Arthur Miller, an American playwright

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/mill-f21.shtml

By David Walsh

21 February 2005

Death puts an end to the ongoing effort that most artists consider a
"work in progress" until the final moments. The body of work, like it
or not, is then a finished product, vulnerable to evaluation as a
whole. The commentators, for better or worse, will have their day.

American playwright Arthur Miller, author of such well-known dramas as
Death of a Salesman (1949) and The Crucible (1953), who outlasted many
of his critics, is no exception to this general rule.

However one evaluates his work, Miller—who died February 10 at the age
of 89—was unquestionably a major figure in postwar artistic life in
the US and his death is necessarily the occasion for a consideration
not only of his plays, but the era and social environment that helped
produce them.

This is a large subject, and the present piece can hardly be the final
word. It is intended to raise certain vexing problems in artistic and
intellectual life in the US that seem inevitably to attach themselves
to Miller's life and work.

That Miller was a personally decent man ought to figure prominently in
any commentary. The American liberal intelligentsia took a drastic
turn for the worse in the middle of the twentieth century, making a
bargain with the most dastardly elements in American society.
Political and intellectual life still suffers today from the
consequences of that devil's pact. In the late 1940s and early 1950s
renunciation of previous ideas and denunciation of former colleagues
became a fashion that hardly anyone resisted.

Miller was perhaps the most well-known figure who did. He resisted the
tide of cowardice, egoism and selfishness, personified by his one-time
colleague director Elia Kazan, and refused to "name names" to the
congressional witch-hunters. "My conscience will not permit me to use
the name of another person," he told his persecutors in 1956.

The playwright, although he did not remain untouched by the difficult
political climate, maintained a critical attitude toward American
society until the end of his life. He supported and participated in
the civil rights struggle. He famously opposed the Vietnam War. Unlike
so many others, Miller did not take the easy route, rallying to a
Reagan or turning "neo-conservative." Most recently, he criticized the
US invasion of Iraq. Of George W. Bush, Miller said contemptuously,
"He's not a very good actor. He's too obvious most of the time, he has
no confidence in his own facade, so he's constantly overemphasizing
his sincerity." Whatever the fate of his dramas, Miller's reputation
as an individual of genuine integrity rests secure.

Nonetheless, the present task would be a more obviously pleasant one
if one were able to claim that Miller was an enormous talent, or that
he possessed at least the spark of genius (like a contemporary of his,
Leonard Bernstein). It would be a mistake, in my view, to make either
assertion. Rather, he was a liberal-minded and well-meaning man, with
severe limitations as an artist.

Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, his most popular works, have
their strengths, but in the end seem shallow. The first, in its rather
sentimental tribute to "Everyman" Willy Loman, is something of a
pseudo-tragedy that does not look terribly deeply at the lower middle
class "dream of success" or any other aspect of American life.

Miller perhaps should have resisted the urge, as tempting as it might
have been, to create a parallel between the Salem witch trials of 1692
and the anticommunist purges of the early 1950s. Articulate and
intelligent as it is, The Crucible does not offer much insight into
the source of McCarthyism or the state of American society as a whole.

If Miller was the leading American dramatist of the 1940s, 1950s and
into the 1960s, and he probably was, that speaks more than anything
else to the painful ideological-artistic conditions of the time. It is
questionable how long his plays will endure as living, meaningful
works.

His death has been greeted with an outpouring of praise for his work,
some of it quite out of proportion. Steven Winn of the San Francisco
Chronicle termed Death of a Salesman an "American King Lear." David
Thacker, the British theater director, commented that "if you put
Shakespeare to one side, Arthur Miller stands comparison with any
playwright writing in the English language for his contribution." This
is simply foolish. And not merely because Marlowe, Congreve, Gay,
Sheridan, Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw come immediately to mind. Placing
Miller second or thirteenth on a list of great playwrights in the
English language takes for granted that he was a great or even a
consistently good playwright.

Thacker's remark speaks to a certain divide between British and
American critics and audiences in regard to Miller's work. Playwright
Harold Pinter, when he learned of the latter's death, observed: "In
the United States, they didn't like him very much because he was too
outspoken and too critical of the way of life in the United States and
certain assumptions that were made over there."

There might be something to this. Miller did indeed fall out of favor
with US theater critics and audiences decades ago, and this was not
entirely to his discredit. What replaced him in New York has not been
an improvement; empty experimentalism and narcissistic playing at
theatrical form, on the one hand, and bombastic musical revues, aimed
at the tourist trade, on the other. The methodical, well-crafted
dramas Miller brought forth no longer had a home, whereas in Britain
the more highly-subsidized theaters and the circles around them kept
such work alive.

In 2003 Miller lamented the deplorable state of New York theater,
finding himself "wondering about Broadway's relevance to the life of
this world now." While there had once been a "steady trickle" of
"acerbic social commentary" in the American theater, it now appeared
"to have dried up."

