The Fiction of Arthur Miller

Novelists enjoy writing plays; that much we know. They assume that the skills they have mastered in the medium of prose narrative will transfer to the congenial forum of the theater. After all, a plot is a plot, a character is a character, a scene is a scene. . . . But the history of this century suggests that there is something absolutely unique about the experience of crafting a great full-length play, and that the talent required to construct a long fiction might actually militate against the capacity to shape a three-hour performance piece that succeeds on stage. The failures of this century's great novelists are legendary: Henry James's Guy Domville, Virginia Woolf's Freshwater, James Joyce's Exiles,F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Vegetable, Ernest Hemingway's The Fifth Column, John Steinbeck's Burning Bright. But what of playwrights' fiction? Chekhov, Pirandello, and Beckett wrote so much of it, and of such high quality, that one wonders finally in which category of authorship to place them. The chief contemporary examples are Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. "His fiction . . . is negligible," writes Martin Seymour-Smith of Williams in Who's Who in Twentieth Century Literature, though the positive reviews and decent sales of his Collected Stories (1985) suggest otherwise. What of Miller's fiction? Of marginal interest even to admirers—no fiction appears in The Portable Arthur Miller, for example—it has been steadily neglected by scholars as well as lay-readers of the playwright's career.

The publication of Homely Girl, A Life, and Other Stories in 1995 provides an occasion to look back on Miller's fiction and make some assessments. The bibliography is a short one. Miller established his literary reputation not with plays, though he had written a fair number of journeyman dramas in the 1930s and early 1940s, but with a novel, Focus, in 1945. Its theme of American anti-Semitism, coming at a time when the nation was prosecuting a war against Nazism, brought it notoriety, translation into several European languages, and a sale to the movies; but Laura Z. Hobson's more commercially crafted Gentleman's Agreement (1946) usurped Miller's claim on the controversial subject of prejudice against Jews. The movie was never made, the book went out of print. Short stories published in journals throughout the 1950s and early 1960s were collected in I Don't Need You Anymore (1967), a volume that received respectful but not enthusiastic notices. Miller chose one of the stories, "The Misfits," as the scenario for a classic film of 1961 and its companion, a book-length prose narrative he described as "neither novel, play, nor screenplay . . . [which] uses the perspectives of the film in order to create a fiction which might have the peculiar immediacy of image and the reflective posssibilities of the written word." Busy with theatrical projects in the following decades, Miller published only one piece of fiction, "Bees," in the Spring 1990 issue of Michigan Quarterly Review, before the appearance of Homely Girl, A Life. And that volume contains only one new story, the title novella, along with two others reprinted from I Don't Need You Anymore.

The fiction of a famous playwright is guaranteed to attract attention but also a certain measure of condescension. The reviews and literary criticism tend to reproduce the literary world's reservations about Miller's plays, his politics, and his private life, in a minor key. How much easier to critique Miller's use of vernacular, or his moralistic vision, or the Freudian dynamics of his dramaturgy, in speaking of the alternative forum provided by his fiction. Critics who see his play All My Sons (1947) as simply an exposé of war profiteering find it easier to dismiss the earlier Focus as a "message novel." Was anything ever written about The Misfits that did not concentrate on Miller's marriage to and divorce from Marilyn Monroe? There is so little fiction, compared to the output of fiction writers (Faulkner, Cheever, Mailer, Oates, et al.) that the whole corpus became vulnerable to the suspicion that each work was undertaken lightly, as a failed theatrical idea. His stories have very rarely been reprinted in anthologies and are virtually unknown even to general readers who pride themselves on keeping current with the modern masters. Clearly it is time for a new reading, not to make exaggerated claims but to give the fiction a fairer hearing, an "audition" in the old sense of focusing our judgments on the quality of a performance irrespective of public fame.

It may be, however, that fame is the best avenue into the subject of Arthur Miller's fiction. I refer specifically to his short story "Fame," first published in 1966 and one of the two stories he has chosen to reprint in Homely Girl, A Life. In this brief, comic narrative a playwright with two hits on Broadway and his face on the cover of Look magazine, drops into a bar down the street from one of his productions and responds with "aristocratic graciousness" to the recognition and praise of the patrons. "This is the greatest country in the world," he thinks, where an obscure fellow like himself can be catapulted into the "secret fate" he had nourished as a beginner. A man of his own age approaches and asks, "Are you Meyer Berkowitz?" He turns out to be an old friend from high school, Bernie Gelfand, who has announced himself for the purpose of bragging about his accomplishment since graduation: he is General Manager of the largest shoulder-pad industry east of the Mississippi. When this puffed-up fellow (his upper body enhanced by shoulder-pads) gets around to inquiring about Berkowitz he is abashed to learn that his old schoolmate has beaten him in the fame game. In fact, Gelfand has seen and admired one of the plays without connecting the author to his former classmate. He flees in a kind of panic, collecting his mink-laden wife on the way out.

