Focus
Focus
Arthur Miller
Contents
Introduction by the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
Focus
Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 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 (1964), Incident at Vichy (1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels, Focus (1945) and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he won the Pulitzer Prize. He was the recipient of the National Book Foundation 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, he was awarded with the prize Prince of Asturias of Letters in 2002, and in 2003 was awarded the Jerusalem Prize. He died in 2005.
For Mary and Jane Ellen
Introduction by the Author
Some part of the genesis of this book must lie in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where I worked the night shift in the shipfitting department during World War II, one of some sixty thousand men and a few women from every ethnic group in New York. It is no longer possible to decide whether it was my own Hitler-begotten sensitivity or the anti-Semitism itself that so often made me wonder whether, when peace came, we were to be launched into a raw politics of race and religion, and not in the South but in New York. In any case, whatever the actual level of hostility to Jews that I was witnessing, it was vastly exacerbated in my mind by the threatening existence of Nazism and the near absence among the men I worked with fourteen hours a day of any comprehension of what Nazism meant – we were fighting Germany essentially because she had allied herself with the Japanese who had attacked us at Pearl Harbor. Moreover, it was by no means an uncommon remark that we had been maneuvered into this war by powerful Jews who secretly controlled the federal government. Not until Allied troops had broken into the German concentration camps and the newspapers published photos of the mounds of emaciated and sometimes partially burned bodies was Nazism really disgraced among decent people and our own casualties justified. (It is a fiction, in my opinion, that national unity around the war reached very deep in a great many people in those times.)
I cannot glance through this novel without once again feeling the sense of emergency that surrounded the writing of it. As far as I knew at the time, anti-Semitism in America was a closed if not forbidden topic for fiction – certainly no novel had taken it as a main theme, let alone the existence within the Catholic priesthood of militants whose duty and pleasure was to stoke up Jew-hate. When one is tempted to say that everything in the world has gotten worse, here is one shining exception.
I was reminded of this only recently when quite by chance I happened to tune in on a local Connecticut radio station and heard a Catholic priest trying to reason an obviously anti-Semitic man out of laying the blame for several bombings of Jewish homes and synagogues in the Hartford area upon the Jews themselves. There was a widespread search going on for the perpetrators, so the man had called into the priest’s talk program to offer his ideas as to who might have been responsible. He had no doubt it was somebody whom a Jew had mistreated, either one of his employees, or somebody who had bought some defective item from him, or someone he had bilked out of money, or maybe it was the work of the client of a Jewish lawyer outraged at having been defrauded. There were, he thought, all sorts of interesting possibilities since the Jews, as everyone knew, have a habit of defrauding and exploiting their workers, and in general have no respect for right and wrong and feel responsible only to one another. (The arsonist was caught some weeks later – a mentally disturbed young Jew.)
I had not heard this litany since the thirties and early forties. Not since before the photos of the bodies were published in the papers. But here it was again, as though freshly minted, brand new discoveries that the caller was supremely confident everyone knew perfectly well but thought it bad manners to talk about in public. And such was the confidence of his manner that he soon had the poor priest on the ropes and could assert with utmost self assurance that he was simply being factual and not anti-Semitic.
The differences now, of course, are that no Hitler stands at the head of the greatest armed force in the world vowing the destruction of the Jewish people, and there is an Israel, which, notwithstanding all the futility of much of its present vision, is still capable of defending the right of Jews to exist. This book, in short, was written when a sensible person could wonder if such a right had reality at all.
It is inevitable that one should wonder whether anything like the situation in this novel could recur, and it is a question no one can answer. In the fifties and sixties I might have persuaded myself that its recrudescence was not likely, and I would have based such reasoning on what had begun to seem a truly profound shift in the world’s conception of the Jew. For one thing, anti-Semitism, linked as it was to totalitarianism, was being viewed as one of the keys to the dismantling of democracy and at least in its political forms was no longer an option for people who, whatever their private grievance against Jews, were still committed to the liberal state. This conjunction between mere private prejudice and public calamity had not even been broached when this book was written, and it is the centerpiece of its shape and action. By the end of World War II anti-Semitism was no longer a purely personal matter.
