It is not hard to see how Miller regarded this as in some ways addressing that political and moral paralysis that he saw infecting Europeans and Americans alike in the face of fascism. To him, such inaction revealed something more than a failure of will, something beyond mere political pragmatism. It was as if belief in the possibility of action had been destroyed, as if the march of fascism across Europe were a natural and hence irresistible phenomenon. Beyond that, he seems to have detected a more fundamental defeatism, since this is a novel and then a play in which characters, acknowledging what seems to them to be the sheer arbitrary nature of experience, appear to accept the role of victim, to welcome the sense of vertigo that comes with staring into the depths of a self-generated despair.
For David, this was not always so. At the beginning of the play he is a man who seizes the day. In the words of his brother, Amos, he knows “how to do.” Others are more quiescent. Thus his father wants success for Amos, having trained him for years, but it is David who finally calls the baseball scout, asking, “Can you just wait for something to happen?” By contrast, Shory, in part an echo of the figure of Moe Axelrod in Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing, has been made cynical by his wartime experience. For him, “A man is a jellyfish. The tide goes in and the tide goes out. About what happens to him, a man has very little say.” Gus, the Austrian mechanic, likewise initially insists that “there is no justice in this world.”
This is a view that David at first resists, if only because not to resist it would bring him to the brink of madness. As he says, “If one way or another a man don’t receive according to what he deserves inside . . . well, it’s a madhouse.” Yet this principle seems not to be operative. Many of those around him fail, and as evidence of this accumulates he feels a rising tide of hopelessness and a despair that transmutes into madness. He can take no pleasure in a success that he feels no less arbitrary than the failure of those others. He becomes increasingly desperate. Like Willy Loman, he buys a life insurance policy as though the balance he looks for could be secured by trading his life for the future of his family. It is a bargain whose irony escapes him.
Whom, after all, is he bargaining with except the God for whose existence he can find no convincing evidence? If we do not exist in God’s eye, then what is our sanction to exist at all? If God does not exist, then all things are possible. It was a question that fascinated both Sartre and Camus and that also concerned Miller, if not his Broadway audience or, perhaps more accurately, the critics who were Broadway’s gatekeepers. There is a world of difference between Miller’s protagonist and Camus’s Caligula, but both of them test out the absurdist proposition that there is not only no moral sanction but no moral system at all. In the novel David goes to his death, a victim of his own belief in the absurd. In the play he learns a social ethic born out of a private understanding of agency.
David’s identity and social role, then, are initially invested in the idea that he is literally the maker of his own future: but as doubts begin to intrude, that meaning starts to dissolve. The focus shifts to his deepening anxieties. His state of mind begins to determine the shape if not of events then of his perception of them. The play, in effect, takes an inward track as David filters experience for its meaning, or, increasingly, its perceived lack of meaning. His life, and what he chooses to make of the lives of those around him, is less lived than shaped by himself into an exemplary tale. He stands outside himself, watching, as if powerless to act.
He is alienated from his life because he cannot identify the transcendent purpose that he believes alone can charge it with significance. His identity comes close to being destroyed because he chooses to see it in terms of that absent force. Balanced between hope and despair, he fails, for much of the play, to recognize the truth that he holds his own life in his hands and that there are connections—those with wife, child, friends—that contain the essence of the very meaning he has sought in an abstract principle. In this he is close kin to Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, who would be dazzled by a dream that blinds him to those who value him for himself.
It is Gus who explains what David has lost, in doing so making the most explicit reference to the wider issues involved: “What a man must have, what a man must believe. That on this earth he is the boss of his own life. Not the leafs in the teacups, not the stars. In Europe I seen already millions of Davids walking around, millions. They gave up to know . . . that they deserve this world.” Man, he explains, is his own God and “must understand the presence of God in his hands.”
In the novel David dies; in the play he lives. He does so because he is finally convinced that his success has indeed been a product of his own hands, just as the failure of some of those around him can be traced to their own culpability. Shory, it turns out, bore responsibility for the loss of his legs which occurred not on the battlefront but in an accident at a whore-house. J.B.’s life has never been what he hoped because of his drinking, though in this version he does not suffer the loss of his child. Amos and his father have narrowed their lives down until they have lost sight of what living might be. Such lives are still in part the product of contingency, but that contingency is not definitional. The thunder, representing arbitrariness, rumbles but, despite his apprehension, David calls out the central existential truth: “I’m here!”
