Customer Reviews

Arthur Miller: His Life And Work

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Arthur Asher Miller is famous, as this book's back cover sums up, for three things: his own body of work, his defiance of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the mid-1950s, and his marriage to "the most famous of movie stars" (Gottfried's quote), namely Marilyn Monroe.

In his own country, Miller is, also as Gottfried says, unappreciated to the point of scorn. My only disappointment with this work-and it is a fine book-is that he does not explore this aspect of Miller's relationship to the "vox populi", whom his work, like that of Rockwell and Springsteen, is supposed to relate to. My own observation is that one's attitude to Miller-as playwright, as 'Mr.Marilyn Monroe', as human being-often is, like an artificial horizon indicator of one's own sociopolitical attitudes. Those listing to port will invariably uphold Miller as the great conscience of his generation whilst those heading starboard will dismiss him pretty perfunctorily as merely another "Intellectual", in the vein of those figures of derision Paul Johnson deftly skewers in his volume of that title.

Actors, or those considering themselves as such, place Miller's work on a great pedestal, and the technical merits of his work are considerable and generally undisputed. However,Miller's sense of life, so to speak, is not essentially noble, but essentially fatalist and indifferent.

Miller, personally, despite his wealth, critical success, and longevity-he's still working at 88-is not a figure one wants to view sympathetically, and I certainly do not. He left his first wife and ran off with a very public movie star whom he had ample reason to know would be very high maintenance, and, like an intricately built exotic car in the hands of a teenager, didn't maintain her well at all. While it's certain he had no direct involvement in her death, he was something of a negligent husband who failed to effectively deal with her dependencies on barbituates and psychoanalysis, and tormented her for her indiscretions with Yves Montand despite the fact that he'd done the same thing whilst she was married to Joe DiMaggio. To rub salt into the wounds, as percieved by the American public, he failed to attend her funeral and then proceeded to write a play (After the Fall)in which an unmistakably Monroe-alter-ego character is dealt with cruelly. Make no mistake, there are many theatre-goers who flatly hate Arthur Miller.

Many of those will snort with indignation when they read, in this volume for perhaps the first time, that Miller's son (with third wife Inge Morath) was born with Down''s syndrome and perfunctorily institutionalized, or Miller's unprovoked attack on a journalist in 1995-inasmuch as he was 80 at the time, however, many may more disdain the journalist (a healthy male in his early thirties) for "not besting the old Bolshevist", as one conservative commentator said.

Ultimately, it's his work that will either uphold Miller as the great playwright-of his nation, of his century, even,as one actor avers in this book, along with Shakespeare,of his species-or merely an important but not overarching writer, and such grand judgments are only plausible many years,even decades, after one's death. While it's clear Gottfried believes the former to be the case, and I believe the latter, one virtue of his book is that I still can concede its excellence without endorsing the notion of Miller as the ultimate in any aspect, save that which appears on the back cover: as a concomitantly commercially successful, politically controversial, and romantically conspicuous celebrity at a noteworthy time and place.

Arthur Miller, once the ultimate celebrity.

This is one of the best of Gottfried's books that I have read since the oversized Broadway Musicals volume of the '70s. I found his Fosse book exploitative and his life of Danny Kaye defensive.

Miller was once the ultimate playwright and perhaps unique as one known as a personality. Gottfried walks a sword's edge between academic appreciation of his works and biographical information, highlighting the places where one informs the other.

The book is the poorer because Miller chose not to cooperate with its biographical aspects. Thus, the title is a little unbalanced (it should almost be: His life and WORK). It also shares with the author's otherwise classy biography of George Burns the unavoidable flaw of having been written before the subjects death. You can see Gottfried straining a bit for an ending on the last page--how to tie up the mysteries of his subject into a neat little paragraph?

But this makes engaging reading for theatre-goers, and is highly recommended for struggling playwrights, actors, etc.

Expertly written by award-winning drama critic and biographer Martin Gottfried, Arthur Miller: His Life And Work is the exhaustive and superbly presented biography of the award winning American playwright, and knowledgeably examines his life and his theatrical creations in close detail. A wealth of information and insight into one man's life and his timeless, century-defining plays set Arthur Miller: His Life And Work quite apart among notable and worthy biographies. No academic or community library American Theater History or American Biography collection can be complete without the inclusion of Arthur Miller: His Life And Work.

There are 2 factual errors in this book. "Anna Christie" was NOT written by August Strindberg, and John Kennedy was not shot and klilled on November 23. Mess up things that a high school kid should be able to catch, and it casts doubt on other things.

It doesn't mean the book isn't a good read, but how could such obvious errors make it into print? And why is wife #3 of such little focus? She was married to the man for 40 years! More than the other two combined.

This book appeared to be so dense and so detailed that I was tempted to skim a lot of it, but in the end I found it to be passionate as well as inviting. Especially in its favor, the book refrains from being pawning. It's too bad it ended so soon because it makes Miller's life abruptly come to a complete stand-still with no end in sight.

Arthur Miller is another so-called genius who turns out to be cold and self-righteous. He didn't attend either his mother's or his father's funerals because he "already had other plans" for those days (which were years apart). Additionally, he appears either stupid or oblivious to the feelings of human beings which goes beyond hubris and even conceit. He showed little to no empathy for his parents as well as his children, his wives, and many of his friends and contemporaries. Oh, and let's not forget what would appear to be total disregard to a son who is born with Down Syndrome and never again mentioned by Miller, even in his autobiography.

He also appears to have forgotten about his brother whom he considers a fool for not forging ahead with his own plans and career in lieu of caring for his parents. He even blamed his father for his own down-fall in the depression for being a working man in the first place. He showed no pity for him since he described his father, and other working men, as "never having expected to have a destiny" in the first place, and who "die of boredom". I have read a lot of biographies but this is the only time I have read quotes such as those.

How Arthur Miller became such a snob isn't clear. Lots of artists sense their calling at a young age and strive for recognition and to make a living at it, but most of them are not as callous as it seems he was. All of this is not to say that he didn't write some great and enduring plays, which of course he did. As dated as the themes of his plays have become, some characters have become a part of the present lexicon, such as Biff, the mocked son in "Death of a Salesman". We continue to see his exaggerated image in the characters of George in "Seinfeld" and Alan in "Two and a Half Men".

I didn't know very much about Arthur Miller, except his plays and of course his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, and I confess that probably the reason for my interest in him is that marriage. It's funny how popular culture works in that the marriage brought her a sense of respectability while at the same time it made him look foolish. From a human stand-point, however, she did attend his mother's funeral and he didn't. She also was a good friend to his father in the short time she had left, perhaps a better friend than he had ever been to anyone. Harsh judgment, I know, and the author didn't necessarily come to that conclusion although I did.