It’s the big men who command respect

It’s the big men who command respect.”In Willy’s frenzied and exhausted attempt to claim himself, Miller had stumbled on to a metaphor for a post-war society’s eagerness to pursue its self-interest after years of postponed life. In Willy’s desperate appetite for success and in the brutal dicta offered by his rich brother Ben (“Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.”) Death of a Salesman caught the spirit of self-aggrandisement being fed by what Miller calls “the biggest boom in the history of the world”.In the economic upheavals of the 1930s, social realism reflected the country’s mood; plays held a mirror up to the external world, not an internal one. But in the post-war boom, Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1945) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), written in what Williams called his “personal lyricism”, suddenly found an audience and struck a deep new chord in American life. The plays were subjective, poetic, symbolic; they made a myth of the self, not of social remedies.Indeed, the name “Willy Loman” was not intended by Miller as a sort of socio-economic indicator (“low man”). Miller took it from a chilling moment in Fritz Lang’s film The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1933) when, after a long and terrifying stakeout, a disgraced detective who thinks he can redeem himself by exposing a gang of forgers is pursued and duped by them.

The chase ends with the detective on the phone to his former boss (“Lohmann? Help me, for God’s sake! Lohmann!”); when we see him next, he is in an asylum, gowned and frightened and shouting into an invisible phone (“Lohmann? Lohmann? Lohmann?”). “What the name really meant to me was a terrified man calling into the void for help that will never come,” Miller said.Willy is afflicted by the notion of winning – what Brecht called “the black addiction of the brain”. He cheats at cards; he encourages his boys to seek every advantage Victory haunts him and his feckless sons. In a scene from the notebook, Biff and Happy tell Willy of their plan to go into business. “Step on it, boys, there ain’t a minute to lose,” Willy tells them, but their souls are strangled by their father’s heroic dreams, which hang over them like some sort of spiritual kudzu. In another notebook entry, Biff rounds fiercely on Willy: “I don’t care if you live or die. You think I’m mad at you because of the Woman, don’t you? I am, but I’m madder because you botched up my life, because I can’t tear you out of my heart, because I keep trying to make good, be something for you, to succeed for you.”In dramatising the fantasy of competition, Miller’s play was the first to dissect cultural envy in action – that process of invidious comparison which drives society forward, but also drives it crazy.

“You lose your life to it!” Miller says of Willy’s restlessness “It’s the ultimate outer-directional emotion. In other words, I am doing this not because it’s flowing from me, but because it’s flowing against him.” He goes on, “You’re living in a mirror It’s a life of reflections Emptiness Emptiness Emptiness Hard to go to sleep at night. And hard to wake up.” In his mind, Willy is competing with his brother Ben; with Dave Singleman, a successful old salesman who could make a living “without ever leaving his room”; with his neighbour Charley, who owns his own business; and with Charley’s lawyer son, Bernard “Where’s Willy in all this?” Miller asks “He’s competed himself to death. He’s not existing any more, or hardly.”In his notebook Miller wrote, “It is the combination of guilt (of failure), hate, and love – all in conflict that he resolves by ‘accomplishing’ a $20,000 death” In death, Willy is worth more than in life.

His suicide is the ultimate expression of his confusion of success with love and also of his belief in winning at all costs. As a father, he overlooked Biff’s small childhood acts of larceny – taking sand from a building site, stealing basketballs, getting the answers for tests from the nerdy, studious Bernard – and Biff has continued his habit into adulthood, out of a combination of envy and revenge. A notebook citation reads, “It is necessary to (1) reveal to Willy that Biff stole to queer himself, and did it to hurt Willy,” and “(2) And that he did it because of the Woman and all the disillusionment it implied.” In the final version of the play, Biff, admitting in passing that he spent three months in a Kansas City jail for lifting a suit, tells Willy, “I stole myself out of every good job since high school!”At first, Miller saw the $20,000 of insurance money as cash to put Biff on the straight and narrow. ” ‘My boy’s a thief – with 20,000 he’d stop it,’ ” he wrote in the notebook. Instead, Willy’s suicide – the final show of force and fraud, in keeping with his competitive fantasies – is pitched on a more grandiose and perverse note. In an early draft of the terrific penultimate scene, where Biff exposes Willy, there is this exchange:BIFF (to him): What the hell do you want from me? What do you want from me?WILLY: – Greatness -BIFF: No -In Miller’s final draft, Willy, who will not accept his son’s confession of thievery, takes Biff’s greatness as a given as he visualises his own suicide. “Can you imagine that magnificence with $20,000 in his pocket?” he says to Ben.

He adds, “Imagine? When the mail comes he’ll be ahead of Bernard again.” When he goes to his death, Willy, in his mind, is on a football field with Biff, and full of vindictive triumph (“When you hit, hit low and hit hard, because it’s important, boy.”). “He dies sending his son through the goalposts,” Miller says “He dies moving.” Miller pauses “I think now that Kazan had it right from the beginning. He said, ‘It’s a love story.’ “On the last page of his notebook Miller scribbled a short speech to give to the original cast after its members had read the play in galleys: “I want you all to know now that the cannons are quiet that this production has been the most gratifying I have known. I believe you are the finest ever gathered for any play and I am exceedingly proud and gratified not only for myself but for the American theatre.” (The original cast included Lee J Cobb as Willy, with Mildred Dunnock, Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchell.) In its passage to greatness, Death of a Salesman was enhanced enormously by the poetic set design of Jo Mielziner, who created a series of platforms, with Willy’s house as a haunting omnipresent background. However, as Elia Kazan pointed out in his autobiography, “The stage direction in the original manuscript that Art gave me to read directly after he’d finished it does not mention a home as a scenic element. It reads, ‘A pinpoint travelling spot lights a small area on stage left The Salesman is revealed. He takes out his keys and opens an invisible door.’ It was a play waiting for a directorial solution.” It got it.Death of a Salesman also got its share of bad suggestions.