The Man Who Had All the Luck Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  ACT ONE

  ACT TWO

  ACT THREE

  THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK

  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), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir, Timebends (1987), the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999), Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000, and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

  CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY has published more than twenty-five books on British and American culture. His works include studies of African-American writing, American theater, English drama, and popular culture. He is the author of four novels, Hester, Pearl, Still Lives, and Beautiful Dreamer, and he has written plays for radio and television. He is also a regular broadcaster for the BBC. He is currently professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

  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)

  On Politics and the Art of Acting

  COLLECTIONS

  Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays (Volumes I and II)

  The Portable Arthur Miller

  The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert Martin, editor)

  Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000

  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

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Great Britain in a volume with The Golden Years by Methuen Books 1989

  This edition with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby published in Penguin Books 2004

  Copyright © Arthur Miller, 1989

  Introduction copyright © Christopher Bigsby, 2004

  All rights reserved

  The amateur stage performance rights in The Man Who Had All the Luck are controlled exclusively by the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. No non-professional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the requisite fee.

  Inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to the author’s agent, International Creative Management, Inc., 40 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

  Miller, Arthur, 1915-

  The man who had all the luck : a drama in three acts / Artur Miller ; with

  an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

  eISBN : 978-0-142-43786-5

  1. Alienation (Social psychology)—Drama 2. Failure (Psychology)—Drama

  3. Success in business—Drama I. Title.

  PS3525.I5156M36 2004

  812’.52—dc22 2003068909

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  Introduction

  In 1938, Arthur Miller left the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, with high hopes. He had twice won the prestigious Hopwood Award for drama and once been runner-up. One of his plays had even been staged, albeit for a single night, by the Federal Theatre in Detroit. He returned to New York confident that he could conquer Broadway. After all, the Hopwood judges had been drawn from the New York theatre world and he did quickly join the Federal Theatre, an invention of FDR’s Works Progress Administration.

  Even as he tried to sell one of his Michigan plays, revising it in the basement of his family’s Brooklyn home, he was writing another—the story of Montezuma and Cortez—perfect for the large casts that the Federal Theatre could afford. Despite encouraging words from his agent, from producers, actors and fellow writers, however, nothing happened, and in 1939 the Federal Theatre was closed down, suspected of Communist subversion. Broadway, meanwhile, showed no interest.

  The theatre, though, was only one possibility and if it proved resistant there were always short stories or the novel. He wrote both but failed to place them. The only market he succeeded in penetrating was that for radio drama, though this in itself opened up other possibilities. He worked, briefly, for the Library of Congress and was also commissioned to write the screenplay for a film inspired, in part, by the dispatches of war correspon
dent Ernie Pyle. This took him to military bases around the country and though the final film—The Story of GI Joe—was written by others, in 1944 he published a book about his experiences: Situation Normal.

  These ventures were financially rewarding but scarcely satisfying for a man whose eyes were still on Broadway. Then came his breakthrough. A play he had originally written as a novel was accepted. At twenty-nine, and after six years, he had, seemingly, arrived. He was to be produced on Broadway, today, of course, a virtual impossibility for a first-time writer. The play, The Man Who Had All the Luck, was to star Karl Swenson, who had appeared in several of Miller’s radio plays. Its out-of-town tryout was in Wilmington, its premiere at the For-rest Theatre in New York on November 23, 1944. It should have been a triumph; instead it was a disaster. Luck, it seemed, was in short supply.

  Both novel and then play were inspired by a story he had originally heard from his wife’s mother. She told of a relative who had hanged himself from a rafter in his Ohio barn. What intrigued Miller, and bewildered the man’s wife, was that he had been popular, never wanting for a job even in the middle of the Depression. Then he developed what was plainly a mental disorder. By then the owner of a filling station, one of several properties he acquired while still in his twenties, he had begun obsessively to check the books, afraid of embezzlement by his staff. The paranoia grew and, despite treatment, he killed himself. What interested Miller was not his psychosis but the notion of a successful man being drawn toward death, more especially in a rural setting, away from urban pressures.

  He was intrigued not least because his cousin’s husband, Moe, had also died suddenly. Another successful man, he, too, prospered even during the Depression when others were failing. Going for a swim at Brighton Beach, he had collapsed, his body, bizarrely, driven back to his home by the doctor who had tried in vain to revive him. The arbitrary seemed at work both in his rise and his fall.

  If he had seemingly been chosen for preferment, he was just as capriciously transformed into cosmic victim, born, it seemed, with no greater purpose than to die. The Man Who Had All the Luck, at least in its first form, was thus an exploration of the absurd, of the fact that, as a Beckett character would observe, humankind gives birth astride of a grave. By reversing the polarity and staging the plight of the man seemingly immune to disaster—a man who has all the luck—Miller explores, by inference, the implications of the man for whom disaster is an unearned fate, indeed of mankind for whom it is arguably likewise.

  This is a dark fable reminiscent in certain respects of Camus’s 1938 play Caligula, as the central character tests the proposition that there is no governing principle to existence, no inherent meaning, while desperately hoping for evidence to the contrary.

  The Man Who Had All the Luck, in its various versions, “wrestled,” Miller explained, with the unanswerable—the question of the justice of fate, how it was that one man failed and another, no less capable, achieved some glory in life. Miller later speculated that his interest might have been fired by his sense of his own talents and success and the contrasting lack of them in others. Also, kept out of war as a result of a football injury, he was aware that he flourished where others, including his own brother, risked death on a daily basis. For them, life was suspended and even forfeit; for him it offered opportunity, a family life and, if as yet only to a modest degree, success. Where was the justice in that? Was there some underlying moral order in the world or was everything the product of mere chance? And if the latter, could that be the basis for anything but despair?

