Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (41 page)

There are no riots, no depressed economy, no complaining about taxes or public services or failing schools or social unrest or crumbling infrastructure. Yet the double vision that we readers bring to Willy’s arcadian view of New England cities is not merely our hindsight but is hardwired in the play itself: Willy himself knows that he is a dinosaur, a creature of the past; he knows that the figure of the salesman no longer commands the respect it once did. We hear of the legendary salesman Dave Singleman, who was still going strong at eighty-four, “remembered and loved and helped by so many different people,” whose funeral was attended by hundreds of salesmen and buyers. Not so anymore. Not so with Willy Loman. This aging salesman is dying, and there’s nothing ceremonial in sight.

Miller’s play is about the clockwork of human affairs: it runs down, must run down. No one tells you, when you start a job or enter a profession, that you’re slated for obsolescence, that your effectiveness and productivity are likely to die before you do. In short, Willy Loman is learning the hard lesson that aging often brings to those who work right into their late years: they become outmoded, their labor is undervalued, they cannot keep up, they are going under. Part of this is his own personal decline: he tells Linda that he talks too much, he’s getting fat, no one respects him anymore, he can no longer concentrate, he’s distracted while driving, he almost hit a kid in Yonkers. He is used up. It makes good if grisly economic sense for Howard to lay him off. This is market logic. We also see it as tragic. Linda puts it succinctly: “He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away.” Willy himself puts it with more pith as he begs Howard to let him stay on: “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away—a man is not a piece of fruit!”

But being discarded from the workplace is only part of it. Despite their obvious differences,
Death of a Salesman
registers the same murderous view of fathering and childing that we saw in
King Lear
. It is not simply that Willy Loman can no longer cut the mustard. (Though he can’t.) The damage is greater than that: he has lived long enough to see that his deepest investments have gone wrong, have come to nought. I’m not thinking of refrigerators or cars or houses, but of the essential human investment of Willy’s life: his two boys, Biff and Happy. To be sure, they are a far cry from Edmund or Goneril or Regan (or the Goriot daughters), but time itself seems possessed of serpents’ teeth and ingratitude. The Loman brothers—the Loman brothers! so talented and promising in their youth, so gratifying for their father—haven’t amounted to much: Biff’s athletic prowess has led nowhere, whereas his character flaws and academic failures (stealing, flunking math) have proven to be massive impediments; and Happy has become a sharp, hustling womanizer, unfocused, no plan, breezy, low wattage. And Willy is no longer what he was. This is a grim picture of time’s incursions: Willy can no longer drive properly, deliver his spiel, or sell his wares, and his two sons have more or less gone amok.

Arthur Miller was well aware that pathos came too easily to him as a writer, yet the pathos here is unbearably central to modern secular life: what are we living for? Or, as the mythic Uncle Ben asks, “What are you building?” This play lays it out with great clarity: all you’ve got is your work and your family, and it turns out that both of them are in the process of going kaput. That is the dirty secret: we do not build, we (and our projects) fall apart. There won’t be an idyllic retirement in the country. There won’t be a garden to putter around in. There won’t be aging with dignity. There won’t be a continuing paycheck. And the one glory that seemed utterly guaranteed, given how rich and fail-safe it seemed when one was younger—the beautiful promise of one’s children—that too is not to be. Nothing is going to bear fruit.

I called this the tragedy of modern secular life because it targets much more than salesmanship. Miller has (perhaps unnecessarily) put a drama of sexual betrayal into the mix, thereby motivating the adored Biff’s failure still more profoundly: the boy has discovered his father’s infidelity while on the road, and it has sapped his belief in him. But we are to understand that Willy was an imperfect father in other ways too, that he should have counseled his boys more wisely, insisted that they do their homework, that they eschew chutzpah and glamour but commit themselves to hard work and decent grades. But he couldn’t see them in such a steely-eyed way, because their glamour and charm were visible to the naked eye, advertising an immediate, all-powerful force that nothing—certainly not a grade point average—could rival. Fond familial love, fond to the point of blindness, is on the docket here. We are, all of us, romantics, inasmuch as we believe—or want to believe—in our children’s magic promise; they are our future, our genetic carriers, our afterlife. “Because you got a greatness in you, Biff, remember that. You got all kinds a greatness,” Willy, exhausted, tells his disillusioned son, who walks out, having heard it all before, knowing it for a sweet cheat, sensing that it is toxic, has been toxic all along. And we realize that this is Willy’s lifeline even more than Biff’s, Willy’s sustaining fantasy, Willy’s religious faith.