One feels that a good deal of the effusion in the wake of Miller's
death is tinged by philistine self-satisfaction, the pleasure taken in
eulogizing a safely deceased and relatively harmless icon. For
example, this: "But beyond being a great playwright, Miller was a
glorious example of what it meant to be a liberal when liberalism was
in its prime. He stood up to McCarthyism in the Fifties as bravely as
any American. In the mid-Sixties he stood up to communism by helping
Soviet bloc authors as president of PEN, the international writers'
organization. Through the early Seventies he raised one of the most
urgent, resonant voices against the Vietnam War."

The New York Times has led the way in this effort, publishing no less
than six obituaries, op-ed pieces and assorted articles on Miller in
the first few days after his death, in addition to slide shows on its
web site. Marilyn Berger commented that Miller's work "exposed the
flaws in the fabric of the American dream" in "dramas of guilt and
betrayal and redemption that continue to be revived frequently at
theaters all over the world. These dramas of social conscience were
drawn from life and informed by the Great Depression."

Charles Isherwood noted that Miller's concerns "were with the moral
corruption brought on by bending one's ideals to society's dictates,
buying into the values of a group when they conflict with the voice of
personal conscience."

The Nation, the liberal-left publication whose outlook perhaps most
closely corresponded to Miller's own, editorialized rather pompously
that when a figure like Miller dies, "his greatness swells in
retrospect in a mound of accumulated tributes and memories." Further
on, the journal observed oddly, "In his plays Miller made no
distinction between art and politics."

The last comment was apparently intended as a compliment, but the
editors may have given away more than they intended to. Art and
politics cannot be identical. Art is not merely a means toward
practical aims, it has an end in itself, to picture life in all its
complexity. The editors' comment smacks of something didactic and
utilitarian. It reminds one of the populist formula that "art is what
the people want," which rejects the critical need, raised by both
Trotsky and Wilde, to educate masses of people artistically. We would
be bold enough to suggest that the Nation's tepid and tired stew of
national-reformist, Democratic Party politics will not under present
conditions adequately nourish the genuinely creative imagination. And
this leads us back to the "Miller problem."

One of the issues that needs to be addressed in any consideration of
the dramatist's work is why, despite his obvious intelligence,
sensitivity and ability with language, there is such an inartistic
quality to much of Miller's work, even, to borrow Plekhanov's phrase,
an "anti-artistic element."

A reading of Miller's plays and essays, as well as a viewing of some
of his work on film, makes largely dreary work. A good many sensible
things are said, a number of worthy themes introduced, a certain
quantity of believable moments dramatized, but, all in all, poring
through his work is drudgery. The plays lack spontaneity and
inspiration, the dramatic mechanisms are rather obvious and
predictable.

If he were a poor craftsman that would be one thing, but Miller
obviously labored diligently over his work and it won him wide
recognition, after all, as "America's leading playwright." This often
inartistic dreariness was not simply his, so to speak, it was embraced
and made their own by wide sections of the intelligentsia, and not
only in the US.

The problem then must lie in something more than a personal failing,
or a simple misunderstanding. This raises certain questions. Is it
possible that there are social circumstances and milieus that are
uninspiring by their very nature? Or can there be conditions under
which a writer feels content or at least obliged, consciously or
otherwise, to be less than artistic? Were there ideological and
political stances in the twentieth century that were not conducive to
true artistic expression?

One has to examine the conditions under which Miller matured as an
artist to begin to answer some of these questions.

The future playwright, born in 1915, belonged to that generation
deeply affected by the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In Miller's case,
the event was particularly traumatic, an awful bolt from the blue. His
father, a wealthy New York garment manufacturer, had been speculating
heavily on the stock market and lost everything in the Crash.

The Millers moved from an elegant apartment in Manhattan to a
"flimsily built" house in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, "a sad
comedown" (Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller: His Life and Work). Miller
would later describe the Crash as a defining experience, "A month ago
you were riding around in a limousine, now you were scraping around to
pay the rent."

To what extent Miller ever fully worked through this experience,
either in emotional or social terms, is questionable. In The Price,
one of Miller's later plays, a character recalls how his mother
vomited when his father told the family that "it was all gone.... All
over his arms. His hands. Just kept on vomiting, like thirty-five
years coming up."

The image of a blow delivered from on high recurs in his plays. Critic
Henry Popkin, in an unfavorable commentary in 1960, asserted that each
of Miller's plays exhibits "the same basic pattern: each one matches
ordinary, uncomprehending people with extraordinary demands and
accusations.... From day to day they live their placid, apparently
meaningless lives, and suddenly the eternal intrudes, thunder sounds,
the trumpet blows, and these startled mediocrities are whisked off to
the bar of justice."

It is difficult not to see the financial crisis of 1929 literally
"crashing" down on the heads of the Miller family in the background of
this general pattern.

As it did for many, the Depression radicalized Miller. In 1934 he
began attending the University of Michigan (tuition was only $65 a
semester), a school that, according to Gottfried's book, "was buzzing
with left-wing political activities." As a reporter for the Michigan
Daily he traveled to nearby Detroit and Flint to cover the
unionization efforts at several General Motors plants and interviewed
United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther.

The personal and more general impact of the devastating economic
depression, the example of the struggling auto workers and the radical
atmosphere in Ann Arbor combined to propel Miller to the left, and
inevitably to an admiration for the USSR. He later recalled that
students "connected the Soviets with socialism and socialism with
man's redemption."

