Death of a Salesman at Fifty: An Interview with Arthur Miller

Death of a Salesman had its first public performance at the Locust Street Theater in Philadelphia. In his autobiography, Timebends, Arthur Miller recalls that directly across the street the Philadelphia Orchestra was performing Beethoven's Seventh Symphony that afternoon, and the play's director, Elia Kazan, thought it might be a good idea to expose Lee J. Cobb, who played Willy Loman, to the majesty and exuberance of the music to inspire him for the ordeal to come:

 
Whatever stirred the spirit in Cobb, he did perform mightily, along with the rest of the cast, and from that night forward audiences and critics have praised the play as precisely that "continuation of a long and undying past" stretching from the Greek theater to the present day.

It is hoped that the aura of Salesman in its 50th year enhances and does not erase the accomplishments of Arthur Miller during the last decade, when new plays and revivals have kept his words before audiences around the world. One thinks of the Roundabout Theater's 1992 revival of The Price, the National Actors Theater's production of The Crucible, the 1994 Olivier Best Play Award for the London production of Broken Glass, and the successful 1996 Nicholas Hytner film version of The Crucible. During the summer of 1997, the Williamstown Theater Festival staged All My Sons (directed by Barry Edelstein) and The Ride Down Mount Morgan (directed by Scott Elliott); shortly thereafter these productions moved to New York City. In October of 1997, the Signature Theatre Company in New York opened its season with The American Clock (directed by James Houghton) and concluded a year of Miller plays with a new work, Mr. Peters' Connections (directed by Garry Hynes). Meanwhile a revival of A View from the Bridge at the Roundabout Theater Company, directed by Michael Mayer, introduced this play to a new generation of viewers. The enthusiasm of these young directors, all in their thirties, contributed, in part, to the success of these productions.

This is only the tip of the iceberg, however. In high schools and colleges, in small towns and large cities all over the world, people are discovering daily the power of Arthur Miller's plays. If Salesman remains the flagship of his great career, a score of other dramatic pieces continue to link "a long and undying past" to the present moment of the contemporary stage.

On September 17, 1997, I interviewed Arthur Miller in his East Side, New York City apartment. The occasion provided the playwright with the opportunity to talk about Death of a Salesman fifty years after its successful Broadway premiere on 10 February 1949. Although the interview focused on Salesman, Miller was free to take the conversation in any direction he felt suitable.

 
kullman: Death of a Salesman will soon be fifty years old. What are your thoughts at this time about your masterpiece?

miller: One thing that strikes me now has occurred to me from time to time. I directed Death of a Salesman in China and I also directed it in Stockholm in Swedish. The reactions of casts and audiences, with a few very small differences, are the same as with other productions around the world. Since Salesman is involved so intimately with American civilization (it seems like the completely American play), how true is it that these cultures are all that different? Some of the etiquette is different. People don't address parents quite the way Americans do, and there is also a question of intimacy. Americans make a play at being very intimate very quickly, which seems disrespectful sometimes to people who aren't used to instant emotional closeness. For example, in China, in the scene where one of the brothers (they're both seemingly asleep), asks the other whether he's sleeping, the Chinese find that very strange. I said, "Why is that strange?" They replied, "It would be impolite to awaken him." Every play shows cultural idiosyncrasies in a foreign production, but I was pleased at how the main thrust of the play becomes very Swedish or very Chinese.

kullman: You describe in Timebends a Chinese man coming up to you and saying, "It's what we all want, the dream, to have it all." Coming from a communist country, doesn't such a comment seem strange?

miller: It makes me wonder every time it opens in another country. How will the play be understood or misunderstood?

kullman: Madrid, not known for its liberal politics, had a very famous production of Salesman, too, didn't it?

miller: They've had several over the years. Whole generations of actors have come and gone, riding on that shoeshine. One question that keeps rising in my mind is what really are the cultural differences among people.