An entire American belief system is in its death throes here. It has to do with the cult of personality, the notion of charisma, the seductive beauty of human promise and dreams. Not just Dale Carnegie but Jay Gatsby and today’s photogenic politicians and captains of industry are on the line: aura, authority, grace, magnetism, popularity, president of your class, prom queen, voted most likely to succeed, all this is in trouble. Of course we realize, in moments of lucidity and sober judgment, that Willy should have understood that charm and the smile on your face are not enough to guarantee success in life. But how could he have known? He was a salesman. His own career was fueled by just those virtues. And he did just fine. For a while. There’s the rub:
for a while
. Time exacts its price. Growing up and growing old: Miller illuminates how interlocked they are, how the generations both sustain and poison each other, how parental dreams are built on shifting sand (if not minefields), how all families incubate reciprocal fantasies that can rarely be actualized, how severe the final reckoning is likely to be when the curtain goes up late in the game: you are old, they are not magic. No villains are needed in this modern story of disillusionment: it is life that betrays you, because time undoes dreams.

Your children won’t carry you through, nor will your job. “You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away,” Willy cried. Reportedly, at the end of one early performance of the play, a business magnate came to the stage to announce that henceforth he would increase the pensions for all his old employees going into retirement. But can the problem be fixed? We know that retirement, even decently paid retirement, has its own casualties as people try to readjust, recalibrate their energies, reconceive who they are, face the dilemma that they may be nobody (in their own eyes) if they’re not working and using that old skill set. The car’s steering goes, you still owe on the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner, and the fridge, one fine day you can’t concentrate on the road, another fine day Linda’s hair turns gray, and at the end the man who has worked thirty-six years at the same job is put out to pasture. Could it have been otherwise?

These matters are admittedly cultural, not universal. I have French and Swedish friends who move effortlessly and rewardingly into retirement, who have long regarded their work as a time-bound activity, to be followed by a still more gratifiying chapter in life. But Willy Loman? But those of us whose work and success hinge on day-to-day personal exchange, personal powers of persuasion? It’s odd, isn’t it, that we never know for sure what Willy was selling, what his actual line was. But maybe we do. His only currency, his real merchandise, was himself. That was what he was peddling all along. And at some point in time either the well dries up or there are no buyers left. He was a creature of belief, convincing others that they needed what he had to offer. At play’s end, Charley spells it out: “And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life.… He’s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine. And when they start not smiling back—that’s an earthquake.… A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.”

How long is the dream good for? Smiles, like Chevrolets and Studebakers, are time-bound vehicles, and your ride on/in them will only last so long. What are you building? “Breathing,” Faulkner once wrote, “is a sight-draft dated yesterday.” But a chunk of you can die while you’re still drawing breath. You can live long enough to become obsolete and to learn that your deepest hopes and desires—the ones that fueled you, kept you going, were your article of faith—were fool’s gold, illusory, undone by the passing of time. For Willy Loman, there will be no children around the hearth, no harvest to reap, no golden age of retirement and tranquillity. The most valuable property he still possesses at this late juncture in his life is his insurance policy: secular culture’s supreme response to mortality, the final paycheck in the sky that comes at your exit.

Let me close by asking: would one want Willy Loman any different? Like Goriot, he loved his children too much, but how much of a failing is that? It is true that Goriot played the
papa gâteau
, bringing up his girls to see him as an endless source of financial support, but I have to wonder how many modern parents are not guilty of such excess. Yet Willy Loman’s tragedy breaks your heart, because his belief in Biff and Happy is something beautiful as well as dangerous. If you spend your days selling … shoes, refrigerators, cars, real estate, insurance, stocks and bonds, whatever, well, then, it might make some sense for you to see your flesh-and-blood children as your ultimate compass: a nobler, more permanent, more spiritual form of belief. To then find that the entropic law of obsolescence that dooms you in your work is no less corrosive when it comes to your kids, that is dark indeed. Growing old makes for such unwelcome discoveries.

