CUNY Kingsborough Community College Death of a Salesman Play Discussion The death of a sales man play is attached and further description is on the guideli

CUNY Kingsborough Community College Death of a Salesman Play Discussion The death of a sales man play is attached and further description is on the guideline paper below. DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Certain Private Conversations in
Two Acts and a Requiem
ARTHUR MILLER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY
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PENGUIN BOOKS
penguin twentieth-century classics
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Arthur Miller was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the
University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of
a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A
Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall (1964), Incident at Vichy
(1965), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business
(1972), and The American Clock (1980). He has also written two novels,
Focus (1945) and The Mis?ts, which was ?lmed in 1960, and the text
for In Russia (1969), Chinese Encounters (1979), and In the Country (1977),
three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works
include a memoir, Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays 1944–2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting
(2001). Timebends (1987), and the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
(1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994). He has twice won
the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Gerald Weales is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Religion in Modern English Drama,
American Drama Since World War II, The Play and Its Parts, Tennessee
Williams, The Jumping-Off Place, Clifford Odets, and Canned Goods as Caviar: American Film Comedy of the 1930s. Mr. Weales is the editor of
Edwardian Plays, The Complete Plays of William Wycherley, and The Viking Critical Library edition of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. He has
written a novel, Tale for the Bluebird, and two books for children. Mr.
Weales won the George Jean Nathan Award for Drama Criticism in
1965.
BY ARTHUR MILLER
DRAMA
The Golden Years
The Man Who Had All the Luck
All My Sons
Death of a Salesman
An Enemy of the People (adaptation of the play by Ibsen)
The Crucible
A View from the Bridge
After the Fall
Incident at Vichy
The Price
The American Clock
The Creation of the World and Other Business
The Archbishop’s Ceiling
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
Broken Glass
Mr. Peters’ Connections
ONE-ACT PLAYS
A View from the Bridge, one-act version, with A Memory of Two Mondays
Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror)
Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror)
I Can’t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!)
Clara (in Danger: Memory!)
The Last Yankee
OTHER WORKS
Situation Normal
The Mis?ts (a cinema novel )
Focus (a novel )
I Don’t Need You Anymore (short stories)
In the Country (reportage with Inge Morath photographs)
Chinese Encounters (reportage with Inge Morath photographs)
In Russia (reportage with Inge Morath photographs)
Salesman in Beijing (a memoir)
Timebends (autobiography )
Homely Girl, A Life (novella)
COLLECTIONS
Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (Volumes I and II)
The Portable Arthur Miller
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert Martin, editor)
VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS
Death of a Salesman (edited by Gerald Weales)
The Crucible (edited by Gerald Weales)
TELEVISION WORKS
Playing for Time
SCREENPLAYS
The Mis?ts
Everybody Wins
The Crucible
DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Certain Private Conversations in
Two Acts and a Requiem
ARTHUR MILLER
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY
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PENGUIN BOOKS
penguin books
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,
New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane,
London W8 5TZ, England
Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood,
Victoria, Australia
Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road,
Auckland 10, New Zealand
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Of?ces:
Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
First published in the United States of America by
The Viking Press 1949
Published in a Viking Compass Edition 1958
Published in Penguin Books 1976
This edition with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby published in
Penguin Books 1998
Copyright Arthur Miller, 1949
Copyright renewed Arthur Miller, 1977
Introduction copyright ? Christopher Bigsby, 1998
All rights reserved
caution: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Death of a Salesman
is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United
States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright
Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention
and the Universal Copyright Convention, and of all countries with which the
United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional
and amateur stage performing, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval
systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages,
are strictly reserved. Address inquiries to the author’s representative, International
Creative Management, 40 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019.
library of congress cataloging in publication data
Miller, Arthur, 1915 –
Death of a salesman/Arthur Miller; with an introduction by
Christopher Bigsby.
p. cm.—(Penguin twentieth-century classics)
ISBN: 1-4295-1457-4
1. Sales personnel—United States—Drama. 2. Fathers and sons—
United States—Drama. I. Title. II. Series.
