Although best known as a dramatist, Arthur Miller was also a skilled writer of fiction with a successful novel and three published volumes of stories. This is an aspect of his writing we hear too little about. There have been several studies that usefully consider the relationship between the fiction of Tennessee Williams and his drama, but little has been done with Miller’s prose. When the playwright published his first short story compendium in 1967, I Don’t Need You Anymore, he wrote an introduction in which he expressed surprise that the included stories seemed to fit together so well. Given they all came from the mind of the same writer, this is unsurprising. The entire body of Miller’s work throughout his 73-year career from 1932 to 2005 express his central concerns about identity and commitment, guilt and responsibility, hope, and individual potential.
Miller’s humanism is forefront in his prose, as it is in his drama, but he conveys this in different ways than in his plays, exploring alternate avenues and formulas. The fiction introduces us to characters who offer intriguing reflections on several of those dramatic creations we thought we knew so well. Paying closer attention to his fictional output suggests new ways of looking at and understanding Miller’s career as a whole.
Miller began experimenting with short fiction as a teenager . Around age seventeen he created his first vision of a down-on-his-luck salesman in Alfred Schoenzeit in the story “In Memoriam.” The young, first-person narrator recalls being asked to carry samples for Schoenzeit on a sales round. Schoenzeit is doing so badly he has to ask his companion for their train fare. Treated disrespectfully by the buyers and selling nothing, Schoenzeit nonetheless becomes upbeat and chatty on their return home. When the narrator later hears that Schoenzeit is dead, his response is a “glowing smile within my soul” (Miller 1995, 111), suggesting a positive message in the man’s death.
Little more than a character sketch, this story has echoes in both Death of a Salesman with its central protagonist, Willy Loman, and The American Clock, in which Miller has an embarrassed Moe Baum ask his son for train fare. Like Willy, Schoenzeit is an indifferent salesman crippled by uncertainty and the sense his profession does not really suit his nature. Schoenzeit masks his dejection with surface joviality but apparently chooses to end his life rather than continue such humiliation. The story itself does not suggest suicide, but a note on Miller’s manuscript says, “The real Schoenzeit of the story threw himself in front of an El train the day following the incident” (Miller 1995, 110). This is the first glimmer of Miller’s understanding of the tragedy of the common man: a thankfulness for the man’s release from a painful existence but also admiration for his struggle against defeat. The character’s name ironically means “beautiful time,” and Miller’s memory here is bitter-sweet and tinged with approbation.
Miller’s first published story, “Ditchy,” came out in 1944 in Mayfair Magazine and offers another of Miller’s life-long themes: using empathy to guide one’s embrace of social responsibility. It tells the tale of a young man revisiting where he grew up near Central Park and going to the spot where he had been mugged for his roller skates at the age of seven. As he recalls this, he is confronted by a similar trio of thugs. Being older and wiser, he responds unexpectedly, befriending one of them, who calls himself Ditchy. In an empathetic leap, the narrator sees that Ditchy’s aggression is a symptom of a harsh upbringing and the unrelenting pain he gets from his mouth full of rotten teeth. Offering compassion rather than anger, the man takes Ditchy to a dentist, who pulls his teeth. The man then treats Ditchy to ice cream.
We can see parallels between this story and Miller’s play of the same year, The Man Who Had All the Luck. Both utilize the format of an allegorical fable and deal with similar issues of fairness and compassion. Everything goes right for David Beeves, but he cannot accept his good fortune and nearly drives away his wife and child, while his gentle brother Amos, simply cannot catch a break. Miller asks us to empathize with both characters. He refuses to accept any simple notion of fate, always holding people responsible for how they engage with what they receive. In his portrait of the young thug, Ditchy, Miller shows his early interest in how people evolve and what motivates their choices, constantly realizing that individuals need to be treated with sympathy. Early on, Miller was aware that people left in isolation never do as well as those surrounded by a caring community. All of us need to find this balance between serving ourselves and others to live fully human lives.
Disappointed by the failure of The Man Who Had All the Luck—Miller felt the production had not captured his intended fabulist tone—he turned again to fiction and penned his first and only full-length novel. Originally titled Some Shall Not Sleep, he eventually settled on the more succinct title, Focus, since the way in which people perceive others is essential to his narrative. Miller’s subject was a topic about which many people in the 1940s were strangely silent: the casual racism and anti-Semitism running throughout American society. He depicts it as backed by mainstream religion, fueled by ignorant, disgruntled people seeking scapegoats for their own frustration, and permitted by the moral inertia of the masses, who want a quiet life. Its central character, the ambiguously named Lawrence Newman, is one such person, who during the novel is forced to confront his own racism and apathy and finally take a stand, allying himself with Finkelstein, the Jewish underdog of the neighborhood.
