The Tragic Commitment: Some Notes on Arthur Miller

THE TRAGIC COMMITMENT: SOME NOTES ON ARTHUR MILLER ARTHUR MILLER has created at least three images for the American public. To the vast audience of mass communications, he has been variously identified with Marxism, Marilyn or misfits. To the theaterminded person, his name evokes the memory of a play about a salesman. To a much smaller audience of interested readers, he is distinguished by a significant body of dramatic theory and critical comment on contemporary serious drama. It is precisely in this third capacity that he has made some of his most important contributions to the tradition of the American theater. 1949-1957: The Development of a Critic The key document in understanding Arthur Miller is not his play Death of a Salesman nor even his well-known essay "Tragedy and the Common Man," but the preface which he wrote for his Collected Plays in 1957. One critic, grasping the importance of this essay on dramatic structure, has called it "one of the major documents of American theater."! There are, unfortunately, few critics who are sufficiently aware of Miller as a critic himself. The opinions of the critics of Miller the playwright are well known. John Gassner, for instance, has spoken of Willy Loman as a hero of "low tragedy" who is to be pitied but who is not tragic because he lacks "enlightenment."2 Another critic concludes that Miller and playwrights like him have not written tragedy because their heros are not free: "In the best known drama of Williams and Miller the central characters are victims of the 'system' in which they mature."3 Another speaking of the hero in Death of a Salesman says: "As a study of a little man succumbing to his environment, rather than a great man destroyed by his greatness, it is characteristically modern."4 Francis Fergusson has made an incisive criticism of all modern realism, which includes Miller, as at best a truncated version of the tragic rhythm.5 To sum up the general criticism of Miller by serious critics, one might say that he fails to achieve genuine greatness because his dramatic vision is too narrow. 1. The same critic immediately begins to find the public image of Miller intruding into his critical theory. He concludes that Miller's neo-hberal views of man and society only help to confuse the theme of Death at a Salesman so that instead of tragedy "irony and pathos are the most we can get ... /~ TOIn Driver, "Strength and Weakness in Arthur Miller/' Tulane Drama Review, IV (May, 1960), p. 45. 2. The Theatre in Our Times (New York, 1954), p. 65. 3. William McCollum, Tragedy (New York, 1957), p. 29. 4. Herbert Muller, The Spirit at Tragedy (New York, 1956), p. 316. 5. The Idea at a Theater (New York, 1957), pp. 156-90. 11 12 MODERN DRAMA May If, however, there has been misunderstanding between the critics and the playwright, Miller himself must assume part of the blame. The plaY'''nght has written hvo major critical documents, "Tragedy and the Common Man" in 1949, and the preface to the Collected Plays in 1957. It may have appeared that the views of the first article were definitive and final. But if both pieces are~,ljdied together, one finds that many of the views that were confusing or poorly stated in the first essay were clarified and even changed in his second more mature work. It is this clarification of the dramatic principles operative in his plays that gives Miller his peculiar strength in the preface. The failure of some to understand Miller's basic approach to drama may indicate that they ha';re not recognized the growth of the author's critical thought over the intervening years between the publication of "Tragedy and the Common Man" and the preface to the Collected Plays. To understand this growth in Miller's critical thought, one must first tum to "Tragedy and the Common Man." Published immediately after the opening of Death of a Salesman in New York in February, 1949, this essay delivers an apologia to the American public. First, the author vindicates his writing of "tragedy" in a modem scientific society. Secondly , he defends the...