Arthur Miller 1915-2005

Other articles on Arthur Miller: Kushner on Miller by TONY KUSHNER Arthur Miller: Theater to Change the World Attention Must Be Paid: In Memory of Arthur Miller The Theater and New Ideas Sitting Together in the Dark and Moving Towards the Light Arthur Miller Dies Arthur Miller Accuses Bush of Abusing and Curbing Civil Rights

Arthur Miller: Theater to Change the World

by C.J., Revolution #004, May 29, 2005, posted at revcom.us

"Shipping clerk, salesman, business of one kind or another. It's a measly manner of existence. To devote your whole life to keeping stock, or making phone calls, or selling or buying. To suffer fifty weeks of the year for the sake of a two-week vacation, when all you really desire is to be outdoors, with your shirt off. And always to have to get ahead of the next fella..."

—Biff Loman, Death of a Salesman

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is the story of Willy Loman, a decent man driven to despair and suicide when his life is declared over by the cold workings of American capitalism. He kills himself in his car so his son can collect his life insurance. Miller describes Willy Loman as someone who "gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it."

When you think about it, it's one of those remarkable ironies of history that this play—which so poignantly reveals the toxic heart of the "American dream"—won a Pulitzer Prize and has been one of the most frequently read plays in U.S. high school and college English classes over the past six decades. It is testament to the tricky way an artwork which powerfully lays bare a society's deceits can make its way deep into that very body politic, sowing doubts, debate, and seeds of change.

Equally remarkable, Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, just as Henry Luce, publisher of Time magazine, was declaring the "American Century," and Americans were being directed to enjoy the "good-times" in this reputed best of all possible worlds. The play hit with such force in the Broadway theater that often at the final curtain there was silence—audience members, especially men, "bent forward covering their faces, and others openly weeping."

The world lost a great one when Arthur Miller died in February 2005 at the age of 89.

"I could not imagine a theater worth my time that did not want to change the world, any more than a creative scientist could wish to prove the validity of everything that is already known."

Arthur Miller wrote that, and he made it real, seeking new ways to explore the new in play after play.

In 1947, mere months after World War 2 ended, Miller's All My Sons arrived on Broadway—a play that reveals the way the logic of capitalist relations in America drives a small-time industrialist to knowingly send faulty airplane parts to the military during the war, causing the deaths of several pilots and ripping apart his own family.

A few years after Salesman 's huge success in 1949, and just as the McCarthy inquisition was settling around the necks of thousands of communists and liberals, Miller brought to Broadway The Crucible (1953)—a harrowing tale set during the Salem, Massachusetts witch trials of 1692. His central characters struggle for truth and love as a cruel theocratic government manipulates a terrified population into turning on their fellow citizens with wild- eyed accusations. All dissent from the madness is regarded as further proof of the devil.

Miller's A View from the Bridge was produced in 1955 (revised as a two-act play in 1956). This devastating play was set in Brooklyn's Red Hook waterfront where the "promise" of America for peasants arriving from post-war Italy turned out to be a back-breaking job in an isolated urban backwater where the old feudal traditions thrived alongside the cold requirements of capitalist calculations—and the government kept order by turning family members into snitches.

Arthur Miller would write for the next five decades, into the 21st century. He was the author of more than 20 plays, as well as screenplays, short stories, books of reportage, a richly conceived autobiography Timebends , and numerous groundbreaking essays on the role of theater in society and the creative process. His plays have been performed and revived more often than any other American playwright, in countries across the globe.

Miller's political themes command attention because he fearlessly confronts the emptiness and heartlessness of the late-imperialist era. But I think he is beloved for his ability to convey, with great depth and tenderness, the peculiar ways in which social contradictions of our era become concentrated in the interior lives of individuals and embedded in the choices they make.

Everywhere in Miller's plays one encounters unbearably lonely people, more or less dying to connect—a condition which in Miller's view is not some universal and timeless human conundrum, but has a material basis in modern capitalist society. And if it's bound up with our historical moment, this implies possibilities for human beings to consciously transform themselves and the world: "We want to give of ourselves, and yet all we train for is to take, as though nothing less will keep the world at a safe distance. A time will come when they will look back at us astonished that we saw something holy in the competition for the means of existence." (Miller, on the one-year anniversary of Death of a Salesman)

In exploring this bleak terrain, his plays are searching out "the right way of living in the world," even while the characters do not always make the right decisions. He presents people and situations in their changing contradictoriness: ".To take up a sad story and discover the hope that may lie buried in it, requires a most complete grasp of the characters involved. For nothing is so destructive of reality in literature as thinly motivated optimism. It is my view—or my prejudice— that when a man is seen whole and round and so characterized, when he is allowed his life on the stage over and beyond the mould and purpose of the story, hope will show its face in his, just as it does, even so dimly, in life." (Miller, The Nature of Tragedy , 1950, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller )

Until the age of 12 Arthur Miller lived as a rich kid, the son of Augusta and Isidore Miller. Isidore was a Jewish immigrant who shipped out from Europe alone at the age of seven to join his parents in New York, and rose to own one of the largest coat manufacturing businesses in the country, while never learning to read or write in any language. The family home was a rambling apartment overlooking the north end of New York City's Central Park (then a wealthy Jewish area of Harlem), and Isidore was chauffeured downtown to his factory by limousine.

