Arthur Miller (Guardian)
Hyfler/Rosner
One of the greatest playwrights of the 20th century, his
work explored the dilemmas of the American dream
Michael Ratcliffe
Saturday February 12, 2005
The Guardian
Arthur Miller, one of America's greatest playwrights, who
has died aged 89, was an active and prolific writer across
seven decades. In Death Of A Salesman (1949) and The
Crucible (1953), he created two of the century's most
durable dramatic myths, and, in Timebends (1987), one of its
outstanding autobiographies. He walked his own life into the
glare of living myth when, at the height of her fame in
1956, he married Marilyn Monroe.
Miller was born in Harlem, New York. Both Jewish
grandfathers came from the same hamlet in Poland; his father
Isidore - lzzie - had been dispatched alone from Radomizi to
relatives in New York at the age of six and became a prince
of the Manhattan rag trade. Ruined in the depression, he had
had the good sense to marry the sassy and beautiful Augusta
Barnett (Gussie), who was much smarter than him.
Arthur was closer to his mother, but tender to the memory of
both parents, and their spirit, ambition and disappointments
are present in most of the plays. He once said that
everything he had written was based on somebody he had seen
or known, and although Death Of A Salesman is not strictly
autobiographical, it is hard to imagine without the lives of
Izzie and Gussie Miller.
The Millers left Harlem for Brooklyn in the early 1920s.
Arthur, their second son and middle child, was proceeding
normally through an American suburban boyhood - baseball,
skating, crooning, football - when Wall Street crashed. He
was 14. This first great discord of the American century
informs all his work. Like Dickens and Ibsen, he drew from
his father's financial disaster the lifelong convictions
that catastrophe could strike without warning and that the
crust of civilised order was perilously thin. Miller would
later pour scorn on the sentimental myth of the American
depression as a golden age of good neighbourliness -
"Everybody was your friend? Horseshit! Nobody was your
friend!"
In 1934 he went to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
where he became a student journalist, wrote his first play,
No Villain, and three more with the kind of grand, resonant
titles which reflect the gathering global melodrama of the
time: They Too Arise, Honors At Dawn, and The Great
Disobedience. He won a $1,250 prize from the Bureau of New
Plays run by the New York producers, the Theater Guild.
Tennessee Williams - four years his senior - won a New Plays
Prize in the same year.
Miller's graduation in 1938 coincided with a rare moment of
generous state funding for the arts in the US, and he joined
the Federal Theater Project (FTP) at $22.77 per week. Set up
in 1935 by Roosevelt's work-creation programme, the FTP's
purpose was to provide jobs for the unemployed of the
theatre industry. Congress killed it off in 1939, believing
it to have become too left-wing; but in its short life the
Federal Theater played to more than 12 million people in New
York City alone, allowed Orson Welles and John Houseman to
fly the pirate flag of disobedience with The Cradle Will
Rock, produced The Swing Mikado, and bought a little time
for the ambitious young Arthur Miller.
In 1940, Miller finished The Golden Years, a drama of
confrontation between Cortez and Montezuma. The script,
mislaid by Theater Guild, turned up many years later at the
University of Texas and was premiered in Britain, on BBC's
Radio Three in 1987. Today, it reads like a cross between a
Hollywood costume epic and an opera libretto in translation;
but the subject of genocide in 16th-century Mexico laid down
a pattern in Miller's career, whereby he often chose to
write about the horrors of the 20th century at one remove.
The real stories behind The Golden Years were the bombing of
Guernica and the appeasement of fascism.
A college football injury kept him from active service in
the second world war. He worked on an army training film,
wrote for the radio, drove a truck, published a novel about
anti-semitism and became a fitter at Brooklyn navy yard.
Miller was the kind of writer on whom no experience was
wasted: just as the navy yard turned up years later in A
View From The Bridge (1955), so a nightmare visit to see
Václav Havel in 1969, in the wake of the Prague Spring,
inspired one of Miller's most tensely wound later plays, The
Archbishop's Ceiling (1977).
He made Broadway at last in 1944, with The Man Who Had All
The Luck, a hubristically named fable which closed after
four performances. The play is significant, however, because
it is Miller's first attempt to mix the disciplines of
suburban tragedy, folkish realism and ironic farce. It draws
on a gorgeous inheritance of Brooklyn family and
neighbourhood stories and flags up a theme which recurs
throughout his work: personal honour.
By the end of the second world war, Arthur Miller had
written many kinds of theatre out of his system, and could
figure the mood of the time to some purpose. What would
America's peace be like? His answer was a play that can
still deliver an emotional knock-out, and became his first
hit. Opening at the Coronet Theatre on January 29, 1947,
directed by Elia Kazan, and starring Ed Begley, Beth
Merrill, Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, All My Sons ran for
328 performances - a good length for an unfamiliar
playwright, and one he rarely surpassed.