kullman: There's just been an African-American cast of Salesman which performed at New Stage Theater in Jackson, Mississippi. And I know that After the Fall was done with a black actress some time ago in London. Recently, August Wilson and Robert Brustein debated interracial cross-casting of plays. Brustein was in favor and Wilson was very much against having white people play black parts in his plays. How do you feel about all-black productions of Salesman?

miller: The first of those was at least twenty-five years ago in Baltimore.

kullman: Did it work?

miller: Well, it didn't, I didn't think. I went down to see it, but the actors weren't that good. It had nothing to do with race. When the acting is terrific, the whole thing works. But that's true whether they're white or black or Chinese. If you put on a lousy production with white actors, it's lousy. There is a problem, or can be, at this stage of our social evolution, with mixing the casts. It may not be a question of race so much as class. You would rarely find a black man in a high executive position where he was swinging his weight around. There would always be the lingering question of how could this possibly happen? Or, reversing the field, let's suppose you were going to do O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, and you decided you were going to use a white actor in the central role and black actors in other roles, what happens to the play? Wilson has a point. I think he's got an agenda that's political and immoral. But there is a real question about cross-casting. I don't think you can give a blanket answer. I can see where you can play a black Hamlet if he were an original enough actor. James Earl Jones could have done it. I would believe him because his emotional range is so profound. It's hard enough on a white actor. When he's got to overcome the social barriers of color, at the same time, he's got to be almost twice as good doing the role.

kullman: And it seems in August Wilson's plays a lot is directed toward the situation of the African American family in America, so racial appearance and identity become much more important.

miller: It's very tangled. There's no single answer. . . . I guess Salesman's ability to somehow transcend the moment that it was written in has contributed to its long-lasting success, but that's really an enigma to start with. You see, that play was written in 1948, when we were starting the biggest boom in the history of the United States. However, a good part of the population, including me and President Truman, were prepared for another depression. We had only escaped the first depression by the advent of war. It was, I think, a year and a half into the war before we absorbed all the unemployed; therefore, what were all these young guys going to do when they came home? There had to be another crisis. We turned out to be completely cockeyed. The fact of the matter is that the Marshall Plan supplied the cash to Europe to consume everything we could manufacture. The boom began that way. We were the only real money in the world. Every other European currency was weak, worthless in some cases. We were the sole Empire. I don't think any of us had foreseen that. Probably a lot of people had, but I didn't know about it.

Salesman appeared in '49 in a country already starting to prosper, and to take a completely unforeseen path. The psychology of the audience was still that of depression people. The depression had only ended maybe ten years earlier, and people were on very shaky ground for the following ten years because of the war and the uncertainty as to how the country and the economy were going to go. I won't even mention our situation with Russia. The atmosphere was filled with uncertainty at the moment, but a growing prosperity. When considering the income of Willy Loman, we're talking about a world that already was disappearing. Indeed, I can tell you that I myself had difficulty at one point placing this play in its proper time. I kept being surprised by Biff's reference to being at war because it seemed to me later that this play had taken place before the war.

kullman: It is 1942 and then 1928. There is very little about the war in the play; and at this time the war must have been a major force in the lives of everyone.

miller: So it's already suspended in time, a little bit off the earth. It's not a documentary of a period and never tried to be. Consequently, it escaped a period feeling, I suppose, because I keep getting the same astonished report from people that it seems to have been written yesterday.

kullman: This past Sunday [15 September 1997], the New York Times ran an article about four young directors, all in their thirties, who are working with various Arthur Miller plays produced in New York during 1997; and they all explain why your plays work for them, but the article doesn't ask you.

miller: A mystery involved here. As a writer, I've always believed that while my work and I myself are embedded in whatever period I am writing about, clearly I am sensitive to the winds that are blowing in the culture. At the same time, I have always felt that the issue was not to deal with the problem in the abstract, but to deal with the people who are in that problem. The emphasis is on the people. The general problem begins to resolve itself even before the play is finished.

kullman: Many viewers feel that they see something of their fathers as well as some of themselves in the character of Willy Loman. Willy seems to be a universal type, and his fate continues to fascinate us.