With the stockmarket crash of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression, the coat business tanked, and the Millers had to move to a small shabby house in the flatlands of Brooklyn next door to the poor relations. Arthur later wrote of his father: "Along with a desire to help, I was filling with pity for him. As the waiting began for the past to return and the unreality of the present wound itself around us all like some dusty vine that had taken root in the living room carpet and could not be kept down for more than a day before it grew again. It was my father who was our link to the outside world, and his news was bad every night." (Miller, Timebends )

Augusta Miller, a woman accustomed to paying a Columbia University student $2 an afternoon just to come talk to her about novels, cursed her rough new life but soldiered on nonetheless, earning food money playing illegal bridge games all over Midwood and Flatbush.

Arthur made it through okay, spending his teens living cheek-by-jowl with an endless stream of enterprising neighbors and relatives, Hymie and Stella and Manny—closely observing how they tried to make sense of their harsh lives.

Some of them would later be reincarnated in his plays. They were also among the people for whom he wrote his plays. ".My style as a playwright had been influenced by Stella no less than by my mother, that somewhere down deep where the sources are was a rule never if possible to let an uncultivated, vulgarly candid, worldly, loving bleached-blonde woman walk out of one of my plays disappointed."

Miller came of age in the 1930s when, as he said, "one lived as though in a permanent emergency.which would end with either the triumph or defeat of fascism.. A point arrived—perhaps around 1936—when for the first time unpolitical people began thinking of common action as a way out of their impossible conditions."

Miller describes the afternoon he was introduced to Marxism while watching a ball game in front of Dozick's drug store. He was 16 and an older boy, a college student he barely knew, showed up.

"[He] stood beside me explaining that although it might not be evident to the naked eye, there were really two classes of people in society, the workers and the employers. And that all over the world, including Brooklyn, of course, a revolution that would transform every country was inexorably building up steam. I remember giving up my turn to get into the game and saying to him, `Everything is upside down!'—meaning that in my family workers had always been a nuisance; necessary though they might be, they were always getting in the way of businessmen trying to make and sell things."

Transforming the world would prove to be far more complex than the communists of that time projected, and nothing in life was ever so linear and predetermined as their epistemology would have it. But in important ways, "the spin [his] soul was given by this anonymous college student" stayed with Miller, as the burgeoning left movement gained influence throughout American society. He never became a communist, but he permanently crossed over to stand with the oppressed.

After high school, Arthur was one of the lucky ones to get a job in an auto parts warehouse. He saved the money for college (and later wrote a play about the experience, A Memory of Two Mondays ). No one in his world except his mother and brother had ever had any use for books, but during that year at the warehouse he started to read. "He is probably the only man who ever read through War and Peace entirely on the subway, standing up," his friend the director Harold Clurman wrote.

Miller enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1934 and four years later had won all of the school's play writing awards and was headed back to New York City. He worked for the Federal Theater Project, wrote for radio, took some factory work, refused write-for-hire Hollywood jobs, and was supported by his first wife, all the while writing plays. In 1944, his first play on Broadway flopped after four days, and he turned to writing a novel, Focus, a searing tale of how anti-semitism and fascism could take root in America. The book sold well, and established him as a writer. More plays soon came tumbling out.

You meet Willy Loman on the last day of his life. It is 1949. Death of a Salesman opens as he drops his sample cases in the kitchen, "thankfully letting his burden down," the stage directions read. Willy is past 60, stooped and exhausted, haunted by the fact that nothing about his life remains in his control—not his job (he will be fired later that day), not his sons (Biff has returned home again without a job or moral center), not even his car, which he nearly drove off the road on his way back from New England.

He believed in the dream, and still does, but he is being thrown out like a used pair of shoes.

Only his wife Linda knows how close he is to ending it all, and she is in a desperate struggle to save his life, and to give it meaning. Her pronouncement to her sons is one of the most famous speeches in American theater:

"Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest man 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 go to his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. "

All his life, Willy has had to lie, obfuscate, and peddle hype—to the world and to himself—in the required drill to "succeed." Now as it all flies apart, moments from his past intrude and come brashly to life onstage.

To deliver the complexity of what was going on in Willy's head, Miller departed from the realism of All My Sons ; time is exploded, linear cause and effect rearranged, the sets minimized—a table and chairs become the kitchen, a window frame hangs in air.

These formal innovations were new for Miller and uncommon for Broadway.

