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Arthur Miller: A Life
By Martin Gottfried
484 pages
Published by Faber and Faber at £25
Dateline: 16th October, 2003
In this very readable story of the life of perhaps the greatest living
playwright, Martin Gottfried both suffers and benefits from his subject's
withdrawal of authorisation part way through. Miller is an extremely
private man who is willing to reveal himself in thin disguise on paper
and stage but not in person.
This loss of Miller's support allows the author to make his own judgements
and assess issues that Miller would have preferred to see swept under
the carpet. However it also requires speculations that sometimes irritate.
To an extent, the inability to refer to Miller is overcome by copious
references to his 1987 autobiography, Timebends.
Gottfried's real strength is in analysing Miller's writings, which
he does both succinctly and with real insight. From his early novel,
Focus, through the first six plays Gottfried sets them in context,
briefly précis the subject matter and then runs through the history
of rehearsals and early productions.
The conclusions that he and the reader reach are that despite Miller's
denials, his life and work are inextricably linked and, more controversially,
that each has a drastic effect on the other. As well as undergoing psychoanalysis,
Miller uses his work for a similar purpose. This is particularly noticeable
with regard to his marriages.
His first wife Mary, something of an intellectual, seemingly became
too dowdy and his ultimate break with her is thought through in A
View From the Bridge. This play also addresses his "quasi-marriage"
with his friend and director Elia Kazan that is also a prime source
for Miller's thinly disguised attack on anti-communism, The Crucible.
The pair seems to have been inseparable with Kazan realising Miller's
internal thoughts on stage. There is even a suggestion that Kazan regarded
himself as Miller's co-writer on some of the plays.
The relationship broke down at a seminal moment in both men's lives
when Kazan named names to the House of Representatives' Un-American
Activities Committee, while Miller stood firm and risked prison. It
cannot have been helped by the fact that while Miller was wooing his
second wife, Marilyn Monroe, Kazan was sleeping with her.
Several years of silence between Miller and Kazan were mirrored in
Miller's career. Partly because of his need to nurse Monroe, while Miller
wrote and wrote, he actually achieved very little apart from the film
script for his wife's film, The Misfits. It seems to have taken
a reconciliation with his favourite director to allow After The Fall
to appear.
This piece is arguably the story of his life up to the early 1960s.
As Gottfried puts it, summarising not only this piece but so much of
Miller's work, "this time he was taking to the outer limit his
method of factual research for fictive modeling. Here is his life story,
perhaps more honest than in his autobiography, but set in an artistic
mold and made into a separate drama".
In fact, almost all of Miller's work is packed with references to and
recreations of himself, his family and his friends. It is perhaps sad
that it is one member of that group, the most famous actress of her
time, Marilyn Monroe that everybody wants to know about. This relationship
is treated sympathetically by Gottfried but is a relatively small part
of the life of a great playwright. If anything, it was an interlude
that prevented him from writing and gave him experience less rich for
his material than a brief afternoon spent with a clothing salesman in
his childhood.
That was the original source of his most famous and successful play,
Death Of A Salesman. With this original kernel of knowledge,
Miller then "stole" the lives of his uncle and two cousins
who eventually became Willy Loman, Biff and Happy. There is also surely
something of Miller's own family in this play, as there is in The
Price, as his father was a very successful businessman who lost
everything in the Wall Street crash and was never the same again.
After devoting 400 pages to Miller's first fifty or so years up to
the production of The Price, Gottfried reaches what might be
regarded as the playwright's American wilderness years. The biographer
then abandons his successful formula practically ignoring some plays.
It is almost as if Gottfried has lost heart and energy as it takes under
50 more pages to cover the last 30 years.
In this section, the author tries to identify why Miller's plays began
offending the American press and failing on Broadway, to the extent
that he could hardly get a production of a new play there. This is contrasted
with the success of the same plays in England where there were long
runs in major theatres and awards flooded in.
Gottfried doesn't really come to a satisfactory conclusion of this
conundrum, although his thesis that British audiences are (to paraphrase)
more sophisticated than their American counterparts is interesting.
Similarly, there is a mystery as, at the start of the new Millennium,
the forgotten man suddenly became acknowledged in his native land as
its greatest living playwright.
It is always unfair to quibble over minor errors, but there are a few
and it is amusing to note that director Michael Blakemore changes nationality
in the space of about 75 pages.
While Gottfried might have covered Miller's later years in greater
detail, this is a vastly researched and very entertaining biography.
It is such a good read about a great writer that it is strongly recommended
for the Christmas stocking.
Philip Fisher
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