For Miller it was the 1930s, and the Great Depression, that was the real crucible in which his future work was mixed and honed, which he acknowledges in his 1987 autobiography, Timebends: A Life when he writes that he “… knew the Depression was… a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation of the hypocrisies behind the façade of American society.”
As a consequence of this Miller went on to write plays that peel away those hypocrisies, and in Death of a Salesman he succeeds brilliantly in creating a character, Willy Loman, who still believes (even as he is taking his own life) in the American Dream, and cannot, will not, acknowledge it has become for him, and many like him, a nightmare.
For Miller the Great Depression was just one of “…two American disasters that were truly national. Not the First or Second World Wars, Vietnam, or even the Revolution. Only the Civil War and the Great Depression touched nearly everyone wherever they lived and whatever their social class.” And it is the dreadful legacy of that1930s financial upheaval that is at the heart of all of Miller’s plays. If you get a chance to see a Miller play today you’ll soon realise that one of the strongest themes to come across is Miller’s affinity with, and understanding of, those men and woman who survived those times.
And all good playwrights, like all good historians, are the collective memory of the people, and it is a playwright’s duty to remind succeeding generations that what happened yesterday might be happening again today. And I believe Arthur Miller did just that.
Arthur Asher Miller was born in Manhattan on the 17th of October 1915, the second son of Isidore and Augusta Miller. Isidore, his father, a Polish immigrant, was a successful manufacturer of ladies coats. The young Arthur Miller was brought up in a well furnished six storey town house in Harlem where his mother Augusta (an ex school teacher) paid a young student from Columbia University to come to her home every week and talk with her about novels. Miller recalled that his mother could “… begin a novel in the afternoon, pick it up again after dinner, finish it by midnight, and remember it in detail for the rest of her life.”
Although Isidore Miller lost a great deal of money in the Crash of 1929 his business didn’t actually go under (he stopped making coats and instead started manufacturing ladies hats which eventually made him a second fortune), but as a consequence the Miller family had to move into a small wooden house in Brooklyn (not far from where Walt Whitman had lived as a boy) where the teenage Miller spent his time playing football and baseball and reading adventure stories.
Part 2 – 1930s, Automobile warehouse, Dostoevsky, Avery Hopwood Award, Michigan State University, They Too Arise, the Federal Theatre Project, Orson Welles, and CBS...
In 1932, finding himself unqualified for university, Arthur Miller left High School and took a job in an automobile parts warehouse for $15 a week, where, in his breaks, he began to read seriously. And it was after finishing Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that he decided to get into university and become a writer. Two years later, having saved enough money for the tuition fees, his second application to Michigan State University was accepted. Miller spent the next four years studying journalism and English literature.
In his first year at university he wrote a play called No Villain, which he entered for the prestigious Avery Hopwood Award, and although the drama was written in just six days it won the $250 first prize. Miller subsequently revised the play under the title They Too Arise, which won a $1,250 prize from the Theatre Guild in New York. Two more student plays followed - Honors at Dawn (which won another Hopwood award) and The Great Disobedience, about life in prison.
After graduation (he earned a BA in English) Miller returned to New York and joined the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) where he collaborated with playwright Norman Rosten on a blatantly socialist comedy called Listen My Children.
The FTP had been set-up in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal and was under the directorship of Hallie Flanagan, who claimed Roosevelt told her to get professional theatre back to work. This tough woman took the President at his word and in the first year of its existence over 1,000 Performances took place in twenty-two different States, including the now famous black Macbeth, directed by Orson Welles for the Negro Peoples Theatre. Welles followed that, in 1936, with Marc Blitzstein’s controversial musical The Cradle Will Rock. Take a look at Tim Robbins 1999 film of the same title to get a feel of those times.
At its height the FTP employed over 5,000 people in New York alone, with actors paid a basic $22.73 a week. Over the three years of its existence 12 million people attended FTP performances across the country. But as with all such Government projects of the time many opposition politicians objected to the FTP.
