FOR most of his
life, Arthur Miller was a carpenter. At 14, with the money made from delivering
bagels on his bike round Harlem, he bought enough wood to build a back porch
on the family house. In his old age, living on 360 acres in Connecticut, he
made tables, chairs, a bed, a cabinet. To make extra-sure the angles were
right, he once consulted a mathematician. He loved making plays—which
he did better than any other American of the 20th century, with the possible
exception only of Tennessee Williams—for much the same reason. They
gave him “an architectural pleasure”.He tried novels occasionally
and wrote, in “Timebends” in 1987, a chaotic autobiography. But
he revelled in the structure of the drama. He thought of Ibsen and Sophocles,
his early influences, as master-carpenters, and of his own best plays as careful
constructions of “hard actions, facts, the geometry of relationships”.
It was no accident that his male characters were often skilful with their
hands, even if they were good at little else. Yet Mr Miller's plays were not
conceived as simple artefacts. He meant them to move minds. If they could
not do so, there was no point in writing them. In “Death of a Salesman”
(1949), the play that brought him global fame, he displayed
in Willy Loman the futility of a salesman's life, the fragility of his dreams,
his longing to leave a lasting mark on the world. In “A View from the
Bridge” (1955) he anatomised, in Eddie Carbone, the unacknowledged terrors
of incestuous passion. In several plays, the last written only a year before
his death, he tried to unravel his own relationship with Marilyn Monroe, his
wife for almost five years. She remained surrounded, however, by “a
darkness that perplexed me”. Throughout his work, his message was consistent.
Actions had consequences, and the individual was responsible not only for
his own acts, but for what he knew others were doing. In “All My Sons”
(1947), his clearest statement of this philosophy, a father had secured the
future of his family by shipping defective aircraft parts that had caused
pilots to die; eventually, his own son reported him. There were moments, Mr
Miller wrote, “when an individual conscience was all that could keep
a world from falling.” On the other hand, his characters were seldom
that strong. Outside forces—destiny, law, political authority, sudden
catastrophe—often overwhelmed them. As a child during the Depression,
he had seen his father's coat-making business destroyed and his mother, whom
he remembered in fox-fur and diamonds, reduced to eking out shovelfuls
of coal. His father and his colleagues, he noticed, never blamed anyone but
themselves for what had happened. Mr Miller, already imbued with his lifelong
socialism, tried to persuade his shellshocked father to blame the capitalist
system too, and accept that profit was wrong. His father, naturally, could
not begin to understand him. His career was not all adulation. He had a dry
patch in the 1960s, when he felt he did not speak with the accent of the time,
and by the 1980s the all-powerful New York critics (whom he loathed) seemed
to be tired of him. Constantly, critics objected to his blatant stage moralising:
“like neon signs”, one wrote, “in a diner window.”
Mr Miller was unapologetic. He had a purpose, he confessed, even beyond teaching.
Though he seemed to be didactic, he was in fact asking questions: “How
can we be useful?” “Why do we live?” He was, he once admitted,
“in love with wonder...the wonder of how things and people got to be
what they are.” The aim of each of his plays was to discover which commitment
or challenge his main character would accept, and which he would walk away
from: “that moment when out of a sky full of stars he fixes on one star.”
He remembered his own such moment, when he decided to be a writer. It came
when, reading Dostoevsky's “The Brothers Karamazov” as a teenager,
he discovered that among the most breathtaking passages were accumulations
of hard, simple fact: “the kind of bark on the moonlit trees, the way
a window is hinged”. As well as the playwright, it was the carpenter
speaking.