Whenever I contemplate who America’s dramatic masters are, my answer is always Eugene O’Neill and Edward Albee. The reason for this is both fought their way out of critical deep-freezes or personal issues and wrote some of their best work later in life. In addition, a dramatic master, in my opinion, must be fully skilled in the traditions of playwriting (and must show that), but also experiment and push the form further. Some may wonder why I don’t include Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams on that list. I’ve addressed Williams on the blog before. Now to Miller.
Both were born at a time when their first great works saw the last age when a play could have a real cultural impact. Both Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire have been in print ever since they first appeared, are widely produced and translated, and are among the most purchased scripts to be read both in schools and by the general public. But their careers also share striking similarities. For example, both had a virtually unblemished record of work between the mid-1940s until the early 1960s. Williams’ best work begins with The Glass Menagerie and ends with Night of the Iguana. Miller’s best work begins with All My Sons and ends with After the Fall. They both continued to write voluminously, but personal issues and the critical press which, by that time, had moved onto celebrating the works of Sam Shepard and David Mamet, prevented them from ever giving us what they could have. For Williams, it was drinking and drugging. For Miller, it was politics and, of course, his marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
Miller, as all of America, was fascinated by her. Whether it was love or pure physical attraction, I can’t say. He once remarked to her, as is echoed in a line from their only collaboration, the film The Misfits, that she was the saddest girl he ever knew. He meant this as a cheeky compliment, but I think he became both entranced by her beauty and frustrated by the fact that she needed to be sent back to the factory and fixed. He wanted to fix her and couldn’t.
Both disregarded and abused in her early life, Monroe rose to stardom with limited acting ability, but personal charm and, of course, great beauty. The dumb blonde routine was an act. Deep inside, she was tortured and Miller’s life with her became tortured as well. Being a man of great moral character, he thought he could save her from what was a certainty: that she would kill herself. They divorced before her death, but he never let his pain go as is exemplified by his last great play, After the Fall, and his final play, Finishing the Picture. Both are thinly veiled accounts of his time with her.
After the Fall was part of a failed attempt at creating a repertory company in New York City. This financial blunder and his portrayal of Marilyn in the character of Maggie set it up for failure. While it did have a respectable run and no shortage of talent in the cast (Jason Robards, Faye Dunaway in a minor role), friends of Marilyn were horrified at her portrayal on such display.
All of Miller’s work is a kind of autobiography. I think this is true of most playwrights’ work even when they disagree, but Miller’s, if you know his life, is obvious even in his greater works even when the personal connections are less on-the-nose. Both All My Sons and Death of a Salesman drew inspiration from Miller’s relationships with his father and uncle, the former of which lost everything in the Great Depression and the latter of which, for all intents and purposes, was Willy Loman in real life. Miller’s obsession with trying to understand his family continued in works like The Price, his last commercial success on Broadway.
But, even The Crucible, a parable about the McCarthy hearings (which would eventually find Miller in contempt of court), has many veiled references to his own adultery (in the guise of John and Elizabeth Proctor & Abigail Williams), although at that point, the romance with Marilyn was all in his mind. His first marriage fell apart because of Monroe, who was being fed nonsense by Strasberg acting-teachers in New York while trying to improve her craft and being fed barbiturates by doctors. A View from the Bridge is also a story about his sexual obsession with Marilyn.
The likelihood of such a union as Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe seems absurd on the face of it. Miller, in the mid ‘50s, was not only a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright, but a kind of public intellectual. He believed (foolishly) that plays had some sort of social responsibility. His progressive sentiments are scattered throughout his plays, including 1980’s The American Clock, a solid effort that received a poor production in New York. His belief in the ultimate evil of capitalism, of course, never left his work and led to a successful second career as an advocate for oppressed writers in fascist countries. Monroe, on the other hand, was known as a sex symbol, but few people knew she was a deeply haunted soul who fame swallowed up, just as it did other luminaries such as Elvis Presley. Looking at pictures of Art & Norma Jean together, one can see she was obviously attracted to intelligence and not just a pretty face (Sorry, Art).
But with the demise of their marriage and Monroe’s untimely death, Miller also lost his craft. The 1970s were a particularly cruel time to him critically speaking. His The Creation of the World and Other Business and the resulting musical adaptation Up from Paradise were almost completely ignored. With each passing play, the critics sneered at him and, quite frankly, they were mostly right. There are flourishes of his early talent in The Last Yankee (and, some would say, Broken Glass), but none of the early weight was there—the depth of characterization, the real exploration of a particular moment of stagecraft. He was, as the title of his last great play suggests, working After the Fall.
Re-reading that play this last weekend, I was amazed at how he made absolutely no effort to allegorize his and Monroe's relationship. The play is about a lawyer, Quentin, who is seeking understanding about his life, putting himself on trial for his crimes, real or imaginary. The first act deals a lot with his family, but the second act is almost squarely focused on his relationship with a budding singer, Maggie. Perhaps if the director Elia Kazan (he and Miller had resumed their friendship even after Kazan named names to HUAC) had not put Tony-winner Barbara Loden in a platinum blonde wig, things would have turned out differently. But, even then, the text might as well be docudrama. I still call it Miller's last great work because it is, at the very least, a fully rendered idea, though tough for most audiences to follow (and a challenge for any actor playing Quentin, whose monologues are short story length). You could already see the change. The man who had created the perfect allegory and parable in The Crucible stood naked and alone onstage in After the Fall and he suffered for it for the rest of his life.
With Monroe’s death came Miller’s artistic death. Again, he continued to write. Some of his later plays have garnered some attention, particularly The Ride Down Mt. Morgan and Mr. Peter’s Connections, but the ill-fated, under written Resurrection Blues is a veritable mess and Finishing the Picture, though produced shortly before his death, was only published a few years ago. The saddest thing about these later plays, and the same is true of Tennessee Williams, is they only have flashes of the early brilliance. While I find some faults in Death of a Salesman, it has spoken to virtually every country which has produced it and, as I’ve mentioned multiple times on the blog, The Crucible deserves to be called one of the greatest plays, if not the greatest, by an American playwright. It was a terrific fall from grace.
As to the autobiographical nature of his work, Miller was an interesting figure. He watched his family lose everything and temporarily sought solace in early socialist ideals, yes, but he was not as interesting as some might believe. He was a quiet man who, when not writing, did carpentry and puttered around his Connecticut farm. His life simply did not have the flavor of most of his contemporaries to sustain a tome of autobiographical plays. As you go down the list, the plays get increasingly less interesting. And the fact that Marilyn was still haunting him in the mid-aughts proves she was something he could never get over.
Of course he couldn’t save her. When you’re that depressed, and taking pills to excess, there’s not much to do for a person. He later had a very successful marriage to photographer Inge Morath (and even declared love for another lady after her death), but if we look at the plays alone, Marilyn overshadows everything he did afterwards.
It is not uncommon for American theatre critics to revel in lifting someone up and then spend the rest of their careers tearing them down (this was the case with Shepard, Mamet, Lanford Wilson, even August Wilson). But it is rare that such vitriol is deserved. In Miller’s case, it may not be deserved, but it was certainly inevitable. A person may only have two great plays in them. For the “famous playwrights,” they are usually acknowledged in their obituaries as the writer of one or two great plays. No matter whether he continued writing, his obit would have read, “Arthur Miller, author of Death of a Salesman...” Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. I would have been proud to have written it. But I would’ve been much prouder of him if he had worked through the pain, as O’Neill and Albee did, and came out with greater works than he left us.
