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But Mr. Miller called playwriting the hardest work of all. "You know," he
said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you
can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take
a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them."
'I'm a Fatalist'
What Mr. Miller could not swallow was critics. During a 1987 interview, he
dismissed them as "people who can't sing or dance." It was a reprise of a
bitter theme he had sounded throughout his working life.
"I'm a fatalist," he said. "I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is
and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result
of a misunderstanding."
He also once said, "I never had a critic in my corner in this country," and
that he never saved the reviews of his plays, even the raves: "There's an
instinct in me that I had to exist apart from them, lest I rely on them for
my esteem or despair. I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of
anything."
Mr. Miller's antipathy was understandable. At one moment he was hailed as the
greatest living playwright, in the same rarefied company as Tennessee
Williams and Eugene O'Neill, and at another as a has-been whose greatest
successes were decades behind him. Even at the height of his success, Mr.
Miller's work received harsh criticism from some prominent critics. Eric
Bentley, the drama critic for The New Republic in the 1950's, simply
dismissed "The Crucible," writing, "The world has made this author important
before he has made himself great."
Mr. Miller also despaired of the American theater, which he believed was too
profit-oriented to allow writers and actors to flourish. He noted that opera
and ballet in America were supported through contributions but that what he
called the "brutal inanity" of Broadway required that the American theater
pay for itself. "If the thing is gonna be regarded the same as the fish
business, it ain't gonna work," he said in the feisty tones of his New York
City boyhood. "In the whole entertainment enterprise, the theater has become
a fifth wheel. People only take parts hoping it will lead to the movies."
Arthur Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to
Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so
prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment
overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment
district. For a child, as Mr. Miller remembered in "Timebends," life unfolded
as "a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news."
The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that
etched its way through Arthur Miller plays, from "Death of a Salesman" and
"The Price" to "After the Fall," "The American Clock" and "A Memory of Two
Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from
the apartment overlooking the park to considerably reduced circumstances in
the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the teenage Arthur worked as a bakery
delivery boy and developed a knack for carpentry, which left him fascinated,
he said, with "the idea of creating a new shadow on the earth."
He attended James Madison High School, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High
School in 1932, and then went to work in the auto-parts warehouse, earning
$15 a week and saving $13 a week for college. Mr. Miller said he was not much
of a student, but he knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted to be a
writer. He recalled a terrific urge to tell stories, a talent that he said
made him a center of attention.
Prizes Pay Tuition
When he had put away enough money for his freshman year, Mr. Miller went to
the University of Michigan with the hope that he could write a play good
enough to win the Avery Hopwood Award, an honor administered by the
university that carried a prize of $250, enough for a second year at college.
He did not win the first year, but managed to scrape together enough money to
go back. He went on to win two Hopwood Awards, as well as a $1,250 Bureau of
New Plays Award from the Theater Guild. He earned more money by winning that
one prize than he had earned in three years at the warehouse. It became
clearer than ever that playwriting was for him.
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