More of a sketch than a story, "Fame" succeeds in keeping its main character and its reader equally off balance. On one level Berkowitz wins the contest of champions by chasing away his momentary rival. But in the encounter both men's vanity is mortified: both are revealed as smug and narrow-minded in their amour propre. The art of the story is a dramatic strategy central to Miller's poetics: bring unlike people from different realms together and let them discover who is the stronger, who has superior bragging rights. Because the turf they contest is Broadway, the playwright wins, but at least for a moment in their competitive struggle Gelfand has triumphed, and may do so again if and when he—or his type of moneybags—exerts some kind of influence over Berkowitz's fate, perhaps by grasping control of the theater itself (or City Hall, or the halls of Congress) at some future time when Berkowitz returns to obscurity. The comic premise, then, is shaded by the reader's sense of the fragility of fame as well as its immense clout in our celebrity culture. Fame, Miller writes in his autobiography, Timebends, provokes guilt as a defensive measure. "Guilt is a protective device to conceal one's happiness at surpassing others. . . . It is a kind of payment to them in the form of a pseudo remorse." The dynamics of fame and shame have been much examined in the literature of this century, but rarely in such a highly-condensed and beguiling narrative form.

Two men meet in a significant place to see which is the stronger. Isn't this a familiar scene in Miller's work? Focus begins with the protagonist, a personnel manager named Lawrence Newman, meeting with his boss, Mr. Gargan, who upbraids Newman because he has near-sightedly hired a woman, against company policy, who has the facial features of a Jew.

 
Gargan is the stronger, Newman the weaker, and the invisible Miss Kapp the weakest of all. The scene with Gargan is reminiscent of the one in Death of a Salesman in which Willy Loman pleads with Howard Wagner, the son of his former employer, for his job. Newman, too, loses his job; his new glasses make him look Jewish, though he is in fact gentile, and thus an embarrassment to the giant corporation that employs him. Like Bernie Gelfand and Willy Loman, Newman slinks away from his superior, wondering how in the Darwinian jungle of modern capitalist society he can achieve an identity that restores the sense of rank, of self-worth.

The dynamics of stronger and weaker are learned in the family circle, the primal arena in which each family member aspires to the role that validates his or her desired position. Miller sees clearly that no single role is definitive because the weaker often exerts power over the stronger in the day-to-day activities of a complex family. Who wields the greater power in a parent-child relationship? The parent seems to hold all the highest cards, but in reality—and nobody intuits this more swiftly than the child—the whole point of the family structure is to nurture the child toward self-realization and a happy life in the future. So the child exerts significant control: he or she will be attended to, indulged, often spoiled. He will also be punished with verbal and physical abuse if he falls short of the parents' longing to live vicariously through his success, and his internalization of both nurturing and abuse constitutes the principal crises of his struggle for identity. This is certainly true of the five-year-old in Miller's story, "I Don't Need You Anymore." The family's youngest, he dominates by means of his tantrums, his aggressive remarks (like the title phrase hurled at his mother), and his visionary moments that set him apart from the more practical parents and brother. He has seen God in the waves along the beach. Much of Judaism haunts and terrifies him, and he strikes at his orthodox family, especially his mother and his older brother, as he seeks reconciliation and love from his patient but often exasperated father. Genesis and Freud inform the story, to be sure, but Miller knows enough to keep them at arm's length, partly by adopting the boy's point of view, and partly by selecting a vocabulary of the most exact realism.

Martin is abusive to his family, the opposite of, say, Maisie in Henry James's novel What Maisie Knew, and of the six-year-old protagonist of Henry Roth's novel Call It Sleep, to cite two masterpieces told through a child's consciousness. A child eager to learn and master the mysteries of life, and capable of violence if frustrated in his quest, Martin intuits that grown-ups are his antagonists, though he loves them too, in part because they spoil him as the household favorite. "My life consisted of explosions of desires that could not wait to be satisfied," Miller writes in his autobiography. Miller transacted his own struggles for individuality in "a kind of immanent symbolism of menace. . . a beleaguered zone surrounded by strangers with violent hearts." His strategy, like so many of his characters', was to use his intelligence and talent to master his environment. The eyeglasses that Newman acquires in Focus are a heavy-handed symbol of the intellectual vision requisite to penetrate to the truth of appearances. Newman's neighborhood seems placid enough, but once his neighbors suspect him of being Jewish, the unwanted result of the glasses, he has to focus on his fellow man with a Jew's perspective. Not money, not marital bliss—for his wife takes the side of the bigoted neighbors against his newly-acquired "Jewishness"—but simple justice becomes the prize for unremitting struggle. In Miller's case, the troubled Jewish son grows up to write plays that trouble the conscience of his extended neighborhood, his society. Those alter-egos who seek salvation in money—the father in All My Sons, Willy Loman, Bernie Gelfand—find themselves trumped by the moral authority of their creator.

