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Autopsy Willy Loman: Good-bye and Good Riddance by Travis Stewart Arthur Miller
tried to grasp wonder, and failed.
If there is a sacred cow in American letters, it is the
late, lamented Arthur Miller. Known to everyone in a country where the average
citizen can name fewer than five dramatists, he has long been regarded by anyone
who ever finished high school as the Great American Playwright, the theater's
long-awaited equivalent to Melville, Poe, Emerson, and the handful of others who
are entrenched in our education system's woefully short reading lists.
| | Travis
Stewart is a playwright, performer, and cultural critic in New York City.
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Miller's recent passing, as might have been predicted (and was entirely
appropriate), was cause for much memorializing. The New York Times ran close to a
dozen obituaries, eulogies, op-eds, encomia, and sober reflections. The rest of
the nation's newspapers weren't far behind. Miller's long career was widely
hailed as a milestone; Miller was almost universally remembered as America's
first important dramatist. Unlike his most famous character, Willy Loman, Arthur
Miller was mourned by many when he passed. While it may be a heresy of the
sort that once got you burned at the stake in Salem, I must confess that Miller's
works have never spoken to me, let alone impressed me. I find in our reputed
Great American Playwright a smallness of spirit, a sensibility out of step with
the national character, and a writing style most charitably compared to bland
hash. Claims that Miller is America's first great playwright (implying that all
who went before him were rubbish) are overstated; assertions that his heirs
apparent in today's theatre are necessarily superior to their 19th-century
forbears are equally hyperbolic. Good and bad plays came before and after Arthur
Miller, a very large percentage of them more interesting than anything he ever
wrote. And while Miller has often been referred to as an intellectual, that gives
him too much credit: he was a pedant — no different from, or wiser than,
thousands of college professors and bureaucrats around the world. In his favor it
can be said that he was one of the few to envision some of the qualities the
great playwright should have, and he worked hard to attain them. But he was
limited by a parochial moralism, a schoolmarmish, holier-than-thou
pulpit-pounding manner that hardly made him the superior of the McCarthyites to
whom he professed to be an alternative.
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appeared in America, it was wicked, because polite society considered it to be
wicked, and mostly wicked people or good people out for a wicked time attended.
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Like so many 20th-century artists, Miller's chief significance lay in his
utterance of fashionable sentiments. He is famous for his social conscience
(that's the kind of conscience where everyone else has to help address the things
you think are wrong). The free-market system that educated him, financed the
production of his plays, nurtured his investments, and made him rich invariably
wore a black hat in the stories he told. The Cold War era intelligentsia and
guilt-ridden wealthy liberals who patronized the New York theatre ate it up with
a fork and spoon. His best known works are essentially trials, with businessmen
or other powerful figures (or those who would partake of their system) sitting in
the dock for the audience to judge. In "All My Sons" (1947) he gives us a war
profiteer who sells cracked munitions to the government. In "Death of a Salesman"
(1949), it's a success-obsessed jerk who is cruelly fired with no safety net. In
1951, he adapted "An Enemy of the People" by Ibsen, a story about a muckraker
destroyed when he goes against the financial interests of his town. Two years
later, he gave the world "The Crucible," a thinly-veiled allegory about the
abuses of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. The HCUA theme would
reemerge in his 1964 play "After the Fall." By then, he'd had the opportunity to
testify before the committee himself and polish his leftist credentials by not
naming names. In his last few decades, when his newer plays weren't scoring like
his hits of the Truman and Eisenhower eras, he took his act around the world as a
sort of international cause célèbre. While Miller's credentials
as a leftist are impeccable, he comes up wanting as a writer and thinker. I've
