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Arthur Miller's Slow Ride Down
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20380 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,164 Words |
| Author
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Herb Greer
Herb Greer is an American writer and playwright who lives in
Britain and on the Continent. |
Arthur Miller, now something of a modern culture-hero was not always the object of groveling respect. After the original first night of Death of a Salesman in America, Rebecca West found herself at a party sitting next to a man she did not know. It happened to be Miller himself: without telling her who he was, he asked her what she thought of the play "Stuff and nonsense". She snapped. "Judging from the set, he was sitting on one of the most valuable pieces of domestic real estate in town. So what was all the fuss about"? Miller's response is not recorded.
Today the British theatrical establishment regards Miller with an attitude not far off adulation. His plays, published by Methuen, are regularly revived in the United Kingdom, when he decided to open his latest, The Ride down Mt. Morgan in London instead of New York, this was touted as a major theatrical event. A fawning London Times interviewer, dangling the image of Miller as "some auxiliary president on the face of Mount Rushmore," flattered him by using this to sneer at former real presidents and United States:
Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt are frozen into their glowers…Miller…twinkles even from his enormous height of years, renown and stature. The presidents also happen to have been carved by an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan on South Dakota land grabbed from Sioux Indians. Rushmore is not Arthur Miller country.
The remarks are in fact a tuft-hunting echo of Miller's own reproaches to American society in his most famous plays. At his theatrical best he has mined a thin but rich ore of social guilt, molding this into dramas that are really concentrated prosecution briefs. All my Sons gradually exposed the guilt of a subcontractor who, under ruthless commercial pressure, furnished defective parts to the American Air Force during World War II. Pilots died, and perhaps one of his sons. But as he says "they were all my sons." His surviving son rejects him and it is too much; he blows his brains out.
In Death of a Salesman the guilt was widened to include the whole of American society itself which was supposed to suck dry and throw away the hard-working little man (the protagonist is called Willy Loman i.e. low man) Poor Willy, an aging salesman discarded like an old shoes, slides into a nervous breakdown and kills himself in his car and for this we are all guilty, forsooth.
With The Crucible Miller's reproach was more focused; this piece of cle took
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