Arthur Miller: 1915-2005
by Joshua Adams

That Arthur Miller, who died Friday at 89, was the most successful American playwright of the 20th century stands without question. Although the past 100 years produced no shortage of literary luminaries, in drama as elsewhere, the fall of Willy Loman has moved beyond the confines of literature to become a permanent fixture in the cultural landscape. So much so that, though performances of "Death of a Salesman" are nearly as cliche as those of "Our Town," Miller's play retains a dizzying ferocity to this day, while Wilder's melodrama practically begs to be carefully euthanized. Whereas we consider other dramatic roles part and parcel of American theater, the simple, awful visage of the raving Willy Loman is synonymous with American theater itself.

If there are questions about Miller, they tend to focus on the unusual trajectory of his career, which emerged from obscurity into brilliance, crystallized in celebrity and managed to sustain itself though a long and slow decline into what many critics assumed was an artistic dotage. Some see his failed marriage to Marylin Monroe, and the play he wrote subsequently, "After the Fall," as having stained the searing honesty of his previous plays, and anti-HUAC activism, with a whiff of self-serving retrospective. Never mind the fact that, by many accounts, Miller attempted to steer the stricken actress away from the early death that awaited her. What matters is neither whether Miller should have left his wife for Monroe, nor whether he should have written a play loosely based on his marriage to her. Writers are not responsible for the vagaries of their fame but only the quality of their work.

In Miller's case, the work both flouted and, ironically, followed F. Scott Fitzgerald's recommendation that a writer cater first to the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolchildren of ever after. Not exactly a cult figure like the Beats, and imbued with enough respect for electoral politics to became a delegate to the Democratic National Convention of 1968, Miller laced his plays with a moralism that remained a constant creative source throughout his working life. The avant-garde notion that artists should perpetually reinvent themselves, and their genres, was lost on him. His was a commitment of an older vintage, almost Greek, and definitely group theater, in its logic: the stage exists to move its witnesses, through pity and fear, to a heightened state of awareness, and, ultimately, to action.

Consider the ideas at work in Miller's earliest, and best plays: "Death of a Salesman," "The Crucible" and "A View from the Bridge." Each is, in its own way, claustrophobically serious and nightmarishly indirect — for chilling groupthink, nothing beats the various testimonial scenes in "The Crucible" — but the roots of each tragedy remain surprisingly mundane. The men who go to their deaths in these plays do so for reasons that are at once perfectly intelligible and deeply appalling. Each makes of his body a human sacrifice to the invisible contagion that rots his society from within: rampant materialism, unrestrained accusations of politico-religious subversion, the betrayal of intimates.

Nowadays, after English language theater has thoroughly absorbed the Brechtian impulse to alienate the audience out of its complacency through disjunction and discontinuity, Miller may seem a quaint relic, a figure from the past marginally more significant than the likes of George Bernard Shaw. And, when compared to some of his American contemporaries, it's tempting, too, to write him off: His plays lack the dark sensuality of a Tennessee Williams or the philosophical pessimism of Eugene O'Neill, whose "The Iceman Cometh" lost the New York Drama Critics Circle Award to Miller's "All My Sons," in 1947. Even at their bleakest, Miller's plays aren't quite as savage as Edward Albee's, either. But like the work of many of the mid-century liberal intellectuals who underwent a critical repudiation in the '70s and '80s, Miller's achievements remain relevant, and engaging, to this day.

This is no doubt due, in part, to nostalgia for the liberal achievements that bracketed McCarthyism — the New Deal and the Great Society — which are now disdained as relics in need of reform, or, to translate more accurately from the current lingo, annihilation. But there is another reason why Miller's work speaks to us from across the years, and that is its dogged, musty, old-fashioned pursuit of truth. The characters in Miller's work search rather desperately for the keys that will save them; that they are unable to make these discoveries does not mean that the right answers do not exist, only that men and women in the world, blinded by fear, lust, and ambition, often make the wrong choices. Those choices have consequences. Though it was ridiculed by some at the time as an epiphenomenal piece of Marxist agitprop, "Death of a Salesman" could not be more conservative in the moral approbation heaped on its protagonist for abandoning his family. Liberal thinkers who are now re-discovering the importance of a value-based politics could do worse than dust off their copies of "The Portable Arthur Miller."

E-mail Joshua Adams at joshua at uchicago dot edu.