Dramatist With a Mission
SCHOENWALD, RICHARD L.
Dramatist With a Mission Collected Plays. Reviewed by Richard L. Schoenwald By Arthur Miller. History department, Wesleyam University; Viking. 439 pp. $4.95. author, "Sigmund Freud" Arthur...
...Out of the agony, acutely sensible when the play is read, tor-turingly felt when the play is staged, rises awareness of an opportunity...
...The price of keeping silent, or of being forced to keep silent, is very great, and both hunters and hunted pay this price...
...His adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, not included in the Collected Plays, was staged in 1950...
...One or two scenes apart, it is talky, with the talk multiplied in the Collected Plays reprint by long historical asides...
...This is a very high ambition, avowing that men in a theater and in life respond to more than the easily emotional...
...A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), a one-act play, is set in the early Thirties and sometimes seems, like The Crucible, to echo the feeling and dramatic technique of that time...
...He admired Ibsen for his refusal to entertain, for his insistence that people listen to what he was saying, for his unrelenting analysis of cause and effect...
...It makes plain one reason for Miller's triumphs: He has seen that men must face the need to make of the world a home, he has felt the loss they feel at leaving an earlier home...
...Tragedy happens when a man will not remain passive, ivhen he must answer a challenge to his dignity, to his self...
...Surely, however, there is true passion in A View from the Bridge, and in a few places it flames almost as searingly high as in his earlier hits...
...Certainly he had to guard that sense, or blunt it and flee from it, like Joe Keller and Willy and the men of Salem and Eddie Carbone, into a deadly ignorance from which they are finally freed by the tragic assertion of their selves...
...Can Miller stay hot...
...A man must proclaim his knowledge that a secret, inner self exists, and then live on the foundation of what he knows...
...One can only look back over Miller's career with admiration for his courage and gratefulness for his artistic intelligence...
...and the dreams of those who called the war an attack on Fascism...
...It probably will prove far more important in his development than the extended preface to the Collected Plays, which runs over again themes long his preoccupations...
...A View from the Bridge (1955) directs attention to Miller's mixed feelings about psychoanalysis...
...In a preface for the play's first printing, he declared that tragedy was not reserved for royalty alone...
...Miller's grandest creation is Death of a Salesman (1949...
...Parallels thread relentlessly between then and now, but they do not hold the drama together...
...His sense of his self, its uniqueness and sacredness, has ruled his life and his art...
...author, "Sigmund Freud" Arthur Miller is a hot man in a cool time...
...Death of a Salesman deals with what old men have wanted and younger men want, with bad dreams and with the possibility of better dreams...
...One can live for the real self, one can make a world which allows living for that real self, or one can perish after a wasted life, seeing finally how futilely he had passed his years...
...Miller discovered that he could intensify "social" meaning unbearably by anchoring it to a human situation found in the story of Abraham and Isaac and in so much more of the world's most heart-rending art...
...A very bad story, "It Takes a Thief" (Collier's...
...Witch hunts must be attacked because they deny the sense of the self, because fear of them limits what a man can see and face as he grows...
...One must look forward hopefully to another volume of Collected Plays, filled, as this is, with the knowledge that men who know they are men and act like men stay hot and alive, but those who let ice crust over their inner selves disappear nameless, and the earth remembers them not at all...
...The Family in Modern Drama" (Atlantic, April 1956), reveals how clearly Miller can think and how beautifully he can write...
...In All My Sons (1947), the first play included in this collection, Miller turned his typewriter into a flamethrower and hurtled out a question: What was the war about...
...In the play he caught the hopes of younger men at two levels: the expectations children have of fathers in every age and place, though fathers often prove weak, unknowing, evil...
...He wants to affect men through the power of ideas...
...Before the House committee, Miller said, "I am trying to and I will protect my sense of myself...
...An essay, very significantly first spoken as a lecture...
...Because of the war, people should be better, but a father nevertheless destroys his son...
...February 8, 1947), shows how superficial such an aim would have been...
...Miller's concern is that of a man born in 1915, a Jew who grew up in New York...
...It lacks the penetrating force of his earlier plays...
...Impassioned, a man who cares, he stands against the glacier compounded of small hopes and petty feelings which grinds forward now even faster than when its movements first were charted by the present reviewer ("The Cool Approach," NL, September 5, 1955...
...Miller has not yet been able to find satisfying ideas about the relation between the individual and society...
...He edges up to its insights, then tells himself that mankind's fate is social and withdraws into reliance on a mythic past...
...He can and probably will...
...The dramatist shows men the family from which they have come, and makes them see how they can struggle to build a home in the world, each for his own precious and different self...
...Yet this is, unmistakably, a play by Arthur Miller...
...Today, Miller felt, little tragedy is written because psychiatric and sociological formulas allow hardly any chance for a man to act...
...He is battling with ultimate mysteries, with what men must admit and understand or turn away from and perish, suffering in a daze, like animals...
...Miller has not yet produced anything which matches these plays in power and sharpness of insight...
...He lived in a family, through changes of its social position, in a time throbbing with issues...
...He did not intend simply to indict greed and profiteering...
...Miller's crackling dialogue shows a family breaking up, fate-fully debating whether there can be anything larger than the tie between parents and children...
...Finally, however, some like John Proctor assert a name, an identity, discovered in meeting the demand to name others...
...Caring, working, thinking, he changed, but always he believed in the importance of his mission, the writing of drama...
...The Crucible (1953) indicts a present that Miller abhorred, the regime of fear and investigating committees, by going backward to the Salem witch hunters...
Vol. 40 • September 1957 • No. 39