In drawing near to the Communist Party, Miller and others of his
generation were not, as they thought, adhering to a Marxist
organization. The American CP was a thoroughly Stalinized formation,
in the process of moving sharply to the right.

The Depression had shattered illusions about capitalism and increased
the prestige of the Soviet Union, which became quasi-respectable in
liberal circles by the mid-1930s, particularly after the adoption by
the Stalinists of the Popular Front policy in 1935. The Soviet regime,
frightened by the Nazi threat, now oriented itself to what it termed
the "democratic" bourgeoisie, i.e., the ruling classes in Britain,
France and the US.

Class no longer served as a meaningful term of reference; parties and
regimes were either "fascist" or "anti-fascist." The various national
Communist parties, whose leaderships themselves had been Stalinized
and reduced largely to slavish appendages of the Kremlin, abandoned
attempts to establish the political independence of the working class
or advance a socialist program. Their principal task became forming
alliances with parties and movements that might show sympathy for the
Soviet regime and its interests. For the CPUSA this translated into an
endorsement, for all practical purposes, of Roosevelt and the New
Deal.

It remains unclear whether Miller joined the Communist Party while in
university or whether, in fact, he ever joined. In one of his first
plays, which was never performed, a young man named "Arny" (Miller's
nickname was "Arty" at the time) is a member of the CP. Norman Rosten,
Miller's closest friend at university, joined the Young Communist
League in Michigan. It seems likely that Miller did take that step,
but he never clarified the matter.

One suspects that while the Depression and its disastrous impact
rendered the Soviet Union more attractive, a sensible alternative to
chaotic and destructive capitalism, Miller was less drawn to the
Russian Revolution itself. That event finds little echo in his work.
Nor does one find any indication that Trotsky's opposition to
Stalinism made an impression on Miller.

In this he was like many of those attracted to Stalinism in the late
1930s. Writing about a somewhat older generation, David North, in
"Socialism, historical truth and the crisis of political thought in
the United States,"
http://www.wsws.org/history/1996/apr1996/truth.shtml noted, "Many
liberal intellectuals were flattered by the new attention that the
Stalinists devoted to them, and were pleased to find that their
opinions and concerns were taken so seriously. Their personal
identification with the Soviet Union seemed, at least in their own
eyes, to make up for the fact that they lacked any independent program
for radical action in the United States.

"The admiration among liberals for Soviet accomplishments and their
political support for the Soviet regime did not at all signify an
endorsement of revolutionary change within the United States. Far from
it. Rather, many liberal intellectuals were inclined to view an
alliance with the USSR as a means of strengthening their own limited
agenda for social reform in the United States, as well as keeping
fascism at bay in Europe. Among many liberal intellectuals, the
Stalinist regime itself was admired not because it was considered the
spearhead of world revolutionary change."

Whether Miller considered himself a revolutionist or what he might
have even meant by this is not entirely clear, but he would
necessarily have received a great deal of political and ideological
miseducation in Stalinist circles. While the party paid lip service to
the ideas of Marx and Lenin, its orientation was largely crude and
pragmatic, focusing on activism increasingly colored by populist and
nationalist nostrums. To many liberals the Stalinist ideology seemed
to dovetail rather conveniently with their own vague commitment to
social progress and democratic reform.

Miller was not primarily a political activist. He determined at a
relatively early age on writing as a vocation. He studied plays and
playwriting in university: Ibsen in particular, but also Greek
tragedy, the German expressionists, Brecht, Büchner, Frank Wedekind.
Eugene O'Neill, the dominant figure in the American theater in the
1920s and 1930s, seemed too "cosmic" to Miller and unresponsive to
social realities. He was more sympathetic to the efforts of Clifford
Odets, author of Waiting for Lefty and other works, the leading
left-wing playwright of the time. Shakespeare, oddly, is not mentioned
in Gottfried's biography as a subject of study.


American theater

The American theater, as a serious institution, dates from the period
around World War I, when groups such as the Washington Square Players
and the Provincetown Players established themselves. O'Neill,
associated with the latter group, poured forth a series of expressive,
often insufferable works (Desire Under the Elms [1924] Strange
Interlude [1928] and Mourning Becomes Electra [1932] and many others),
influenced by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Freud (and Jung), which
nonetheless transformed the American stage.

The "left" theater, which arose in the aftermath of the Crash of 1929,
hardly offered an alluring alternative to O'Neill's cosmic and static
fatalism. In the hands of Stalinist chief literary thug Michael Gold,
subtlety and nuance were reduced to naught.

C.W. E. Bigsby, in his A Critical Introduction to Twentieth Century
American Drama, observes that in the "proletarian" theater proposed by
Gold, "The crudity of the work was in some sense to be the guarantee
of its authenticity. It followed that articulateness was liable to be
in some senses ambiguous, a potential class betrayal."

Bigsby, interestingly, cites Trotsky against Gold, pointing to the
former's admonitions against "formless talk about proletarian
culture," and notes further Trotsky's comment in Literature and
Revolution that "weak and, what is more, illiterate poems do not make
up proletarian poetry, because they do not make up poetry at all."
This was not Marxism, but "reactionary populism.... Proletarian art
should not be second-rate art."

