Collected Essays

by Arthur Miller

  Secretly, of course, I was outraged, but sufficient praise was on the way to put offense to sleep. An hour or so later, at the opening-night party, Jim Proctor grabbed my arm and pulled me to a phone. On the other end was the whispered voice of Sam Zolotow, that generation’s theatrical inside dopester and a reporter for the Times, who was actually reading our review directly off Brooks Atkinson’s typewriter as the critic wrote it—I could hear the clacking of the typewriter on the phone. In his Noo Yawk voice he excitedly whispered word after word as Atkinson composed it under his nose—“Arthur Miller has written a superb drama. From every point of view, it is rich and memorable . . .”—and as one encomium was laid upon another Sam’s voice grew more and more amazed and warm and he seemed to reach out and give me his embrace. The conspiracy that had begun with me and spread to Kazan, the cast, Mielziner, and all the others now extended to Zolotow and Atkinson and the Times, until for a moment a community seemed to have formed of people who cared very much that their common sense of life in their time had found expression.

  Driving homeward down lower Broadway at three in the morning, Mary and I were both silent. The radio had just finished an extraordinary program, readings of the play’s overwhelmingly glowing reviews in the morning papers. My name repeated again and again seemed to drift away from me and land on someone else, perhaps my ghost. It was all a letdown now that the arrow had been fired and the bow, so long held taut, was slackening again. I had striven all my life to win this night, and it was here, and I was this celebrated man who had amazingly little to do with me, or I with him.

  In truth, I would have sworn I had not changed, only the public perception of me had, but this is merely fame’s first illusion. The fact, as it took much more time to appreciate, is that such an order of recognition imprints its touch of arrogance, quite as though one has control of a new power, a power to make real everything one is capable of imagining. And it can open a voraciousness for life and an impatience with old friends who persist in remaining ineffectual. An artist blindly follows his nose with hands outstretched, and only after he has struck the rock and brought forth the form hidden within it does he theorize and explain what is forever inexplicable, but I had a rationalist tradition behind me and felt I had to account to it for my rise.

  I came to wish I had had the sense to say that I had learned what I could from books and study but that I did not know how to do what I had apparently done and that the whole thing might as well have been a form of prayer for all I understood about it. Simply, there is a sense for the dramatic form or there is not, there is stageworthy dialogue and literary dialogue and no one quite knows why one is not the other, why a dramatic line lands in an audience and a literary one sails over its head. Instead, there were weighty interviews and even pronouncements, and worst of all, a newly won rank to defend against the inevitable snipers. The crab who manages to climb up out of the bucket causes a lot of the other crabs to try to pull him back down where he belongs. That’s what crabs do.

  The fear once more was in me that I would not write again. And as Mary and I drove home, I sensed in our silence some discomfort in my wife and friend over these struggling years. It never occurred to me that she might have felt anxious at being swamped by this rush of my fame, in need of reassurance. I had always thought her clearer and more resolved than I. Some happiness was not with us that I wanted now, I had no idea what it might be, only knew the absence of it, its lack—so soon. In fact, the aphrodisiac of celebrity, still nameless, came and sat between us in the car.

  And so inevitably there was a desire to flee from it all, to be blessedly unknown again, and a fear that I had stumbled into a dangerous artillery range. It was all an unnaturalness; fame is the other side of loneliness, of impossible-to-resolve contradictions—to be anonymous and at the same time not lose one’s renown, in brief, to be two people who might occasionally visit together and perhaps make a necessary joint public appearance but who would normally live separate lives, the public fellow wasting his time gadding about while the writer stayed at his desk, as morose and anxious as ever, and at work. I did not want the power I wanted. It wasn’t “real.” What was?

  Outlandish as it seemed, the Dowling party in the Lomans’ living room came to symbolize one part of the dilemma; the pain and love and protest in my play could be transformed into mere champagne. My dreams of many years had simply become too damned real, and the reality was less than the dream and lacked all dedication.

  Preface to Salesman in Beijing

  1991

  Writing a book was the last thought in my mind when I went to China in 1984 to direct a Chinese cast in Death of A Salesman at the Beijing People’s Art Theatre. There were too many uncertainties to allow for writing anything. Would I manage to communicate with Chinese actors, only one of whom understood English? Would the audience make any sense of the play, whose form, like the society it spoke of, was utterly strange to them? Indeed, one director of the theatre declared on reading the play after rehearsals had begun that “it is impossible to act this thing.” And in truth several of the actors would later confess that they could make nothing of it in the beginning.

