THE ATE
R CH
RON I C L E
635
victimized as well as victimizing characters; and yet the effect, with all
its continuing vibrations of meaning, has been achieved by nothing but
a simple juxtaposition of a moment of the salesman's life with a pattern
of simple, almost primitive love. There is no sound of whining here.
It
may be that this salesman too would have enjoyed working with his
hands, but he is incapable of it ; when his car rolls into a ditch another
man has to haul it out for him, and he goes to his death in a dumb
despair at the thought of that other man's life.
As against as strong and unpretentious a piece as this, Mr. Miller's
use of his material seems even more unpleasantly pompous, and above all,
flat. It can hardly have occurred to anyone to use such a word as, for in–
stance, suggestiveness in connection with it. Everything is stated, two
or three times over, all with a great air of something like poetry about
it but actually with no remove, no moment of departure from the literal
whatever; through scene after snappy scene the action ploughs along
on a level of naturalism that has not even the virtue of being natural. A
jumble of styles is maintained, with borrowings from the movies, the
ballet and the Greeks, and at moments of particular significance the
colloquial but unimagized language of the play becomes a trifle more
genteel-HI search, and I search, and I search, and I can't understand,"
Willy's wife says after his suicide, though she has been foreseeing it and
explaining it from the beginning of the play. But such tricks, however
skillfully worked, are no substitute for real impact, and can only mom–
entarily hide the fact that this is a very dull business, which departs in
no way that is to its credit from the general mediocrity of our com–
mercial theater.
A simpler example of the norm, and of the weird inflation and dis–
tortion of values that goes on around it, is Sidney Kingsley's
Detective
Story.
Taken only in itself, apart from the lofty explanations in the press
which are part of the trappings of the trade, this is considerably less
distressing than
Death of a Salesman.
It
is exactly the middle-brow,
second-rate offering that one expects from Mr. Kingsley, with a touch
of melodrama, a terrific rushing and swirling about of more or less
stock characters, a good deal of street humor, two secondary plots to
keep the main one from pulling thin, and no demands on the mind. The
scene is a New York police station, and the leading character, capably
played by Ralph Bellamy, is a sadistic principle-ridden detective named
McLeod, who in a certain criminal matter that turns out to involve his
wife, takes the law into his hands and ends up being shot for it. The
usual smattering of popular psychoanalysis appears-the detective, it