Miller wrote:

"There is no limit to the expansion of the audience's imagination so long as the play's internal logic is kept inviolate. It is not true that conventionalism is demanded. They will move with you anywhere; they will believe right into the moon so long as you believe who tell them this tale. We are at the beginning of many explosions of form. They are waiting for wonders."

("The Salesman Has a Birthday," 1950, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller)

This was an artist with a deep-going relationship with his audience, and serious respect for their ability to make sense of well-constructed theater.

He later said about the experiments in form found in Death of a Salesman :

"I was very moved by German expressionism¹ when I was in school; yet there too something was perverse in it to me. It was the end of man, there are no people in it any more; that was especially true of the real German stuff: it's the bitter end of the world where man is a voice of his class function, and that's it. Brecht² has a lot of that in him, but he's too much of a poet to be enslaved by it. And yet at the same time I learned a great deal from it. I used elements of it that were fused into Death of a Salesman ."

Willy's older brother, Uncle Ben, a man who has recently died, makes regular ghostly appearances to counsel Willy on the puniness of his life's path—never failing to remind him of his own choice to grab adventure in Alaska ("When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle, and when I was twenty-one I walked out. And by God I was rich.") These jarring visitations, along with scenes from Willy's past, co-exist in a play that retains the basic structure of a realistic setting. The effect of this is to connect the audience with how social relations are poisoned in a world that has logic and order but is fundamentally inhumane and anarchic.

Willy is driven by forces much larger than he can understand, but he is not simply "a voice of his class function"—he is not a reified representative of the tossed-out lower middle class. Ironically perhaps, Miller needed the level of abstraction offered by the expressionist approach to fully convey the confused and complex Willy as a person "whole and round."

Miller's choice of Willy as his protagonist has been a source of much argumentation over the past half-century. He did not fit the mold of knight in shining armor, up-by-the-bootstraps Horatio Alger, or even the conflicted moral visionary. Neither did he have a place in a reductive version of the class struggle that has the evil bourgeoisie and the noble proletariat squaring off (or trading positions), rosy outcome predetermined.

Instead, in this play Miller found something to learn about this society—what it was and what human beings could be capable of—in examining the tragic saga of a person in the middle, caught up in the dream that is actually an alienating nightmare for the vast majority. In coming to care about what happens to this pointedly unheroic individual, your heart opens up to the millions of individuals whose life force gets snuffed out by a system that would turn people into idea-less clerks of commerce (or beasts of burden) before they have a chance to soar, just as it sucked up the fresh air and invaded Willy's backyard with the "bricks and windows" of the cold new apartment buildings filled with people who could not connect.

Miller's plays are rich with an understanding of social class, but his body of work does not explore the potential of the proletarian class of our era to act as agent for the emancipation of humanity. By the `50s he had rejected as futile and wrongheaded the expressed mission of the communists of his day and the various socialist experiments then underway.

Taking all this history apart, and Miller's intersection with it, goes far beyond the scope of this article. But one can say that while Miller correctly scorned the gross determinism which marked much of the communist movement, he, like many other left artists in the post-war period, negated it with a bourgeois democratic and not a revolutionary vision.

He found a powerful voice in looking at the crossroads facing the individual who apprehends the terrible truth of a situation and struggles to act honorably, to do right by humanity.

In the last scene of The Crucible , after several townspeople have been hanged as witches, the central character John Proctor makes a lying confession of having seen the devil—to save his life and to return to his wife whom he has come to love profoundly through this whole ordeal. But when the town inquisitors try to make him sign an affidavit "to post on the church door for the good instruction of the village," he refuses. They demand "Why?!", and he cries out: "Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang!"

The artistry of The Crucible , along with its scorching indictment of absolutist autocracy, has made it Miller's most-produced play. Proctor goes to his death but up to his final moment, you do not know what he will do, what you would do, and even at certain points, what he should do. Miller understood that if theater is to open new pathways it must engage uncertainty as part of its poetry. To be truthful, you better try to astonish. Miller's plays did this well, and with purpose: "I still believe that when a play questions, even threatens, our social arrangement, that is when it really shakes us profoundly and dangerously, and that is when you've got to be great; good isn't enough." ("Arthur Miller: An Interview," by Olga Carlisle and Rose Styron)

When I saw The Crucible in revival on Broadway following 9/11, the proclamation by hanging Judge Danforth ("You must understand, sir, a person is either with this court or he must be counted against it, there be no road between.") drew audible gasps from the first row to the balcony. But in the few years since, I imagine Miller himself was shocked by how gruesomely exact his 17th century story was coming to resemble the ugly fundamentalist pageant unfolding in 21st century America.

