A Lesson in Star-gazing

Mother:What do you mean... He's not coming back?

Jim: Oh, no, he'll come back. We all come back, Kate. These private little revolutions always die.

The compromise is always made. In a peculiar way. Frank is right... every man does have a star. The star of one's honesty. And you spend your life groping for it, but once it's out it never lights again.

I don't think he went very far. He probably just wanted to be alone to watch his star go out.

Mother: Just as long as he comes back.

Jim: I wish he wouldn't, Kate. One year I simply took off, went to New Orleans;for two months I lived on bananas and milk, and studied a certain disease. And then she came, and she cried.

And I went back home with her. And now I live in the usual darkness; I can't find myself; it's hard sometimes to remember the kind of man I wanted to be. I'm a good husband; Chris is a good son... He'll come back.

Arthur Miller had something very interesting to say of the pivot of drama. That it is not just a matter of creating the right characters and getting them to make up the story as they went along. The point is in knowing, as intimately as the character, not just why he would do something – but why he cannot abstain from doing it; why he cannot just walk away from it. In the creation of that motivation to act lies the reality of drama.

I keep coming back to this exchange. It’s a depressing play, All My Sons, by Arthur Miller. It doesn’t end very well, either. A man lives in guilt for many years, knowing whether he has actually caused the death of 21 fighter pilots in providing faulty fighter jets, knowing that his friend suffers in jail for it. His nerves are frayed by the guilt, his wit dulled and any joie de vivre diminishing in the ever-present doubt that eats away at him.

One of his sons went missing in the war; the same war for which he was commissioned to assemble 21 fighter jets. This son had a sweetheart, the son of his friend now in jail, and the sweetheart re-enters his life on the arm of our man’s younger son. The wife has been utterly shaken by the war and the loss of her son, although she never believes he is truly dead. The dialogue is hopeful and young – the lovers talk of the days to come, neighbours discuss astrology, husbands and sundry. Until the sweetheart’s brother demands that she break off her engagement with the younger son and return as our man put her father in jail. Drama, more of it, ensues. This particular exchange takes place between the wife (called Mother) and her scientist neighbour, Jim, while anxiously waiting for her younger son, Chris, who has just discovered the damning allegations against his father, to return.

Is it true that once our star goes out, it never comes back? Do we lose all the integrity we may possess, all the truth and purity we have lived by, in a passing moment of bad judgement? I may have, in a bid to preserve one of the longest and most beautiful friendships in my life, lied, wilfully, constantly and almost in disbelief that my eyes do not, in fact, speak the truth when all my tongue can do is roll off unconvincing, plastic words that taste bitter even to me.

Maybe my star went out a long time ago.