Arthur Miller (1915-2005)
American playwright who
combined in his works social awareness with deep insights into personal
weaknesses of his characters'. Miller is best known for the play DEATH OF A SALESMAN
(1949), or on the other hand, for his marriage to the actress Marilyn Monroe.
Miller's plays continued the realistic tradition that began in the United
States in the period between the two world wars. With Tennessee Williams, Miller was one of the best-known American
playwrights after WW II. Several of his works were filmed by such director as
John Huston, Sidney Lumet and Karel Reiz.
"Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money.
His name was never in the paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived.
But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention
must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog.
Attention, attention must finally paid to such a person." (from Death of a
Salesman)
Arthur Miller was born in
New York. His father, Isidore Miller, was a ladies-wear manufacturer and
shopkeeper who was ruined in the depression. The sudden change in fortune had a
strong influence on Miller. "This desire to move on, to metamorphose - or
perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary - was given me as life's
inevitable and righful condition," he wrote in TIMEBENDS: A LIFE (1987).
The family moved to a small frame house in Brooklyn, which is said to the model
for the Brooklyn home in Death of a Salesman. Miller spent his boyhood
playing foorball and baseball, reading adventure stories, and appearing
generally as a nonintellectual. "If I had any ideology at all it was what
I had learned from Hearst newspapers," he once said. After graduating from
a high school in 1932, Miller worked in automobile parts warehouse to earn
money for college. Having read Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov
Miller decided to become a writer. To study journalism he entered the
University of Michigan in 1934, where he won awards for playwriting - one of
the other awarded playwright was Tennessee Williams.
After graduating in English
in 1938, Miller returned to New York. There he joined the Federal Theatre
Project, and wrote scripts for radio programs, such as Columbia Workshop (CBS)
and Cavalcade of America (NBC). Because of a football injury, he was exempt
from draft. In 1940 Miller married a Catholic girl, Mary Slattery, his college
sweetheart, with whom he had two children. Miller's first play to appear on
Broadway was THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE THE LUCK (1944). It closed after four
performances. Three years later produced ALL MY SONS was about a factory owner
who sells faulty aircraft parts during World War II. It won the New York Drama
Critics Circle award and two Tony Awards. In 1944 Miller toured Army camps to
collect background material for the screenplay THE STORY OF GI JOE (1945).
Miller's first novel, FOCUS (1945), was about anti-Semitism.
Miller's plays often depict
how families are destroyed by false values. Especially his earliest efforts
show his admiration for the classical Greek dramatists. "When I began to
write," he said in an interview, "one assumed inevitably that one was
in the mainstream that began with Aeschylus and went through about twenty-five
hundred years of playwriting." (from The Cambridge Companion to Arthur
Miller, ed. by Christopher Bigsby, 1997)
DEATH OF A SALESMAN (1949)
brought Miller international fame, and become one of the major achievements of
modern American theatre. It relates the tragic story of a salesman named Willy
Loman, whose past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Loman is
not the great success that he claims to be to his family and friends. The
postwar economic boom has shaken up his life. He is eventually fired and he
begins to hallucinate about significant events from his past. Linda, his wife,
believes in the American Dream, but she also keeps her feet on the ground.
Deciding that he is worth more dead than alive, Willy kills himself in his car
- hoping that the insurance money will support his family and his son Biff
could get a new start in his life. Critics have disagreed whether his suicide
is an act of cowardice or a last sacrifice on the altar of the American Dream.
WILLY: I'm not interested in stories about the past or any crap of that
kind because the woods are burning, boys, you understand? There's a big blaze
going on all around. I was fired today.
BIFF
(shocked): How could you be?
WILLY:
I was fired, and I'm looking for a little good news to tell your mother,
because the woman has waited and the woman has suffered. The gist of it is that
I haven't got a story left in my head, Biff. So don't give me a lecture about
facts and aspects. I am not interested. Now what've you got so say to me?
(from Death
of a Salesman)
In 1949 Miller was named an
"Outstanding Father of the Year", which manifested his success as a
famous writer. But the wheel of fortune was going down. In the 1950s Miller was
subjected to a scrutiny by a committee of the United States Congress
investigating Communist influence in the arts. He was denied a passport to
attend the Brussels premiere of his play THE CRUCIBLE (1953). It was based on
court records and historical personages of the Salem witch trials of 1692. In
Salem one could be hanged because of ''the inflamed human imagination, the
poetry of suggestion.'' The daughter of Salem's minister falls mysteriously
ill. Reverend Samuel Parris is a widower, and there is very little good to be
said for him. He believes he is persecuted wherever he goes. Rumours of
witchcraft spread throughout the people of Salem. "The times, to their
eyes, must have been out of joint, and to the common folk must have seemed as
insoluble and complicated as do ours today." The minister accuses Abigail
Williams of wrongdoing, but she transforms the accusation into plea for help:
her soul has been bewitched. Young girls, led by Abigail, make accusations of
witchcraft against townspeople whom they do not like. Abigail accuses Elizabeth
Proctor, the wife of an upstanding farmer, whom she had once seduced.
