632
PARTISAN REVIEW
of a play?-better be grateful for this. But of course there is no reason
to be grateful for something that pretends to be what it is not, and the
fact of the matter is that these secret whisperings, if they occurred, were
well justified. The play, with its peculiar hodge-podge of dated materials
and facile new ones, is not tragedy at all but an ambitious piece of
confusionism, such as in any other sphere would probably be called a
hoax, and which has been put across by purely technical skills not unlike
those of a magician or an acrobat.
Up to a point this might be considered no more than the usual
operation of the second-rate mind as glamorized by Broadway. But there
is a particular twist to the matter this time, which helps to explain how
a subject that in its general lines was run ragged fifteen or twenty years
ago should be able to turn up now as a vehicle for such large claims
and such ponderous emotionalizing.
Certainly as representing the false dream aspect of American society
Mr. Miller's salesman offers nothing very original. The old gag about
the installment-plan frigidaire ("Once in my life I'd like to own some–
thing outright before it's broke") are evidently still good for a laugh,
and there is always a pocket of pathos reserved for the mortgage, but
things have been sadder and funnier before. A slightly fresher breeze does
blow at moments. Willy Loman calls for a genuine smile or two with
his distinction between being "liked" and being "well-liked," and the
perception behind this is accurate enough, even though in context it
becomes one of the half-truths typical of the play. Willy's rock-bottom
faith has been in the capacity to get along with people, to "make a good
impression"; it is with this faith that he slides to old age and ruin while
his brother Ben, who appears in some well-staged flashbacks, piles up a
fortune in Alaska, and because of it at the end he is still pushing his
favorite son Biff toward a failure worse than his own, the irony, as pre–
sented, lying not so much in the failure as in the denial of the man's
true nature and talents along the way. Willy liked to work with his
hands and had been happy when he was making a cement porch; and
Biff, who had been happy as a ranch-hand in the West, has at the time
of the play restlessly driven himself back home. In the end, after the
suicide, it is the flashy son Hap, content with cheap success and easy
women, who speaks of the salesman's dream as having been "good."
Bill knows better-the dream was rotten though he speaks of his father
nevertheless as a "prince"-and the wife knows better still; Willy was as
good "as many other people." In short, he is the common man, and
something or other has gone terribly wrong. The point is, what and
why.
