Arthur Miller, Christopher Bigsby
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; $75; 739pp
In the opening pages of Sebastian Faulks’s 2007 novel Engleby, the eponymous narrator casts a sardonic eye over some sacred cows of English literature. It is, for anyone involved in that world, an amusing and at times uncomfortable experience. Certainly I felt a pang of embarrassment when I came across the following passage:
I went to a meeting of Jen Soc the other day. It was in Jesus, where I’ve never been before. There were queues to see a play called The Crucible … The Crucible’s about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Goody that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised.
I first read Arthur Miller’s play as an earnest English Lit. student and did indeed feel enfranchised by it, if by ‘enfranchised’ is meant that blend of self-importance and self-righteousness to which the tyro radical is prone. Set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts at the time of the infamous Salem witch trials, the play was an obvious analogue for the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Prepared to martyr myself for the cause to the point of wearing several badges, I knew that if a comparable hysteria were ever to grip my country (Great Britain) I’d be able to follow the example of John Proctor, whose integrity in the face of his Puritan accusers prefigured Miller’s own appearance before the House of Un-American Activities Commission in 1957. Engleby, then, had it just about right. In the hands of left-wing youths in particular, The Crucible is an invitation to self-glorification.
It is also, of course, a very great play, and what makes it so is precisely the degree to which Miller is able to embed the seed of political content in the personal soil, allowing it to emerge organically from the particularities of plot and character. Proctor is a believable character, not a mouthpiece for a political cause. To be sure, he is a flawed character, whose public stand is in part an atonement for his personal, which is to say sexual, transgressions. In other words, it is its indebtedness to life that makes The Crucible a successful play. More specifically, it is Miller’s ability to turn his own life into art that lifts it beyond mere agitprop. And here, threatening to collapse my desk and crash through the floor to the room below, is the life according to Christopher Bigsby.
As Bigsby demonstrates in the opening chapters, the plays did not just reflect the life. They were also major events in that life. Oddly, it was the successes and not the failures that seemed to cause the most disruption. His first big success was All My Sons (1947), the money from which so disconcerted him that he threw himself into a menial job in order to reconnect with the masses. Success also put a strain on his first marriage, while effectively laying the groundwork for his second. Indeed, it was at a party in his honour that his newfound awareness of his own desirability fatally collided with the sexiest woman ever to dunk a potato chip.
If it’s true that men fall in love through the eyes and women fall in love through the ears, then Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe must be accounted a paradigm. Not that Miller wasn’t good-looking. On the contrary, the dust-jacket photograph shows him looking distinctly handsome. But he was hardly Joe DiMaggio. Needless to say, the marriage was doomed, wrecked by unrealistic expectations (Bigsby compares them to Gatsby and Daisy: ‘She, after all, was in part a fantasy’) and Marilyn’s all-consuming neuroses. (As we know, it wasn’t potato chips that Marilyn was washing down with Champagne, but sleeping pills and tranquilisers.)
The relationship raised Miller’s profile and in that way probably precipitated his appearance before the HUAC. To his undying credit, he refused to name names, to point the finger at his fellow communists. Clearly, this was a brave thing to do (or rather a brave thing not to do) but that it has since become the centrepiece of Miller’s record as a political player does him more credit than is due to him. For Miller’s politics were naïve at best. True, his initial conversion to Marxism, which occurred in 1932, was entirely understandable, coming as it did at a time of great hardship. But that Miller held for so long to the cause, turning a deaf ear to the Moscow trials and the numerous reports of Soviet repression, is a black mark against his intellectual credibility.
Such faults as Bigsby’s biography displays are those of literary biography per se, which is to say a sort of cruising pedantry and a weakness for factual attribution that is in some sense antithetical to literature itself. Literary biography is alchemy in reverse: its tendency is to turn gold back into base material. Does it matter, for example, that the table in The Price resembles one in the family home? Or that Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is probably based on Uncle Manny? It doesn’t. Or at any rate it shouldn’t. Nevertheless, one is grateful for Bigsby’s descriptions of specific productions. Drama, after all, is only half literature. The other half takes place on stage and is lost to history when the curtain comes down.
So why does literary biography appeal? It appeals because the creative personality is a fascinating phenomenon. Miller’s was a life of conflicting commitments. The political commitments clashed with the artistic, the artistic with the romantic and the familial. Fortunately for us, the centre held, and the result was The Crucible and Death of a Salesman.