miller: Of course, I couldn't be more pleased that the play has endured. I think that if it is easy to understand why a play has endured, it won't endure. If you can explain it in two sentences, then it has the appearance of a rigid formula and falls apart. I think from the outset, from the day I wrote it, certainly from the day it was first performed, its temporal situation was already quite uncertain. It was to me anyway, and I think it was very quickly to a lot of people. The play ran a long time in New York, more than two years. Suddenly it was already 1951; and a whole new rage was blowing in the wind. The anti-communist tempest had begun. You wouldn't be writing such straightforward critical work about America after 1950. Indeed, I don't recall a single play that analyzed American capitalism as severely.

kullman: Even your own?

miller: Well, I did A View from the Bridge, and that had a side to it that was critical, and of course The Crucible was a head-on confrontation but such critiques were diminishing because America, the country, was on the defensive. And part of the defense was aggression. We struck back after being criticized.

kullman: You have a very good relationship with directors and actors, and you are helping the Signature Theater right now with their production of TheAmerican Clock. Did you have any influence on the actors who have played Willy Loman? Lee J. Cobb? George C. Scott? Dustin Hoffman? Any others?

miller: Well, not with George, because he worked completely apart from me and I had no input into that production. I am sorry to say that some of the casting wasn't very good. The Hoffman production I was very intimately involved in, right from the beginning. I thought that the production itself was very strong.

kullman: How bound by the text have various directors been? With Shakespeare's plays so much license is often taken.

miller: They haven't yet taken any license. They're waiting for me to die. As far as I am aware, they have been faithful to the text. Now, there was a film of Salesman made by a very good director Wim Wenders, a Swede. He eliminated the character of Ben, very foolishly; but he also did some other things that had nothing to do with the text. He made it very Swedish. The characters were very lugubrious. And, of course, I regard the play as having a lot of humor, which you couldn't tell from that performance.

kullman: I was surprised to read that when you wrote half of the play that first night you were laughing a lot of the time and speaking out loud to yourself.

miller: So much of what Willy thinks can lead you to laugh.

kullman: And teachers enjoy pointing out the many contradictions in Willy's thinking. Willy says one thing and then ten seconds later he says exactly the opposite. Students find that very amusing, too. It works just as well today as it did then. What about the character of Linda Loman? Today we hear so much about co-dependency, a term that probably wasn't around in 1948. Do you think it applies to her?

miller: Well, yes. It takes two to tango. She regards Willy as being very brittle, very easily destroyed; and she's got to prop him up or he'll collapse. In a way it's like someone who is dealing with a sick person. She's trying to keep bad news away from him lest he be destroyed by it.

kullman: Much is made of a comment he makes earlier that he's going to be a partner at the Wagner company. Then Ben asks him to come to Alaska with him, and Linda reminds him of his future at the company; truth or lie, we're not sure. But she keeps him back, at home. She's afraid to be adventuresome herself.

miller: At all costs she's got to shield him from the truth. She can insinuate the truth sometimes, but not too obviously. When he says, "You're my foundation and my support," that has a double meaning. She's a kind of co-dependent and heroine at the same time.

kullman: How about the boys, Biff and Happy? Robert Anderson says in I NeverSang for My Father something about a relationship not ending in death but continuing on after death in the life of the survivor. Do you think there's a chance that Biff will come to terms with who he is and accept his father for the person he was?

miller: I think so, as long as he is no longer threatened by him. Then he could possibly accept him as he was without accepting his values, seeing him as a tragic character, and a loving one too.

kullman: One of the most powerful scenes in the play is the climactic scene in the restaurant. When Happy denies his father, people in the audience sometimes gasp in horror; is there any kind of explanation for his behavior that makes him less a culprit and more of a victim?

miller: I don't know if you can explain it. He intends to win and be like his father. The same tragedy awaits Happy. It's going to be repeated in him and probably in his children.

kullman: Willy's friend Charley is always there assisting the Lomans in spite of constant rebuffs by Willy. He knows that Willy is resentful and jealous of him. And yet Charley is always there helping. He loves Willy. How can you explain that?

