Death of a Salesman (3 page)

This claim is a large one. Willy, to Miller, is not a pathological case, and anyone who plays him as such makes a serious mistake. He is battling for his life, fighting to sustain a sense of himself that makes it worthwhile living at all in a world which seemingly offers ever less space for the individual. The irony which he fails to acknowledge is that he believes that meaning lies less in himself and his relationship to those around him than in the false promises of a society no longer structured around genuine human needs. His vulnerability comes from the fact that he is a true believer. Like any believer he has doubts but these seldom extend out into the world. America, after all, offers itself as utopia. He looks, therefore, within himself. And he is plainly flawed, but that flaw is more subtle than he supposes. He is haunted by an act of adultery which he believes deflected his son Biff from the success which would, retrospectively, have justified his father’s faith in the American way. But he is unaware of the more substantial flaw implicit in his failure to recognize the love of those around him—namely, that offered by Linda, Charley, and, most crucially, Biff himself. His problem is that he has so completely internalized the values of his society that he judges himself by standards rooted in social myths rather than human necessities.

That flaw is a clue to the sense of the tragic that Miller and others have seen in the play. But Miller has also said that he wanted to lay before America the corpse of a true believer. To that degree it is a social play. Tragedy/social play. For the critic Eric Bentley the two were incompatible. Either Willy Loman was a flawed individual, he argued, or he inhabited a flawed society.
⁷
It is a curious opposition. In fact, both are true as, of course, they are in the
Oedipus
plays or
Hamlet
. The argument over the tragic status of
Death of a Salesman
is, finally, beside the point, but Miller’s remark that “tragedy . . . is the consequence of man’s total compulsion to evaluate himself”
⁸
does convey his conviction that tragedy concerns not only the self under ultimate pressure but the necessity for the protagonist if not to justify his own existence then to accept his responsibility for his actions. This Willy cannot do. Denial becomes his mode of being. Whereas a tragic hero comes to self-knowledge, in
Death of a Salesman
Willy does not, and Miller came to feel that this might, indeed, have been a weakness: “I feel that Willy Loman lacks sufficient insight into this situation, which would have made him a greater, more significant figure. . . . A point has to arrive where man sees what has happened to him.” (
Conversations
, 26) It is, finally, Willy’s son Biff who reaches this understanding, though his own choice of a rural life perhaps smacks a little of Huck Finn lighting out for the Territory, ahead of the rest. He is moving against history, that history encapsulated in a stage set which fades from rural past into urban present. Indeed in
The Misfits
, written only a few years after
Salesman
, we see what happens when the modern world catches up with such dreams, as wild horses are rounded up to be turned into dog food. It was also, of course, in such a world, as Willy remembers it, that he was abandoned by his father and brother and glimpsed for the first time the life of a salesman.

If Willy is not a pure victim, then neither is his wife, Linda. The critic Rhoda Koenig objects to Miller’s treatment of women, “of whom he knows two types. One is the wicked slut. . . . The other . . . is a combination of good waitress and a slipper-bearing retriever.” Linda, in particular, is “a dumb and useful doormat.”
⁹
It would be difficult to imagine a comment wider of the mark. As Miller is apt to remind actresses in rehearsal, Linda is tough. She is a fighter. Willy is prone to bully her, cut off her sentences, reconstruct her in memory to serve present purposes, but this is a woman who has sustained the family when Willy has allowed fantasy to replace truth, who has lived with the knowledge of his suicidal intent, who sees through her sons’ bluster and demands their support.

