Arthur Miller's conscience.(Notes & comments: March 2005)(Obituary)

What an outpouring of pious liberal sentimentality greeted the death of the playwright and left-wing icon Arthur Miller, aged 89, last month! The Washington Post teared up about the "shatteringly human frailty in his plays" The Chicago Tribune mourned "the preeminent social conscience of the world stage," Harold Pinter (who will get a similar send-off when the time comes) said his pal was "a landmark," and The Guardian told us that the "international theatre community ... had somehow assumed that the creator of an American archetype in Willy Loman ... would live and write forever." Prensa Latina, dateline Havana, fondly recalled Miller's visit to Cuba in 2000, and extolled "an undisputed man of conscience" who "bashed the intolerance that spread in the U.S. during the Cold War, for fear that socialism overtook the world." The New York Times really went to town with a front-page valentine that went on to occupy an additional two pages inside the paper. "Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays," swooned our Paper of Record, "and in them often reflected or reinterpreted the stormy and very public elements of his own life--including a brief and rocky marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his staunch refusal to cooperate with the red-baiting House Un-American Activities Committee." You have to say this for the Times: it pushed all the buttons: Arthur Miller, Genius Playwright; Arthur Miller, Social Celebrity; Arthur Miller, Moral Paragon and Darling of the Left Establishment.

We wouldn't for a moment dispute Arthur Miller's high standing as a celebrity. In that, at least, he really was distinguished. As a playwright, however, he looks smaller and smaller. The folks at Powerline.com got it exactly right when they asked whether Miller "ever wrote anything worth seeing or reading after the play that kicked off his career in 1949, Death of a Salesman." And even that period-piece melodrama is hard for anyone who has graduated from adolescence to take seriously.

Death of a Salesman instantly established Miller's literary reputation. The Crucible (1953), his Salem-witch-trial allegory about HUAC, secured his political bona tides on the Left. It wasn't until the summer of 2000, in an article for The Guardian, that Miller publicly spelled out the connection between his woodenly didactic allegory and what he called the "calamity" of "anti-communist rage" in the late 1940S and early 1950S. Although Miller acknowledged that ...