Writing later, Miller remarked that “the play’s action seemed to demand David’s tragic death, but that was intolerable to my rationalist viewpoint. In the early forties,” he added, “such an ending would have seemed to be obscurantist.”2 But the point was that in the novel it had ended with David’s death. It was a death, however, that seemed to owe rather more to melodrama than tragedy, and in the play version Miller was stepping back from melodrama and tragedy alike. For him,
A play’s action, much like an individual’s acts, is more revealing than its speeches, and this play embodied a desperate quest on David’s part for an authentication of his identity, a longing for a break in the cosmic silence that alone would bestow a faith in life itself. To put it another way, David has succeeded in piling up treasures that rust, from which his spirit has already fled; it was a paradox that would weave through every play that followed.3
That last remark is especially interesting, both in its stress on the absences felt so acutely by his characters and in the biblical language. Miller recounts a conversation with John Anderson, critic for the Journal-American, who asked him, in the context of this play, whether he was religious. At the time he found the question absurd, yet of course the play in many ways focuses on the protagonist’s fear of abandonment, his sense that some coherent principle is in abeyance. David wishes to invent the God in whom, on one level, he does not believe in order to discover justification, explanation, a sense of justice for which he can otherwise find no evidence. He resists the truth, which is resisted by so many of Miller’s later protagonists, that he is his own connection, his own god, fully responsible for who he is and what he does.
The director Paul Unwin’s response to the stylistic problems raised by the play, in the Bristol Old Vic production in England fifty years later, was in part to turn to music, specially composed by Andy Sheppard, and in part to rely on the designs of Sally Crabb, whose productions had included The Master Builder and Our Town, two plays whose style also moves away from realism and which, in effect, also offer themselves as fables.
In talking to Unwin before the production Miller observed that “the thing you’ve got to understand about my plays is that the background is the American dream and the foreground the American nightmare.”4 And, in one way or another, the characters in The Man Who Had All the Luck are dedicated to a dream while the process of the play is to move from dream to nightmare, precisely the transition that offers such a challenge to directors, actors and designers. Meanwhile, like Susan Glaspell’s The Verge, it also has to move from the comic not to the tragic but, briefly, to the psychotic.
David is the paradigm of that dream, beginning with nothing and rising
to success and wealth, the “treasures that rust, from which his spirit has already fled.” He is even, in Willy Loman’s term, well-liked, before, like Willy, though for wholly different reasons, developing a fevered need to justify his own existence. For Willy, the problem is failure; for David, it is success. He is, indeed, a mirror image of Job, who was stripped of everything in a test of his faith. David is given everything in a test of his. It is not the fallacy, or otherwise, of the dream, though, that compels Miller’s attention here, nor primarily its social implications. Despite his remarks, the play is not a critique of the American dream, except insofar as David looks for meaning in the wrong place. What it is, in essence, is a debate about the source and nature of meaning in private and public life alike.
David feels the need to argue for the existence of God, or imminent justice, on the grounds that without such a concept, without a principle of order in the universe, nothing can have meaning. When, as it seems, sheer chance becomes the only observable mechanism at work in his own life and in that of those around him, he is terrified. The idea that things simply happen is intolerable. As far as he can see, some succeed and others fail and there is no reason for it.
In the play, as opposed to the novel, David emerges from his trial of the spirit, not yet secure, to be sure, but seemingly convinced that the logic for which he had looked does exist. People, he comes finally to believe, are responsible for their actions; causality is an operative principle. But the wound is not entirely healed. The thought that “anything can happen . . . at any time” is not purged and the desperate desire for a validating reason not entirely answered by acknowledging his responsibility for his own actions. The arbitrary still exists and, indeed, in invoking the Depression as a presence in the play Miller was doing no more than signal a social, economic and psychological truth of the period.
The collapse of the market was like one of Job’s plagues. People lost livelihoods, relationships were attenuated, the future itself seemed suddenly to collapse. And if some people prospered, how much deeper the irony generated by that fact. Miller himself has said, “Until 1929 I thought things were pretty solid. Specifically, I thought—like most Americans—that somebody was in charge. I didn’t know who it was, but it was probably a businessman, and he was a realist, a no-nonsense fellow, practical, honest, responsible. In 1929 he jumped out of a window. It was bewildering.”5
The Depression was an economic fact but its consequences went beyond social effects. A machine had come apart. Order had dissolved. Something more than a political system had collapsed. The real itself seemed problematic. A life that had seemed so coherent, so inevitable, secure in its procedures, values, assumptions, disappeared overnight. David Beeves believed someone was in charge, not a businessman, to be sure, but someone, until suddenly he could no longer believe this to be true. God, it seemed, had jumped to his death.
Beyond the Depression, however, there was another source for this sense of abandonment, this sudden realization that anything could happen at any time, that there was no redeeming coherence to experience. The novel version of The Man Who Had All the Luck overlapped with the writing of The Golden Years, Miller’s play about Montezuma and Cortez, and both were in part a response to events far removed from America. He was thinking then, as later, of the fact of facism. The terror that was to strike Sylvia Gellberg, in Miller’s later play Broken Glass (1994), was prompted by Kristallnacht, in 1938, when Hitler unleashed his Brown Shirts, thereby announcing that he no longer recognized a system of law, of moral necessities and human values. Here, quite suddenly, all the comforting structures were swept away. Rationality, the whole complex of interlocking social, legal and moral obligations, were effectively declared null and void. The Jew was declared a victim whose fate was never again to be in his own hands.
