Death of a Salesman (2 page)

Miller, then, likened the structure of
Salesman
to geological strata, in which different times are present in the same instant. He has also compared it to a CAT scan, which simultaneously reveals inside and outside, and the time scale in
Death of a Salesman
is, indeed, complex. The events onstage take place over twenty-four hours, a period which begins with a timid, dispirited, and bewildered man entering a house once an expression of his hopes for the future. It is where he and his wife raised a family, that icon of the American way, and reached for the golden glitter of the dream. He is back from a journey he once saw as a version of those other journeys embedded in the national consciousness, in which the individual went forth to improve his lot and define himself in the face of a world ready to embrace him. But the world has changed. His idyllic house, set like a homestead against the natural world, is now hemmed in by others, and his epic journey is no more than a drummer’s daily grind, traveling from store to store, ingratiating himself with buyers or, still more, with the secretaries who guard the buyers from him. The play ends, after a succession of further humiliations, frustrated hopes, and demeaning memories, when Willy Loman climbs back into the car, which itself is showing signs of debilitation, and attempts one last ride to glory, one last journey into the empyrean, finally, in his own eyes, rivaling his successful brother, Ben, by trading his life directly for the dream which lured him on.

But this twenty-four-hour period is only one form of time. There is also what Miller has called “social time” and “psychic time.” By social time he seems to mean the unfolding truth of the public world which provides the context for Willy’s life, while psychic time is evident in memories which crash into his present, creating ironies, sounding echoes, taunting him with a past which can offer him nothing but reproach. All these different notions of time blend and interact, that interaction being a key to the play’s effect. But, of course, all these differing time schemes are themselves contained within and defined by the audience’s experience of the play, a shared moment in which the social reality of the occasion (its performance, say, in Communist China in the 1980s) and the psychological reality of individual audience members themselves affect the meaning generated by the stage action.

The past, and its relationship to the present, has always been vital to Miller. As a character in another Miller play (
After the Fall
) remarks, the past is holy. Why? Not merely because the present contains the past, but because a moral world depends on an acceptance of the notion of causality, on an acknowledgment that we are responsible for, and a product of, our actions. This is a truth that Willy resists but which his subconscious acknowledges, presenting to him the evidence of his fallibility. For the very structure of the play reflects his anxious search for the moment his life took a wrong turn, for the moment of betrayal that undermined his relationship to his wife and destroyed his relationship with a son who was to have embodied his own faith in the American dream.

Death of a Salesman
differs radically from his more traditionally constructed first Broadway success,
All My Sons
, while still focusing on father-son relationships. It is technically innovative, with its nearly instantaneous time shifts. It is also lyrical, as Miller allows Willy’s dreams to shape themselves into broken arias. And whereas the earlier work had echoes of Ibsen, this play was generated out of its own necessities as Miller discovered a form that precisely echoed its social and psychological concerns.

 

In 1948, Miller, fresh from the achievement of
All My Sons
, built himself a shed on land he had bought in Connecticut. It took him six weeks. He then sat down to write
Death of a Salesman
. He completed the first half in a single night and the whole work in a further six weeks. He began the play knowing only the first two lines and the fact that it would end with a death, the death of the man who became Willy Loman and whose last name came not from any desire to link his fate with that of the common man, but from Miller’s memory of that name being called out in a scene from the film
The Testament of Dr
.
Mabuse
: “What the name really meant to me was a terror-stricken man calling into the void for help that will never come.” (179) The name was fine with the producers; the title was not. They were convinced that the word “death” would keep audiences away. And, indeed, Miller himself considered other titles, including
The Inside of His Head
and
A Period of Grace
, the latter a reference to the practice of insurance companies that allow a policy to stay active beyond its effective termination date, as Willy had lived on beyond the death of his hopes. But the title remained, and far from audiences staying away they sustained it for 742 performances.

Death of a Salesman
begins with the sound of a flute (and there were some twenty-two minutes of music in the original production), a sound which takes Willy back to his childhood when he had traveled with his father and brother in a wagon. His father made and sold flutes. He was, in other words, a salesman, though one who, unlike Willy, made what he sold. It is a tainted memory, however. The distant past is not as innocent as, in memory, he would wish it to be. It represents betrayal, for his father had deserted the boys, as his brother, Ben, had deserted Willy, going in search first of his father and then of success at any price. Betrayal is thus as much part of his inheritance as is his drive for success, his belief in salesmanship as a kind of frontier adventure whose virtues should be passed on to his sons.

In the notebook that Miller kept while writing the play, he saw Willy as waiting for his father’s return, living a temporary life until the time when meaning would arrive along with the person who abandoned him, as Vladimir and Estragon would await the arrival of Godot. That idea is no longer explicit in the text, but the notion of Willy leading a temporary life is. Meaning is deferred until some indefinite future. Meanwhile he is a salesman, traveling but never arriving.

When the stage designer Jo Mielziner received the script, in September 1948, it called for three bare platforms and the minimum of furniture. The original stage direction at the beginning of the play spoke of a travel spot which would light “a small area stage left. The Salesman is revealed. He takes out his keys and opens an invisible door.” (385) It said of Willy Loman’s house, that “it had once been surrounded by open country, but it was now hemmed in with apartment houses. Trees that used to shade the house against the open sky and hot summer sun now were for the most part dead or dying.”
³
Mielziner’s job was to realize this in practical terms, but it is already clear from Miller’s description that the set is offered as a metaphor, a visual marker of social and psychological change. It is not only the house that has lost its protection, witnessed the closing down of space, not only the trees that are withering away with the passage of time.

