In April 1948, the 32-year-old playwright Arthur Miller got down to construct a 10-by-12-foot studio—two home windows, clapboard partitions, a desk long-established from an outdated door—on land he’d purchased in rural Connecticut. As soon as it was carried out, he sat down and started to write down. By the subsequent morning, he had accomplished the primary act of what would develop into his most well-known work; he’d identified solely its opening traces, he mentioned, and that it might finish within the calamity presaged by its title, Dying of a Salesman. The play was completed in six weeks, and it debuted 75 years in the past, on February 10, 1949. Dying of a Salesman was the primary play to sweep all three main drama awards—the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle, and the Tony.
Eight months into the play’s Broadway run, Miller answered a letter from Barbara Beattie, a junior on the College of Richmond who had reached out as a part of an project for a journalism class. Beattie’s daughter found Miller’s letter whereas serving to her mom, now 94, transfer out of her dwelling. Miller was diligent about his correspondence, in accordance with Julia Bolus, the director of the Arthur Miller Belief and the playwright’s former assistant, however a reply of this size was distinctive. Beattie acquired an A within the class.
Oct 5, 1949
Pricey Miss Beattie;
If there’s a formal genesis of Dying of a Salesman it definitely is within the Elizabethan drama, significantly Shakespeare. From the standpoint of kind I’ve lengthy felt that the spaciousness of his performs had been forfeited for a bodily focus which contradicts life itself. I’ve realized from him, if you’ll, that phrases themselves are the very best scene setting; that it’s not mandatory to plan elaborate plot equipment so as to “set” a scene which itself can clarify itself—briefly, to proceed to the meat of a scene without delay and to make it occur the place and when it logically would occur, and never the place a stationary setting forces it to occur.
As nicely, my kind is one which allows time for what in impact are soliloquies. As I see it, the drive of the Elizabethan kind lay in its means to observe the psychological processes of its protagonists wherever they may lead. The identical could also be mentioned of mine. This can’t be mentioned of the “life like” kind, known as Ibsen’s, which itself imposes upon the story and the characters as a substitute of following them, making means for them. In such performs unbelievable ingenuity, and far time, is wasted within the mere effort to justify the easy assembly of two characters. One might pretty say that in our day this way has come to be a phrase sport wherein the confrontation of characters is made to look “pure” or “actual”. After all it’s truly a extreme type of stylization whose utter unreality and unnaturalness is shrouded by units with home windows that work, rugs on the flooring, and so forth. Thus the means employed truly stand as an obstruction between the imaginative and prescient of the playwright and the emotional receptivity of the viewers. For we don’t dream or inwardly suppose in such phrases however in any other case. We dream in scenes, don’t we. However the preparation for these scenes is direct, rapid, and contained within the scenes themselves. There isn’t a maid who enters and talks to a butler who between them inform us that our father is about to return dwelling after a yr’s absence. We immediately see our father, and in what he does and says lies all related details about his state of affairs. Performs written on this style due to this fact proceed with true naturalness, from relevancy to relevancy, with out sparring about.
Regarding the concept of Elizabethan tragedy and my very own, I might converse for a lot of hours. Central to Shakespeare’s tragedy is the thought of the Fall, which means social stature of a royal degree. I too see the Fall as a crucial facet of tragedy, however our world has modified, and it’s not doable to think about the Fall as that of a socially elevated individual solely. However social standing, to my thoughts, was and is just a superficial expression of a deeper Fall, so to talk, specifically, the destruction of a person’s concept of what he’s by forces opposing him. Any class is thereby given entrance to the precincts of the tragic, and so it’s in a democratic society. Underneath Elizabethan feudalism this notion was unthinkable if solely as a result of none however the royal had the alternate options of seemingly absolute selection, the liberties of the plenty being hedged about by all kinds of inflexible proscriptions. Right this moment we’re all “free” to aspire to any peak, we’ve the hero’s mandatory alternate options. My ethical object, due to this fact, is to try to direct the efforts of males towards the clear appreciation of actuality, exposing the illusory so that man might notice his inventive potentialities. In one other context, Shakespeare was trying the identical factor, as within the historical past performs the place the disaster derives from the unattainable ambitions of the monarch or these of the themes in opposition to the monarch. A sure supreme order is due to this fact implied as having been violated in his work, and in mine. His supreme was feudal; it supposed that life can be good when males behaved in accordance with their social place and neither lapsed right into a decrease degree, (Prince Hal), nor created havoc by trying to crash into one above them, (The King in Hamlet ). My supreme order is much less simple to formulate if solely as a result of it doesn’t but exist, whereas he was writing inside a society whose concept was ample for him. I see man’s happiness pissed off till the time arrives when he’s judged, given social honor and respect, not by what he has amassed however by what he has given to his society. This supreme is posited not for itself, however as a result of I do know that the frustration of the inventive act is the reason for our hatred for one another, and hatred is the reason for our fears. We reward our sellers, our accumulators, our speculators; we penalize with anonymity and low pay our academics, our scientists, our employees who make and do and construct and create. And so the urge that’s in all of us to present and to make is turned in upon itself, and we settle for the upside-down concept that to take and to build up is the good good. And whether or not we reach that or not, we’re eventually left with the attention of our vacancy, our interior poverty, and our isolation from mankind. When a person reaches that data and has the sensitivity to really feel the lack of his true self deeply, he’s a tragic determine; however not until he tries to search out himself regardless of the world can he elevate up in us the precise feeling that one thing high quality and nice and valuable has been found too late. The historical past of man is his blundering try to kind a society wherein it pays to be good. The tragic determine now, and at all times, is the person who insists, previous even loss of life, that the stultifying mixtures of evil give means earlier than the outpouring of humanity and love that’s bursting from his coronary heart. Because of this tragedy endures, and this is the reason it has actually by no means modified excepting in its superficial facets of rank and so forth.
I hope a few of this has been clear. I write at such size as a result of there should not many who’ve taken the difficulty to look at the matter in any respect.
Sincerely yours,
Arthur Miller
This text seems within the April 2024 print version with the headline “Sincerely Yours, Arthur Miller.” Letter utilized by permission of the Arthur Miller Belief, within the care of the Wylie Company LLC. Whenever you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.