As the Holocaust gathered pace, he was the ultimate embodiment of human insignificance, ordered to board the train to his own annihilation and invited to pay for the privilege as if irony would be the last emotion to be felt. Hope was sustained until the clang of the metal door and the hiss of the scattered powder sucked the souls of those seemingly born with no other fate than to die locked inside their own terror. Where were the assurances of a civilization? Where was the law? Where was God?
Seen in this context, The Man Who Had All the Luck seems to reflect that deep sense of abandonment felt by so many as hope was not only transmuted into its opposite but itself became a component element of absurdity. David Beeves’s sense of an arbitrary good fortune is merely the other side of the same coin. His question—“Why?”—becomes the question of all. If life ends in death, where can meaning be born?
It was against this that Miller pitched his own native existentialism, his belief that man is the source of his own identity, obliged to accept responsibility for himself and the society which he joins in shaping. History, to Miller, is not some implacable force crushing the human spirit. It is made by men and can be challenged and changed by those who acknowledge this truth. And if suicide might be a logical response to a sense of abandonment, renewed commitment is no less logical. The story of David Beeves was apparently about the personal dilemma of an individual in an obscure location. For Miller, though, here and throughout his work, the private and the public were intimately connected so that the questions posed by his protagonist reach out into the world.
As he remarked, “The Man Who Had All the Luck tells me that in the midst of the collectivist Thirties I believed it decisive what an individual thinks and does about his life, regardless of overwhelming forces. . . . David Beeves arrives as close as he can at a workable, conditional faith in the neutrality of the world’s intention toward him.”6
The Man Who Had All the Luck is, Miller has said, “trying to weigh how much of our lives is a result of our character and how much is a result of our destiny.” For him, there was “no possibility . . . to come down on one side or the other.”7 In that sense he backed off from the severity of Sartrean existentialism, which made the individual bear the full burden of responsibility for action and inaction alike. For Miller, the arbitrary nature of experience could not be denied. What was necessary was to shape it into meaning, which is, after all, precisely what he saw the writer as doing in giving form to experience.
Reviews of the play were negative or, in Miller’s words, baffled, and he himself came to feel that both he and the director had failed to understand its antirealist thrust. It needed a style of presentation they never found. A note at the bottom of the Variety Review for November 29, 1944, announced, “Withdrawn Saturday after four performances.” Since one of these was a matinee, the play ran for just three days. It was a disaster. As Miller later remarked, “Standing at the back of the house . . . I could blame nobody.” It was “like music played on the wrong instrument in a false scale. . . . After the final performance and the goodbyes to the actors, it almost seemed a relief to get on the subway to Brooklyn Heights and read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.”8
But he never forgot The Man Who Had All the Luck. Inspired in part by the Depression and wartime concerns, it proved a fable capable of speaking to people in other times and other places. In 1988 a staged reading convinced him that there was still life in the play. In 1989 it was republished by a British publisher (along with The Golden Years) and staged by the Bristol Old Vic and the Young Vic in a production that, Miller insisted, captured “the wonder and naivete and purity of feeling of a kind of fairytale about the mystery of fate and destiny,” a play that he now saw had “the bright colors of youth . . . all over it, and the fixation of youth on the future and what heaven has in mind for one’s life.”9 It was favorably reviewed.
There was a further staged reading in Los Angeles, in 2000, and then a production the following year at the Williamstown Festival in Massachusetts, with Chris O’Donnell as David Beeves. It was this production that reached Broadway in 2002, fifty-eight years after the play’s precipitate failure
. This time The New York Times, which had dismissed it in 1944, welcomed it as “compelling” and asked how it could ever have been so easily dismissed over half a century earlier. The Man Who Had All the Luck had finally arrived.NOTES
1 . Arthur Miller, Timebends (London, 1987), pp. 90-91.
2 . Ibid., p. 105.
3 . Ibid.
4 . Program note of Bristol Old Vic and Young Vic production.
5 . Arthur Miller,“Afterword,” The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck (London, 1989), p. 231.
6 . Arthur Miller, “Introduction,” The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck, pp. 8, 10.
7 . Mel Gussow, “Life, He Thought, Meant Waiting for One Bad Thing,” The New York Times, April 28, 2002, Arts, p. 9.
8 . Miller, Timebends, pp. 104-5.
9 . Program note of Bristol Old Vic and Young Vic production.
Cast
DAVID BEEVES
SHORY
J.B. FELLER
ANDREW FALK
PATTERSON (PAT) BEEVES
AMOS BEEVES
HESTER FALK
DAN DIBBLE
GUSTAV EBERSON
AUGIE BELFAST
AUNT BELLE
The Time Not so long ago.
Act One
Scene i An evening in early April. Inside a barn used as a repair shop.
Scene ii The barn, near dawn.
Act Two
Scene i June. About three years later. The living room of the Falks’—now David’s—house.
The Man Who Had All the Luck Page 2