Customer Reviews

Death of a Salesman: 50th Anniversary Edition

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Hopeless fathers & sons were a favorite theme of Miller. The pressure of failing aspirations. The horror of failure. Drawn between overconfidence and self-doubt. Flashbacks on scenes from a dreary life. Lies to others and oneself. Failures in job and family.
The play is one of the quintessential pieces of modern American theater. Its themes are known and have been expounded endlessly. Why is it still fresh? I have never watched it on stage nor screen. I have known it for ages, but could not find enough interest to look for a performance, nor to read it. Now LoA does it.
Looking at the reviews here on the Penguin modern classic page, I am wondering about the spread in reviews. From 5 to 1 stars all is there, with a downward slope towards the negative votes. The play has more friends than foes, but on an absolute level, the nays would sink an ordinary ship. Of course quality questions are not decided by democracy. One particularly daft observer produced a perfect inverted version of cultural Stalinism. With perfect perverted logic, he tells us that only positive depictions of the American dream are acceptable. That is completely in line with 'socialist realism': if the artist fails to enthuse about the reigning system, he is condemned.
Thanks to LoA for making me get to know the man Miller. I will definitely look for a movie version or go to a play if I find an opportunity.

+++++

(Note that this review is for the book "Death of a Salesman: 50th Anniversary Edition" published in 1999)

This book has five sections:

(1) Preface by the playwright, Arthur Miller (Oct. 1915 to Feb. 2005) who provides a very brief analysis of his play (among other things). Its title is "Salesman at Fifty." (This play was published in 1949.)
(2) Actual play itself that has two acts and a requiem. (In fact, the subtitle of this play is "Certain Private Conversations in Two Acts and a Requiem.")
(3) Still pictures in black & white and color from the first production of this play in 1949 (starring Lee J. Cobb) and the 50th anniversary production of this play in 1999 (starring Brian Dennehy). There are eleven of these pictures found between the first and second acts.
(4) Afterword by Chris Bigsby (an author, playwright, broadcaster, and University professor). This afterward is an excellent detailed analysis of the play from which I learned much.
(5) Selective chronology of world productions of this play from 1949 to 1999. For example, one entry has the play put on film for CBS in the US in 1985. The lead character was played by Dustin Hoffmann.

The actual Pulitzer Prize-winning play itself is unforgettable. It is about hard-working, traveling salesman Willy Loman, a man whose life has become a permanent nervous breakdown, due to a kind of "success mania." He's about to lose his job, he can't pay his bills, and his sons Biff & "Happy" don't respect him and can't seem to live up to their potential. His wife stills loves him but she is caught up in a state of "bitter helplessness." Willy, now in his sixties, wonders what went wrong (after all, his dream of monetary success should have come true by now!!) and how he can make things up to his family. He is now indeed a "low man."

I shall provide a quotation from Miller's preface and from Bigsby's afterword both of which seem to capture the essence of the play:

Miller:

"The Lomans [especially Willy], like [society's] models...are not content with who and what they are, but want to be other, wealthier, more cultivated [and] closer to power."

Bigsby:

The story of Willy Loman is "a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what they might have been and what they are, who need to believe that their children will reach out for the [monetary] prize that eluded them, and who feel that the demands of reality are too [absolute] and relentless to be sustained without hope of a transformed tomorrow."

Finally, I saw the movie version of this play (starring Dustin Hoffmann) first and then read the actual play. I found that when I did this, the actual play was easier to read and follow.

In conclusion, Arthur Miller has left us a gem of a play that is truly "one of the greatest dramas of our time."

(published 1999; play is 110 pages; entire book is 145 pages)

+++++

I don't think this play will ever truly become dated. The themes are just to basic to human nature. There are cultural issues that come through -- issues I think still prevade in American culture. Arthur Miller will be one of the best forever.

What a traumatic look at a family of 1950's America. The Land of the Free is the Land of the Miserable. Struggling to keep alive thier hopes and dreams are continually knocked down by the race towards financial security. Willy Loman, a poor salesman who tragically reminds himself of the past - the "good 'ol days." Unfortunately these days were not so good and the future is always better. A tragedy in every sense, Arthur Miller creates a sad look into American idealism of the 50's demonstrating that man's identiy is surrounded by his job and finances. A masterpiece!

