When I first read Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, which many critics consider to be one of the greatest American plays, I was puzzled. “What’s Willy Loman’s problem?” I said to myself. He was not like any salesman I knew—and I knew many because my father was a salesman, and so were most of his friends. My high school English teacher, who had assigned the play, said it was a profound commentary on American life. I thought it was corny. Salesmen get fired if they don’t make their sales quotas.
What’s the big deal?
Willy Loman apparently was based on an uncle of Miller—a salesman who had committed suicide. My father was fired from at least a dozen jobs, but he didn’t fall apart like Willy Loman. If my father was depressed, I never noticed it. He always got another job in a few days. I guess you could call him resilient.
My father was not a complicated man. When he came home from work, he would have a Manhattan straight up. After dinner, he usually watched a sports event, baseball or boxing. On weekends, he polished his car and played cards with his salesmen friends. He also enjoyed playing the piano at parties. He lacked the discipline to become a good pianist, but he could pick up a song on the piano if someone hummed the tune.
My father, who left school after the eighth grade, was a traveling salesman for most of his life, his territory usually New Jersey and upstate New York. I can’t remember all the things he sold. There was expensive Belgian cookware and English bone china; there were ceramic wall decorations and humorous greeting cards. In our crowded one-bedroom apartment in the West Bronx, boxes of his samples filled the foyer. He occasionally worked in retail, selling men’s clothing in stores in Manhattan and suburban New Jersey.
He never made much money. If he had a good month on the road, we would go out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant. His highest-level job was serving as the American sales representative for an English dinnerware company. There was a write-up about him in a trade journal, with a picture. But the company was not a success in the United States, and my father was out of a job in six months. If my mother hadn’t worked as a secretary, we would have had trouble making ends meet.
My father liked buying and selling so much that he also did it on the side. He would often buy a car, keep it for several months, and then sell it. He would do the same thing with pianos. Coming home from school, I sometimes would see men removing a piano from the townhouse in suburban New Jersey that my parents bought when I was 14. A few months later, he would buy another piano. The neighbors got annoyed with all the traffic, so he had to stop.
In his mid-sixties my father went into business for himself: He rented a used-car lot in a sketchy neighborhood in Paterson, New Jersey, bought cars for $200 at an auction and sold them for around $400. His slogan was “Rely on Eli,” but his cars were unreliable—and not only the ones he sold but the ones he bought for his own use. On vacation trips, our car would often break down.
For that matter, selling used cars in Paterson was dangerous. Once I answered the telephone at my parents’ house and a man asked, “Is Eli there?” I said he wasn’t, but I could take a message. “Tell the *** that if he doesn’t give me my money back I’m going to kill him.” My father always dismissed such threats, but he decided to get out of the used-car business when he came to the lot one morning and found all the windshields smashed.
Though my father gave up the used-car business, he continued to make deals. He would read the want ads with a red pen, circling things he might buy. The strangest deal he made was the trailer home he bought in Florida. When my brother first visited my parents, he noticed that there was something odd about the furniture.
“Dad, why is the furniture so low?” he asked. “It came with the trailer,” my father replied. “Yeah, but who would want such low furniture?” “I bought the trailer from a sky-diving dwarf,” my father said. “I got a good deal.”
Five years later, my father decided to move north to be near my mother, who was in a nursing home in the Washington area because she had Parkinson’s Disease. So I went to Florida to help him with the move. He had sold the trailer, but he was still in it, selling off almost everything he owned. We were down to odds and ends. A woman who had done a lot of favors for him wanted a metal bookcase. My father liked this woman, but he was in his deal-making mode: “You can have it for ten dollars.”
“Dad” I said, “give her the damn thing for free.”
He relented. He knew he had gone too far.
In Death of a Salesman, his wife says of Willy Loman: “Attention must be paid” to him. Why don’t writers pay more attention to the pleasures of deal-making? The only American writer I know who describes it well is John Updike. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry Angstrom talks about how good a used-car salesman his father-in-law is: “By the time he had sold a car to a customer, the poor bozo thought he was robbing old Fred blind when the fact is the deal had angles to it like a spider web.”
The world of commerce is a tough world where suckers never get an even break; but many people enjoy making deals, even though some deals don’t turn out well. My father’s life as a salesman had many ups and downs, but it was, for the most part, a happy life.
Stephen Miller is the author, most recently, of Walking New York: Reflections of American Writers from Walt Whitman to Teju Cole.
