Arthur Miller was a man of presence, writes Eileen Battersby Literary Correspondent
Arthur Miller, brave and forthright, brought an element of honour to that wholly American concept of Writer as Public Man.
While Gore Vidal parades a wittily Europeanised patrician swagger, and Norman Mailer hones his insights on bravado teamed with aggression, Miller, in common with his exact contemporary Saul Bellow epitomised the clever son of Eastern European emigrants who looked beyond physical work to the power of language.
His thesis was the human dilemma and his themes self knowledge, realisation and personal quests. The anger abated but his sense of justice endured.
Miller's death this week at the age of 89 leaves Bellow as the sole claimant to the mantle of US literary giant. Philip Roth and John Updike, both some 15 years younger, continue to write; Updike remains prolific while Roth has matured into a passionate chronicler of his country.
But for all their respective gifts, Miller was different. His four big plays; All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View From The Bridge (1955) were shaped by the legacy of the Depression, the central event, in his opinion, of 20th-century US history, the century in which America came of age.
He was and will be remembered as a major voice of 20th century world theatre as well as being a great US writer, an astute reader of American consciousness and the author of a majestic memoir, Timebends, in which he told his story and also America's.
It was Miller who explored the true pathos of the collapse of the American Dream because he looked beyond the romance and instead identified the essential perversion of defeated idealism. His vision was to move on from Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby. Willy Loman, the central character in Death of A Salesman is not a tragic hero, but merely the victim of his pathetic delusions and fragile ego. Loman's son, particularly Biff, presented as a golden youth, college-bound and destined for greatness, is a liar.
Written in six weeks, Death of A Salesman, Miller's Pulitzer Prize-winning, breakthrough masterpiece, opened in 1949. The Broadway production was directed by Miller's sometime friend, sometime enemy Elia Kazan, the lead role played by Lee J. Cobb in a seminal US theatre performance and for all the harshness of the play's realism - and Miller was a realist in the tradition of Ibsen - its genius rests in the compassion with which Miller shaped Loman, an Everyman figure who is, in all his failings, so very human and so very real as are Eddie Carbone and John Proctor.
Salesman elevated Miller to the status of immortal, but his voice had already been noted. Some two years earlier, in 1947, All My Sons - in which a man pays the ultimate price for his part in a corrupt deal, the death of his son - had established Miller, in tandem with that most troubled of artists, Tennessee Williams, as the new generation of post second World War US theatre. Before them, towered the figure of Eugene O'Neill (1888-1953), who looked to the giants of European theatre. O'Neill died the year The Crucible was completed.
Although Miller and Williams have little in common - Miller's realism was shaped by his speech-as-spoken dialogue and the powerful truth he brought to his study of human behaviour, while Williams's lush and often magnificently lyric hysteria was rooted in sexual tensions and disappointments - together they opened the door for the emergence of Edward Albee, and in Miller's case, most specifically, David Mamet.
Miller was born in New York City on October 17th, 1915, had studied journalism and was a natural campaigner. His father, Isidore Miller, a factory owner, was proud of his son, and his son, as he told me in July 1997, was proud of him. "He was a kind man, he was uneducated, we didn't have an intellectual relationship, I loved him." Miller never dealt in easy nostalgia. In conversation he was natural, direct and engaging. When I met him he was 82 years of age, relaxed and unaffected, yet impressive, a man of presence who had aged well, aside from sporadic deafness, "it makes talking on the phone kind of messy". The deep, gravelly New York Jewish accent was matched by bright brown eyes. You had to like him.
Equally, it was impossible not to notice that the various people who kept interrupting our interview approached him not as a writer, but more as a visiting holy man. They held his hand, and he had huge hands, the hands of a carpenter which he was, on a hobby level, throughout his life.
More than a writer, Miller was revered as a survivor who had refused to compromise, wouldn't squeal on his communist friends and later denounced Vietnam. The Crucible is good theatre, it is also formidable polemic. Based on the Salem witch trials, it takes commitment as its theme and exposes the corruption of a society. Of course it was his response to the hypocrisy of McCarthyism and its witch hunting paranoia which devastated US intellectual and artistic life for a generation.
His plays demand a book in themselves. Suffice it to write he knew an individual in crisis makes riveting theatre.
Timebends, random, candid, self questioning and reflective, is unforgettable not least for the sequences about his mother whom he realised as the rabbi spoke over her coffin, he never really knew.
In 1995, a late great short story, Homely Girl (1993) was published in Britain under the title Plain Girl. It was only his 10th short story and was written in his late 70s. It is only 48 pages long yet it speaks volumes as will the enduring intelligence of Arthur Miller.