The Moral of Arthur Miller

Across the nation, Miller was eulogized as a brave victim who had withstood the Babbitts and the McCarthys and the Mrs. Grundys to show America as it is. The New York Times hailed his “work that exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream,” while the Washington Post divided the metaphor in two: the “Playwright of Broken Dreams” who “Showed Flawed Characters.”

The American intellectual left has always differed from its European counterparts by holding out disillusion, rather than hope, as the basis of its message. Even the harshest plays of, say, Henrik Ibsen and Sean O’Casey were based on ideals of self-sacrifice and heroism, while Willy Loman, the hero of Miller’s Death of a Salesman, represents a world in which heroism is absent.

But Arthur Miller was nothing if not a product of the leftist disaffection with American existence, and it is doubtless on this score that the New York Times could declare him the “most American” of our great playwrights. That’s a curious conclusion, for Death of a Salesman hasn’t aged particularly well. In the post-Reagan era of triumphant entrepreneurship, a drama proclaiming the uselessness of hard work and devotion to a job lacks the force it once seemed to have.

Still, in its use of language and skillful timing, Death of a Salesman has its points. It was with his 1953 play The Crucible that Miller fell entirely into the self-dramatizing of his own politics. The play has been read by millions of high-school students as a metaphor equating American anticommunism with the Salem witch trials.

Here the essential mendacity of Miller’s politics came to the fore. The Crucible effectively dramatizes the terror of false accusation and persecution. And yet, as Peter Mullen wrote in the London Times, “There were no witches in Salem, Mr. Miller. But there were plenty of communist enemies of the state in America.” Indeed, the Moscow purge trials of the 1930s, in which people lost their lives, are a more significant parallel to the Salem tragedy than are the American congressional hearings of the 1950s, which caused a few to lose their jobs.

AND YET, the effectiveness of Death of a Salesman and The Crucible–Miller’s best work, by a large measure–suggest the man was something more than a propagandist turned into a literary icon, an author of minimal talent whose reputation was grossly inflated by the recusant left. Rather, he falls into the category of writers of some real talent whose careers were blighted by their allegiance to leftist ideology. Bertolt Brecht was such a figure. So was the Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, who began as a brilliant member of that country’s literary generation of 1927 and ended as a Stalinist hack. So were the French surrealists Louis Aragon and Paul luard, who dedicated themselves to strident praise of the Russian secret police and its purge operations. The American left provided another, and worse, example in Henry Roth, author of the classic novel Call It Sleep (1934), who was convinced by the Communist cadres to turn his back on literature for years to work as a factory hand.

Miller never abandoned literature for proletarian employment, although he made a point of reminding people that he had worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, during World War II, as a shipfitter’s helper.

His once popular A View from the Bridge (1955) mythologized the lives of longshoremen and other working-class characters. And yet, even in this later attempt to find some ordinary Americans whom he could treat as objects of empathy, he could not escape the overwhelming tone of dissatisfaction with America–or the self-dramatization of presenting “informers” as the nation’s great evil.

Of course, many Americans remember Miller for something far from the lives of waterfront workers: his marriage to Marilyn Monroe from 1956 to 1961. The relationship was as political and social, in the Marxist sense, as it was psychological and sexual. Each was drawn to the other by a particular discontent. Monroe was inhabited by a desperate need to be taken seriously as an actress and as a person. Miller’s capture of the most desirable female in the world was seen by his leftist admirers as their ultimate revenge after the humiliations they had suffered at the hands of anti-Communist union leaders, social democratic and other anti-Stalinist intellectuals, and congressional investigative committees. If the Communists could not seduce America, the “Lincolnesque” Miller had, at least, seduced The Goddess.

Sexual politics has a unique allure. The liaison of Trotsky and the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, played on the screen by the steaming Salma Hayek in a recent film, keeps the old Bolshevik’s name current among many for whom Trotsky’s confrontations with Stalin mean little. Leftist acrimony was a deeply established element in Miller’s personality. In his plays and interviews, he expressed his barely concealed rage at the society around him, which had disappointed him by its indifference to the simple verities of the 1930s left, both politically and in its aesthetic tastes. He never forgave American theater-goers for the turn in their affections from political pantomime to absurdist and other styles.