  The novel, which preceded the play, concerns David, a young man in his twenties, talented and successful, in everything he does. Setting himself up as a mechanic, he manages to get by on instinct until confronted with a car whose fault he cannot diagnose. He takes it to a specialist garage in a neighboring town but accepts the credit for the repairs they effect. As a result his reputation as a mechanic is enhanced and he secures a contract to work on the tractors of a neighboring farmer. From there his business grows. Slowly he adds other ventures, in which he is equally successful. But he is increasingly aware that he is surrounded by those who have failed in life, as he is of the lie on which his own career had been constructed.

  One friend, Shory, had lost his legs during the war and as a result feels unworthy of the woman he loves. Another, Amos, was trained by his father to be a baseball pitcher but, despite his talent, fails to be taken on by the major leagues because his training, directed by his father in the basement of their house, has made him insensitive to other aspects of the game. A third friend, J.B. Fellers, appears to thrive, even having the child that he and his wife had desperately wanted, only inadvertently to kill that child when drunk.

  For David, by contrast, everything goes well. He has the child he wanted and succeeds in everything he tries; but his very success breeds a deepening paranoia. He awaits the catastrophe he feels must balance his luck, if there is to be true justice in the world. He begins, like the man on whom he was in part modeled, to inspect the books of the gas station he owns. He prepares himself for what he feels must be the death of his own child, in some kind of perverted trade-off for a life otherwise without blemish. And, finally, he commits suicide, vaguely feeling that he will thereby lift the curse that surely must be on his family.

  Perhaps that death is a sign that the novel was still too close to its origins, but perhaps it is also evidence of the fact that, to Miller, death raised the stakes, gave a deepening significance. He was reaching for the tragic but being snared by the merely pathological. When he came to write the play version he chose a different ending. He also introduced a number of changes, at least one of which would prove of lasting significance.

  The play finds David Beeves’s marriage to Hester blocked by her father. A bitter and cynical man, he is abruptly killed off in a traffic accident. The first obstacle to success is thus conveniently removed, that very convenience being a clue to the style of a play that Miller chooses to call “A Fable.” Its very improbabilities (David buys a gas station, and a highway development fortuitously makes it profitable; he invests in mink, and survives an accident that wipes out a rival’s holdings) are indicators of its status as a moral tale and, indeed, it was the inability of the director to define a style appropriate to this that in part accounted for its initial failure.

  When David is confronted with a fault in a car that defies his skills, he is saved not, as in the novel, by taking it to another garage but by the arrival of an Austrian mechanic called Gus. Two elements of the novel are thus tied together while the second obstacle to David’s success is removed. And so he emerges as the man who had all the luck, in contrast to those around him, though the subplots that had overloaded the novel are now pared back. Meanwhile, the would-be young baseball player is integrated into the story when Miller makes him David’s brother, a crucial change not only for this play but for his future work.

  As he later explained, “The Man Who Had All the Luck, through its endless versions, was to move me inch by inch toward my first open awareness of father-son and brother-brother conflict. . . . One day, quite suddenly, I saw that Amos and David were brothers and Pat their father. There was a different anguish in the story now, an indescribable new certainty that I could speak from deep within myself, had seen something no one else had ever seen.”1 Only now recognizing that two of his university plays had also featured brothers, Miller, who was himself one of two brothers, felt he understood something of the tension that underlay the play.

  Father/son relationships, those between brothers, suddenly opened up new possibilities that Miller would deploy in his work for another two decades and more. Within the family unit, he came to feel, are contained alternative possibilities, tensions that are, in some senses, the fragmented parts of a self (spiritual/material, poetic/prosaic, blessed/cursed). The evidence for that seems clear in Death of a Salesman and The Price, where the brothers have a dialectical relationship to one another, albeit one suffused with ambiguities
. Father/son relationships, meanwhile, bring past and present together, hopes and fulfillments, or otherwise. They are the locus of anxieties about identity, of contested values, of an ambivalent love, of guilt. In the context of The Man Who Had All the Luck, though, Miller’s decision to make David and Amos brothers seems primarily to have rooted the piece in a psychology he could understand and inhabit.

  At the heart of the play is a concern with the extent of human freedom. Beyond offering an account of a man’s decline into madness, and eventual redemption, it explores the degree to which so many of the characters become complicit in their own irrelevance, the extent to which they collude in the idea of man as victim, a mere object of cosmic ironies. At its center is the existential conviction, resisted by most of the characters, including David in his madness, that we are the sum of our actions. If not believers in God, a number of them are believers in fate, which is the word they choose to give to their own personal and social paralysis. For them chance is the operative principle in life and if that is so it is illusory to believe that one can deflect one’s fate. Destiny is an excuse for inaction. Identity is a product of contingency. A Darwinian logic, selecting in favor of some and against others, appears the only observable principle.

  As the play develops, David himself is a convert to this faith. He looks for some justice, some sense of social and perhaps even metaphysical coherence in existence. Finding none, he comes close to destroying himself, sure now that he has no power or reason to intervene in his own life, as if his suicide might constitute that balancing justice whose absence has brought him close to despair.