heard otherwise intelligent people speak about the "poetry" in Miller's writing,
but I wonder: what on earth can they be talking about? One combs through the
collected works of Arthur Miller quite in vain to find even the tiniest scrap of
anything resembling a poetic turn of phrase or flight of imagination, or anything
of the sort. The closest I've been able to come up with is "A man is not a piece
of fruit," from "Death of a Salesman." That not Shakespeare. It's not even
Sunnydale Orchards. In 70 years of writing, Miller never rose above
humdrum, flat prose, reminiscent of real speech, but far more boring. Confronted
with the challenge of taking on the voice of 17th-century Massachusetts for "The
Crucible," he fudged it, claiming modern audiences wouldn't understand the
archaic patois. But 20th-century audiences sit through Elizabethan plays all the
time, just as they read their King James Bibles. The sad fact is that Miller
didn't take on the problem because he couldn't. He had none of the hellfire or
wit or poetry in his bones to write the speech of either the demented sermonists
or the defiant sex-crazed teenage pagans in their midst. Miller, as always, does
a fine job of delineating the motives of these people, but without capturing the
language he can't convey their religious passion, and lacking that, he forces us
to experience the story through the cool eye of a disaffected modern. Eugene
O'Neill, who believed that God should be pulling all the strings in the theatre,
might have fared better. The atheistic Miller writes about Puritans like a blind
man might write about the sun. In writing his 1944 play "The Man Who Had
All the Luck," Miller claimed to have tried — and failed — to grasp
"wonder." But if you want to be a poet of the stage or anyplace else, you
shouldn't have to "try" to grasp what that is. To his credit, Miller realized his
limitation in this regard, so instead of attempting to squeeze something out of
himself he could never achieve (however necessary it might be to great drama), he
sought to become, instead of a poet, an advocate. Like his alter ego
Quentin in "After the Fall," Miller was a lawyer at heart. He acknowledged this
frankly on many occasions, and fought valiantly to make a virtue of it. Theatre,
he said more than once, was "a species of jurisprudence." His skill (and the
trait that so endears him to method-trained actors) was in laying down a
meticulous argument, each note of the play leading logically to the next in a
cogent and digestible manner. The discovery of this knack was what made Arthur
Miller a household name. After the Broadway failure of "The Man Who Had
All the Luck," Miller went back to the drawing board for three years, conceivably
for the last time, to see if he could get it right. Confounded by wonder, he
resolved to take the opposite tack, seeking to explore, he wrote, "cause and
effect, hard actions, facts, the geometry of relationships" and to build his new
play on "a bedrock of logic." The result was "All My Sons," a play of nearly
flawless construction. While Miller's debt to Ibsen in this play is often
acknowledged, one can also see more than a little Sophocles in the relentless,
methodical peeling of layers to reach the play's horrific revelation. Formally,
someone once said, "All My Sons" is like the pyramids. You can't even fit a knife
in the cracks between its building blocks.
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felt, had to address the injustices of the day. In other words: decadent
capitalist play bad; didactic socialist play good.
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Like Ibsen, Miller said, he wanted to "make a play as men make watches,
precisely, intelligently." But form is only one element of art. Some writers
prefer to make a play more like a Vietnamese nun setting herself on fire, and
others like a fat man doing a belly flop off the high dive. Big sloppy passions
that speak to our whole nervous system are every bit as vital to the theatre as
an architecturally sound playscript. But "bigness" onstage is the essence of
theatricality, and Miller's declared aim in writing "All My Sons" was "to be as
untheatrical as possible." (I'm glad Beethoven didn't make the Eroica Symphony as
unmusical as possible.) Thought — and thought of a rather pedestrian and
orthodox sort — is Miller's stock in trade. And a man who endeavors to
undertake tragedy without passion is a quixotic soul indeed, every bit as full of
illusions as Willy Loman. To be fair, Arthur Miller was a man of his time.
