A Life of Fade-Outs and Fade-Ins TIMEBENDS

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

Autobiographies by writers tend to be awkward combinations of exquisite craft at storytelling and desiccated scarcity of incident. The writer's trade is by nature solitary, his customary posture bemused detachment, the key events in his inner life involved with the murky business of shaping a sensibility. In the American tradition, moreover, serious writers rarely enter politics or play more than a peripheral role in celebrity culture.

Arthur Miller undertakes the story of his 72 years with almost none of those disadvantages. His best-known works are for the stage, a collaborative medium and, in his view, one meant to arouse passions. His plays have frequently been topical, occasionally incendiary, and he researched them with the fervor of an investigative journalist. Opinionated and outspoken, he relished the platform that his fame provided and undertook a running battle with McCarthyite elements in Government. They retaliated by stripping him of his passport, summoning him before the House Un-American Activities Committee and trying him for contempt of Congress for refusing to denounce fellow leftists. Miller was catholic in his choice of antagonists, clashing just as fiercely with Communists and hoarding spiteful anecdotes about characters ranging from "Lucky" Luciano to Norman Mailer. Among the more mean-spirited is his sketch of Frank Lloyd Wright, drowsy at 90, commissioned to plan a country house and proposing something vast, costly and impractical, including a suspended swimming pool requiring "heavy construction on the order of the Maginot Line."

Beyond all this, Miller remains fascinating because he fulfilled an almost universal male daydream: he married Marilyn Monroe. By his account, he savored her wit and beauty but was driven away by her self-abasing craziness; in the end she was pleading for his return, phoning to ask, as if they had not agreed ! to part, "Aren't you coming home?" He adds, "Her voice now had all its old softness and vulnerability, as though nothing at all destructive had happened in the past four years."

Miller's story could not but be a provocative glimpse into the outraged soul that conceived All My Sons, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Price and The American Clock. Yet for all the cut and thrust of action and emotion, there is something ruminative, at times woolly, about Timebends. The title seems to have been chosen to reflect its nonlinear, outwardly random structure, which in turn is apparently meant to evoke "time's fade-outs and fade-ins and cross-fades." His first words describe watching his mother's feet and ankles as he lay in infancy on the floor. Colorfully sketched relations come and go, their idiosyncratic histories often beguiling in themselves -- especially vivid is the dying great-grandfather who caught the new rabbi robbing him of his life's savings and pummeled the loot out of him -- but only occasionally do they illumine the writer's developing spirit.

Abruptly, a few dozen pages in, the narrative lurches from Miller's first boyish attempt at running away from home to his walking through Harlem streets nearly half a century later. The process of orderly causality deliberately begins to crumble. Thereafter, from paragraph to paragraph, Miller is a child, an old man, a college student, a rising Broadway star. He is in China, in Connecticut, along the Mob-dominated Brooklyn waterfront, making a movie in Nevada. Each story brings on the next before the first is quite concluded, in a fashion at times conversational, at times dramatically juxtaposed. Too often, the result just seems guarded. For example, Miller's first wife Mary Slattery, the mother of two of his children, appears only at the moment he is about to marry her. Their courtship and several years of living together -- no small adventure in those times for a Roman Catholic from Ohio and a Jew from New York City -- take place almost entirely offstage.

The main reason for this odd and often frustrating approach probably lies in Miller's view of his masterwork, Death of a Salesman. Although what lingers with many spectators is the play's powerful naturalistic evocation of family mistrust and disappointment, Miller emphasizes its nonrealistic side, the scenes of recollection and hallucination taking place in the haunted mind of its title character. His goal when creating Salesman, he says, was to "cut through time like a knife through a layer cake or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers, and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding another, display past and present concurrently, with neither one ever coming to a stop . . . How fantastic a play would be that did not still the mind's simultaneity."

Maybe for Salesman, but Timebends is often muddled, even mawkish. In the final passage, Miller describes eyeing coyotes warily eyeing him on his Connecticut spread and sententiously proclaims, "We are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees." Still, if Miller the autobiographer refuses to offer shapely stories and easy pleasures, but instead insists on the uncomfortable, the unsettling and the contentious, that is what Miller the playwright has done for more than four decades. American literature -- and life -- has been vastly the richer for it.