There’s a wonderful photograph taken 40 years ago showing Arthur Miller–then as now America’s preeminent dramatist–in the arms of photographer Inge Morath, his third wife. A bare tree stands in the distance against the snowy Connecticut landscape that surrounds the nearby town of Roxbury, where Miller has lived and written much of his life. The writer holds a cigarette in his right hand, a good distance from his bespectacled, broadly smiling face. Bundled in a leopard-skin coat, Morath looks no less happy. n The scene contrasts remarkably with earlier photos of Miller and his second wife, actress Marilyn Monroe. In those pictures the playwright often appears clenched, ambivalent. He is a man who wants to get back to a typewriter, or at least away from the flashbulbs. Monroe’s instinct for vamping photographers seems to have brought out a countervailing impulse in Miller toward even more intense moral rectitude than usual. Quite a feat, since the public image of Miller, the playwright who stiffened the backbone of postwar Broadway with such wallopers as “All My Sons” (1947), “Death of a Salesman” (1949) and “The Crucible” (1953), was already that of someone with a world of injustice, hypocricy and personal reckoning to sort through, someone who believed in what Miller classifies, to this day, without apology, as “seriously intentioned work.”
But on that wintry, black-and-white day in 1962, he was just a guy up to his ankles in snow, grinning. The Miller here is the antithesis of his greatest theatrical creation, Willy Loman, the aging, spited, spiteful salesman who says he feels “kind of temporary about myself.”
The photograph of Miller and Morath radiates an aura of fulfillment that verges on the most tantalizing of all dreams: permanence.
It is not quite four decades later, on the morning of Sept. 12, 2002.
Near the end of a long hallway that is pervaded by the lingering smell of cleaning fluids, the door to Miller’s Manhattan apartment stands half in light, half in shadow, owing to a trick of the fluorescent lighting. The setting is a fine old building in the East 60s, vintage 1930. Miller himself is vintage 1915. He will turn 87 a month and five days later.
The visitor pushes the buzzer and its harsh sound–zzzzzzt zzzzzt zzzt–bounces down the uncarpeted hallway like a metal ball. Miller opens the door. His 6-foot-2-inch frame is somewhat stooped, owing to back problems, but his is a considerable presence.
He offers a quick greeting and shows his visitor to a seat in the living-room area before sitting down himself. He is dutifully subjecting himself to the incursion of yet another journalist with a tape recorder, which will necessitate in its wake a round with yet another photographer.
The night before, Miller, like millions of other people, watched parts of various commemorative 9/11 specials. What he saw disturbed him, both in form and content, medium and message. Disturbing, too, has been all the verbal saber-rattling coming from the White House in recent months, which Miller says proves that Bush “doesn’t have a clue about how his statements resonate in the world. There’s this idea that the war they’ve planned will only be fought in Iraq, way far away.
“If we bomb Iraq, we lose the moral right to pass judgment on anybody else.”
That’s the stuff, the visitor thinks: That’s Arthur Miller talking, the man who wouldn’t name names before the House Un-American Activities Committee in the waning hours of Sen. Joe McCarthy’s Red Menace Tent Show.
“Yeah, well, I suppose there’s no way around it,” Miller says, nodding at his Sony set across the room. “No way to avoid that kind of coverage. It just . . . it seems like a routine. Show business. Those endless renditions of ‘God Bless America.’ I’m sure people want a way of expressing their grief and horror. But it just seems so public.
“Real grief . . . is more private.”
Alongside the windows near the kitchen stands a handsome old dining table and set of chairs. The table, chocolate brown, dominates the apartment.
It seems to catch the sunlight in a special way.
The visitor asks about the table.
“That table?” Miller says. “I think it’s 17th Century Spanish.”
He pauses.
“Don’t try to lift it. Unbelievable. Must be olive wood, or something like that. Amazing.”
Then, simply: “It was my wife’s table.”
Inge Morath died on Jan. 30 at the age of 78. Her death is not an easy topic for Miller, even when he is talking with an old pal like Studs Terkel.
Terkel, whose oral history of the Depression, “Hard Times,” inspired Miller’s 1980 play “The American Clock,” met up with Miller last March for a John Steinbeck tribute. They were chatting backstage at Lincoln Center, Terkel recalls, and Terkel asked: “How’s Inge?”
Terkel recalls Miller going silent, as if a curtain had come down. Notes Terkel, “All he said was: ‘She died.’
