As far as I know, nobody has figured out time. Not chronological time, of course - that's merely what the calendar tells - but real time, the kind that baffles the human mind when it confronts, as mine does now, the apparent number of months, weeks, and years that have elapsed since 1948, when I sat down to write a play about a salesman. I say "apparent" because I cannot find a means of absorbing the idea of half a century rolling away beneath my feet. Half a century is a very long time, yet I must already have been grown up way back then, indeed I must have been a few years past thirty, if my calculations are correct, and this fact I find indigestible.

A few words about the theatrical era that Death of a Salesman emerged from. The only theatre available to a playwright in the late forties was Broadway, the most ruthlessly commercialized theatre in the world, with the off-Broadway evolution still a decade away. That theatre had one single audience, not two or three, as is the case today, catering to very different levels of age, culture, education, and intellectual sophistication. Its critics were more than likely to be ex-sports reporters or general journalists rather than scholars or specialists university-trained in criticism. So a play worked or it didn't, made them laugh or cry or left them bored. (It really isn't all that different today except that the reasoning is perhaps more elevated). That unified audience was the same for musicals, farce, O'Neill's tragedies, or some imported British, French, or Middle European lament. Whatever its limitations, it was an audience that loved theatre, and many of its members thought theatregoing not quite a luxury but an absolute necessity for a civilized life.

For playwriting, what I believe was important about that unified audience was that a writer with ambitions reaching beyond realistic, made-for-entertainment plays could not expect the support of a coterie of like-minded folk who would overlook his artistic lapses so long as his philosophical agenda tended to justify their own. That unified audience had come in from the rain to be entertained, and even instructed, if need be, provided the instruction was entertaining. But the writer had to keep in mind that his proofs, so to speak, had to be accessible both to the lawyers in the audience and to the plumbers, to the doctors and the housewives, to the college students and the kids at the Saturday matinee. One result of this mix was the ideal, if not the frequent fulfillment, of a kind of play that would be complete rather than fragmentary, an emotional rather than an intellectual experience, a play basically of heart with its ulterior moral gesture integrated with action rather than rhetoric.

In fact, it was a Shakespearean ideal, a theatre for anyone with an understanding of English and perhaps some common sense.

Some of the initial readers of the Death of a Salesman script were not at all sure that the audience of 1949 was going to follow its manipulations of time, for one thing. Josh Logan, a leading stage and film director of numerous hits, Mr. Roberts and South Pacific among them, had greeted All My Sons two years earlier with great warmth, and invested a thousand dollars in Salesman, but when he read the script he apologetically withdrew five hundred. No audience, he felt, would follow the story, and no one would ever be sure whether Willy was imagining or really living through one or another scene in the play. Some thirty years later I would hear the same kind of reaction from the theatre people in the Beijing People's Art Theatre, where I had been invited to stage the play, which, in the view of many there, was not a play at all but a poem. It was only when they saw it played that its real dramatic nature came through.

In the 1949 Broadway audience there was more to worry about that their following the story. In one of his letters, O'Neill had referred to that theatre as a "showshop," a crude place where a very uncultivated, materialistic public cut off from its own spirituality gathered for a laugh or a tear. Clifford Odets, with his first successes surely the most hotly acclaimed playwright in Broadway history, would also end in bitter alienation from the whole system of Broadway production. The problem, in a word, was seriousness. There wasn't very much of it in the audience, and it was resented when it threatened to appear on the stage.

So it seemed. But All My Sons had all but convinced me that if one totally integrated a play's conceptual life with its emotional one so that there was no perceptible dividing line between the two, such a play could reach such an audience. In short, the play had to move forward not by following a narrow, discreet line, but as a phalanx, all of its elements moving together simultaneously. There was no model I could adapt for this play, no past history for the kind of work I felt it could become. What I had before me was the way the mind - at least my mind - actually worked. One asks a policeman for directions; as one listens, the hairs sticking out of his nose become important, reminding one of a father, brother, son with the same feature, and one's conflicts with him or one's friendship come to mind, and this all over a period of seconds while objectively taking note of how to get to where one wants to go. Initially based, as I explained in Timebends, my autobiography, on an uncle of mine, Willy rapidly took over my imagination and became something that had never existed before, a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars.

His language and that of the Loman family were liberative from any enslavement to "the way people speak." There are some people who simply don't speak the way people speak. The Lomans, like their models in life, are not content with who and what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated perhaps, closer to power. "I've been remiss," Biff says to Linda about his neglect of his father, and there would be many who seized on this usage as proof of the playwright's tin ear or some inauthenticity in the play. But it is in Biff's mouth precisely because it is indeed an echo, a slightly misunderstood signal from above, from the more serious and cultivated part of society, a signal indicating that he is now to be taken with utmost seriousness, even remorseful of his past neglect. "Be liked and you will never want" is also not quite from Brooklyn, but Willy needs aphoristic authority at this point, and again, there is an echo of a - for want of a better word - Victorian authority to back him up. These folk are the innocent receivers of what they imagine as a more elegant past, a time "finer" than theirs. As Jews light-years away from religion or a community that might have fostered Jewish identity, they exist in a spot that probably most Americans feel they inhabit - on the sidewalk side of the glass looking in at a well-lighted place.

As it turned out, this play seems to have shown that most of the world shares something similar to that condition. Having seen it in five or six countries, and directed it in China and Sweden, neither of whose languages I know, it was both mystifying and gratifying to note that people everywhere react pretty much the same in the same places of the play. When I arrived in China to begin rehearsals the people in the American embassy, with two exceptions, were sure the Chinese were too culturally remote from the play to ever understand it. The American ambassador and the political officer though otherwise, the first because he had been born and raised in China, and the second, I supposed, because it was his job to understand how the Chinese thought about life. And what they were thinking turned out to be more or less what they were thinking in New York or London or Paris, namely that being human - a father, mother, son – is something most of us fail at most of the time, and a little mercy is eminently in order, given the societies we live in, which purport to be stable and sound as mountains when, in fact, they are all trembling in a fast wind, blowing mindlessly around the earth.

 
Copyright © Arthur Miller,1999
Published by Penguin Books
Used with permission