Chapter 37
Arthur Miller: The Playwright and his Moral Imperative
In the earlier chapter you have read about the British playwright Harold Pinter. You have also understood
Pinter’s political commitments. In this chapter you will learn about Arthur Miller, the American playwright of
plays such as Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and After the Fall (1964).
Background
Arthur Miller, was born on October 17, 1915- and died on February10, 2005. Along with Eugene O’Neill and
Tennessee Williams, he is the most influential American playwright of the 20 th century. Arthur Miller was born
in New York in a well-off Jewish family. His father was a manufacturer of hats. The Great Depression (1929),
however, changed the fortunes of the Miller family. The family moved to a small frame house in Brooklyn
from their more luxurious Central Park apartment . The change in the attitude of relatives with the loss of
fortunes caused a lasting impression on Miller. As a teenager, Miller sold newspapers and worked in
warehouses to survive (later portrayed in A Memory of Two Mondays). He entered the University of Michigan
in 1934, where he won awards for playwriting. During this period, he wrote several plays dealing with family
relationships (father-son & brother-brother), which anticipated many of his full-length plays.
The Early Years
After graduating in English in 1938, Miller returned to New York. There he joined the Federal Theatre Project,
and wrote scripts for radio programs . Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford and Lee Strasberg formed the Group
Theatre in New York in 1931. The Group was a pioneering attempt to create a theatre collective, a company of
players trained in a unified style and dedicated to presenting contemporary plays. Members of the group tended
to hold left-wing political views and wanted to produce plays that dealt with important social issues.
While working at the Group Theatre Lee Strasberg developed what became known as the Method. Based on the
ideas of the Russian director, Konstantin Stanislavsky, it was a system of training and rehearsal for actors which
bases a performance upon inner emotional experience, discovered largely through the medium of improvisation.
The Group Theatre disbanded in 1941. After the Second World War, House of Un-American Activities
Committee (HUAC) investigated most of the members of the group. Some like Elia Kazan, Clifford Odets and
Lee J. Cobb testified and named other members of left-wing groups. Those that refused to do this were
blacklisted. In 1940 Miller married a Catholic girl, Mary Slattery, his college sweetheart, with whom he had
two children. Miller's first play to appear on Broadway was The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), and had
shades of Ibsen’s The Master Builder (1892). Miller also published a novel, Focus (1945), which was about
anti-Semitism.
Success came in the form of All My Sons (1947), a three-act play about a factory owner who sells faulty
aircraft parts during World War II. It won the New York Drama Critics Circle award and two Tony Awards.
Structurally, it followed the conventional Aristotelian construction of plot, observing the unities of time, place
& action. The play’s central theme of war-profiteering, sets the stage for conflict between father and his sons,
resulting in the father committing suicide.
Death of a Salesman (1949) shot Miller to international fame, and the Pulitzer –winning play became one of the
major achievements of modern American theatre. It maps the tragic story of a salesman , Willy Loman, whose
past and present are mingled in expressionistic scenes. Loman is not the great success that he aspires to be, and
scholars have found the play as a scathing critique of the American Dream and the myth of success.
Arthur Miller and Elia Kazan
Kazan was a theatre director and one of the all-time great film directors (East of Eden, Streetcar Named Desire,
On the Waterfront, Splendour in the Grass) . Miller and Kazan were friends & collaborators till Kazan ‘Named
names’ of fellow communists before the HUAC. Miller took this as an ideological betrayal
Kazan’s “A Life” is a detailed account of his life and works.
The Crucible (1953) was based upon the events in 1692, which led to the Salem Witch Trials, a series of
hearings before local magistrates to prosecute over 150 people (falsely) accused of witchcraft in colonial
Massachusetts, between February 1692 and May 1693. The play was written in the early 1950s during the time
of McCarthyism, when the US government blacklisted accused communists. The HUAC questioned Miller in
1956 about his political affiliations. The play was first performed on Broadway on January 22, 1953. The
reviews of the first production were hostile, but a year later a new production succeeded and the play became a
classic. Miller said in an article "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?" in The Guardian/Observer, “More than a
political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed over more than a year, became the
awesome evidence of the power of human imagination inflamed, the poetry of suggestion, and the tragedy of
heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin” (June 17, 2000). The play was adapted for film
twice, by Jean-Paul Sartre as the 1957 film Les Sorcières de Salem and by Miller himself as the 1996 film The
Crucible, the latter with a cast including Daniel Day-Lewis and Winona Ryder.