The love of money is not the sole or even principal evil in Miller's world, even though his characters talk about money all the time. As in the works of his chief early models, Ibsen and Odets in drama and social realists like Sinclair Lewis and James T. Farrell in fiction, the cash nexus is a metonym of the entire network of temptations and desires by which the society sustains itself in the effort to better its condition. Art may (or may not) trump money, but Miller constantly tries to define a way of life that puts both aside in favor of some purer and existential form of self-worth. This is the thematic burden of "Fitter's Night," the other story that Miller has chosen to reprint in Homely Girl, A Life.

In this 48-page story of 1966, Miller tries to lay the ghosts of ambition and fame that motivated, and then exhausted, him in the aftermath of his celebrity years as The Heir of Eugene O'Neill and The Husband of MM. The story is set not on Broadway but in the Brooklyn Naval Shipyard during the last years of World War II. (Miller worked there as a steam fitter in the early 1940s and several elements of the story are based on his experience.) The main character is Tony Calabrese, Shipfitter First Class, whose life has been so empty of significance that he chronically derides himself as a failure, "God's original patsy, Joe Jerk." Hoodwinked into an unhappy marriage by the promise of a fortune that never materialized, he thinks enviously of some famous Italian-Americans—Frank Sinatra, Lucky Luciano—who have achieved satisfactions forever denied to him. The story moves between past and present by means of the narrative "timebends" Miller has favored since the composition of Focus and Death of a Salesman, and finally concentrates upon the ultimate insult to Tony's life, his assignment to do a routine job of repairing the broken depth-charge railing on a destroyer before it joins a convoy the next day. The job seems absurd, unnecessary, "fit for suckers," especially coming on the coldest night of the year.

Everything we know about Tony suggests that he will try to weasel out of doing this job, and justify his laziness by appealing to his low status and his justified resentment with life's humiliations. In fact, he makes an effort to talk the captain into complicity, into postponing the task and doing less than his duty:

 
Once again, two men from different worlds confront each other. Tony's language distinguishes him as lower-class and he invites the stereotype of a shirker or slacker. The commanding officer speaks the kind of correct English that comes from disciplining speech no less than conduct. The contest of wills seeks to locate the stronger, and in this case it turns out to be the captain. Tony goes to work pounding the rail back to its original position.

What follows is a sustained description of perilous labor, for Tony must hang suspended above the frigid ocean, in a driving wind, in order to get a purchase on the bent rail. This is the crucial scene of the narrative, and it is one that cannot be dramatized in the performing arts. Tony's harrowing work must be articulated moment by moment, with an abundance of descriptive detail that makes the reader vicariously undergo the agony of a strenuous unremitting physical ordeal:

 
Hammering the rail into shape is a means of hammering his flaccid selfhood into shape, a Promethean labor that will, many pages later, command the respect of the captain, who will feel momentarily inferior to this common man capable of so much determined and skillful labor. Tony will not die like John Henry with a hammer in his hand, but go home satisfied with having put in one good night at the end of so many futile ones. His reward is the captain's acknowledgment of Tony's manhood: "that lit face hung alone in endless darkness." He returns to his old unsatisfying life, but in the course of the night he has done something faintly heroic, faintly redeeming.

"Fitter's Night" is a revisionist work about World War II, a conflict that Miller treated with some irony in his journalistic book of 1944, Situation Normal. The war, like the Depression it helped bring to an end, figures in Miller's work as an event of immense moral disorder, recapitulated in the private lives of every American citizen. Except in Incident at Vichy and his teleplay, Playing For Time, Miller does not travel abroad to locate the horror of the war, but instead finds tropes in his own milieu, his own nation, to focus the wider conflict in a determinate site. In Focus the predatory world of the early 1940s is crystallized in the figure of the city. That Manhattan and Queens, like Germany, should present a nightmare world of anti-Semitic behavior reinforces Miller's contention in all his work that blame and guilt should not be fixed on individual parties or countries but on social conditions and cultural ideologies that have deformed the whole of humanity.

In Focus Lawrence Newman is presented from the first page as someone "yearning for order," someone fixated on neatness, cleanliness, and efficiency. (His name recalls Christopher Newman, the decorous protagonist of Henry James's The American.) His life has become complicated by the presence on his block of a newsstand operated by a Jew, Finkelstein, whom the bigoted neighbors have vowed to drive away. Newman, too, tries to persuade Finkelstein to pack up, but the contingency of Newman's own physical resemblance to the Hebrew type makes him a victim as well, leading in the final scenes to solidarity with the Jew as both become targets of street violence. Miller has been criticized for the contrivance of making Newman a gentile rather than a Jew, much as Gentleman's Agreement shortly afterward made its gentile journalist masquerade as a Jew, safe from the full effects of prejudice. (The contemporary witticism was that such stories taught readers to be nice to Jews because they might turn out to be Christians after all.) But our own multicultural era might look back on the novel with more respect for the ingenuity of its allegorical construction. Jewish readers will find themselves crossing the ethnic border to identify with Newman because he is persecuted, and gentile readers will have to struggle with the implications and effects of being identified as vicarious Others, not a far-fetched scenario in a culture where prosperous citizens are routinely compelled to assume the guilt of the stronger.

