Arthur MillerBy Christopher Bigsby Weidenfeld Nicolson, 739pp. £30 WHEN ARTHUR MILLER was researching The Crucible, his play about the New England witch trials, he came across a painting of the grim Puritan judges in Salem, Massacusetts. He was immediately reminded of the swaying, singing elders and rabbis of the synagogue of his childhood on 114th Street in Harlem, writes Thomas Kilroy
The moment is a defining one, not just linking but synthesising the two streams in his consciousness, the Jewish and the American. "I understood Salem in that flash; it was suddenly my own inheritance".
The other strand of the plays is, of course, the personal. A play cannot be written merely out of public discourse and ideas of ethnic or cultural identity. Miller is also on hand to tell us about this personal level as well. "Playwriting was an act of self-discovery from the start and would always be; it was a kind of license to say the unspeakable, and I would never write anything good that did not somehow make me blush".
Certainly, in All My Sonsand Death of a Salesman, two of his best known plays, a man is driven over the edge by inner torment. Chrstopher Bigsby, a British expert in American drama, goes a long way towards grounding those inner dramas in the vulnerable, conscience-stricken playwright himself. He also makes a persuasive case that The Crucibleand A View from the Bridge, owe more than a little to Miller's complicated marriage with Marilyn Monroe.
The quotations above are from Timebends, Miller's wonderful memoir, which should be read alongside this book. Bigsby makes good use of it but he also knew Miller personally. The singular contribution of this volume comes from a series of long interviews which he conducted with Miller over the years and from a collection of papers which Miller made available to him.
In the interviews, the playwright looks back with characteristic honesty on his career in theatre and his life-long battle against injustice everywhere but particularly in the US. The box of papers clearly offered Bigsby insights into Miller's very early anti-racism, well before the Civil Rights movement, as well as details on his unpublished work.
Much of this helps to fill out what is a very big book indeed. The rest of the bulk comes from the detail which Bigsby provides of the social and political history of 20th-century America, a lot of it well known already. This gives a kind of background trajectory to Miller's career in theatre and film: the immigrant experience of the early century, the Great Depression which destroyed the business of Miller's father, the Spanish Civil War, the second World War and the Holocaust and, perhaps, most crucial of all to Miller personally, the Cold War of the 1950s.
There we find the FBI file on Miller, his Marxism, his interrogation by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and his bravery during the years of American paranoia fuelled by the witch-hunting of Senator Joe McCarthy in the Senate. Miller's response to this toxic rubbish was, of course, The Crucible.
He was never a member of the Communist Party (unlike his brother Kermit) but he did participate in the Waldorf Conference of 1949. This event, taking its name from the hotel on Park Avenue in New York where it took place, was a kind of cultural staging of the very real political hostility between the US and Soviet Russia and between the Right and the Left in American life.
Among the participants was a young Norman Mailer who, typically, took on both contestants, communist and anti-communist. The divisiveness in American intellectual and artistic life was catastrophic and took decades to exorcise, if that ever happened.
Bigsby, who is impatient with the Left, takes us in great detail through the turmoil this conflict created, while having Miller, in hindsight, looking back at his own actions and the stance he took in those turbulent times. It is utterly fascinating, particularly in the way it anticipates the reaction of Bush's America towards another devilish enemy from the East after the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Miller emerges out of all this with great integrity (unlike his director buddy Elia Kazan, for instance). Because of his bias and because of Miller's own honest, later questioning of himself, Bigsby rather underestimates Miller's achievement here as a public witness. I may be wrong but I feel he misses the point that what mattered to Miller more than anything else was the enormous damage being done to the consciousness of the country that he loved, "a kind of frenzy", he called it, of hatred which was poisoning the American mind.
In his words this could never be "a service either to intellectual honesty, the welfare of the American people, the Russian people, or to the cause of world peace".
FINALLY, HOWEVER, what matters are the plays. There's a brilliantly written passage in Timebends which describes the writing of Death of a Salesmanin Roxbury, Connecticut. First, Miller had to build, by hand, a cabin outside his new home. First the cabin, then the play. Christopher Bigsby is surely right connecting Miller's craft as a playwright to the craft of joining timber, of putting together a well-made piece of construction with everything in its exact place. But this play, at least the first half of it, came to him in joyous waves mixing laughter and tears, yelps and cries and writing, writing, over one day and one night. All he had to start with were the first two lines and the DIY cabin. The second half of the play took much longer.
I first saw his work in the 1950s along with that of Tennessee Williams. These two utterly different playwrights were always yoked together in those days. Miller tried to give tragic identity to his American Everyman. As with many modern playwrights who have harnessed Greek tragedy to their purpose there is, at times, a strain, an inflation both of character and rhetoric in the writing. Williams, on the other hand found tragedy in his created characters, as natural as breathing. He disliked writers who took public stands calling them "professional againsters".
On the other hand he wrote a splendid letter of protest on behalf of his fellow-playwright to the State Department in 1954 when Miller was refused a passport. It had no apparent effect on the bureaucrats but Christopher Bigsby has reprinted it in full for all to read, a master statement on the freedom of art in a politically corrupt state.
And then there is Marilyn Monroe. If there is one tabloid image of Miller it is the one on the back cover of this book, a tall bespectacled intellectual with a gorgeous blonde on his arm. Bigsby is excellent, with the help of Miller himself, in trying to make sense of this relationship and its sad ending. Like self-destructive people everywhere, Monroe visited destruction on those nearest to her but, here, as elsewhere, Miller demonstrates an iron will.
Quite deliberately, this book concentrates upon the first two thirds or so of the life. There is then, something perfunctory about its conclusion. The last chapter is an extended portrait of the Austrian photographer Inge Morath, Miller's third wife. It is a remarkable story in itself but not, primarily, the story of Arthur Miller.
One would love to have had his thoughts on George W Bush. His difficulties in having his later work accepted in New York and his association with the Irish directors Joe Dowling and Gary Hynes would also have made interesting reading.
His death in 2005 provoked that casual brutality which is never far below the surface of American life and which was given particular encouragement during the Bush years. "The Great Pretender: Arthur Miller Wasn't Well Liked - and With Good Reason" was the headline in the Wall Street Journal. Miller embodied a different America, humane and decent with a respect for the rights of all human beings, everywhere around the globe. Maybe this is about to re-emerge once more.
Thomas Kilroy is a playwright and novelist and is Emeritus Professor of Modern English at NUI Galway