8 Some Kind of Love Story

Arthur Miller's theatre essays seem to suggest that relationships are at the centre of his oeuvre. 'The fish is in the sea and the sea inside the fish' ,1 he writes. Man and society are inextricable and man can only be seen as part of a social unit: a community, a family, a marriage, a fraternity, a friendship. But Miller's practice seems to run counter to his theory. The most striking scenes tend to be those which poignantly isolate the individual; the characteristic con­ clusion that of Death of a Salesman (1949) when Linda Loman demonstrates that she's never understood her husband and Willy's sons perceive their father in diametrically opposed ways and where the most understanding figure is a fatalistic and helpless friend who sees Willy in quintessentially American terms as a loner and a never-satisfied entrepreneur. 'Nobody dast blame this man', says Charley. 'You (the family) don't understand: Willy was a salesman . . . . A salesman is got to dream, boy. It comes with the territory.2 Dreams came, self-reliance was attempted; generations of actual wanderers and literary isolatos walked the American continent. The play focuses not on society but on an American Everyman figure. For, to paraphrase Melville, who ain't a salesman? Willy's all-American funeral is a parodic social act, in which the mourners signally fail to comply with social tradition. They do not suspend their differences to eulogise the dead man. Many of the nostrums of Miller's theory would be difficult to predict from his practice. Which of the plays communicates the problem of 'How may a man make of the outside world a home?'3 Which can, when the homes exist so minimally, so paradoxically. All My Sons (1947) perhaps argues for the extension of familial morals into society at large, though equally the play implies that the extended family in tum would derive its strengths from feelings of