The Slayer of False Values

Miller, ever after, bore the weight of the heightened expectations, and the celebrity, that Salesman imposed on him. He wrote some good plays--The Crucible, a heavy-handed but still potent work in which the Salem witch trials stood in metaphorically for contemporary McCarthyism;The Price, wherein he returned to the world of lower-middle-class lying and striving--but never again a great one. He also, alas, wrote some pretty bad ones, most notably After the Fall, about his disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe, which painted her as a monster, him as her improbably pious victim. He defended himself nobly when the House Un-American Activities Committee came calling in 1956. That made him a hero to the liberal community, and he used that position passionately to defend civil liberties in the U.S. Kazan, who notoriously cooperated with the committee, thought Miller was acting like "a high school boy." Others did not.

As the years wore on, he became something of a paradigm to some of us: the octogenarian still writing, still thinking (and, incidentally, living happily with his 34-year-old girlfriend), still part of our political and moral discourse. And then, Chicago's Goodman Theatre last fall mounted Finishing the Picture. It was the play about Marilyn that almost sweetens the bad taste of After the Fall. She's a silent, drugged-out, usually nude, presence in a drama about getting her sufficiently mobilized to complete a film. Obviously based on the situation surrounding her final appearance, in The Misfits, which Miller wrote for her, it is a dark, sharp comedy about desperate people trying to stay reasonable in the face of unreason. There's another universal metaphor in there somewhere, but Miller didn't ride it hard; he just enjoyed it. It's dismaying that dim reviews derailed the play's trip to Broadway, but it was heartening to see the old man sounding so spry.

Finishing the Picture is not Death of a Salesman. Nothing ever could be. Maybe history will finally judge Arthur Miller a one-masterpiece writer. But so what? Speaking to her sons, Willy Loman's wife cried out, "Attention must be paid." It was. One suspects it always will be.