This was a new Broadway, and All My Sons was a watershed
show. Eighteen months after the euphoria of V-J Day,
audiences were ready for what is a back-from-the-war play. A
family tale of corrupt profiteering at home that led to the
death of US pilots abroad, it exploded in the pause between
victory and the attempted press-ganging of show business for
Washington's cold war. From this point on, Miller's best
scenes display a mastery of conversation, a gift for
sketching vivid characters on the margins of a play, and a
narrative talent for seizing the spectator's attention from
the start.
The Broadway theatre of the 1940s and 1950s, in which Miller
and Tennessee Williams made their name, was something of a
public tribune, led by spectacular performers, directors,
artists and writers: Kazan, Eugene O'Neill, William Inge,
the designer Jo Mielziner, actors such as Marlon Brando,
Jessica Tandy and Lee J Cobb. The tribune was graced by the
golden age of the American musical which ran alongside it,
and attended by a highly responsive press. Subtitled Certain
Private Conversations In Two Acts And A Requiem, Death Of A
Salesman opened at the Morosco Theatre on February 10, 1949,
and played for 742 performances: it was the biggest success
of Miller's career and has recently enjoyed a revival on
Broadway which is due to transfer to London in May.
Sales rep, husband and father, "way out there in the blue,
riding on a smile and a shoeshine", Willy Loman is a slave
to the US ideals of pitching, hard work and equal
opportunity, driven by the disciplines of exemplary
manliness in the home and the need to keep up appearances
outside it. Like Williams's Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar
Named Desire - the two plays are contemporaneous - Willy
freefalls through American society by following its false
dreams. He destroys his sons with great expectations, and is
working himself to death.
If you met Willy Loman going on about his boys in a hotel
bar out on the road, you would make for the door within
minutes. The strength of the play is that Miller makes this
exasperating dumbness precisely the reason why the economic
injustice against him is so great. After two decades of
depression and two world wars, the nation was still not
respecting his own. A man whose insurance policy makes him
worth more dead than alive, does what Hamlet only talks of
doing, and walks into the air. It is a shameful, culpably
American suicide, and the play asks two questions. What is
"America"? And what should America be?
The questions are asked, too, in All My Sons (1947), The
Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955). Talking
to Eric Hobsbawm later in life, Miller identified two
paradoxes that make the US so volatile and contradictory. In
the land where the individual is king, society rules
supreme. In a nation of immigrants, the "alien" is necessary
and forever being redefined - the subject of A View From The
Bridge. "Once you've accepted the idea that orthodoxy is
required", he said, "you have to go through the
Inquisition".
By 1949, a new inquisition had indeed detected a new
heresy - the enemy within - and sniffed a pandemic of
Marxism on the wind. Joy in victory was rapidly tarnished by
the paranoia of McCarthyism. The House Un-American
Activities Committee was hijacked by the hard right, and one
of its first tasks would be to disinfect the Augean stables
of showbiz.
Miller's integrity was tested like steel. There was never a
blacklist on Broadway like those in Hollywood and
Washington, but many of his old friends and colleagues were
pressed by HUAC to shop anyone who had once attended some
pathetic, long-forgotten, left-wing meeting or conference,
and who may or may not have belonged to the Communist party.
Miller began to feel as if he was living in an occupied
country.
Some of the most moving pages he ever wrote are in
Timebends, and describe the anguish of Elia Kazan, whom he
loved and admired like a brother, as the great director
walked him through the chill, untapped woods of a
Connecticut spring, trying to explain why he had decided to
remain in work by throwing HUAC a few names.
Miller drove straight from the Kazans to Salem. He had
noticed that ceremonies of observed ritual and public
contrition were common to the HUAC hearings and to the
Massachusetts witch-trials of the late 17th century: "What I
sought was a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the
heart, all-inclusive, full of light, a sonorous instrument
whose reverberations would penetrate to the centre of this
miasma."
The Crucible was that metaphor, and the penetrating strength
of its light has not dimmed. New York was at first
discomfited, even offended, by the historical analogy
proposed, and the play - which opened at the Martin Beck
Theatre on January 22 1953, and ran for a modest 197
performances - enjoyed greater success in revival two years
later. People then claimed that Miller had rewritten it,
made it "warmer". His response was trenchant: he had not
changed a comma, but Joe McCarthy was dead, and the high
tide of fear had receded. Not completely, however, and in
1956 HUAC pulled Miller himself in. He refused to testify,
was found guilty of contempt of Congress, and had his
passport withdrawn. By this time, his life had moved on to
the front page of the world, and remained there for the next
six years.
Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller, who married over the
weekend of June 30 1956, were not indulging a whirlwind
romance. They had had an affair in the early 1950s and
corresponded regularly since; each seems to have become a
kind of beacon to the other in a storm-darkened world.
Arthur, Marilyn's fourth husband, made himself a hostage to
fortune from the start when he told the press: "Marilyn will
only make one film in every 18 months or so, which will take
her about eight weeks". "And the other 18 months?" "She will
be my wife. That's a full-time job". It looked as though it
might be. Within a year she had risked her own - always
precarious - Hollywood career by going with Miller to
Washington to speak in his favour at the contempt hearings;
her intervention helped to keep him out of prison.
Each married an idea of the other that could not be
sustained. She called him "Papa", not entirely in jest. He
saw her as a revolutionary idealist. They were both right,
and both wrong. Lurching between romance and misery, the
marriage suffered two miscarriages and lasted just five
years. In Britain, it occasioned early tabloid frenzy, with
a crude script which never changed: Pompous Yankee Egghead
Marries Dumb Beauty. The script was male-defined, and its
subtext malign envy and lecherous resentment. Miller could
not win. He looked back on the filming of The Misfits, which
he wrote, in 1961 - with Monroe, John Huston, Clark Gable
and Montgomery Clift - as the lowest point of his life.
"Neither of us reproaches the other," he told Huston when it
was all over, "and there's no one else to blame."
For more than a quarter of a century it was understood by
interviewers of Arthur Miller that Marilyn was off-limits,
but after the writing and publication of Timebends the
problem went away, except that he then said he had written
everything he wanted to say: "It was impossible to guess
what she wanted for herself when she herself had no idea
beyond the peaceful completion of each day. When she
appeared the future vanished; she seemed without
expectations, and this was like freedom. At the same time,
the mystery put its own burden on us, the burden of the
unknown."
After her death in 1962, he wrote his first play for seven
years, and placed it entirely inside the autobiographical
protagonist's head: After The Fall, the most interior play
by an American master since O'Neill's Strange Interlude in
1928, opened to a storm of publicity and outrage on January
23 1964 at the Anta Theatre on Washington Square. The
outrage was that Miller had dared to "put Marilyn on stage"
so soon, although audiences today are more likely to feel
that, in taking stock of his life so far, he deals far less
gently with his first wife Mary Slattery, whom he married in
1940, and with himself. But critics who complained that he
had failed to do justice to the "great magic subject" of
Marilyn Monroe would have to wait for Timebends. He returned
to the subject of Monroe again, many years later, in his
play Finishing The Picture (2004).
The 1960s began Miller's wilderness years ("I didn't speak
with a contemporary accent"), but a watchdog in the
wilderness still has work to do, and Miller's was well
mapped. He married Inge Morath, the Magnum photographer, in
1962; the marriage lasted until her death (obituary,
February 6 2002).
Through the fame of his second marriage and divorce, and the
universal nature of his two most performed plays, he became
iconic at 50. His views and his signature were sought on
everything. He was the first American President of
International PEN (1965-69) and the world's most famous
playwright since Shaw.
He continued to write, like Ibsen, with a civic insistence
on the causality of human behaviour. Survival depended on
men and women taking responsibility for what they do and,
more contentiously, for what they know other men and women
to be doing. "It's me", he said at the height of the Vietnam
war, "I'm responsible. I'm paying the taxes that pay for the
rope that ties the guy's hands, and my bucks are paying for
the gas that drives the truck." He led an American group to
Paris in 1968 with a proposal to stop the war, but on stage
he refined his anger into the blistering family comedy of
The Price (1968), and never set a play in Vietnam.
He described himself as someone who wrote about what was "in
the air", but he often did this obliquely. His best writing
about the Holocaust is contained in the guilty introspection
of After The Fall, not in the oddly prurient television play
about the Auschwitz womens' orchestra, Playing For Time
(1981). When, in Broken Glass (1994), he appeared to be
writing openly about Kristallnacht and our universal
responsibility for the genocide of the late 1930s and 1940s,
the real subjects were more personal and urgent: the
spiritual void of the early 1990s, his own Jewishness, and
the obscene reappearance of genocide, half a century after
the Holocaust, in Yugoslavia.
In a tribute on Miller's 80th birthday, the writer Carlos
Fuentes said that bigotry would be the sin of the 21st
century, and was staring at us out of A View From The
Bridge.
