“Riding on a Smile and a
Shoeshine”
by Thomas Canfield
In the decade after
World War II, Arthur Miller transformed American theatre with such powerful
plays as All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), and A View from the Bridge (1955). The same
year that Death of a Salesman–widely regarded
as Miller’s masterpiece–premiered on Broadway, it was recognized with a Tony Award
for Best Play, a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, and a Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The
play’s initial run of 742 performances illustrates the tremendous response it
received from audiences of the day; the fact that it has been revived four
times on Broadway, earning three Tony Awards for Best Revival, is a testament
to the play’s endurance. In the 21st century, Death of a Salesman continues to speak to audiences that, like
those in the late 1940s, are still searching to achieve the elusive “American
Dream.”
The son of
Polish-Jewish immigrants, Arthur Miller (1915-2005) was born into comfortable
circumstances in the Harlem section of Manhattan. However, the failure of his
father’s coat manufacturing business in the 1929 Wall Street Crash had a profound
impact on the young man. In 1932, as an aspiring, seventeen-year-old writer, Miller
penned “In Memoriam,” a brief memoir about a salesman named Schoenzeit who worked
for his father. In it, Miller recalls
an experience one morning when he carried Schoenzeit’s coat samples across town.
“His was a salesman’s profession,” Miller writes, “if one may describe such
dignified slavery as a profession, and though he tried to interest himself in
his work he never became entirely molded into the pot of that business.” Their
brief, yet intense encounter led Miller to conclude that Schoenzeit, “felt as
if his life were ended, that he was merely being pushed by outside forces. And
though his body went on as before, the soul inside had crumpled and broken
beyond repair.” On the day following their encounter, Schoenzeit committed
suicide by throwing himself in front of an elevated railway train.
Miller and the
Transformation of Tragedy
Death of a Salesman distinguishes itself as a tragedy about a
common man. Miller experimented with the form of classical tragedy, but with a
critical difference. In his essay “Tragedy and the Common Man” (1949), Miller argued
against the Aristotelian principle that that tragedy is “fit only for the very
highly placed, the kings or the kingly” by positing that “the common man is as
apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense.” Contrary to classical dramatic
tradition, Miller believed that any character willing to make the ultimate
sacrifice in order to achieve a sense of personal dignity and justice is a suitable
subject for tragedy; thus, the “commonest of men may take on that stature to
the extent of his willingness to throw all he has into the contest, the battle
to secure his rightful place in the world.” Although the privileged person is
the chosen subject of tragedy throughout history, Miller instead argued that it
is actually the common man who is most familiar with the fear of being
displaced, or of suffering the destruction of the fragile image of what and whom
he is. The ultimate fate of Willy Loman (“Low-Man”), the tragic hero in Death of a Salesman, arouses just as
much emotion in contemporary audiences as the noble Oedipus, for example, precisely
because the illusions, anguish, failures, and tense family relationships surrounding
a 63-year-old salesman from Brooklyn are more recognizable and keenly felt. Since
the average person can identify with Willy Loman, we are moved by his tragic
fate with an intensity that is equal to–perhaps even greater than–that evoked by
the downfalls of kings or princes.
The contemporary
post-war setting of Death of a Salesman
gives the tragedy much of its poignancy. However, in many ways it is also an
expressionist play in which the physical landscape of the stage reflects
Willy’s inner psychological turmoil and sense of societal displacement. Miller’s
original title for the play was The
Inside of His Head, and his initial concept for the stage setting was an
enormous face that would appear and then open to reveal the interior of a man’s
head. The ultimate set design created by Jo Mielziner for the first production was
quite different, but it still reflected the central character’s psyche: the set
included a “small, fragile-seeming home” that was “partially transparent,” dreamlike,
and surrounded by “towering, angular shapes” of apartment buildings enveloping it
on all sides. As a tangible, outward symbol of the American Dream, this house
represents Willy’s life: his sales career, his hard work, his devotion to his
family, and his hopes. When the play opens, his burden of paying off a 20-year
mortgage on the house is almost at an end, but inexorable changes in the outer
world have encroached upon and overshadowed this once-optimistic dream, suffocating
and devaluing it. “The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows
and bricks,” Willy says, “There’s not a breath of fresh air in the
neighborhood. The grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the
back yard.”