But there was also the shift, however paradoxical, in the perception of the Jew as a consequence of the first successful decades of Israel’s life as a state. In a word, the Jew was no longer a shadowy, ghettoized mystery, but a farmer, a pilot, a worker. Throwing off the role of victim he stood up and was suddenly comprehensible as one of the world’s dangerous peoples – dangerous in the conventional military and characterological sense. He was like everybody else now and for a time it would be difficult to imagine the traditional anti-Semitic attitudes feeding themselves on warriors rather than passive victims. For a time Israeli technical and military missions were spread across Africa and her example seemed about to become an inspiration for any poor country attempting to enter this century.
This exemplary condition was not to last. An irony so gigantic as to sweep the mind into the explications of mysticism moved Israel partially in fact, entirely in the world’s perception, from a land settled by pastoral socialists and internationalist soldier-farmers, into a bellicose armed camp whose adamant tribal defensiveness has inevitably hardened against neighboring peoples to the point of fanaticism. Jewish aloneness is back, but now it is armed. One more impersonation has been added to the long historic list that supplied so many contradictory images: Einstein and Freud and/or Meyer Lansky or another gangster; Karl Marx and/or Rothschild; the Prague Communist chief Slansky running Czechoslovakia for Stalin, and/or the Jew Slansky hanging by the neck as tribute to Stalin’s paranoid anti-Semitism.
Focus is much involved with impersonations. Its central image is the turning lens of the mind of an anti-Semitic man forced by his circumstances to see anew his own relationships to the Jew. To a certain degree, it seems to me that Newman’s step toward his human identification with some part of the Jewish situation has indeed occurred, at least in sectors of the democratic world, since the mid-forties, and so the projection of such a change as occurs in this story was not altogether romantic and unlikely.
But in the four decades since writing Focus certain new perspectives on the Jewish situation have opened up from surprising angles. In particular the attitudes of some Asian peoples toward certain successful strangers settled in their midst, for example the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in the Cambodia of Sihanouk before the Vietnamese occupation of that country. It used to amuse me to hear descriptions in Bangkok of the local Chinese, which were so exactly similar to what people used to say about Jews, and doubtless still do in the West. ‘The Chinese really have only one loyalty, to one another. They are very clever, study harder in school, always try to be first in their studies. There are lots of Chinese bankers in Thailand, too many; in fact, it was a real mistake to give Chinese Thai citizenship, because they have secretly taken control of the banking system. Besides, they are spies for China, or would be in time of war. Actually, what they are after is a revolution in Thailand [despite their being bankers and capitalists] so that we would end up as dependents of China.’
Many of the same contradictory things were being said about Vietnamese who had been settled in Cambodia for generations, and they too were more industrious than the natives, of doubtful loyalty, on the verge of being spies for Communist Vietnam despite their being fervent capitalists, and so on. Two striking similarities exist in these instances – the Chinese in Thailand and the Vietnamese in Cambodia were very frequently visible as merchants, landlords of stores and small houses, peddlers, and an inordinate number of them were teachers and lawyers and intellectuals, enviable in a peasant country. They, so to speak, visibly administered the injustices of life as far as the average Thai or Cambodian could see, since it was to them one paid the rent or the limitlessly inflated prices of food and other necessities of life, and one could see with one’s own eyes how soft a life they led as intellectuals.