AND SIMILARLY, he never absolved Marilyn Monroe for ending their marriage, soon after completion of The Misfits–a film about an uprooted cowboy, his friends, and a divorcée–written by Miller and released in 1961. One year and six months after its premiere, Monroe was dead from a fatal dose of barbiturates. Hollywood insiders have argued that Miller was cruel to her: Not only did he fail to provide her the reputation for artistic seriousness she craved, he and his circle held her in visible contempt for failing to share their political orientation. The Misfits was filmed in the Nevada desert in the height of summer, and the assignment proved extremely taxing for its male lead, Clark Gable, no less than for Monroe. Gable died of a heart attack shortly after the production wrapped up. Miller, who saw Monroe slipping away from him, and hated to let her go, had adopted the devastating habit of overanalyzing her every change in mood, which drove her deeper into depression.

The Misfits was directed by John Huston, who kept his camera trained on the outstanding features of Monroe’s body, but the real theme was the same as that of Death of a Salesman. Gable, as the cowboy Gaylord Langland, and Eli Wallach, playing his sidekick Guido, have been shortchanged by American enterprise. They refuse to “work for wages,” and instead hunt stray horses for sale as pet food. Miller’s America was always a bleak, unrewarding place; but his social consciousness masked a personal heartlessness. His sense of America as a land of despair reinforced his permanent anger at the insufficiency of the adulation he received from critics as well as the public.

BUT FEW IMAGINED how deep his rancor went until 1964, when his play After the Fall was produced on Broadway. Aside from exhuming old Miller obsessions with governmental investigations of communism, After the Fall exposes a tortured intimacy between a lawyer, Quentin, and his second wife, the beautiful and highly sexual but dumb, corrupt, and drugged-out Maggie, a television star. Maggie is portrayed as the ultimate harridan, demanding that Quentin fulfill demeaning orders, enraged and jealous, and even accusing him of homosexuality. In a terrible scene, the couple fight over a bottle of pills and Quentin is tempted to kill Maggie.

Miller claimed, disingenuously, not to have imagined that the public would perceive this portrait as a vicious caricature of Marilyn Monroe. But they did, and little but condemnation would come to Miller for After the Fall. Robert Brustein, in a much-quoted review in the New Republic, called the play “a three and one half hour breach of taste, a confessional autobiography of embarrassing explicitness . . . there is a misogynistic strain in the play which the author does not seem to recognize. . . . He has created a shameless piece of tabloid gossip, an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs, . . . a wretched piece of dramatic writing.” Those who understand the milieu from which Miller sprang will recognize something else in After the Fall: a classic Stalinist hatchet job, turned against a most unlikely target.

Miller was never capable of the self-examination and insight found in truly great artists. His 1987 autobiography Timebends was more notable for what it did not say than what it said, and much of the latter was provably dishonest, such as the specious claim that Elia Kazan, his on-again, off-again friend and collaborator, stole the substance of the Oscar-winning 1954 movie On the Waterfront from him.

To be fair, Miller inevitably recognized that it was incumbent upon him to denounce tyranny, especially against writers, in some Communist states (except, notably, Castro’s Cuba), in addition to railing against the disappointments of capitalism. But his basic grudges, including his spite about his failure with Marilyn Monroe, never died. His last work, Finishing the Picture, was based on the making of The Misfits, and, once again, portrayed Monroe, under the name Kitty, as a mentally unstable pill-head. Deborah Solomon, writing in the New York Times, employed a feminist cliché with devastating accuracy: “Like any number of male intellectuals, Arthur Miller is not always wise when the subject turns to women.”

What a life. All those plays, each straining to be the iconic declaration of the failure and pointlessness of American life in the twentieth century, when, really, it was Arthur Miller himself who best demonstrated the point.

Stephen Schwartz is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.