Arthur Miller: the idealist speaks

The themes that emerge from Christopher Bigsby’s interviews in The Arthur Miller Tapes (Cambridge UP, 322pp, £25/$30) are truthfulness and deception, betrayal and guilt, the origins of creativity, the dangers of fame, the temptations of the flesh, the corruption of Hollywood, the commercialisation of Broadway and the betrayal of American idealism.  Miller himself (1915-2005) adds that “the creation of a new world, and the rejection of cynicism, have been the themes of so much of my work”.

During Miller’s great period from 1947 to 1964, he wrote All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, The Misfits and After the Fall.  A suitable title for all his plays could be What Is to Be Done?  Ben’s greedy and dynamic speech in Salesman, “When I was seventeen I walked into the jungle and when I was twenty-one I walked out.  And by God I was rich,” recalls the rapacity of Mr. Kurtz, who plundered the riches of the Congo in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Bigsby’s interviews were recorded for nearly 30 years and have been rearranged to follow the chronology of Miller’s life, described in a useful 19-page summary of events.  Bigsby, Miller’s English biographer, is a well-informed and effective interviewer, but there are some contradictions.  Miller says of A View from the Bridge, “I wrote it very quickly, in a matter of a couple of weeks,” and reverses this on the next page, “I had a hell of a time writing it.”  The capable and practical Miller likes “to make furniture, to fix things myself or rebuild stuff”.  He taught Bigsby how to drive on icy roads, fixed his tape recorder and repaired his car, and the grateful interviewer concludes, “No home should be without an Arthur Miller.”

A surprising number of errors appear in this carelessly edited book.  All the American place names, “Theater” and “Center,” are misspelled in the English way.  The correct words should be Coastguard (not Coastguards); Peters’ (not Peter’s); Pyle (not Pyles); Ives (not Yves); Lindbergh (not Lindberg); Michigan Daily (not Daily Michigan). “General MotorsChrysler” are two different corporations (not one).  Thailand was not an American colony.

Miller says his Jewish background “sensitized me to the whole question of the survival of smaller groups, and to the individual in the face of monstrous power complexes.”  The Depression was the most influential event in his early life.  His wealthy father “owned a very large manufacturing outfit employing something like a thousand people and then suddenly the Depression took it all away from him.”  He thinks “Americans live in a fear of falling” (or did he mean “failing”?).

Miller was an astonishingly rapid writer of 28-minute wartime radio plays: “a book would arrive at about 2 o’clock in the afternoon and they had to be rehearsing that thing the next day at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.  I would sit down and write the whole damn thing and get it off.”  He had to sympathise with a character in order to write convincingly about him.  His incisive aphorism explains that “playwriting presents you with an apparent situation in the first act, and then begins to tear it apart in the succeeding acts.  It is really a classic formula.”

In 1950, Miller “wrote a screenplay, The Hook, which was hijacked by Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg in On the Waterfront.”  Kazan also shamefully named names when testifying before the witch-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), yet Miller allowed him to direct After the Fall.  Kazan was the director of Lincoln Center and “they could not have found a better one.  Nobody was better prepared than he to run a theater of this kind.”

Joseph Raymond McCarthy

When investigating the historical background of The Crucible (1953), Miller was shocked to discover that “in a small village in 17th-century Massachusetts people would start killing each other over whether one was a witch or not.”  The play is “about a social paranoia, where a whole town was destroyed by a misconception”.  In Salem, Massachusetts, “not only did you commit the crime of being involved with the Devil, but you must have seen others, and if you don’t give us the names of the others it means you are still in that conspiracy.”

The parallel with Senator Joe McCarthy’s HUAC in the 1950s is brilliant.  The Committee already knew the names of all the people involved in communist organizations.  But each person summoned had to establish his “credibility as a patriot” and forcing victims to name names “was meant to break the people they were confronting”. Miller bravely refused to cooperate with the Committee: “I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble to him.”  He was fined and sentenced to jail for Contempt of Congress, but his conviction was reversed by the Court of Appeals.

Arthur Miller before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Washington, June 1956.

Miller is perceptive about working in the theater, and the difficulty of keeping a famous actor in the long run of a play: “if an actor gives an especially striking performance, he has immediate offers to go to the movies, where he is going to make a lot of money.  It is the difference between making a few thousand dollars a week and making a hundred thousand dollars for half an hour’s work.”  He has a low opinion of Hollywood and caustically comments that their movies in the 1930s “were known as junk; and they were made to be junk, and they were junk, and they have now become classics.”