PS3525.I5156D41998
812′.52—dc21
97–37223
CONTENTS
Introduction by Christopher Bigsby
vii
Act O ne
1
Act Tw o
52
Requiem
110
Cast
113
INTRODUCTION
The Depression of the 1930s seemed to break the promises
America had made to its citizens. The stock market crash of
1929, it was assumed, ended a particular version of history:
optimistic, con?dent. The American dream faded. And yet,
not so. Myths as potent as that, illusions with such a purchase
on the national psyche, are not so easily denied. In an immigrant society, which has, by de?nition, chosen to reject
the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When
today fails to offer the justi?cation for hope, tomorrow becomes the only grail worth pursuing. Arthur Miller knew
this. When Charley, Willy Loman’s next-door neighbor,
says that ‘‘a salesman is got to dream,’’ he sums up not only
Willy’s life but a central tenet of his culture.
Death of a Salesman is not set during the Depression but
it bears its mark, as does Willy Loman, a sixty-three-yearold salesman, who stands baf?ed by his failure. Certainly in
memory he returns to that period, as if personal and national
fate were somehow intertwined, while in spirit, according
to Miller, he also reaches back to the more expansive and
con?dent, if empty, 1920s, when, according to a president
of the United States, the business of America was business.1
And since he inhabits ‘‘the greatest country in the world,’’
a world of Manifest Destiny, where can the fault lie but in
himself ? If personal meaning, in this cheer leader society,
lies in success, then failure must threaten identity itself. No
wonder Willy shouts out his name. He is listening for an
echo. No wonder he searches desperately back through his
life for evidence of the moment he took a wrong path; no
wonder he looks to the next generation to give him back
vii
viii
INTRODUCTION
that life by achieving what had slipped so unaccountably
through his own ?ngers.
Death of a Salesman had its origins in a short story Miller
wrote at the age of seventeen (approximately the age of the
young Biff Loman), when he worked, brie?y, for his father’s
company. It told of an aging salesman who sells nothing, is
abused by the buyers, and borrows his subway fare from the
young narrator. In a note scrawled on the manuscript Miller
records that the real salesman had thrown himself under a
subway train. Years later, at the time of the play’s Broadway
opening, Miller’s mother found the story abandoned in a
drawer. But, as Miller has noted, Death of a Salesman also
traced its roots closer to home.
Willy Loman was kin to Miller’s salesman uncle, Manny
Newman, a man who was ‘‘a competitor, at all times, in all
things, and at every moment. My brother and I,’’ Miller
explains in his autobiography, ‘‘he saw running neck and
neck with his two sons in some race that never stopped in
his mind.’’ The Newman household was one in which you
‘‘dared not lose hope, and I would later think of it as a perfection of America for that reason. . . . It was a house . . .
trembling with resolutions and shouts of victories that had
not yet taken place but surely would tomorrow.’’2
Manny’s son, Buddy, like Biff in Miller’s play, was a sports
hero and, like Happy Loman, a success with the girls, but,
failing to study, he never made it to college. Manny’s wife,
meanwhile, ‘‘bore the cross of reality for them all,’’ supporting her husband, ‘‘keeping up her calm, enthusiastic
smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated.’’ (123) It is
not hard to see this woman honored in the person of Linda
Loman, Willy’s loyal but sometimes bewildered wife, who
is no less a victim than the husband she supports in his struggle for meaning and absolution.
Though Miller spent little time with Manny, ‘‘he was so
INTRODUCTION
ix
absurd, so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of
gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions . . . so lyrically
in love with fame and fortune and their inevitable descent
on his family, that he possessed my imagination.’’ (123) To
drop by the Newman family home, Miller explains, was ‘‘to
expect some kind of insinuation of my entire life’s probable
failure, even before I was sixteen.’’ (124) Bernard, son of
Willy’s next-door neighbor, was to ?nd himself treated in
much the same way by the Lomans.
