PENGUIN CLASSICS
ALL MY SONS
ARTHUR MILLER (1915–2005) was born in New York City and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953), A View from the Bridge and A Memory of Two Mondays (1955), After the Fall and Incident at Vichy (1964), The Price (1968), The Creation of the World and Other Business (1972), and The American Clock (1980). His other works include Focus, a novel (1945); The Misfits, a cinema novel (1961); and the texts for In Russia (1969), In the Country (1977), and Chinese Encounters (1979), three books in collaboration with his wife, photographer Inge Morath. His memoirs include Salesman in Beijing (1984) and Timebends, an autobiography (1987). His short fiction includes the collection I Don’t Need You Anymore (1967), the novella Homely Girl, A Life (1995) and Presence: Stories (2007). His later work includes the plays The Ride Down Mt. Morgan (1991), The Last Yankee (1993), Broken Glass (1994), and Mr. Peters’ Connections (1999); Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000; and On Politics and the Art of Acting (2001). Among numerous honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the John F. Kennedy Lifetime Achievement Award.
CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY has published more than twenty-five books on British and American culture. His works include studies of African American writing, American theater, English drama, and popular culture. He is the author of three novels, Hester, Pearl, and Still Lives, and he has written plays for radio and television. He is also a regular broadcaster for the BBC. He is currently professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.
BY ARTHUR MILLER
PLAYS
The Golden Years
The Man Who Had All the Luck
All My Sons
Death of a Salesman
An Enemy of the People
The Crucible
A View from the Bridge
After the Fall
Incident at Vichy
The Price
The Creation of the World and Other Business
The Archbishop’s Ceiling
The American Clock
Playing for Time
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
Broken Glass
Mr. Peters’ Connections
Resurrection Blues
Finishing the Picture
ONE-ACT PLAYS
A View from the Bridge (one-act version)
A Memory of Two Mondays
Fame
The Reason Why
Elegy for a Lady (in Two-Way Mirror)
Some Kind of Love Story (in Two-Way Mirror)
I Can’t Remember Anything (in Danger: Memory!)
Clara (in Danger: Memory!)
The Last Yankee
SCREENPLAYS
Playing for Time
Everybody Wins
The Crucible
The Misfits
MUSICAL
Up from Paradise
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Timebends
REPORTAGE
Situation Normal
In Russia (with Inge Morath)
In the Country (with Inge Morath)
Chinese Encounters (with Inge Morath)
Salesman in Beijing
FICTION
Focus (a novel)
Jane’s Blanket (a children’s story)
The Misfits (a cinema novel)
I Don’t Need You Any More (stories)
Homely Girl, A Life (a novella and stories)
Presence: Stories
COLLECTIONS
Arthur Miller’s Collected Plays, Volumes I and II
The Portable Arthur Miller
Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1944–1961 (Tony Kushner, editor)
Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1964–1982 (Tony Kushner, editor)
Arthur Miller: Collected Plays 1987–2004 with Stage and Radio Plays of the 1930s and 40s (Tony Kushner, editor)
ESSAYS
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (Robert A. Martin, editor)
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944–2000 (Steven R. Centola, editor)
On Politics and the Art of Acting
VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS
Death of a Salesman (Gerald Weales, editor)
The Crucible (Gerald Weales, editor)
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
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New York, New York 10014
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First published in the United States of America by Reynal & Hitchcock 1947
This edition with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby published in Penguin Books 2000
Copyright © Arthur Miller, 1947
Copyright renewed Arthur Miller, 1975
Introduction copyright © Christopher Bigsby, 2000
All rights reserved
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
eISBN: 9781101664933
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Miller, Arthur, 1915–
All my sons: a drama in three acts / Arthur Miller; edited and with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.
p. cm.
ISBN 9780141185460
1. World War, 1939-1945—United States—Drama. 2. Aircraft industry—Corrupt practices—Drama. 3. Aircraft industry—Military aspects—Drama. 4. Fathers and sons—Drama. I. Bigsby, C. W. E. II. Title.
PS3525.I5156 A7 2000
815’.52—dc21 00-032621
CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that performance of All My Sons is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States of America, and of all countries covered by the International Copyright Union (including the Dominion of Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth), and of all countries covered by the Pan-American Copyright Convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, the Berne Convention, and of all countries with which the United States has reciprocal copyright relations. All rights, including professional/amateur stage rights, motion picture, recitation, lecturing, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound recording, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as CD-ROM, CD-I, information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and the rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved. Particular emphasis is placed upon the matter of readings, permission for which must be secured from the author’s agent in writing.
The amateur stage performance rights in All My Sons are controlled exclusively by the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. No nonprofessional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the required fee.