Rarely have life and art collided more potently than with the staging of The Crucible. By the time of its Broadway opening, the McCarthy witch hunt was in full swing—a phenomenon which Miller attributed largely to the frantic reaction of rightwing forces inside the U.S. government to the "loss of China", i.e., the 1949 victory of the Chinese communists, who in Miller's view, "were basically a miserably exploited peasantry that at long last had risen up and thrown their exploiters into the sea. I thought it was a great idea." (Miller from " The Crucible in History," 1999, Echoes Down the Corridor )

The "red scare" was part of a massive effort by forces within the U.S. bourgeoisie to swiftly secure supremacy against the Soviet Union in the post-war world. They dropped the atomic bomb on Japan to terrorize the planet; they painted the Soviets (their allies the year before) as the totalitarian scourge of humanity; and meanwhile the U.S. authorities occupying Germany removed all mention of the Hitler decade from the schoolbooks.

In the U.S., hundreds of artists and other individuals were dragged before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and accused of being spies, their careers and lives ruined.

Miller was among the suspects. Shortly after The Crucible went up, and four years before he was subpoenaed by HUAC, the renewal of his outdated passport was denied and at the last minute he was prevented from traveling to the Belgian premiere of the play.

"A rather farcical situation soon developed. Since the play was the first and practically the only artistic evidence Europe had of resistance to what was considered a fascistic McCarthyism, the applause at the final curtain was intense and insistent, and since the newspapers had announced I had accepted the invitation to be present, there were calls for the author. These went on and on until the American ambassador felt compelled to stand and take a bow. A species of insanity was spreading everywhere. Here was the ambassador, an officer of the State Department, acknowledging the applause for someone deemed by that department too dangerous to be present."

("The Crucible in History")

It got more insane. Four years later, in 1956, Miller was formally called before the HUAC. By this time, news was out of Miller's forthcoming marriage to actress Marilyn Monroe and the chairman of HUAC sent word through Miller's lawyer that "he would be inclined to cancel my hearing altogether if Miss Monroe would consent to have a picture taken with him. This offer having been declined, the good chairman, as my hearing came to an end, proceeded to entreat me to write less tragically about our country."

Miller displayed a healthy sense of humor about even the most dire developments (as well as in his plays), and the fact that someone of his stature refused to name names contributed to the eventual winding down of the witch-hunt. He did not even take the Fifth (refusal to answer "on the grounds that it may incriminate yourself"). Echoing his character John Proctor, he told the Committee in effect that his associations were none of their goddamn business. He was convicted, fined, and given a suspended prison sentence that was overturned on appeal the next year.

In 1965, Miller took a four-year term as the head of PEN, the international literary association that defends writers persecuted by governments, enhancing the power and reach of the organization around the world. He stood up against the Vietnam War early and passionately. In 1985, he and British playwright Harold Pinter were thrown out of the U.S. embassy in Turkey after protesting Turkey's huge number of political prisoners at a state dinner.

Arthur Miller was an ethical man, and he challenged people to consider their responsibility to the human race in ways that were neither blandly moralistic nor facile.

He wrote of Incident at Vichy (1964), his play about a collection of diverse individuals trapped for the night in a Nazi holding tank:

"The occasion of the play is the occupation of France, but it's about today. It concerns the question of insight—of seeing in oneself the capacity for collaboration with the evil one condemns. It's a question that exists for all of us—what, for example, is the responsibility of each of us for allowing the slums of Harlem to exist? Some perfectly exemplary citizens, considerate of their families and friends, contributing to charities and so forth, are indirectly profiting from conditions like that."

Miller was a democrat, not a revolutionary communist. As eloquently as he exposed the reality of what the American dream actually meant for people, he continued to believe in the promise of it. Doubly ironic since he brought us play after play which made abundantly clear that America could never deliver that promise. As is often the case, the impact of the art went beyond the politics of the creator.

But right up to the end, Arthur Miller engaged the world, thumbing his nose at absolutist authorities and taking on their killing crusades. On February 15, 2003, I ran into him bundled up in the front seat of a station wagon trapped in Manhattan gridlock on the way to the huge international protest against the Iraq invasion. Two days later, he came out in a blizzard to join the poets at Lincoln Center for Not In Our Name's "Poems Not Fit for the White House."

He seemed to never let the enormity of what confronts humanity—not to mention the pettiness of cranky theater reviewers—paralyze him.

In the first scene of the disturbing and beautiful film, The Misfits (1961), Marilyn Monroe's Roslyn is trying to memorize the legal answer required by the Reno court for a quick divorce ("he persistently and cruelly ignored my personal wishes, and on several occasions resorted to physical violence."). In the saddest way she suddenly turns to her friend, "Why can't I just say he wasn't there? I mean you could touch him but he wasn't there."

Miller's screenplay for The Misfits , and much of Miller's drama, unfolds tragically around this basic dilemma: we are a race of creatures capable of boundless love and courage and invention, trapped in a brittle, obsolete society in which we can touch each other but not be present. The crackling contradictions, including the potential for new things embodied there, is a story Miller tells again and again, each time anew.