Indeed the "second-rate" or worse "left" theater promoted by Gold has
not endured; Odets remains, to a certain extent, but he was a cut
above the rest. The American theater remained rather provincial and
limited throughout the first half of the twentieth century and beyond.
There is nothing to compare with developments in Germany (Brecht,
Weill, Piscator and others) or the Soviet Union (Meyerhold,
Vakhtangov, Mayakovsky's comedies, Babel's foray into playwriting).
The hostile and ignorant reception received by Brecht, whatever his
personal and artistic shortcomings, in 1935 in the New York theater
world is some measure of that.


Miller's first success

Upon graduating from the University of Michigan in 1938, Miller
returned to Brooklyn, working briefly for the Federal Theater program.
He married Mary Slattery, a Catholic from Ohio, in 1940. A few months
after the US entered World War II, in the spring of 1942, Miller went
to work at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

His first produced play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, opened and
closed quickly in New York in 1944. He was to have considerably more
success with his next effort, three years later.

All My Sons concerns two families in Ohio (the play was inspired by an
anecdote related by his mother-in-law), the Kellers and the Deevers.
Joe Keller is a vulgar, successful small-town businessman whose
company manufactures aircraft parts. As the play unfolds, in
Ibsen-like fashion, we learn that his oldest son, Larry, a flyer, has
been missing in action for three years. His fiancée, Ann Deever, has
given up waiting for him and intends to marry his brother, Chris,
contrary to the wishes of Larry's mother. We also discover that Ann's
father, Joe Keller's former partner, has been sent to the penitentiary
for providing the military with defective parts that cost the lives of
21 airmen.

George Deever, Ann's brother, arrives at the Kellers' suburban home
convinced that Joe actually authorized the fatal shipment. This
proves, in fact, to be the case. To Chris's horror, Joe's crime is
unmasked (as well, it turns out that Larry guessed his father's guilt
and deliberately crashed his airplane). "I'm in business, a man is in
business," Keller tells his son. "You lay forty years into a business
and they knock you out in five minutes, what could I do, let them take
forty years, let them take my life away?" Keller agrees to turn
himself in, "Sure he was my son. But I think they were all my sons."
He goes into the house and shoots himself.

More than its obvious social statement, about war profiteering and
one's larger responsibility to society, the play's enduring impact,
such as it is, emerges from the anger of the younger men against
Keller and his generation. Something of Miller's own background and
feelings makes itself felt in the seething fury of George Deever in
particular. Other than that, All My Sons is largely patriotic, pat and
contrived. Nonetheless, the drama clearly struck a chord with
audiences still hopeful, like Miller himself, that a more populist,
vaguely anti-capitalist New Dealism would flourish in postwar America.


Death of a Salesman

By the time Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949 that
particular illusion had surely been crushed, with the onset of the
Cold War and the anticommunist crusade, and Miller's new play no doubt
reflects that reality.

The political situation in the US had transformed itself within a
matter of months in 1947-48. Whereas the prospects for third-party
candidate and former vice president Henry Wallace, who received the
support of the American Stalinists, seemed relatively propitious when
he began considering running for president in 1947, his campaign had
virtually collapsed by the following summer. The American political
and media establishment's anticommunist campaign had shifted into full
gear.

The House Un-American Activities Committee hearings into "Communist
influence" in Hollywood grabbed headlines day after day in the autumn
of 1947; ultimately, the "Hollywood Ten" were convicted and sentenced
in April 1948; throughout that year the Communist Party leadership in
New York City faced prosecution under the Smith Act, which outlawed
conspiring to advocate forcible overthrow of the government; in August
1948 congressional hearings (presided over by Richard Nixon) began
into accusations that former State Department official Alger Hiss had
spied for the Soviet Union; the following summer, indicating the
general climate, a right-wing mob broke up a Paul Robeson concert in
Peekskill, New York.

Even while drawing fairly sharp conclusions about Death of a
Salesman's failings, one always has to bear in mind the conditions in
the teeth of which Miller wrote the play; the unfavorable atmosphere
goes a considerable distance toward explaining some of its more
obvious weaknesses.

The piece, Miller's best-known work, treats the final hours in the
life of an aging salesman, Willy Loman. In the course of one day Loman
quarrels repeatedly with his older son, Biff, an idler, who has
returned home after spending time out West; gets fired by his firm
after more than 30 years of backbreaking effort on its behalf;
continues to borrow money from an old friend to cover up the fact that
he has not been earning anything from his sales work; conjures up the
presence of his dead brother and other memories of a happier past;
recalls as well the traumatic moment when Biff, a teenager, discovered
him in a hotel room with another woman; and, finally, because he is
worth more dead than alive (thanks to an insurance policy), kills
himself at the wheel of his automobile. In an epilogue, his neighbor
defends Willy's memory, "Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got
to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

Death of a Salesman was an instant success, provoking rapturous praise
from the New York press, Brooks Atkinson of the New York Times being
the most prominent at the time, and guaranteed Miller's stature as an
important American writer.

Is this praise deserved?