He doesn’t like to direct his own plays because he “could not stand the boredom of hearing everything sixteen times.  I can’t bear that.”  He does not allow directors to change his lines, and believes “the director should be the servant of the play.  He should not conceive of himself a co-author.  He should try to interpret the play, not create his own.”  Broadway theatergoers want entertainment, not serious plays, and newspapers cater to popular taste. When journalists discuss the theater, they offer gossip instead of a serious story, and “tell you what this star uses as a hair rinse, and how he or she started as a grocery clerk.”  The problem of Broadway “is a severely unrehearsed audience”.  Laurence Olivier told Miller that he wouldn’t perform Strindberg in New York “because he did not want to act on a stage before an ignorant audience.”

Miller is shrewd on the savagely hostile critic Robert Brustein: “He wanted to be an artist, desperately, and, since he couldn’t be, the next best thing was to destroy everybody around and to lift up those he regarded as inferior to him.”  Despite enduring harsh attacks, Miller “cannot imagine what I would do with myself if I weren’t writing.”

His personal revelations are also fascinating: “I was in analysis every day for a couple of years.  I would never advise anybody to do that.  About 80 per cent of it is repetition.  What there is to learn you learn very quickly.  Most of it was a waste.”

Miller, his third wife, the Austrian photographer Inge Morath, and their little daughter were looking at the temples in Angkor Wat when American forces started bombing Cambodia.  The French residents had fled with all the transport and there seemed no way to escape across the border to Thailand.  A resourceful English businessman bought a tiny Fiat: “There was Foxton, his wife and daughter, Rebecca, Inge and I, and a driver, and baggage, in this car that was as big as a small desk.”  When a woman tried to claim their car and Miller refused, she said, “you call yourself a humanitarian.” He replied, “Not today.”

Inge Morath, 1956. Photographer unknown.

Readers are naturally most interested in Miller’s views on his ex-wife Marilyn Monroe.  “She had literally no inner resources.  She had gone over the top in her sensitivity with respect to animals.  She began to suspect everybody of exploiting or damaging her.  She needed constant help all the time.  Death was always on her shoulder, always; it was always there.  After all she had tried suicide several times before we ever met.  The self-destruction was terrifying.  It was certainly beyond me to master it.  It was impossible for her to live, let alone with anybody.  You couldn’t go on with that intensity of life, and those drugs, and manage to survive.”

During the filming of The Misfits, which Miller wrote for Marilyn (her best role), “they weren’t speaking to each other and the marriage was effectively over.”  The film was an artistic success and a personal disaster.  His portrayal of Marilyn in After the Fall “is really about the question of survival, how one spiritually survives a wreckage and still sustains some grip on life.  The play is really about the death of love.”

Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller on set of The Misfits

I saw Arthur Miller eight times when I came to the East coast from California, and can add to what he recalled about Marilyn in the Tapes.  Sitting in the lush quiet of his Connecticut garden, I said surely this place must have made Marilyn happy.  “Nothing could make Marilyn happy,” he regretfully observed.  He spent so much money on her medical treatments that he had to sell his literary manuscripts to the University of Texas.  “Wasn’t she rich, couldn’t she pay for her own doctors?” I asked.  He explained that she was actually broke.  She’d signed a seven-year contract with Fox that kept her on the same low salary after she became famous and earned them a fortune.  Her photographer, Milton Greene, had formed a joint corporation with her, literally owning 49 percent of her.  Arthur prevented Greene from getting majority control, but Marilyn eventually had to pay $100,000 to get rid of him.

Miller met and may even have advised several political leaders: Mikhail Gorbachev, Václav Havel, Nelson Mandela and Yitzhak Rabin.  He thought playwriting should be a social and moral force; he was an instructor or moral conscience, decent, idealistic and wise.  He observes that The Crucible “was written when everybody was terrified of this man, Joe McCarthy, including people who knew perfectly well he was an idiot.  There was a paralysis of people like [President] Dwight Eisenhower, who could not be brought to condemn McCarthy, whom he privately regarded as the scum of the earth.”

Miller, who fought for the underdog and was always on the barricades, “shouldst be living at this hour”.  Unlike the timid politicians of today, he would surely confront and defy the worst disaster since the Depression, the HUAC witch hunts and the Vietnam War: the first dictatorship in American history.

Jeffrey Meyers published a chapter on his friendship with Miller in Privileged Moments (2002) as well as The Genius and the Goddess: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe (2009).  His most recent book is The Biographer’s Quest (Mercer UP, April 2026).

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