Elizabeth's husband John Proctor reveals his past lechery. Elizabeth, unaware,
fails to confirm his testimony. To protect him she testifies falsely that her
husband has not been intimate with Abigail. Proctor is accused of witchcraft
and condemned to death.
The Crucible, which received Antoinette Perry
Award, was an allegory for the McCarthy era and mass hysteria. Although its
first Broadway production flopped, it become one of Miller's most-produced
play. Miller wrote The Crucible in the atmosphere in which the author
saw "accepted the notion that conscience was no longer a private matter
but one of state administration." In the play he expressed his faith in
the ability of an individual to resist conformist pressures. Two short plays
under the collective title A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE were successfully produced in
1955. The drama was about incestuous love, jealousy and betrayal.
"You know, sometimes God mixes up the people. We all love somebody,
the wife, the kids - every man's got somebody he loves, heh? Bus sometimes...
there's too much. You know? There's too much, and it goes where it mustn't. A
man works hard, he brings up a child, sometimes it's niece, sometimes even a
daughter, and he never realizes it, but through the years - there is too much
love for the daughter, there is too much love for the niece." (from A View
from the Bridge)
In 1956 Miller was awarded
honorary degree at the University of Michigan but also called before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Miller admitted that he had attended
certain meetings, but denied that he was a Communist. He had attended among
others four or five writers's meetings sponsored by the Communist Party in
1947, supported a Peace Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, and
signed many apppeals and protests. Refusing to name others, who had associated
with leftist or suspected Communist groups, Miller was cited for contempt of
Congress, but the ruling was reversed by the courts in 1958. Miller was
politically active throughout his life. In 1965 he was elected presiden of
P.E.N., international literary organization. At the 1968 Democratic Convention
he was a delegate for Eugene McCarthy.
Miller - "the man who
had all the luck" - married the motion-picture actress Marilyn Monroe in
1956; they divorced in 1961. In the late 1950s Miller wrote nothing for the
theatre. His screenplay MISFITS was written with a role for his wife. The film
was directed by John Huston, starring Mongomery Clift, Clark Gable, and Marilyn
Monroe. Marilyn was always late getting to the set and used heavily drugs. The
marriage was already breaking, and Miller was feeling lonely. John Huston wrote
in his book of memoir, An Open Book, (1980): "One evening I was
about to drive away from the location - miles out in the desert - when I saw
Arthur standing alone. Marilyn and her friends hadn't offered him a ride back;
they'd just left him. If I hadn't happened to see him, he would have been
stranded out there. My sympathies were more and more with him." Later
Miller said that there "should have been more long shots to remind us
constantly how isolated there people were, physically and morally." Miller's
last play, FINISHING THE PICTURE, produced in 2004, depicted the making of Misfits.
Miller returned to stage in
1964 after a nine-year absence with the play AFTER THE FALL, a strongly
autobiographical work, which dealt with the questions of guilt and innocence.
Many critics consider that Maggie, the self-destructive central character, was
modelled on Monroe, though Miller denied this. A year after his divorce, Miller
married the Austrian photographer Inge Morath (1923-2002), with whom he
co-operated on two books about China and Russia. After Inge Morath died, Miller
plannd to marry Agnes Barley, a 34-year-old artist.
In the 1990s Miller wrote
such plays as THE RIDE DOWN MOUNT MORGAN (prod. 1991) and THE LAST YANKEE
(prod. 1993), but in an interview he stated that "It happens to be a very
bad historical moment for playwriting, because the theater is getting more and
more difficult to find actors for, since television pays so much and the movies
even more than that. If you're young, you'll probably be writing about young
people, and that's easier -- you can find young actors -- but you can't readily
find mature actors." ('We're Probably in an Art That Is -- Not Dying' , The
New York Times, January 17, 1993) In 2002 Miller was honored with Spain's prestigious Principe de Asturias
Prize for Literature, making him the first U.S. recipient of the award. Miller
died of heart failure at home in Roxbury, Connecticut, on February 10, 2005.
For further reading: Arthur Miller by Martin Gottfried (2003); The
Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller, ed. by Christopher Bigsby (1997);
Approaches to Teaching Miller's Death of a Salesman, ed. by Matthew C.
Roudane (1995); Arthur Miller and His Plays by P. Singh (1990); Arthur
Miller by B. Glassman (1990); File on Miller, ed. by C.W.E. Bigsby
(1988); Arthur Miller, ed. by H. Bloom (1987); Arthur Miller by
J. Schlueter and J.K. Flanagan (1987); Convesations with Arthur Miller,
M.C. Roudané (1987); Arthur Miller: Social Drama as Tragedy by S.K.
Bhatia (1985); Twentieth Century Interpretations of Death of a Salesman,
ed. by H.W. Koon (1983); Arthur Miller by N. Carson (1982); Arthur
Miller by L. Moss (1980); Arthur Miller by R. Hayman (1972); Arthur
Miller by R. Hogan (1964); Arthur Miller, ed. by R.W. Corrigan
(1962)
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/amiller.htm