The passage of time in
the play is another remarkable way that Miller combines classical and
expressionistic elements. In chronological time, the plot, from beginning to
end, dramatizes events that occur in a clearly identifiable time frame: Miller
termed this as Willy’s “last day on the earth.” In making this dramatic choice,
he adheres to the Aristotelian unity of 24 hours, a common feature of traditional
Greek tragedy. Yet throughout the play, Miller experiments with what he called
the “bending of time” as well. Through the magic of theatre we are transported,
via Willy’s recollections, to 15 years earlier when two magnificent elm trees towered
outside the Loman house, and lilac, wisteria, peonies, and daffodils bloomed in
the sun. The play reaches into the interior of Willy’s fragmented, non-linear
psychology and mental confusion to reconstruct these memories, which Miller
described as “a mass of tangled roots without end or beginning.” As to the way these memories play out on the
stage, Miller insisted that, “There are no flashbacks in this play, but only a
mobile concurrency of past and present, and this, again, because in his
desperation to justify his life, Willy Loman has destroyed the boundaries
between past and present.” Death of a
Salesman’s often-overlooked subtitle, Certain
Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem, underscores the way that
Willy’s mind, in a desperate and futile effort to comprehend how his past has
led to his present circumstances, revisits, relives, and even reimagines events
and people from his past, seemingly without a conscious choice. These moments in time also give us the
opportunity to reconstruct a series of events, from Willy’s perspective, that culminate
in the play’s tragic conclusion.
Miller as Social Critic
In addition to Miller’s transformation of our understanding of tragic
form, he also calls into question the central tenets of an idealized American
dream and the self-made man. The golden ideal of unlimited opportunity and financial
success, rooted in the archetypical rags to riches Horatio Alger story, is inextricably
linked to the American dream of upward mobility. As Americans, we learn early on that adhering
to the Puritan work ethic is the means of achieving any goal we desire and the
ultimate means to happiness. Miller wrote: “The American idea is different in
the sense that we think that if we could only touch it, and live by it, there’s
a natural order in favor of us.” Because
we often derive our individual identity and personal dignity from the work we
do, our inherent sense of self-worth is frequently linked to our professional success
and financial security. Conversely, those who are unsuccessful can easily fall
prey to “the law which says that a failure in society and in business has no
right to live,” as Miller termed it. When we no longer have an occupation with
which to identify ourselves, we are completely lost, which is why Miller
defined tragedy as “the consequence of man’s total compulsion to evaluate
himself justly.” In his autobiography,
Miller characterized the misguided notion of basing one’s personal worth on financial
success, as embodied in Willy Loman, as a “pseudo life that thought to touch
the clouds by standing on top of a refrigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at
the moon, victorious at last.”
Even though Willy’s profession is integral to his identity, we never
learn precisely what he sells in the play. When asked, Miller only replied that
Willy was selling “Himself.” In the end, believing that the life he has lived and
all that he has placed his faith in are hollow, Willy does sell himself, which
he views as his last asset–for a $20,000 life insurance policy. “After all the highways, and the trains, and
the appointments, and the years, you end up worth more dead than alive,” he
says. His false belief that life is a popularity contest along the road to
professional success and personal happiness are the causes of his downfall.
Being “well liked” is Willy’s lifelong obsession, but only five mourners attend
his funeral.
Audience response to the initial production of the play, starring Lee
J. Cobb, showed how groundbreaking and powerful it truly was. Miller recalled
that, during some performances, “there was no applause at the final curtain,”
and “Strange things began to go on in the audience. With the curtain down, some
people stood to put their coats on and then sat again.” Theatre critic Richard
Watts noticed that male audience members were impacted most profoundly by
Willy’s story: “Usually with a tragedy . . . the wives drag their protesting
husbands along and the husbands have an awful time and the wives cry. But I saw
again and again that it would be the husband who would be moved by Death of a Salesman. He would see
something of himself in it.” “Some, especially men, were bent forward covering
their faces, and others were openly weeping,” recalled Miller, “People crossed
the theatre to stand quietly talking with one another. It seemed forever before
someone remembered to applaud, and then there was no end of it.” The most concise
reaction was expressed by one man, obviously a salesman; on leaving the
theatre, he remarked, “I always said that New England territory was no damned
good.”
Thomas Canfield (Program Essayist) holds a Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in Elizabethan drama, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and is pursuing a second master’s degree in Theatre History and Dramaturgy at UMKC. In the past, he has contributed to Rep productions of King Lear, Gee’s Bend, and The Drawer Boy. At UMKC Theatre, he has provided dramaturgy for The Country Wife, Great Expectations, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For the last six summers, he has been the dramaturg for the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, most recently for the 20th anniversary season productions of Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He teaches Theatre, Humanities, and English at UMKC and National American University, and is a regular contributor to KC Stage magazine. Currently, he is writing a complete history of the first professional resident theatre company in Kansas City, the Circle theatre, which was located in Union Station from 1962-67.
Thomas Canfield (Program Essayist) holds a Ph.D. in English, with a specialization in Elizabethan drama, from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and is pursuing a second master’s degree in Theatre History and Dramaturgy at UMKC. In the past, he has contributed to Rep productions of King Lear, Gee’s Bend, and The Drawer Boy. At UMKC Theatre, he has provided dramaturgy for The Country Wife, Great Expectations, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For the last six summers, he has been the dramaturg for the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, most recently for the 20th anniversary season productions of Antony and Cleopatra and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He teaches Theatre, Humanities, and English at UMKC and National American University, and is a regular contributor to KC Stage magazine. Currently, he is writing a complete history of the first professional resident theatre company in Kansas City, the Circle theatre, which was located in Union Station from 1962-67.
