All My Sons and the Larger Context

All My Sons and the Larger Context BARRY GROSS ARTHUR MILLER HAS ALWAYS MAINTAINED that his plays have not been immediately understood, that After the Fall was not about Marilyn Monroe and Incident at Vichy was not about anti-Semitism, that A View from the Bridge was not about longshoremen and The Crucible was not about McCarthyism, that Death ofa Salesman was not about the business world and All My Sons was not about war-profiteering. What, then, twenty-five years later, is All My Sons about? In 1947 the generation gap was not the cliche it has since become and All My Sons is certainly, on one level, about that. Joe Keller is almost twice his son Chris' age. He is an "uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things," for instance, that new books are published every week or that a man can earn "a living out of ... old dictionaries." He is the product of a vanished America, of a time when "either you were a lawyer, or a doctor, or you worked in a shop," a time oflimited possibilities for someone "put ... out at ten" to "earn his keep," for someone who learned English in "one year of night-school" and still does not know what "roue" means or that it is French, still says "brooch" when he means "broach." We can only guess at Joe Keller's history because the kind of play Miller had in mind would, of necessity, exclude it. All My Sons was to be a ')urisprudence," and, as Miller says in the introduction to Collected Plays, when a criminal is arraigned ... it is the prosecutor's job to symbolize his behavior for the jury so that the man's entire life can be characterized in one way and not in another. The prosecutor does not mention the accused as a dog lover, a good husband and father, a sufferer from eczema, or a 15 16 BARRY GROSS man with a habit of chewing tobacco on the left and not the right side of his mouth.1 Well and good: Miller is entitled to establish the design for his own work and to be judged according to the terms he proposes. But the jury is also entitled to hear the defense, indeed must hear it if it is to reach a fair verdict, and Joe Keller's unrevealed history is his defense. "Where do you live, where do you come from?" Chri~ asks him, "Don't you have a country? Don't you live in the world? What the hell are you?" The answers lie buried in Joe Keller's past. Is he an immigrant? The son of an immigrant? If he had to learn English in night-school, does that mean he grew up speaking German? Yiddish? These are not irrelevant questions if Joe Keller's crime is to be understood in human, rather than aberrational, terms, and it is clearly an important part of Miller's design that Keller's crime be seen as a profoundly human one. There are logical answers to Chris' questions; that Chris cannot imagine them is both result and proof of the generation gap that inevitably separates father and son. The gap can be defined by their differing perceptions of and attitudes toward the idea and the reality of community. Joe Keller is guilty of an anti-social crime not out of intent but out ofignorance; his is a crime ofomission, not ofcommission. For him there is no society, and there never has been one. It is not simply that Joe's "mind can see" only "as far as ... the business" or that for Joe "the business " is "the world." Actually, he does not see as far as that and for him the world is smaller. Where does he live? He lives at home. Does he live in the world? No. Does he have a country? No. What the hell is he? Provider, bread-winner, husband and father. His world is bounded by the picket fence that encloses the suburban back yard in which the play takes place, his commitments and allegiances do not extend beyond its boundaries . He is an...