Miller is not concerned simply with an individual whose values are at odds with those of his society. On the contrary, Joe Keller is not aberrant, except in the extremity of his crime. He represents a pragmatism that coexisted with the language and fact of idealism in wartime America. As Miller insisted, when he wrote the play, “everybody knew that a lot of hanky-panky was going on. . . . A lot of illicit fortunes were being made, a lot of junk was being sold to the armed services, we all knew that. The average person was violating rationing. All the rules were being violated every day but you wanted not to mention it.”10
Indeed, as Miller observed in his introduction to the Collected Plays, All My Sons was conceived when the contrast between sacrifice and aggrandizement seemed both sharp and profoundly disturbing: “When all public voices were announcing the arrival of that great day when industry and labor were one, my personal experience was daily demonstrating that beneath the slogans nothing had changed.” The play was thus “an unveiling of what I believed everybody knew but nobody publicly said.”11
The play was finally produced after the war, in January 1947, but its themes transcended the immediate circumstances that had generated the story. Indeed, speaking in 1999, Miller still insisted on its continuing relevance, noting that audiences recognize the force, if not the justification, of Keller’s defense of his actions, not least because they understand, while rejecting, his motives and acknowledge their own potential for complicity: “The justification that Joe Keller makes is that . . . you do what you have to do in order to survive,” a defense which is “always understandable and always unacceptable.” The fact is that audiences “know pretty well that given the kind of pressure that Joe Keller was under they might have collapsed too, so that people participate in the conflict. They don’t stand apart entirely from it because they know they’re vulnerable.”12
When the play begins, Keller is seen reading the want ads in a Sunday newspaper. As he explains, he no longer reads the news section, in which, after all, he would have found his own name only a few years before. As his neighbor rightly remarks, “It’s all bad news.”* Joe and his wife live in fear of bad news, about their son and about the crime they have conspired to deny. Indeed, the son and the crime are braided together in their minds.
Keller is joined by two neighbors, one, Frank Lubey, “uncertain of himself . . . thirty-two and balding”; the other, Jim, a doctor, “wry, self-controlled . . . but with a wisp of sadness that clings to his self-effacing humor.” Their wives are, respectively, Lydia, a “robust, laughing girl of twenty-seven,” and Sue, “rounding forty, an overweight woman who fears it.” These notes are for the actors, and there is more than a hint that this suburban setting contains elements of regret and anxiety which extend beyond the Kellers’ backyard. The neighbors give something more than a social density to All My Sons; they are more than a chorus, refracting the views of the community. They contain in themselves the conflicts at the heart of the play, acknowledging, as they do, a tension between the pragmatic and the ideal, and recognizing the compromises that seem an inevitable aspect of daily living. Marriage itself, it seems—on the basis of the marriages in this play—offers an image of such compromises, a fact that will surely cast its shadow over the proposed relationship between Chris Keller and Ann Deever.
The play begins with Chris Keller’s admission that he has invited his brother’s fiancée, Ann, with the intention of proposing marriage to her. Since his mother still insists that Larry is alive, such an action must destroy her fragile faith, for the fact is that, rather than confront her with the truth, both husband and son have, until now, remained silent. However, when Chris says, “Being dishonest with her. That kind of thing always pays off,”* this is a statement that foreshadows other forms of dishonesty and other prices that must be paid—as does Joe’s reply, “I ignore what I gotta ignore.”* Indeed, Chris himself, shortly thereafter, prevaricates in the face of his mother’s questioning. And though the focus of the play seems to be on Joe, whose past failings are revealed and whose guilt is affirmed, an ambiguity attaches itself to Chris and becomes more profound as the play proceeds.
Chris’s early statement, for example, that “I don’t know why it is, but every time I reach out for something I want, I have to pull back because other people will suffer. My whole bloody life, time after time after time,”* seems to lack substance, outside of the immediate issue of his proposed marriage. What, precisely, has he reached for that he has been denied or required to relinquish so that others would not suffer? Chris, we begin to realize, is a man who sees himself as a martyr, an idealist; yet the suspicion grows that this is an image behind which he hides. Doubts are swallowed up in this self-conscious presentation of himself as an honest man doing nothing more than demanding honesty, a self-denier only now able to assert his rights. He presents himself, to himself, as serving truth, but truth not only places him at risk; it becomes a means of directing attention away from himself and his own moral failings.
At the beginning of the play he announces, “I’ve been a good son too long, a good sucker. I’m through with it.”* In what sense is this true, beyond his failure to confess his love to Ann for fear of disturbing his mother? He now declares his willingness to leave the family business if necessary, but in fact he is anxious to secure the terms on which he can remain, while condescending to it. The business, he explains to the father who has built it, as he knows, in part for him, doesn’t “inspire” him. But what does? He speaks of having to “grub for money,”* as he later speaks resentfully of having to join the “rat race.” He wants, he explains, to build something he can give himself to, quite as though he were still pursuing his metaphor of immolation and sacrifice. Knowing that his father is desperate for him to stay, he threatens to leave. Marriage to Ann, he implies, will secure his loyalty to the business. She becomes his bargaining tool.
