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Andrew Feffer. Review of Christopher Bigsby's Arthur Miller: 1915-1962 (Harvard, 2009)

(Andrew Feffer teaches American cultural and intellectual history at Union College in Schenectady, New York where he co-chairs the Film Studies program. He presently is writing a history of anti-communism and liberal political culture in New York City at the end of the Depression.)

When Arthur Miller died in 2005 the lights were dimmed on Broadway. Conservatives who hated him politically and resented his literary stature, however, could not resist parting shots. Roger Kimball announced the event on the New Criterion’s weblog with the headline “Arthur Miller: Communist Stooge.” (Arma Virumque, 12 February 2005) Commentary’s Terry Teachout called him “pretentious” in the Wall Street Journal, dredging up reviews from the heart of the McCarthy era to show that he pretended to be a greater writer than he in fact was. Miller was, Teachout intoned, “a man of limitless self-regard.” (Wall Street Journal, 15 February 2005)

Christopher Bigsby’s massive biography shows a considerably more modest Miller than that, a man of limitless self-reflection perhaps, but no pretender. And yet, Miller had no occasion to be modest, certainly not about his life. Vanessa Redgrave, whom right-wing pundits like Kimball and Teachout despise, offered the most fitting eulogy, one supported marvelously by Bigsby’s book. Miller, she told the press, “just represented the utmost integrity and the very best values we were so proud of.” Of course the “we” is the rub.

As someone clearly sympathetic to Miller and his work, Bigsby had unusual access. He builds a narrative of Miller’s life in part on a series of interviews conducted from the early 1980s almost up to Miller’s death. In those encounters Bigsby established an unprecedented trust with the playwright, who as a target of both anti-communist inquisitors and paparazzi was understandably wary of probes into his private affairs. Miller also opened an archive of personal documents to Bigsby, including unpublished and uncompleted stories, unproduced plays, earlier drafts of well-known plays, and poetry, all of which allowed a biographical and literary exploration in intimate detail.

In cultivating a long and durable relationship to Miller, Bigsby achieved insights into the writer’s intellectual and literary formation that would escape other biographers, many of whom would have the sorts of political axes to grind that Bigsby does not. It is no revelation to discover that Miller incorporated much from his own life into family dramas such as All My Sons (1947) or Death of a Salesman (1949): His ambitious but uncultured (in fact, illiterate) father, a coat manufacturer broken by the Depression, but also by the constantly receding dream of success; his conscientious and frustrated mother, whose literary and cultural interests were defeated by her marriage and then again by the family’s impoverishment; his older brother, who like many brothers in Miller’s plays took on responsibilities that Arthur could then relinquish.

Bigsby does, however, reveal an almost overwhelmingly intricate relationship between Miller’s personal history and the characters, narratives, and speech written and rewritten for the stage. Thus, Bigsby opens a rare view into the formation of a great writer. He also meticulously chronicles Miller’s creative deliberation, the enormous amount of work he logged to become a skilled playwright (including several years turning out weekly radio plays for NBC’s Cavalcade of America in the early 1940s) as he refined his skill at constructing compelling stories and dialogue.
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Yet, this is not a credulous, authorized biography. Bigsby gets inside his subject, to be sure; however Miller’s agonized self-reflections (which evolved over a lifetime) and Bigsby’s scholarly integrity lend themselves to a critical narrative that could never be labeled hagiographic. There are plenty of moments at which Bigsby could take Miller’s side and does not. He is even reserved in his judgment of Miller’s work, accepting the historical and literary impact of the earlier plays (before 1960) while recording the less than enthusiastic reception of his later ones. It is safe to say that Bigsby’s feel for Miller’s literary strengths is probably unsurpassed, especially for the relationship between Miller’s reflections on private life as the scene in which a social order is formed, doubted, fought over, taken apart and rebuilt; the agonized intimacy for which Miller’s drama was and is widely celebrated.

In most of the book Bigsby painstakingly covers territory that will be familiar in outline to most readers, including Miller’s association as a writer and activist with the Communist Party and the broader Popular Front against fascism. As framed by a life disrupted by poverty, Miller’s conversion to Marxism at the age of seventeen comes as no surprise. It made sense of the times: “Suddenly, there was a spine to history,” as Bigsby puts it. As a matter of record, the book makes a good case for doubting that Miller officially joined the Party (unlike his brother Kermit, who signed up as a young man), which he always denied yet which has been assumed by many historians. Yet his sympathies for and with the party, which developed in his student days at the University of Michigan are never in doubt. As Miller explained to Bigsby many years later, to be a “communist” merely meant to take global affairs on the eve of the Second World War seriously: “The word ‘communist’ was a generic name for people who were militant, and cared about all this, because the majority of students didn’t. They didn’t know what was happening. They were studying dentistry. It was the difference between those who were conscious of what was happening, particularly in Europe, and those who were not.” And of course a good deal of the last part of the book deals with Miller’s nearly catastrophic marriage to Marilyn Monroe, a sympathetic account (towards both parties) that has unexpected relevance to the playwright’s political life.

There are some small surprises in this rather overwhelming narrative, which in its nearly seven hundred pages reaches only the start of the 1960s – an early unpublished novel on racism, for instance, that emerged from Miller’s experience growing up with anti-Semitism in New York City during the 1930s and 40s. And there is a superb account of Miller driving a college friend to New York to catch a ship bound for Spain to join the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Miller received word in Michigan that the friend had been killed by Franco’s soldiers but never learned his exact fate until Bigsby tracked it down fifty years later. Here the trust Bigsby cultivated with his subject allows a delicate exploration of Miller’s feelings of “undischarged responsibility” concerning the anti-fascist struggle, sentiments entangled in his personal life (his relationship to his brother, for instance) that continued to drive his political and literary endeavors until his death.

When tracing the complicated relationship between Miller’s private and public lives, this biography is excellent. Bigsby is less convincing when he tries to place Miller as a political figure in the intellectual context of the Cold War and McCarthyism. This not entirely Bigsby’s fault, as the history is heavily contested and confused, with too many historians of the era (on whom Bigsby depends) lapsing into superficial nostrums about and condemnations of the “the left.” In trying to understand Miller’s place in the wider American political culture Bigsby relies too heavily on rigid conceptions of Communism and the Popular Front that treat participation in largely institutional terms -- of membership (in party or front organizations), attendance at meetings, and the signing of documents. But Miller is perhaps better understood as part of what Michael Denning called the “cultural front,” a form of engagement by writers and artists in anti-fascist, labor, racial justice and other movement activism that defied simple institutional or party affiliation. It was such ambiguity and nuance that the anti-communists of the era couldn’t or chose not to understand (they still can’t).

Readers will find this book a bit daunting and a bit rambling. Still, it is a book well worth reading and a life certainly worth appreciating. There is no pretense here, not on the part of the author or the subject. Only a lifetime of reflection and self-reflection in a world that has too little of it.