February 21, 2005
Death of a Playwright
Arthur Miller died last Thursday. The playwright most famous for "Death of a Salesman" received a lot of accolades, yet some conservative press has veered off "de mortuis nil nisi bonum" and pointed out some problems with his work and his philosophy.
Sugarchuck e-mailed me about Terry Teachout's Wall Street Journal Piece -- he found it very harsh.
Well, Mark Steyn is no friendlier. In today's Spectator, he has a go at Miller's anti-Americanism and the esteem to which he is held in Britain. I liked this line:
Even in his disparagement, Miller was right to grasp that the salesman is a critical American archetype. In the dictatorships he admired, from the USSR to Cuba, you don’t need them: there’s no competition, no choice, nothing on the shelves, and every checkout line in the supermarket is perforce for five items or less. And in a one-party state, politicians don’t need to be salesmen, either — or at least not to their own people: Gorbachev and Castro were very canny in the way they flattered Miller, understanding that a man of such unbounded self-regard judged the health of nations and political systems in the same way he did the health of the American theatre — by how fulsomely they acknowledge his genius. And Fidel and Gorby were applauding long after Broadway had fallen silent.
It's just one more work of art that leans left: I can't not read Steinbeck -- or Stephen King -- because I disagree. I watch "It's a Wonderful Life" every year with my internal economist bound and gagged. I enjoy the art and just know that they're wrong.
Willy Loman is one of the archetypical characters in American fiction. Sugarchuck ranks him with Huck, Tom Sawyer and Gatsby You create a character like that and as Lileks would say you've proven you can "hit the right keys."
Requiescat in pace.