Arthur Miller’s Achievement in ‘Death of a Salesman’ Transcends the Play’s Leftist Politics

NEW YORK — Seven times a week, audiences fill the 1,600-seat Winter Garden, one of Broadway’s largest venues, to see Nathan Lane, 70, an ornament of contemporary theater, spend almost three hours strenuously portraying the last day of a lost man: Willy Loman, a salesman. “Death of a Salesman” is grand despite what playwright Arthur Miller was thinking in 1949. This durable achievement of American dramaturgy will grip audiences in 2049 and beyond because Miller’s art survived his politics. A pastiche of banal leftist cultural criticisms, they were and are irrelevant to the play’s shattering depiction of something timeless, not context-dependent: the pathos of a despairing individual whose dreams exceed his capacities.Loman is an aging and failing salesman riding on a smile and a shoeshine whose delusions of just-around-the-corner success are dying. The play is a harrowing depiction of his, and his similarly delusional sons, colliding with reality.Theater critic John Lahr, in his ideologically enthusiastic biography of Miller, says the play presents Loman as “a victim of competitive capitalism.” It “caught the spirit of self-aggrandizement” that Miller loathed about the postwar consumer-driven economic boom after 15 years of Depression and war. Mr. Lahr, channeling Miller’s vision of America through a “Marxian lens” acquired in the 1930s, says the play dramatizes “the barbarity of American individualism.” The play depicts “the envy and the exhaustion” of mid-century America.This overwrought and underthought assessment insinuates that Loman’s tormented, eventually delusional, finally suicidal psyche mirrors America’s. Mr. Lahr understands Miller’s mentality when writing “Death of a Salesman.” Fortunately, Miller’s politics remain irrelevant to what moves audiences 77 years after the play’s Broadway debut.The political left, always and everywhere, deplores individualism, which supposedly produces a lonely, chilly society needing the warmth of collectivism. Mr. Lahr says Loman exemplifies “American individualism, in which the value of the self is hopelessly tangled with the question of wealth.” In America, “cultural envy” and “invidious comparison” “drives society forward but also drives us crazy.”Miller, nostalgic for wartime solidarity, lamented that Americans’ concentration turned from “society to the self.” He later wrote that his play “opened in peacetime when we were once again free to destroy each other.” Peace, not war, is hell.The postwar American left has often defined itself by its aesthetic recoil from middle-class American enjoyments (cars with too much chrome, and other “self-aggrandizements”). The left thinks the pursuit of individual happiness takes too high a toll on social solidarity, an idea discordant with this 250th anniversary.Miller’s politics would have been the death of his play were Loman presented as Miller thought of him — as a social symptom. That play would today be as dated and boring as a 77-year-old political tract. Loman, like Lear, remains riveting because he is not a mere reflection of a particular social context. He is something more universal: a casualty not of this or that society, but of perennial human foibles.“The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in “Walden” in 1854, before American capitalism burgeoned, and a century before post-1945 America disgusted Miller. And Thoreau was mistaken. Most people meet life’s difficulties by coping, then move on.Loman’s unquiet, raving, finally fatal desperation is not “tragic,” as tragedy is often understood: a great flaw dooming a great person. Loman is nevertheless a movingly sad figure eliciting pathos. We go to the theater to be moved, not to be lectured.“I am not a dime a dozen,” Loman cries, trying to convince himself. His wife, watching him stumble toward suicide, exclaims:“I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid.”If there are more remembered words in an American play than those last four, they are a similar cri de coeur from Tennessee Williams’s 1947 “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Blanche DuBois, her delusions of Southern grandeur fading, cries, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.” Another timeless human condition.In 1950, sociologist David Riesman’s “The Lonely Crowd” diagnosed “other-directed” individuals whose inner emptiness makes them desperate to win approval by conformity to social norms. After a recent performance, Mr. Lane noted the pursuit of “likes” by people posting on social media. Many are salesmen selling themselves, begging for attention to be paid.The Washington Post

Arthur Miller’s Achievement in ‘Death of a Salesman’ Transcends the Play’s Leftist Politics

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