Miller was married to the great Hollywood star Marilyn Monroe for almost five years. After their marriage fell
apart, Miller’s immediate play was After the Fall (1964). The title derives from the Bible as well as Albert
Camus’ existentialist novel The Fall. Noted for its autobiographical theme as well as innovative techniques, the
play brought together Miller and Kazan again after a long break.
The play received mixed reviews when it was first staged. However, over the years, the play has become a cult
classic. The critic of “Curtain Up” says, “It's good to see After The Fall 40 years after, like going to your high
school reunion and seeing what was there all the time when you were too emotionally involved to notice. In this
case, Arthur Miller's honesty, poetry, depth and the very compassionate portrait he has painted of Maggie.”
Miller became increasingly political in the 60s/70s. Some of the important works of this period are: Incident at
Vichy tracks a day in the Nazi-occupied France, while in The Price he reflects on his own uneasy relationship
with his brother Kermit Miller. The American Clock is based on Stud Terkel’s Hard Times (1970) is a montage
of the Depression years, and Creation of the World , a satire on the Book of Genesis.
During this period, Miller was also elected the President of PEN (association for poets, playwrights, essayists,
novelists), and took active part in supporting writers in exile, such as Wole Soyinka, Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
and later Salman Rushdie. Sigmund, the protagonist of his The Archbishop’s Ceiling (1972 ), a play set in
Communist Prague, evokes memories of two eminent dissident writers who were the victims of state
persecution, Milan Kundera and Vaclav Havel.
Miller was extremely prolific during the 80s and the 90s, Miller’s works include: The Archbishop’s Ceiling
(based on writers in exile in Communist Czech Republic), Elegy for a Lady [and] Some Kind of Love Story, in
Two by A. M. (double-bill in 1983), Danger: Memory! in 1987 (included I Can’t Remember Anything and
Clara), Ride Down Mt Morgan (1991), and Broken Glass (1964). His prose works were a few short stories, a
novella (Homely Girl) and his autobiography Timebends (1987).
Case study
Excerpt from Miller’s essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949):
I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were. On the
face of it this ought to be obvious in the light of modern psychiatry, which bases its analysis upon
classific formulations, such as Oedipus and Orestes complexes, for instances, which were enacted by
royal beings, but which apply to everyone in similar emotional situations.
More simply, when the question of tragedy in art is not at issue, we never hesitate to attribute to the
well-placed and the exalted the very same mental processes as the lowly. And finally, if the exaltation of
tragic action were truly a property of the high-bred character alone, it is inconceivable that the mass of
mankind should cherish tragedy above all other forms, let alone be capable of understanding it.
As a general rule, to which there may be exceptions unknown to me, I think the tragic feeling is evoked
in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure
one thing-his sense of personal dignity. From Orestes to Hamlet, Medea to Macbeth, the underlying
struggle is that of the individual attempting to gain his "rightful" position in his society.
Sometimes he is one who has been displaced from it, sometimes one who seeks to attain it for the first
time, but the fateful wound from which the inevitable events spiral is the wound of indignity and its
dominant force is indignation. Tragedy, then, is the consequence of a man's total compulsion to evaluate
himself justly.
Discussion
The essay demonstrates Miller’s passionate plea for democratization of tragedy. Notice his insistence
on the “common man” as a subject of tragedy, asserting that a common man too can indeed go through
the upheavals of life, and that great crises are not the sole domain of the royals and the aristocrats. The
essay was written immediately after the enormous success of Death of a Salesmen, where a few critics
had questioned the appropriacy of having a salesman as a tragic character. “Tragedy and the Common
Man” was Miller’s response to these critics.
While most of you, I believe, must be familiar with Miller’s successful plays from the 40s through the 60s, I
would like you to become familiar with one of his major plays of the 90s, Broken Glass.