In Mielziner’s hands the house itself became the key. What was needed was a solution, in terms of lighting and design, to the problem of a play that presented time as fluid. The solution fed back into the play, since the elimination of the need for scene changes (an achievement of Mielziner’s design), or even breaks between scenes, meant that Miller could rewrite some sections. As a result, rehearsals were delayed, out of town bookings canceled, and the opening moved on, but the play now flowed with the speed of Willy’s mind, as Miller had wished, past and present coexisting without the blackouts he had presumed would be required.

Mielziner solved one problem—that of Biff and Happy’s near instantaneous move from upstairs bedroom in the present to backyard in the past—by building an elevator and using an element of theater trickery: “the heads of the beds in the attic room were to face the audience; the pillows, in full view since there were to be no solid headboards, would be made of papier-mâché. A depression in each pillow would permit the heads of the boys to be concealed from the audience and they would lie under the blankets that had been stiffened to stay in place. We could then lower them and still retain the illusion of their being in bed.” (Mielziner, 33)

The collapsing of the gap between youthful hope and present bewilderment, which this stage illusion made possible, generates precisely the irony of which Willy is vaguely aware but which he is powerless to address, as it underscores the moral logic implicit in the connection between cause and effect as past actions are brought into immediate juxtaposition with present fact. Other designers and directors have found different solutions, as they have to Mielziner’s use of back-lit unbleached muslin, on which the surrounding tenement buildings were painted and which could therefore be made to appear and disappear at will, and his use of projection units which could surround the Loman house with trees whose spring leaves would stand as a reminder of the springtime of Willy’s life, at least as recalled by a man determined to romanticize a past when, he likes to believe, all was well with the world. Fran Thompson, for example, designer of London’s National Theatre production in 1996, chose to create an open space with a tree at center stage, but a tree whose trunk had been sawn through, leaving a section missing, the tree being no more literal and no less substantial than Willy’s memories.

With comparatively little in the way of an unfolding narrative (its conclusion is, in its essence, known from the beginning),
Death of a Salesman
becomes concerned with relationships. As Miller has said, he “wanted plenty of space in the play for people to confront each other with their feelings, rather than for people to advance the plot.”
⁴
This led to the open form of a play in which the stage operates in part as a field of distorted memories. In the 1996 National Theatre production, all characters remained onstage throughout, being animated when they moved into the forefront of Willy’s troubled mind, or swung into view on a turntable. The space, in other words, was literal and charged with a kinetic energy. Elia Kazan, the play’s first director, observed that “The play takes place in an Arena of people watching the events, sometimes internal and invisible, other times external and visible and sometimes
both.
”
⁵
The National Theatre production sought an expression for this conviction, finding, thereby, a correlative for that sense of a “dream” which Miller had also specified in his stage directions. It is the essence of a dream that space and time are plastic and so they are here. Past and present interact, generating meaning rather as a metaphor strikes sparks by bringing together discrete ideas. The jump from reconstructed past to anxious present serves to underscore the extent to which hopes have been frustrated and ambitions blunted. The resulting gap breeds irony, regret, guilt, disillusionment.

In part Willy taunts himself by invoking an idyllic past, in which he had the respect of his sons, who were themselves carried forward by the promise of success, or by recalling betrayals which he believes destroyed that respect and blighted that promise. The irony is that Willy believed that he failed Biff by disillusioning him with the dream of success, when in fact he failed him by successfully inculcating that dream so that even now, years later, each spring he feels a sense of inadequacy for failing to make a material success of his life.

Miller has said of Willy Loman that “he cannot bear reality, and since he can’t do much to change it, he keeps changing his ideas of it.”
⁶
He is “a bleeding mass of contradictions.” (184) And that fact does, indeed, provide something of the rhythm of his speeches, as though he were conducting an argument with himself about the nature of the world he inhabits. At one moment Biff is a lazy bum, at the next his redemption is that he is never lazy. A car and a refrigerator are by turns reliable and junk. He is, in his own eyes, a successful salesman and a failure. It depends what story he is telling himself at the time, what psychic need such remarks are designed to serve. Hope and disappointment coexist, and the wild oscillation between the two brings him close to breakdown. In a similar way he adjusts his memories, or “daydreams,” as Miller has called them, to serve present needs. These are not flashbacks, accurate accounts of past time, but constructions. Thus, when he recalls his sons’ school days he does so in order to insist on his and their success. His brother, Ben, by the same token, is less a substantial fact than an embodiment of that ruthless drive and achievement which Willy lacks in his own life and half believes he should want. In one sense the strain under which he finds himself erodes the boundary between the real and the imagined so that he can no longer be sure which is which. His thoughts are as much present facts as are those people he encounters but whose lives remain a mystery to him. Like many other Miller characters, he has built his life on denial. Unable or unwilling to acknowledge the failure of his hopes, or responsibility for his actions, he embraces fantasies, elaborates excuses, develops strategies to neutralize his disappointment.

Willy Loman is not, however, a pure victim. As Miller has said, “Something in him knows that if he stands still he will be overwhelmed. These lies and evasions of his are his little swords with which he wards off the devils around him. . . . There is a nobility, in fact, in Willy’s struggle. Maybe it comes from his refusal ever to relent, to give up. . . .” (
Beijing
, 27) And yet, of course, that energy is devoted to sustaining an illusion which is literally lethal. His nobility lies less in his struggle to uphold a dream which severs him from those who care for him than in his determination to leave his mark on the world, his desire to invest his name with substance, to make some meaning out of a life which seems to offer so little in return for his faith. Beyond that, as Miller has explained, “People who are able to accept their frustrated lives do not change conditions.” Willy is not passive: “his activist nature is what leads mankind to progress . . . you must look behind his ludicrousness to what he is actually confronting, and that is as serious a business as anyone can imagine.” (
Beijing
, 27)