American theatre had an unnatural genesis. Thanks to the Puritans, it was two
centuries before a theatre culture of any sort began to evolve in America. When
it did, it was wicked, because polite society considered it to be wicked, and
mostly wicked people or good people out for a wicked time attended. Thus American
show business was born in 19th-century saloons. From this humble origin sprang
vaudeville, burlesque, musical comedy, and the philosophy that continues to drive
the film, radio, and television industries. In Miller's day, except for a few
notable exceptions like O'Neill, the vast majority of American theatre was
unabashedly frivolous, lacking a scintilla of any attempt to be edifying beyond a
few chuckles. The Greeks, the English, the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the
Germans, the Russians — even the Swedes and the Norwegians! — had
produced first class playwrights of intellectual distinction beyond anything
America had sired. And the excuse that we were a young nation was getting
implausible after we reached our third century. So perhaps we can forgive
the young Arthur Miller for wanting to be "serious" as a corrective. "There is
confusion in many minds about Show Business and the Theatre," he sniffed. "I
belong to the theatre." Seeing everyone eating cotton candy, he thought it would
be a good thing to serve up some vegetables. But contrast his conclusion with
that of Bertolt Brecht, the ultimate socialist playwright, who wanted no less
than Miller to see "humanity" restored to the social equation, but who thought
the paramount quality necessary in the theatre was "fun." With Brecht, one has
both seriousness and fun, combining to create, in my view, the greatest
playwright of the 20th century. But Miller was unable to detach the concept of
fun or "theatricality" from the kind of theatre he hated, the theatre prized by
"tired businessmen," the follies and frolics and farces of Broadway musical
theatre. If he'd found some way to synthesize the two, he might have been a more
complete artist. Just imagine if Shakespeare had confined himself to
"seriousness." What would be left of any of his plays? So the man who
could not grasp wonder decided his mission was "to make understandable what is
complex" and to write plays that "remove some of my helplessness before the chaos
of existence." Chaos: like the death scene in "Romeo and Juliet," like Lear
howling at the thunder, like Hamlet stabbing Polonius. Yes, by all means, let's
have no more of that.
| In 70 years of writing,
Miller never rose above humdrum, flat prose, reminiscent of real speech, but far
more boring. |
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Miller could not think outside the narrow perimeter of his own mind. His
conventional sensibilities prevented him from exploring the really tough aspects
of human existence. He steered clear of true darkness, claiming that if you
depicted "evil in its full bloom in a person [the audience wouldn't] quite
believe it." This is hogwash, of course. Shakespeare must have done it three
dozen times, in characters like Richard III and Lady Macbeth and Iago. But to
paint such characters you have to visit the frightening parts of your own
personality. You either have the bravery — and the ability — to go
there, or you don't. One thing you can't do is write them from a place of
judgment. Miller's attempts to shoehorn life into economic morality plays
take his writing a step farther away from realism. Sometimes ghastly and
hilarious things happen for no bloody reason at all, and there's nothing to do
but cry or laugh about it. Man's economic relations don't dictate every single
event in his life. Yet Miller derided those playwrights, like Tennessee Williams,
who placed too high a premium on subjective emotion as mere chroniclers of
personal neuroses. Really important writing, he felt, had to address the
injustices of the day. In other words: decadent capitalist play bad; didactic
socialist play good. This is the crux of it. Theatre by itself isn't good
enough. It must serve a higher, more political end. And not just any political
end, but one that results in "social justice." The great critic and director
Robert Brustein called this type of theatre the "Theatre of Guilt" — the
main character is made to pay for his attachment to money and power and we are
all to cluck and shake our heads and mutter "shame, shame" as we leave the
theatre. The ultimate example of where he went wrong with this simplistic
approach to human venality is his best-known play "Death of a Salesman." The
ostensible gimmick of the play, and one that caused much ink to be spilled, was
the idea that it is appropriate to write a tragedy in which the hero is not a
king or a prince or a nobleman, but just a common man. This is a wonderful,
egalitarian, and very American idea, and I applaud it. The problem is, Miller
didn't just make Willy Loman a humble man, he made him an asshole. Loman
encourages his kids to steal. He lies, and encourages his kids to lie. He is rude
to those around him, devalues education, and thinks gladhanding is the best way
to get ahead. Instead of a likable, admirable man with a single tragic flaw, he
is a man of a thousand flaws who performs a single pointless sacrifice at the
end. Miller never understood the criticism he received on this point, and perhaps
it wasn't well articulated. The point in making a tragic hero noble has nothing
to do with making him a literal nobleman, as Miller seemed to think the critics
were telling him. Sticking to the rules of tragedy, as laid down by Aristotle,
isn't a matter of blind adherence to some literary dogma. It has to do with the
very practical matter of making the audience like, admire, and relate to the main
character, so that they care deeply about what happens to him. Now, I must
admit, I cry just like all the rest of the suckers when Willy drives off the
road, but ultimately his death is just pathos and not tragedy, because in a
certain sense Willy Loman is a son of a bitch who gets what's coming to him and
deserves every second of his misery. And that's Miller's point, you see.
