The Slayer of False Values

By Richard Schickel

Inspiration is a rare and flighty bird. Most of us never catch a glimpse of it. Very occasionally it settles down helpfully in the corner, cawing advice to artists as they pile up those bodies of work on which their hopes of immortality rest. More usually--and this was the case with Arthur Miller--it touches down briefly, then darts away. The artist may catch tantalizing sight of the creature as he walks on through the woods, but it never again perches long on his shoulder.

It was in the spring of 1947 that the 31-year-old Arthur Miller heard the sweetest--and most profound--birdsong of his life. After a decade of struggle he had finally achieved a hit Broadway play, All My Sons, and with its proceeds bought a farm in Roxbury, Conn. Leaving his family behind in Brooklyn, he repaired to the country, built himself a cabin-studio (he was a great carpenter), settled down at a crude desk he had also fashioned and began writing. He had a first line for a new play in mind, and some thoughts about its tragic theme--a man selling his soul and eventually his life to the false values of materialist America. By the wee hours he had completed the first draft of the first act of the play that was eventually known as Death of a Salesman.

The rest took a little longer--about six weeks--not counting production rewrites. But Elia Kazan, then his best friend, and perhaps always his best director, was correct when he wrote that Miller "didn't write Death of a Salesman; he released it." Not a week has passed since the play premiered on Broadway 56 years ago this month when it was not playing somewhere in the world, playing too on our instinctive response to an instinctive work.

On opening night a woman told Miller his play was "a time bomb under American capitalism," and he hoped she was right. But if it were just a matter of politics (Miller was at the time a committed Stalinist sympathizer), the play would not have lasted. His protagonist, Willy Loman, however, is an Everyman, someone who heedlessly believes all the lies that are fed to us--the ones about success and self-realization, the ones about consumerism, the ones about the necessity of being, as he puts it, "well liked." At the time, the fancier critics thought Willy lacked the noble stature for tragedy. But that's nonsense. We don't live in an Aristotelian age; we live in the age of Donald Trump. And Willy, trying to pass on his false values to his sons (and incidentally destroying them as a result), has become an ever more poignant, and prescient, figure.

Miller, ever after, bore the weight of the heightened expectations, and the celebrity, that Salesman imposed on him. He wrote some good plays--The Crucible, a heavy-handed but still potent work in which the Salem witch trials stood in metaphorically for contemporary McCarthyism;The Price, wherein he returned to the world of lower-middle-class lying and striving--but never again a great one. He also, alas, wrote some pretty bad ones, most notably After the Fall, about his disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe, which painted her as a monster, him as her improbably pious victim. He defended himself nobly when the House Un-American Activities Committee came calling in 1956. That made him a hero to the liberal community, and he used that position passionately to defend civil liberties in the U.S. Kazan, who notoriously cooperated with the committee, thought Miller was acting like "a high school boy." Others did not.

As the years wore on, he became something of a paradigm to some of us: the octogenarian still writing, still thinking (and, incidentally, living happily with his 34-year-old girlfriend), still part of our political and moral discourse. And then, Chicago's Goodman Theatre last fall mounted Finishing the Picture. It was the play about Marilyn that almost sweetens the bad taste of After the Fall. She's a silent, drugged-out, usually nude, presence in a drama about getting her sufficiently mobilized to complete a film. Obviously based on the situation surrounding her final appearance, in The Misfits, which Miller wrote for her, it is a dark, sharp comedy about desperate people trying to stay reasonable in the face of unreason. There's another universal metaphor in there somewhere, but Miller didn't ride it hard; he just enjoyed it. It's dismaying that dim reviews derailed the play's trip to Broadway, but it was heartening to see the old man sounding so spry.

Finishing the Picture is not Death of a Salesman. Nothing ever could be. Maybe history will finally judge Arthur Miller a one-masterpiece writer. But so what? Speaking to her sons, Willy Loman's wife cried out, "Attention must be paid." It was. One suspects it always will be.