In
Part I
, Ibsen’s
The Master Builder
was discussed as one more instance of child sacrifice. But I believe the play most stands out in our minds—and sticks in our craws—as a bold and fierce meditation on old age, as seen in the end-game antics of Solness the master builder, a privileged strong male now faced with the inevitable injunction to exit the stage, to make way for the young.
“Gi plads!”
is the phrase Ibsen repeatedly uses—“Give place, give way”—but it may also be understood, against the grain, in a more creative and generative (and architectural) sense: “
make
room,
make
space.” That ambiguity is at the core of the play: how to offset the story of entropy and approaching death—the fate of the old—by its counterpart: creativity, engendering, outright making. Can the old “make”? What do they make? It strikes me as a wonderful question, so different from the humbling solemnities of
Oedipus, King Lear
, and
Père Goriot
, as if potency itself were a stranger gift than is realized, were perhaps extendible beyond flesh. One feels that Ibsen is mightily taken up with these matters in his late plays, as he himself increasingly feels the weight of age; yet even the renditions of Borkman and Rubek do not have quite the reach or poetry of Solness’s final gambit. Rarely has the drama of the male climacteric been written with such pathos.

The old crowd this play. The first figure we meet is the exhausted, wheezing, palpably dying old Brovik, Solness’s older but now junior partner from whom he more or less wrested the architectural firm; the stakes for Brovik are stark: he will soon die, but he is begging Solness to give his son Ragnar, an apprentice in the firm, a chance to show his stuff, to make way for the next generation. And that is Solness’s nightmare: the next generation. They are, as Ibsen’s rather portentous imagery has it, poised to knock on the door, knock down the door. Brovik seeks, in accordance with the logic of the species, to find a future for his seed, but sowing is in trouble here. Ragnar may never get his chance. What, Ibsen is asking, is required for the old to make room? Do they want to dominate forever?

More significant still: having a living child at all is more than the protagonist Solness and his wife, Aline, have managed. This is a play of empty nurseries, of child cadavers: Aline gave birth to fine, plump twin boys, but the great ancestral house caught fire, Aline became sick, and her mother’s milk poisoned the two little babies. A dark allegory, this. Ibsen makes astonishing poetry of dead babies, for these deaths become richly and horribly motivated. We learn that Solness halfway wanted the house to burn down, sensing obscurely that his own career as master builder could not be properly launched until Aline’s inherited house came down; and so, come down it does, but it brings the little twins with it. Solness sees this as at once intolerable and logical: they too had to die for him fully to live. There will be a price to pay. He says he is chained to corpses, that his success has blood on it, that he has taken on the characteristics of the troll, made use of infernal helpers: all in the service of relentless self-assertion, of never yielding an inch. Children down: so be it. It is as brutal as the infanticidal/parricidal arrangements in Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Balzac, but Ibsen recognizes the special monstrousness of the old killing the young, and his play is about the ineluctable revenge of the young, the threat they pose. Solness’s life is cued to stopping the clock, to keeping the door shut. Ibsen’s question is: Might that threat also be a harbinger of promise for the old? Do the old also yearn to exit? Where to?

If Solness feels guilt at the death of his twins, what is one to say of Aline? In a moment of shocking candor, she confides to Hilda that the loss of the babies, terrible though it was, hurt less than the loss of her dolls: “Because, you see, in a way there was life in them too. I used to carry them under my heart. Just like little unborn children.” In lines such as this, Ibsen reveals himself as the unrivaled poet of displacement, for he seems intuitively to know that our libidinal wires get crossed, that symbols and fetishes carry as much weight as so-called flesh and blood, that they inhabit your womb as well as your mind. But what happens when you trade flesh for symbol? Aline goes through the play with her litany of “duty, duty,” as if her blood had indeed been sucked out of her, turning her into a kind of righteous marionette, postfeeling, on the far side of passion. You look at this group of old folks—Brovik, Solness, Aline—and you feel the geriatric character of the play, even though Solness is hanging on to life and power as hard as he possibly can. He is good at this: unlike so many of Ibsen’s wimpy males, the architect Solness is sexually charismatic—I cannot read this play without thinking of Frank Lloyd Wright, also a visionary, sultanlike architect—able to mesmerize women, hence bent on using this natural resource to keep both Kaia and young Brovik under his control, thereby using the energies of the young while retaining his position as top dog. It is not pretty. And he is in for some surprises.