Old Stories: Death of a Salesman

A Uniquely American Tragedy

In 1949 on Broadway, New York City, a play called Death of a Salesman debuted. It ran for 742 performances. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama that year, and the Tony Award for Best Play. It has been revived five times, winning Best Revival for three of those. It is the most celebrated play in American history, selling over 11 million copies of the book itself. It has been made into movies several times, including an acclaimed 1951 version with Fredric March.

I highlight these achievements because frankly they seem almost unbelievable. The post WWII America was a time of optimism, American greatness, a breakout from war and depression and dustbowls. On the flip side of the coin it’s common to describe the era as grey, drab and conformist. Yet in the midst of it all was a play about none of that; rather, a tragedy about an American life run to it final demise, beaten down by all the human frailties, and then by gravity itself. What might explain such a disjunction?

The playwright, Arthur Miller, was born and raised in New York City. His family was quite wealthy, owning a large business in the garment industry, until the Depression came. They lost everything and ended up living in a poor section of Brooklyn. Miller worked to earn his tuition money and attended the University of Michigan where he majored in English. As an undergraduate he wrote No Villains about a family in sudden dire straits, a father pitted against a son in a garment industry strike. The play explores Marxist theory as well. Also during this time Miller joined a writer’s collective, League of American Writers, launched by the Communist Party of America. Evidently Miller’s family life during the Depression affected his writing and his politics. Safe to say that Death of a Salesman was born out of this personal turmoil.

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Is Death of a Salesman about the plight of a family caught in the malign grip of capitalism? Living on borrowed money, unable to stop running on the hamster mill to make ends meet, losing their humanity along the way? Poor Wily Loman the salesman, the main character and father of the family in focus, is beaten down by his life, trying to provide for his family. He makes the final payment on his home the day he dies. You have to admit after watching the play that it definitely critiques the free market as anything but free. Wily’s wife Linda, now a widow, ends the play with the line “we’re free,” meaning the mortgage was paid in full.

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The question remains however of what audiences thought of Death of a Salesman, and what moved Miller’s own soul as he wrote the play? Is life not tragic always? Does working to pay off a mortgage, something every American family does, really steal from us our humanity? I think you would be hard pressed to walk onto a crowded city bus or subway car in an American city, take a poll and find a single person who believes this. Yet the play continues to be very popular among people who still care about the American Theatre, who are themselves few and far between. My own thought is that what really appealed to audiences about Death of a Salesman was that the Loman family struggled as we all do to with our own infinite appetites for life and our finite capacity to acquire even a small portion of our dreams. Wily Loman is not much different that the peasant who dreams in January of his spring planting on new acres, only to fight flood or drought in April. There is a Wily Loman in all of us. That’s just life, tragic life.

On a more personal note, I thought of Death of a Salesman after the World Trade Center towers were annihilated on 9/11/2001. The New York Times, not knowing how to write about what had happened, came up with the beautiful idea of “Portraits of Grief,” short little vignettes about the missing victims. Here’s one about a salesman from Cantor Fitzgerald, a bond trading firm that rented several floors above where the plane crashed into one of the towers:

MICHAEL ASHER¹

A Daily Goodbye Kiss

On the evening of Sept. 10, Michael Asher called his son, Jeremy, into the den to show him a sleek computer image of an old Jaguar, whose engine he wanted Jeremy to help him replace and rebuild. Jeremy, 18, was eager to work on the project. But that day may never come. Mr. Asher, 53, who worked on the 101st floor of 1 World Trade Center at eSpeed, a spinoff of Cantor Fitzgerald, is missing.

''I was really into it even though I don't know that much about cars,'' Jeremy said of rebuilding the engine. ''It was a chance to spend time with my father.''

Mr. Asher was not only good with cars. He was a family man who enjoyed spending time with his son and daughter, Rachel, 16, at home in Monroe, N.Y., as well as rebuilding computers, creating software programs and listening to jazz.

He was also a man of habits, said his wife, Dana. One of them was ''to kiss me goodbye before leaving for work at 6:30 a.m. while I was still asleep,'' she said.

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Miller lived in an age when much entertainment was still live. There were movies and radio plays, but the American theatre was vibrant. Here’s just a short list of drama works from that era, besides Death of a Salesman, that captured huge audiences and were later made into film:

Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
A Long Day's Journey into Night - Eugene O'Neill
The Crucible - Arthur Miller
A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry

There was great American Theatre at one time and if you are interested in what the experience is like you can watch a film of the play Death of a Salesman on Youtube.

1. The New York Times: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/met_MISSING_1004_asher.html