Arthur Miller, American Rebel

One or another play written by Arthur Miller is being performed somewhere in the world on any given night of any year, as biographer Christopher Bigsby reminds us. If distant audiences find something in these dramas, translated into such different languages and for such different cultures, then surely Miller has captured something of the human spirit at large. A recent New York Times review of the revived "A View from the Bridge" begins by admitting that the reviewer went to see it wondering if the play really needed a revival. He ends by admitting his doubts were misplaced: Miller had captured "the realm of classical tragedy."

How curious, then, to be reminded by the biographer that on Miller's death in 2002, the arts journal New Criterion headlined the obituary, "Arthur Miller, Communist Stooge," and the Wall Street Journal just as predictably headed its version, "The Great Pretender: Arthur Miller Wasn't Well Liked—and With Good Reason." The neoconservative assault, echoing the early 1950s rage of the victorious wing of post-Roosevelt and Trumanesque liberalism against the losers, was precisely that Miller spoke only to the illusions of the anti-anticommunists and would, like their cause, be soon forgotten. How wrong they were! Miller seems to be as durable as the Vietnam Syndrome and behind it, the deeper doubts about that famous nexus of empire and American salesmanship. The doubts disappear, only to pop up again, by now as often in films as in theater, perhaps demonstrating yet one more time the long arm of what may properly be called (but by enemies more likely than friends) Popular Front culture.

To many of us, Arthur Miller nevertheless seems gone a long time. Culturally curious but naïve teenage boys, growing up in the 1950s (and this reviewer was one of them) inclined to merge the name Arthur Miller with that other notorious Miller—Henry. They were both suspect, especially for populations between the East and West Coasts, and their names were connected somehow with knowledge about female sexuality and access to it.

The similarity ends at this point, of course. Henry Miller was a mere symptom, Arthur Miller a creator of enormous importance in his time and, as it turns out, for new generations—especially those, perhaps, facing the current Great Recession without the advantages that their parents enjoyed. The later 1960s and 1970s, however, saw the star of the two Millers' reputation drift downward, mainly because the forces of censorship and condemnation seemed so thoroughly discredited. Like the great satirist of the printed page, Mad Magazine inventor Harvey Kurtzman, and his counterpart of stand-up comedy, Lenny Bruce, they struggled to recast their art and their fate. Mostly, they did not succeed.

Perhaps it is significant that the Arthur Miller Centre is at the University of East Anglia rather than, say, at Harvard (whose press published this book) or another vaunted American location. Miller's spirit may be said to have gone into exile and stayed there. Christopher Bigsby, director of the Centre and a past-master at writing biographies of playwrights, is perhaps better suited for the task than anyone on this side of the ocean. Over there, Hollywood blacklistees were treated as heroic figures. Some of them, including scriptwriter Donald Ogden Stewart and director Joseph Losey, never bothered to come home—and for good reason.

In any case, this is the most exhaustive biography of Miller extant or likely to be written for some time. The biographer wishes to be especially sensitive to a subject that others pursuing Miller, and following the artist's own lead, put to the side: his Jewishness.

The weight of this factor is very great, indeed. Jewish Americans of the 1920s through the 1950s created a radical theater movement (with mainstream English language theater alongside a booming Yiddish stage), supplying playwright, director, set designer, actors, and audience. They also brought from Europe and developed the "approaches," above all the "Method" that ironically led away from the British-style formalism that...