There is, however, something more than absurdity about
such people as Manny, who managed to sustain their faith
in the face of evidence to the contrary. Of a salesman friend
of Manny, Miller writes, ‘‘Like any traveling man he had to
my mind a kind of intrepid valor that withstood the inevitable putdowns, the scoreless attempts to sell. In a sense,
these men lived like artists, like actors whose product is ?rst
of all themselves, forever imagining triumphs in a world that
either ignores them or denies their presence altogether. But
just often enough to keep the game going one of them
makes it and swings to the moon on a thread of dreams
unwinding out of himself.’’ (127) And, surely, Willy Loman
himself is just such an actor, a vaudevillian, getting by ‘‘on
a smile and a shoeshine,’’ staging his life in an attempt to
understand its plot and looking for the applause and success
he believes to be his due. He wants, beyond anything, to be
‘‘well liked,’’ for, without that, he fears he will be nothing
at all.
During the run of his ?rst great success, All My Sons,
Miller met Manny again. Rather than comment on the play,
his uncle answered a question he had not been asked:
‘‘Buddy is doing very well.’’ The undeclared competition
was still under way, as if time had stood still. The chance
meeting made Miller long to write a play that would recreate the feeling that this encounter gave him, a play that
x
INTRODUCTION
would ‘‘cut through time like a knife through a layer of cake
or a road through a mountain revealing its geologic layers,
and instead of one incident in one time-frame succeeding
another, display past and present concurrently, with neither
one ever coming to a stop.’’ (131) For in that one remark
Manny brought together past hopes and present realities
while betraying an anxiety that hinted at a countercurrent
to his apparent con?dence.
Miller, then, likened the structure of Salesman to geological strata, in which different times are present in the same
instant. He has also compared it to a CAT scan, which simultaneously reveals inside and outside, and the time scale
in Death of a Salesman is, indeed, complex. The events onstage take place over twenty-four hours, a period which begins with a timid, dispirited, and bewildered man entering a
house once an expression of his hopes for the future. It is
where he and his wife raised a family, that icon of the American way, and reached for the golden glitter of the dream.
He is back from a journey he once saw as a version of those
other journeys embedded in the national consciousness, in
which the individual went forth to improve his lot and de?ne himself in the face of a world ready to embrace him.
But the world has changed. His idyllic house, set like a
homestead against the natural world, is now hemmed in by
others, and his epic journey is no more than a drummer’s
daily grind, traveling from store to store, ingratiating himself
with buyers or, still more, with the secretaries who guard
the buyers from him. The play ends, after a succession of
further humiliations, frustrated hopes, and demeaning memories, when Willy Loman climbs back into the car, which
itself is showing signs of debilitation, and attempts one last
ride to glory, one last journey into the empyrean, ?nally, in
his own eyes, rivaling his successful brother, Ben, by trading
his life directly for the dream which lured him on.
INTRODUCTION
xi
But this twenty-four-hour period is only one form of
time. There is also what Miller has called ‘‘social time’’ and
‘‘psychic time.’’ By social time he seems to mean the unfolding truth of the public world which provides the context
for Willy’s life, while psychic time is evident in memories
which crash into his present, creating ironies, sounding echoes, taunting him with a past which can offer him nothing
but reproach. All these different notions of time blend and
interact, that interaction being a key to the play’s effect. But,
of course, all these differing time schemes are themselves
contained within and de?ned by the audience’s experience
of the play, a shared moment in which the social reality of
the occasion (its performance, say, in Communist China in
the 1980s) and the psychological reality of individual audience members themselves affect the meaning generated by
the stage action.
The past, and its relationship to the present, has always
been vital to Miller. As a character in another Miller play
(After the Fall ) remarks, the past is holy. Why? Not merely
because the present contains the past, but because a moral
world depends on an acceptance of the notion of causality,
on an acknowledgment that we are responsible for, and a
product of, our actions. This is a truth that Willy resists but
which his subconscious acknowledges, presenting to him the
evidence of his fallibility. For the very structure of the play
re?ects his anxious search for the moment his life took a
wrong turn, for the moment of betrayal that undermined his
relationship to his wife and destroyed his relationship with
a son who was to have embodied his own faith in the American dream.
