Death of a Salesman_ Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem - Miller, Arthur [3]
The past, and its relationship to the present, has always been vital to Miller. As a character in another Miller play (After the Fall) remarks, the past is holy. Why? Not merely because the present contains the past, but because a moral world depends on an acceptance of the notion of causality, on an acknowledgment that we are responsible for, and a product of, our actions. This is a truth that Willy resists but which his subconscious acknowledges, presenting to him the evidence of his fallibility. For the very structure of the play reflects his anxious search for the moment his life took a wrong turn, for the moment of betrayal that undermined his relationship to his wife and destroyed his relationship with a son who was to have embodied his own faith in the American dream.
Death of a Salesman differs radically from his more traditionally constructed first Broadway success, All My Sons, while still focusing on father-son relationships. It is technically innovative, with its nearly instantaneous time shifts. It is also lyrical, as Miller allows Willy’s dreams to shape themselves into broken arias. And whereas the earlier work had echoes of Ibsen, this play was generated out of its own necessities as Miller discovered a form that precisely echoed its social and psychological concerns.
In 1948, Miller, fresh from the achievement of All My Sons, built himself a shed on land he had bought in Connecticut. It took him six weeks. He then sat down to write Death of a Salesman. He completed the first half in a single night and the whole work in a further six weeks. He began the play knowing only the first two lines and the fact that it would end with a death, the death of the man who became Willy Loman and whose last name came not from any desire to link his fate with that of the common man, but from Miller’s memory of that name being called out in a scene from the film The Testament of Dr. Mabuse : “What the name really meant to me was a terror-stricken man calling into the void for help that will never come.” (179) The name was fine with the producers; the title was not. They were convinced that the word “death” would keep audiences away. And, indeed, Miller himself considered other titles, including The Inside of His Head and A Period of Grace, the latter a reference to the practice of insurance companies that allow a policy to stay active beyond its effective termination date, as Willy had lived on beyond the death of his hopes. But the title remained, and far from audiences staying away they sustained it for 742 performances.
Death of a Salesman begins with the sound of a flute (and there were some twenty-two minutes of music in the original production), a sound which takes Willy back to his childhood when he had traveled with his father and brother in a wagon. His father made and sold flutes. He was, in other words, a salesman, though one who, unlike Willy, made what he sold. It is a tainted memory, however. The distant past is not as innocent as, in memory, he would wish it to be. It represents betrayal, for his father had deserted the boys, as his brother, Ben, had deserted Willy, going in search first of his father and then of success at any price. Betrayal is thus as much part of his inheritance as is his drive for success, his belief in salesmanship as a kind of frontier adventure whose virtues should be passed on to his sons.
In the notebook that Miller kept while