The city is a precise recapitulation in America of the moral universe symbolized by the European conflict:

 
Miller has calibrated his descriptions of Newman's tormentors to fit the iconography of Nazi power. The Catholic priest who whips the citizens into a frenzy of anti-Semitism at a huge rally is meant to recall not only Father Coughlin and his ilk but Hitler himself. The thugs who overturn trash cans on the lawns of Jews and beat them on the streets are reminiscent of the Gestapo, the SS, the "willing executioners" of the German public who vented their fear of difference on the most helpless of their citizenry. The most caustic irony at the heart of this urban fable is that Newman's neighbors keep comforting themselves with the thought that when the American troops return from pounding the Nazis they will aid in the persecution of American Jews.

The city as moral waste land, as a place of intense tribal hatreds and bloody warfare, is a convention in modern American literature, especially during the 1930s when the rise of fascism caused writers like Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here) and Nathanael West (The Day of the Locust) to prophesy a mass upheaval on the model of Germany's. But Miller's fiction is remarkable for locating tropes of mass killing, of annihilation on the largest scale, elsewhere than the city, grounded in the dynamics of capitalist commerce that Miller has deplored since the Depression era. His short story "The Misfits" is no less a revisonist work than "Fitter's Night," but the tone is elegiac, not epic, and though the main characters sweat and prevail in their appointed task they emerge by the end of the fiction not as heroes but as the Joe Jerks of the American frontier experience, soldiers in a corrupt and degrading warfare against the ideal of freedom itself.

The main characters, Gay Langland and Perce Howland, 45 and 22 years old respectively, pride themselves on being "misfits" who stand apart from the constraining domestic and commercial lives of their fellows. In the 1950s there was a widespread anxiety about the transformation of American society into a world of "organization men," of conformist office workers whose individuality was ground down by systems of robotic time-keeping in a corporate world. One result was a mythologizing of the cowboy as exemplar of the free spirit. Miller's story allows its characters to imagine themselves marching to a different drummer. "It's better than wages," is the refrain they use when reassuring each other that their free-ranging life is superior to that of men in gray flannel suits hiving in the city. In fact, the men make a living catching wild mustangs in the mountains of the western states and selling them to industrial producers of dogfood. They are the deluded agents, the shock troops, of commercial forces transforming the living world of nature into a universe of death.

The men are intermittently aware of their sinister role in the degradation of the way of life they embody. They refer to the mustangs as "misfits" just like themselves, and feel genuinely sorrowful at having to capture them. The mustangs have been hunted down for years and now it takes extraordinary efforts to locate and ensnare them. A pilot must fly into the high valleys and stampede the mustangs by shotgun so that the horses run down the mountain into a prehistoric lake bed where Gay and Perce rope and bind them. After their costs are factored they earn perhaps $35 each, hardly enough to sustain them till they move on to the next killing field. As in "Fitter's Night," readers are invited to admire the skill and determination of the laborers, and grant them a certain glamour. The art of the story is in balancing the men's resourcefulness with their murderous task. But the pathos of the horses' captivity, especially a colt's devotion to its doomed mother, alerts the reader to the story's moral argument against a nostalgia for icons of liberty that are so clearly mercenary. Gay and Perce remain cogs in a system of butchery that recalls not just the haphazard violence of warfare but even the Holocaust, as the herds of mustangs face extinction thanks to the irresistible efficiency of their predators.

"Please Don't Kill Anything" is a story with a similar theme. A husband and wife, obviously based on Miller and Marilyn Monroe, are taking a happy walk on the beach when they confront a band of fishermen pulling up nets of fish and dumping them into trucks. The wife feels deeply the pain of this slaughter but is reconciled to it, tentatively, by her husband's explanation that the fish must be sacrificed for the health of humans like themselves. But she is anguished anew when she sees the workers litter the beach with inedible sea robins (flying fish). The ghastly sight of so many creatures left to die revolts her and, it is suggested, endangers her fragile sense of well-being. The husband responds by hurling the sea robins one by one back into the ocean. Like the mustangs, the sea robins are victims of a merchandising process that reduces all living things to consumption items, valued or not for their price in the market. If their mass extinction (for it's clear that teams of fishermen are operating similar nets up and down the coast) recalls wartime atrocities, it also serves as a warning to postwar readers that the conditions of consumer behavior inevitably involve a war against nature in which all of us are implicated.

