Smiles and shoeshines
Cris tina Monet
Whenever one reads, as one inescapably does these days, of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (voted most significant play of the millennium by the National Theatre poll, multi-Tony award winner for the powerful 50th-anniversary revival on Broadway with its rival con- tender, The Iceman Cometh, left out m the cold), much is made of the Connecticut cabin that played host to its fruition, built by the author by the sweat of his rugged, young brow. It was here he created his soul-searing paean to the average Joe, suckered by the American Dream, vic- timised by the built-in obsolescence of products and people who have passed their sell-by date in a consumerist culture. We read that the building of the cabin was 'a purely instinctive act' born of an impulse to `sit in the middle of it, shut the door, and let things happen'; and that the first act of this drama about 'a salesman with his feet on the subway stairs and his head in the stars' released itself(Elia Kazan's phrase) in the space of a day, on a desk that Miller fashioned from an old door, to the smell of raw wood and the chirping of crickets.
Now this, no doubt, is all very estimable, but I acknowledge a perverse resistance to this barrage of homespun muscularity, much as I've always felt a visceral refusal to be moved by the play's famous requiem for Willy Loman delivered by his laconic neighbour, Charley:
Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand: Willy was a salesman, And for a salesman there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back — that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman has got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.
I quote this iconographic text in full because it encapsulates everything about the work which leaves me disaffected: sen- timental, didactic, arbitrary in its stylistic vacillations between naturalism, self-con- scious folksiness and lumbering lyricism, meretriciously seductive. What, pray, is `out there in the blue' about climbing into a Chevy and pushing the product in dreary New England town after town? And who says a salesman's 'got to dream'? Surely those drummers for Willy's firm who hit the road in a spirit of canny cynicism with no dreams whatsoever were masters of their metier. Come to that, pick up a copy of Bleak House and see if Dickens thought there was any 'rock bottom' to life in the legal profession.
Well, another famous American whom Miller is often said to physically and moral- ly resemble — and whose occupancy of a cabin in leaner days was also much publi- cised and imbued with mythic stature — is reputed to have said, 'People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.' History does not record which book elicited this comment from President Lincoln, but I borrow it with regard to Death of a Salesman. Heaven knows, the range of people who have liked this sort of thing for the half century since its inception is unprecedented. Imagine all those Beijing businessmen lachrymose before Miller's own mounting of his masterwork. Yet didn't someone once remark that while it's easy to make people cry, it's not easy to make them think?
Consider the son of the Lomans' neigh- bour (he of the graveside eulogy), the unathletic, scholarly wimp, Bernard, so eager to carry Biff Loman's equipment to the high school football field. While Biff grows up into a high school has-been and kleptomaniac drifter, Bernard becomes a prestigious attorney pleading before the Supreme Court and playing tennis on the other sort while weekending with posh friends. Are we to infer that the 'right' val- ues produce status and the rewards of affluence in the terms of that very society which Miller is holding accountable for Willy's naive belief in its spurious promis- es? And in order to shin up the American judiciary flagpole, are not 'smiles' and `shoeshines' equally mandatory? The pur- port of the play's most arresting line, when Willy with macabre shrewdness keeps insisting of Bernard, 'He's liked, but not well liked', is never truly addressed. Has the later, successful Bernard bypassed being well liked with ruthless indifference? Has he a less romantic perception of the function of being an expert networker? Or was a Mr Smith Goes to Washington/Jimmy Stewart-like uprightness rewarded by the selfsame society that can cast its expend- able members so heartlessly aside?
It can be no accident that two post-war plays of the late Forties, each lambasting the righteous complacence of that boom time in America, with a salesman at stage centre, are playing to full houses at the close of the success-driven Nineties.
The Iceman Cometh (set in 1912) transcends the pedantically proselytising preoccupation with the plight of the com- mon man that typifies most American real- ist drama, whose central character is generally a prosaic member of the lower urban middle class or — in the words of Mary McCarthy — 'a suffering statistic' subsisting on instalment plan largesse and aspirations furnished by advertisements. Eugene O'Neill's renegade salesman, Hick- ey, is in pursuit of a liberating resignation, not of material success. His dark decision to snuff out his wife's unwavering faith in his redemption has tragic stature because it is a choice; and one which, robbed of the reverberations with which he had invested it (he is still destiny's pawn), allows O'Neill to take the mickey out of realism and reali- ty itself with Hickey's compassionate and/or despairing relinquishment of his soapbox dynamics. Hickey's social class is immaterial to the larger questions raised by the ambiguity of his nature, while his spe- cific straits elicit an uneasy empathy. Con- versely, somewhere the slick accessibility of Salesman and the bathos of Willy's predica- ment suggest that prosperity would have brought him happiness, that no spiritual strivings have engendered his anguish: rather the fortuitous convergence of mis- fortunes that is a standard lubricant of melodrama.
`Attention must be paid!' Linda Loman admonishes her negligent sons and the audience; Willy, she reminds them, is `a human being'. But the play's glib hyper- bole, composite characterisations and grandstand polemics make Willy a sort of dramatised editorial: in being 'every man, he is no one in particular, a 'human being, rather than human. Where, too, is the intellectual uplift in the 'there but for the grace of God go vicarious self-pity that washes over those snivelling spectators sod- den with sentiment at close of curtain?
Melodrama lets us weep, tragedy makes us suffer and ruminate. I, for one, have never seen the house, however mes- merised, dissolve into floods of facile tears over the fate of that wretched, myopic old monarch, Lear — another grandiose, mis- guided father with a need to be well liked.
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