Newman, like most of those around him, tends to stereotype those whom he sees as Other. His desire for the safety of a tightly ordered life makes him categorize everyone he meets to keep them safely in their place. He plays “trying to spot the Jew” on the train going to work, a skill on which his livelihood depends as a personnel officer in a deliberately bigoted corporation that does not hire Jews. He must weed out any employment candidates who might try to hide this detail. Despite his attraction to Gertrude Hart when she applies for a secretarial position, he refuses to employ her, suspecting she is Jewish from the shape of her nose. His suspicion turns out to be false.
Newman makes judgments solely on appearance, so Miller turns the tables on him, having others judge him in the same way when he is forced to wear glasses that make him look Jewish. The subsequent disdain with which he begins to be treated, including a demotion at work, eventually brings home to Newman the injustice with which he has treated others. He quits his workplace and after meeting Gertrude once again, marries her.
In a further ironic twist, we discover his new wife is more virulently anti-Semitic than he ever was, especially as he begins to discover the falseness of the stereotypes he had unquestioningly accepted as he and Finkelstein become friends. Stereotypes collapse when confronted by real individuals: “He could not break his gaze away and kept staring into Finkelstein’s eyes. It was like seeing Gertrude all new over Ardell’s desk that time, seeing her changed, human” (210). By the close, Newman has found an inner calm in his recognition of the perversity of racism. No longer feeling conflicted, he now allows himself to be seen as a Jew in solidarity with a neighbor he knows suffers from bigoted injustice.
The theme of focusing and clear vision plays though the novel at many levels. Politically, Miller focuses his reader’s attention on a dark aspect of American culture, as he will continue to do in his dramas, challenging America to become a better place. More literally, the focus of Newman’s vision changes once he puts on his new glasses, which brings about a change in his life. Gertrude constantly changes in his vision: at first, he thinks she is Jewish, then an attractive Gentile, and finally an unpleasant and narrow-minded bigot. Her reaction to being refused a room at the hotel they go to on their honeymoon exposes the widening difference in their visions of the world: she sees nothing wrong in restricting clientele and just wants people to know she is not Jewish; Newman, however, is indeed becoming a “new man” who is morally outraged by such restrictive treatment. Ultimately, he and Finkelstein survive by joining forces and taking the social action Finkelstein has recommended all along to save America from a bigoted minority. The novel ends not in despair but in hope for the power of courage and solidarity against injustice.
Newman’s recurring dream of the carousel and its underground machinery becomes a metaphor for the underground way in which prejudice is manufactured in America. Finkelstein explains how these feelings are being exacerbated by a small “gang of devils” who influence the masses (183). If not stopped, they will destroy American ideals. Finkelstein does not spend his time focusing on people like Fred (Newman’s racist neighbor) or Gertrude. His greater concern, like Miller’s, is with the morally deficient bystanders who are the majority and allow themselves to be sullied by their acceptance of a bigotry they know is morally wrong. Miller’s next play, All My Sons (1947) also deals with issues of complacency and myopic perspective, showing that the community’s embrace of successful businessman Joe Keller and his individualistic ideals cannot justify his self-serving actions in shipping faulty airplane parts, gambling with people’s lives, and ultimately causing the deaths of 21 pilots (as well as his own son Larry). Keller’s moral hypocrisy, like Newman’s, will be exposed as the play unfolds.
While Focus is Miller’s only novel, there followed a steady stream of short fiction in which the playwright evidently was trying out ideas that surface later in his drama. In 1946 he published “The Plaster Masks,” in which he explores the impact of war injuries on veterans, based on his experiences visiting military hospitals during World War II. This theme also surfaces in the play he was writing at that time, All My Sons, as the veteran son Chris tries to come to terms with American apathy toward his war experience and talks of the awful casualties of armed conflict.
