Death of a Salesman_ Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem - Miller, Arthur [10]
Death of a Salesman, Miller has said, is a play with “more pity and less judgment” than All My Sons. There is no crime and hence no ultimate culpability (beyond guilt for sexual betrayal), only a baffled man and his sons trying to find their way through a world of images—dazzling dreams and fantasies—in the knowledge that they have failed by the standards they have chosen to believe are fundamental. Willy has, as Biff alone understands, all the wrong dreams but, as Charley observes, they go with the territory. They are the dreams of a salesman reaching for the clouds, smiling desperately in the hope that people will smile back. He is “kind of temporary” because he has placed his faith in the future while being haunted by the past. Needing love and respect he is blind to those who offer it, dedicated as he is to the eternal American quest of a transformed tomorrow. What else can he do, then, but climb back into his car and drive off to a death which at last will bring the reward he has chased so determinedly, a reward which will expiate his sense of guilt, justify his life, and hand on to another generation the burden of belief which has corroded his soul but to which he has clung until the end.
When a film version was made, Columbia Pictures insisted (until a threatened lawsuit persuaded them otherwise) on releasing it with a short film stressing the wonderful life-style and social utility of the salesman. They might be said to have missed the point somewhat. However, in one respect they recognized the force of the salesman as a potent image of the society they evidently wished to defend. He sells hope. And to do that he must first sell himself. However, the success of the play throughout the world, over a period of nearly fifty years, shows that if Willy’s is an American dream, it is also a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what they might have been and what they are, who need to believe that their children will reach out for a prize that eluded them, and who feel that the demands of reality are too peremptory and relentless to be sustained without hope of a transformed tomorrow.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. If the play were set at the time of its composition the scenes from the past would date back to 1931, but we have Miller’s assurance that “For Willy it meant the American 1920s, the time when it all seemed to be coasting, expanding opportunity everywhere, the dream in full bloom” (Salesman in Beijing [New York and London, 1984], p. 108).
2. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York and London, 1987), p. 122. All future references are incorporated in the text.
3. Jo Mielziner, Designing for the Theater: A Memoir and a Portfolio (New York, 1965), p. 25.
4. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds., The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (New York, 1996), p. 423.
5. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, A Theater in Your Head (New York, 1960), pp. 48-49.
6. Salesman in Beijing, p. 27.
7. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (London, 1954), p. 85. Interestingly, in another book, What Is Theatre?, he argues that there is a confusion between the political and the sexual realm, with the key scene being that with the tape recorder, if it is a political play, or that set in the Boston hotel room, if it is a sexual play, quite as though the two acts of betrayal and denial were wholly separate. In fact, for Miller, the private and the public are intimately connected and betrayal all of a piece.
8. Matthew C. Roudane, Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson, Mississippi, 1987), p. 15.
9. Rhoda Koenig, “Seduced by Salesman’s Patter,” The Sunday Times, London, October 20, 1996, 10.4.
10. Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles: 1937-1958 (London, 1959), pp. xxiii, xv.
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