In part a product of Willy’s disordered mind, in part autonomous, Linda defines herself through him because she inhabits a world which offers her little but a supporting role; she is a committed observer incapable, finally, of arresting his march toward oblivion, but determined to grant him the dignity which he has conspired in surrendering. That she fails to understand the true nature and depth of his illusions or to acknowledge the extent of her own implication in his human failings is a sign that she, too, is flawed, baffled by the conflicting demands of a society which speaks of spiritual satisfaction but celebrates the material. Despite her practical common sense she, too, is persuaded that life begins when all debts are paid. It is she who uses the word “free” at the end of a play in which most of the central characters have surrendered their freedom. Linda’s strength—her love and her determination—is not enough, finally, to hold Willy back from the grave. Yet this does not make her a “useful doormat,” but a victim of Willy’s desperate egotism and of a society which sees his restless search as fully justified and her tensile devotion and love as an irrelevance in the grand scheme of national enterprise.

For Mary McCarthy, always suspicious of American play-wrights, a disturbing aspect of
Death of a Salesman
was that Linda and Willy Loman seemed to be Jewish, to judge by their speech cadences, but that no mention was made of this in the text. “He could not be Jewish because he had to be ‘America.’ . . . [meanwhile the] mother’s voice [is] raised in the old Jewish rhythms. . . . ‘Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.’ . . . (‘Attention must be paid’ is not a normal American locution; nor is ‘finally,’ placed where it is; nor is ‘such a person,’ used as she uses it.)”
¹⁰
Forty years later Rhoda Koenig objected that “although the characters are never identified as Jewish, their speech patterns constantly proclaim them to be so. Willy answers a question with another question; his wife reverses normal sentence structure (‘To fix the hot water it cost $97.50’).” She adds, somewhat curiously, that “as a result, Jews can enjoyably weep buckets of empathy without worrying that Gentile spectators will consider Willy’s money-grubbing a specifically Jewish failing.” Speaking on behalf of what she calls “my people,” by which she seems to mean Americans in general and New York Jews in particular, she associates money-grubbing with Jews and identifies a characteristic of Willy Loman that is invisible in the play since it is not money he pursues but success. Indeed, Miller has said that “built into him is—distrust, even contempt, for relationships based only on money.” (
Beijing
135) Insisting that Miller’s “coded ethnicity” was a product of the more anti-Semitic climate of the 1940s and ’50s, she is seemingly unaware that in 1945 Miller had published a highly successful novel,
Focus
, which directly and powerfully addressed the subject of American anti-Semitism. In other words, when he wished to create Jewish characters, he did and without hesitation, and at precisely the moment she supposed he was least willing to do so.

Ironically, a road production of the play, which opened in Boston starring Mary McCarthy’s brother, Kevin, and a number of other Irish-American actors, was hailed as an Irish play. The fact is that Miller was not concerned with writing an ethnically specific play, while the speech patterns noted by McCarthy and Koenig were an expression of his desire to avoid naturalistic dialogue. Indeed he wrote part of the play first in verse, as he was to do with
The Crucible
, in an effort to create a lyrical language which would draw attention to itself. He wished, he explained, not to write in a Jewish idiom, or even a naturalistic prose, but “to lift the experience into emergency speech of an unashamedly open kind rather than to proceed by the crabbed dramatic hints and pretexts of the ‘natural.’ ” (182)

 

Over the years Miller has offered a number of intriguing interpretations of his own play. It is about “the paradoxes of being alive in a technological civilization.” (
Theater Essays
, 419) It is “a story about violence within the family,” about “the suppression of the individual by placing him below the imperious needs of . . . society.” (
Theater Essays
, 420) It is “a play about a man who kills himself because he isn’t liked.” (
Conversations
, 17) It expresses “all those feelings of a society falling to pieces which I had” (
Theater Essays
, 423), feelings which, to him, are one of the reasons for the play’s continuing popularity. But the observation which goes most directly to the heart of the play is contained in a comment made in relation to the production that he directed in China in 1983: “
Death of a Salesman
, really, is a love story between a man and his son, and in a crazy way between both of them and America.” (
Beijing
, 49) Turn to the notebooks that he kept when writing the play, and you find the extent to which the relationship between Willy and his son is central.