One such was Congressman J. Parnell Thomas who claimed that subsidised theatre, and the FTP project in particular (and the undoubtedly radical messages that came from many of their productions) were simply fronts for the Communist party and therefore the enemies of America. The arguments were long and fierce and in 1939 Congress abolished the project. The FTP was a bold and innovative step by Roosevelt, which in its three years gave hope to the theatre industry and launched the careers, not only of Miller, but of John Houseman, Paul Green, Marc Blitzstein, Elmer Rice, Will Geer, and of course the aforementioned Orson Welles.
Soon after the abolition of the FTP Miller was commissioned by CBS to write a satirical radio script for their new experimental radio drama series, “Columbia Workshop”, with the finished piece, The Pussycat and the Expert Plumber Who Was a Man, more experimental than satirical. But as a result of that broadcast he was asked by NBC to write a piece for their new radio drama slot, “Cavalcade of America”. He was on the ladder.
Part 3 – 1940, Brooklyn Navy Yard, Mary Slattery, Hollywood Commission, The Story of GI Joe, and All My Sons...
During the hot summer of 1939, and with the threat of war growing ever larger, America introduced the draft; but luckily for Miller (due to a football injury at Michigan) he failed his army medical and was sent to work at the navy yard in Brooklyn. By 1940 his confidence was high, and with those two radio plays produced, with several more in the pipeline, and a steady job at the navy yard, Miller asked his university sweetheart, Mary Slattery, to marry him. She accepted.
In 1941 Miller began to write a play that would eventually turn into The Man Who Had All The Luck which, in 1944, was Miller’s first play to be professionally produced on Broadway. The New York critics didn’t like it and with Broadway going through a “classical” period (not uncommon in wartime) Miller was out of step with the more upbeat mood of those post D-Day times. The play closed after just four performances.
Throughout the war years Miller continued to write radio plays and in 1943, just after he left the navy yard, he was commissioned by the eminent Hollywood producer Lester Cowan ( for $750 a week) to turn war correspondent Ernie Pyle’s best selling book, Here Is Your War, into a movie. Miller visited military camps all over the US gathering information for a script that was eventually, with the help of five other writers, turned into the 1945 film, The Story of GI Joe, starring Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum. Miller didn’t even get a writing credit.
During the next two years Miller wrote more radio plays, completed his first book, Situation Normal, based on all those interviews with the GIs, and wrote his first novel, Focus. He also finished a stage play that was to change his life.
All My Sons, written during the last two years of the war, and finished in the summer of 1946 in a rented bungalow on Long Island, is a melodrama about aircraft parts manufacturer, Joe Keller who, during World War Two, knowingly sends out a batch of faulty parts that cause the death of twenty-two flyers. Keller is arrested but puts the blame onto his partner Steve Deever who is sent to jail, with Keller publicly exonerated. Keller’s son Larry is then reported as missing in action - although we later learn that he actually committed suicide after learning of his father’s arrest. When Keller’s other son, Chris, asks Larry’s old girlfriend (who is Deever’s daughter) to marry him it causes huge tension which eventually results in Keller’s guilt being uncovered. When Chris - an ex-soldier - learns of his father’s guilt he totally rejects him. Then, when Keller discovers how his son Larry died, he finally accepts responsibility for his actions and kills himself. As with all of Miller’s plays the writing is tough, as the following extract from Act Three shows, where Keller, having been accused earlier by his son Chris of selling those faulty aircraft parts, is talking with his wife.
MOTHER: I don’t know, I’m beginning to think we don’t really know him. They say in the war he was such a killer. Here he was afraid of mice. I don’t know him. I don’t know what he’ll do.
KELLER: Goddam, if Larry was alive he wouldn’t act like this. He understood the way the world is made. He listened to me. To him the world had a forty-foot front, it ended at the building line. This one, everything bothers him. You make a deal, overcharge two cents, and his hair falls out. He doesn’t understand money. Too easy, it came too easy. Yes, sir. Larry. That was a boy we lost. Larry. Larry. [ He slumps on chair in front of her] What am I gonna do, Kate?
