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Jonathan Freedman Miller, Monroe and the Remaking of Jewish Masculinity What does it mean to be a man—a father, a son, a husband, a lover? These questions are central to the work of Arthur Miller, who has over the course of his career explored the contradictory penumbras of meaning surrounding each of these with a persistence and an intensity that often—quite literally—reduced audiences to tears. One such access of sentiment was particularly significant. As Miller recalls in his autobiography , Timebends, when All My Sons opened in Boston, I was surprised to see [his salesman uncle] Manny among the last of the matinee audience to leave. He had a nice gray overcoat on his arm and his pearl gray hat on his head,and his little shoes were brightly shined,and he had been weeping. It was almost a decade since I had last laid eyes on him. Despite my name on the marquee he had clearly not expected to see me here. “Manny! How are you? It’s great seeing you here.” I could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day’s business. Without so much as acknowledging my greeting, he said, “Buddy [Miller’s cousin] is doing very well.”1 Manny’s gratuitous mention of his son sparked a reflux of Miller’s resentment of his lower-middle-class, uninhibited relative—“my boyhood need of his recognition, my resentment at his disparagements, my envy of his and his sons’ freed sexuality, and my contempt for it too” (Timebends, 131). But it also sparked, he claims, his most famous achievement.This was when, Miller later claimed, the method (and, it would seem, much of the matter) of Death of a Salesman was born.The playwright said that the image of the appropriately named Manny’s “hopeless hope of the day’s business,” combined with his empathic vision of his uncle’s life gave the impetus to the work with which he was to be associated for the rest of his career. If this is a crucial moment in the history of American theater, it is also 135 a crucial moment in another, equally theatrical, history: that of JewishAmerican masculinity.The relation between Manny’s family and Miller’s experience represents a divergence between an ideal of maleness that conjoins business success with sexual potency and one associated with more refined sentiments—with cultural attainments and cosmopolitan amplitudes.The anecdote I have begun with suggests the triumph of this form of masculinity over Manny’s, for (not to be too Nietzschean about the matter) to empathize with someone who once frightened or appalled us is also to stage a victory over him—a victory that confirms the very values Miller opposes to those of his uncle, those of art and imagination itself. It is a double triumph as well.The quite worldly success of that play brought with it fame, fortune and the love of a movie star—an undeniable achievement in Manny’s world as well as in Miller’s. The playwright’s double triumph has cultural as well as personal rami- fications, for it accompanies, and perhaps even accomplishes, the creation of an entirely new ideal-type of Jewish masculinity: the persona of the pipe-smoking Jewish intellectual as star-marrying studmuffin—a persona that, later on in the decades,Woody Allen and Philip Roth also came to represent in the publicity-mad public sphere,to their delight and chagrin. It is the construction and ramifications of this new social type that I will be studying here. I should stress, especially to the reader of this volume, that despite my deep respect for Arthur Miller the man and playwright, he is subsidiary to my interest in “Arthur Miller” the cultural phenomenon . (His marriage to Marilyn, Miller told an interviewer in 1983,“is not part of my life now . . . except when some stupid jerk says something about it”;2 it is my hope in what follows to be as little a jerk as possible.) To be sure, there are points of overlap between the two, particularly as Miller commented on or attempted to come to terms with “Arthur Miller” in works like Timebends or After the Fall. But it seems to me that, like so many figures caught up in the publicity machine of American popular culture (like, for example, Norma Jean Baker/Marilyn...

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