The Portable Arthur Miller. - book reviews

Arthur Miller lost his anonymity with the smash success of his play "All My Sons" in 1947. Exceeding the Warholian quota of 15 minutes, his fame has extended beyond half the Biblical span of 80 years that the author reached on Oct. 17, 1995. Miller concludes his 1987 autobiography Timebends by observing: "We are all connected, watching one another. Even the trees." The premise of a playwright's life is that all are spectators linked in the act of perception. During the 51 years since "The Man Who Had All the Luck" opened and ran just four performances on Broadway, Miller probably has connected more people throughout the world than any other American who has written for the stage.

With a play in every decade since the 1930s, Miller has created a canon that Christopher Bigsby computes reverently: "They add up to an alternative history of a troubled century." To commemorate the playwright's 80th birthday, Bigsby has edited a revised version of The Portable Arthur Miller.

Arthur Miller first became portable in 1970 when, like William Shakespeare, James Joyce, John Steinbeck, and Rudyard Kipling, his life's work was honored by reduction to a single volume. The new edition includes recent work--"The American Clock" (1980), "The Last Yankee" (1993), "Broken Glass" (1994), and excerpts from Timebends--in addition to "Death of a Salesman" (1949), "The Crucible" (1953), and "After the Fall" (1964).

Miller, who served an eventful term as international president of PEN, the International Association of Poets, Playwrights, Editors, Essayists, and Novelists, consistently has acted on his belief that "there could be no aesthetic form without a moral world, only notes without a staff." In gathering notes for drama, he deliberately engaged himself with the plight of ordinary people. Timebends describes at length how, immediately after the triumph of "All My Sons" freed him to sit in a study and write, he instead sought out a menial job in a beer box factory. His wanderings through the Brooklyn waterfront and his visit to a devastated Italy following World War II shaped the compassionate vision behind "A View from the Bridge."

Miller has been less of a prophet to his own country than to the Europeans who extol and produce him, though. One is more likely to encounter a Miller play on an English stage than in his native New York.

Miller's ambitions have been to offer something more urgent than diversion in the face of war and injustice. "I could not imagine a theatre worth my time that did not want to change the world," he declares in Timebends. The world has not lost is impatience for reproach, and scourges must resign themselves to the narrow satisfactions of sanctimony. For Miller, the signal job of the artist "is to remind people of what they have chosen to forget." Even at 80, he reminds us that attention must be paid to Arthur Miller.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group