A final example of this theme is the story "Bees." This is a "story to be spoken," to cite the subtitle, of how a rural householder discovers that the walls of his house are infested with bees and takes steps to exterminate them. Those who have heard Miller read the story in public know that it works perfectly well on the level of stand-up comedy, a "routine" in which the narrator's Sisyphean labors to extinguish the bees draw sympathetic laughter from listeners who have struggled with similar problems in their own domestic spaces. But the story's effectiveness relies, too, on deeper recognitions of the symbolic character of these bees. When the harassed homeowner pumps liquid DDT into the spaces occupied by the bees, and later pries open boards to discover "dead bees eight or ten inches deep," even he concludes, "It was terrible." "Bees" is another fable of the massacre of the innocents belonging to a civilization endowed with technological power (airplanes, winch-operated fishing nets, DDT) suficient to annihilate large categories of living creatures. In Miller's work, then, the allegorical structure of Focus, in which social forces conspire against fellow-citizens marked by difference, yielded to the more effective rhetorical strategy of fabulism. In the stories non-human surrogates for the Jew suffer and die as sacrifices to the machinery of an overwhelming socio-economic system insistent on its comforts, privileges, and hegemonic power.

Miller's willingness, in his fiction as in his plays, to declare No! in thunder links him with the great tradition of authors in American history who protested the depredations of an exploitive power elite, so often framing their dissenting vision by fables like those described above. James Fenimore Cooper's description of the massacre of passenger pigeons in The Pioneers and Melville's depiction of the slaughter of whales in Moby-Dick are canonical nineteenth-century texts in this mode, and modern versions are ubiquitous, for example the fable of mass extermination in James Agee's classic story, "A Mother's Tale," and the bear-hunting in Norman Mailer's Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967, and more likely influenced by The Misfits than by the commonly cited novella of Faulkner, "The Bear"). The fatalistic strain of such fictions reminds us that literary distinction in America frequently rests on the perceived oppositional character of an author's writing. The author achieves eminence by articulating subversive truths that audiences both resist and surrender to as workers in systems they acknowledge to be harmful to public well-being. The superior status of the writer, even or especially when he is marginalized, derives from being a reproachful conscience within a culture busy with getting and spending. The culture's dismissive term for such writers is "moralistic" or "didactic," as opposed to "entertaining." Miller has worn this charge as a badge of honor.

 
An account of thematic concerns in Miller's fiction would be incomplete without some attention to the positivism imbedded in his stories—a positivism that belongs to the ethical claims he has always mounted for dramatic literature. In Timebends he refers to "my conviction that art ought to be of use in changing society," a belief that he rightly links to the Enlightenment assumptions of the 1930s liberal and radical tradition: that reason and socialism, as personal and political principles respectively, would effect a more humane world, a third force beyond the competing ideologies of capitalism and fascism (including the Stalinist form of fascism). Miller's fiction, beginning with a novel he scrapped in order to rewrite the same story as his first Broadway play, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), shows an increasing sophistication about the constituents of a moral document capable of persuading mankind to choose good rather than evil. It may be useful to chart his progress in craft by focusing on the role of women in his fiction. Miller acknowledges in Timebends that he specialized in "father-son and brother-brother conflicts." In creating an imaginative world so heavily dominated by masculine figures he raises the question of how valid any solution can be in which women are not significant sharers of the revelations and consequences of the mise-en-scène.

Focus offers the most programmatic case in which the main character's evolution of consciousness proceeds by denying the claims of women upon his achievement of superior moral status. In the early portion of the novel Newman fantasizes some perfect woman to share his life in a Romantic dream of ideal union. Yet the woman he chooses to court and marry, Gertrude, is attractive to him in part because she shares his loathing of Jews and his desire to conform to the anti-Semitic neighborhood that plots against the lone Jew at the end of the block, Finkelstein. Constantly Gertrude pleads with Newman to strike out at Finkelstein and make peace with the Jew's tormentors. She serves as a kind of Jungian shadow, a malignant anima who seeks to put Newman on the road to success and riches (significantly, imagined as a Hollywood career). Newman's disabled mother offers him no guidance; in her few appearances she stays glued to the radio. Newman's breakthrough into a redeemed life, as a New-Man of the American era that will succeed the era of fascism, comes when he rejects his wife and takes up arms with Finkelstein against their mutual enemy, battling the local thugs in the street with baseball bats and declaring that they will not be moved from their homes by threats or violence.

The earliest of Miller's short stories, "Monte Sant' Angelo," published in 1951, belongs to the male-bonding tradition of his work of the 1940s. Two friends, one Jewish-American and the other Italian-American, visit an Italian town in search of Vinny's family origins. (Timebends provides the autobiographical matrix for this narrative.) Bernstein is delighted that his friend makes contact with some distant relatives but feels bereft of a personal heritage. A visit to Vinny's aged aunt, an inarticulate, lonely, and altogether scary figure, arouses in Bernstein a deeper longing for some connection to his own people, a longing that is satisfied when he recognizes in the ritual gesture of a male citizen of the town some Jewish habits from his own American elders, and concludes that this man, who knows nothing of Judaism, is a revenant from the past, a mediator of the ancient and modern practices of an identity-bearing system of belief he shares with the old man no less than Vinny shares his name and history with ancestors memorialized in the churches of Monte Sant' Angelo.