We are not to identify with this man. We are to judge him. And Linda's famous
epitaph "Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a man," so often
quoted approvingly by the Left, is revealed to be paradoxical. Attention must be
paid to assholes? In real tragedy, essentially good people tap into the bad part
of themselves and end up destroying themselves and those around them. Here, an
essentially bad person destroys himself and those around him, and we as Miller's
audience are expected not only to care, but to leave the theatre and "do
something about it." That's very much the socialist mindset. It divides mankind
into those who have money and those who don't, and attempts to make an angelic
virtue of "need." In this case, economic justice reveals itself to be far, far
removed from actual justice, and I find myself uninterested in giving Willy Loman
the slightest help.
| Instead of a likable,
admirable man with a single tragic flaw, Willy Loman is a man of a thousand flaws
who performs a single pointless sacrifice at the end.
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Yet, this is Miller's most-quoted line. "Attention must be paid." It reveals
the muddiness of Miller's political thought, and one encounters it frequently on
the Left. Who must pay the attention? How? With what resources? Is such attention
to be paid to every American citizen? If so, how much attention? If a lot of
attention must be paid, will we need a staff of 300 million attention-payers to
service the 300 million Americans? That's a hell of a lot of attention.
Ultimately, money, money must be paid to such a man. Whose money will it be? Oh,
it'll come from guys like Willy Loman. I changed my mind — we should weep
for him! Like so many who feel the human race needs improving, Miller has
no practical platform, just the vague idea that something must be done. His knack
was for the logic of motivation, of character on the stage. But actual logic
eluded him. Over the years, he composed many jeremiads about the state of the
world and the theatre, usually in the form of op-eds for major newspapers and
magazines, and in forewords to published volumes of his plays. Throughout them
one can find the sort of muddled, meaningless language one is more accustomed to
hearing from activist actors than from writers (never mind writers who claim to
want to be logical and rational). Truisms and tautologies combine with
ill-defined generalities and contradictions and we are to take it all as
gospel. For example, he once proclaimed, "Man will only find peace when he
learns to live humanly, in conformity to those laws which decree his human
nature." This is the sort of vague platitude that everyone applauds dutifully and
automatically without pausing to think about whether it actually makes sense.
After all, it all sounds so inarguably correct. "Peace." "Human." But what did he
say? Well, he said nothing, actually. It's a double tautology. He
essentially said, "Mankind will only act like mankind when it acts more like
mankind." But even the component parts of his sentiment break down into nonsense.
After all, man has no choice but to live according to natural laws, does he?
That's what a natural law is. The idea that it is somehow possible for man ever
to act outside natural law is an error that people of all political stripes (but
particularly the Left) frequently make. (They claim to believe in evolution, for
example, but feel somehow the negative byproducts of the human animal's
activities, such as war and pollution, are "unnatural.") In this
statement Miller reveals himself to be ignorant about what that human nature is.
I suppose he derives his vision from Marx, but it sure isn't from Darwin. By all
empirical evidence, man, by killing, looting, amassing power, and a thousand
other selfish activities, is living very much in harmony with the laws of human
nature. That is his nature. If your goal is to make Gandhis of all men,
you are talking about the nature of some new superhuman species — not
men. "Human" proves to be one of those slippery concepts that Miller likes
to inject into his apologies, much to the detriment of clarity. The aim of the
theatre, he wrote in 1949, is to "make man more human." "More humane" would seem
to be Miller's actual task, and a Sisyphean one at that. But more human? When one
is a human how can one possibly become more human? Miller
illuminates the whole thing for us in this tiny clause. Unlike the Roman
playwright Terence, who famously said, "I am human, therefore nothing human is
alien to me," Miller placed himself somehow above his audience, whom he was in
the unique position to "teach" to be human. Apparently, without benefit of his
instruction the American public was — there is no other word for it —
sub-human. It is this lack of humility, this absence of wisdom and grace,
that prevents Arthur Miller from ascending to the rank of great artists.
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