Presence

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