In Broken Glass (1964), Miller tackles the theme of his Jewishness along with the nature of Jewish guilt, amidst
marital discord. The play is set place in 1938, the height of the Holocaust. The title is presumably inspired from
T.S. Eliot’s Hollow Men (1925), a poem that agonizes over the moral and intellectual decay of modern man. He
comments upon the meaninglessness of the entire human exercise:
“Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar”
In Broken Glass, Miller further explores the theme as he goes back to the night of November 9, 1938, or
Kristallnacht (German, “Night of Broken Glass”), when the windows of thousands of Jewish shops and homes
were shattered across Germany and Austria. The attack on Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues was
carried out by the Nazis. The reason cited for such mass extermination of Jews was revenge for a fatal attack
two days earlier by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen year old Polish Jew, on Ernst vom Rath, a third secretary
in the German embassy in Paris. It is believed that over three thousand Jews died that night, almost eleven
hundred synagogues were destroyed, and nearly thirty thousand people were arrested and deported to
concentration camps. Miller makes the protagonist, Sylvia Gellburg, view this event with horror, not only
because of the violence towards people for their race and identities, but also because of the failure of the rest of
the world population to protest.
The play opens with Phillip Gellburg discussing his wife Sylvia’s stroke with Dr. Hyman’s wife Margaret. He
prides himself for his fiercely independent disposition, “I don’t run with the crowd, I see with these eyes,
nobody else’s…I didn’t get where I am by agreeing with everybody.” Gellburg’s cocern is that along with her
stroke, she has also become unnaturally concerned about persecution of Jews in Germany. As a disrelated (the
Depression has not affected him too much) and irrational man (he proposes that his wife has been seized by a
dybbuk, or ghost) Gellburg is unable to fathom the entire situation. He argues, “these German Jews won’t take
an ordinary good job…it’s got to be pretty high up in the firm or they’re insulted. And they can’t even speak
English.” He is conscious of the fact that he is the only Jew ever to head his firm, the only Jew to have ever set
foot on his boss’ yacht―where women, in his opinion, are bad luck―and proudly discloses that Jerome, his
son, is the only Jewish captain in the army.
Dr. Hyman spots the temperamental difference between Phillip and Sylvia. His intuition is that people “get sick
in twos and threes, not alone as individuals.” In other words, he wants Gellburg to accept some of the
responsibility, and tries his best to understand him. He asks Phillip the reason why he is always dressed in black
(black being a symbol of mourning) but Phillip’s response is a vague, “I always liked black for business
reasons.” Hyman delves into a more personal realm and asks if he has “relations” with his wife. Phillip’s
answer is “twice, three times a week.”
Next, we are introduced to Sylvia in a wheelchair. Her sister Harriet cannot understand her concerns for the
assaults on the German Jews, however, for Sylvia this brutal dehumanizing affair is a personal effrontery:
SYLVIA : Remember Grandpa? His eyeglasses with the bent
sidepiece? One of the old men in the paper was his spiting
image, he had the same exact glasses with the wife frames. I
can’t get it out of may mind. On their knees on the wire sidewalk.
two old men. And there’s fifteen or twenty people standing in a
circle laughing at them scrubbing with tooth brushes.
As she becomes dependent on her doctor, Gellburg seethes with jealousy, which is fueled by his own sense of
guilt and insecurity. He reveals his paranoia to Hyman, “this whole thing is against me,” he complains. He also
accuses Hyman of being sexually interested in Sylvia. The scene ends with Hyman’s wife urging him to come
clean about his real feelings for Sylvia. At last, Sylvia comes to terms with her conflict. She is afraid, not of the
Nazis, but of her husband and she sees herself to be his “Jew.” She also bitterly resents him for lying to Hyman
that he and Sylvia lead a normal sexual life. In a fit of rage, “a Jewish woman’s tone of voice”, she confronts
Phillip:
SYLVIA : What I did with my life! Out of ignorance. Out of
not waiting to Shame you in front of other people. A whole life.
Gave it away like a couple of pennies – I took better care of my
shoes. You want to talk to me about it now? Take me seriously, Phillip.