Looked at from this angle of regard, Miller's imagination of a social world inhabited importantly by women as well as men seems to take shape with "The Misfits" and its later change of form into The Misfits, film and novel both. The short story of 1957, as already noted, dramatizes the conventional frontier bonding of male buddies, doomed no less than the wild mustangs hunted to extinction. Gay and Perce think occasionally of Roslyn back in the frontier town, an Eastern schoolteacher with whom Gay lives in a quasi-domestic arrangement. Roslyn disapproves of their occupation and as they rope the horses for slaughter they hear her reproachful voice in their heads. "Roslyn's going to feel sorry for the colt," Gay says to Perce, "so might as well not mention it." Like the compassionate wife of "Please Don't Kill Anything," Roslyn exerts a counter-force in the story against the brute masculine ethic of domination over nature. She is the opposite of Gertrude in Focus, who sides with the powerful against the weak. In Timebends Miller defines stupidity as "the want of empathic power." Gay and Perce are not stupid, but they are inferior in moral intelligence to the offstage Roslyn.

The novel that Miller made of this short story, like the film of which it is a virtual transcript, features as its most significant change the foregrounding of Roslyn as a major character. The inspiration (or exigency) driving this change is clearly the entrance of Marilyn Monroe into the (re)production process, providing box-office dynamite for what would otherwise be an all-too-straightforward film narrative of futility and defeat. Monroe entered and captured the story because she had first entered Miller's life, so that the film achieved a parabolic status from the first day it was announced. And with Monroe's screen persona comes a radical shift in the nature of Roslyn's character. In the short story we are led to believe that she is one of those "college graduate divorced women" from the East who rebound into Gay's arms after shedding their unsatisfactory mates Nevada style. In the long version Roslyn becomes an "interpretive" dancer who has dwindled to performing in dance halls, and has found even shadier ways of supporting herself. By making her less intellectual and more of a class match for Gay, Miller guarantees that their relationship will not be an uneven struggle in which each partner exerts a formulaic exploitive power over the other (her snob condescension, his sexual allure, the obverse of what the union of Monroe and Miller represented to the general public). What does not change from story to film/novel is the deeper sensitivity that Roslyn displays about the fate of the hunted mustangs, and more generally her refusal to have love on terms degraded by her partner's habit of violence against living things.

The story begins in Reno, "Divorce Capital of the World" (a billboard informs us), no less Babylon than the New York of Focus, though here the moral disorder seems more appealing. Displaced people gamble and sin, hucksters ply their trades, and in venues thematically related to Reno, such as the rodeo town, a kind of barbaric "lewdness" erupts constantly into view. An older woman, Isabelle (Thelma Ritter in the film), has befriended the insecure Roslyn, a high school dropout whom Isabelle compares to a little child and chaperones a short distance till Gay assumes the commanding role. Isabelle has a toughmindedness that recalls Miller's description of his mother in Timebends; in a minor mode she anticipates the heroine of "Homely Girl, A Life." Roslyn is all heart and no brain; she drinks "To Life—whatever that is" and Gay remarks to her, "I think that you're the saddest girl I ever met." But she does love life, and Guido, the least sympathetic of the characters, tells her "You have the gift of life." She wants to keep Gay from killing the rabbits desolating his lettuce garden; she loves the birds; she complains about the bucking strap on the rodeo horses. She is, in fact, a rather obvious trope for Nature itself, an Earth Mother who in one scene embraces a tree in a wild dance. "Honey, when you smile it's like the sun coming up," Gay tells her.

As a figure for the life force she contains immense power to change other people by withholding sanction for their ruthless behavior, but she too must undergo change as a human being in a social community far from utopia. She must, for one thing, escape her rote sentiments about the holiness of life and understand Gay's need to capture the wild mustangs in ritual acts of violence. She must acquire a masculine vision of experience if she expects Gay to move a commensurate distance toward her nurturing piety toward nature. The captured colt is the critical figure in the evolving narrative that brings Gay and Roslyn together. The colt represents the child potentially possible between them, their future as a contracted couple. If Gay sacrifices it for the few dollars it would bring in meat (and the colt's mother another thirty dollars or so), he will forfeit the joyful life they might have together beyond the reach of a rapacious commercial system both he and Roslyn despise. The immense pathos of the short story, in which he does, unhappily, accede to financial necessity and his outworn code of honor, yields in the longer version to a happy ending in which he permits Roslyn and Perce to let the mustangs go, except for a stallion which he wrestles into submission and then frees to show that he is still in control. At the end of the novel she mentions the child she believes they can conceive (a line deleted from the film version), and Gay remarks in the last scene, "I bless you, girl."

