The Last Page
Berman, Marshall
ARTHUR MILLER'S death this spring brought back his great moment half a century ago, when he defied the foul fiend. At his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in June 1956, he...
...In Miller's masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, this is Willy Loman's story: He don't put a bolt to a nut...
...He would gladly accuse himself, but he refused to name anyone else...
...Attention must be paid...
...It's never too late...
...Miller's art created a tragic role that American life gave him a chance to fill...
...She should share the prize...
...But "I will protect my sense of myself...
...Miller's hero is executed for refusing to implicate his fellow villagers as servants of the devil...
...He deserves recognition as a hero of dissent...
...Miller intuited that more and more people would be depending on their personalities for their lives...
...We need this promise now as we strive to stand up to foul fiends all our own...
...And then you get a couple of spots in your hat, and you're finished...
...He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine...
...We should feel honored to recognize him...
...Her million-dollar smile told the world, Dissent is delicious...
...Thanks to the Court and the star, what looked like a tragic confrontation ended comically...
...At his House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearing in June 1956, he tried to explain himself...
...The recent Public Broadcasting System documentary "Not Without Sin" showed her in action, putting complex ideas into sound bites with wit and flair...
...He knew they would convict him of contempt of Congress...
...They don't know me anymore...
...MARSHALL BERMAN 128 n DISSENT / Summer 2005...
...It offered a promise that bad times won't last forever, if you just stand up...
...It wasn't big men in boots, but a much bigger bunch: all the people forced to market themselves, to sell their personalities to capital because their personalities were all they had...
...of an "Age of Conformity," as Irving Howe called it, when people could not say what they felt or respond to life freely, when they were turned into rats, tearing at each other, crushed in traps...
...I have three children," he says, "how can I teach them to walk like men in the world, and I sold my friends...
...And he knew personality was a resource that had to run out...
...She not only quieted the wolves but made them laugh...
...And when they start not smiling back— it's an earthquake...
...But they're there...
...We could see a new politics of conscience being born...
...Miller loved one of the most luminous of these people, Marilyn Monroe...
...Miller's The Crucible (1953) is still the best dramatization of McCarthyism: of a time when America became a closed society where "the accuser alone is holy...
...He got mad and said No...
...So should the Warren Court, which threw out Miller's conviction...
...In many ways they are us...
...At the old 72nd Street Newsreel, the whole house cheered...
...AFTER THE HEARING, Marilyn Monroe flooded the scene with her radiance, diverted the mob of reporters from Miller, and explained the case...
...They are a proletariat with no Communist Manifesto, no vision of how they can come together, organize collectively, change the world...
...Then she squeezed Miller, waved to the crowd, and led the two of them away...
...But he was a misfit for a deeper reason: his vision of the proletariat...
...all they wanted was names...
...Miller thought the Communist Party rejected him because he believed in the autonomy of art...
...My conscience will not permit me to use the name of another person...
...It was an eccentric position then...
...sooner or later other people are bound to "start not smiling back...
...I take full responsibility for everything I have ever done, but I cannot take responsibility for another human being...
...Half a century later, there's a bigger, lonelier crowd than ever...
...People living on their personalities were alone, "way out there in the blue...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
