Abominable. But things are only abominable from one side, don't forget, eh? And, you know ... experience is a dim lamp which only lights the one who bears it ... and incommunicable. . . . . Have to keep that for myself. For me, you only had the right to die when you had a good tale to tell. To enter in, you tell your story and pass on. That's what Death on the Installment Plan is, symbolically, the reward of life being death. Seeing as . . . it's not the good Lord who rules, it's the devil. Man. Nature's disgusting, just look at it, bird life, animal life.
Interviewer: Do any of the younger playwrights create heroes — in your opinion?
Miller: I tell you, I may be working on a different wave length, but I don't think they are looking at character any more, at the documentation of facts about people. All experience is looked at now from a schematic point of view. These playwrights won't let the characters escape for a moment from their preconceived scheme of how dreadful the world plays. It is very much like the old strike plays. The scheme then was that someone began a play with a bourgeois ideology and got involved in some area of experience which had a connection to the labor movement— either it was actually a strike or, in a larger sense, it was the collapse of capitalism—and he ended the play with some new positioning vis-a-vis that collapse. He started without an enlightenment and he ended with some kind of enlightenment. And you could predict that in the first five minutes. Very few of those plays could be done any more, because they're absurd now. I've found over the years that a similar thing has happened with the so-called absurd theater. Predictable.
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Interviewer: Do you think these critics influence playwrights?
Miller: Everything influences playwrights. A playwright who isn't influenced is never of any use. He's the litmus paper of the arts. He's got to be, because if he isn't working on the same wave length as the audience, no one would know what in hell he was talking about. great; He is a kind of psychic journalist, even when he's great; consequently, for him the total atmosphere is more important in this art than it is probably in any other.