Ordinary people

For all its compassion, “Death of a Salesman” is arguably the most subversive play ever written in and about America: a depiction of middle-class domesticity as a trap in which all the trophies of the good life -- devoted spouse, healthy kids, house that’s nearly paid off -- ultimately matter less than the insurance policy that says you’re “worth more dead than alive.”

As pension plans are phased out of corporate America and the future of Social Security is up for grabs, that chilling realization has become newly relevant. If you accept the values that the play undermines, it may be hard to see it as a critique of materialism, but salesman Willy Loman has been a lifelong prisoner of the success ethic. And when it bottoms out for him in his 60s, he at last learns how expensive the illusion of personal freedom can be.

How many desperate acts has Willy Loman’s fate inspired in people who maybe never heard of the play? Aren’t all the betrayals of shareholders and other cruelties of recent economic life attempts to forestall the high-and-dry dead end that Arthur Miller portrays for those who blindly trust the future?

Of course, “Death of a Salesman” holds us not as a tract but as a portrait of a husband and father so ground down by pressures related to his job and its definition of him as a provider that he becomes scarcely able to communicate with the people who love him. And as such it’s heartbreaking, what critic John Mason Brown called “the most poignant statement of man as he must face himself to have come out of our theater.” Facing himself isn’t easy for Willy, and when it happens he feels “the woods are burning ... there’s a big blaze going on all around,” and he sees his whole life as a burned-out ruin.

“They don’t know me anymore,” he laments. And the lack of respect and recognition erodes his faith in himself just as surely as his financial problems. He’s a man whose sense of self-worth comes from what he’s earned, and that makes him a projection of all our need to prove ourselves throughout our lives.

The play had its premiere on Feb. 10, exactly 56 years to the day before Miller’s death, and its rhetorical style is about the only thing that seems dated -- that and Miller’s insistence that Willy Loman was a tragic figure. “Tragedy arises when you are in the presence of a man who has missed accomplishing his joy,” he wrote in 1950. Academics debate whether Miller gave Willy the stature for genuine tragedy -- or whether he reconceived tragedy so it can embrace the likes of ordinary people who fall prey to false ideals or confused self-interest, whether it’s the sympathetic Willy, the murderous Scott Peterson or fallen queen bee Martha Stewart.

Maybe even my father. Miller never met him, but “Death of a Salesman” proves that Miller knew him -- his jaunty bravado in public, his growing confusion in private, the helplessness that paralyzed our family when he degenerated into alcoholism. And when you’ve lived with a Willy Loman, you don’t think of him as belonging to the line of great-hearted tragic figures stretching back to Oedipus and Orestes. No, he’s your father, brother, friend, and when he falls apart, you instinctively flinch away from him the way Willy’s sons do in the play -- inwardly tortured but unable to help or see clearly beyond your own pain.

That pain blinds Willy’s son just as it blinded me. At the end of the play, Willy’s eldest son, Biff, says that the man had the wrong dreams and never knew who he was. It all sounds true enough. But Charley -- Willy’s friend and Miller’s mouthpiece -- adds after the oft-quoted line “Nobody dast blame this man,” that there was “no rock bottom” to Willy’s life.

That should scare us, because it’s a condition we all share. We may not be salesmen, “riding on a smile and a shoeshine,” in Charley’s words, but our security is just as vulnerable, and everything that defines us in the world could vanish just as quickly.

Maybe Miller was right, after all. The classic definition of tragedy insists that it inspire pity and terror. “Death of a Salesman” has always inspired pity -- a variegated spectrum of pity for trapped father, troubled sons, suffering wife. And for all of us who lack a rock bottom to our lives, the play should inspire terror too. Not for Willy, Linda, Biff or Happy. For ourselves.

Miller leaves behind a distinguished body of work for the stage, motion pictures and television, winning in the process virtually every award a writer can earn. Nor did material success elude him. And he even won, for a time, the heart of the most glamorous movie queen on Earth. But nothing he achieved is likely to eclipse the bone-deep writing of “Death of a Salesman.” And wherever dead playwrights gather, he’s unlikely to ever have to say: “They don’t know me anymore.”