Arthur Miller’s shame
Paula Marantz Cohen on ethnicity, family and the writing of plays
As the curtain fell on the first performance of Death of a Salesman, in Philadelphia in 1949, the audience sat silently, too moved to applaud. The play was morally illuminating as well as dramatically powerful and it affected Bernard Gimbel, the owner of Gimbel’s Department Store, so much that he announced that never again would anyone in his company be fired because of their age.
Death of a Salesman won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1949, and it turned its author into a celebrity. Arthur Miller was thirty-four years old, and that early success, if I can judge by the tone of his memoir, Timebends (1987), became a drag on his psyche. The autobiography circles around this achievement and spends more time discussing All My Sons, the work that preceded it. Anyone who is hailed as both a moral beacon and a consummate artist at a young age is bound to confront the challenge of how to best move forward – to experience the fear, as Miller put it, that “I would not write again”. But the difficulty that Miller faced was not merely a matter of early success but also of shame.
I came to understand shame as a structure for Miller’s life and work when I learned about his son, Daniel, who was born in 1966 with Down’s syndrome. Miller and his third wife, Inge Morath, chose not to raise Daniel at home. Instead they placed him in a state facility in Connecticut which, according to someone who worked there at the time, “was not a place you would want your dog to live” (quoted in Vanity Fair, September 13, 2007). According to Martin Gottfried’s Arthur Miller: A life (2003), Miller neither visited his disabled son there, nor mentioned him in his memoirs or interviews.
Some may say that this is a story with no bearing beyond the confines of the Miller family. I disagree. The fate of Daniel Miller offers a way to understanding patterns in Arthur Miller’s plays but it also, and perhaps more importantly, gives insight into the attitudes of the generation of people of whom Miller was a representative.
Neal Gabler, in his book An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews invented Hollywood (1988), argues that Eastern European Jews, who became major producers of and audiences for movies in the early 1900s, embraced an idea of America through the films they made and flocked to see. These movies projected an idealized vision of family and community that stood in direct contrast to the difficulty and marginality that had characterized their lives in Europe. Miller and his peers were the children of these immigrant Americans, more educated and more comfortable in their skins than their parents, but also more deeply conditioned into the American ideal that their parents had helped to shape and promote. “I inherited from my father”, Miller says in the documentary that his daughter, Rebecca Miller, made about him, “the attitude of being an American more than a Jew.” Being a Jew and being linked to other elements of marginality (which would include, later, being the father of a son with Down’s) were not just secondary elements, they were also aspects of the self that needed to be hidden or denied.
My first generation Jewish-American parents worked hard to be above the fray. They strove to be elevated in their cultural tastes – not only to project the image of normal Americans, but to be morally and intellectually superior. Anything that jarred with this impeccable presentation was banished, denied, or kept undercover. This need to maintain an impeccable image appears throughout Jewish-American culture in the 1950s. It explains, for example, the clash that occurred between Norman Podhoretz and his fellow writers at Partisan Review, a publication that prided itself on its intellectual high-mindedness and progressive politics. In Podhoretz’s book Making It (1967), he revealed candidly that he was ambitious and wanted to make money, and suggested that his peers felt the same way. He was lambasted for this – both for what was viewed as the low nature of his values and for trying to bring the group down to his level. Norman Mailer could stab his wife and spew profanity but remain critically unscathed because his behaviour showed a certain American-style bravado. But when Podhoretz wrote about ambition and money, he seemed to his peers to be playing into the very stereotypes that had contributed to the destruction of European Jews.
It is interesting, in this context, to compare Podhoretz with Philip Roth. Both were about the same age and faced similar angry criticism from the Jewish community for their early writing: Podhoretz for Making It; Roth for Portnoy’s Complaint. But where Podhoretz retreated into his role as editor of Commentary (becoming, in the process, one of the fathers of neoconservatism), Roth continued his literary career, and, as first-generation American Jews gave way to more fully assimilated second-generation Jews, became a literary icon to the children of those who had excoriated him. By the 1960s, anti-establishment protest became a new norm among young Americans. This new attitude was also a function of distance from the extermination camps of the Second World War. If Podhoretz made his contemporaries ashamed, Roth eventually made embracing what had seemed shameful – ie, his oddness and otherness – a badge of courage and originality.
Miller, however, was almost twenty years older than Roth and Podhoretz. The war was far more a presence for him. He makes only perfunctory mention in his autobiography that he was turned down for military service, elsewhere elucidated as the result of a knee injury playing football in high school. His play All My Sons deals with a man who has committed the egregiously shameful (indeed, immoral) act of knowingly manufacturing faulty airplane parts during the war. Miller explained what I postulate to be the psychological process behind his writing when he told his daughter: “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him … where he puts himself on the line, sometimes quite secretly, sometimes symbolically”. The statement acknowledges the power of shame but it also contradicts itself: to “put [oneself] on the line” secretly or symbolically is not really to expose oneself at all. It is to mask one’s shame by transforming its source into something else.
Miller did not avoid representing marginal themes and figures in his work. His first and only novel, Focus, deals with antisemitism, though from a Gentile perspective. He discussed pre-Second World War antisemitism in Timebends, and made some attempt to address the Holocaust, beginning in the 1960s when ethnic identity became more acceptable in literary circles (thanks in large part to writers like Roth). Incident at Vichy (1964) and Broken Glass (1994) both deal with the war and European antisemitism, though gingerly (the heroic figure of Incident is not Jewish; the link to the Holocaust in Broken Glass is indirect since the action takes place in America). The most notably ethnic character in Miller’s canon is the Jewish appraiser, Solomon, in The Price – although when I taught the play, my students did not recognize him as a European Jew, noting that he referred to “church”, not “synagogue”, and said “Boy oh Boy”, rather than “Oy vay”. Nonetheless, the cadence of Solomon’s speech, not to mention his profession and behaviour, seem intended to evoke a Jewish stereotype, but softened into a lovable foil and rendered at least quasi-heroic as a philosopher. It is noteworthy that in A View from the Bridge, the one play in which Miller dramatizes an ethnic family and creates a deeply, indeed embarrassingly, flawed protagonist, he chooses to make the family Italian rather than Jewish.
Most of Miller’s characters, however, have no ethnic inflection. They speak in the tones of an imagined generic America, rendered as simple or elevated, depending on the context. The stage directions at the beginning of Death of a Salesman tell us that Willy Loman should first be heard muttering: ”Oh, boy, oh, boy” as he returns from a failed business trip; after his death, his neighbour Charlie intones: “Nobody dast blame this man”. one is working-class American diction; the other, high-flown literary encomium (anticipating, one could argue, the formal, Puritan-speak that Miller would use in The Crucible).
Miller extended this drive to universalize and normalize into his own life – rebuilding himself successively, as the culture changed, almost as one would write a new play. Each time he seemed to be conforming to an identity that placed the marginal aspects of his background at a distance, and embraced the cultural conventions of the moment. He initially married a Midwestern non-Jewish woman and had two children with her, establishing this family as a counterpoint to his Jewish immigrant family of origin. He then married Marilyn Monroe, an icon of sexuality that American men of that period were supposed to find irresistible, usurping, in the process, America’s most famous baseball player (Joe DiMaggio, in reality, represented another ethnic minority struggling for a place in the culture, but unlike Miller, who managed to be American by normalizing his language, DiMaggio managed to do so through athletic prowess and by keeping his mouth shut). Miller’s third wife was Austrian – the nation that produced Hitler. one could say – and I find this covertly suggested in After the Fall – that this marriage allowed him to assimilate something that was symbolically antithetical to his Jewishness.
Even as Miller sought to be “normal” in some generic sense, he also sought to give this image a moral patina. What most confirmed his stature in this regard was his refusal to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee (in marked contrast to his best friend and favoured director, Elia Kazan, who did co-operate with the Committee and was never forgiven for doing so in some progressive intellectual circles). But here, too, Miller’s action, lauded as heroic, seems less so when scrutinized more carefully. As some critics have pointed out, he was called to testify when HUAC was losing influence, and he knew that in the theatre the blacklist had little power. He questioned his own heroic motives in later years, and enthusiastically supported the Lifetime Achievement Oscar eventually given to Kazan. In After the Fall, Miller’s most transparently autobiographical play, the lawyer protagonist Quentin agrees to defend a friend accused by the Committee, then feels relief when the friend commits suicide before the hearings, letting him off the hook. The play makes clear that Quentin takes his friend’s case not out of particular conviction but in order to avoid the shame of appearing weak or disloyal.