It is important also that the host people were self-characterized as somehow more naive than these strangers, less interested in money making and more ‘natural’ – that is, less likely to become intellectuals. In the Soviet Union and the lands ruled by her arms and culture in Eastern Europe the same sort of accusations are made openly or implicitly. Focus is a view of anti-Semitism that is deeply social in this particular sense: the Jew is seen by the anti-Semitic mind as the carrier of that same alienation that the indigenous people resent and fear, the same conniving exploitation. I would only add that they fear it because it is an alienation they feel in themselves, a not-belonging, a helplessly antisocial individualism that belies fervent desires to be a serving part of the mythic whole, the sublime national essence. They fear the Jew as they fear the real, it often seems. And perhaps this is why it is too much to expect a true end of anti-Semitic feelings. In the mirror of reality, of the unbeautiful world, it is hardly reassuring and requires much strength of character to look and see oneself.
Chapter One
HE had gone to sleep exhausted by the heat; his bones hurt. For a long time he lay there purposely seeking a dream that might draw him off to unconsciousness. And seeking it he fell asleep, and a dream arose.
He was in some sort of amusement park. A crowd was listening to a barker whose face was pouring perspiration. He moved away from the crowd and walked aimlessly. The ocean was nearby. Then before him stood a large carousel, strangely colored in green and purple patches. Somehow there were no people there. It was deserted for acres around him. And yet the carousel was moving. The brightly colored carriages, all empty, were going in a circle. And then they stopped, and went backwards. They stopped again and went forwards. He stood there perplexed, watching the shuttling of the carousel, and then he knew that underneath, below the ground, there was a gigantic machine operating: a factory, he realized. Something was being manufactured beneath the carousel, and trying to imagine what it was he grew frightened. The empty carousel kept going forwards and backwards, and he began moving away from it. Then for the first time he heard a noise coming from it, a growing sound, a cry … ‘Aleese! Aleese! Aleese!’
With a shock he awoke. It had sounded like a woman. How sharp! He was panting. With open eyes he lay on his bed listening.
The night was quiet. A slow summer breeze was swaying the curtains pleasantly. He looked at his window and regretted having left it open so wide. Suddenly the cries came again. ‘Aleese! Aleese!’ His fleshy arms jerked down to his sides. He lay perfectly still. Again the sounds pierced his room. ‘Aleese!’ They were coming from the street. Was he still dreaming? He tried lifting a leg. It worked. He got out of bed and walked barefoot out of the room and along the corridor to the front bedroom windows. Silently he raised the venetian blinds.
Near the lamp post across the street he could sense two moving figures. The cry went up again, but this time Mr Newman could make out what it said: ‘Police! Police! Please, police!’ He strained to see through the darkness, and crouched very still at the window. A woman seemed to be out there struggling with what looked like a large man. Now Mr Newman could hear the man’s voice. It was growling threateningly, drunkenly bass. The woman broke away from him now and ran into the street toward Mr Newman’s house. On the manhole cover in the middle of the street the man caught up with her and slammed his arm against her head. The manhole cover clanked under his weight. As he held her she broke forth in a shrill tirade of something that sounded like Spanish. Probably Puerto Rican, Mr Newman decided. The man’s sounds were English, however, he recognized with relief. The drunk’s free arm came up again as though to strike at the woman and again she screamed for the police. But now she was pleading for them, weeping to the darkness around her. Mr Newman, twenty yards from her, could hear the frantic breath rushing out of her body as she screamed for the police. She turned in the direction of his window now. She must have noticed that his blinds had come up only a moment before. Mr Newman quickly stepped back into the room. ‘Police!’ He thought of his bare feet; without his slippers he could not be expected to go out and stop this. Nobody else on the block was out there anyway. If he called the police the woman and the man would probably be gone by the time they arrived, and he would be embarrassed to explain why he had made such a fuss. The pair were struggling no more than ten feet from the edge of his little front lawn now. He could not see the woman’s face because the street light was behind her, but in the night, and awakened rudely from sleep, he thought he saw her eyes. The whites were bright against the dark skin, and she was darting helpless glances at his and all the other houses from which people were undoubtedly watching her. But he backed away from the window, the woman screaming ‘Police! Police!’ in her accent. He turned in the dark and went out of the room.