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Contents Acknowledgements ix Editors’ Preface x 1 Beginnings (1915–39) 1 2 The Golden Years (1939) and The Man Who Had 8 All the Luck (1944) 3 All My Sons (1947) 14 4 Death of a Salesman (1949) 20 5 Betrayals (1949–56) 29 6 The Crucible (1953) 37 7 A Memory of Two Mondays (1955) and A View from 47 the Bridge (1955) 8 Celebrity (1956–61) 55 9 The Misfits (1956–61) 60 10 Refuge (1961–68) 65 11 After the Fall (1964) 73 12 The Price (1968) 81 13 Alienation (1968–2000) 91 vii viii Contents 14 The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972) 95 15 The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1977) 100 16 The American Clock (1980–86) 105 17 Incident at Vichy (1964) and Playing for Time (1979–85) 110 18 Four One-Act Plays (1980–87) 116 19 The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991–2000) 121 20 The Last Yankee (1991–93) 126 21 Broken Glass (1994) 130 22 Mr Peters’ Connections (1998) 134 23 Resurrection Blues (2002) 139 24 Non-Theatrical Writing 143 25 Finishing the Picture (2004) 157 26 Conclusion 162 Notes 167 Bibliography 174 Index 178 1 Beginnings (1915–39) Arthur Miller has been called the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century. While that claim may be open to challenge, the writer’s death in 2005 brought to a close a sixty-year career of astonishing variety and distinction. As playwright, novelist, essayist and indefatigable spokesman for artistic and human rights, Miller achieved an international celebrity quite exceptional in its scope. Although his sensibility and values were quintessentially American, having been formed during the years of Roose- velt’s New Deal and the post-war McCarthy era, his plays speak to a world-wide audience. Death of a Salesman, the definitive exploration of the inherent contradictions of the American Dream, has been applauded internationally, including in Communist China; The Crucible, an indict- ment of Anglo-American puritanism, is instantly recognizable wherever tyranny reigns. As a result, Miller is widely respected as a courageous champion of humane liberalism. If the playwright has occasionally been revered as something of a prophet abroad, however, he has not always been so honoured in his own country. In America his social criticism is sometimes resented by those who fail to recognize its roots in a profound patriotism. Another obstacle to a fully balanced assessment of Miller’s achievement is the fact that his reputation is almost entirely based on the plays of his middle years. Of the dramas, novels, short stories, essays and travel books published since his last major Broadway triumph in 1968 there is widespread ignorance and misunderstanding. Consequently, in spite of his international celebrity, Miller remains something of an enigma. There are several reasons for this. One is the changing nature of American theatre. Whereas Broadway had once been the nursery of serious American drama, rising costs and changing demographics had gradually deprived it of that function, forcing dramatists like Miller to rely on the off-Broadway and regional theatres which attract smaller and more spe- cialized audiences. Another reason is that Miller found himself increasingly at odds with the theatrical innovations and revolutionary enthusiasms fashionable during the second half of the twentieth century, preferring 1 2 Arthur Miller to follow his own path of dramatic experimentation and social criticism. Embittered by the disappointment of his own millennial hopes, he seemed unable to share the certainties of the anti-Vietnam and civil rights protesters, and was gradually isolated artistically and philosophically. Broadway audiences, accustomed to popular musicals, were baffled by the startling departures from simple realism in his later plays, while news- paper reviewers found it difficult or impossible to follow the convoluted intellectual arguments presented in them. As a result, the later work never received the public exposure and critical attention it deserves. Only now, perhaps, after the playwright’s death, do we have the necessary perspective and objectivity to form a balanced judgement of his total oeuvre. *** Arthur Asher Miller was born into a wealthy New York Jewish family on 17 October 1915 and grew up in a period of unprecedented economic growth and swelling American confidence following the First World War.1 His boyhood home was a luxurious eleven-room apartment on 110th Street overlooking Central Park where his mother enjoyed the help of a Polish maid and from which his father travelled to work in a chauffeured limousine. In the summers the family escaped the city heat to a rented waterfront house on Long Island. As the middle child between an elder brother, Kermit (born 1912), and a much younger sister, Joan (born 1922), ‘Arty’ often felt the odd one out. He was overshadowed by his brother who was not only a better student and athlete, but (sharing his father’s light colouring) regarded quite lit- erally as the blue-eyed boy of the family. Arthur, on the other hand, was tall and gangling, with ears that stuck out and the dark eyes and complexion of his mother. Temperamentally, too, he seemed closer to his imaginative and sometimes dramatic mother, and after the birth of his sister he began to feel displaced. Thereafter he looked more and more to his friends for an understanding of the world. Those friends were almost entirely Jewish. Religion was not a subject of much discussion in the Miller home. Indeed, conversations on any subject were rarely probing, family members being fairly reticent. Nevertheless, Jewish culture permeated their lives. The food, the rituals, the jokes were Jewish as were the traditional values they unquestioningly adhered to. While Mr Miller’s business brought him into contact with people from many different backgrounds, there was no thought that the children would be raised outside the faith and, when the time came, the boys went to Hebrew school to prepare for their bar mitzvahs. Beginnings (1915–39) 3 Arthur was not a student. The only place he seemed able to make his mark was on the athletic field. It was after school that he came alive – playing baseball, skating on the pond in Central Park, riding his bicycle around the neighbourhood and up towards Harlem. He came to love the city. Its energy and diversity enthralled him; its sounds fascinated him. He delighted in the variety of the accents of its multi-racial popu- lation. The city seemed the embodiment of the American experiment, tangible evidence of the new life possible for those fleeing the tyranny and poverty of Europe. Certainly for Arthur’s father, New York had proved to be the promised golden door. Arriving alone from Eastern Europe in 1891, Isidore Miller, age six, had been met by his parents and six siblings who had emigrated to the city a few years earlier. The family was then living in a two-room tenement in the Lower East Side from which they ran the S. Miller and Sons garment business. Young Isidore attended school briefly, but left before he learned to read and remained illiterate for the rest of his life. It was a liability that didn’t hold him back. Starting off at a sewing machine in the family business, he soon graduated to salesman and by the age of 26 was rich enough to marry. His bride, Augusta (‘Gussie’) Barnett was the eighteen year-old daughter of an uptown Jewish family who had just graduated as a qualified teacher. By the time their first son, Kermit, was born in 1912, Isidore owned his own business, the Miltex Coat and Suit Company, employing about 800 people. In 1929, however, all that changed. Like most of his associates, Isidore Miller had for some years been putting all of his savings and much of his capital into common shares which he hoped would give him a better return on his money than his regular business. When the stock market collapsed in 1929, therefore, he was left virtually bankrupt with a viable company but impoverished customers. After a few months, when it became apparent they could no longer afford the rent of the apartment, the family was forced to move. At Gussie’s suggestion, Isidore bought a house in the Midwood section of Brooklyn to be close to her two sisters who had moved there after the First World War. At the time, it was an area of unpaved streets with empty spaces behind the houses and the intimacy of a village. With no grocery store within four miles, the family kept a vegetable garden as well as rabbits and chickens. There the family settled into a house so small and cramped that fourteen-year-old Arthur had to share his bedroom with his irascible maternal grandfather. The ‘crash’ of 1929 and the Depression following it were the major influences on the playwright’s slowly developing view of life. The failure 4 Arthur Miller of the economic system called into question everything he had accepted as normal up to that time. His previous life had been a dream. The ‘reality’ was no longer the chauffeured limousines of New York, but the breadlines and the man fainting from hunger on a back porch in Brooklyn. Not only did the crisis affect the Millers’ economic status, it also brought out inexplicable differences in the personalities of its victims. His father, whose success in business had been so astonishing, seemed overwhelmed by the catastrophe. The severely straitened cir- cumstances of the family also affected his mother who became increasingly bitter and critical of what she considered to be her husband’s foolhardiness in investing so heavily in the market.

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