Review
ARTHUR MILLER: HIS LIFE AND WORK
by Martin Gottfried
Da Capo Press (HarperCollinsCanada), 484 pp.
Some playwrights are, fundamentally, philosophers and/or activists for whom the theatre is simply a tool – a medium for expressing their ideas. One thinks of George Bernard Shaw and, certainly, the American dramatist Arthur Miller.
Although his work can be both highly artistic and deeply personal, Miller has always been essentially a man with something to say, who found himself most adept at saying it through dialogue and dramatic contrivances.
As Martin Gottfried’s valuable new biography reveals, Miller showed no special aptitude for writing as a boy and was a mediocre student who preferred athletics. But the Wall Street crash and subsequent Depression, which reduced his well-heeled New York Jewish family to poverty, gave him a burning sense of injustice, and his years at the University of Michigan, a hotbed of 1930s socialist activism that also boasted one of the country’s few playwriting courses, provided both an ideology and a means to vent his anger.
The combination led to a remarkable one-two punch that sent postwar American theatre reeling. First came Death of a Salesman, which remains the stage’s most powerful and emotional indictment of our capitalist, consumerist society a half-century after its première. Miller followed that hammer blow with The Crucible, a cunning attack on America’s Cold War communist paranoia clothed in the garb of a historical drama about the Salem witch trials. As timeless as it was timely, it continues to resonate in any state where fear is allowed to supplant reason.
At the height of his fame, Miller himself became a hero for refusing to "name names" when he was called before the loathsome House Committee on Un-American Activities, and, almost simultaneously, a figure in the Hollywood gossip columns for his 1956 marriage to Marilyn Monroe. It would be his second marriage and her last. While Miller may well have been the love of Monroe’s life, as Gottfried claims, he arrived too late on the scene and was left mainly to babysit a woman who had become, at the zenith of her sex-goddess celebrity, a mentally unstable, drug-addicted mess. Miller was, perhaps, too emotionally repressed and self-centred to be a compassionate caregiver, but, as Gottfried shows us, he did try.
However, the Monroe section of the book is one of the few times the author manages to make us sympathize with Miller, who remains otherwise a rather chilly, if not outright irascible, figure well into his old age – at 80, he actually punched a young newspaper reporter who had the bad taste to ask him if he ever dreamed of Monroe.
However, like fellow American playwright Edward Albee, Miller had every right to be angry at his shabby treatment by the New York critics in the difficult decades following his initial successes. Also like Albee, in the 1990s he finally received belated respect and attention in the U.S. – a major Broadway revival of Salesman, a Hollywood film of Crucible – while the British theatre and its critics, who hold writers in much higher regard, have supported Miller’s work even at its poorest.
Gottfried is a veteran drama critic and biographer and his book, the first major Miller biography, is engrossing despite its frequently sloppy writing and a few salient errors (O’Neill, not Strindberg, wrote Anna Christie, and Solzhenitsyn wasn’t deported to the Soviet Gulag in the mid-1970s, he was living in exile in the West.). Time will tell the worth of Miller’s flawed latter-day plays, but it scarcely matters. The fact that audiences are still left stunned and tearful at the end of Death of a Salesman is proof enough that the man with a message is also a master of the theatre.
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