Inquiries concerning all other rights should be addressed to International Creative Management, Inc., 40 West 57th street, New York, New York 10019.
Cover photo © Photofest
Version_1
Contents
Cover
About the Authors
Also by Arthur Miller
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction by Christopher Bigsby
/>
Dedication
A Note on the Text
Cast and Synopsis of Scenes
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Property List
INTRODUCTION
WHEN ARTHUR MILLER began writing All My Sons in 1945, he was thirty years old. The author of a number of radio plays and the screenplay for a film—The Story of GI Joe—he was nonetheless finding theater a more difficult proposition. After a successful college career, he had written a play for the Federal Theater, only to see that organization closed down by Congress. His only professionally produced work, The Man Who Had All the Luck (1944), had failed after a matter of days. By contrast, his first novel, Focus (1945), was a considerable success, suggesting that he might be better employed as a writer of fiction. He determined, though, to make one more assault on the theater.
He first heard the story on which he would base All My Sons from his mother-in-law in Ohio. She had read of a young woman who informed on her father. He had been defrauding the military. In the context of Miller’s later career—his resistance to informing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, and his portrait of informers in The Crucible and A View from the Bridge—it is fascinating to think what he might have made of such an act, but this element swiftly disappeared. The young woman became a man, “because I didn’t know much about girls then,”1 and a new family context was created. Until that point, Miller had rarely spent more than three months on a play. This new one took two and a half years to write.
Begun in wartime but produced in peacetime, it lost something of the air of scandal that might have accompanied an earlier production and became, in essence, what it had always been in his own mind: a study of denial, of guilt, of social responsibility. It is a play in which past and present are brought together out of a belief in causality, a conviction that personal meaning and identity are the product of willed actions.
All My Sons concerns a manufacturer of aircraft parts, Joe Keller, who under the pressure of wartime production allows a batch of faulty cylinder heads to be supplied to the Army Air Force, knowing that they may cause catastrophic failure and thus endanger life. He does so rather than risk losing the contract and possibly his business, which he wishes to pass on to his sons. In the subsequent court case he denies responsibility, allowing his employee and neighbor, Steve Deever, to take the blame. Deever’s daughter, Ann, meanwhile, is engaged to Keller’s son Larry. Following their father’s conviction both she and her brother, George, sever all connection with him, refusing to visit him in prison or even write to him. To sustain his own family, Keller, it seems, sacrifices another and, beyond that, a wider family, those who die as a result of his actions.
When Larry, a pilot, goes missing in action, Kate Keller refuses to acknowledge his death, not least because to do so would be to accept a connection between her husband’s action and her own loss. The play opens as the Kellers’ other son, Chris, invites Ann to stay, intending to propose a marriage which will, effectively, signify public acknowledgment of Larry’s death and thus precipitate a crisis for all of them as past and present are brought into immediate confrontation. The action takes place in less than twenty-four hours.
Miller’s failure to secure a production for his Federal Theater play, a densely poetic drama about Montezuma and Cortés called The Golden Years, together with the failed production of The Man Who Had All the Luck, whose style eluded director, critics, and audience alike (though both plays would be produced successfully fifty years later), led him to attempt a more recognizable form. To that end, he turned to Henrik Ibsen as a model. As he explained, he was drawn to Ibsen because in Ibsen’s work the “enormous past was always heavily documented to the end that the present be comprehended with wholeness, as a moment in the flow of time,” so that “it presents barely and unadorned what I believe is the biggest single dramatic problem, namely, how to dramatize what has gone before.”2
Kate Keller, half desperately moved, half terrified, announces, “Everything that happened seems to be coming back.”3 So it does. That, indeed, is the circumstance of the play and its dialectic as the present interrogates the past and the past infiltrates the present. As Miller puts it, the chickens come home to roost.
At the beginning of the play Miller set himself to create an atmosphere of what he called “undisturbed normality.”4 The first act moves at a steady pace. It takes place “beneath a clear landscape in the broad light of a peaceful day.”5 However, as he remarked of Mordecai Gorelick’s designedly ordinary setting, this only “made the deepening threat of the remainder more frightening,”6 for into this recognizable domesticity, this Andrew Wyeth scene of a Sunday morning in an Ohio town, he gradually inserts corrosive elements. The night before, we soon learn, there was a storm. A tree has blown down, a tree planted to commemorate a life. More is to follow, in an elemental drama in which father destroys son and son destroys father.