“And that was it.”
Writer-director Rebecca Miller, Miller’s daughter by Morath (Miller has two other children by his first wife, college sweetheart Mary Grace Slattery), says that her mother’s death was a shock. “[I] just didn’t expect it. I never thought that my father would be the person to survive my mother.
“Obviously, my dad’s in mourning. But he’s truly strengthened by his work. And he’s a survivor. He’s survived a lot of things.”
At Miller’s chosen pace, his writing, traveling and lecturing continue. He comes to Chicago next weekend to deliver a Nov. 3 Chicago Tribune lecture in association with the Chicago Humanities Festival at Symphony Center. Miller is the recipient of the first Chicago Tribune Prize for Literary Achievement in recognition of his impact on American letters. His talk, he says, will be based on his own 2001 National Endowment for the Humanities Jefferson Lecture, called “On Politics and the Art of Acting.”
Much of that speech focused Miller’s wittily righteous anger on the 2000 presidential debates and election, by which George W. Bush, in Miller’s eyes, stole the victory from Al Gore.
“As the sparkly magic veil of actual power has descended upon him,” Miller said in the NEH lecture, “[Bush] has become more relaxed and confident, like an actor after he has had some hit reviews and knows the show is in for a run.”
Both Bush and Gore, in Miller’s view, wanted to impart a “Bing Crosby mellowness” to the cameras. Such role-playing is part of the problem. “I find myself speculating whether the relentless daily diet of crafted, acted emotions and canned ideas is not subtly pressing our brains not only to mistake fantasy for what is real,” Miller wrote, “but to absorb this falseness into our personal sensory process. This last election is an example. Apparently we are now called upon to act as though nothing very unusual happened and as though nothing in our democratic process has deteriorated, including our claim to the right to instruct lesser countries how to conduct fair elections. So, in a subtle way, we are induced to become actors, too. The show, after all, must go on, even if the audience is obligated to join in the acting.”
The week of the 9/11 commemoratives, Miller attended a reading of his 1964 drama “After the Fall,” at midtown Manhattan’s Roundabout Theatre. Michael Mayer, who directed a well-received revival of Miller’s “A View From the Bridge” in 1997, is in charge of the project, which stars Liev Shreiber and, in the role inspired by Marilyn Monroe, Hilary Swank.
Like many of Miller’s stage works from the 1960s onward, “After the Fall” received generally tepid reviews stateside before shipping out overseas to much warmer critical climes. In England and beyond, Miller’s middle- and late-period work has been greeted with the respect owed to a living legend who will not coast on last year’s accomplishments. Earlier this month Miller traveled to Paris for the lauded French premiere of his 1998 memory play “Mr. Peters’ Connections.” In New York, the same play came and went with characteristic low-key murmurs of notice.
More than any other American playwright, Miller has shown that no matter of the heart or conscience can remain private, and moral fiber isn’t acquired by winning popularity contests. “There’s a universe of people outside and you’re responsible to it,” says the son in “All My Sons” to his father, a man who has knowingly overseen the manufacture of faulty aircraft parts during World War II.
Miller’s newest play is “Resurrection Blues,” a sprawling satire on TV, American foreign policy and the buck everlasting, in which a televised Latin-American crucifixion becomes the ultimate reality media circus. It premiered in August at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. London appears to be the next stop. Following the decades-old pattern, the London critical reception to “Resurrection Blues” has been much more favorable than the American response. (The Tribune critic’s response: mixed.)
“Most of the critics hated it for the very reasons I love it,” he says. “Farce and tragedy, right together, cheek by jowl.”
The play’s satiric despair sets it apart from most of Miller’s earlier stage work, yet it’s very much in line with his satiric essays calling for the privatization of the U.S. Congress or open-air executions in Shea Stadium. They have been collected in the volume “Echoes Down the Corridor,” and they are superb. Along with Miller’s 1987 autobiography “Timebends,” they are his strongest literary contributions in decades.
In truth, the tonal change-ups in “Resurrection Blues” aren’t so alien to Miller’s most famous work, the story of an aging salesman, his sons and his tin-plated dream of American success.
