THE ATE R CH RON I C L E
633
At first blush the answer seems fairly simple. Willy has a fatal flaw.
He lives in a dream world; he can't face reality; he has always had
excuses for his own failures ("the shop was closed for inventory") and
has ruined Biff's life by indulging him all through his childhood in any
whim including theft. It is a good theme. But it turns out not only that the
author is saying a good deal more than this, but that he is also either
very unclear as to his further meanings, or very anxious to present them
and evade responsibility for them at the same time.
It
is, of course, the
capitalist system that has done Willy in; the scene in which he is brutally
fired after some forty years with the firm comes straight from the party
line literature of the 'thirties, and the idea emerges lucidly enough
through all the confused motivations of the play that it is our particular
form of money economy that has bred the absurdly false ideals of both
father and sons. It emerges, however, like a succession of shots from a
duck-blind. Immediately after every crack the playwright withdraws
behind an air of pseudo-universality, and hurries to present some cruelty
or misfortune due either to Willy's own weakness, as when he refuses
his friend's offer of a job after he has been fired, or gratuitously from
some other source, as in the quite unbelievable scene of the two sons
walking out on their father in the restaurant. in the end, after so much
heaping of insult on injury, all one really knows about Willy Loman is
that if the system doesn't kick
him
in the teeth he will do it himself-a
well-known if wearisome tendency, that in itself might have dramatic
possibilities, but that is neither particularly associated with salesmen nor
adapted to the purposes of this play.
What it does lend itself to in this case is an intellectual muddle and a
lack of candor that regardless of Mr. Miller's conscious intent are the
main earmark of contemporary fellow-traveling. What used to be a
roar has become a whine, and this particular piece of whining has been
so expertly put over that it has been able to pass for something else, but
behind all the fancy staging the old basic clumsiness and lack of humor
are there. To be sure there are a few moments of ordinary Broadway
sprightliness, as in the matter of the ice-box, or Hap's little performance
with the girls in the restaurant, but these are in passing.
The crucial scenes, like the general conception, are all heavily dead–
pan, to an extent that floors the talents of every actor in the play but
Mr. Cobb; Cameron Mitchell and Arthur Kennedy as the two sons
do as well as possible with the script but both are driven by it at various
points to over-act, and Mildred Dunnock in the part of the wife is
obliged to keep up a tension of high-pitched nobility that would wear
