Arthur Miller, 1915-2005

We are all Willy Loman

By Chris Jones Chicago Tribune arts critic
Published February 13, 2005

In modern-day America, where the free-market flourishes along with sincere Judao-Christian moralism, there is one widespread, fundamental impediment to widespread popular happiness. We desperately want to be liked -- loved, even -- by our fellow human beings. Yet our inherently competitive economic system requires us simultaneously to beat them to the punch. You can see this anxiety-inducing paradox every-where -- the classroom, the church or synagogue, the workplace, even the family room. Government policy -- be it Democratic or Republican -- is shot through with a contradiction that everyone knows but few dare admit. Its fangs inform the debates over taxation, education, Social Security. Sure, we parse these opposing forces where we can: we argue that love can be tough or that we don't crave anymore success than we already enjoy. We think we can be something other than selfish, or that selfishness can be morally righteous. But most of us fail to fool either ourselves or our God for long. And we surely failed to fool Arthur Miller. His "Death of a Salesman," a play about the slow but inevitable destruction of the quotidian foot-soldier of American business known as Willy Loman, is the greatest play ever written about ever-ascendant but ever-nervous America. At this moment of his early peak at the age of 32 (so early that he had to spend years under its oft-debilitating shadow), Miller had our collective, 20th Century number better than any other dramatist -- before or since. He wasn't the first to select the salesman -- the man who produces nothing but lives on a wan smile and a fragile shoeshine -- as emblematic of the underbelly of the American dream. But nobody has ever done so better. As Elia Kazan, the first director of this towering work, figured out during early rehearsals, Willy Loman is indeed a tragic figure. He confuses -- and thus cannot reconcile -- his need to be loved with his need for success. And that failure pulls him apart. Tragically so. He even poisons -- figuratively but agonizingly -- his own children. Many of us worry about doing precisely the same. "All My Sons," the story of a businessman who cuts corners and puts soldiers at risk, was an embryonic probing of much the same issue. Joe Keller was doing what he had to do to thrive in business -- and he forgot what it means to be a human being with a sense of personal morality. All at once, Miller forgave him and refused to forgive him. Within two years, he'd upped the ante to full-blown tragedy. By traditional standards, of course, "Death of a Salesman" is not a tragedy. In the classical era, the critic Aristotle defined the tragic hero as an imperfect but empathetic figure with "magnitude," someone whose fall impacts others beyond himself. Thus when Sophocles' Oedipus -- or Shakespeare's King Lear -- rips himself into pieces due to some manifestation of the love-versus-competition paradox, entire nations come crashing down along with him. Before Miller, tragedy was the elevated province of monarchs and dictators. By contrast, the death of Willy Loman -- Willy 'Low-Man' -- affects no one outside his tiny personal circle. His career was insignificant -- even inept. He was never a great salesman, in part because he made the lifelong mistake of believing that business leaders become great business leaders by being loved by all, rather than by doing better than everyone else, which really is the case. No one has ever paid Willy much mind. That's why Linda, his enabling wife, insists time and time again that "attention must be paid" to this man. "He is not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog," she says, even as that's what happens. But as he articulated in his famous essay "Tragedy and the Common Man," Miller had come to the brilliant realization that classical notions of tragedy held no sway in mature, capitalist societies. In his white-collar, post-war, ideologically oppositional America, Miller saw tragic heroes on every commuter train -- their regal robes replaced by fading business suits. These were men -- and they always were men -- whose magnitude was derived from their ubiquity. There were -- are -- millions of Willy Lomans in America. And, for that matter, in China, where they understood this play all too well. In "Death of a Salesman," Miller argued relentlessly for the brilliant notion of representative magnitude. Why should the nobility of tragedy be reserved for the aristocratic by birth? If millions of people suffer the same fate as Willy Loman, then surely the man has the weight both of numbers and human misery?Attention, indeed, must be paid. There are those who find this play to be a flawed melodrama -- or, at best, the ripe tale of a pathetic but not tragic man who sleeps with a floozy, reveals himself to be a hypocrite, and thus sends his kids off the rails. You can make that case. Many productions -- especially the simple-minded ones -- have emphasized it. But if you think that this play is a battle between an individual soul and the wolves of the great American marketplace, you must reach the conclusion that it's the great American tragedy. We've all known Willy Loman -- he has been our co-worker, our friend, our father. We have bits of him inside ourselves. Miller, friend of the working stiff, said that he mattered. And he was right.