When Miller died in 2005, the theatres on Broadway dimmed their lights. The sense that a source of light had passed – the equal of Ibsen and Chekhov – was apparent. The date was 10 February, precisely the day in 1949 on which an exhausted Willy Loman first set down his sample cases and turned Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the downfall of a great man on its head.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson; $75; 739pp
In the opening pages of Sebastian Faulks’s 2007 novel Engleby, the eponymous narrator casts a sardonic eye over some sacred cows of English literature. It is, for anyone involved in that world, an amusing and at times uncomfortable experience. Certainly I felt a pang of embarrassment when I came across the following passage:
I went to a meeting of Jen Soc the other day. It was in Jesus, where I’ve never been before. There were queues to see a play called The Crucible … The Crucible’s about a group of American Puritans called Goody this and Goody that; it has self-righteousness and modern parallels. Students like it because it makes them feel enfranchised.
I first read Arthur Miller’s play as an earnest English Lit. student and did indeed feel enfranchised by it, if by ‘enfranchised’ is meant that blend of self-importance and self-righteousness to which the tyro radical is prone. Set in seventeenth-century Massachusetts at the time of the infamous Salem witch trials, the play was an obvious analogue for the McCarthyite witch hunts of the 1950s. Prepared to martyr myself for the cause to the point of wearing several badges, I knew that if a comparable hysteria were ever to grip my country (Great Britain) I’d be able to follow the example of John Proctor, whose integrity in the face of his Puritan accusers prefigured Miller’s own appearance before the House of Un-American Activities Commission in 1957. Engleby, then, had it just about right. In the hands of left-wing youths in particular, The Crucible is an invitation to self-glorification.
It is also, of course, a very great play, and what makes it so is precisely the degree to which Miller is able to embed the seed of political content in the personal soil, allowing it to emerge organically from the particularities of plot and character. Proctor is a believable character, not a mouthpiece for a political cause. To be sure, he is a flawed character, whose public stand is in part an atonement for his personal, which is to say sexual, transgressions. In other words, it is its indebtedness to life that makes The Crucible a successful play. More specifically, it is Miller’s ability to turn his own life into art that lifts it beyond mere agitprop. And here, threatening to collapse my desk and crash through the floor to the room below, is the life according to Christopher Bigsby.
As Bigsby demonstrates in the opening chapters, the plays did not just reflect the life. They were also major events in that life. Oddly, it was the successes and not the failures that seemed to cause the most disruption. His first big success was All My Sons (1947), the money from which so disconcerted him that he threw himself into a menial job in order to reconnect with the masses. Success also put a strain on his first marriage, while effectively laying the groundwork for his second. Indeed, it was at a party in his honour that his newfound awareness of his own desirability fatally collided with the sexiest woman ever to dunk a potato chip.
If it’s true that men fall in love through the eyes and women fall in love through the ears, then Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe must be accounted a paradigm. Not that Miller wasn’t good-looking. On the contrary, the dust-jacket photograph shows him looking distinctly handsome. But he was hardly Joe DiMaggio. Needless to say, the marriage was doomed, wrecked by unrealistic expectations (Bigsby compares them to Gatsby and Daisy: ‘She, after all, was in part a fantasy’) and Marilyn’s all-consuming neuroses. (As we know, it wasn’t potato chips that Marilyn was washing down with Champagne, but sleeping pills and tranquilisers.)
The relationship raised Miller’s profile and in that way probably precipitated his appearance before the HUAC. To his undying credit, he refused to name names, to point the finger at his fellow communists. Clearly, this was a brave thing to do (or rather a brave thing not to do) but that it has since become the centrepiece of Miller’s record as a political player does him more credit than is due to him. For Miller’s politics were naïve at best. True, his initial conversion to Marxism, which occurred in 1932, was entirely understandable, coming as it did at a time of great hardship. But that Miller held for so long to the cause, turning a deaf ear to the Moscow trials and the numerous reports of Soviet repression, is a black mark against his intellectual credibility.
Such faults as Bigsby’s biography displays are those of literary biography per se, which is to say a sort of cruising pedantry and a weakness for factual attribution that is in some sense antithetical to literature itself. Literary biography is alchemy in reverse: its tendency is to turn gold back into base material. Does it matter, for example, that the table in The Price resembles one in the family home? Or that Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is probably based on Uncle Manny? It doesn’t. Or at any rate it shouldn’t. Nevertheless, one is grateful for Bigsby’s descriptions of specific productions. Drama, after all, is only half literature. The other half takes place on stage and is lost to history when the curtain comes down.
So why does literary biography appeal? It appeals because the creative personality is a fascinating phenomenon. Miller’s was a life of conflicting commitments. The political commitments clashed with the artistic, the artistic with the romantic and the familial. Fortunately for us, the centre held, and the result was The Crucible and Death of a Salesman.
When Miller died in 2005, the theatres on Broadway dimmed their lights. The sense that a source of light had passed – the equal of Ibsen and Chekhov – was apparent. The date was 10 February, precisely the day in 1949 on which an exhausted Willy Loman first set down his sample cases and turned Aristotle’s definition of tragedy as the downfall of a great man on its head.
