Arthur
Miller was born in New York
City on 17th October, 1915. The son of a small businessman, Miller
worked in a warehouse after graduating from high school. When he saved
enough money he attended the University of Michigan.
During the Second World War, Miller moved to
New York where he began writing plays. Directed by Elia
Kazan, his play, All
My Sons (1947) dealt with war and business corruption.
His next play, also directed by Kazan, Death
of a Salesman (1947), and featuring Lee
J. Cobb as Willy Loman, won a Pulitzer
Prize and became one of the most famous plays in history.
Miller broke with Elia Kazan over his decision
to give names of former members of the American
Communist Party
to the House
of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
Miller was himself blacklisted by Hollywood when he refused to testify
in front of the HUAC. However, this did not stop his plays being performed
on stage.
Miller's next play, Crucible
(1953), based on the 1692 Salem witch trials was deeply influenced
by the blacklisting of his left-wing friends and reflected the era
of McCarthyism. After the Hollywood
Blacklist was lifted, Miller wrote the screenplay for the movie,
The Misfits
(1961).
Other plays by Miller include A
View from the Bridge (1955), After
the Fall (1963),
Incident at Vichy (1964),
The Price
(1968) and Playing
for Time (1981). Miller also wrote an impressive
autobiography, Timebends:
A Life (1987).
Elia
Kazan and Arthur
Miller while
working on Death of a Salesman (1949)
(1)
In his autobiography Timebends, Arthur Miller describes being
told by Elia Kazan about his intention
to testify to the House of Un-American Activities
Committee.
Listening to him I grew frightened.
There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he
came clean he could never hope, in the height of his creative powers,
to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given
a passport to work abroad either. If the theatre remained open to
him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen
his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told
in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president
of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless
he satisfied the Committee.
I could only say that I thought this would pass and that it had to
pass because it would devour the glue that kept the country together
if left to its own unobstructed course. I said that it was not the
Reds who were dispensing our fears now, but the other side, and it
could not go indefinitely, it would someday wear down the national
nerve. And then there might be regrets about this time. But I was
growing cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed,
I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I attended meetings
of the Communist Party writers years ago and had made a speech at
one of them.
(2)
Louis Untermeyer befriended Arthur
Miller when he first arrived in New York. In his autobiography, Timebends
- A Life (1987), Miller explained the impact that the blacklist
had on Untermeyer.
The resurgent American
right of the early fifties, the assault led by Senator McCarthy on
the etiquette of liberal society, was among other things, a hunt for
the alienated, and with remarkable speed conformity became the new
style of the hour.
Louis Untermeyer, then in his sixties, was a poet and anthologist,
a distinguished-looking old New York type with a large aristocratic
nose and a passion for conversation, especially about writers and
to become a poet. He married four times, had taught and written and
published, and with the swift rise of television had become nationally
known as one of the original regulars on What's My Line?, a
popular early show in which he, along with columnist Dorothy Kilgallen,
publisher Bennett Cerf, and Arlene Francis, would try to guess the
occupation of a studio guest by asking the fewest possible questions
in the brief time allowed. All this with wisecracking and banter,
at which Louis was a lovable master, what with his instant recall
of every joke and pun he had ever heard.
One day he arrived as usual at the television studio an hour before
the program began and was told by the producer that he was no longer
on the show. It appeared that as a result of having been listed in
Life magazine as a sponsor of the Waldorf Conference (a meeting
to discuss cultural and scientific links with the Soviet Union), an
organized letter campaign protesting his appearance on What's My
Line? had scared the advertisers into getting rid of him.
Louis went back to his
apartment. Normally we ran into each other in the street once or twice
a week or kept in touch every month or so, but I no longer saw him
in the neighborhood or heard from him. Louis didn't leave his apartment
for almost a year and a half. An overwhelming and paralyzing fear
had risen him. More than a political fear, it was really that he had
witnessed the tenuousness of human connection and it had left him
in terror. He had always loved a lot and been loved, especially on
the TV program where his quips were vastly appreciated, and suddenly,
he had been thrown into the street, abolished.
(3)
Arthur Miller, Timebends - A Life (1987)
I could not help thinking
of Lee Cobb, my first Willy Loman, as more a pathetic victim than
a villain, a big blundering actor who simply wanted to act, had never
put in for heroism, and was one of the best proofs I knew of the Committee's
pointless brutality toward artists. Lee, as political as my foot,
was simply one more dust speck swept up in the thirties idealization
of the Soviets, which the Depression's disillusionment had brought
on all over the West.
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