''A star is an animal; you control an animal with love and threats.''

That's a line by Arthur Miller, from another one of his plays about his long-dead wife, Marilyn Monroe. Deborah Solomon plies her wily interview skills in the NYT Magazine:

In conversation, Miller seems fully attentive to the present and its preoccupations. He spoke well of Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' and lavished high praise on Philip Roth's about-to-be-published ''Plot Against America: A Novel,'' which he was in the middle of reading. (''Philip and I see each other regularly once every three years,'' he noted humorously.) An unreconstructed leftist, he still subscribes to The Nation. (''How can the polls be neck and neck when I don't know one Bush supporter?'' he asked with apparent earnestness.)



But Miller betrays the biases of his generation when the subject turns to pop culture, linking it to the degradation and marginalization of serious theater and the intellectual life of the nation in general. ''It used to be that a play seemed to resonate into the society a lot more,'' he said, ''and now it's simply one more entertainment. Maybe the competition has ground down moral and social meaning. Publicity and advertising are the major arts today. They shape the consciousness of the people far more than actual art does.



"There was a time when people like Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Dos Passos seemed to represent something in the country,'' he continued. ''It's hard for me to imagine that a writer now could be said to somehow represent America.'' It might seem contradictory for a man who married Monroe to claim a wholesale disdain for ''entertainment,'' but then he is hardly the first literary figure who would rather talk about high art than about seemingly unresolved impulses.

Imagine being such an unreconstructed leftist that you'd subscribe to The Nation? But yeah, I really remember when plays were supposed to shake the complacent audience to its very core and awaken us to a whole new way of living. How grand it must have been in those days to be the guy who got to do the shaking! And what could have been better proof of your grandeur than to marry Marilyn Monroe? And what could be better proof of how times have changed than that no one has the slightest feeling that their worldview will be reshaped if you wring another drop of tragedy out of poor Marilyn's dead body? The great irony is that the fabulous persona Marilyn Monroe created in her short life will "resonate into the society" with "moral and social meaning" long after anyone cares about Arthur Miller. Call it "publicity and advertising" if you want to take the edge off your bitterness, but Marilyn was an artist and she changed the world. Solomon wisely observes: "Time has turned her into precisely what Miller sought to create with Willy Loman and his other middle-class Everymen -- a beloved embodiment of American striving and heartbreak."

Today, Miller is even less willing to speculate on the source of Monroe's enduring mystique, and in fact when the subject was raised, he gazed away and said nothing. As the seconds passed and the silence in his living room thickened, you might have assumed he was formulating an unusually nuanced response. Finally, he spoke. ''I'm hungry,'' he said in his gruff voice.