This American Life

Arthur Miller in 1996. AP Photo by Alan Solomon.

The Depression left an indelible mark on playwright Arthur Miller. "It’s a memory in his nerves and his muscles that he just can’t get rid of," his sister, the actress Joan Copeland, said later. Miller’s dark body of work always exposed the American dream as a nightmare. Three of his early dramas end with a suicide. "Business is business," his salesman Willie Loman exults, repeating a popular tautology before getting shafted by the company whose wares he’d hawked for four decades. In Miller’s plays the business of business is to devour the common man, leaving him – as Loman is left – with no money, no happiness, and worst of all, no self-respect.

Miller was born into an upper middle class family, living in a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Young Arthur’s father went off to his ladies-wear factory in a chauffeured limousine, while his mother played the piano, and hosted luncheons. A year after Arthur’s bar mitzvah, the stock-market crash took it all away from them, bumping the family to a ramshackle house in Brooklyn.

But their straitened circumstances weren’t leavened by loving merriment. "We didn’t celebrate birthdays, not even with birthday cards," his sister remembered. The icy atmosphere of his early days entered Miller never to leave, chilling his work and his subsequent personal relationships. He generally acted conscientiously, and wrote with passion, but he seldom gave off any warmth. Accordingly, Miller’s plays are filled with unhappy clans, and debunk that other great American innovation: the nuclear family.

Arthur’s older brother would drop out of school to keep the family business afloat and would later volunteer to fight abroad, coming home a broken man. The drive to survive was always stronger in the younger sibling – Arthur always put himself first. He worked odd jobs to save up enough to pay his tuition to the University of Michigan, subsequently learning how to write plays in its first-rate dramaturgy program and immersing himself in socialism then bubbling up on the campus. He married for the first time (a Catholic Midwesterner) to postpone his call to service.

Miller went at writing with a frenzy, and was hugely prolific, writing a hundred words for every one that made a final script. At 32, with a drawer full of unproduced plays, he finally had his first Broadway success with 1947’s All My Sons. The play takes aim at both his bugbears, the profit motive and the enemies within the family unit. A war munitions manufacturer sells faulty machinery to the army, knowing that it will endanger soldiers, including his own sons, but not caring – "What could I do? A man is in business; your stuff is no good, they close you up, they tear up your contracts."

His collaborator on this project, the director Elia Kazan shared Miller’s left-leaning politics, and would become his best friend, a rival for Marilyn Monroe’s affections, and later his enemy. Kazan bullied sterling performances out of the strong casts he found for both All My Sons, and Miller’s masterpiece, 1949’s Death of a Salesman. The latter play was an immediate hit, shocking audiences into long silences at its end – something Broadway old-timers had never before witnessed.

At the turn of the half-century, Kazan was also busy directing work by the other talented newcomer, Tennessee Williams. Both at their peak creatively in the 1950s, Miller and Williams produced strikingly different work, and ever since, American theatrical types have either sworn allegiance to Miller (admiring his moral analyses of people’s actions) or to Williams (preferring his dreamy scripts about inner feelings). It was a measure of Kazan’s versatility that he could direct work by both halves of this odd couple, the pair then dubbed the Rising Princes of Broadway.

The success of Salesman transformed Miller. "His eyes acquired a new flash and his carriage and movement a hint of something swashbuckling," Kazan would observe. He also was tired of his longtime marriage to his university sweetheart, the mother of his two children. At work together on a script in Hollywood, both Kazan and Miller fell for Marilyn Monroe – then a B-list actress filling bimbo bit parts. For a time they would share her, before Kazan bowed out.

Miller was sometimes later accused of hitching his wagon to Monroe’s rising star, but at the time of their meeting the eminence lay all on Miller’s side, and, as her marriage to Joe Dimaggio wound down, she would pursue the older, still married man relentlessly.

While conducting this high-profile affair, Miller parted ways with Kazan, after Kazan provided a list of communists he knew of to the House Un-American Affairs Committee, something Miller refused to do. Instead, in 1953, at the height of the red-baiting rage, shortly after the execution of the Rosenbergs, Miller produced a transparent allegory, The Crucible, about the literal witch-hunting in Puritan Salem. A measure of the courage it took to stage the drama during this outbreak of mass hysteria is apparent in early reviews of the play: in describing the play, the critics, fearing to become targets themselves, resolutely ignored its evident attack on McCarthyism.

Miller soon married Monroe – and, in so doing, became an avatar of the dream he so reviled in his work. Miller’s sister described the unlikely match as "these two great planets in the sky, aligning." By the time she finally landed her quarry, Monroe had become America’s biggest movie star, and he, fresh from the success de scandale of The Crucible, had become its most celebrated playwright – the public was fascinated by what the tabloids dismissed as the union of the Owl and the Pussycat, the strange pairing of beauty and intellect.

Marilyn was Miller’s femme fatale, destroying his reputation and interfering with his feverish work ethic. She became increasingly addicted to painkillers, and he found himself playing the unwelcome role of nursemaid, staying up with her until all hours, and missing his most productive writing time, the early morning. By the time they came to work together on The Misfits, the movie she starred in and he scripted, she was evidently in trouble – her habitually mischievous eyes had a glazed over look in the film. Life was imitating art, as Miller’s screenplay was, in his own words, about "people trying to connect and afraid to connect."

Meanwhile, a new arrival on Broadway, 1956’s Waiting for Godot, had made Miller’s realist, earnest, resolutely unplayful plays seem dated. Miller would never again hit the zeitgeist so forcefully as he did with the Salesman-Crucible-Marriage to Marilyn combo.

In his next play, After the Fall, he would caricature Marilyn Monroe as a daffy, needy addict. It premiered shortly after Norma Jean's suicide, and so tarnished his reputation that it permanently alienated the affection of the American public – many of whom blamed the ascetic, cool man for her death.

Miller always extricated himself from complications with surgical cuts – leaving his brother to support the family while he went off to university, summarily divorcing his first wife after Marilyn’s entry on the scene, parting company with Kazan after Kazan snitched, and as quickly finding another lover (his last wife, a German-born photographer) after his ill-fated dalliance with the starlet ended. "Things don’t get better, unless you make them better," he once said, evincing his you-make-your-own-luck creed.

In his plays, Miller posits a harsh world-view, shared by many of his Depression-bred contemporaries: in this tough world, only the strong survive. If he could sympathize with losers like Willy Loman, he was, nevertheless, determined not to share their lot.

And yet, his play is as symphonic a celebration of the common man as has been written. "Willy was a salesman," his son Charley says in his eulogy. "He don’t put a bolt to a nut, he don’t tell you the law or give you medicine. He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back – that’s an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. … A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory."

Alec Scott is a Toronto playwright and theatre critic.