In “The Plaster Masks” a writer comes to the hospital to ask if he can interview badly injured soldiers for a radio broadcast. As he observes surgeons’ consultations with patients for reconstructive surgery, he finds it hard not to be repulsed. The men have severe injuries that include missing limbs and sections of their heads, but they are mostly spirited and comradely. The writer struggles to understand their lack of bitterness and how those around them, including spouses and young helpers at the hospital, respond with such kind sensitivity. After meeting with a sculptor, who makes plaster masks of the men’s faces before and after surgery to help the surgeons envision their work, the writer comes to understand how these people have chosen to embrace a future rather than wallow in the unpleasant past. In the same way, Miller will have Chris in All My Sons (who is based partly on Miller’s brother Kermit, who suffered from PTSD after World War II) resolve to leave behind the horrors of war and start a new life with Ann. Near the close of “The Plaster Masks,” the writer spots a post-surgery mask that looks like his own face. After trying on the initial mask that reflects the soldier’s injuries, he is able to put himself in this man’s place and understand the uselessness of pity or regret.
“The Plaster Masks” bluntly exposes what war does to people, and in All My Sons Miller develops a more complex response, extending his analysis beyond the battlefield. For Miller, who was forced to stay home from the war due to an old football injury, those who served are not to be pitied but admired for their spirit and sense of purpose. But Miller also realizes that they are able to cope only through a surrounding network of those who care. Someone like Joe Keller, who cares so little for others that he risks pilots’ lives just to stay in business, will not be allowed to continue without facing his moral irresponsibility, despite what the law allows.
This sense of justice also permeates the more comical story “It Takes a Thief,” which Miller published less than two weeks after All My Sons opened in January 1947. Like the Kellers, the Sheltons are presented as an upper-middle-class couple. Shelton, like Joe Keller, developed a profitable business during the war. Where Keller sold aircraft parts, and then kitchen appliances and washing machines after the war, Shelton sold used cars to the war plants and then new cars in the growing postwar economy. Like the Kellers, the Sheltons are friendly, engaging people. We initially sympathize with them when they discover they have been robbed. But when Shelton telephones the police, our suspicions are aroused as his wife stops him before he gives his name and address. It recalls Kate Keller telling her husband “Be smart now, Joe” (Miller 2015, 114). We discover that Shelton has been skimming money from his business to avoid taxes, and $91,000 in cash has been stolen along with jewelry, silver, and a fur coat.
When the police trace his call and come to find out what has happened, Shelton must avoid mentioning the theft since the money was acquired illegally. Eight days later when the police catch the thief, Shelton goes to the station to reclaim the jewelry but is afraid to claim the money. Asking the detective what will happen to it, he is told it will be held while the police complete their investigation. The Sheltons are haunted the rest of their lives, caught in a self-imposed limbo and rarely leaving their house, waiting for the police to arrest them. The story’s title becomes true: the thief who burgled their home exposed the bigger theft by this supposedly respectable couple. As in All My Sons, Miller again espouses a Greek- or Shakespearean-like belief that ultimately justice prevails, and the universe is righted.
In his next plays of the late 1940s and early 50s—Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, as well as his adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People—Miller continues his exploration of morality, self-definition, and the distorting limits of the American Dream. It is not surprising, therefore, that his 1951 story “Monte Sant’ Angelo” also concerns issues of identity and connection. The idea came from Miller’s experiences during a brief trip to Italy in 1948, the year before Salesman appeared, and it relates how Bernstein, an American Jew, accompanies his friend Vincenzo “Vinny” Appello on a search for Vinny’s Italian relatives, and through this rediscovers himself.
Though similar in appearance, Bernstein is presented as a total opposite to the ebullient Vinny. Initially uncertain of his identity—significantly, we never learn his first name—Bernstein hides behind an aloofness that also masks a jealousy of his friend’s opportunity to make family connections. Regardless of the paucity of Vinny’s success with these family reunions, Vinny remains upbeat, which encourages Bernstein to reconsider his own sense of connection. Bernstein discovers Mauro di Benedetto, an Italian who follows Shabbat routines while having no knowledge of Judaism; he is merely following old family customs. Despite, or perhaps because of, this man’s lack of self-awareness, this testament to the Judaic emphasis on community and tradition leads Bernstein to feel less alone in the world. Knowing his Austrian relatives and millions of Jews had been lost in the Holocaust, Bernstein had felt that the past also had been erased, but now he feels a renewed sense of connection, as Irving Jacobson suggests (507), not only to his Jewish roots and identity but also to the larger world: he now somehow is “at home in this place” (Miller 2016b, 62). Bernstein’s new-found confidence leads him to encourage Vinny to find the graves of the ancestors they had previously failed to uncover, which takes their friendship to a new, more emotionally engaged level. In his 1956 essay “The Family in Modern Drama” Miller asserts that all great plays explore the question: “How may a man make of the outside world a home?” (Miller 2016a, 87–88), and this theme also pervades his stories.