The theatre remained his first and last love - neither
fiction nor the cinema ever tempted him for long - and an
Indian summer of witty, troubled, ironic and often
undervalued pieces for the stage graced his last three
decades. He believed that theatre would survive, because it
was "the art of the present tense", and audiences would
still want to give. But it would, he thought, be simpler. Of
the far from simple, and very diverse, later plays perhaps
only The Price will join the quartet of the 1940s and 1950s
in the standard rep. This is partly because in Solomon, the
junk dealer who attacks English grammar with a Yiddish
pickaxe, Miller invented a show stealer on the scale of the
sozzled photographer in Priestley's When We Are Married. But
four one-acters, paired as Two-Way Mirror (1985) and Danger:
Memory! (1986) are masterly magazine stories for the stage;
and The American Clock (1980), a depression vaudeville where
Izzie and Gussie Miller finally take centre stage, has
enormous charm, power to move, and some of the funniest
scenes Miller wrote.
The true masterpiece of these later decades, however, is
Timebends, a profoundly sharp and honest memoir that plays
fast and loose with conventional chronology, but holds its
narrative firm by the seductively conversational tone in
which it is, almost like music, often composed. By its very
success, it denies Miller's distinction between dialogue and
prose. "One could walk around a play," he writes. "It
excited an architectural pleasure that mere prose did not."
Yet Timebends exemplifies the kind of prose that may be
walked around, and there is nothing mere about it.
Miller became mantrically obsessed with Broadway's decline,
and never shed his generation's sense of a Broadway hit as
the true benchmark of success. In 1984, Salesman returned to
Broadway with Dustin Hoffman. The old tribune was delighted,
but wise: "Fashion and rejection are experiences felt by
all. Know that, or go mad."
Then in 1998 came his play Mr Peters' Connections, premiered
at the tiny Signature Theater on the W 42nd Street fringe.
Both playwright, and theatre, still carried sufficient clout
to attract a star player such as Peter Falk. For their
season in 2000, Chicago Lyric Opera commissioned an opera of
A View From The Bridge from William Bolcombe, and Miller's
interest was keen. Although he wrote of it rarely, he loved
music.
Throughout his long career, there was no shortage of
distinguished dissenting Americans against Miller, firing
from left and right: Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Mary
McCarthy, the academic theatre critics Robert Brustein and
Eric Bentley, the film critic Pauline Kael. He was too
intellectual for Broadway, and too "Broadway" for the
intellectuals. "This theatre is corn," snapped McCarthy in
1958, by which she probably meant he attempted to decode
plain lives and asked the kind of embarrassing 19th
century-type questions modern highbrow writers were not
supposed to ask. Such as: How can we be useful? and, why do
we live? Vidal begged him to stop telling people what they
already knew, missing the point (for once) that the best
bloodyminded writers have done that since the beginning of
time.
For a decade, from the mid-1980s, his work was more highly
valued in Britain, where a succession of younger theatre
directors Paul Unwin at Bristol Old Vic, David Thacker at
the Young Vic, Richard Eyre at the National - offered time,
intelligence and tender loving care. Audiences seized on
Miller as the revitalising sage the British theatre did not
have; Christopher Bigsby set up the Arthur Miller Centre for
American Studies at the University of East Anglia. In 1995
he celebrated his 80th birthday in Norwich; over the
following week he was toasted at the Ivy, received a packed
evening at the National and an honorary degree from Oxford,
where he was visiting professor of drama. In New York, PEN
gave a do at the town hall.
Journalists, no less than theatre people, loved listening
and talking to him. Variously compared to a watchful heron,
an obelisk in motion, an amiable crocodile and Mount
Rushmore (all of it), Arthur Miller cut a considerable
figure well into his ninth decade. Low-voiced, curling and
folding himself into sofas and chairs, he was a generous and
masterly interviewee; no two Miller interviews were ever the
same.
He wrote his plays in his country home, with its 380 acres,
in Connecticut, where he died. Well into old age he got up
at 6.30am, swam every morning, and went straight to his
studio a hundred yards from the house. All his life he loved
making things, and in Connecticut he built chairs, cabinets,
a dinner table, a bed - many of them, he noted, with a
rueful grin and one eye on the Puritan farmers of Salem,
vaguely churchy. As farming in the east continued to decline
during the 1980s and 1990s, he delighted in the return of
wild turkeys and coyotes to the same New World wilderness
the settlers had anathematised as the devil's lair.
Paradise, lost to bigotry and paranoia 300 years before, was
being a little regained.
He is survived by a son and daughter from his first
marriage; and a daughter from his marriage to Inge Morath.
· Arthur Miller, playwright, born October 17 1915; died
February 10 2005