It is high summer, the apogee of the year. Ahead lies the fall. In the garden, already, are plants “whose season is gone.” The stump of the apple tree stands downstage, its upper trunk, branches still covered with fruit, lying beside it. Having said that he wished to be “as untheatrical as possible,” and in particular wanting to ensure that “any metaphor, any image, any figure of speech . . . was removed if it even so slightly brought to consciousness the hand of the writer,”7 he placed this tree at the heart not only of the stage but of the play, quite as much as Chekhov did the cherry orchard. Fallen in its prime, it undeniably stands as a correlative for a son apparently cut down in the war, and it is identified as such by the characters. A storm occurring on the eve of a family crisis might seem an unnecessary underscoring of a drama which has its own logic, its own emotional tone, its own internal dynamics. That it does not seem unduly theatrical is precisely because the symbolism is read into it by characters themselves neurotically alert to threat and vigilant for evidence of change. And change is about to come over the Keller household, though for the moment these people seem frozen in time.
There is no past that can be confronted with total honesty and no future that does not carry a threat as well as a promise; and the present is no more than a temporary condition. The characters inhabit a no-man’s-land. The primary action driving the play has already occurred and been buried, apparently, beneath the routines of daily existence. The living are haunted by the dead, whom they seek to exorcise with a simple denial of reality. No action that any of the characters can take will alter what has happened. At stake, though, are truth, responsibility, and what Miller has called the evil of “unrelatedness.” For in a play in which the principal characters are drawn together by family affiliation, it is the fractures in relationships that most concern him, the limitations of responsibility. The structure of the play, he insisted, was “to bring a man into the direct path of the consequences he has wrought.”8
Joe Keller’s crime is that he has sent defective cylinder heads for use in aircraft engines, has committed perjury, and has allowed others to bear responsibility rather than accept the consequences of his own actions. But this is not primarily a play about a crime. It is about a man’s failure to understand the terms of the social contract. In Miller’s wartime play The Half-Bridge, never produced, the ultimate crime, in a drama about espionage and blackmail, is not those breaches of the criminal law but the removal of the buoys which mark a safe passage through ocean waters. Remove such buoys, literal and symbolic, and there is no longer a common world from which we may derive either personal identity or social meaning. This is what is at stake in All My Sons—and not for Joe Keller alone, since this is a play in which few if any of the characters could be said to be free of a self-concern that here, and elsewhere in Miller’s work, is the primary root of denial and betrayal on a private and a social level.
When Ibsen discussed the first production of The Wild Duck (clearly an influence on All My Sons) with the director of the Christiana Theater, he stressed th
e “naturalness and realism” of the play, at the heart of which, nonetheless, was an affecting symbol; he also stressed the need for lighting that would reflect the “basic mood” of each act.9 Miller’s play reveals a similar commitment to realism and a similar symbol, though not with the same centrality and force as the wild duck in the earlier work. Miller also, perhaps, learned from Ibsen about lighting that would reflect a mood. In the first act the sun shines brightly, as Chris Keller and Ann plan their wedding. In the second act it is twilight, as the mood darkens. In the third, it is two o’clock in the morning, with the moon casting a “bluish light” on people whose lives have been drained, suddenly, of color and purpose alike.
The Keller home is hedged in by poplar trees and has a “secluded atmosphere”; this physical description develops a metaphoric force as the play unfolds and we learn of the moral isolation of this family, or at least of its patriarch. Miller pointedly tells us the financial value of the seven-room family home (fifteen thousand dollars when it was built in the 1920s), not only as a note to the director and designer but also as a clue to the actors, for whom this is to be a house in which money has been a determinant and “family” a defining term. Indeed, the word “money” recurs throughout the play, as a kind of counterpoint to the idealism generated by the war. Character after character invokes money as a reason for relinquishing ideals or hopes. A next-door neighbor, a doctor, has abandoned medical research, at his wife’s insistence, for a more lucrative general practice—“You wanted money, so I made money.”* Another neighbor becomes financially secure because he has never served in the war. Joe Keller, whose wife also stresses money, complains that his son Chris “don’t understand money”; and Keller finally defends his own actions as no more than a reflection of a general morality: “Did they ship a gun or a truck outa Detroit before they got their price? Is that clean? It’s dollars and cents, nickels and dimes; war and peace, it’s nickels and dimes.”*
Joe Keller is described as a “heavy man of stolid mind and build,” a businessman who bears the imprint of “the machine worker and the boss”; “when he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgment must be dredged out of experience and a peasant-like common sense.”* His life is a triumph over such disadvantages, a triumph he will not readily allow to slip between his fingers. He is a man for whom survival is a primary necessity. Having lived through the Depression, he knows how fragile a grasp he, or anyone, has on the world. Nor is survival only a matter of maintaining a way of life and a way of being. Keller survives by insulating himself from knowledge of the consequences of his actions, by denying involvement in the world.