Miller had married Mary Slattery, a Midwestern Catholic, in 1940, but after the success of Death of a Salesman in 1949, he was feeling increasingly estranged from his family. Miller’s 1950s plays all deal with issues of belonging to a community and personal identity. In The Crucible, John Proctor nearly loses himself but in the end embraces the cause of his put-upon neighbors and dies a hero. Eddie Carbone, on the other hand, in A View from the Bridge, rejects the values of his community when he breaks one of their cardinal rules and so dies shunned and virtually alone. Aside from young Bert, who knows where he is heading and what he wants to be, the characters in A Memory of Two Mondays drift aimlessly with little true satisfaction despite their connections to one another. To know oneself is a key to contentment, and at this point Miller knew his relationship with Mary was doomed.
In 1956 Miller divorced Mary to marry a very different type of woman, Marilyn Monroe, who would convert to Judaism to be with him. While briefly residing in Nevada to obtain this divorce, he produced his first version of the story “The Misfits,” published in 1957. It relates the simple lives of local cowboys Miller had met while living in Nevada. Called “misfits” as they feel left behind by the current society that no longer values their way of life, they feel most alive when close to nature, rounding up mustangs for a living. The sad fact is that this endeavor has become both cruel and pointless: the mustangs are as much misfits as they, no longer wanted as mounts and fated to end up as dogfood. There is a strong sense of wasted beauty and potential in the final image of the defeated mustangs waiting tired and thirsty in the desert for their inevitable destruction. It is a destruction wrought upon them by the ceaseless capitalism of the larger world. As Malcolm Bradbury suggests, the story depicts “waste, mechanized futility, and the corruption of the natural” (224), and the meager profit the men make from their round-up only reinforces these negative aspects of their trip.
There are mirrored similarities between Miller and Gay Langland, the story’s central character. Miller was an adulterer with Monroe. Langland left his wife six years earlier, for her adultery, but also because he felt she no longer needed him, which was perhaps more to the heart of Miller’s marriage breakdown. Langland left behind two children, feeling they would be better raised by their mother, just as Miller left Jane and Robert with Mary. Langland, trying to move on with his life, is dating Roslyn, a character who will be expanded later into a part for Monroe to play in the 1961 film version, though also changed from being a teacher to an exotic dancer.
What is most notable in this original prose version is that the central story is about Langland and Perce Howland, a young cowboy. The close of the tale has them driving off together. Though they have only known each other for five weeks, Langland is more concerned with maintaining his friendship with this younger man than with Roslyn to whom he feels too beholden. Both men have the same outlook on life, spurning wages and wanting to rule their own lives, and in this Guido, their pilot friend, is little different as we learn he turned down an airline job to keep his freedom. It is hard not to sympathize with these men however brutal their exploits, for there is a bond and caring camaraderie between them that has value.
Expanding Roslyn into a disruptive sexual presence, whom all the men desire, the later screenplay developed from this tale offers a very different dynamic in which a demanding female presence upends the male bonds, and Langland rejects his former life. As if trying to write his own marriage a happy ending, Miller has the film end with Langland riding to town with Roslyn. However, Miller would leave the film set without Monroe, and they shortly would be divorced. Abigail (The Crucible), Catherine (A View from the Bridge) and Patricia (A Memory of Two Mondays) all suggest tantalizing, seductive versions of Monroe, and her ghost haunted many of Miller’s writings for the rest of his career.
While with Monroe, Miller published three more short stories: “I Don’t Need You Any More” (1959), “Please Don’t Kill Anything” (1960), and “The Prophecy” (1961), all of which were included in Miller’s first story collection I Don’t Need You Any More (1967). The selection of this as the collection’s overall title reflects a theme that often recurs in Miller’s work: the difficult need for balance between individual independence and authentic connections to other people, an issue in Miller’s own connections to his parents and siblings and in his marriages. It is seen clearly in his two plays written in this period of the early 1960s, directly after his divorce from Monroe: After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. Indeed, there are similarities between the child at the center of this title story and Quentin in After the Fall: both flip back and forth between feelings of martyrdom and inadequacy.
