Penguins on Parade: The Penguin Arthur Miller!

Some Penguin Classics are so physically beautiful they stifle dissent, at least temporarily. This is certainly true for most of the “Deluxe” titles (again, we shall not turn our thoughts toward a Deluxe edition of The Liars’ Club, lest those thoughts become impure …), and wow, even in that company, one of the newest Penguin Classics Deluxe editions really stands out: the new Penguin Arthur Miller, a big, gorgeous volume designed by Paul Buckley with cover art by Riccardo Vecchio (the art isn’t just a closeup of Miller’s hangdog face, thank God – the wraparound features 1950s-era New York City). This is a big book, 1300 pages, with French flaps and deckle edges, and its binding is so good that it obediently lays open at almost any page. It’s a genuinely hefty volume, capable – as I know now from first-hand experience – of being read and annotated and battered for a week straight. This is the Arthur Miller volume to own for a lifetime.

If you want such a thing, that is. Certainly you get the impression from reading the Foreword by playwright Lynn Nottage that you should want it. In a quick piece titled “Letter to a Young Playwright,” she takes the pretty much standard line about Miller’s worth in American letters:

I found myself drawn to Miller’s work because he wrote with a sense of purpose – an evangelical fervor rooted in his overarching concern about the shifting moral fault lines that threatened to fracture the foundation of American culture in the twentieth century. Indeed, Miller never backed away from the social issues of the day, mining his own misgivings and frustrations to create plays that probed the complexities of a flawed society. He had great empathy for the disaffected souls that hovered on the edges of darkness, light-seekers trying to negotiate a world that was rapidly redefining itself in the aftermath of the Depression and World War II.

It’s passionately – if somewhat tritely – stated (when writing about the critical and financial failure of Miller’s 1944 play The Man Who Had All the Luck, she has to contort herself to avoid using any kind of gendered pronoun: “These setbacks remind us that a playwright is shaped not only by how one copes with success, but, also as important, how the playwright rebounds from failure”). But I’ve never seen it in this writer. I know millions of people have read his plays and seen them performed – unlike our previous entries in this Week O’ Penguins, I’m not in his case saying he doesn’t belong in the Penguin lineup – but to me, he’s always seemed not only to be a mediocre dramatist but also an intensely insecure one. The mediocrity strikes me as self-evident; virtually nothing in his plays happens for organically dramatic reasons, virtually nothing progresses, and the characters are as flat as baking pans. And the insecurity jumps out in the texts of the plays themselves, where Miller is a stage mother from Hell, constantly hovering at the elbows of every actor and director, making sure every intonation and nuance is performed exactly the way he himself envisioned it, and to Hell with their own interpretations. It’s a fundamental distrust of the whole process of staged drama, and the only reason a playwright would feel it is if he wasn’t all that sure he’d done his job well enough so that his words led naturally to the interpretations he wanted.

His most famous play, Death of a Salesman, is absolutely lousy with such micro-management, but it runs through all the plays. Take for example his oft-staged (and Halloween-friendly) 1953 play about the Salem Witch Trials, The Crucible: it starts off with “A Note on the Historical Accuracy of This Play” (as if a dramatist has any business even thinking of such a note), then it proceeds to a four-page dissertation on Puritan Massachusetts – all this before Act One even begins. And even once the play has started, Miller is constantly there fussing with things, as in a quiet moment at the beginning of Act Two, between John Proctor and his wife Elizabeth:

PROCTOR, with a grin: I mean to please you, Elizabeth.

ELIZABETH – it is hard to say: I know it, John.

He gets up, goes to her, kisses her. She receives it. With a certain disappointment, he returns to the table.

PROCTOR, as gently as he can: Cider?

ELIZABETH, with a sense of reprimanding herself for having forgot: Aye! She gets up and goes and pours a glass for him. He now arches his back.

PROCTOR: This farm’s a continent when you go foot by foot droppin’ seeds in it.

ELIZABETH, coming with her cider: It must be.

PROCTOR, he drinks a long draught, then, putting the glass down: You ought to bring some flowers in the house.

ELIZABETH: Oh! I forgot! I will tomorrow.

PROCTOR: It’s winter in here yet. On Sunday let you come with me, and we’ll walk the farm together; I never see such a load of flowers on the earth. With good feeling he goes and looks up at the sky through the open doorway. Lilacs have a purple smell. Lilac is the smell of nightfall, I think. Massachusetts is a beauty in the spring!

ELIZABETH: Aye, it is.

It’s always struck me that Arthur Miller wasn’t so much a great dramatist as a second-rate novelist, but I realize I’m distinctly in the minority on that point. And lord knows, I tried to change that opinion! I lived with this beautiful Arthur Miller Penguin volume for days on end, taking it with me as I walked around in the traditional, nothing-to-see-here-folks 80-degree Boston October weather; I had strangers on subways comment on how lovely the book itself was, and I enthusiastically agreed with them. I talked to a couple of people who’d actually seen an Arthur Miller play, but their recollections were fuzzy. One older man told me about having seen a recent Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman,” and I asked him how he felt when he was leaving the theater. He looked puzzled, and then his face brightened. “My wife and I had a great dinner before the show.” We ended up talking about that, which was fine by me.