miller: Charley would probably drop him someday. But Willy is exciting. Charley's really very boring. He can sit there quietly for a long time without saying anything, and Willy's mind is always rolling all over the place. And that is a very attractive quality for a man like Charley whose mind goes direct to reality. Willy's personality is a counterpart to Charley's own personality. He often wishes he could be a little like Willy. All those contradictions that he recognizes in Willy—while Charley knows they're destructive and tells Willy, "You'd better grow up"—still there's something lovable in Willy because he is so vulnerable.

kullman: There's that lust for life, the zest, the imagination, the strength of this character that brings life of a strange sort to wherever he is.

miller: He's constantly thinking of the garden, of planting seeds. Of course, Charley admires Linda a lot. Part of his motive is to help her. Charley's simply being the guardian. Nobody in that house, in his opinion, can be depended upon to do anything; and they are relying on him even though they don't say so. Willy admits as much in his soliloquy where he says, "Charley's a man of few words, and people respect him." Charley knows that Willy envies him, and that's an ego pleasure. He knows that, in certain moods, Willy would much rather be Charley than himself.

kullman: The minor characters are important enough that none of them can be left out: Miss Forsythe; Stanley, the bartender-waiter; and Bernard. How do you feel about them today?

miller: They are exactly where they have to be because the story is very strong and they are firmly embedded in the story. What would you do without the waiter? He has more compassion for Willy at that moment than do the two sons. Each part is embedded in the other part. It's one unit, one articulated unit.

kullman: In 1947 Tennessee Williams's AStreetcar Named Desire came out, two years before Salesman. In Timebends you mention that Williams gave you the power to speak. What was your relationship with Williams, and did he influence Death of a Salesman?

miller: Yes. Tennessee's early plays were very realistic plays, very social. They were almost class-conscious plays. Not much is made of this, quite rightly, as they're not too interesting. So he had to struggle to find his own speech, and I had a parallel struggle. Most of the plays I wrote before All My Sons were rather expressionistic. They were not what you would call conventional realism. All My Sons was kind of a sport for me. It was a dollarly attempt to write a play that was acceptable. Both of us were unacceptable to the Broadway producer. The Glass Menagerie was not a conventional Broadway production. It came out of left field. It was unique at that time. The poetry was appealing. Our theater was bound by conventional realism. You could hardly tell who wrote any play. There were various attempts to break out of this situation. Maxwell Anderson tried to write in iambic pentameter and ended up with some museum pieces. Elmer Rice, way back in the early twenties, was writing Mr. Zero, an experimentally expressionistic work. Eugene O'Neill was fiddling with all kinds of forms to break out of the realistic tradition. This struggle, of course, goes back at least a hundred years in Europe—a whole school of them in France especially were writing very pedestrian language. It's the Irish who exploded things with J. M. Synge, who recognized that the main struggle at the turn of the century was to find a way to break the grip of street realism and to reintroduce the imagery of poets. A number of people, myself included, and obviously Tennessee, were struggling with this dilemma of how to hold an audience, to make them feel something with language that was not exactly familiar.

The first achievement of Tennessee's, one which really made a full step forward, was Menagerie rather than Streetcar. Streetcar was flashier, sexier, and more commercially successful because its story was more available to the audience. The fact that he found a unique voice that way was inspiring to me. He was a couple of years older and I felt I could go more in that direction with confidence. I had been fumbling for years to find my voice. I had wanted to write a play without transitions of any kind. There would be the direct thrust of the story from the first minute, each scene would be cut at its earliest moment, and succeeding scenes would begin at the latest possible moment. Salesman was built that way, and it had very little to do with Tennessee. What suddenly was encouraging to me was that nobody else could have written Streetcar. Here was a piece of writing that belonged to that author and not six others. You could hear a poet's voice in the theater again. I appreciated that.

kullman: I know you didn't have a strong relationship with William Inge, but for a while in the fifties the three of you were winning a good share of the theater awards. Did you have much contact with him?

