Companion to an Untold Story

Death of a Salesman

59 Death of a Salesman. A play much taught in schools. Arthur Miller innovates in making the protagonist of his tragedy not the typical prince but a low man, Willy Loman, to whom, though he leaves behind no monument to his industry and talent , attention must be paid. In April 1984, Joel, now thirty-four years old, had a three-day stint substitute-teaching the play to an English class at South San Francisco High. It was, he said, “chock full of themes and characters perfectly designed to make me miserable at this moment in my life.”20 The sore spots are apparent in Miller’s plot of two brothers in rivalry for their father’s love and blessing . Says Biff to Happy, “Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!”21 Joel’s own brother was Michael, some four years older and his lone sibling. “There was . . . intense competition with Michael,” Gale commented.22 Joel himself identified Michael as a rival in a poem from The Glory Hole: 20 Letter, April 7, 1984. 21 Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (New York: Viking, 1949), 16. For other themes in Miller, see Gas (“I suddenly couldn’t drive any more” [13]) and Time travel (“I don’t remember the last five minutes” [13]). 22 Gale, e-mail to me, November 4, 2002. Gale felt herself drawn into this competition, where she was pitted against Michael’s wife. 60 I am in every way your brother. The womb you stretched before me led me into this world and together we grew in love and constant contention. The world that bore us is the object of our greatest jealousies; her favor is claimed by us both. Our father, who gave us the freedom we realized in the land we call our home, watches and judges our growth, ready to snatch this gift from our hands if he deems us undeserving. We are in every way brothers: Let us have our fights and arguments; And let us always have our love. No one will mistake this for Whitman, but it does lay out the family romance on a grand terrain in the classic American way.23 Joel’s mother is the bountiful continent, spouse to a founding father, his gift of freedom not quite an inalienable right. The patriarch is less James Madison than Isaac; the siblings are biblical, Jacob and Esau in contention for a blessing only one can have. Many of the poems in The Glory Hole are exercises in sarcastic scatology, but in this one the sentiment is refreshingly direct: Michael was someone with whom Joel wished to share love. In light of their future relations, the wish seems wishful thinking indeed, and the notion of a contest over the country’s bounty a laughable misassessment of the brothers ’ relative chances. 23 One of Joel’s courses at Berkeley was taught by Henry Nash Smith, the “grand old man,” author of Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1950). ...