That the novel is a romance, a fairy tale in the form of a realistic narrative about modern people on the frontier, is more apparent to us when we read it through the retrospective lens of the Miller-Monroe marriage and through Miller's highly unromantic autobiographical play, After the Fall (1964). Yet the figure of Roslyn is clearly readable in the vulnerable Maggie of that play; Maggie calls herself "a joke that brings in money" and yet her intellectual husband admires her giving nature. "You're all love, aren't you," he asks, and she answers, "That's all I am." The point is not whether this is an identity satisfying to our current standards—obviously it doesn't satisfy Miller either—but that in rendering such a character's needs and demands in a complex dramatic structure Miller is able to imagine a figure of believable intensity and mythic resonance.

The Misfits is not sentimental about Roslyn; for one thing, she is too sentimental herself to attract the reader's wholehearted sympathy. One gets tired of her fixed angelic nature, what Miller in Timebends (speaking of Marilyn) calls "a purely donative femininity," and also of the constant kvetching and sniffling and sobbing she carries on throughout the second half of the book. But the reader is snapped back to respect for her powerful feelings of tenderness when she lashes out at Guido, the veteran pilot, constantly evoking the memory of his dead wife as he propositions Roslyn, bargaining with her to save the mustangs if she'll shack up with him:

 
In speeches like this we hear the proleptic voice of the counter-culture in America preparing its critique of the one-dimensional men who prosecuted the Vietnam War later in the 1960s. Roslyn emerges at the end of this narrative as the idealized figure of resistance to the American leaders who justified the slaughter of millions of Asians by turning them into nothing but data. And in summoning the nuclear holocaust, Miller takes aim at the ultimate culmination of the genocidal impulse dramatized in hisfabulist fictions. That Roslyn can embody such a range of moral imperatives—not, admittedly, without straining dramatic credi bility—speaks well for the relevance of The Misfits in a feminist era.

Two later stories develop the theme of female empowerment initiated by The Misfits. "The Prophecy," published in 1961, is Miller's earnest effort to enter fully into the consciousness and assess the fate of a female character for the first time. Indeed, it dramatizes the struggle of wills among a group of female characters. The story begins as if it will be an appreciative study of a famous architect, Stowey Rummel, but he is quickly banished from the narrative and the focus turns to his wife, Cleota, and a house party she mounts in her well-appointed country home. Cleota possesses a determined, even rigid demeanor; she looks on most of her invitees with disdain, especially her husband's sister Alice and a fortune teller who later in the story prophesies that Alice will outlive her brother. Cleota also learns that her longtime friend Lucretia has just been abandoned by her husband. The emotional turmoil of these messy lives, in addition to a quantity of alcohol, stirs up Cleota and she makes an impulsive pass at another guest, Joseph, who fends her off. The next day Stowey returns and the couple resumes their married life, more satisfying, perhaps, for Cleota's momentary breakout from the puritanical habits that have brought her a measure of despair.

Plot summaries rarely do justice to complex fiction, and this story, especially, uses a melodramatic structure to generate a considerable number of ideas about love relationships—ideas presented as such in the midst of conversation among intellectuals, or through the consciousness of the characters, the fiction writer Joseph preeminently. Of central importance to our purpose, the story elevates Cleota above the welter of mere ideas (some of them on the futility of thinking when intuitive action is called for), and concludes with her in a state of near ecstasy, "cherishing a rapture, the clear heart of those whose doors are made to hold against the winds of the world." The prophecy proves false, Stowey survives the somewhat mean-spirited Alice, and embraces Cleota in front of the abashed Joseph, as if to make the point that the solidarity of a romantic couple is invulnerable, like a well-designed house. Cleota has not been struck by the lightning of an angry god, but rewarded for making her way through thickets of anxiety (especially about aging), jealousy, and vindictive lust, as well as the arid analytical debates common to her class of sophisticates, to an achieved life; she has conquered the shadow in herself, as Newman did in Focus when he matured beyond the infernal temptations offered by his neighbors.

"The Prophecy" is written with an uncertainty and turgidity that critics might point to as a validation of their suspicion about genre-leaping in the verbal arts. It is not quite a "playwright's story," in the sense that it does not resolve its key conflicts through dialogue, but it represents a falling-off in quality from Miller's earlier stories, for all its evocative writing. The same cannot be said for Miller's most recent work, "Homely Girl: A Life," which takes up where first-rate stories like "The Misfits" and "Fitter's Night" left off. In limpid prose and a fluency of dramatic scenes reminiscent of Miller's tableau play The American Clock and his autobiography, this chronicle of a woman's life from childhood to old age is unique in Miller's fiction, a full-throated endorsement of the female will to forge a happy life from unpromising circumstances. Janice Sessions is not a cardboard heroine rising miraculously from harsh adversity into one of those successful roles Miller has critiqued throughout his career; she is unusual enough, in appearance and personality, to construct a private life secure against the overwhelming desires of others, even those who mean her well. Like Cleota, she cherishes the rapture of self-creation, of autonomous and gratifying existence, and by so doing she becomes a model for women, and men, suffering from timidity and arrogance alike.

