As the curtain fell on the first performance of Death of a Salesman, in Philadelphia in 1949, the audience sat silently, too moved to applaud. The play was morally illuminating as well as dramatically powerful and it affected Bernard Gimbel, the owner of Gimbel's Department Store, so much that he announced that never again would anyone in his company be fired because of their age.
Death of a Salesman won a Pulitzer Prize and a Tony Award in 1949, and it turned its author into a celebrity. Arthur Miller was thirty-four years old, and that early success, if I can judge by the tone of his memoir, Timebends (1987), became a drag on his psyche. The autobiography circles around this achievement and spends more time discussing All My Sons, the work that preceded it. Anyone who is hailed as both a moral beacon and a consummate artist at a young age is bound to confront the challenge of how to best move forward – to experience the fear, as Miller put it, that “I would not write again”. But the difficulty that Miller faced was not merely a matter of early success but also of shame.
I came to understand shame as a structure for Miller's life and work when I learned about his son, Daniel, who was born in 1966 with Down's syndrome. Miller and his third wife, Inge Morath, chose not to raise Daniel at home. Instead they placed him in a state facility in Connecticut which, according to someone who worked there at the time, “was not a place you would want your dog to live” (quoted in Vanity Fair, September 13, 2007). According to Martin Gottfried's Arthur Miller: A life (2003), Miller neither visited his disabled son there, nor mentioned him in his memoirs or interviews.
Some may say that this is a story with no bearing beyond the confines of the Miller family. I disagree. The fate of Daniel Miller offers a way to understanding patterns in Arthur Miller's plays but it also, and perhaps more importantly, gives insight into the attitudes of the generation of people of whom Miller was a representative.
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