remarks
E.L. Doctorow
Thank you. It is my happy task to try to locate and define to some extent the elements of Arthur Miller's achievement. I'm prepared to do that as long as you understand that finally any critical analysis has to stand in awe and realize and not be able to analyze what he does what he does. But in an Arthur Miller play, there's always a day of reckoning. It arrives at that point in a man's life, when truth bursts through the fortress of his consciousness and he's overwhelmed. The means by which he has failed himself and others is given full expression, and the cost is borne. As Arthur himself as said, this is the classical Greek concept of the theater. He says, "I come out of that tradition where the past is the burden of man and it's got to be placed on the stage so that he can grapple with it. It's the story of how the birds come home to roost. Every play."
Yet within the rigors of that tradition, Arthur Miller has depicted an astonishing variety of lives, of different classes and from different periods of our history. He's provided us a body of work that transcends its undeniable theatricality and its skillful application of suspense and conflict. Its glory in characterization and play of language to implicate us, the audience, in its actions to a degree which, in my opinion, are achieved by perhaps no other American playwright. It is not merely good storytelling that yanks us up there on the stage with the salesman Willy Loman, or the longshoreman Eddy Corbone, or Lyman Phelps, the wealthy businessman of the recently produced Ride Down Mount Morgan, a play of which I'm very fond, but the author's evidentiary case for the moral immensity of human life.
Miller deplores the label of "naturalist" which has stuck to him since his early drama All My Sons, from 1947, his one venture in the well-made, forth wall play in the manner of Ibsen. He's right about that. Even the subsequent Death of a Salesman of 1949, a poetical conceit play of multiple realties, posed one upon another, breaks the mould. And in his later work, he has dispensed with walls altogether. After the Fall, 1964, set in a man's mind. The past conflates with the present. And in the case of Mount Morgan, there's no consistent guideline to the reality of the action. The partition separating the exterior and interior life of the hero is permeable if not porous.
But why this playwright's reputation as a naturalist endures is an interesting question. It could have to do with the fact that when he writes a play, the social context of his characters’ lives is given full view. People live inseparable from their times. The capitalist ethos is visible in the slump of Willy Loman's shoulders. Gross crisis of history - the Depression, the Holocaust - are not only reported by the characters, but are mirrored in their personal calamities. In the play Broken Glass from 1994, the domestic tragedy of a Jewish accountant and his mysteriously afflicted wife in 1938 is seen as a kind of transmuted Kristallnacht. In The Ride Down Mount Morgan, Lyman Phelps, the self-involved lover of two women, is as contemporary as the Gospad of Washington in his bigamist heart is without a doubt a double fin de siecle organ.
Another reason for Miller's misidentification as a naturalist is his unfailing ear for the speech of real life. He knows the way bank presidents speak, even if they're from Chase, lawyers, salesmen, wealthy WASPS, poor Jews, working class Italians, old men, young men, brothers, fathers, women who are wives, women who are not wives. And thus the theater goer finds himself hearing the realistic dialogue of characters embroiled a world historically familiar. That he is witnessing a severely aesthetic form of drama whose revelations converge of allegory may be less apparent to him. But is that bad? It is more likely a measure of his genius as an artificer that Arthur Miller is mistaken for a naturalist.
Unlike the scripts of some of his contemporaries, his bear reading. They read well. The music of the lines can be heard and the elegance of their construction in the logician's meaning of elegance is exclusion of the inessential can be appreciated. The playgoer who has a chance to read published editions of the plays will make additional discoveries. Chief among them, that in the malarian universe, the drastic failings in human beings invariably play out as forms of self-deception. Nobody is simply posited as evil, as for example, Iago is evil or Edmund, the bastard son of Gloucester, in King Lear. The birds come home to roost because evil has been done in the delusion of doing good. Eddie Carbone, of A View from the Bridge, cannot admit to himself his unnatural love for his niece. He thinks he's protecting her. And in Broken Glass, the accountant Philip Gelberg must give himself a heart attack before he can acknowledge the destructiveness to himself and his family of his Jewish self-hatred.
These men are given to controlling not only themselves but the people around them, and they rationalize their compulsion as love. And in the morally complex vision of this author, it is also and exactly love. The hero of Mount Morgan, Lyman Phelphs, in the aftermath of that punishing ride, undergoes something like a confessional review of his life and his relationships. As Quentin does in After the Fall, he puts himself on trial, and the defense arguments are made and made well.
But if there's redemption for a Miller protagonist, it is in his self-judgement of moral insufficiency. The defense forever rests and however ruthlessly embraces the truth that as been so long resisted. So that among the protagonist of these plays, there are those incapable of self-reflection who chose rather to destroy themselves and those who undergo the crisis of self-revelation and find some means of stumbling on. And what we as audience are left with in any event is the sense of moral consequence that brings us back to ourselves.
But we find there are no easy answers. Those cast out from our fortress consciousness are fortressed as well. We begin to appreciate the dimension of original sin. As Lyman Phelps in Mount Morgan says, "A man can be faithful to himself or to other people but not to both." That is one tough line, and it could not be uttered in a facile, moralistic tale.
Like most authors, Arthur Miller has his obsessions, the ideas and archetypes he returns to again and again. He's preoccupied with the familial structures of father and son, brother and brother, husband and wife and second wife. And quite understandably, he finds ways to return thematically to the Holocaust. There's a Calculus in his overriding concern for individual moral failure. He proposes that the major social catastrophes, like the Holocaust, are compounded of prior cowardice, self-delusions, and rationalized cruelties of individual, ordinary lives. And in so far as this suggests that we all live with a Nazi inside us, well, not everyone will agree. But no one will deny the courage of a writer who will say so nor deny his vision that we all connect in ways that we court disaster not to understand. Thank you. Congratulations, Arthur.