The play has achieved a reputation as a critique of American
capitalist society or at least its moral and social standards, and
audiences and readers have seen it in that light for decades. In one
of his essays, the playwright notes that a right-wing periodical
called the play "a time bomb expertly placed under the edifice of
Americanism." Nor has this merely been some fraud perpetrated on the
public. Miller's legitimate hostility to aspects of American life
comes through in Death of a Salesman, in places quite eloquently.

His antagonism in particular toward the get-rich-quick, glad-handing
salesman's dream of success, a valueless, pointless, soul-destroying
dream, retains its validity. Echoing Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends
and Influence People, the salesman's bible), Loman tells his sons, "Be
liked and you'll never want."

The play opens at a moment, however, when he is beset by misgivings.
Willy senses he has been on the wrong path all his life, and searches
throughout the play for the right one. Biff comes to the conclusion
that the pursuit of success itself is the source of the problem. "I'm
a dime a dozen, and so are you!" he tells his father. "I'm nothing,
Pop. Can't you understand that?" Whether this is a satisfying
alternative to delusions of grandeur remains an open question.

In any event, some of the play's most effective scenes, in my view,
are those that take place outside the family, between Willy and
Charley, his neighbor, for example, or Willy and his boss, Howard. (In
the Dustin Hoffman-Volker Schlöndorff 1985 version, Charles Durning as
Charley and Jon Polito as Howard turn in two of the strongest
performances.)

Here Miller seems on firm, objective ground. Particularly in the
latter scene something of the cruelty of American business life comes
across. As his boss casually dismisses his request to be relieved of
going out on the road any longer and transferred to the New York
office, Loman bursts out, "You mustn't tell me you've got people to
see—I put thirty-four years into this firm, Howard, and now I can't
pay my insurance! You can't eat the orange and throw the peel away—a
man is not a piece of fruit." These are moments that have enduring
value.

In the end, however, wasn't the American traveling salesman—shallow,
crude and philistine—something of an easy target? (Weren't many of
Miller's subjects somewhat undemanding targets?) After Dreiser,
Sinclair Lewis (Babbitt, Main Street and Elmer Gantry—whose
protagonist spends time on the road as a traveling salesman), Sherwood
Anderson and others, was Miller breaking any terribly new ground in
this general area?

The genuinely telling moments in Death of a Salesman are all too
infrequent. The spectator is meant to sympathize with Loman without
looking too deeply at his life. Loman's relationship to Biff is the
play's weakest feature, with Miller at his least convincing and most
schematic. The notion that Biff's adult life has been derailed by the
discovery that his father had a girlfriend in Boston is simply
puerile. How is this discovery connected to the play's principal
theme, that Loman has imbibed and made his own a false view of success
and failure in life? This critical scene seems entirely to lack what
Lukács called "dramatic necessity."

If, as the play suggests, Loman has deluded himself and his family
about every aspect of life, including marital fidelity, then this one
lesson in reality should have set Biff on the right course, not sent
him off the deep end. His son should have thanked him for at least one
honest experience! Something of Miller's own rather conventional,
petty bourgeois outlook comes across here.

Despite the undeniable moments of truth, at the center of Death of a
Salesman is a profound ambiguity, which must reflect, in the end, the
playwright's own ambiguous feelings about American society and the
American dream. What precisely is the playwright's attitude toward
Loman and what should ours be? Tom Driver, writing in the Tulane Drama
Review in 1957, argued that in the play "at one moment [Loman is] the
pathetic object of our pity and the next is being defended as a hero
of tragic dimensions."

Loman is a rather unpleasant figure throughout much of the play, a
boastful blowhard, a bully, a coward. He gains our sympathy in his
boss's office and again when his sons desert him in a Manhattan
restaurant, only to lose it once more by his foolish ranting in the
play's final moments. "I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and
you are Biff Loman!"

Miller wants it both ways. He makes Loman hateful, but he can't resist
having him touch the spectator's heartstrings too. So we have his wife
Linda famously declare, "I don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman
never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not
the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a
terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's
not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention,
attention must be finally paid to such a person." This is one of the
play's most oft-quoted speeches and taken to reflect one of its
central themes.

It is a speech, however, that needs to be criticized and rejected.
Attention mustn't be paid to Loman, in this sentimental fashion, but
to the circumstances that made him into such a largely detestable,
self-deluded figure. His tragedy is not that he can't make money as a
salesman any longer, or that his eldest son thinks he's a fake, but
that he has thoroughly accepted, even in his dreams, the ideology of a
way of life that is killing him and the rest of his family. His
tragedy is that he lies to himself until the end of his life. Why
should we celebrate and honor him? We should remain angry at his
behavior, not "forgiving." The maudlin final scene, in the graveyard,
the "Requiem," is a capitulation by Miller, despite Biff's
half-hearted comments. What one takes away from the scene is Charley's
eulogizing the salesman as a quasi-heroic figure, a dreamer.

In the end, Miller's analysis of American society falls far short.
Loman's tragedy is that he listened to those who "inhabit the peaks of
broadcasting and advertising offices," Miller wrote in one essay, and
their "thundering command to succeed," and within that framework
considered himself "a failure."

