more “positively” about his country and held
him in contempt of Congress for refusing to
name names, it mistook his Shakespearean outlook for the antipatriotic negativity of a former
communist fellow-traveler. Miller’s own view
of national myths, such as the sacredness of
family, was hardly an attack based on universal
brotherhood or the inevitability of socialism.
Miller’s was a much more fundamentally tragic
view of damaged human goods—“that sense of
a flawed human nature,” as Christopher Bigsby
calls it in his brilliant 2009 biography, Arthur
Miller: 1915–1962—that would have found
no approval from any patriotic committee in
any country.
Miller’s own personal history left him
gifted or cursed with X-ray vision about how
seemingly picture-perfect families could crack
up. his father, Isidore, had been abandoned in
Poland by his family, crossing the Atlantic in
the filth of steerage only to be received coldly
by his parents. Isidore rose from a fifteen-year-
old traveling clothing salesman to a garment-
industry captain, so wealthy by the 1920s that
he was once approached for a $50,000 loan by
William Fox, who had the outlandish idea of
starting a motion picture studio in California.
Isidore declined what he believed to be a risky
move, but his money disappeared anyway after
the 1929 crash. Miller’s brother Kermit left col-
lege to work in the family business—and would
later serve in World War II while Arthur was
declared physically unfit for combat. The writer
escaped to the University of Michigan, where
he wrote his first play, No Villain, about a labor
dispute in a garment factory between the boss
and his idealistic son “Arnold.” Miller drew on
many other sources—the plot of All My Sons
was based on a newspaper anecdote about de-
fective military goods produced in ohio—but
his early guilt about leaving home, his subter-
ranean feeling that he might have abandoned
or supplanted his brother, and his college-age
rejection of his father’s pleas to join the family
business, worked their way through his plays.
Isidore was illiterate all his life, a fact that Bigs-
by notes as psychologically revealing. his son
would weave a life for himself out of nothing
but words.
Bigsby suggests that the playwright may have been drawn to Marilyn Monroe
because the star, like Miller’s father, had been
an abandoned child, and also notes the curious fact that Monroe and Isidore continued
to socialize after her divorce from his son. In
one sense, Monroe had been searching for a
substitute father all her life—many of her lovers were older men, including Miller. According to Joyce Carol oates’ fictionalized version
of her life, Blonde (2000), she had grown up
thinking that an image of Clark gable in her
mother’s home was a picture of her long-lost
dad, and this stunningly imagined episode
from the novel is based in fact. An irony of
fate that also foreshadowed doom brought
them together in 1960 to play lovers on the
set of John huston’s filmed adaptation of The
Misfits. Miller had written the screenplay to
honor Monroe, but their marriage collapsed
on the set.
When the screenplay was published in
book form as a “cinema novel,” a new hybrid
genre that combined theater and film as the
next stage in Miller’s writing, it was dedicated to gable. Miller depicts his character,
gay Langland, as capable of winning Monroe,
acting as an all-purpose hero able to fill the
void left behind by missing families, husbands
that are “not there,” and an overall Western
scene of landscapes populated not by cohesive
families and cheerful small towns but rather
by Edward hopper’s solitaries congregating
along the highways, in gas stations and diners and desert places. Almost a negative image of Miller’s claustrophobic Eastern family
dramas, The Misfits is a movie about drifting
Americans suffering from a lack of ties to
any family or community, dying for a sense
of collective identity or togetherness. “From
the desperate city you go into the desperate
country,” Thoreau said in Walden, presaging
the concerns of Miller’s career as he moved
from stage to screen.
