STUDY - DEATH OF A SALESMAN by ARTHUR MILLER at the Lyric Theatre

'SALESMAN' HAS A BIRTHDAY
- IN ARTHUR MILLER'S OWN WORDS

February 5, 1950

The 'Salesman' Has A Birthday

by Arthur Miller (Author of Death of a Salesman, which celebrates its first anniversary on Friday)

Experience tells me that I will probably know better next year what I feel right now about the first anniversary of Death of a Salesman – it usually takes that long to understand anything. I suppose I ought to try to open some insights into the play. Frankly, however, it comes very fuzzily to mind at this date. I have not sat through it since dress rehearsal and haven’t read it since the proofs went to the publisher. In fact, it may well be that from the moment I read it to my wife and two friends one evening in the country a year ago last fall, the play cut itself off from me in a way that is incomprehensible.

I remember that night clearly, best of all. The feeling of disaster when, glancing up at the audience of three, I saw nothing but glazed looks in their eyes. And at the end, when they said nothing, the script suddenly seemed a record of madness I had passed through, something I ought not admit to at all, let alone read aloud or have produced on stage.

Tears and Laughter

I don’t remember exactly what they said, exactly, excepting that it had taken them deeply. But I can see my wife’s eyes as I read a – to me – hilarious scene, which I prefer not to identify. She was weeping. I confess that I laughed more during the writing of this play than I have ever done, when alone, in my life. I laughed because moment after moment came when I felt I had rapped it right on the head – the non sequitur, the aberrant but meaningful idea racing through Willy’s head, the turns of story that kept surprising me every morning. And most of all the form, for which I have been searching since the beginning of my writing life.

Writing in that was like moving through a corridor in a dream, knowing instinctively that one would find every wriggle of it and, best of all, where the exit lay. There is something like a dream’s quality in my memory of the writing and the day or two that followed its completion.

I remember the rehearsal when we had our first audience. Six or seven friends. The play working itself out under the single bulb overhead. I think that was the first and only time I saw it as others see it. Then it seemed to me that we must be a terribly lonely people, cut off from each other by such massive pretense of self-sufficiency, machined down so fine we hardly touch anymore. We are trying to save ourselves separately, and that is immoral, that is the corrosive among us.

On that afternoon, more than any time before or since, the marvel of the actor was all new to me. How utterly they believed what they were saying to each other!

To watch these fine actors creating their roles is to see revealed the innocence, the naïve imagination of man liberated from the prisons of the past. They were like children wanting to show that they could turn themselves into anybody, thus opening their lives to limitless possibilities.

Kazan’s Technique

And Elia Kazan, with his marvelous wiles, tripping the latches of the secret little doors that lead into the always different personalities of each actor. That is his secret; not merely to know what must be done, but to know the way to implement the doing for actors trained in diametrically opposite schools, or not trained at all. He does not “direct,” he creates a center point, and then goes to each actor and creates the desire to move toward it. And they all meet, but for different reasons, and seem to have arrived there by themselves.

Was there ever a production of so serious a play that was carried through with so much exhilarating laughter? I doubt it. We were always on the way; and I suppose we always knew it.

There are things learned – I think, by many people – from this production. Things which, if applied, can bring much vitality to our theatre.

There is no limit to the expansion of the audience’s imagination so long as the play’s internal logic is kept inviolate. It is not true that conventionalism is demanded. They will move with you anywhere, they will believe right into the moon so long as you believe who tell them this tale. We are at the beginning of many explosions of form. They are waiting for wonders.

A serious theme is entertaining to the extent that it is not trifled with, not cleverly angled, but met in head-on collision. They will not consent to suffer while the creators stand by with tongue in cheek. They have a way of knowing. Nobody can blame them.

And there have been certain disappointments, one above all. I am sorry the self-realization of the older son, Biff, is not a weightier counterbalance to Willy’s disaster in the audience mind.

And certain things more clearly known, or so it seems now. We want to give of ourselves, and yet all we train for is to take, as though nothing less will keep the world at a safe distance. Every day we contradict our will to create, which is to give. The end of man is not security, but without security we are without the elementary condition of humaneness.

In The Future

A time will come when they will look back at us astonished that we saw something holy in the competition for the means of existence. But already we are beginning to ask of the great man, not what has he got, but what has he done for the world. We ought to be struggling for a world in which it will be possible to lay blame. Only then will the great tragedies be written, for where no order is believed in, no order can be breached and thus all disasters of man will strive vainly for moral meaning.

And what have such thoughts to do with this sort of reminiscence? Only that to me the tragedy of Willy Loman is that he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it. It is the tragedy of a man who did believe that he alone was not meeting the qualifications laid down for mankind by those clean-shaven frontiersmen who inhabit the peaks of broadcasting and advertising offices. From those forests of canned goods high up near the sky, he heard the thundering command to succeed as it ricocheted down the newspaper-lined canyons of his city, heard not a human voice, but a wind of a voice to which no human can reply in kind, except to stare into the mirror at a failure.

So what is there to feel on this anniversary? Hope, for I know now that the people want to listen. A little fear that they want to listen so badly. And an old insistence – sometimes difficult to summon, but there none the less – that we will find a way beyond fear of each other, beyond bellicosity, a way into our humanity.