But is that Loman's tragedy, that he fails, or thinks he has? Miller,
of course, stacks the deck. Loman no longer can make a living as a
salesman and ultimately loses his position altogether, he alienates
his eldest son, his mind and his body may be going. His defeats and
deterioration sadden us, we confuse them with what ought to be the
tragic essence of his life.

How much more profound is Welles' Citizen Kane, in which the
protagonist succeeds brilliantly and, as his reward, endures only
moral and mental anguish. More than that, Welles' film exposes the
spiritual emptiness in America, the waste of talent and energy and the
essential meaningless of a life like Kane's, devoted to the
accumulation of wealth and celebrity. Hardly anything is more
punishing than success in America, a social process Miller was to
witness first-hand less than a decade later when he married the most
famous film actress in the world.

The popularity of Miller's drama with audiences was due in part to the
fact that it did not demand that they look closely at the lives of the
successful. Spectators could return home comforted to a certain extent
by a life that was "tragic" in the light of abject failure. This helps
make Death of a Salesman something of an ersatz tragedy. The drama was
perhaps already an anachronism by the time it was written and staged.
It refers to moods more bound up with the Depression, or Miller's
conception of it. America was about to "take off" in 1949, the
American salesman was entering a golden age. The play hardly speaks to
the "success story," with all its devastating moral and social
consequences, that was about to unfold in the economic boom.

After all, if Willy Loman had simply hung on a few more years perhaps
he could have made a bundle selling Chevrolets or kitchen appliances.
Even within the framework of the play, one might reasonably ask: what
if Loman's sales figures remained as high as ever? What if he were a
younger, healthier man? What if one of his sons struck it rich in some
line of work or other? How much of the play's tragic core would then
remain?

The playwright is simply not on to the more troubling undercurrents in
American life; he remains largely on the surface. And, inevitably,
half-attached to the world he depicts. Noel Coward, a creator of
drawing room comedies for the most part, was unsurprisingly hostile to
Death of a Salesman, but his remark that the play "is a glorification
of mediocrity" was not entirely off the mark.

This, it seems to me, provides a further and related hint as to
Miller's success in postwar America. On the one hand, he criticized
certain tendencies in American society (selfishness, mediocrity,
cowardice), sometimes sharply; on the other, he offered
"understanding" that amounted, in the end, to a form of approval or at
least acquiescence. With unerring instinct the critics and the
cultural establishment responded with enthusiasm.

There is a marked regression from Dreiser's An American Tragedy (and
perhaps Fitzgerald and Richard Wright in the first half of Native Son)
to Death of a Salesman. The best American artistic work did not hold
itself back from the terrible social reality. Dreiser would burst into
tears walking down the street, looking at the faces of people he met.
Where is that quality in Miller, of bottomless compassion and
implacable, unanswerable analysis? Nowhere to be found.

Again, this cannot be simply a personal failing. What was it in the
social environment that precluded the element of "getting to the
bottom of things"? One feels the lack of inspiration, the compromise
with mediocrity. Miller writes about the "the heart and spirit of the
average man," but Henry Popkin argues persuasively that his
characters, who "possess as little imagination" as any ever presented
on stage, "inhabit the dead center of dullness as they sit and wait
for the voice of doom."

By 1949 the general shape of the postwar world had begun to emerge.
The pressures on left-wing writers were vast and intense, and Miller,
it must be said, stood up to them far better than most. But he could
not go unscathed. One always senses, even as he takes a principled
stand, that the playwright is well aware of the ideological and social
limits beyond which he cannot go. The right-wing, patriotic policies
pursued by the American Stalinists without a doubt played a role in
this.

Only a relative handful of artists and intellectuals, probing beneath
the surface of postwar life, recognized that the unresolved
contradictions of capitalism would reemerge with explosive force.

Arthur Miller did not belong, in any event, to that species. He was a
much more moderate individual. The dreariness of postwar America did
not frighten him, he had known dreariness. He accepted it with good
grace.

One might make the case that, in the final analysis, Miller's special
role was to become the registrar and chronicler of drab social and
political prospects—all the while holding out for maintaining a good
conscience, doing good works, not cheating on one's wife, etc.

The horror of Hiroshima, the Cold War, McCarthyism could not be
treated fully within the left-liberal framework, it would have led to
despair. The only way within this framework not to give in to despair
was to hold back, to censor oneself.

Of course the painters, the Abstract Expressionists (Pollock, Rothko,
etc.), gave vent to their revulsion and horror, but as mutes,
screaming on canvas. One cannot place pure pain and mental dissolution
on a stage. What was a dramatist to do? This very difficult situation,
a tightrope walk, called for someone with intelligence, but not overly
penetrating; with left-wing views, but not too far to the left; with
talent as a writer, but not gifted with genius; with sympathy for the
"common man," i.e., above all, the lower middle class, the more
mediocre social layers. Arthur Miller found himself fulfilling these
requirements.


