A playwright’s own crucible
A new biography delves into Arthur Miller’s life and work
Even casual consumers of Arthur Miller’s plays can list correspondences between his art and his life.
“The Crucible,” most of us remember, was Miller’s response to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) and the antiCommunist hysteria of the late 1940s and 1950s. “After the Fall” was the playwright’s attempt to exorcise the trauma of his disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. And “Death of a Salesman,” his most famous work, reflected his family’s experiences during the Great Depression.
John Lahr’s “Arthur Miller: American Witness,” an entry in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, goes further and deeper. In this succinct and gorgeously written portrait, the former New Yorker drama critic and awardwinning biographer of Tennessee Williams offers a keen psychological appraisal of Miller’s works, and of Miller himself.
The book concentrates on literary analysis, much of it pivoting around a poignant irony: Miller, often celebrated (and sometimes condemned) as a moralist, was keenly aware of and tormented by his own moral flaws.
Lahr begins with his December 1998 encounter with Miller, in Roxbury, Conn., for a New Yorker article. The piece, published the following year, marked the 50th anniversary of “Death of a Salesman,” a play about failure so successful that Lahr says it is “staged somewhere in the world nearly every day of the year.”
The narrative then flashes back to Miller’s New York upbringing as the middle child in a family of Polish Jewish émigrés who “lived by the cruel logic of the bottom line and practiced the imperialism of privilege.” Miller’s father, a salesman who later owned a clothing store and speculated recklessly in the stock market, was illiterate; Miller’s American-born mother was cultured and intellectually ambitious. The Depression devastated them both.
Miller was a lackluster student until late in high school, and his once-prosperous family couldn’t afford college. His grades were so bad that it took him three tries to win acceptance at the University of Michigan. College journalism sharpened his skills and leftist politics; playwriting awards helped pay his tuition and set his future course.
Miller’s first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck,” was unlucky, closing, in 1944, after only four performances. (In 2002, I spotted the playwright at a sleek Broadway revival, a transfer from the Williamstown Theatre Festival that made the most of the play’s modest virtues. Miller, seated in the row behind me, was beaming.)
Along with probing Miller’s art, Lahr illuminates the complexities of his relationships. One of the most fruitful, and contentious, was with Elia Kazan, who introduced Miller to Monroe, and directed three of his plays: his first Broadway success, “All My Sons;” an acclaimed production of “Death of a Salesman;” and, following years of estrangement, “After the Fall.”
Miller was unforgiving of Kazan’s decision to “name names” before HUAC, and the two channeled their disagreements into their work. Kazan’s Oscar-winning
1954 film “On the Waterfront” celebrated the courage of the informer. Miller’s retort, a year later, was “A View From the Bridge,” in which informing precipitates tragedy.
In “The Crucible,” Lahr sees the imprint of both Miller’s troubled first marriage, to Mary Slattery, and his nascent romance with Monroe. Before the play’s protagonist, John Proctor, attains heroic stature as a foe of the Salem witch trials, he is a fallen man, guilty of adultery and of treating neither his wife nor his lover, Abigail, with much kindness.
Dysfunctional families, reflecting his own, are at the heart of Miller’s work. “All My Sons,” a post-World War II tragedy of greed and betrayal, depicts the unraveling of a suburban American household. Family conflict, along with the corrosive impact of lies, surfaces again in “Death of a Salesman,” as well as in “The Price,” which Lahr considers Miller’s last major play.
In that 1968 drama, two brothers, haggling over legacy, blame, and roads not taken, enact the relationship between Miller and his older brother, Kermit. (Ross Miller, Kermit’s son, confirms the exactness of the parallels to Lahr.) The playwright apparently broke a promise to his brother to return home from college and help out in the family business, arguably another moral lapse. Lahr calls the play a “dissection of survivor’s guilt.”
Lahr is hard on Miller’s first two wives, and his dismissiveness toward Monroe, expressed in scintillating prose, departs from modern feminist takes. “Onscreen, she was a vivacious picture of equipoise, a seductive promise of delight,” Lahr writes. “Off-screen, she was all disarray, a waif haunted by the doom that was her blighted family inheritance.” In the end, Lahr writes, Miller was “traumatized by Monroe’s madness and his own stupidity.”
Lahr credits the photographer Inge Morath, Miller’s “never tempestuous or needy” third wife, with saving him. But their marital happiness seems not to have benefited Miller’s work. A 1995 British production of “Broken Glass,” which directly confronts his Jewish heritage, received an Olivier Award for best new play. But, for the most part, his later plays were critical and commercial failures.
Miller died in 2005, at 89, but his masterpieces endure, transcending the historical particularities of their creation. In the salesman Willy Loman’s “frenzied and exhausted attempt to claim himself and a future for his sons,” Lahr writes, “Miller had stumbled on to a metaphor for postwar society’s eagerness to pursue its self-interest after years of postponed life.” The current postpandemic, racially conscious Broadway revival of “Death of a Salesman,” with Wendell Pierce in the title role, seems to be timed just right.