Later in the film, Eli Wallach's character, Guido (a cowboy, a World War 2 pilot and one damaged individual), careens down the highway in a drunken tear, pouring out his soul to Roslyn in the back seat: "We're all blind bombardiers, Roslyn. We kill people we never even saw. I bombed nine cities.. Think of all the puppy dogs and mail carriers and eyeglasses that must have gone up. Dropping a bomb is like telling like a lie. Makes everything go quiet and smooth, pretty soon you don't hear anything, you don't see anything.."

I think Miller saw a kind of moral equivalence in the savagery of modern society and the violation of the truth. He did not wish to take part in either, and with his art he broke open some of the wretched secrets lying beneath the surface, so that we could sift through and confront this reality, quietly at first, together in a dark room—but ultimately with the hope that once we know we can never be quiet again.

NOTES:

^1.A movement in art and literature which began in the early 1900s in reaction to naturalism which was concerned primarily with the realistic representation of existence; expressionism had as its object the expression, or portrayal, of the inner feelings, experiences, and reactions of the artist or writer.

[Return to article]

^2.Bertolt Brecht was a communist playwright from Germany who himself broke new ground in the theater, in a different direction from Miller.

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Attention Must Be Paid: In Memory of Arthur Miller

Revolution #004, May 29, 2005, posted at revcom.us

Estelle Parsons stepped to the podium, her voice instantly taut with a suppressed fury:

"Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest man 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 go to his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person ."

"Attention must be paid." Words I memorized in high school almost four decades ago, words that still deliver the betrayal of hard work in pursuit of an illusion, an American dream that spits out even its most ardent believers. Words that dig deep at the sons, daughters, and partners of all who chase this dream, only to be ground up, inflicting that potent mixture of rage and love that is the family.

I am sitting in The Majestic, one of Broadway's grandest theaters, it's a full house in the middle of a workday, in tribute to Arthur Miller who died the month before. At once, I am awed by the power of his art and life, and, at the same time, I am wrestling with why it is that I might be the youngest person there, aside from Miller's own children. This is not good.

Speaker after speaker brought forward examples of Arthur Miller's integrity, his courage in living a life of principle— standing up to the inquisition of the McCarthy hearings, publicly opposing the Vietnam and Iraq wars, and most of all, his creation of a rich body of work that exposed the dark side of America.

From the vise grip that squeezed the life out of a traveling salesman, to the challenge of standing up to the vicious terror of a majority whipped up by a lunatic fear and revenge in The Crucible , Miller brings you right into the harsh and complex reality of life, the killing contradictions. He makes you recognize and wrestle with the choices his characters make and, in so doing, reveals the potential to understand and, perhaps, to do better. Arthur Miller made wise and ethical choices in his life, his example makes us feel we can, and must, do so too.

The Majestic was filled not just in memory and celebration of Miller's life and work, but with an urgent tension for today. There was a palpable sense that these are times, with the mad peril of Christian fascists looming, that will require many to stand up for principle, no matter the cost. The Reverend William Sloan Coffin, pastor emeritus of Riverside Church, brought some humor to bear, telling the audience what he said to Miller, who could hear, but not speak, a few days before he died: "I know you think you are on your way to nowhere, but I've got better information than you do. They've got a special seat up there for you. As God's favorite atheist, your sole assignment is to keep the Christians honest. What you do with the Jews, you have to figure out on your own time."

We laugh at the image, yet acutely feel the need for more Arthur Millers. There is a relationship between a society where the culture is so debased, where the majority of youth and people are kept from arts such as theater, and a society where a cowboy-inspired theocratic movement that scorns science, the truth, and all imagination—save that of the rapture—is on the ascendancy.

The playwright Edward Albee gave an impassioned tribute: "Some writers matter and some do not. Some of our most clever writers don't matter. They teach us nothing and they do not render ourselves coherent. Arthur Miller was a writer who mattered. A lot."

Attention must be paid.

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The Theater and New Ideas

Revolution #004, May 29, 2005, posted at revcom.us

In researching this article, I came across several extraordinary essays by Arthur Miller. While undoubtedly familiar to people in theater and academia, these pieces figured hardly at all in the discourse on his life in recent obituaries. Here is an excerpt from one of his intriguing explorations on how new theories come to light, and the particular role of theater in this process—not all of which I concur with, but I offer it to the reader as rich food for thought.

"A genuine invention in the realm of ideas must first emerge as an abstruse and even partial concept. Be it Christianity, Darwinism, Marxism, or any other that can with reason be called original it has always been the product of proofs which, before they go to form a complete and new concept, require years and often generations of testing, research, and polemic. At first blush a new idea appears to be very close to insanity because to be new it must reverse important basic beliefs and assumptions which, in turn, have been institutionalized and are administered by one or another kind of priesthood with a vested interest in the old idea. Nor would the old idea be an idea at all, strictly speaking, if some goodly section of the population did not believe in it. If only because no dramatic structure can bear the brunt of the incredulity with which any really new idea is greeted, the play form would collapse under the burdens of having to deliver up the mountain of proof required for a new idea to be believed.