  But it soon turned out that the moon is the moon and actors are actors, the same everywhere. However, what indeed was often very different was their etiquette, what I came to think of as the signals by which Chinese communicate, as well as the assumptions they conventionally make about each other. They are obviously more formal with one another and more deferential to anyone who is older, but—at least in Communist China—the interesting difference was that they rather assumed that anyone expressing a view must be in conformity with whatever social organization he was part of. For instance, it took a lot of persuading for them to believe that Biff, in so stubbornly opposing Willy’s belief in money-making, was not speaking for an organization but for himself out of his own experience. More, it was hard for them to imagine that any man would be able to take off and simply float from job to job purely on his own volition. Chinese are attached to society and are directed by it in ways difficult for Westerners to imagine. It was also painfully embarrassing for the actor playing Happy to continue talking to his brother once the latter had closed his eyes and announced that he was going to sleep—this was simply too impolite, and not only for the character but the actor himself.

  But beneath these questions of etiquette I found the same basic emotions as we have, the love and pity and false hopes and the rest. The Chinese audience proved this similarity in its reactions to the play whose popularity was such that after a run of many months and much touring through China, as well as television broadcasts, it has recently been mounted again in Beijing with the original cast with two substitutions.

  Of course what the Chinese audience makes of this play is another story and no doubt differs from person to person. One woman, an early viewer of our rehearsals, shook her head and referring to Willy said to my wife, Inge Morath—“He’s just like my mother.” Another, a young man interviewed on CBS TV as he left the lobby of the theatre, thought that Willy’s philosophy was absolutely correct. “We all want to be number one man, the boss, this is natural and very good. Biff is wrong.” And so Biff would seem to be in post Cultural Revolution China which had just emerged from a period of brutal social levelling, a time when it was immoral for any individual to seek distinction of any kind. (Even keeping goldfish or a pet bird was condemned as perverse anti-social individualism.) To Chinese, Biff sounded a lot like a Red Guard in his refusal to try to excel and personally succeed as Willy was demanding.

  This unintended book essentially formed itself partly as the result of the rehearsal schedule. The Chinese rehearse from eight to noon, then break until seven in the evening and work till ten. The hiatus is used for food-shopping and napping. In fear of finding myself separated by language from the day-to-day development of the production, I had brought along a small tape recorder to pick up what I had said during rehearsals, as well as what
Ying Ruochang was saying to me. He was Willy, the play’s translator, and a fluent English speaker through whom I communicated to the cast. In the afternoons with nothing to do I listened to the morning’s transactions, most of which, complicated and onrushing as they were, I had already begun to forget, and typed them out in rough form. What I soon began to realize, now that I could look back even a few days, was that we were all feeling our way rather tentatively into a sort of new and undiscovered country where none of us had been before—they in their imaginary Willy Loman-America and I in a Chinese Brooklyn.

  Of course this was all years before the Tiananmen catastrophe, a time, shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution, when hopes were growing that China had really stepped out on to the road of widening liberties and governmental self-restraint. It seemed impossible, at least to me, that they could ever revert to the violent suppressions of the recent past which they now knew had cost China more than a generation of development. And there seemed a great and growing confidence that a more rational and liberal future was opening up, so much so that they would not even hear of reprisals against those who had persecuted them. No vendetta, the past was the past, they had no need to humiliate former enemies, even those responsible for the deaths and tortures of teachers, writers, artists and workers. I admired their temperance and their resolve to demonstrate tolerance and liberality in order to begin the moderation of civic behavior. Our stage manager, as a matter of fact, had been a militant Red Guard fanatic, one of those who had made the lives of many of the cast miserable in the recent Cultural Revolution period. Worse yet, he was still being a nuisance, rushing at me and jabbing his finger at his watch at the very instant rehearsal time had run out, cutting off a scene or veritably a sentence in order to force conformity with the rules. But now they could smile rather than tremble at his officious antics, and for them this was a big difference. I don’t suppose they are smiling any more at such ridiculously meddlesome and often dangerous people.

  But China is immortal and will go on winding its way across history, sometimes the world’s wise teacher, sometimes its stubbornly ignorant and recalcitrant pupil. This production of Salesman happened by sheer chance to occur when the wave of hope was on a steep rise in China. This record of it may be one of a very few candid glimpses inside the minds of quite ordinary Chinese who were actors also in the larger tragedy of our time.

  Salesman at Fifty

  1999

  As far as I know, nobody has figured out time. Not chronological time, of course—that’s merely what the calendar tells—but real time, the kind that baffles the human mind when it confronts, as mine does now, the apparent number of months, weeks, and years that have elapsed since 1948, when I sat down to write a play about a salesman. I say “apparent” because I cannot find a means of absorbing the idea of half a century rolling away beneath my feet. Half a century is a very long time, yet I must already have been grown up way back then, indeed I must have been a few years past thirty, if my calculations are correct, and this fact I find indigestible.