Miller’s acknowledgment and essential celebration of his Judaic roots in “I Don’t Need You Any More” with its High Holidays setting and overtly Jewish family is unsurprising after “Monte Sant’ Angelo,” but it is the story’s five-year-old protagonist Martin’s feeling of restriction by women that makes this story most intriguing as he discovers the essential separateness of people. Martin initially is suspicious toward women, especially his mother’s tendency to be overprotective, which is at odds with his nascent desire to become part of the bigger world. Torn between wanting to be fully accepted by his family and needing independence, he equates women with darkness and men with light as he thinks it is they who best navigate the world. He admires what his father and older brother are doing and feels left out of the male activities as they observe the rituals of Yom Kippur—a period of atonement during which adults fast, attend synagogue, and significantly renew themselves for another year.
Forbidden to go swimming on his first trip to the ocean, Martin imagines the stormy waves full of strangely bearded and threatening sins. He contains his impulse to run home to tell his mother, feeling uncomfortable that this child’s world of fantasy is at odds with reality. He recalls a time his mother met the local dentist and confessed to him that she nearly had married this man, which horrifies him as it is evidence of a life she has led separate from the family. Coupled with his unacknowledged realization that she is having another child, which soon will change his position in the household, Martin tries to set himself apart from his mother before she can reject him, and does so quite viciously, striking her and screaming the line in the story’s title.
Christopher Bigsby suggests that the boy’s cry of “I don’t need you any more,” at this point is “less an expression of independence than a confession of bewilderment” (449). Martin is not ready to be alone but is trying to better understand his place in the world. Later while eating back at home and trying to act grownup, Martin spills his soup and reverts to being a child. He calls for his mother, but she refuses him help as family allegiances shift to and fro. He apologizes to his mother, but things escalate into another row until finally his family gives him the attention he needs to authenticate himself: “three congealments of warmth embracing him” (Miller 2016b, 40). But when his father accuses his mother of spoiling him and he sees his brother’s tears over Martin’s treatment of their mother, Martin begins to understand that each member of his family is a separate person, each with a different responsibility to the others, including him. His growth has been less from child to adult than from innocence to awareness.
Martin’s discovery of the essential separateness of people, kept in balance with their need for connection will be expanded into the adult world in 1964 in After the Fall and Incident at Vichy. We see it in After the Fall in the complex relationships between Quentin and his friends and family, and in Incident at Vichy within a wider social milieu as a disparate group of men navigate their potential responsibility to one another as they are being threatened by the Nazis.
The central female in “Please Don’t Kill Anything” (1960) foreshadows the revised version of Roslyn for the screenplay of The Misfits and is based on an event that occurred when Miller was walking the beach with Monroe. Here, the wife’s identification with the unwanted and suffering fish the fishermen have cast aside on the shore, speaks volumes regarding her psychological fragility. She persuades her reluctant husband, Sam, to throw the fish back into the sea. While he dutifully saves them all, even battling against local dogs who play with the fish, there remains an undercurrent that they are fighting a losing battle. In The Misfits Miller has Roslyn persuade Langland not to kill the rabbits that are eating their garden and again not to kill the mustangs. Twice the killing is deferred, but even Monroe felt the closing scene of Langland and Roslyn going off together was unrealistic. As Miller had written with prescience in the earlier story version of The Misfits, “The victims make other victims” (Miller 2016b, 68).
Bradbury suggests that in “The Prophecy” Miller captures “the sensation of life, its moments of senselessness, its challenge, and its metaphysical difficulties” (226). Written at a time when Miller was himself uncertain about his marriage to Monroe, it depicts the underlying problematic relationships of several couples at a party hosted by Cleota and attended by a seer, Madamme Lhevine. All the characters struggle; not knowing what the future will bring, they are guarded, victims of their own delusions, and unable fully to commit. None are truly content or in touch with what Lhevine calls their “inner voice” (Miller 2016b, 126). As a result, they damage themselves and others. Taking risks and facing life honestly, Miller appears to be saying, are necessary to give life deeper meaning. This is a theme Miller also is exploring in the plays he wrote in the early 1960s. Prince Von Berg demonstrates it in Incident at Vichy, and Quentin comes finally to accept it through his relationship with Holga, who is based on his wife Inge Morath, by the end of After the Fall.