Miller and Kazan went on to rationalize their respective behaviour before the HUAC Committee, each shaping a narrative that would place his choice in a superior light. Kazan directed the film, On the Waterfront, where Terry Malloy, played by Marlon Brando, testifies against the Mob-influenced longshoremen’s union as the noble course of action. Malloy does the difficult but heroic thing in the context of that movie. “I’m glad what I done!” he yells towards the end, echoing what Kazan said subsequently about his decision to name names. Miller, for his part, wrote A View from the Bridge as an indictment of “snitching”. His protagonist, Eddie Carbone, is destroyed when he turns in his Italian cousins to the immigration authorities. Eddie, we learn early on, is “unnaturally” attracted to his niece, Catherine, and his obsession with her makes it impossible for him to behave “normally” towards his relatives. “Normal” and “natural” are terms used throughout the play, both by Eddie and as a judgement on him.
But what must strike any contemporary analyst of A View from the Bridge is how, while it clearly condemns Eddie for his actions, it leaves other elements unaddressed. The play harps on the idea that Catherine needs to grow up and separate from her uncle. Yet the prescribed course of action for growing up is engagement to the immigrant, Rodolpho, who refers to her continuously as his “little girl”. The implication is that what is unnatural is not female subordination and infantilization but male over-reaching: the idea of a father (or uncle) holding onto his child when she reaches an age when she should be passed on to another man in marriage.
Another element that escapes attention is the attitude towards homosexuality. Eddie Carbone castigates the good-natured Rodolpho as “not right, not right” – implying that he is gay, an assumption that the audience is meant to feel is the result of Eddie’s mounting paranoia and obsession with his niece. Yet, as Hilton Als noted in his discussion of Ivo van Hove’s 2015 staging of the play, this could also reflect Eddie’s own repressed homosexuality and, for that matter, Miller’s fear of this in himself. Seeing this in the play is to see how deeply the shame that Miller attaches to not being “normal” penetrates his work.
Arthur Miller was a man seeking to escape his roots, wanting to be a distinctly American success story, just as Willy Loman wanted this in another register. A real-life symptom of this drive to fashion an impeccable image was the repudiation of a flesh-and-blood child. In an uncanny passage in After the Fall, written two years before the birth of his son, Miller has Holga (the character who resembles Inge Morath) in After the Fall tell Quentin (the character who resembles Miller): “I dreamed I had a child, and even in the dream I saw it was my life, and it was an idiot, and I ran away. But it always crept onto my lap again, clutched at my clothes. Until I thought, if I could kiss it, whatever in it was my own, perhaps I could sleep. And I bent to its broken face, and it was horrible … but I kissed it. I think one must finally take one’s life in one’s arms”. This is precisely what the Millers did not do after the birth of their son. “Taking one’s life in one’s arms” is like “putting oneself on the line”. Miller espouses the importance of these things even as he swerves away from them.
This shame did not impede Miller’s work in any fundamental way. His plays fell out of favour in the 1960s when a more open and idiosyncratic art came into vogue, but his greatest work seems to have gained energy and stylistic originality through recasting what was shameful to its author in a symbolic or disguised form. After the Fall (1964) is a departure from his previous work in being blatantly (and embarrassingly) autobiographical, but it was also a failure. one could argue that here was a case of Miller trying to do something that he was not, by disposition and talent, suited to do. The plays that followed, with the exception of The Price (1966), seem half-baked and stilted. As a new generation of Jewish-American writers became more inclined to embrace embarrassing self-exposure in the 1960s, Miller seemed out of date.
But in the 1980s and 90s, his earlier plays, which had always remained popular in Europe, began to be revived in America. A new generation of audiences found that they could relate to them. The need to “secretly” or “symbolically” represent what was a source of shame had reflected Miller’s drive for assimilation that mirrored that of people, like my parents, who wanted desperately to fit into American life. Eventually, however, audiences from different backgrounds and a later era came to identify with the result. By flattening speech into conventional, even stilted, Americanese, Miller could create a gallery of characters one thinks of as the American Everyman. Here is a case where a limitation, very much a function of a particular group neurosis, when accompanied by a great artistic gift, could help in the creation of work that has enduring value.