  A few words about the theatrical era that Death of a Salesman emerged from. The only theater available to a playwright in the late Forties was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialized theater in the world, with the Off-Broadway evolution still a decade away. That theater had one single audience, not two or three, as is the case today, catering to very different levels of age, culture, education, and intellectual sophistication. Its critics were more than likely to be ex–sports reporters or general journalists rather than scholars or specialists university-trained in criticism. So a play worked or it didn’t, made them laugh or cry or left them bored. (It really isn’t all that different today except that the reasoning is perhaps more elevated.) That unified audience was the same for musicals, farces, O’Neill’s tragedies, or some imported British, French, or Middle European lament. Whatever its limitations, it was an audience that loved theater, and many of its members thought theatergoing not quite a luxury but an absolute necessity for a civilized life.

  For playwriting, what I believe was important about that unified audience was that a writer with ambitions reaching beyond realistic, made-for-entertainment plays could not expect the support of a coterie of like-minded folk who would overlook his artistic lapses so long as his philosophical agenda tended to justify their own. That unified audience had come in from the rain to be entertained, and even instructed, if need be, provided the instruction was entertaining. But the writer had to keep in mind that his proofs, so to speak, had to be accessible both to the lawyers in the audience and to the plumbers, to the doctors and the housewives, to the college students and the kids at the Saturday matinee. One result of this mix was the ideal, if not the frequent fulfillment, of a kind of play that would be complete rather than fragmentary, an emotional rather than an intellectual experience, a play basically of heart with its ulterior moral gesture integrated with action rather than rhetoric. In fact, it was a Shakespearean ideal, a theater for anyone with an understanding of English and perhaps some common sense.

  Some of the initial readers of the Death of a Salesman script were not at all sure that the audience of 1949 was going to follow its manipulations of time, for one thing. Josh Logan, a leading stage and film director of numerous hits, Mister Roberts and South Pacific among them, had greeted All My Sons two years earlier with great warmth, and invested a thousand dollars in Salesman, but when he read the script he apologetically withdrew five hundred. No audience, he felt, would follow the story, and no one would ever be sure whether Willy was imagining or really living through one or another scene in the play. Some thirty years later I would hear the same kind of reaction from the theater people in the Beijing People’s Art Theater, where I had been invited to stage the play, which, in the view of many there, was not a play at all but a poem. It was only when they saw it played that its real dramatic nature came through.

  In the 1949 Broadway audience there was more to worry about than their following the story. In one of his letters O’Neill had referred to that theater as a “showshop,” a crude place where a very uncultivated, materialistic public cut off from its own spirituality gathered for a laugh or a tear. Clifford Odets, with his first successes surely the most hotly acclaimed playwright in Broadway history, would also end in bitter alienation from the whole system of Broadway production. The problem, in a word, was seriousness. There wasn’t very much of it in the audience, and it was resented when it threatened to appear on the stage.

  So it seemed. But All My Sons had all but convinced me that if one totally integrated a play’s conceptual life with its emotional one so that there was no perceptible dividing line between the two, such a play could reach such an audience. In short, the play had to move forward not by following a narrow, discrete line, but as a phalanx, all of its elements moving together simultaneously. There was no model I could adapt for this play, no past history for the kind of work I felt it could become. What I had before me was the way the mind—at least my mind—actually worked. One asks a policeman for directions; as one listens, the hairs sticking out of his nose become important, reminding one of a father, brother, son with the same feature, and one’s conflicts with him or one’s friendship come to mind, and all this over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one wants to go. Initially based, as I explained in Timebends, my autobiography, on an uncle of mine, Willy rapidly took over my imagination and became something that has never existed before, a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars.

  His language and that of the Loman family were liberative from any enslavement to “the way people speak.” There are some people who simply don’t speak the way people speak. The Lomans, like their models in life, are not content with who and what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated perhaps, closer to power. “I’ve been remiss,” Biff says to Linda about his neglect of his father, and there would be many who seized on this usage as proof
of the playwright’s tin ear or of some inauthenticity in the play. But it is in Biff’s mouth precisely because it is indeed an echo, a slightly misunderstood signal from above, from the more serious and cultivated part of society, a signal indicating that he is now to be taken with utmost seriousness, even remorseful of his past neglect. “Be liked and you will never want” is also not quite from Brooklyn, but Willy needs aphoristic authority at this point, and again, there is an echo of a—for want of a better word—Victorian authority to back him up. These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more elegant past, a time “finer” than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit—on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.