The same theme of personal hollowness is taken up in Miller’s 1962 story “Glimpse at a Jockey.” This monologue of an unnamed jockey speaking to a stranger at a bar, is a motif Miller will echo in After the Fall as Quentin confesses to an unnamed listener, but the outcome in the story is less positive. The drive to win at all costs has ruined the jockey’s enjoyment of horse-racing (a metaphor for any life passion), and while he has had great success, he reveals that after a bad fall most people abandoned him. He declares love for his wife and children, but also states that “you draw a line somewhere, someplace” (Miller 2016b, 103), suggesting his inability to fully commit, and he closes by declaring his intent to pick up a woman in the bar. There is a depressive undertone to his speech, and when he reveals how his father deserted the family, we recall Willy Loman’s sense of inadequacy in not knowing who he is because of a similar abandonment. Like Cleota, the jockey is a person who cannot be alone, and yet by his inability to be fully honest or commit he drives himself toward that fate. The story in fact offers a warning as Christopher Bigsby suggests: “The man who tries so hard to conceal himself, in fact slowly reveals the drama of his life which has been the slow loss of meaning, the sacrifice of value to ambition, of love to obsession” (451).
After his father’s death in 1966, Miller wrote three short stories that can be connected to his 1968 play, The Price. The first, “A Search for a Future,” is about a middle-aged Jewish actor, Harry, who learns from his elderly father how to appreciate life by being genuinely involved with definite goals rather than hiding in empty roles and pretending things don’t matter. To have a future, one must commit to the present as an honest and realistic path to getting there. Having placed his father in a nursing home, primarily because he does not want the burden of caring for him himself, Harry also admires his father’s courage in attempting to leave the place and re-engage with his old life. Characters’ confrontations with their own cowardice are depicted often in Miller’s plays, perhaps most pointedly in Victor Franz in The Price, which Miller was working on during this same period. Victor, unlike Harry, cared for his father at home, but has made similar self-limiting choices. He, too, is led to reassess his life after being forced to take a more honest look at the past. Like The Price, the story also can be read as a critique of America’s blindness in the Vietnam War, here made explicit in the repeated image of a young man who has had his eyes shot out on a Vietnam battlefield.
The next story offers a potential aspect of the other brother in The Price, Walter, the successful surgeon who has come to see the emptiness of his achievements and wishes to live more honestly. Originally published under the title “Recognitions,” Miller retitled this short fable “Fame” when he included it in the I Don’t Need You Any More collection. Even while he enjoys his popularity, successful Jewish playwright Meyer Berkowitz has become sick of what he feels is the insincere adulation of people who do not really know him. Wanting to be admired and fearing anonymity, he is surprised by an encounter with an old schoolmate, Bernie Gelfand, who does not know about his success and embarrasses himself by boasting of his own mediocre achievements. Berkowitz knows the revelation of his own success will embarrass Gelfand, but gets a perverse pleasure from doing it, nonetheless, and comes to see that it is he who has created this false public image of himself about which he initially complained. The story exposes Miller’s uneasy recognition that fame and wealth distort how others see you and can interfere with relationships. Success offers a sense of achievement and a boost to the ego, but it also can isolate and lead to guilt, as it does in Walter Franz.
The third story Miller produced at this time, “Fitter’s Night,” is a meditation on marriage and career choices that also will be explored in The Price. Miller introduces us to shipfitter, Tony Calabrese, who works at the Brooklyn Navy Shipyard during World War II. Having been tricked into a marriage by the promise of cash that turned out to be worthless, Tony avoids what he has come to see as a meaningless existence through defensive cynicism. Tony and his friends tend not to push themselves, but this evening he gets called to a difficult repair job. Although he goes to this reluctantly, having completed the dangerous repair, he feels good about his success, wins real respect from the ship’s Captain and crew, and is rewarded with a new sense of purpose and connection in his life. It is another tale about the benefits of true commitment.
After The Price, Miller’s next play is the comedic retelling of Genesis in The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), which is followed by the brief 1976 story, “Ham Sandwich.” Both reflect Miller’s engagement with more whimsical presentation and interest in scenes of closure and renewal. An impressionistic sketch of less than 500 words, this story encapsulates that moment when old friends reunited at a small dinner party after five years apart discover they no longer have anything in common despite joyful memories of their shared past. Their friendship now is awkward and cannot be revived, just as Adam and Eve no longer can return to Eden, and nor should they. It is a condensed parable of how to best embrace changing life and testament to the great changes in Miller’s own life during this period.
First produced in 1977, The Archbishop’s Ceiling is an overtly political play that reflects not only Miller’s growing experience abroad but also his continuing interest in his roots and human nature in general. The following year he published “The 1928 Buick,” a story recalling defining incidents from his past, and “White Puppies” a dark and unusual tale about the potential destructiveness of people, themes he revisits in two plays from 1980: The American Clock a semi-autobiographical tale of the Great Depression and Playing for Time, set at Auschwitz.
