John Lahr’s biography of Arthur Miller begins with a fascinating chapter on the creation and electric debut in 1949 of the playwright’s masterpiece, “Death of a Salesman.” Lahr calls the play’s impact on American theater “seismic.” But at the first performance, when he lowered the curtain, the audience sat in stunned silence, “like a funeral,” Miller recalled. “I didn’t know if the show was alive or dead… Finally, someone thought to clap, and then the house fell apart.”
From there, the sharp and insightful “Arthur Miller: American Witness,” part of Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series, goes back to the beginning, tracing the twists and turns of Miller’s childhood in New York City. Born in 1915, the playwright spent his early years in the privilege of a Harlem row house until his business-owning father, a numerical whiz who couldn’t read or write, lost everything in the Depression and moved family to a much reduced situation in Brooklyn. Lahr calls the elder Miller’s downfall the defining trauma of Miller’s life, describing what the author calls the “heartbreaking and shocking” moment when the once-prosperous patriarch asked his teenage son for a quarter for the subway.
Theater critic Lahr, a longtime contributor to the New Yorker who has written biographies of Tennessee Williams and Frank Sinatra, among others, is equally adept at recounting Miller’s checkered life story and interpreting the canonical works that grew out of it. The playwright frequently drew on his own past as a subject: Lahr quotes his friend and collaborator Elia Kazan, who directed Miller’s “Salesman,” “All My Sons” and “After the Fall,” as saying, “Art was not a writer who raised stories. His material had to be experienced; he reported on his inner state.”
“Salesman,” whose tragic protagonist Willy Loman represents, in Lahr’s words, “the aspiration and despair of American life,” was inspired in part by a salesman uncle of Miller’s who took his own life. “The Crucible,” the 1953 play dramatizing the Salem witch trials of 1692, grew out of Miller’s angst over McCarthyism. (Kazan, once a member of the Communist Party, named famous names in his testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, resulting in a rupture in the relationship between the two men; Miller, on the other hand, he was a hero to the left for his principled testimony, not naming or defending the Fifth as many prominent witnesses had done.) “After the Fall” was a thinly veiled rendition of Miller’s disastrous five-year marriage to Marilyn Monroe.
The success of “Salesman” had made Miller famous as a public intellectual, but his affair with the movie star made him an international celebrity. “After the Fall,” which was released in 1964, a year and a half after Monroe’s death, was panned by critics as voyeuristic and unpleasant. “Miller, who had refused to give names to HUAC, was now charged with reporting on Monroe,” Lahr writes.
Over time, the author notes, “once the memory of Miller and Monroe had faded in the collective unconscious,” the work came to be regarded with more generosity. Similarly, “The Crucible,” whose original Broadway run ran for just 197 performances, has seen its reputation improve as the years have distanced itself from the historical events that inspired it. Its early critics, Lahr notes, were unable to see “beyond its connection to Red Scare to its deeper meanings.”
At approximately 200 pages, “Arthur Miller: American Witness” is a slim volume. Miller’s parents, whose influence is so great in the early chapters, are barely mentioned later in the book, though their lifelong friction with his older brother, Kermit, is presented in more detail. Furthermore, we learn little about Miller, who died in 2005, as a father (Monroe was the second of his three wives and had four children).
In Lahr’s hands, however, the works come to life. While Willy Loman’s shattering story has worn off for decades: “The show,” Lahr notes, “is played somewhere in the world almost every day of the year,” a new, acclaimed Broadway revival featuring a cast of Black actors is proof of its continuing relevance. While Miller’s critical reputation rose and fell throughout his life, Lahr’s insightful book also makes a strong case for the playwright’s enduring relevance.