Death of a Salesman differs radically from his more traditionally constructed ?rst Broadway success, All My Sons,
while still focusing on father-son relationships. It is technically innovative, with its nearly instantaneous time shifts. It
xii
INTRODUCTION
is also lyrical, as Miller allows Willy’s dreams to shape themselves into broken arias. And whereas the earlier work had
echoes of Ibsen, this play was generated out of its own necessities as Miller discovered a form that precisely echoed its
social and psychological concerns.
In 1948, Miller, fresh from the achievement of All My
Sons, built himself a shed on land he had bought in Connecticut. It took him six weeks. He then sat down to write
Death of a Salesman. He completed the ?rst half in a single
night and the whole work in a further six weeks. He began
the play knowing only the ?rst two lines and the fact that
it would end with a death, the death of the man who became
Willy Loman and whose last name came not from any desire
to link his fate with that of the common man, but from
Miller’s memory of that name being called out in a scene
from the ?lm The Testament of Dr. Mabuse : ‘‘What the name
really meant to me was a terror-stricken man calling into the
void for help that will never come.’’ (179) The name was
?ne with the producers; the title was not. They were convinced that the word ‘‘death’’ would keep audiences away.
And, indeed, Miller himself considered other titles, including The Inside of His Head and A Period of Grace, the latter a
reference to the practice of insurance companies that allow
a policy to stay active beyond its effective termination date,
as Willy had lived on beyond the death of his hopes. But
the title remained, and far from audiences staying away they
sustained it for 742 performances.
Death of a Salesman begins with the sound of a ?ute (and
there were some twenty-two minutes of music in the original production), a sound which takes Willy back to his
childhood when he had traveled with his father and brother
in a wagon. His father made and sold ?utes. He was, in other
words, a salesman, though one who, unlike Willy, made
INTRODUCTION
xiii
what he sold. It is a tainted memory, however. The distant
past is not as innocent as, in memory, he would wish it to
be. It represents betrayal, for his father had deserted the boys,
as his brother, Ben, had deserted Willy, going in search ?rst
of his father and then of success at any price. Betrayal is thus
as much part of his inheritance as is his drive for success, his
belief in salesmanship as a kind of frontier adventure whose
virtues should be passed on to his sons.
In the notebook that Miller kept while writing the play,
he saw Willy as waiting for his father’s return, living a temporary life until the time when meaning would arrive along
with the person who abandoned him, as Vladimir and Estragon would await the arrival of Godot. That idea is no
longer explicit in the text, but the notion of Willy leading
a temporary life is. Meaning is deferred until some inde?nite
future. Meanwhile he is a salesman, traveling but never arriving.
When the stage designer Jo Mielziner received the script,
in September 1948, it called for three bare platforms and the
minimum of furniture. The original stage direction at the
beginning of the play spoke of a travel spot which would
light ‘‘a small area stage left. The Salesman is revealed. He
takes out his keys and opens an invisible door.’’ (385) It said
of Willy Loman’s house, that ‘‘it had once been surrounded
by open country, but it was now hemmed in with apartment
houses. Trees that used to shade the house against the open
sky and hot summer sun now were for the most part dead
or dying.’’3 Mielziner’s job was to realize this in practical
terms, but it is already clear from Miller’s description that
the set is offered as a metaphor, a visual marker of social and
psychological change. It is not only the house that has lost
its protection, witnessed the closing down of space, not only
the trees that are withering away with the passage of time.
In Mielziner’s hands the house itself became the key.
xiv
INTRODUCTION
What was needed was a solution, in terms of lighting and
design, to the problem of a play that presented time as ?uid.
The solution fed back into the play, since the elimination of
the need for scene changes (an achievement of Mielziner’s
design), or even breaks between scenes, meant that Miller
could rewrite some sections. As a result, rehearsals were delayed, out of town bookings canceled, and the opening
moved on, but the play now ?owed with the speed of
Willy’s mind, as Miller had wished, past and present coexisting without the blackout…
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