"The dramatic form is a dynamic thing. It is not possible to dally in it for reflection. The polemical method, as well as the scientific exposition, the parable, or the ethical teaching, all depend upon a process which, in effect, says, `What you believe is wrong for these reasons; what the truth is is as follows.' Tremendous energy must go into destroying the validity of the ancient proposition, and destroying it from an absolutely opposite viewpoint. An idea, if it is really new, is a genuine humiliation for the majority of the people; it is an affront not only to their sensibilities but to their deepest convictions. It offends against the things they worship, whether God or science or money.

"The conflict between a new idea and the very notion of drama is remorseless and not resolvable because, among other things, plays are always performed before people sitting en masse and not alone. To a very large degree, much greater than is generally realized, we react with a surrounding crowd rather than against it; our individual criteria of truth are set to one side and we are no longer at the mercy of a performance alone, but of the surrounding reaction to it.

"If plays have not broached new ideas, they have enunciated not-yet-popular ideas which are already in the air, ideas for which there has already been a preparation by non-dramatic media. Which is to say that once an idea is `in the air' it is no longer an idea but a feeling, a sensation, an emotion, and with these the drama can deal. For one thing, where no doubt exists in the hearts of people, a play cannot create doubt: where no desire to believe exists, a play cannot create a belief.[the dramatic form] literally has no existence if it must wait until the audience goes home to think before it can be appreciated. It is the art of the present tense par excellence."

(Miller from "Introduction to the Collected Plays," 1957)

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Sitting Together in the Dark and Moving Towards the Light

Revolution #004, May 29, 2005, posted at revcom.us

Unfortunately these days people look much more to movies and TV for their stories and inspiration (as well as sheer diversion). Too many folks rarely set foot in a theater, including, I imagine, some people who are reading this article.

Miller would argue, and his plays offer proof, that there is something about the way the theater works its magic that can be found in no other human experience. A play is not a "live movie."

Think about it, you're sitting in a dark room with strangers—moving towards the light. People pretending to be other than who they are appear on stage. Real time is suspended at the very same moment that it is clicking by, steady as your pulse. Stories you have never heard are slyly brought to life. There is an intimacy unlike watching a film—it can be like the first time you overhear your family arguing about you, or your father crying. But this is done with an intensity that cannot happen in real life—a decade compressed to a scene change, a second of terror rocking the stage with light and sound for an excruciating minute.

You get to peer in on secrets but—miraculously and thankfully—you are taking this journey sitting beside other people. Miller:

"...My concept of the audience is of a public each member of which is carrying about what he thinks is an anxiety, or a hope, or a preoccupation which is his alone and isolates him from mankind; and in this respect at least the function of a play is to reveal him to himself so that he may touch others by virtue of the revelation of his mutuality with them. If only for this reason I regard the theater as a serious business, one that makes or should make man more human, which is to say, less alone."

Great theater creates a certain audience. (Live music, dance, spoken word—any performance art—can do this too.) Communities come together and are transformed by the truth embodied in these artists' works. Such communities can flourish outside of, and in sharp counterpoint to, the dominant ideas of the realm. They can nourish unconventional thoughts and rebel people. They can get out of hand.

Miller's work, especially in the 1950s, drew forth this kind of community. And the power and universality embodied in his plays has meant that they continue to thrive in a way that happens with very few playwrights—on Broadway, on TV (17 million people saw Death of a Salesman in 1966), in church basements, high school gyms, and in theaters around the world.

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The Public Thinker

by BOB HERBERT, NYT OP-ED COLUMNIST on ARTHUR MILLER
The New York Times
February 14, 2005

Arthur Miller, in his autobiography, "Timebends," quoted the great physicist Hans Bethe as saying, "Well, I come down in the morning and I take up a pencil and I try to think. ..."

It's a notion that appears to have gone the way of the rotary phone. Americans not only seem to be doing less serious thinking lately, they seem to have less and less tolerance for those who spend their time wrestling with important and complex matters.

If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on. God made man and the godless evolutionists are on the run. Donald Trump ("You're fired!") and Paris Hilton ("That's hot!") are cultural icons. Ignorance is in. The nation is at war and its appetite for torture may be undermining the very essence of the American character, but the public at large seems much more interested in what Martha will do when she gets out of prison and what Jacko will do if he has to go in.

Mr. Miller's death last week meant more than the loss of an outstanding playwright. It was the loss of a great public thinker who believed strongly, as Archibald MacLeish had written, that the essence of America - its greatness - was in its promises. Mr. Miller knew what ignorance and fear and the madness of crowds, especially when exploited by sinister leadership, could do to those promises.

His greatest concerns, as Charles Isherwood wrote in Saturday's Times, "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 individual, in Mr. Miller's view, had an abiding moral responsibility for his or her own behavior, and for the behavior of society as a whole. He said that while writing "The Crucible," "The longer I worked the more certain I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling."