MOTHER: Joe, Joe, please… You’ll be all right, nothing is going to happen.
KELLER [ desperately, lost]: For you Kate, for both of you, that’s all I ever lived for…
Miller has often been accused of sentimentality in his work, but I find no sentimentality there at all, just good honest realism that strikes home and brings out the fact that you can’t beat the system even when given the chance.
Part 4 – Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, Karl Malden, New York Drama Critics Award, Tony Award, Death of a Salesman, Lee J.Cobb, Marilyn Monroe, and The Crucible...
With the completion of the play Miller vowed that if All My Sons was a flop he’d give up writing plays altogether. He sent the MSS to the Broadway producer, Herman Shumlin, who returned it saying he didn’t understand it. Eventually the script ended up in the hands of agent Kay Brown (who would remain Miller’s agent for the next forty years) who loved it and gave it to director Elia Kazan, and his producer partner, Harold Clurman. Brown also gave a copy to the Theatre Guild and within two days both organisations were bidding for the rights. Kazan and Clurman won and the play, directed by Kazan, and starring Karl Malden and Arthur Kennedy, opened on Broadway in 1947, where it ran for a respectable 328 performances, winning the prestigious New York Drama Critics Award and two Tony Awards. The play, when it ran in London the following year, clocked-up 148 performances. For Miller it was also a huge personal success, earning him $2,000 a week at its height.
In February 1949 Miller’s most famous play, Death of a Salesman, opened at the Morosco Theatre on Broadway, again directed by Kazan, and starring Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman. The play ran for 742 performances (something of a first for a new play) and is now probably the best known piece of drama on how not to cope with life. The play was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece winning not only the New York Drama Critics Award for 1949, but also a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. It was translated into 29 languages, and when it opened in London, in July 1949, ran for 204 performances. It was also described by some as “Marxist propaganda.” Miller had entered the bloodstained political arena from which he was never to leave.
Reading the play today it still has this dreadfully fractured feeling for lost times and lost aspirations and Loman’s lost love of his son, as this short extract from Act Two shows:
WILLY: Oh, Ben, how do we get back to all the great times? Used to be so full of light, and comradeship, the sleigh-riding in winter, and the ruddiness on his cheeks. And always some kind of good news coming up, always something nice coming up ahead. And never let me carry the valises in the house, and simonising, simonising that little red car! Why, why can’t I give him something and not have him hate me?
Elia Kazan invited Miller to Hollywood in 1950, and on the set of As Young As You Feel Miller was introduced to Marilyn Monroe. Miller wrote of the meeting, which was a decisive moment in the playwright’s life, that Monroe “… seemed almost ludicrously provocative, a strange bird in the aviary, if only because her dress was so blatantly tight, declaring rather than insinuating that she had brought her body along and that it was the best one in the room. The sight of her was something like pain, and I knew that I must flee or walk into a doom beyond all knowing. It was not duty alone that called me; I had to escape her childish voracity.” After discussing the possibility of filming Death of a Salesman Miller fled Hollywood with his emotional equilibrium destroyed.
The playwright now came under the scrutiny of the House Committee on un-American Activities. The committee, which had been set-up in 1938 to investigate a spy scandal, had, by 1950, become a hugely influential body within American political life, with a determination to rid the US of such left wing intellectuals as Miller. They picked on the wrong man.
Miller’s next play, The Crucible - which opened in New York in January 1953, starring E.G. Marshall and Arthur Kennedy - is an allegorical re-telling of the activities of the aforementioned House Committee and is set during the 1692 Salem Witchcraft Trials, where several young girls accuse innocent townsfolk of witchcraft to avoid getting into trouble for harbouring such ideas themselves. The end result is that an innocent man is given the chance to save his own life by incriminating friends and neighbours. In the end he chooses to die rather than name names. On its first Broadway outing The Crucible ran for only 197 performances, but has, over the years, become the most performed of all Miller’s plays.The critical response was mixed as many considered the play something of a let down after Death of a Salesman, while others thought it too preoccupied with McCarthyism. The play also marked the very public rift between Miller and Elia Kazan, who, for whatever reason, had named names before the Committee, an act which infuriated Miller.
