Death of a Salesman Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  REQUIEM

  DEATH OF A SALESMAN

  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 Misfits, which was filmed 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 Misfits (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 Misfits

  Everybody Wins

  The Crucible

  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,

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  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

  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)

  eISBN : 978-1-101-04215-1

  1. Sales personnel—United States—Drama. 2. Fathers and sons—

  United States—Drama. I. Title. II. Series.

  PS3525.I5156D41998

  812’.52—dc21 97-37223

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  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, confident. 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 definition, chosen to reject the past, faith in the future is not a matter of choice. When today fails to offer the justification 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-year-old salesman, who stands baffled 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 confident, 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 that life by achieving what had slipped so unaccountably through his own fingers.

  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, briefly, 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 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 find 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 first 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 first 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 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 confidence.

  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 define 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, finally, in his own eyes, rivaling his successful brother, Ben, by trading his life directly for the dream which lured him on.

  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 defined 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 reflects 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 first Broadway success, All My Sons, while still focusing on father-son relationships. It is technically innovative, with its nearly instantaneous time shifts. It 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 first half in a single night and the whole work in a further six weeks. He began the play knowing only the first 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 film 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 fine 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 flute (and there were some twenty-two minutes of music in the original production), a sound which takes Willy back to his chi
ldhood when he had traveled with his father and brother in a wagon. His father made and sold flutes. He was, in other words, a salesman, though one who, unlike Willy, made 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 first 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 indefinite 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.