“The 1928 Buick” reveals the clannish isolation of people in Miller’s old neighborhood and the empty repetition of their lives. When young, Miller had much admired Max Scions, who was planning to marry Miller’s cousin, Virginia, and drove the title car, often taking her to the beach. After a gap of seven years, having since been to college, Miller discovers the now-married couple is miserable and the car has sadly deteriorated. Max has a new car, which he drives to the beach alone, where he weeps and then dies of a heart attack. A doctor who witnesses this brings his body home but is cruelly shunned by Max’s mother and wife as if he were partly to blame. Virginia spends the rest of her life in a kind of daze, sheltering in her home. It is precisely this kind of narrow existence and wasted potential that so appalled Miller and provoked him to leave behind his old life.
In “White Puppies” Karl and Caroline Gruhn seem to have perfect lives but are revealed to be full of resentments and regrets in a desperately dissatisfying marriage. We learn that in the future one of their children, Joseph, will commit suicide, and Karl will physically attack his wife. This playing with time and perspective is something Miller will develop further in his one-act plays of the 1980s that were produced as Danger Memory! and Two-Way Mirror.
Both Gruhns drink heavily and despite their complacent appearance are filled with contained rage and negativity that bursts through in Karl’s virtual rape of his wife and Caroline’s eventual drowning of the title puppies. Their fraught relationships with everyone, from parents to children to each other, are fed by their own insecurities and inability to connect. When their dog, Sally, gives birth to five puppies, three are the wrong color, and even though they appear more virile than their siblings, it is decided they must be drowned to preserve the pedigree. Karl insists his wife deal with this, a callous decision intended to illustrate the complacent carelessness toward life of people like the Gruhns. We are encouraged to equate their son Joseph to those wasted puppies as he drowns himself in suicide.
Miller’s quirkiness continues into his next story, “Bees,” published in 1990, based on his attempt to exterminate a colony of bees he found in his original Roxbury farmhouse. Almost disappointed by what he assumed was his success, he returns several years later after the house has been sold to discover the bees are back, and he feels an admiration for their persistence. Might the bees represent the persistence of memories and/or his own imaginative thought? The concepts of memory and imagination are integral to his earlier one-act pieces and continue into his plays of the 1990s: The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, The Last Yankee, Broken Glass and Mr. Peters’ Connections. Miller clearly is concerned with past behaviors and their impact on the present, which are also key aspects of his 1990s dramatic output.
In 1991 Miller produced The Ride Down Mt. Morgan, which comedically explores the self-destructive, bifurcated desires of the egotistical bigamist Lyman Felt. The Last Yankee, meantime, offers some simple truths about survival through judicious compromise. In 1992 he published the novella Homely Girl, a Life, which recounts the life of Janice Sessions from youth into her sixties and has a connection to both these plays. Janice has had two very different husbands, albeit not simultaneously: Sam, a confident but arrogant bookdealer and committed socialist activist, whom she found sexually unfulfilling; and the more charming Charles, a blind pianist, who makes her feel like an equal. Each reflects different aspects of her nature to which she is drawn. She also has a family, like Patricia Hamilton in The Last Yankee, who have unrealistic expectations and have made her self-conscious, unconfident, and far too concerned with what others think.
After Sam confesses to raping a German farmwoman while serving abroad, Janice has the excuse she needs to leave him and his outmoded politics. After two abusive affairs, she meets Charles with whom she is very happy and sexually satisfied. She acts on her attraction to him, feeling freed by his inability to see what she believes to be her plainness, and so the blind man ironically teaches her to see herself in a more positive light. After his death, she returns to where they first met and feels content to move forward on her own, filled “with wonder at her fortune at having lived into beauty” (Miller 2016b, 253). Her change of heart and new understanding are reminiscent of Patricia Hamilton in The Last Yankee, who feels encouraged by her husband’s love and respect to reembrace the wonder of life.