Part 5 – House Committee un-American Activities, marriage to Marilyn Monroe, A Memory of Two Mondays, A View from the Bridge, Laurence Olivier, The Prince and the Showgirl, Peter Brook...
Ever since their first meeting in 1950 Miller realised he could not ignore his feelings for Monroe and during the Broadway run of The Crucible he allowed Monroe to secretly rent a New York apartment where he and Monroe could meet. When Miller’s wife found out all hell was let loose.
Soon after the opening of The Crucible Miller became the object of a political witch-hunt after he’d been contracted to write the script for a film about the Youth Board of New York’s work with teenage gangs. The New York World Telegram charged Miller with left-wing activities, of attending meetings of communist writers groups, and of protesting against the outlawing of the American Communist Party. Miller’s contract to write the film was quickly revoked by the governors of the Youth Board. It was a taste of things to come.
Miller’s next two plays, A Memory of Two Mondays, a one act play about his experiences working in the automobile parts warehouse in the 1930s, and A View from the Bridge, which tells the story of longshoreman Eddie Carbone, who develops a sexual attraction for his wife’s niece, were plays that, in their caring concern for the less fortunate in society did nothing to help Miller’s standing with those on the right who now held the writer in contempt, considering him little more than a communist propagandist.
In June 1956, and coinciding with his divorce from Mary, Miller was called to appeare before the House Committee un-American Activities, where, under severe questioning Miller repeatedly, and steadfastly, refused to name names. By this time Miller’s relationship with Monroe was much bigger news than the Committee hearings. The Committee, somewhat out maneuvered by the press, and Monroe, eventually fined Miller $500 and gave him a one month suspended jail sentence for contempt of Congress. The decision was reversed, on appeal, ten years later. Miller’s brave stance was, in the end, much applauded by an entertainment industry that had let so many of its members down at a time of political madness.
Monroe and Miller married in July 1956, and in 1957 the couple came to England where Miller worked with Peter Brook on an extended version of A View from the Bridge, with Monroe filming The Prince and the Showgirl, with Laurence Olivier.
Part 6 – The Misfits, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, Inge Morah, The Price, Warren Mitchell, RSC, Royal National Theatre, Bristol Old Vic, Finishing the Picture...
The next few years were quite barren for Miller, with his film script of The Misfits (1961), written as a gift for Monroe, the only highlight. In fact it wouldn’t be until 1964 ( two years after Monroe’s death) that Miller found his stride again with his next play, After the Fall, followed later in the year by Incident at Vichy ( a companion piece to After the Fall ), which is a play that looks at the anti-semitic ideas that fuelled the Holocaust.
In 1962 Miller married the Austrian photographer, Inge Morah; and in 1968 came Miller’s The Price which is again about a man confronting his past and is one of Miller’s finest plays, with the playwright at last putting some of the old ghosts of the Depression to rest. When I saw a production of the play last year in Malvern, starring Warren Mitchell as the furniture dealer, it was a revelation in the art of play-making. Words, and more words. Wonderful.
Between 1968 and his death Arthur Miller wrote twelve more plays, with The Archbishop’s Ceiling and The American Clock successfully produced by the RSC and the Royal National Theatre respectively. 1990 saw Miller’s Broadway flop, The Man Who Had All The Luck, play to rave reviews at the Bristol Old Vic. In 1994 Broken Glass opened at the Royal National Theatre, winning him that years Olivier Award for Best Play. 1997 saw Mr Peter’s Connection premier at the Almeida in London, before going on a national tour. His last play, Finishing the Picture, premiered in Chicago in 2004.
Miller collaborated on several of Inge Morah’s books of photography, and spent increasing hours building wooden furniture, a craft he considered ideal for a playwright. Soon after Inge’s death in 2002 Miller met the young painter, Agnes Barley, who became his companion.
Arthur Miller died on the 10th February 2005, aged 89, at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut.
Arthur Miller