The Guardian

When ‘The Price’, revived in London, was originally seen in New York in 1968, Robert Brustein wrote in the New Republic of his amazement that Arthur Miller was writing “social-psychological melodrama about family responsibility at a time when our cities are burning”.

Brustein, who didn’t actually believe that art changed anything, had also attacked Miller’s earlier play ‘After the Fall’, in which there are also autobiographical elements, in highly personal terms. The character of Maggie is identified with Marilyn Monroe, to whom Miller had been married for four years without (according to Brustein) being capable of insights into her character or recognising his own misogyny, preoccupation with self-justification or creation of a “piece of tabloid gossip”.

Kenneth Tynan in the New Yorker wrote of Miller: “His capacity for self-accusation is endless”. They were not reviewing the play but the people they perceived as the originals of the characters in it.

The American intelligentsia’s long hostility to Miller was doubtless connected organically to the reasons for praising him: granite-like moral authority makes others feel guilty unless there are excuses to chip away at it. ‘Timebends’, Miller’s own autobiography, published in 1987, is an out-of-sequence exploration of events that Miller is himself trying to understand and shape. Gottfried remarks in his own introduction that ‘Timebends’ doesn’t show its author as the “warmest or most self-effacing of men” and the words “ego”, “self”, “aloof” and “unfeeling” occur regularly in the story of what, at one point, Gottfried identifies as a type: the liberal who is better at loving humanity than individual humans.

But what do people want — a great artist or a clubbable man? Whether he is the greatest playwright, and ‘Death of a Salesman’ the greatest play, of the 20th century will be for other centuries to decide, but no other play stands for that century better. It is bigger than a “political” play in the sense that it never talks politics and you need no extraneous knowledge to enjoy it. It defines the century as the one in which Miller taught us, perhaps with some prompting from Ibsen, to pay attention to the common man as a tragic figure.

Miller is not himself a common man, and maybe some people can’t forgive him for that. The usefulness of Gottfried’s book is the detail we can now attach to the way Miller’s themes spring from his “self”.

‘The Price’ derives both from the way the young Arty Miller’s ambitions were financed by his more obviously gifted, decisive and (in the second world war) heroic elder brother, who worked to prop up the family, and from 1960s America’s fratricidal strife over Vietnam.

At a deeper level this book charts Miller’s own anxious search for feeling, for things to write about when he felt his own experience to be limited. ‘Timebends’ is, inevitably, better written and in some ways ‘After the Fall’ reveals more while revealing much less about his marriage to Monroe, a subject of persistent interest for all that it was succeeded by his much happier 40-year marriage to the Magnum photographer Inge Morath.

Gottfried doesn’t tell about the distinguished British actor who sat in tongue-tied silence while being photographed with Miller by Morath for a London production because “all I could think of to ask him was about what it was like to be in bed with Marilyn Monroe”. His discretion was wise: at 80, Miller hit a New York reporter who asked him if he still dreamed about Marilyn. Men wanted to own Marilyn. Maybe the American intelligentsia wanted to own Miller as well. A great artist who is also a kind of moral landmark, and the man who married the most desired woman in the world, should have cast himself as everybody’s best friend.

He withdrew his cooperation over this b ook when he realised Gottfried wanted to deal with personal as well as creative matters; Miller knows the two are connected but, apart from anything else, he has the right to protect his own source material. To make art from the self is, after all, the one resource a writer can call his own.