Book Interview: John Lahr on the legacy of American playwright Arthur Miller
Playwright and University of Michigan alumnus Arthur Miller is interviewed during 'A Conversation With Arthur Miller' at the Mendelssohn Theater on April 1, 2004, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
- Arthur Miller: American Witness
- John Lahr
- Yale University Press, € 19.99
John Lahr remembers an afternoon he spent with the American playwright, Arthur Miller, in December 1998. Miller was then 83 years old and brought Lahr to his writing studio in Roxbury, Connecticut.
“When we first entered the small cabin Miller pointed to his desk, where he had sat down fifty years earlier and wrote the first act of in eight hours,” the American biographer explains from his home in London.
When it first opened on Broadway in 1949, ran for 742 performances straight and won numerous prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and the Tony.
Set in late 1940s Brooklyn, the two-act tragedy tells the story of Willy Loman — a nervous travelling salesman in despair with a mediocre life that has failed to match his ambitious expectations.
“Willy Loman’s great tragedy is that he lives in the past or in the expectation of a future that never arrives, so life passes him by,” says 81-year-old Lahr, who was s chief drama critic from 1992 to 2013.
“Miller was not the first to dramatise the barbarity of American individualism, but he was the first to stage this spiritual attrition as a journey to the interior of the American psyche,” Lahr writes in the opening pages of .
The short biography begins on West 110th Street in Harlem, Manhattan, on Arthur Miller’s birthday, October 17, 1915. Arthur was the second child of Augusta (Gussie) and Isidore Miller. Both of Miller’s parents’ families were first-generation émigrés from Poland who climbed socially when they arrived to the United States. Miller would later downplay the ostentatious wealth he was born into.
“By the mid-1920s Isidore’s Miltex Coat and Suit Company had become one of the largest clothing companies in the United States,” Lahr explains. “Miller was born in a big apartment on the north side of Central Park. His family had maids, oriental rugs, mahogany furniture, a grand piano, and a chauffeur-driven limousine that would take them to Broadway shows on the weekend.”
But when Miller turned 14 his father’s business was wiped out, almost overnight, by the Great Depression. “I remember Miller once told me: The whole idea of people failing is that they can no longer be loved. People who succeed are loved because they exude some magical formula for fending off death,” Lahr recalls.
Miller attended the University of Michigan, where he studied journalism and graduated in 1938. By 1940 Miller had written six plays. All were rejected by producers except T (1944) — Miller’s first play to open on Broadway. It won the Theatre Guild National Award but lasted only four performances. Feeling dejected and rejected, Miller decided he was going to quit writing plays for good.
Miller gave one last attempt at writing a commercial Broadway play. That play was , which opened on Broadway on January 29, 1947, under the direction of Elia Kazan, who would also direct when it premiered in New York two years later.
The latter play would earn Miller two million dollars. “I tell ya, kid, art pays,” Miller wrote to Kazan at the time. It was Kazan who first introduced Miller to the young Hollywood actress, Marilyn Monroe, in 1951. He took Miller to 20th Century–Fox, where was being shot. A few days later, though, Kazan and Monroe began a year-long affair. Miller, meanwhile, was still married to his first wife, Mary Grace Slattery, with whom he had two children, Jane, and Robert.
Lahr’s biography then spends considerable time and ink exploring the explosive public rift that developed between Miller and his close friend and creative partner, Kazan. Their infamous falling out arose not over Monroe, but from the paranoid politics of the Red Scare: an anti-communist witch hunt, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, that dominated American public life during the 1950s, in the early years of the Cold War. Kazan and Miller had both briefly flirted with far-left politics. Miller had attended meetings with communist writers back in 1947. While Kazan had been a member of the Communist Party for 18 months back in the 1930s.
In late 1951, when the film of was about to be released, Columbia Pictures asked Miller to sign an anti-Communist statement, but he refused. Kazan, however, decided he would oust his former communist allies. He had already won an Academy Award and he felt his reputation on both Broadway and in Hollywood was on the line. Kazan was subsequently brought before the House Un-American Activities Committee (which took a prominent role in the investigation of communist activity in the United States) and warned that he would have to give names of other actors who had been Communist Party members, or he would never work in film or theatre again.
Kazan was called before the Committee twice: first in January 1952, then again in April that year. In the first appearance Kazan answered all questions but refused to give names. Then in April, under mounting pressure from the studios, Kazan decided to inform. “Miller felt Kazan’s real sin was naming names for practical rather than moral reasons,” says Lahr. Miller would be called to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956. Unlike, Kazan, however, he refused to name names.
Lahr then turns his attention to Miller’s fixation with Marilyn Monroe. Her life had changed a great deal since Miller was first introduced to her in 1951. In 1952 Monroe appeared on the cover of and in 1953 she became first ever Playmate of the Month. In 1954 Monroe also married Joe DiMaggio, the baseball’s superstar, who became involved with her the year he retired from the New York Yankees. The couple divorced after eight months, however. When Miller turned 40 his marriage to Mary Grace Slattery was also collapsing. She kicked him out of their home in October 1955 and Miller moved into the bohemian Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street in Manhattan.
Miller and Monroe had already begun their affair that April. They married on June 29, 1956.
Lahr says Monroe gave Miller an appetite for life, while he became her anchor. But the whirlwind romance soon turned bitter and resentful. Monroe’s cheerfulness and optimism vanished pretty quickly. “Miller was faced with someone who was [mentally] disturbed. In this romantic story Miller has come out as quite a negative force. But I don’t think he was at all,” says Lahr. “Marilyn was very fragile, incredibly fierce, but also extremely cruel.”
In November 1960 Monroe sued for divorce. During their marriage Monroe had three mental breakdowns and three suicide attempts. In August 1962 Monroe was found dead at 36 at her home in Los Angeles after a barbiturate overdose.
“I would say there were two traumas in Miller’s life,” says Lahr. “The Great Depression and Marilyn’s death. Miller’s failure to save her was something that he couldn’t let go of and give up on. And so he kept writing about her in different forms and different characters.” The year of Monroe’s suicide Miller married Inge Morath, an Austrian-born photographer.
Lahr notes that from the late 1960s onwards Miller’s stature in American public life began to decline considerably. As he aged, Miller was philosophically and emotionally unable to adapt his later plays to sit with the zeitgeist, as cultural tastes evolved and changed. A liberal humanist, Miller’s plays tended to have a strong moral component, which didn’t suit the abstract cultural agenda of European postmodernism and the theatre of the absurd.
Arthur Miller died at 89, on February 10, 2005, fifty-six years to the day after opened on Broadway. “Miller’s work still speaks to us in our present age,” Lahr concludes. “The surface of Miller’s plays may seem old fashioned, but the themes that they explore are still extremely relevant.”
