Anti-Communist PING! "Death of a Fellow Traveler"
Posted on 02/14/2005 9:38:17 PM PST by quidnunc
New York – The bells tolled for Arthur Miller all weekend long — but most of them were made of tin. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, led with a two-liner so flat it could have closed out of town: "The man who wrote 'Death of a Salesman' died Thursday. And attention must be paid." (If you don't recognize the most famous line of Miller's most famous play, first produced in 1949, consider yourself young.)
Elsewhere, overstatement was the order of the day. The British director David Thacker said that "if you leave Shakespeare out of the frame [Miller] is as great as any writer in the history of playwriting," while Steven Winn of the San Francisco Chronicle called "Death of a Salesman" an "American 'King Lear,' " comparing its author to Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Theodore Dreiser, Woody Guthrie and John Steinbeck. (Steinbeck I'll buy.) Marilyn Berger's New York Times obituary praised Miller for having "exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream," an observation sufficiently obvious that variations on it also appeared in the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune and Time magazine, as well as in at least one of the Times' other pieces about Miller.
Compare these wet kisses to what Harold Pinter said when he learned of Miller's death: "In the United States, they didn't like him very much because he was too outspoken and too critical of the way of life in the United States and certain assumptions that were made over there." And who, pray tell, were those mysterious "they"? …
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(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
Let the bouquets begin. The playwright Arthur Miller died yesterday at 89. An icon of the left-liberal establishment for decades, Miller has already been showered with a diabetic's nightmare of saccharine eulogies from … well, from just about everywhere. I won't intrude into this love-fest except to note that a measure of scepticism about Mr. Miller's halo of sanctity is in order. In September 2000, we published a dissenting note about Miller in The New Criterion.
We Now Know
Some myths die hard. One of the most recalcitrant in recent times has been the myth of McCarthyism—the myth that America in the late 1940s and early 1950s was in the grip of a fearsome, paranoid “witch-hunt” against supposed Communists and other alleged traitors. According to this myth, the assault was fearsome because it blighted thousands of careers and lives, and it was paranoid because it was essentially groundless. Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee ranted on about Communist spies, but really, the myth of McCarthyism maintains, there were no spies to speak of, only liberals like … well, like Alger Hiss.
You might think that by now liberals would have given up on this one. After all, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the subsequent opening of many Soviet archives, there is indisputable evidence—a mountain of it—for what had long been alleged by cold warriors. The liberal line had always been that the American Communist Party was basically an expression of home-grown radical sentiment; in fact, it had from the beginning been a tool of Moscow; moreover, many of the radical “martyrs” of the period were hard-core Stalinists and KGB operatives. This is not speculation: it is hard and fast historical fact. As the historian John Gaddis put it in the title of his 1997 history of the Cold War: We Now Know.
Or so we would have thought. But what is evidence in the face of self-righteous political animus? Not much, if Arthur Miller’s breathtaking expostulation about the origins of his play The Crucible is any guide. Entitled “Are You Now or Were You Ever … ?,” Mr. Miller’s latest exercise in self-congratulation appeared in—it is almost too good to be true, but is is true—The Guardian, the most predictable left-wing “quality” paper in London. There had, of course, long been speculation that the activities of Sen. McCarthy and HUAC had been the chief inspiration for The Crucible; no one, we think, will accuse Mr. Miller of having been overly subtle in his deployment of symbolism. But he has now for the first time cleared up any remaining doubts: “It would probably never have occurred to me to write a play about the Salem witch trials of 1692 had I not seen some astonishing correspondences with that calamity in the America of the late 40s and early 50s. … I refer to the anti-communist rage that threatened to reach hysterical proportions and sometimes did.”
Mr. Miller has always been a reliable source of radical-chic clichés and he does not disappoint in this new recollection. We can well believe him when he remarks that “Practically everyone I knew stood within the conventions of the political left of centre; one or two were Communist party members, some were fellow-travellers, and most had had a brush with Marxist ideas or organisations.” But is it naïveté or something else when he goes on to declare that “I have never been able to believe in the reality of these people being actual or putative traitors any more than I could be, yet others like them were being fired from teaching or jobs in government or large corporations.” Mr. Miller is especially incredulous that any of his fellow artists could have engaged in traitorous activities: “The unwelcome truth denied by the right was that the Hollywood writers accused of subversion were not a menace to the country, or even bearers of meaningful change. They wrote not propaganda but entertainment, some of it of a mildly liberal cast, but most of it mindless, or when it was political, as with Preston Sturges or Frank Capra, entirely and exuberantly un-Marxist.”