The phrase “American dream” means little these days, so often have its shiny promises come up for target practice. But a full-bodied revival of “Death of a Salesman,” such as director Robert Falls’ 1998 Goodman Theatre production, makes you realize what Miller’s play achieved a half-century ago, and what it continues to do to audiences everywhere. Its dazzling structure (its past and present planes of action shifting effortlessly) and provocative themes typically reduce theatergoers to puddles of remorse. Yet there’s something oddly inspiring about a good staging of “Salesman.”
Miller’s best work, the “Angels in America” playwright Tony Kushner once said, “is exemplary of art’s greatest paradox: He is a writer of tragedy which is productive of hope.”
Here’s an image from “Salesman”: Willy Loman, at the end of his employment and his sanity, getting the brush-off from his old boss’s son. “There were promises made across this desk!” bellows Willy. Then, in a turn of phrase carrying a touch of Clifford Odets, the darling of Depression-era Broadway, about whom Miller has written so well in essays: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away–a man is not a piece of fruit!”
The Loman household’s refrigerator uses up belts “like a goddam maniac” and Willy can’t pay his insurance premiums. His story is more interesting than that of a good man devoured by a socioeconomic system that uses up good men like a maniac. Willy is a lost soul, making mistakes, believing and passing on the wrong things, along with some of the right ones.
The character reminds us to carefully judge the net worth of a shoeshine and a smile.
In Chicago, Howard Witt may be Miller’s best-known and most-experienced interpreter. Recovering from a recent heart attack, Witt finished up a run earlier this year in the Writers’ Theatre revival of “The Price,” in which he played Miller’s wise, slippery old junk dealer, Gregory Solomon. He also received a Tony Award nomination for his pitch-perfect portrayal of Charley in “Salesman.”
“I don’t think he’s written a person I didn’t know, you know?” Witt says of Miller. “We know these people.
“I remember doing ‘Salesman’ at Missouri Rep, I was playing Willy, and a young graduate student came up to me, saying, why are you doing this old cracker? ‘Well, just come to see the play,’ I said. Opening night, the kid was in tears.
“Every night [with the later Goodman production], in Chicago and New York, men and women would sit in the audience after the show. Sobbing.”
Miller has long worked with wood. In 1948, with his own hands, he built a studio on his Connecticut property and there, in a deeply productive two months, he wrote “Death of a Salesman.”
Build it solidly and a play–like a table–can stand a long time.
Kushner counts himself among the legions who still read Miller’s early plays. “I read Arthur for his incredible craft as much as for the politics,” he wrote via e-mail recently. ” ‘Salesman’ is unsurpassed as an indictment of free-market ‘freedom,’ and as a model of political theater. And ‘The Crucible’ turned out to be incredibly timely and frightening in the [U.S. Atty. Gen. John] Ashcroft era.
“But what I’m getting from Miller’s work these days is how beautifully shaped the plays are, how much, in the words of my friend [playwright] Craig Lucas, Miller takes care of his audience. The dramaturgy is so smart and sharp and shapely, the engine is so powerful. In the best plays you are carried along inexorably. It’s magnificent and a standard to which all narrative playwrights should aspire.”
Rebecca Miller, who recently adapted her own short-story collection, “Personal Velocity,” into a well-received film, recalls walking down a New York street with her father. They came upon a platform-loading garbage truck in action.
“I was trying to figure out why he was watching this with such interest,” says Miller, who now lives in Ireland with her husband, actor Daniel Day-Lewis. (Day-Lewis played John Proctor in the film version of “The Crucible.”)
“He said: ‘It’s beautiful.’ I said: ‘Why?’ And he said: ‘Because everything has a function.’
“I think that was his best advice to me. He believed everything had its function, including a garbage truck. And he believes everything you write has to have a function.”
“The Crucible,” an allegorical melodrama with heft and a long reach, remains among the most-leased titles in the Dramatists Play Service catalog. Miller depicts Puritan-era Salem witchcraft trials ensnaring Proctor, a straying but essentially sound man of principle, and his stalwart wife, Elizabeth. In 1953, the play’s parallels to the Red Scare and its anti-Communist fervor were clear as a bell.
A couple of years later Miller testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and gave up no names of people he knew or suspected to be Communists. He didn’t do what his most inspired director, Elia Kazan, did do. Kazan wanted to preserve his standing in Hollywood. Being a theater man first and a screenwriter a distant second, Miller had less stature in Hollywood to preserve. But even if he had been pelted with Oscars, he’d likely have stuck to his principled guns. He preferred to preserve his good name, the same impulse that drove his “Crucible” protagonist to the gallows rather than point a finger at a suspected Salem sorceress or two.