Necessity in events

One never derives any sense of a necessary historical and social
process from Miller's plays. Again, it is tempting to seek at least a
partial explanation in his own family's experience in the financial
crash. Social events arrive in his plays inexplicably and rather
arbitrarily. The Crucible was intended at least in part as a response
to the anticommunist witch-hunting of the 1950s, and, in the
mechanisms and mentality it exposes, it has a certain value. One would
find it nearly impossible to argue, however, that the piece
illuminates in any way the set of conditions in America that made the
"red scare" possible. The sanctimoniousness and self-aggrandizement of
its central character, John Proctor, stands in direct proportion to
the play's historical or social abstractness.

Considerations of concrete historical problems, bound up with the
dynamics of conflicting social interests, barely make themselves felt
in Miller's work, except in the vaguest sense (a tendency that was no
doubt encouraged as well by the Stalinist Popular Frontism). Vagueness
seems to be the operative word. Writing of Miller's essay, "On Social
Plays," critic Gerald Weales, in a generally sympathetic essay,
pointed out that "there is a kind of vagueness about the essay, as
there is about so much of Miller's critical writing."

It is remarkable, and speaks to the difficulties of the times, that in
the aforementioned essay—published in 1955—the playwright makes
virtually no analysis of contemporary "social life," presumably the
subject of the "social plays" whose writing and staging he seeks to
defend. Miller confines himself to generalities about a general state
of human "frustration" at the inability "to live a human life," the
individual's failure to discover "a means of connecting himself to
society except in the form of a truce with it" and certain rather
clichéd observations about the nature of the modern industrial state,
capitalist or "communist," in the age of the nuclear bomb and
automation.

The vagueness extends to his dramatic writing as well. Mary McCarthy
complained that "Willy [Loman] is a capitalized Human Being without
being anyone, a suffering animal who commands a helpless pity." And
Popkin argued that as Miller's characterizations "reach for
universality, they run the risk of being so general that they are, in
some respects, nebulous." What is the Lomans' ethnicity, for example?
Various indicators suggest a lower middle class Jewish family. Then
why does his brother remember being driven in a wagon across "all the
Western states"? How did Loman end up in Brooklyn? Miller, for his own
reasons, preferred not to make the family Jewish, but their "Every
Family" status further weakens the piece.

This nebulousness only deepened within the stagnant, conformist
atmosphere of the 1950s. Miller too experienced the general "rush
inward" that bedeviled American artistic work. One aspect of America's
official ideology that Miller had hardly challenged in any of his
pieces, its intense individualism, comes more and more to the fore.
His pieces become little more than a series of individual morality
plays.

A View From the Bridge is a poor work from nearly any point of view.
The story of a Brooklyn longshoreman, driven by jealousy and possible
repressed homosexual longing, to turn in a pair of illegal immigrants,
is unconvincing as a picture of working class life and unserious as a
moral-social critique. The knowledge that this misbegotten play was
intended as a reply both to Kazan's infamous act of "naming names" and
the latter's defense of his informing in On the Waterfront merely
reveals how little Miller understood, or allowed himself to
understand, of postwar American society.

Eddie Carbone's suppressed feelings for his niece and rage at (and
perhaps desire for) the newcomer who seems to have won her heart have
little or nothing to do with the complex political situation existing
in the US in the early 1950s.

It is extraordinary, in fact, that neither The Crucible, A View From
the Bridge nor On the Waterfront—the first two, of course, morally far
superior to the last—shed the slightest light on the
concrete-historical situation in the US, the driving forces of the
anticommunist witch-hunt or the roles played by the various social
actors.


HUAC

While the height of the McCarthyite period had passed, Miller was
still to face threats and harassment from the red-baiters in
Washington. In 1954 he was refused a passport he needed to attend a
performance of The Crucible in Belgium on the grounds that his
presence abroad "would not be in the national interest."

The playwright was summoned to appear before the House Un-American
Activities Committee (HUAC) in June 1956 on entirely spurious grounds,
"The Unauthorized Use of United States Passports." Singer Paul Robeson
was obliged to appear in the same round of hearings. When asked
whether he had suggested that black Americans would never go to war
against the Soviet Union, Robeson replied, "Listen to me, I said it
was unthinkable that my people would take arms in the name of an
Eastland [the racist senator James O. Eastland of Mississippi] to go
against anybody, and gentlemen, I still say that."

Miller acquitted himself honorably before the six-man House committee,
if not with the same defiance as Robeson exhibited. In response to a
question about the Smith Act, the playwright expressed his opposition
to "anyone being penalized for advocating anything." In the same vein,
asked if a Communist who was a poet should be able to advocate the
overthrow of the government, he replied, "I would say that a man
should have the right to write a poem on just about anything.... I am
opposed to the laying down of any limits upon the freedom of
literature."

When committee counsel Richard Arens demanded that Miller reveal who
had attended "Communist Party meetings" with him, the dramatist
refused with dignity. Finally, one of the congressmen on the panel
inquired as to whether Miller considered himself "more or less a dupe"
for having joined Communist-influenced organizations. Something
essential about Miller comes across in his honest, straightforward
reply: "I wouldn't say so because I was an adult, I wasn't a child. I
was looking for the world that would be perfect. I think it necessary
that I do that, if I were to develop myself as a writer. I am not
ashamed of this. I accept my life. That is what I have done. I have
learned a great deal."

Miller was eventually convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing
to name names and handed a suspended sentence. The conviction was
overturned by the Supreme Court in 1956.


