Miller Killer

In "Death Of A Phony," yet another right-wing piece kicking Arthur Miller's corpse, Thomas Lifson attacks the playwright for his politics and his hypocrisy.

Fine. Go at it. But I found the opening lines odd:

I must confess that I never liked playwright Arthur Miller's work, even though I never really publicly criticized it. As an Ivy-educated, Ivy-employed intellectual, I was supposed to think he was deep. All the right people agreed on that point. So I sat through performances of his most famous work, Death of a Salesman, on several occasions, in the company of my parents at first, and as a season ticket holder at a couple of repertory theatres in adulthood. But I always found Death to be tedious and pretentious. The author must have been a rather unpleasant man, I would find myself musing during the seemingly endless performances.

As I've noted before, in America, Miller is treated by highbrow critics as middlebrow, which is about the worst thing you can call anyone. They think his work is stilted and prosaic, and does nothing imaginative in form or content.

In fact, it's the middle-class, middlebrow audience that's clutched him to their bosom. He's one of the few Broadway playwrights whom the average citizen can name, and his work, particularly Death Of A Salesman and The Crucible, gets revived in regular venues throughout the nation because it still holds the stage for most people, not because they've been told it's good for them.

Maybe if Lifson had paid more attention in the Ivy League, he'd have noticed them saying Miller writes bad melodrama for the bourgeoisie. And maybe then he could have enjoyed Miller more, knowing by liking this out-of-fashion earnest liberal, he was striking a blow against the presumptuous intelligentsia.