Gellburg accepts his responsibility (as Hyman muses, “nobody’s going to look at himself and ask what he’s
doing.”) But the reality proves too strong for him to bear; and while Sylvia is back on her feet, her husband
ends up with a stroke. Miller is equivocal with the play’s ending, as Sylvia feels grieved as well as victorious
for Gellburg’s destruction, and with Hyman, his wife and Sylvia waiting for their release.
As you will find in Broken Glass, The Last Yankee (1993) , Mr Peters’ Connections (1999) and Resurrection
Blues ( 2002 ), though Miller experimented with theatre techniques and language, his core thematic concerns--exploration of moral issues, high seriousness and steadfastness in public and personal behaviour, and collective
responsibility--- largely remained the same.
The Activist Miller
In an interview Pinter recalls that Miller and he had a memorable trip to Turkey about 20 years ago when we
met a lot of writers that had been in prison and had been tortured. Pinter added how he admired him
tremendously for his independence and his clarity of mind. “And this is what Salman Rushdie had to say,
“Moral stature is a rare quality in these degraded days. Very few writers possess it. Miller’s seems innate. When
I needed help, I am proud that Arthur Miller’s was one of the first and loudest voices raised on my behalf” (pp.
46-47).
Miller’s plays have found global resonance, including in countries such as China and India. His plays have
been adapted in several Indian languages. Some of these are: All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Price,
Clara, and I Cannot Remember Anything.
Miller’s legacy includes being credited with democratization of tragedy by using accessible language and about
common people. His themes of guilt and collective responsibility have influenced playwrights such as David
Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross), Tony Kushner (Angels in America) , John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation),
etc. Notable contemporaries are Edward Albee (American Dream, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf) and Harold
Pinter.
In fact, if you have watched the film American Beauty (2000), I am sure you will find strong parallels between
the Miller play and the film’s central premise of decline of family values and the misplaced faith in the notion
of the American Dream.
While assessing Miller’s position in the dramatic canon, Martin Gottfried concludes,
“There have been playwrights―Strindberg, for instance, Beckett, Wycherley and
Sheridan―who achieved classic reputation
with just one or two acknowledged masterworks. Chekhov wrote only four major plays.
Shaw, Ibsen and Moliere each have bequeathed only a handful of classics. Shakespeare
alone left a body of masterworks. That is the company Arthur Miller joined―remarkably
during his lifetime…For a man who has dwelled on the human imperative to survive,
Arthur Miller not only survived, he triumphed” (Gottfried 2003: 446).
QUIZ
1. Answer in brief:
i. Briefly examine Arthur Miller’s universal popularity and his legacy.
ii. Mention any three plays of Miller from the 80s.
iii. Explain the notion of ‘democratization of tragedy’ with reference to Miller’s plays.
2. State whether the following statements are true or false:
i. Miller’s autobiography is titled Timebends.
ii. The title of Broken Glass is taken from a poem by W.H. Auden.
iii. Miller’s The Archbishop’s Ceiling is a play about the Holocaust in Europe.
Answer key
2: i-True ; ii-False (T.S. Eliot) ; iii- False (Communism)
Suggested readings:
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Routledge , 1989.
Gottfried, Martin. Arthur Miller: A Life. NY: Faber & Faber, 2003.
Latham, Earl. “The Meaning of McCarthyism” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Crucible . John
H.Ferres (ed.). Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972.
Miller, Arthur. Echoes Down the Corridor (ed.) Steven Centola. New York: Viking Penguin, 2000, p. xi.
----------------- . “Family in Modern Drama.” Modern Drama, ed. Bogard and Oliver I. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1965).
----------------- . Collected Plays, vol. 1. New York: Viking 1957.
------------------- . Timebends, New York : Grove Press, 1987.
--------------------.Plays Four. London: Methuen, 1994.
-------------------. "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?"from The Guardian/The Observer (on line), Saturday,
June 17, 2000 .
Rushdie, Salman. Step Across This Line: Collected Nonfiction 1992-2002.New York: The Modern Library,
2003, pp. 46-47.
Suggested websites:
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http://www.arthurmiller.org/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/miller
http://wps.ablongman.com/long_kennedy_lfpd_9/22/5820/1489998.cw/index.html
http://www.curtainup.com/afterthefall.html
http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/11/12/specials/miller-common.html