Death of the dramatist of Everyman

What was disconcerting was how various its subspecies were. There was Saul Bellow and Bernard Malamud, there was Norman Mailer, who managed to seem more Jewish the more he pretended not to be, there were minor or cultish figures such as Herbert Gold or Delmore Schwartz, and there were more complex cases like Isaac Bashevis Singer and his brother Israel Joseph, who wrote in Yiddish and seemed as much European as American.

The one great name who seemed to escape the category, but who insisted on his own place as one of the essential English language playwrights of the 20th century, was Arthur Miller, who died last week.

Perhaps because he is a dramatist, Miller has tended to be treated as a case apart, but it’s also clear that however much his Jewishness conditioned his social and moral philosophy, it was not the substance and content of his work. It’s long been a seminar room quibble whether Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman is or isn’t a Jew. You only have to go to Miller’s own comments for a definitive - that is, affirmative - answer, but the genius of the play and the reason for its universality is that Willy’s experience, his beliefs and pieties, aren’t made too specific.

It’s always been hard to effect the same shift of focal length when reading Miller’s other great masterpiece, The Crucible. Usually read, and quite often staged, as an allegory on the McCarthy witch-hunts in America (Miller was himself a victim of director Elia Kazan’s treachery), it’s become increasingly clear that the real emotional dynamic of the piece is the betrayal of a wife by her husband, an event that precisely echoes Miller’s betrayal of his first wife with Marilyn Monroe. Adultery is a more universal theme than the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In the same way, the sight of his father defeated by unemployment provides Death of a Salesman with its Greek, choric universality.

The key Miller line is from that play: "Attention must be paid." Willy’s tortured relationship with his wife and sons is played out on a stage so that all the Willys of the world aren’t allowed to fall into their graves like old dogs.

The imminence of death is the great Miller theme. The Great Depression happened as he reached the bar mitzvah age of 14. Art Miller became a man just as society was unmanning men like his New Yorker father. It was something he never forgot.

When I met him in Norwich at the start of the 1980s, he would still become tearful even when talking about someone else’s Depression, or an event such as the Highland Clearances.

The form he chose to express these feelings was, on the face of it, a slightly perverse one. Miller does not sit with those great modernists Beckett, Pinter, Albee and more recently Mamet, who have radically changed the language of drama. The oddity of Miller’s work is that from the outset of his career and in his deepest instincts he was a novelist, but one who turned to the drama because it offered more immediate returns. His plays are popular on school and college courses precisely because they can be read. Miller’s character notes for The Crucible almost make it a fictional rather than a dramatic text.

That isn’t to downplay his importance. What he brought to the drama was the novelist’s gift of making a world that seemed like a window on to something much bigger, a world that overcame its own artificiality to make you believe that you were looking at life itself rather than actors and painted sets. Miller observed without judging, with a remarkable evenness of vision. He made and makes us look at human frailty and loss, love and loyalty, in new ways, but always with the implicit warning that oversight and negligence, an inability or unwillingness to see the truth, is the greatest evil.

At the last his own line turns back at him: "Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person."