“Some writers feel more coherently than others that the creative act is inherently a sociopolitical act,” says Edward Albee, who worked with Miller in the early 1960s in the International P.E.N. organization, which works on issues of human rights and intellectual freedom. “Arthur has understood this a long time . . . his plays are all so different, yet they’re all about the same thing: the responsibility to live your life fully, honestly and honorably. So that when you come to the end of it, you don’t say, ‘Oh. S—.’ “
“The Crucible” remains a Greatest Hit title on many a high school lit reading list. Oak Park and River Forest High School instructor Ellen Boyer has taught it, off and on, for more than a decade.
Earlier this month she directed a production of “A View From the Bridge,” Miller’s 1955 Greek-tragic treatment of the Brooklyn dockworker Eddie Carbone, his forbidden attraction to his niece and his ultimate betrayal of the neighborhood “code”: Thou shalt not rat out illegal immigrants.
“Arthur Miller is such a delight to direct,” she says. “Everything in that play is laid out so clearly and cleanly. It’s just there, direct and powerful.” A week before the show opened, the kids associated with the production were still deciding on what they wanted to print on their commemorative T-shirts. One prime vote-getter, Boyer says, was a line spoken by antihero Carbone about turning stool pigeon:
“You can quicker get back a million that was stole than a word you gave away.”
Arthur Asher Miller was one of three children born to Isidore and Augusta Miller. His brother, Kermit, was older; his sister, Joan, came later.
Isidore Miller made a good living as a dress manufacturer. Miller’s early years were spent on 110th Street in a well-to-do part of Harlem. Then in 1928, the year before the stock market crashed, his father’s business gave way, and the family moved to first one Brooklyn abode, then another, smaller one. The latter served as the cramped inspiration for the Loman household in “Salesman.”
Miller’s family got through the Depression less crisis-ridden than many. But the Depression left its mark. In 1934, after saving up some money, Miller traveled west to Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan, drawn in part by the lure of the Hopwood Prizes for playwriting. He won two, and wrote his earliest works there before heading back to New York later in the decade.
Miller’s old Midpoint Brooklyn neighborhood has changed, though it still feels a long way from Manhattan. To get there, you take the F train to Brooklyn, all the way to the Avenue N stop.
As you walk down Avenue N on a cold September night, commemorative 9/11 flags flap everywhere, a little too loudly. Orthodox Jewish teenagers scoot by on scooters, while Russians, Latinos and Anglos stroll toward Avenue M and its fruit and vegetable markets.
Three houses from the end of East Third Street, on the other side of the fence from a local school’s football field, a house sits on the lot where the Miller family once lived in close, often anxious quarters. You cannot see the city from this spot. There is, however, a crescent moon overhead, the same one Biff and Hap Loman gazed at a half-century ago.
Most of his plays, Miller says, were written in the country, with the notable exception of “A View From the Bridge,” which he recalls working on while he lived in Brooklyn Heights.
“But it doesn’t matter where you are,” he says. “You still carry those places around with you.”
In Miller’s East Side apartment the phone rings. “Hallo,” he intones. It is a statement, not a question. “Yes. Who’s this again? Oh, yes. I tell you, I’m a little . . . Where are you now? Yeah. OK, well, look, you’re just going to take a picture, right? Yah. You can come over anytime. Well, I am right now, but . . . if you make it a little later, it’d be better. Yah. Right. All right. Thank you.”
Back on his couch: “Forgot about that one,” he says. A photographer is coming by later in the day to shoot a portrait for a story on the French premiere of “Mr. Peters’ Connections.”
“Le Monde, all the way from in Paris,” he says. Then, with a half-teaspoon of sarcasm, neatly poured: “As opposed to Le Tribune in Chicago.”
“Dry” doesn’t begin to describe Miller’s innate sense of timing. Earlier this year, shortly after “Resurrection Blues” opened in Minneapolis, Miller and Guthrie Theater artistic director Joe Dowling conducted an on-stage conversation. The Saturday afternoon house was packed. The audience relished every jab the playwright aimed at the Bush administration, every jape and insight directed at the bottomless pit of showbiz swill that is, to Miller, the television industry.