miller: A little bit. He was so depressed as a person that it was very difficult to make any kind of contact with him. I'd see him and chat about this and that, but I got the feeling that he disliked and feared social occasions, at least the times that I met him, maybe four or five times. We never got into anything that was very deep. He just seemed to be fending off contact.

kullman: What about revisions? Tennessee Williams wrote Battle of Angels which became Orpheus Descending which became The Fugitive Kind. For a scholar doing research on Williams, this can be a nightmare. Which text does one use? When you finished Salesman in 1949, did you finish it entirely or were there rewrites?

miller: I made one change, as I recall. It appears in the restaurant scene during the dialogue between Biff and Willy, where Biff is telling some truths, some half-truths, and some outright lies about his adventures in seeing Oliver. The original text was so complicated that finally Arthur Kennedy turned to me and said, "I can't follow it myself." I said, "Just hang in there, do something else." So, I went home and that night I rewrote it. Simplified it.

kullman: How would you advise young playwrights who are trying to write about relationships between people?

miller: Get into another line of work. I don't know if any advice matters. These situations differ. Sometimes it's better for the playwright if he takes good advice, but how do you know what advice is good? Other times, he should stick to his guns. But that's more and more difficult because for the past century the position of the director has come to dominate the theater, whereas before that, at least in most cases, the writer was the dominant figure. It's very tricky. Consider Chekhov; the first performances of The Sea Gull were really quite disastrous. Stanislavsky didn't understand the play; he didn't understand that it was a comedy, an ironical play. And he damned near ruined that play forever. Chekhov could have reacted by trying to fix The Sea Gull to suit Stanislavsky's idea that it was dark, tragic, and so on. The truth is that the characters in that play are based on real people. This play was full of commentary about people alive at that time, and everyone knew who they were. It was, therefore, somewhat ruthless but also an affectionate play, a very brave attempt. I think at the time the convention was win, lose, or draw, the play is a play and it goes on as written. Ibsen made changes occasionally. He changed the ending of A Doll's House in Germany. Nora didn't leave. The Germans wouldn't stand for it. He either did that or he couldn't put the play on. The Germans were his biggest customers. The German theaters were his support. He couldn't live off twelve people coming into the theater in Norway. I don't know that his motives were gross. He was a director too. He started out as a kind of a director.

kullman: Have you ever made such a compromise?

miller: Well, I haven't had to, for one reason or another.

kullman: How would you explain your success with directors?

miller: I don't like to interfere while the director is working with actors. The reason is purely political. I think that actors ought to feel like there is a certainty in one's being directed. I don't want to break up the director's authority. Otherwise the actor will start to look to me. His allegiance will be divided. That's a bad thing to happen.

kullman: What was it like working with Elia Kazan?

miller: He was the best director that we've ever had that I know of. In Salesman and Streetcar, he was able to direct realistic psychology with an unrealistic surface, and that was his greatest strength during that time.

kullman: Is there anything you would like to say about why people should go to the theater today, or anything about politics and drama?

miller: Drama, any theater, is a manifestly, preeminently public art which exists in historical time. It prospers when the evolution of a society has reached a certain point. But we know politics is embedded in every work of significance. I don't understand why people try to separate these two elements. It's all one twine rope. You cannot separate them. I am not a Greek scholar, but I seem to recall that the Greeks referred to people who had no social sense as idiots, meaning the id was dominant in their thinking. That's what the word means. The caring for the fate of man, for the fate of their society, that it not evolve into some evil disorder, is implicit in all their great tragedies, or sometimes explicit. Oedipus is not only about the death of a father and mother. His disaster comes because there is a blight on his city which is killing people. It's not a soap opera about incest; it's a tragedy about the fate of a community. Hamlet is not just the son of a mother who is fooling around with a man who has murdered her husband. He's the prince of Denmark, and when it is said, "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark," it's to direct attention to the fact this country has to be governed. The politics of America is implicit in the whole of Salesman. The Salesman is close to being the universal occupation of contemporary society—not only in America, but everywhere. Everybody is selling and everything is for sale.