Arthur Miller: 1915-1962 (review)

Dramatists – America's big three in particular, Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller – continue to inspire writers in the profitable field of biographical writing, and while that writing is not always inspiring in and of itself, it pays rich tribute to the fascination readers have with such towering cultural figures. O'Neill, Williams, and Miller, of course, each wrote compelling dramas based on their early experiences; plays like Long Day's Journey into Night and The Glass Menagerie demonstrate with great psychological candour the many ways in which an artist's life nourishes his art. Miller, too, displayed a similar impulse, though, in his case, it can be most clearly illustrated in No Villain and They Too Arise, the prize-winning plays he composed while still an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. (Later in his career, he would expose himself further, as Quentin in After the Fall and Paul in Finishing the Picture). While it could be argued that these dramatic portraits partake of the fictive, if not the self-aggrandizing, there remains a sense in which all of them ring spiritually and emotionally true. Strong actors in the theatre have dignified the integrity of such works by responding to their roles with honesty and precision.

Of the three playwrights, Miller is in some ways the most difficult subject for a biographer, a result of the fact that he could often be evasive. In 1987, he published his remarkable book Timebends: A Life, calling it a "Parthian shot" thrown against would-be interpreters who might seek to upstage him by attempting to have something like the final say. This was also the first time he would agree to discuss publicly his complex ten-year relationship with Marilyn Monroe. The writing of that autobiography is now part of his biography, too; so that the challenge for the conscientious chronicler of Miller's life is how to weigh that very life against what he had to say about it himself, and in print. The results have been decidedly mixed, even at times partisan, most especially when Miller is miscast in the role of reluctant acolyte to Marilyn – this time with a mythic capital M. (Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates are almost embarrassing to read in this respect.) Martin Gottfried's biography Arthur Miller: His Life and Work (2003) sets out to prove the discrepancies between Miller's private life and public posture, as though, for example, Gottfried had never considered the dictum that people don't necessarily have their vices and virtues in neat categories, though they have them anyway.

In Christopher Bigsby's biography Arthur Miller, we are on much firmer ground and are finally presented with a study that will stand the test of time. Bigsby is, without question, the pre-eminent critic working on Miller today, and his long history with the writer pays dividends on nearly every page. More to the point, he has had access to unpublished Miller material as well as to the author himself. These factors alone certify his credentials and credibility as well as his authority. The biography he has written – well over seven-hundred pages that take us only through 1962 (more to come) – will be a basic research tool well into the foreseeable future for anyone working on Miller. It's an important book.

Bigsby sets out to tell Miller's story as a representative life, one that is set against the story of America itself. It's a clear choice on his part, and it leads him to extensive commentary on the social and political climate and on many other personalities who figure prominently within it: among them, Paul Robeson, the sitting members of HUAC, the Hollywood Ten, and Elia Kazan. That makes a lot of sense for a critic based in England – Bigsby, based for many years at the University of East Anglia, is well regarded as a prime mover behind the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies – though...