For the United States, which launched a misguided, pre-emptive war in Iraq, is shipping prisoners off to foreign countries to be tortured and has pressed the rewind button on matters of social progress, this may be one of those moments.

Reading Miller again, and looking back on his life, it's interesting to see some of the differences he has spotlighted in two sharply defined eras: the Depression-wracked 1930's and the prosperous, postwar 1950's. "It was not that people were more altruistic," he wrote in "Timebends," "but that a point arrived - perhaps around 1936 - when for the first time unpolitical people began thinking of common action as a way out of their impossible conditions. Out of dire necessity came the surge of mass trade unionism and the federal government's first systematic relief programs, the resurgent farm cooperative movement, the TVA and other public projects that put people to work and brought electricity to vast new areas, repaired and built new bridges and aqueducts, carried out vast reforestation projects, funded student loans and research into the country's folk history - its songs and tales collected and published for the first time - and this burst of imaginative action created the sense of a government that for all its blunders and waste was on the side of the people."

By the early 50's the agony of the Depression was gone. McCarthyism was in flower and the dean of Mr. Miller's alma mater, the University of Michigan, was complaining that his students' highest goal was to fit in with corporate America rather than separating truth from falsehood.

The dean, Erich Walter, said, "They become experts at grade-getting, but there's less hanging round the lamppost now, no more chewing the fat," or, as Mr. Miller put it, "speculating about the wrongs of the world and ideal solutions, something no employer was interested in, and might even suspect."

Mr. Miller understood early that keeping the population entertained was becoming the paramount imperative of the U.S. We're now all but buried in entertainment and the republic is running amok. Mr. Miller is gone, and if we're not wise enough to pay attention, his uncomfortable truths will die with him. (He felt, among other things, that most men and women knew "little or nothing" about the forces manipulating their lives.)

Anyway, the Grammys were last night and Michael Jackson's trial resumes today.

Arthur Miller? Broadway dimmed its lights Friday night. His country may decide that's enough of a tribute and it's time to move on.

Arthur Miller Dies

The Associated Press
Updated: 11:33 a.m. ET Feb. 11, 2005

ROXBURY, Conn. - Arthur Miller, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright whose most famous fictional creation, Willy Loman in "Death of a Salesman," came to symbolize the American Dream gone awry, has died. He was 89.

Miller, who had been hailed as America's greatest living playwright, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury of heart failure, his assistant, Julia Bolus, said Friday. His family was at his bedside, she said.

His plays, with their strong emphasis on family, morality and personal responsibility, spoke to the growing fragmentation of American society.

"A lot of my work goes to the center of where we belong - if there is any root to life - because nowadays the family is broken up, and people don't live in the same place for very long," Miller said in a 1988 interview.

"Dislocation, maybe, is part of our uneasiness. It implants the feeling that nothing is really permanent."

Miller's career was marked by early success. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for "Death of a Salesman" in 1949, when he was just 33 years old.

Unwanted publicity

His marriage to Marilyn Monroe in 1956 further catapulted the playwright to fame, though that was publicity he said he never pursued.

In a 1992 interview with a French newspaper, he called her "highly self-destructive" and said that during their marriage, "all my energy and attention were devoted to trying to help her solve her problems. Unfortunately, I didn't have much success."

"Death of a Salesman," which took Miller only six weeks to write, earned rave reviews when it opened on Broadway in February 1949, directed by Elia Kazan.

The story of Willy Loman, a man destroyed by his own stubborn belief in the glory of American capitalism and the redemptive power of success, was made into a movie and staged all over the world.

"I couldn't have predicted that a work like 'Death of a Salesman' would take on the proportions it has," Miller said in 1988. "Originally, it was a literal play about a literal salesman, but it has become a bit of a myth, not only here but in many other parts of the world."

In 1999, 50 years after it won the Tony Award as best play, "Death of a Salesman" won the Tony for best revival of the Broadway season. The show also won the top acting prize for Brian Dennehy, who played Loman.

Miller, then 83, received a lifetime achievement award.

"Just being around to receive it is a pleasure," he joked to the audience during the awards ceremony.

From 'All My Sons' to 'The Crucible'

Miller won the New York Drama Critics' Circle's best play award twice in the 1940s, for "All My Sons" in 1947 and for "Death of a Salesman." In 1953, he received a Tony Award for "The Crucible," a play about mass hysteria during the Salem witch trials that was inspired by the repressive political environment of McCarthyism.

That play, still read by thousands of American high-school students each year, is Miller's most frequently performed work.

Miller and Monroe divorced after five years and in 1962 he married his third wife, photographer Inge Morath. That same year, Monroe committed suicide. Miller wrote the screenplay for the Monroe film "The Misfits," which came out in 1960, and reflected on their relationship in his 1963 play "After the Fall."

Reminiscing about Monroe in his 1987 autobiography, "Timebends: A Life," Miller lamented that she was rarely taken seriously as anything but a sex symbol.

