Arthur Miller, the American playwright, died on 9 February, aged 89,
having battled with cancer, pneumonia and a heart condition. Tributes
were carried in the international media. Newspapers as far apart as the
New York Times, the Boston Herald, the Daily News, in addition to the
Times, the Daily Telegraph and the Observer, were compelled to recognise
Miller’s eminence in his field. It was a life that had seen the Wall
Street crash, World War Two, the Holocaust, and the McCarthy era.
Tony Mulhearn
Miller was a literary colossus who penned some of the most revealing
insights into the corruption of corporate practices and the concept of
the ‘American Dream’. Death of a Salesman, View from the Bridge, The
Crucible and All My Sons, are just some of his works which are now
classics.
Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915, the son of a
prosperous garment manufacturer whose business was a casualty of the
Great Depression of 1929-31. This experience fuelled his instinctive
radicalism and began his politicisation.
Miller worked in a warehouse after graduating from high school until
he saved enough money to move to the University of Michigan where he
studied journalism and playwriting.
Success
After the outbreak of World War Two, Miller moved to New York to
pursue his writing. His first successful play, staged on Broadway in
1947, was All My Sons which dealt with a corrupt arms manufacturer,
whose selling of faulty aircraft parts to the US air force during the
war led to the death of servicemen.
This was followed by Death of a Salesman, which was acclaimed as a
masterpiece, won the Pulitzer Prize and is now synonymous as Miller’s
critique of the American Dream (or, if you’re Willy Loman, the American
nightmare). It starred Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman and the then icon of
the left, Elia Kazan, directed both plays. The two men subsequently
played a baleful and crucial role in Miller’s later life.
Anti-communism
The House un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), originally set up
by Congress to investigate Nazi activity in the US, turned to
anti-communism under Richard Nixon’s leadership.
In the 1950s it became a tool of Senator Joe McCarthy’s rabid
anti-communism, supported by right-wing republicans thirsting for
revenge for Roosevelt’s New Deal. It tapped into a mood of anxiety,
which was fuelled by the existence of Stalinist-dominated Eastern Europe
and the emergence of communist China in 1949.
McCarthy’s witch-hunt targeted the motion picture industry as a
so-called hot bed of sedition and communist sympathy. An atmosphere of
fear and uncertainty swept post-war America. Hundreds of activists and
radical liberals who had supported various peace campaigns which sprang
up during and after the war were hauled in front of HUAC and asked the
question: "Are you or have you ever been a member of the Communist
Party (CP)?"
If they took the Fifth Amendment, they were damned for contempt. If
they answered yes, they had to apologise and give the names of friends
and colleagues who had been at CP meetings. If no, they had to prove it.
If they refused to name names they were in contempt of Congress, faced
with jail and prevented from working in their own industry.
Appalled by this blatant violation of basic human rights, Arthur
Miller began to write The Crucible, a play that would reflect the
activities of HUAC. To research material he paid a visit to Salem,
Massachusetts, the scene in 1692 of the most grotesque witch-hunt in
American history. Ironically, it was while on his journey to Salem that
he heard of Elia Kazan’s decision to collaborate with HUAC.
Kazan’s betrayal
In his biography, Time Bends, Miller describes Kazan’s attempt to
justify his decision: ‘Listening to him I grew frightened. There was a
certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he came clean he
could never hope, in the height of his creative powers, to make another
film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work
abroad either.
‘If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest
anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart
lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend
Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company
would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee…. I was growing
cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still
be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I attended meetings of the Communist
Party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them.’
Self-justifying
In the early 1950s, Kazan made On the Waterfront, a film about the
Mafia controlling the stevedores’ union on the New York docks. Budd
Schulberg, who wrote the book and the screenplay, and most of the
principal actors, including the aforementioned Lee J Cobb, were
‘friendly witnesses’, collaborators with HUAC. In his own biography
Kazan conceded that he made the picture to show that if the
circumstances demanded it, it was OK to betray your friends.
In response, Miller wrote The View from the Bridge, also set in New
York’s dockland. In contrast to the lionisation of Brando’s character in
Waterfront, it attacked the role of the stool pigeon Eddie Carbone for
his act of betrayal.
Witch-hunted
In 1956, Arthur Miller’s name was projected onto the pages of the
world’s popular press when he married Marilyn Monroe and was found
guilty of contempt of Congress for refusing to name names to HUAC.
He describes his revulsion at the morals of HUAC when its then chair,
right-wing senator Francis Walter, offered to drop the charge if he
could persuade Monroe to be photographed shaking his hand. Miller and
Monroe both refused.
According to Nicholas Hytner, director of the film adaptation of The
Crucible, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Miller used to joke that, as a
measure of the play’s timeless relevance, you could get an indicator of
the level of international political persecution by counting the number
of productions taking place around the world.
To demonstrate the truth of that observation, it was staged on
Broadway just after the Patriot Act had been brought in.
Disenchantment
During the 1990s, Miller expressed his disenchantment with the New
York theatre by spending more time in Britain. In one of his last
articles, he declares that the Broadway theatre has succumbed to
glorious, glamorous show business.
He was right. Everything is about the bottom line. The theatre now
parallels capitalism’s obsession with downsizing, delayering,
streamlining, privatising, and other euphemisms for sacking workers or
attacking wages and conditions.
Miller argued that his great plays would not now be staged on
Broadway because they required ‘too many people.’
Arthur Miller, while pronouncing and writing boldly about the
political issues of the century, was explicitly political in his
analysis of society but never joined a political party. David Mamet,
director of Glengarry Glenross a film that parallels Salesman, in his
New York Times tribute, suggests that there is an acceptance in Miller’s
work that it is the ‘human lot to try and fail’.
However, this is a profoundly pessimistic analysis. Whilst writing
about the dark side of society, Arthur Miller constantly brought out and
underlined humankind’s potential for nobility. To the end, he never
lapsed into cynicism, or abandoned his vision of a more humane and just
society.
Socialism
Socialists can refer to his work as a means of popularly explaining
the evils of capitalism, but also explaining how such evils can be
eliminated by the socialist transformation of society. On that score,
Arthur Miller’s contribution to this debate remains priceless.