Chris feels guilty about his new happiness. In the war he led his men to their death. He is a survivor who feels the guilt of the survivor, a theme to which Miller would return in After the Fall (1964). Beyond that, he can see no connection between the sacrifices of war and the way of life it was supposedly fought to preserve, a bland materialism with no transcendence. Wartime camaraderie implies a concept of human relationships and a shared perception of worth that seems to have no correlative in a postwar world concerned with simple acquisitiveness. However, he seems quietly to abandon his own rhetoric: “Annie,” he announces, “I’m going to make a fortune for you!”* It is a half-ironic remark that perhaps reflects something of his unacknowledged ambiguity as a participant in a tainted company.
Kate Keller, meanwhile, carries the authority in the house, defines its reality. In an earlier version of the text she was in an even more dominant position. Her faith in astrology—a faith that was designed to bolster her desperate belief in her son’s survival—generated the play’s original title: The Sign of the Archer. Astrology may, as Miller has suggested, have given way to psychology—his own flirting with mysticism revealing, he thought, one of the problems with his earlier plays, such as The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck, at least so far as Broadway was concerned—but Kate still remains a powerful figure. The relationship between father and son may move to the center of attention, but she holds a key to the action. It is her will that has sustained them and, in a sense, her desperate necessity that has infantilized them as she struggles to deny the truth, to reject causality. For her, nothing must change. The clock must be stopped. Chris must remain unmarried; her husband must remain a charming incompetent, unable to function in the simplest of matters—since to assume otherwise would be to accept a view of the world that could only destroy her.
If Joe Keller uses the family as a justification for his actions, it is equally vital to Kate because beyond it lies nothing but a kind of anarchy, exemplified by the death of a son. In that regard there is something of Steinbeck’s Ma Joad about her; she is determined, until the very end, to maintain the integrity and reali
ty of the family in the face of change and competing models of social responsibility. Indeed, All My Sons, with its emphasis on human solidarity, on the interests of mankind over those of the individual or the family group, clearly chimes with a central conviction of the 1930s, embodied in the work of Steinbeck, Odets, and even, in To Have and Have Not and For Whom the Bell Tolls, of Ernest Hemingway. “Marx said it. Abolish such families,”13 remarks the protagonist of Odets’s Awake and Sing.
Interestingly, Kate Keller is referred to as “Mother” not only by Chris and, not entirely incidentally, by her husband, but also by the playwright, her speeches being so indicated in the text. It suggests, perhaps, that Miller, whose stage directions describe her as “a woman of uncontrolled inspirations, and an overwhelming capacity for love,”* feels close to her and alienated from her husband—who is the only other character in the play not referred to by his first name in the speech indicators. The fact is, however, that the power system in the family changed with Joe Keller’s decision to send out the defective parts, and with the criminal case that followed. Kate’s knowledge, at whatever level it operates within her, strips him of the authority he once wielded. He cedes his position as head of the house, living in a temporal void enforced by his wife. Her desperate need to deny the possibility of her son’s death, understandable in its own terms, also derives from her desire to deny the connection between that death and her husband’s actions.
That connection is there, long before Ann’s revelation in Act III that the son deliberately took his own life, out of shame at his father’s actions. It is a connection that Kate can continue to deny only so long as she can convince herself and others that he may have survived. If he has not survived, then such meaning as she has constructed for herself will dissolve. As she says, “If he’s not coming back, then I’ll kill myself.”* Why? Not simply because she will be admitting the death, three years before, of a son—a terrible but hardly unique loss—but because a connection will be made between that death and the culpability she shares with her husband. In her mind, the only defense for Joe Keller’s action is that it was done for the sake of their sons. If one son is not returning and the other may abandon them, then it stands stripped even of this justification. It must be named for what it is. As she says to her husband, “You above all have got to believe.”* As a result, she keeps her son’s memory polished, like the shoes she puts out ready for his return.
That connection, however, is readily made by Ann. Speaking of her father, whom she believes to be responsible for shipping the faulty parts, she says, “He knowingly shipped out parts that would crash an airplane. And how do we know Larry wasn’t one of them?” When Keller shows signs of agitation at this suggestion, Kate interrupts to insist, “He’s not dead, so there’s no argument.”*
Joe is an accommodationist. His public denials are matched by his private ones. When Kate asks if Chris has discussed marrying Ann, his reply is, “He didn’t tell me any more than he told you,”* though we have just witnessed such a discussion. Having practiced private deceit, he seems to have internalized his own denials. Urging Ann to persuade her father to return to the neighborhood after his imprisonment, he says, “Listen, you do like I did and you’ll be all right.”* The fact is that he is far from all right, but at this stage in the play we are in no position to know this, though already there are sufficient hints to undermine the assurance he displays.