"To have survived, she would have had to be either more cynical or even further from reality than she was," he wrote. "Instead, she was a poet on a street corner trying to recite to a crowd pulling at her clothes."

Miller's success, so overwhelming in the 1940s and '50s, seemed to be on the wane during the next two decades. But the 1980s brought a renewal of interest, beginning with a Broadway revival of "Death of a Salesman" starring Dustin Hoffman in 1984.

Enthusiasm for Miller's work was particularly strong in England, which marked his 75th birthday in 1990 with four major productions of his plays.

'Salesman' goes to China

Miller also directed a Chinese production of "Death of a Salesman" at the Beijing Peoples' Art Theatre in 1983.

Those who saw the Beijing production may not have identified with Loman's career, Miller wrote, but they shared his desire, "which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count."

In his later years, Miller became increasingly disillusioned with Broadway, and in 1991 he premiered a new play, "The Ride Down Mt. Morgan," in London - the first time he had opened a play outside of the United States.

Miller said at the time he opted for the London opening to avoid the "dark defeatism" of the New York theater scene.

"There is an open terror of the critics (in New York) and of losing fortunes of money," Miller said in an interview that year. "I have always hated that myself. All in all, it seemed like we ought to do the play in London."

He returned to Broadway in 1994 with "Broken Glass," a drama about a dysfunctional family that won respectful reviews and a Tony nomination, but no big audiences. In London, it won an Olivier award as best play.

Even in his later years, Miller continued to write.

"It is what I do," he said in a 1996 interview with The Associated Press.

"It is my art. I am better at it than I ever was. And I will do it as long as I can. When you reach a certain age you can slough off what is unnecessary and concentrate on what is. And why not?"

"Resurrection Blues" had its world premiere at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis in the summer of 2002 when Miller was 86. Set in an unnamed banana republic, the satire dealt with the possible televised execution of a revolutionary.

Rediscovering Miller

In recent years New York even rediscovered Miller's first Broadway play, "The Man Who Had All the Luck," which was a four-performance flop in 1944, but had a successful revival, starring Chris O'Donnell, nearly six decades later.

Last October, another new play, "Finishing the Picture," premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. It was based on an episode of his marriage to Monroe.

In accepting his lifetime achievement award at the 1999 Tony awards ceremony, Miller lamented that Broadway had become too narrow.

"I hope that a new dimension and fresh resolve will inspire the powers that be to welcome fiercely ambitious playwrights," Miller said. "And that the time will come again when they will find a welcome for their big, world-challenging plays, somewhere west of London and somewhere east of the Hudson River."

He was born Oct. 17, 1915, Miller was one of three children in a middle-class Jewish family. His father, a manufacturer of women's coats, was hard hit by the Depression in the 1930s, and could not afford to send Miller to college when the time came.

Miller worked as a loader and shipping clerk at a New York warehouse to earn tuition money and eventually attended the University of Michigan, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1938.

He wrote his first plays in college, where they were awarded numerous prizes. He also published several novels and collections of short stories.

He wrote several screenplays, including "The Misfits" (1961), which became Monroe's last movie, and "Playing for Time," (1981) a controversial television movie about the women's orchestra at Auschwitz.

He also wrote a number of books with Morath, mainly about their travels in Russia and China.

Miller had two children, Jane Ellen and Robert, by his first wife, Mary Slattery, and he and Morath had one daughter, Rebecca.

© 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

22 December 2001

Arthur Miller Accuses Bush of Abusing and Curbing Civil Rights

By David Lister
Media and Culture Editor
The Independent UK

Arthur Miller, America's greatest living playwright, will speak out against the Bush Administration for abusing civil rights, in a BBC interview to be broadcast on Christmas Day.

Miller was called before Senator McCarthy's Un-American Activities Committee in the crusade against supposed left-wingers in 1956 and wrote one of his greatest plays, The Crucible, in response to it. He says he now fears the United States is using the war on terrorism to "increase its power over civil rights". Miller's words make him the highest-profile figure in the American arts world to take issue with President Bush's stance.

In the interview with the BBC World Service, he refers to Mr Bush's emergency order that allows non-Americans accused of helping terrorist enemies to be tried outside normal courts by military tribunals. Twenty million immigrants and visitors fall within its scope.

Miller says of the new law: "The government now is taking advantage of it ... and using it as a way of increasing its power over civil rights and so on, by this business of creating military courts for terrorists."

Asked by Ritula Shah, presenter of The World Today, whether he thinks the world has changed since 11 September, he says: "The confrontation of a mass dying is a traumatic experience even for the dullest mind and I think people were drawn together, but I question whether this is a long-term effect." Asked how events have forced American attitudes to change, he says: "I think that more people are prepared now ... to inquire as to why we are so hated in so many places.

"It comes as a big surprise to a lot of people who have always accepted that American foreign policy was beneficent."