'Arthur Miller' Review: Only Truth for Sale

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Growing up in Philadelphia, I had from childhood heard the story about the pre-Broadway opening of "Death of a Salesman" in 1949. A hushed silence filled the Locust Street Theatre as the curtain fell. The playwright, the 33-year old Arthur Miller, at first didn't know what to think. Then he heard the sounds of weeping. Men weeping. Then the audience went wild. He knew that he had tapped into the zeitgeist.

A biography is a "life" that re-creates a life. Any individual existence moves forward, but the written version must be assembled retrospectively, from a distance, with whatever wisdom hindsight can provide. If the writer is John Lahr, himself a distinguished biographer of Tennessee Williams, Frank Sinatra and others, man of letters and man of the theater, that wisdom is considerable. His book "Arthur Miller: American Witness" begins with the triumph of "Salesman" before traveling back to the playwright's Depression-era youth. Miller's achievement of national prominence and his tabloid-fodder romance and marriage to Marilyn Monroe occupy the middle section, almost like a dramatic climax surrounded on either side by rising and falling action.

The author treats his subject with clarity and charity. Mr. Lahr’s cogent analyses are revelatory but not surgical, and his sympathy never cloys. He does what a good literary biographer must do: He does not reduce the work to the life, but shows how it explains the life from which it emerges. He is an investigative reporter, a profiler of personality, mind and character, and a critic who understands drama on the page and in the house.

Miller’s greatness was partly unpredictable. He does not seem to have been destined to shine, other than in the eyes of his mother, who worshiped him, calling him “God’s chosen” in the wake of his success with “Salesman.” He always felt that she was watching over him, “the boy-child, half lover and half rebel against her dominion.” That was sufficient.

It is an irony that in a series called Jewish Lives the author doesn’t stress this Old Testament aspect of the Millers’ family romance. The younger brother succeeded where the firstborn did not. It’s a story going back to Jacob and Esau, or Joseph and his brothers. Kermit Miller (1912-2003) was the prince: accomplished, handsome, athletic, creative and scholarly. Arty, born three years later, was the dreamer, a poor student in school, something of a second fiddle—though also possessed of square-jawed good looks (see the jacket photo). “Unencumbered by thought,” he couldn’t get into college on the first go-round. Reading “Crime and Punishment” changed his life, when he discovered that “words were . . . a kind of tidal drag on your spirit.”

Before the successes, however, came the fall. In the 1929 stock-market crash, the Millers lost almost everything. Isidore Miller, the father, ran a successful clothing company. Illiterate but with a head for numbers, he married a woman (Gussie) with genteel tastes and cultural aspirations. He had overinvested in the market. In the wake of apparent ruin, the family relocated from a town house in Harlem, with good furniture and servants, and a summer home on the beach, to the wilds of semirural Brooklyn. Kermit left college to pitch in, becoming a hard-working carpet salesman. In 1946 it would come out that Isidore and Gussie had lied about the extent of their financial want and had unnecessarily forced Kermit into sacrifice. The sense of betrayal would echo through Miller’s later work.

The younger Miller climbed his way clear through talent, chance and chutzpah, at the University of Michigan and then in New York. He wrote his first plays in Ann Arbor, and he stuck at it: “My plays were revolving around the question of waking up an individual to what ultimately became a moral obligation to change the world.” His first Broadway play, “The Man Who Had All the Luck” (1944), won the Theatre Guild National Award but closed after four performances. An early novel, “Focus” (1945), sold 90,000 copies and was optioned for the movies, and Miller tried writing for Broadway again. Both the Theatre Guild and the Group Theatre—the establishment and the new wave—wanted to produce “All My Sons,” his 1947 play about deceit, lies, family tensions and civic responsibilities. Elia Kazan and the Group Theatre won out, and although the play got mixed reviews, Brooks Atkinson at the New York Times said “the theater has acquired a genuine new talent.”

Mr. Lahr locates Miller and “Salesman” squarely within its postwar American milieu, detailing Miller’s reactions to anti-Semitism, to the fault lines between individual and community, to moral confrontations, to individual and collective guilt. He also manages to steer clear of the bombast that characterizes many accounts of the Miller-Monroe romance, which began in April 1955 and ended in a bitter divorce in 1961. He treats Monroe with courtesy and discretion (as Miller did, too: he “clung to her like Ishmael to his coffin,” says Mr. Lahr in a chilling simile).

Mr. Lahr deals with his subject’s public life as cogently as he does his love life. Alone among his contemporary playwriting equals (O’Neill, Williams, Albee), Miller engaged broadly in politics and committed himself to the idea of the commonweal. Unlike Elia Kazan, Miller refused to name names when called before HUAC, nor did he plead the Fifth. He simply said that he could not in good conscience do as the committee asked, that he was not protecting Communists, but was trying to “protect my sense of myself . . . I cannot take responsibility for another human being.”

“After the Fall” (1964), the flawed and deeply autobiographical Marilyn play, was a commercial success, but Miller’s star had already begun to fade. The highbrow critics—Robert Brustein, Kenneth Tynan, Susan Sontag—panned it, as though they were reviewing Miller, not his work. By the late 1970s, he felt like a relic, overlooked by contemporary fashion. Mr. Lahr calls him “perhaps the most lionized of outcasts.” Although lambasted by Mr. Brustein and the irascible John Simon (“the world’s most over-rated playwright”), he kept writing until the end. In London he never went out of fashion.

With appropriate symmetry, the book closes with Miller’s death, 56 years to the day that “Salesman” opened on Broadway. Mr. Lahr allows, with foresight as well as hindsight, for the inevitable revaluations that occur as the wheel turns: With regard to “After the Fall,” he says that decades later, after our memory of the participants has dimmed or at least changed, “the play’s eloquence [can] be more easily recognized and admired.” If one of Miller’s themes was the ease with which a man’s life might be discarded, his work remains a force not easily forgotten.


Mr. Spiegelman’s “Nothing Stays Put: The Life and Poetry of Amy Clampitt” will be published in February