Saturday, September 1, 2007
Another nail in the coffin
Tom Smith
Oh, swell. Arthur Miller had a son with Down's Syndrome that he abandoned in an institution, and conveniently forgot to mention that in his memoirs. (HT Instapundit.) I wonder if he knew his dad was the conscience of his generation.
This emboldens me to observe that the last time I watched Death of a Salesman I reluctantly reached the conclusion that it kind of sucks. Just as my mother always thought.
And then there is that stupid play about the guy who sold defective parts to the Army Air Force in WW2, like arms profiteering was the most salient event of defeating fascism in Germany, and Japan, but unfortunately not the Soviet Union.
And The Crucible, of course. Except the Salem ladies very probably did not actually enter into contracts with Satan, while Alger Hiss was in fact A. Commie. Spy.
I am so done with all the self-congratulatory left-wing cant that passed for American letters for the 30 or 40 years after WW2. A wasteland indeed.
Well, we won the Cold War. I guess they can have their crappy plays.
Also via Instapundit, this gets it exactly right.
https://rightcoast.typepad.com/rightcoast/2007/09/another-nail-in.html
Comments
Tough day for the University of Michigan- football team loses big to I-AA Appalachian State, and Arthur Miller, among its most famous alums turns out to be a shit bag.
Posted by: U-M | Sep 1, 2007 5:18:21 PM
In regard to Salem, Miller got it all wrong.
There is no evidence that John Proctor even knew any of the girls, let alone the one who was supposed to have had an affair with him. He came to their attention because he publicaly called them liars.
Also, Proctor was in his 60s, and ran a bar. The wife who was spared hanging was his second wife, and much younger (rather than Daniel Day Lewis in the role, it should have been Sean Connery.)
Posted by: John H. Costello | Sep 1, 2007 6:12:41 PM
In regard to Salem, Miller got it all wrong.
There is no evidence that John Proctor even knew any of the girls, let alone the one who was supposed to have had an affair with him. He came to their attention because he publicaly called them liars.
Also, Proctor was in his 60s, and ran a bar. The wife who was spared hanging was his second wife, and much younger (rather than Daniel Day Lewis in the role, it should have been Sean Connery.)
Posted by: John H. Costello | Sep 1, 2007 6:12:57 PM
I know all these clowns like Miller want to be America's conscience, but I think it takes more to be somebody's conscience than just irrationally and obsessively hating him (or them, or it, or whatever).
When I was 16, I thought "Death of a Salesman" was really, like, hard-hitting, realistic stuff. It *spoke* to me, as it probably speaks to a lot of maladjusted teenagers, kids in trouble, tenured faculty, etc. Then I grew out of my own adolescent resentment of my own father, and recognized it for what it was: An extended adolescent tantrum by some poor emotionally-retarded jerk who couldn't grow up. The characters are cartoons, they're a millimeter deep. It's drivel. What's so damn clever about hating your dad? Or is it clever that Miller's one of the few men too dumb to grow out of it? Is that what makes him special?
How in God's name could an adult ever take that play seriously?!
Posted by: Super-Electro-Magnetic Midget Launcher | Sep 1, 2007 6:39:27 PM
I don't mind them having their crappy art. What I resent is all the art they prevented.
Posted by: Bob Hawkins | Sep 1, 2007 6:39:43 PM
To be totally fair, plenty of people in the fifties thought that institutionalization was the most humane thing for Downs' syndrome people.
However, by the seventies and eighties, it had become abundantly clear that this was not true. Miller could have brought his son home and could have afforded home care. He also could have talked about him.
It's no shame to do wrong out of ignorance. But to perpetuate a wrong once you know?
Posted by: Maureen | Sep 1, 2007 7:15:41 PM
Is it really so different from what the Kennedy's did to the girl?
Posted by: dearieme | Sep 2, 2007 6:51:13 AM
Tom, you must read Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals". It is a quick, extremely readable, and brilliant look at 12 narcissistic intellectuals, mainly gleaned through information from their best friends.
Rousseau, Shelly, Mark, Ibsen, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Sartre, Edmund Wilson, Victor Gollancz, and Lilian Hellman.
Rousseau, for example, abandoned each of his five children as infants to certain death in orphanages.
The general requirements to devolve into a malignant narcissist are apparantly:
Detest your parents for never doing enough, especially if they dote on you.
Be an only child, or the oldest child, or the only male child.
Love people in groups of one million or more, but destroy family and burn friends.
It is Johnson's intention to show that charity begins at home, and if you cannot be just at home you are faking it elsewhere.
I don't know where Miller fits in. Perhaps he's a piker.
Posted by: James wilson | Sep 2, 2007 8:34:29 AM
I wonder how many parents, upon finding out that their kid's senior play is going to be "Death of a Salesman", thinks that they would rather go get a root canal.
Posted by: Diggs | Sep 2, 2007 9:32:39 AM
I have a lifetime (or a third of one) doing, being in, or watching Death of a Salesman. When I first touched it I thought it was fabulous; keep in mind the sets were the type never seen before and the actors--Lee J. Cobb, Arthur Kennedy etc. were the best of the best, and the director, one Elia Kazan a coming legend. Everything about it was different. It was artistically sensational, the dialogue never heard before (cussing), and the plot brand new. Twenty years later it had been copied so much---the sets were old hat, the flashbacks ho hum, Kazan was famous and then cast out by Hollywood---it became stale.
The very first time I saw it twenty years later all I could think about Willie's trouble was, "refinance the fucking house, asshole." The children seemed self pitying, useless, self centered jerks and the wife a blind moron.
I now think that it was a period piece and true to the period, one in which the entire population had gone through the Great Depression and WWII and that audience, all over the age of 35, really had no clue as to the coming possibilities. Miller represented the last of the Depression Lefties who capitalism had stomped into the ground and the new generation was ten years away.
One last thing: I was doing the play at a Summer Theatre and camp. The camp had little kids from five through sixteen and these little ones were to be protected from the bad language and the Commie plot. On a rehersal break I spotted two little eyes in a bush next to one of the windows. I went over there and a little girl of about nine (I knew her from teaching her to fish) obviously affected by what she had seen. I asked her what she thought the play was about (had she become a fucking little Commie??). She thought deep. Then she looked at me and said, "I think it means that your parents are always trying to do the right things for you."
Tell me again that the play ain't about that.
Posted by: Howard Veit | Sep 2, 2007 2:17:08 PM
The point of being a lefty is to wear your heart on your sleeve. In that position, of course, a heart doesn't work very well.
Posted by: dearieme | Sep 1, 2007 4:08:23 PM