Really? Mr. Miller concludes his piece by speaking of the black singer Paul Robeson, whose “declaration of faith in socialism as a cure for racism,” he says, “was a rocket that lit up the sky.” Robeson is widely considered a martyr of HUAC. In fact, he was a doctrinaire Stalinist who believed that only in the Soviet Union were blacks really free. At the World Peace Congress in 1949, Robeson publicly declared that American blacks would not fight for the American flag, least of all against Moscow: “It is unthinkable,” he said, that his race “would go to war on behalf of those who oppressed us for generations.” Russia he described as “a country which in one generation has raised our people to the full dignity of mankind.” In the same year, like many other artists under Stalinist “discipline,” he voluntarily gave up acting and singing, explaining that “I have no time in the political struggle of today to entertain people.” Robeson received the Stalin Prize in 1953, the year of the dictator’s death, and he signed a eulogy that contained the benediction “Glory to Stalin. Forever will his name be honored and beloved in all lands.”
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(Roger Kimball ['Armavirumque'] in The New Criterion, February 12, 2005)
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Anti-Communist PING! "Death of a Fellow Traveler"
I got slagged for pointing this out by oh so many fREEPErS who thought he was the cat's meow, iow a grand artiste.
The rest was, admittedly, pretty mediocre. But I confess the sagas of Willie Loman and John & Elizabeth Procter moved me.
Death of A Salesman has made two generations of readers and theatergoers cry, think, look at their lives differently. I've seen it half a dozen times, as have my parents, and my teenage children saw and were moved and amazed by the most recent revival. And the Crucible was written in response to McCarthy but when my kids read and perform it they don't really think about that, because the play is a powerful statement about the power of the individual conscience standing against unthinking group-think, and that is a lesson that needs to be taught across ideological lines. Yes, Arthur Miller was a writer of ideas. Somebody had better be.
In as much as 'the gods are not always kind to those whom they make beautiful' ... neither do they guarantee intelligence to those whom they give the gift of literacy.
I thought the Crucible was a cheap shot that a commie stooge took at America at a time it was in a struggle with communism.I don't see the greatness in copying the story of the Salem Witch Trials and substituting your communist self for the witches.It reminds me of the claims that Woody Allen is such a great talent when I see nothing even mediocre in his work.
hear hear!
it's like "Seinfeld"
I don't get it, and don't see that there's anything TO get.
<< Arthur Miller wasn't well liked –- and for good reason. >>
Nor was Alger Hiss.
Nor John Kerry.
And nor is William Jefferson Blythe the Three.
And for the very same good reason.
Miller was a talentless hack puffed by the left bump!
One need only ask Zig Zigler what he thinks of "Death of A Salesman".
I say this because he specifically critiques it in his lectures on sales, I don't have his exact quote,but as I
remember it was something along the lines of ,DoaSM did
more harm to the image of the salesman than any thing to
ever come down the pike.
What modern American plays do you like? I'm curious to know.
"Arthur Miller wasn't well liked..."
LOL! I, too, thought Miller was taking pot shots at America through his abject portrayal of the 1950's essence of Ameican families and Male occupations. Like the book 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit' TDOAS sought to fuse the insecurities of an individual with the corporate life of the times and paint it as uniquely American.
But, hey, as working class filth, maybe I'm just too sensitive to the commie messages being sprayed around through agents of effete 'kulture'. Give me a little old fashioned 'kampf' instead.
Having been involved with TDoaS twice at the community theater level, I've had a bit of time to absorb it. While he may have been taking some cheap shots at capitalism and the American Dream, he also did manage to get a dusting of Truth mixed in. I am referring in particular to the tendency of many people to confuse popularity with success, and success with personal value. Miller wanted to use Willy to portray the Common Man who had been misled by the American Dream, when he accidentally portrayed people who had fooled themselves with artificial concepts of value. A common failing of people who try to denigrate American society is that they themselves have their value system so screwed up that they create a pathetic caricature of themselves, rather than a true image of someone whose belief system is rooted in integrity, country, and (oh, by the way) God.
Bump for honest evaluation of this Marxoid.
Black and white. No room for grey. No sir. You either agree with us 100% on every unrelated political nit and pick, or all of your work will be discarded and your reputation besmirched.
The party has spoken. Now get thee to re-education.
By modern I assume you mean plays contemporary of Death of a Salesman which is almost 60 years old?
Right, 20th century...
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