The need for understanding and mutual support between couples also lies at the heart of Miller’s next play, Broken Glass (1994), in which he returns to Jewish themes and once again revisits the family culture of his childhood. It also is the theme of the 2001 story “Bulldog,” another highly symbolic tale of maturation and growing independence such as “I Don’t Need You Any More,” but with the unnamed protagonist now thirteen. Wanting a dog, the boy answers an advertisement and gets seduced by the lady selling the puppies, who gives him a puppy for free. Having been sexually awakened the boy now feels embarrassed with his mother as the pair ineptly try to discover how to care for a dog, which soon takes the opportunity to eat an unguarded chocolate cake and dies as a result. The boy considers returning to the lady, about whom he frequently has fantasies, but turns to playing the piano. Just as Martin in “I Don’t Need You Any More” had discovered a new sense of himself on the beach, the boy here feels he is changed as a person: he now has secrets and a separate life from his family. At the story’s end, he plays the piano in a new way that amazes even his mother.
Moving into the twenty-first century there is a definite change of tone in both Miller’s prose and drama. The year 2002 marked the death of his wife of 40 years, Inge Morath, and Miller’s new works are clearly darker and closer to absurdism. Hope, however, still lingers in the margins. The play Resurrection Blues explores the complications of blind acceptance in a satire of overblown capitalism as the dictator of a third-world country is willing to perform a live crucifixion for American television. The stories “The Performance” and “The Bare Manuscript” connect to this theme in a variety of ways.
“The Performance” is a similarly quirky tale that riffs off a famous American dancer who, keeping his Jewish identity a secret, is invited to perform for Hitler. Harold May’s performance is a huge hit, and Hitler offers him a position running a tap-dancing school for the German people. Seduced by Hitler’s sense of power, May initially agrees but soon realizes it would be untenable and leaves. His experience has left him confused and burdened: he cannot connect these dance enthusiasts, whose attention he found flattering, to the men who will kill so many Jews. His momentary desire to ignore corruption in naïve self-service is reminiscent of the behavior of Henri Schultz in Resurrection Blues, who made a fortune off the misfortune of others by turning a blind eye.
“The Bare Manuscript” features Clement Zorn, a writer who has lost his way both in his writing and his relationship with his wife, Lena. He regains impetus toward both through writing about his courtship of his wife on the naked flesh of another woman. Like the dictator Felix Barriaux in Resurrection Blues, Clement begins fairly lost, but is able to regain his passion through the assistance of a willing woman. This way of producing new work allows Clement to “bare” his soul, reexamine his past, and rediscover direction in his art and life. The story portrays Clement’s recognition that the power that breathes life into his work is love, rather like the message of love asserted by the Christ figure in Resurrection Blues.
Miller’s final works are interesting in their insistence on the redemptive power of love and refusal to give up hope. It is hard not to view his own unexpected relationship with the much younger Agnes Barley in his final years as providing inspiration. “The Presence,” a story published in 2003, relates how an older, unnamed male protagonist leaves his sleeping wife to go for a walk and witnesses a young couple making love in the dunes. He later encounters the woman in the sea, who had sensed his “presence;” they kiss and embrace, and he then falls asleep. When he awakes he is unsure if it was a dream, but the experience revivifies his sense of life, and despite the darkness and sense of loss, “a tremendous joy was flowing into him that was no longer connected to anything” (Miller 2016b, 371). Miller’s final play, Finishing the Picture, while returning to the issue of how Monroe had been abused, closes with a cleansing fire and the hopeful romance of Ochsner and Edna, who unexpectedly find something in each other they had been missing.
The year of Miller’s death, 2005, saw two more published pieces of fiction: “The Turpentine Still” and “Beavers.” In “The Turpentine Still” we meet another former leftist, Mark Levin, who has lost his passion for the cause and needs to be taught how to re-engage. His lesson is achieved through two separate visits to Haiti taken thirty-three years apart. On the first visit he meets Douglas, an American who has moved with his family to the island and is determined to distil turpentine there, a decision everyone else views as crazy. Returning to the still on the second trip, Levin learns that it has fallen into disarray but in fact had been built, which he takes as evidence that passionate involvement, however apparently absurd, is its own reward, and that a life without such passion is not worth living.
A kind of companion piece to “The Bees,” “Beavers” is also about unwanted wildlife that is reluctantly destroyed on Miller’s property and teaches the author a lesson. Miller fears the beavers will kill his trees and pollute his pond, so he has a neighbor kill them. The male beaver’s earlier blockage of a pipe coming into the pond seems senseless: the pond was already sufficiently deep for their lodge. Bothered by this, Miller decides the construction must have been done as an act of love for the beaver’s partner. The lesson is that much in life is unknowable, including love, but it is a worthwhile pursuit in and of itself. A positive note on which to end a life.