Don't say he's a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the
paper. He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being, and a terrible thing is
happening to him. So attention must be paid. He's not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old
dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person
-Linda Loman, Act 1, Death of a Salesman

Why must attention be paid? Since the play's debut, amazingly over 50 years ago now, that has been the central question : must we pay attention to the demise of Willy Loman? Even Willy's name seems to be a gauntlet thrown down in the face of the critics. Where traditional tragedy deals with the high born, the fall of royalty, Arthur Miller quite consciously structures his drama around the fall of a lowly man, a two-bit salesman. But the answer to the question, as is so often the case, is all in how you ask it.

You see, if the question is, can the life and death of a salesman be tragic?, then, of course, the answer is yes it can. Nor does it require that he be a "great" man, but it does require that he be a good man. The problem with trying to imbue this play with the aura of tragedy is not that Willy Loman is a little man, it's that he's not a good man : he's not much of a salesman; he cheats on his wife; he lives vicariously and unfairly through his eldest son, Buck, then makes excuses for that son's pathological misbehavior; he virtually ignores his second son; he's a real bastard to friends, neighbors and extended family; and so on. Perhaps I missed something, but what quality is it in Willy that should make us regret his departure?

Arthur Miller, who is one of the last unrepentant Marxists, obviously sees Willy as a victim of capitalism. Willy has bought into the American Dream and it has destroyed him; after a lifetime of toil in the system, he is being disposed of now that he is no longer productive. The problem with this is that, much like Jay Gatsby (see Orrin's review), Willy has simply failed to understand the promise of that dream. He believes that the recipe for success is to be "impressive" and "well-liked" and for your children to be identical to you in manner and aspiration. Toward that end, he is all back-slapping, forced humor, pretense, and bluster and he demands the same of his poor benighted sons. One doesn't really expect an intellectual to have any real understanding of economics (or much else for that matter) but Miller, in reducing capitalism to nothing more than a kind of cheap hucksterism, has followed in the footsteps of Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the like, with equally obtuse results.

It is the genius of capitalism that chaff like the Loman's are ruthlessly winnowed. Willy and his sons are so transparently phony it makes your flesh crawl just listening to them. It's not as if Willy had been steadily advancing through the business world and then suddenly hit the wall. He's spent forty years on the lowest rung of the corporate ladder for a reason. That reason?, he has been judged inadequate, long before his age caught up to him. This is a man who should have been a gym teacher and an athletics coach. But not only has he deluded himself and ignored forty years of messages from the system, he also insists that his sons follow in his clearly misguided footsteps.

It is perhaps most instructive to compare Willy Loman to George Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life. George is a truly talented young man who yearns to escape his hometown and put his skills to use elsewhere. A series of external circumstances intervene and he never gets out, but he does build a vital local business, has a loving family and myriad friends. Facing economic ruin, through no fault of his own, he despairs that he's worth more dead than alive, but realizes, with the help of a guardian angel, that he's helped hundreds of people and that his selflessness has had a profound effect on those around him. He decides not to commit suicide and throngs of friends and customers turn up to help him out of his fix. He's really had a wonderful life.

The narrative structure of Death of a Salesman is even similar, though Miller, perhaps unwisely, eschews the angel. But as Willy looks back over his life, he sees, not a series of charitable acts, but a series of selfish acts. When Willy finally does kill himself, there are hardly any mourners, and one has to ask whether even those who are there won't be better off with him gone.

This play is really a relic of the short, unhappy period in the 30's and 40's when American intellectuals had been seduced by Marxism. It is too doctrinaire in it's assumptions about democracy and capitalism to actually say anything of lasting value. You know how there are periodic attempts to ban the teaching of certain books in public schools? Well, I had teachers who taught both this play and The Crucible, that equally morally flaccid piece of tripe and let me just say this : as a parent, I just don't want some nitwit teacher trying to explain this Stalinist propaganda to my kids and telling them that it offers some kind of profound analysis of our society. If folks think it's important to expose kids to authors who critique capitalism and the American Dream, at least let them read The Great Gatsby, which, though wrong also, is at least great literature.

GRADE : F