634
PARTISAN REVIEW
out one's tragic sense long before the end even if nothing else did. As for
the clumsiness, it shows not only in the large aspects of the play but,
rather surprisingly considering the general technical excellence of the
job, in a number of small ones too. That the much-stressed point of
WiIIy's being deprived of working with his hands, and of his pride in
that, is not a specific reflection on the money standards which are cen–
tral to the play's action, but as remarked on by many writers over the
last hundred years, has to do with modern mechanized society in what–
ever form, could perhaps be passed over. But nothing excuses the
triteness and pseudo-psychoanalytic nature of the Boston scene, dragged
in to explain Bifrs failures, though he would have been far better per–
ceived as a contemporary character without it. It is also annoying not
to know what the salesman sells, and whether or not the insurance is
going to be paid after his death, and to have the wife say in her final
speech that they were just getting out of debt, with no previous explana–
tion of how, and when in fact we have just seen Willy getting further
into debt.
These are details, but they indicate something of the speciousness of
the play, which manages at every point to obscure both the real tragedy
and the real comedy of the material. Willy is presumed to be losing his
mind because he talks to himself, which permits the long series of flash–
backs that give the play its illusion of liveliness, a form of madness that
can at least, in the case, be called convenient; but all of us have seen
and probably most of us have experienced delusions wilder and more
il–
luminating than this. In the picture of Biff's unhappy restlessness Mr.
Miller gives an impression of contemporaneity, but that is all; the true
malaise of men of thirty now is a great deal more terrible than what
happens to anyone in this play, and would not be a subject for a Broad–
way success. And so on. The play is made of such semi-perceptions, as
can easily be appreciated by a glance at Eudora Welty's story, "Death
of a Traveling Salesman," published some years ago.
There are of course many possible approaches to the character of
the salesman, and Miss Welty was humble in hers, but she succeeded
nevertheless in some twenty pages in creating a figure of loneliness and
haunting futility that conveys a truly tragic sense, and remains as a
clear, echoing symbol in the mind. The story makes no claims, it says
only what it has to say, at its own sure quiet pace, and its limitations are
never violated, but it strikes deep and has been deeply felt and so they
become irrelevant.
If
one chooses to take it that way, this is as strong a
condemnation as one could wish of one of the abnormal, humanly
stultifying aspects of our society, as represented by one of its most
