Portrait of the Pompous Ass as an Old Man . . .

What an unintentionally funny interview. Arthur Miller is a pretentious, self-important hack, whose reputation rests on a single play that's just a tad above mediocre (Willy Loman is a self-indulgent loser whose sympathy as a character depends upon the condescension of Miller's well-heeled audiences), but you can almost hear the hushed tones of this interview -- as though the interviewer, Deborah Solomon, has been granted an audience with the Pope, Mick Jagger, and the oracle at Delphi all at once.

Here's a sample:

And yet, as I sat beside him on his smallish living-room couch one morning in August, his marriage to Monroe was not only a fair subject to raise but also a mandatory one.
For one thing, he himself has broken the long silence [by writing a fictionalized dramatic account of the filming of The Misfits]. For another, he always ''aspired to a rather exalted image of the dramatist as a species of truth-revealing leader,'' as he himself once wryly wrote, and it seems only reasonable that he bring the same scrutiny to his life that he insists on bringing to ours, that he stop brushing off legitimate questions about the biographical sources of his art.

-- Gag. Gag. Gag again. First of all, I must admit I don't know the quote about the "dramatist as a species of truth-revealing leader," but I'm sure that there was nothing "wry" about Miller's self-aggrandizing characterization of the dramatist. That's how he sees himself, and that's apparently how Solomon sees him. How else to interpret her suggestion that he bring the same scrutiny to his own life that he brings to ours? Speak for yourself, lady. The only scrutiny that Arthur Miller ever brought to my life was a fleeting reflection about contemporary notions of decorum that arose when I failed to stifle a snort of laughter at the line "Who dast blame this man?" during a production of Death of a Salesman.

"There is no correct version [of the truth],'' he continued. ''It's purely the way I see it."

But what if the rest of us see it differently?

''It doesn't matter,'' he said. ''It's my truth. It's not your truth.''

My truth, your truth -- conversations with Miller tend to move beyond the quotidian and enter such depths quickly.

Wowie. Such depths. My truth, your truth. I don't think I've waded into "such depths" since my last trip to a cow pasture. Miller's profundity is the kind that sticks with you -- it's hard to scrape off of the bottom of your shoes. But Solomon mucks around in it reverently, glorying in Miller's shallow "depths" the way his audiences gloried in his tired, sapped-of-content dramatic "truths."

In conversation, Miller seems fully attentive to the present and its preoccupations. He spoke well of Michael Moore's ''Fahrenheit 9/11'' . . .

-- Well, he would, wouldn't he? Moore is kind of a bloated version of Miller himself; he has all the tendentious, self-important, gaseous pedantry of Miller, with a dash of poorly executed satire thrown in to make him "edgy."

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.)

-- Still subscribes to The Nation, eh? How proud you must be, Artie -- but, honestly, don't you think it's gone downhill a bit since its glory days as a mouthpiece for Stalinism? And that "I don't know one Bush supporter" comment . . . spoken like the true voice of the modern Everyman.

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.

-- How quaint. I thought that Miller's plays were responsible for the "degradation and marginalization of serious theater and the intellectual life of the nation in general.'

"You do what you can do, and the rest is up to the zeitgeist,'' he remarked cheerfully. ''I'll probably be forgotten completely. Most of the work in the world is forgotten completely; 99.99 percent of all artwork is forgotten. There have been so many writers who dominated a period and then slipped off. History is like some gigantic beast -- it simply wriggles its back and throws off whatever is on it.''

His comments were endearingly modest but impossible to take at face value. The truth is that not everyone is thrown into the abyss of oblivion.

-- The irony here is that these are the truest words that Miller has uttered in the whole interview, yet neither he nor his fawning interviewer really believes them. Who dast blame him, though? No "artist" likes to feel himself being thrown off by the gigantic beast of History.

I asked Miller how he would like to be remembered by the audiences of the future. He thought for a while and then replied in a solemn voice, ''I would like to be remembered as a man who wrote what he felt.''

-- Audiences of the future? Wishful thinking. Oh, Willy Loman will hang around for another few decades, I suppose, until "audiences of the future" figure out that Miller's everyman was very much a man of the "zeitgeist," chained to a particular time and place, imprisoned in Miller's plodding prose. And, if Miller's plays are any indication, the man who "wrote what he felt," felt -- and thought -- very little indeed.