After the Fall

A period of nine years separates A View From the Bridge from the
staging of After the Fall and Incident at Vichy in 1964. During that
time, in addition to his difficulties with HUAC, Miller was divorced
from his first wife, married movie star Marilyn Monroe and then
divorced her. Monroe committed suicide one year later in 1962.
Miller's depiction of Monroe in After the Fall, for the most part a
travesty of a play, was poorly received by critics and the public at
large. Its unflattering portrait was viewed as uncharitable, an
instance of speaking ill of the dead.

After the Fall is a pretentious and cheaply despairing work. Its
overall straining for significance can be gauged by the fact that the
set of the play, which was directed by none other than Elia Kazan
(Miller and he had more or less made up), was dominated by the
presence of a concentration camp tower.

The play takes place in the mind of Quentin, a New York lawyer, who
recalls various experiences with his three wives in particular. Monroe
appears as Maggie, a self-destructive and "ingenuous whore," in Martin
Gottfried's words. The play, as Gottfried writes, "begins and ends ...
with the imperative to take care, not only about everyone but about
someone. In short, oneness." It's all rather banal. Quentin doubts
whether he can love. Miller attempts to link this individual coldness
and failing with the world-historical catastrophe of the Holocaust.
Quentin cannot mourn for his dead parents, he attempts to strangle
Maggie in one scene. The play rejects the "fantasy of innocence."
Quentin feels like "an accomplice" in the shadow of the concentration
camp.

Gerald Weales explains, "The guilt that Quentin assumes is something
very like original sin: an acceptance that he—and all men—are evil. Or
that they have evil in them—the capacity to kill." Holga, Quentin's
third wife, says that "no one they didn't kill can be innocent again."

In 1947 Miller told an interviewer that his writing evolved from
settings and dramatic situations "which involve real questions of
right and wrong." He meant it sincerely, but this type of conventional
moralizing inevitably proves a very limited and inadequate guide to
the complexities of modern life. Miller's failure to make any serious
analysis of social life and history brought him to this unattractive
and untenable position in After the Fall. Incident at Vichy raises
similar concerns. One confronts here the demoralization of the liberal
intelligentsia, its "overwhelmedness," in the face of the traumas of
the mid-twentieth century.

After the Fall also suffers from a type of false self-criticism that
abounds in the modern theater. The character, generally rooted in
autobiography, beats his breast and proclaims, "I'm a swine! I'm a
swine!" precisely as a means of avoiding the most troubling questions
posed by his life situation. The problem with Miller's
characterization of Monroe is not chiefly that he is unkind to her. He
had the right, after all, to portray her as he thought she was. But
the "self-criticism" Quentin/Miller offers—that he fooled himself into
thinking he could be her savior ("this cheap benefactor") and then
abandoned her in the end—misses the point, at least in relation to
Miller's own life and condition.

The Miller-Monroe coupling, in real life, was not a long-lived or
happy affair, although it began idyllically enough. Monroe, Miller
discovered, was a deeply unhappy and insecure woman; in addition, she
was addicted to barbiturates. Her film roles, as a "dumb blonde," a
"joke," in her own words, deeply frustrated and depressed her.

Things went from bad to worse. In the last phase of their
relationship, during the 1960 filming of The Misfits (which Gottfried
describes as being about three men trying to get into bed with Marilyn
Monroe ... each one of them Arthur Miller), Miller "could only watch
as she swallowed her pills, and, if she became anxious, keep her
company through the night, carefully avoiding, he said, anything that
might irritate her. When he ventured into the bedroom, she would
scream at him to get out. Oftentimes she wouldn't fall asleep until
six o'clock in the morning, shortly before she was supposed to be
ready for work."

In After the Fall, Quentin/Miller is appalled by Maggie/Monroe's
neurotic behavior (the character is a popular singer in the play) and
the extent of her self-destructive tendencies. One is tempted to ask:
what did Miller expect? That he had so little insight into what the
fearsome machinery of the entertainment business could do to the
vulnerable human personality is a measure of Miller's own limited
grasp of American reality. Moreover, why did this supposed critic of
the American dream fail to shine a light on his own obvious
fascination with celebrity? To have truly subjected his own fantasies
about movie stars, "sex symbols" and the rest to a critical analysis,
that might have made a promising starting-point for a drama.

Miller's last play to receive significant attention, The Prize, was
staged in 1968. The drama centers on the relationship of two brothers,
one of whom stayed at home with his depressed father after the
latter's business went bankrupt and the other who became a glamorous
and successful doctor. The play, less pompous and more genuinely
self-critical than his previous effort, is not without interest. It
resonates with the experience of Miller and his brother Kermit and
their father, who went into a deep depression after the collapse of
his enterprise. It is, nonetheless, a slight piece.

Miller's later pieces, such as The American Clock (1980), The Ride
Down Mt. Morgan (1991) and Broken Glass (1994), reveal that the
playwright maintained his limited artistic virtues to the end of his
life.

Arthur Miller will be remembered as a serious figure, but the rebirth
of the American theater will have to take place on a far more
audacious basis, socially and artistically, than that provided by his
work.

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