Posted on 09/01/2007 9:23:20 AM PDT by Kaslin
I must confess that I never liked playwright Arthur Miller's work, even though I never really publicly criticized it. As an Ivy-educated, Ivy-employed intellectual, I was supposed to think he was deep. All the right people agreed on that point. So I sat through performances of his most famous work, Death of a Salesman, on several occasions, in the company of my parents at first, and as a season ticket holder at a couple of repertory theatres in adulthood.
But I always found Death to be tedious and pretentious. The author must have been a rather unpleasant man, I would find myself musing during the seemingly endless performances. Even if he did manage to snag poor disturbed and abused Marilyn Monroe as a trophy wife for awhile. As an adolescent, I adored Marilyn. I still do, although I appreciate the tragedy she lived through more deeply, the more I learn of her treatment at the hands of adult males when she was a girl, Hollywood when she was seeking stardom, Joe DiMaggio when they were married, and Bobby and Jack Kennedy, the least of whose crimes against her may have been their sexual exploitation of a badly depressed and highly medicated woman.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
He was well liked.
Attention must be paid.
He was so good with his hands. He had the wrong dreams.
Yet another another leftist humanitarian who turn[ed] out to be all theory and no practice
I read “Death of a Salesman” in HS English, and thought it was insipid. Shakespeare was much more entertaining, even to a 16 y.o. kid.
“Thank God, someone with more humanity than Miller intervened before it was too late, and convinced the playwright and deep moral thinker to include Daniel in his will just six weeks before he died two years ago. That person turns out to be the very gifted actor Daniel Day-Lewis, who married Daniel’s sister Rebecca Miller, and who was reported to be “appalled” at the treatment given to Daniel. Imagine what Daniel’s life would have been, had he been excluded from sharing the estate of his father.”
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My regard for Daniel Day-Lewis (”My Left Foot”) just went up a notch. They are not all phonies.
excellent read...
Arthur Miller is the mordant version of Philip Roth—Miller’s literary masturbation is mental and dark. At least Roth had fun with his own sexuality, unlike Miller who couched his in uninteresting metaphors. The only thing Miller “held a mirror to” was his own chic arrogance. But we wouldn’t expect the Times to understand that.
Miller was a man full of words which were not backed up by deeds. That is the definition of hypocrite. I can only hope that his son found better people in the institution he was placed. I can only imagine what the staff thought of Miller.
He was a liberal and liberals are afterall hypocrites
It would be wise for Miller to set up a trust for his son, but if he had not, presumably Rebecca and Daniel Day-Lewis would have cared for him out of Rebecca's inheritance, being decent people.
I must say I agree with the author's assessment of The Crucible.When my son was assigned it two years ago I re-read it - what a cheap and manipulative invitation it is to share in the nobility of individual in his doomed but triumphant battle for integrity against the forces of faith and state, just the thing to be convincing to teenage intellectuals.
Mrs VS
It was obvious that Will was focused upon what his child could do, despite his handicap.
Quite a contrast with Miller.
I always thought all his works were boring and melodramatic -— sheer cheap melodrama-— but never dared say so because anything I had to say that contradicted the idees recus of the time were ignored or denigrated so I learned to shut up.
Some (me at least) appreciate the aptness of your comment.
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
I would love to hear Lewis’s take on the whole matter. Having played an invalid who was able to navigate through life in “My Left Foot” he was most likely sympathetic to the plight of the handicapped. Probably thrilled at first to be Arthur Miller’s son -in-law, the truth must have dulled Miller’s halo.
He's the theatre version of Chomsky: supposedly brilliant but, no one can figure exactly in what way.
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