Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

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 (1963), Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) and The American Clock. He has also written two novels, Focus (1945), and The Misfits, which was filmed in 1960, and the text for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977), three books of photographs by his wife, Inge Morath. More recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1993), which won the Olivier Award for Best Play of the London Season, and Mr. Peter's Connections (1998). His latest book is On Politics and the Art of Acting. Miller was granted with the 2001 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

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Echoes Down the Corridor

Penguin Books

Chapter One

A Boy Grew in Brooklyn

Nobody can know Brooklyn, because Brooklyn is the world, and besidesit is filled with cemeteries, and who can say he knows thosepeople? But even aside from the cemeteries it is impossible to say that oneknows Brooklyn. Three blocks from my present house live two hundredMohawk Indians. A few blocks from them are a group of Arabs living intenements in one of which is published an Arabic newspaper. When Ilived on Schermerhorn Street I used to sit and watch the Muslims holdingservices in a tenement back yard outside my window, and they had areal Moorish garden, symmetrically planted with curving lines of whitestones laid out in the earth, and they would sit in white robes?twenty orthirty of them, eating at a long table, and served by their women who worethe flowing purple and rose togas of the East. All these people, plus theGermans, Swedes, Jews, Italians, Lebanese, Irish. Hungarians and more.created the legend of Brooklyn's patriotism, and it has often seemed to methat their having been thrown together in such abrupt proximity is whatgave the place such a Balkanized need to proclaim its never-achievedoneness.

    But this is not the Brooklyn I know or was brought up in. Mine waswhat is called the Midwood section, which now has no distinguishingmarks, but thirty years ago was a flat forest of great elms through which ranthe elevated Culver Line to Coney Island, two and a half miles distant. MyBrooklyn consisted of Jews, some Italians, a few Irish?and a Mr. Dunham,whom I remember only because he was reputed to carry a gun as partof his duties as a bank guard.

    Children going to school in those days could be watched from the backporch and kept in view for nearly a mile. There were streets, of course, butthe few houses had well-trodden trails running out of their back doorswhich connected with each other and must have looked from the air like across section of a mole run; these trails were much more used than thestreets, which were as unpaved as any in the Wild West and just as muddy.Today everything is paved and your bedroom window is just far enoughaway from your neighbor's to leave room to swing the screens out when fallcomes.

    My aunts and uncles, who moved there right after World War I, couldgo to Manhattan on the Culver Line for a nickel (although my cousins alwaysclimbed around the turnstile, which was easy, so long as you didn'tmind hanging from iron railings a hundred feet or so above the street), butthey had to buy potatoes in hundred-pound sacks because there was nogrocery store within four miles. And they planted tomatoes, and theycanned fruits and vegetables, and kept rabbits and chickens and huntedsquirrels and other small game. The Culver Line cars were made of wood,like trolleys hooked together, and clattered above the cemeteries and theelms, and I must say there was something sweet about it when you gotaboard in the morning and there was always the same conductor who knewyou and even said good morning.

    I don't precisely know why, but Brooklyn in my memory has alwaysbeen full of characters and practical jokers. I suppose it is really a collectionof villages which all seem the same to the stranger's eye, but are not;and characters thrive and express their special ways in a village atmosphere.My father was one, and is the last of those Mohicans as he sits infront of his frame house of a Sunday afternoon, remembering, as heglances down the tree-lined block, the old friends and screwballs wholived in each of the houses and are now resting peacefully in the cemeterythat spreads out two blocks away, their pinochle decks laid down forever,their battles done.

    My father, a large, square-headed man who looks like a retired policecaptain, and has that kind of steady severity, is likely to feel the need, fromtime to time, to "start something." Years ago, he sat down on the CulverLine one morning, and seeing a neighbor whom he regarded as particularlygullible, moved over to him and in his weightiest manner, began:

    "You hear my brother-in-law got back from Florida?"

    "Yes, I heard," said the neighbor. "What does he do down there? Justfish and like that?"

    "Oh, no," my father said, "haven't you heard about his new business?"

    "No. What?"

    "He raises cockroaches there."

    "Cockroaches! What does he do with the cockroaches?"

    "What does he do with the cockroaches? Sells them!"

    "Who wants cockroaches?"

    "Who wants cockroaches! There's a bigger demand for cockroachesthan for mink. Of course they gotta be of a certain breed. He breeds themdown there. But they're all purebred."

    "But what good are they?"

    "Listen," my father confided, lowering his voice. "Don't say I evenmentioned it, but if you happen to see any cockroaches around, in yourhouse, or anywhere like that, my brother-in-law would appreciate it if youbrought them all to him. Because I tell you why, see?he's raising them uphere now, right in his house, but in Brooklyn it's against the law, you understand??butonce in a while a couple of them escape, and he's bashfulto ask people, but you'd be doing him a big favor if you happen to catchany, bring them to him. But be very careful. Don't hurt them. He'll pay fivedollars for any purebred cockroach anybody brings him."

    "Five dollars!"

    "Well, listen, that's his business. But don't tell anybody I told you becauseit's against the law, you know?"

    Having planted this seed, my father left the neighbor. A week or solater my uncle's doorbell rang, and there was the man, considerably insecurein his mind, but there nevertheless, with a matchbox full of cockroaches.For three whole days my uncle refused to play casino with myfather.

    There is Ike Samuels, who runs?or rather sits outside?the hardwarestore. Ike's way with women who come in not knowing precisely whatthey want is something not easily described. I have watched him double-talkinga Hausfrau for better than ten minutes; but when they come in withcomplaints he rises to a height of idiotic evasion that is positively lyrical.I was myself a victim of his for years, as a boy. We lived three blocks fromhis store, and often as I passed he would open his eyes against the sunlightwhere he sat in his rocker beside the door, and say, "Raining on OceanParkway?"

    For years I answered him seriously because he has a remorselesspoker face and thick lenses on his eyeglasses that make a clear view of hiseyes impossible. Out of respect, at first, I described the weather threeblocks away; but later I began to doubt myself and came to wonder, nowand then, whether it had been raining there while the sun shone here.

    But that was the least of Ike Samuels. I happened to be in his store onemorning when a woman entered. Like so many of them at eleven A.M., shehad a coat on top of her nightgown?and in her hands was an electricbroiler which Ike had repaired only a week before. She strode in, a largewoman with lumpy hair that, in her anger at the broiler, she had neglectedto comb, and she...