By Isaac Butler
That certainly seems to be the question lying at the heart of this piece in the Guardian by chief arts staff writer Charlotte Higgins. And while you might thing the answer is a fairly obvious "no," Higgins decides to cherry pick quotes about Miller from American press sources and use the widespread distaste for the last decade of his work as proof that America was just too Right Wing and Ahistorical for Miller's genius.
It's a pretty unfortunate piece of writing, one whose first two paragraphs wouldn't survive about ten seconds of editing for accuracy or fairness:
When dramatist Arthur Miller died in 2005, the Wall Street Journal obituary was headlined "The Great Pretender: Arthur Miller wasn't well liked – and with good reason". New Criterion magazine was blunter, running with "Communist stooge".
His was a tarnished name in the US: he was seen as a man whose best years as an artist ended with the 1950s; who blotted his copybook with a lifelong commitment to the far left; and who acted unforgivably by consigning his son, with Down's syndrome, to an institution as soon as he was born.
While the quotes at the beginning were written-- I remember writing a blog post criticizing Terry Teachout for that WSJ piece-- they're hardly representative. One of the reasons why both the New Criterion and WSJ pieces are so forcefully written is that they're arguing with the mainstream vision of Arthur Miller as one of the greatest American playwrights of all time. These quotes are simply cherrypicked to give a vision of American opinion on Miller that is flat-out false.
Why am I asserting they're cherrypicked? Because they're two of the only negative obituaries published around Miller's death. Take a little gander at the New York Times, for example, the paper most people normally cite when looking for mainstream establishment opinion on matters theatrical. Not only did they publish an obituary calling him the "Moral Voice Of The American Stage" but they created an entire sub-page on their website devoted to appreciations of him, including one from op-ed columnist Bob Herbert, one from Right Wing playwright David Mamet, articles from Jesse McKinley, Charles Isherwood and Adam Cohen, and a complete archive of the Times' coverage of his career. And then there's this WaPo obit, which is fairly representative of how people reacted to Miller's career and death.
Furthermore, over the last decade, there have been around 117 productions of Miller's plays in TCG member theaters, according to a quick search of their database. While this isn't as many as Tennessee Williams (140) or August Wilson (157) it's over twice Eugene O'Neill's number (50) and more than Edward Albee's (98). Arthur Miller has additionally never gone longer than 5 years without a play on Broadway since 1965 and has had seven plays on the Rialto since 2000.
That people believed (rightly, I'd argue) that Miller's best work came early in his career, and that his final decade of plays are kind of a mixed bag, has nothing to do with rejecting Miller as an artist because of his leftist politics. Miller was never rejected here in America, a certain part of his body of work was. Higgins is completely led astray by a British Miller biographer who wants to assert blithely that the quality of Miller's work never flagged and then defend Miller's reputation (hardly under attack) with some good ole-fashioned anti-Amerian bollocks:
Bigsby, professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, also argued that Miller's reputation in the US had been damaged because the American public "never forgot and never forgave his Marxism. Here in Britain, by contrast, we are hardly taken aback by the fact that we have a lot of socialist playwrights and that they write 'state of Britain' plays." Miller's UK reputation had, he said, always prospered by comparison with the US.
He also argued that Miller's feeling for history in his plays caused Americans bewilderment. He said: "It is an immigrant country to do with transcending the past, with wiping the ground behind you because you are leaning into the future. What Miller found in America is a country that has a disregard for history except as myth." Whereas, he said, Miller understood that "the past is not dead, we carry the past with us. We are the past."
Yes, yes. We hate history! And the left! . And of course this explains why the play of Miller's that most American high schoolers know is the one about HUAC that's set during the Salem Witch Trials. Clearly it's because we hate Miller's Marxism and are made uncomfortable by history. That must be why August Wilson-- a playwright who focused largely on the weight of history on the African American experience-- is one of our most produced playwrights. It's bad enough that an academic would assert such lazy, stereotype-based hogwash without evidence, but it's more disappointing that a journalist at the Guardian would pass it along so uncritically.
To say that the WSJ and the New Criterion represent mainstream American opinion on Miller, or on anything theatrical, is like saying that the Telegraph and the Times of London represent their nation's cultural vanguard. That's not cherrypicking, it's willful ignorance.
Posted by: Rob Weinert-Kendt | August 25, 2011 at 11:10 AM
No, I'd say it most definitely is cherry-picking: choosing the conservative newspaper and only known conservative culture journal to kick off a story about lefty Arthur Miller was rejected by a too conservative American society? If I started with that argument and wanted to back it up, those are two of the first places I'd look.
Posted by: Jeremy M. Barker | August 25, 2011 at 02:22 PM