In his newest play, he told Dowling, he was “trying to express the cruel absurdities of our period, especially the impact of TV. Because I have come to believe that television is the great trivializer of our lives.” Applause, a lot of it. “There’s something about that form that reduces everything to powder. I’ve watched it with more and more horror as time goes by, but also laughter, because it’s so pretentious.” Laughter, a lot of it.
On the topic of Bush’s war on terrorism: “I’m afraid as anybody of terrorism, but I don’t think we ought to sacrifice the American freedoms to it.” More applause, sustained and sincere.
In this forum, Miller’s statesmanlike aura–if he had a nickel for every time a writer smacked him with the adjective “Lincolnesque,” he’d have a lot of nickels–evokes a kind of dream senator, flinty yet eloquent and compassionate. On the other hand, says actress Jane Alexander, former head of the National Endowment for the Arts, “I don’t think Arthur could ever have been a politician. The lifestyle is too compromising.”
During her mid-1990s tenure at the NEA, in which she withstood various conservative attempts to hobble or cut the agency’s often controversial artists’ grants Alexander conferred with Miller “a number of times. He’s very wise. I needed his advice sometimes. I’d ask if he would write an editorial, or if he would respond to some negative [NEA-related] newspaper article. I asked him if he would go to Independence, Kan., to receive the 1995 William Inge Award, which he was really loath to do, because he doesn’t much like the whole business of awards, I think.
“And yet, when he realized that it was in the home state of [Republican] Sen. Nancy Kassebaum Baker, who was chair of the committee which oversaw the NEA, he went. And he spent time with her. It wasn’t a short thing, either; it was three days. It wasn’t easy for Arthur and his wife, but they did it.”
“To tell you the truth,” Miller says in his Manhattan apartment, “I’d just as soon never speak about the plays, except through the plays. Writing plays is the only way I can manage to say more or less what I feel like saying. I write essays and other pieces, of course, and wrote a few around the time of the last election because I found it insufferable. I couldn’t remain silent.
“But I find a speech or an essay more difficult [than a play]. The nuances have to be hammered. They always sound more blunt than I’d like them to–than they need to be in a play.”
These days, he says quietly but with a smile, “I find myself satirizing. Which is the last stand, before you fall silent.”
The Tribune photographer hits the door buzzer. After Miller lets her in, she is all bustle and hyped-up cheer. While she and her assistant set up camera equipment near the dining table, Miller talks, very briefly, about how his writing–short stories lately, among other things, he notes–has been going since his wife died.
“Tough,” he says. “The feeling that it’s all pointless, somehow . . . .” A pause. “. . . That’s not easy to fight off.”
A silence settles on the apartment.
Then the September sun, already strong, seems to intensify. The apartment fills up with sunshine, even brighter than before. And as Miller prepares to sit for the photographer, the old table by the window takes on a mellow, hearth-like glow in the light.
An Arthur Miller sampler:
“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.”
“Death of a Salesman,” 1949
“The first ripple of what may properly be called the Outside World was felt one day when a crowd of people formed at the doors of The Bank of the United States. . .To be succinct about it, the thing had closed. This in itself did not bother me particularly because, while I had been a depositor to the tune of twelve dollars, I had withdrawn the entire amount the very day before to buy Joey Backus’s Columbia racer. What did bother me was that the day after the bank closed I got hungry, left the bike in front of our house, went inside for some bread and jam, and came out to find no bike, and a block can never look as empty as it does to a boy whose bike should be on it and isn’t. In that emptiness lay the new reality. With this incident I was introduced to the Depression Age.”
“A Boy Grew In Brooklyn,” 1955
“I don’t care for a theater that is absolutely personal and has no resonance beyond that. We’ve become so accustomed to that we’ve forgotten that for most of mankind’s history the theater was quite the other way. Theater was involved with the fate of the kingdom, and the importance of power, of rank, of public policy. It’s in Shakespeare. It’s absolutely essential in Greek drama. Ours is almost excessively bourgeois in that it presumes the world really has no effect upon us.”
Miller, interviewed in Studs Terkel’s “The Spectator,” 1980
“I am not the only writer, Jew or Gentile, who does not want his plays or novels to end in utter despair, even when objective events seem to demand precisely that conclusion–a Holocaust story, for example. But my resistance to despair seems to have something Jewish about it; some vagrant cell floating through my blood seems to demand that however remote and unlikely ever to be found, a ray of light has to remain after darkness has closed in. . .”
“Timebends: A Life,” 1987