They wrestle each other for their existence. Biff is Willy’s ace in the hole, his last desperate throw, the proof that he was right, after all, that tomorrow things will change for the better and thus offer a retrospective grace to the past. Willy, meanwhile, is Biff’s flawed model, the man who seemed to sanction his hunger for success and popularity, a hunger suddenly stilled by a moment of revelation. Over the years, neither has been able to let go of the other because to do so would be to let go of a dream which, however tainted, still has the glitter of possibility, except that now Biff has begun to understand that there is something wrong, something profoundly inadequate about a vision so at odds with his instincts.

He returns to resolve his conflict with his father, to announce that he has finally broken with the false values offered to him as his inheritance. Two people are fighting for survival, in the sense of sustaining a sense of themselves. Willy desperately needs Biff to embrace him and his dream; Biff desperately needs to cut the link between himself and Willy. There can be only one winner and whoever wins will also have lost. As Miller explained to the actor playing the role of Biff in the Beijing production, “your love for him binds you; but you want it to free you to be your own man.” Willy, however, is unable to offer such grace because “he would have to turn away from his own values.” (
Beijing
, 79)

Once returned, though, Biff is enrolled in the conspiracy to save Willy’s life. The question which confronts him now is whether that life will be saved by making Willy confront the reality of his life or by substantiating his illusions. To do the latter, however, would be to work against his own needs. The price of saving Willy may thus, potentially, be the loss of his own freedom and autonomy. Meanwhile the tension underlying this central conflict derives from the fact that, as Miller has said, “the story of
Salesman
is absurdly simple! It is about a salesman and it’s his last day on the earth.” (
Theater Essays
, 423)

 

Miller may, in his own words, be “a confirmed and deliberate radical” (
Conversations
, 17), but
Death of a Salesman
is not an attack on American values. It is, however, an exploration of the betrayal of those values and the cost of this in human terms. Willy Loman’s American dream is drained of transcendence. It is a faith in the supremacy of the material over the spiritual. There is, though, another side to Willy, a side represented by the sense of insufficiency which sends him searching through his memories, hunting for the origin of failure, looking for expiation. It is a side, too, represented by his son Biff, who has inherited this aspect of his sensibility, as Happy has inherited the other. Biff is drawn to nature, to working with his hands. He has a sense of poetry, an awareness that life means more than the dollars he earns. Willy has that too. The problem is that he thinks it is irrelevant to the imperatives of his society and hence of his life, which, to him, derives its meaning from that society.

Next door, however, in the form of Charley and Bernard, is another version of the dream, a version turning not on self-delusion and an amoral drive for success, but hard work and charity. What Miller attacks, then, is not the American dream of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but the dream as interpreted and pursued by those for whom ambition replaces human need, and for whom the trinkets of what Miller called the “new American Empire in the making” were taken as tokens of true value. When, on the play’s opening night, a woman called
Death of a Salesman
a “time bomb under American capitalism,” Miller’s response was to hope that it was, “or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.” (184) The play, of course, goes beyond such particularities. If it did not it would not be played as often as it is around the world. At the same time it has a distinctly American accent and places at its heart a distinctly American figure—the salesman.

In choosing a salesman for his central character Miller was identifying an icon of his society seized on equally by other writers before and since, not least because a salesman always trades in hope, a brighter future. In
The Guilded Age
Mark Twain sees the salesman as a trickster, literally selling America to the gullible. Sinclair Lewis chose a car salesman as the key to his satire of American values, as, decades later, John Updike was to do in his Rabbit Angstrom books. The central figure in Eugene O’Neill’s
The Iceman Cometh
is a salesman, as is Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s
A Streetcar Named Desire
and Rubin Flood in William Inge’s
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs.
David Mamet’s
Glengarry, Glen Ross
once again featured real estate salesmen, the symbolism of which is obvious. But what did Hickey sell, in
The Iceman Cometh
? He sold the same thing as Willy Loman, a dream of tomorrow, a world transformed, only to discover that meaning resides somewhere closer to home.