By Mursi Saad El-Din The death of Arthur Miller last Friday brought back old memories. I first became familiar with Miller's work when I watched his masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, on the London stage. Since then I have read most, if not all, of Miller's plays, ending with The Crucible which was written in the era of the US McCarthy anti-Communist persecutions. In his introduction to the play, Miller wrote in 1953: "It was not only the rise of McCarthyism that moved me, but something which seemed much more weird and mysterious. It was the fact that a political, objective, knowledgeable campaign from the far right was capable of creating not only a terror, but a new objective reality, a veritable mystique which was gradually assuming even a holy resonance." The first time I met Miller was in June 1966 in the 34th PEN Congress in New York. He was then the international president of this great writers' association. Going through his address to the Congress, one has a quick insight into the workings of his mind. He stressed the work of the "intellectual" and that because of its importance "so many people work so hard to regulate it. That is why in just about every country there is censorship in some form; books are burned or suppressed altogether." Miller went on to say that American writers were being hounded by government committees and blacklisted in the 1950s, forced to write under pseudonyms or, in some cases, barred outright from publishing, it was the task of PEN to intervene. But, he added, PEN is not yet doing its job. PEN should work to become the cockpit of controversy, the free arena in over 50 countries, the leading edge of the wing that cuts the air. For a PEN centre to become relevant to the promise of PEN, "it must become a place of confrontation, a place with a certain danger, so that the agony of this time is not spuriously covered by an empty conviviality, but laid open to investigation." PEN in his opinion should make more possible a view of literature as literature, as an expression of universal human conditions and feelings, universal human ideals. To universalise culture should be the aim of PEN. "It is our particular business as writers simply because no other group is in a position to care as much as we can care about it and because it is in the nature of writing to reach out to the whole world," he said. Sometime in the 1970s Miller visited Egypt, accompanied by William Styron, a novelist famous for his work titled The Confession of Nat Turner, whom I had met in 1958 in the first Afro-Asian Writers Conference. A small group of Egyptian intellectuals met the two writers in the office of the president of the Arts Academy -- at that time, Rashad Rushdi. We had long discussions about modern American writings and the state of literature in Egypt. As for the last time I met Miller, it was at yet another PEN Congress in 1986 in New York. During the week's stay we resided in the same hotel, my wife and myself becoming very close to Mr and Mrs Miller. Mrs Styron was with us by herself, her husband being in hospital for treatment of a depression. He later sent me his book, Darkness Visible, about the cure. Miller will always be remembered as a writer who, in the words of The Independent 's Stephen Feuder "dramatises the American century. He was a big man in every way: physically, personally, emotionally , intellectually -- in the years his life spanned and in the imaginary world he created."