He insists, apparently with conviction, that he himself deliberately chose to return and confront his skeptical neighbors: “None of them believed I was innocent. The story was, I pulled a fast one getting myself exonerated. . . . The beast! I was the beast; the guy who sold cracked cylinder heads to the Army Air Force; the guy who made twenty-one P-40s crash in Australia. . . . Except I wasn’t, and there was a court paper in my pocket to prove I wasn’t.”*
Yet, of course, he was and knows he was. Is this, then, mere bravado—blatant, calculated lying—or has denial sunk so deep into his being that reality has been reinvented? The speech ends with his boast that fourteen months later he had “one of the best shops in the state again, a respected man again; bigger than ever.”* Best. Bigger. The language of material success blots out the language of guilt. It is as though the words themselves define the real and are his defense against self-knowledge. In his own mind he stands doubly vindicated, by the court and by his renewed success.
The “only way you lick ’em is guts!”* he insists, though he has, of course, precisely lacked the courage to face the implications of his own actions. He believes, because he must believe, that there is a space between his actions and the self those actions define. His observation that “you play cards with a man you know he can’t be a murderer”* is less a confident piece of advice than a desperate article of faith on the part of a man seeking confirmation that appearance finally matters more than reality.
His assurance, however, is easily deflated. A telephone call from Ann’s brother, George, combined with her sudden appearance in the house, is enough to put him on the defensive: “She don’t hold nothin’ against me, does she? . . . I mean if she was sent here to find out something. . . . I mean if they want to open up the case again, for the nuisance value, to hurt us.”* The call comes from Columbus, where Ann and George’s father is in prison. Suddenly, and with no further prompting, Joe Keller insists that he wants a “clean start” for his son, that he wishes him to inherit what he built for him, “without shame.” The very phrases imply an acknowledgment of the culpability he otherwise denies.
Already the questions begin to accumulate. Why this nervousness, why this insistence on a clean start and on being unashamed, if he is not guilty? And why does Miller indicate that Joe’s son, too, responds “a little uneasily” to the inheritance he is offered, and that he is “a little frightened” when asked to affirm that there is nothing wrong with the money he receives from the company that will one day bear his name? As in Miller’s later plays, the integrity of a name is of crucial importance to those who have conspired in subverting that integrity.
Ann’s father has lost his name, his reputation, in the eyes of the community. Joe defends his own name and reputation by refusing to acknowledge the connection between himself and his actions, while his son tries to sustain his by asserting an idealism that is at odds with his equally evident self-interest. Ann Deever, meanwhile, is to change her name, becoming Ann Keller, a process that requires certain adjustments and accommodations on her part, her new identity implicating her in the moral values of the family she joins. The fact is that these are all characters whose motives are mixed, who contain contradictions and who display different levels of consciousness of that fact. They are all characters who insist on the integrity of their identity when they are in the process of denying it.
Miller has said that Joe Keller feels justified in his actions because if his business had been threatened he would have had nothing to hand on to his son and “that would be a fate worse than death because one of his psychological supports is that he is a provider . . . the father of the house . . . the man from whom all power and . . . energy flows.” Nonetheless, “he does feel guilt about what he has done” while at the same time feeling that “there was no other way for him. . . . It’s a crazy quilt of motivations and contradictions inside of him.”14 He would, Miller suggests, be a “sociopathic person” if he were wholly insensitive to the social rules he has broken, fully capable of suppressing guilt for his actions, yet at the same time he denies the force of his knowledge. His sensitivity is, hence, evidence both of his guilt and of the survival of a moral conscience.
Interestingly, Miller has also said that he does not see Keller as a criminal. Since Joe assuredly is a criminal—his culpability being slowly exposed—what Miller seems to mean is that he is not wholly so, that such a word hardly sums up a man who acknowledges a hierarchy of values in which the needs of the family are placed ahead of strangers with whom he feels no organic connection, a man whose denials seem necessary to his surviva
l. But he is not the only person who survives by virtue of suppressing the truth.
Speaking of Kate, Rosemary Harris, who played the part in the London production, said: “One of the fascinating aspects of playing Kate is the question of how much she really knows or suspects. It is a very thin line.”15 Miller is more peremptory: “Kate knows everything from the time the curtain goes up . . . because she remembers the day it happened.” On the other hand, “her life has consisted of trying to deny what she knows.” The same is true of Chris, “but with him it is buried deeper because it is so intolerable—the idea of his betraying him and his comrades—that he simply will not consider it.”16
There is, in other words, a layered consciousness in this supposedly realistic play, a sense that each character contains within himself or herself a debate about contending values, about competing versions of the moral world and of reality. The characters are drawn together by love, but that love becomes the source of a certain corruption. It is also not untinged with its opposite. When Chris precipitates the confrontation that is to destroy his father, Miller has said, he has “to feel a certain, almost vengeance upon his father or he would not be able to do what he does.” It is he, more even than George Deever, who drives the issue to the point of crisis, and he who has “to feel resentment and hatred for his father, to some degree”17 in order to do this.
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