The biographical structure of "Homely Girl" recalls the autobiographical structure of Timebends, and throughout this novella we sense that Miller is working out once again some of the profound lessons of his own life. Janice's homeliness is something of a metaphor driving the narrative forward. Miller has described himself in Timebends as "gangling and unhandsome" to make the point that he was never in danger of succumbing to the fatality of beauty, the easy and treacherous path to the future laid out for the picture-perfect faces of a exhibitionistic culture. He would achieve by pulling down one form of vanity in favor of the admiration derived from intellectual and physical labor. In political terms he would work relentlessly to improve the happiness and prosperity of mankind by promoting first radical, then liberal causes. It would have been a simple matter to send Janice down the same road. Author and character both begin their adult life in the Depression, and the facts of economic life exert enormous pressure on Janice's leap into maturity:

 
Janice's guilt comes from wanting to enjoy the present, not sacrifice pleasure for an uncertain future. She is one of those legion of characters in modern fiction trying to awaken from an oppressive history. But Miller does not let such desires reach an easy fulfillment. "A character is defined by the kinds of challenge he cannot walk away from," he writes in Timebends. "And by those he has walked away from that cause him remorse."

In this sense, too, Janice is "homely"—she does not think in internationalist terms, her home is not the future but the domestic present where the dominant fact of her consciousness is that she is living a secondhand life in service to husband and Party. During the war she commits an adultery that helps to liberate her from an unsatisfying marriage. She then has an affair with an art history professor, and seems fated to do nothing in life but put her body in service to available males as a way of making a point about her bleak freedom to do so. But Miller would be incapable of an allegory quite that rigid. Janice meets a blind man who works as a recording technician for Decca Records. Their fourteen years of wedded bliss is the only period of genuine happiness in her life. This blindness contrasts interestingly to the near-sightedness of Newman in Focus. When Newman obtains the means to see more sharply he achieves the insight to understand how his former anti-Semitism had poisoned his life and that of his culture. Charles's inability to see (and thus impose value on) Janice's homeliness permits both of them the more profound pleasures of personal intimacy apart from the harsh world— the pleasures of sexuality, of music, of compassionate understanding. Though she volunteers some time after his death to the civil rights movement, the core of her life is composed of the union created by this romantic couple.

"The key to the present is always pleasure," Janice thinks at one point, and then rebukes herself as a fraud for such a superficial philosophy. The story is artfully posed between life options that carry highly determinate values: Sam's devotion to the Communist Party, Janice's brother's greedy Capitalism, the hedonism of her lovers, and finally Charles's soulful devotion to the art of music. Janice acquires traits from all these men, inflected toward the future by being "conspiratorially linked" to her father's "arrogant style" in which "guts" not piety forms the self. The absence of strong female characters besides Janice guarantees the story a suspicious reading by feminist critics. If Miller has imbued and ennobled Janice with his own drive, he has withheld from her the saving grace of extraordinary talent, making her dependent on masculine influences to an extent unwarranted by the conditions of postwar society. Nevertheless, her liberation from the controlling forces that threaten to deform her prematurely stands as an affirmation on Miller's part that authentic happiness does come to those who actively quest for it, no matter what the social circumstances. In the last paragraph of the story an aged Janet stands in the city watching a teenage drug dealer drive by in his BMW, rap music blaring, but finds herself immune from the despair threatened by such moral disorder, "filling with wonder at her fortune at having lived into beauty."

 
In his introduction to I Don't Love You Anymore, Miller writes that he is attracted to the story form because "from time to time there is an urge not to speed up and condense events and character development, which is what one does in a play, but to hold them frozen and to see things isolated in stillness." His choice of terms reveals that he seeks in fiction writing an escape from the highly-wrought intensity that audiences demand in a live-action performance. His stories are quieter, more meditative, more attuned to nuances of consciousness than to the oral rhythms of excited speech; they lack the extremity of feeling that draws his theatrical characters into such fireworks of verbal argument and abuse. Missing in the stories, too, is the intensity of dreaming and longing, and of savage remorse and atavistic hatreds, we associate with the dramaturgy of the stage. Miller's "secret fate" was to be a playwright, no doubt about it. But the fiction does regard the same world, as Miller claims in the Introduction, from a different distance. The chronicle or case study of Focus or "Homely Girl, A Life" lays before us the customarily unapprehended textures of an actual life in more detail than a three-act play can comfortably incorporate. The shorter stories, at their best, give us an extended vision into landscapes and lifestyles belonging not only to the familiar universe Miller has half-created these last sixty years but to the modern scene represented by his most talented peers. This neglected corpus of a major writer will not disappoint those readers whose literary taste has been formed and replenished by Death of a Salesman, A View from the Bridge,and The Crucible.