Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Spring/Summer 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

Oregon Humanities, a journal of ideas and perspectives about the humanities, is published biannually by the Oregon Council for the Humanities, 812 SW Washington Street, Suite 225, Portland, Oregon 97205.

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Secret Lives: Arthur Miller

When American playwright Arthur Miller died in 2005, the New York Times obituary called Death of a Salesman a "landmark of twentieth-century theater" and noted that "Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays." The BBC proclaimed Miller, the author of The Crucible, All My Sons, and more than ten other plays, "a man of the highest integrity, both in his work and in his personal life. Arthur Miller was an old-fashioned liberal, who never accepted the American dream at face value."

The obituaries noted Miller's resistance to "Red-baiting," his refusal to "name names," and his work on behalf of persecuted writers, most famously, Wole Soyinka. The obituaries also noted that Miller was survived by his three children: Jane Ellen and Robert by Miller's first wife, Mary Slattery, and his daughter Rebecca, by Miller's third wife, Inge Morath. Most obituaries and retrospectives made no mention of Miller's other child, Daniel, born with Down syndrome in 1962. Perhaps this is to be expected: Miller himself omitted Daniel from his autobiography, Timebends, published in 1987.

Daniel was born to Miller's third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, several months after the death of Miller's second wife, actress Marilyn Monroe. Miller responded coldly to the news of Monroe's death, telling the person who called with the news, "It's your problem, not mine," and chose not to attend Monroe's funeral or send flowers. Marilyn's last words on the subject of her marriage to Miller speak to the ascendancy of Miller's writing and perhaps to his highest value--the intellect: "I think he's a better writer than a husband. I'm sure writing comes first in his life."

In his biography Arthur Miller His Life and Work, Martin Gottfried notes that Miller told his producer, Robert Whitehead, "I'm going to have to put the baby away." Daniel was sent immediately to live at Southbury Training School, where Miller rarely, if ever, visited, though Inge Morath visited regularly.

It seems unlikely that Miller's rejection of his disabled son will undermine his legacy as one of the twentieth-century's great American dramatists, but it could deepen and complicate our understanding of the playwright and his plays, many of which explore shame, blame, guilt, and the complex relationships between fathers and sons.

--Mary Rechner

Published in the Spring/Summer 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities