Next door, however, in the form of Charley and Bernard, is another version of the dream, a version turning not on self-delusion and an amoral drive for success, but hard work and charity. What Miller attacks, then, is not the American dream of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, but the dream as interpreted and pursued by those for whom ambition replaces human need, and for whom the trinkets of what Miller called the “new American Empire in the making” were taken as tokens of true value. When, on the play’s opening night, a woman called Death of a Salesman a “time bomb under American capitalism,” Miller’s response was to hope that it was, “or at least under the bullshit of capitalism, this pseudo life that thought to touch the clouds by standing on top of a refigerator, waving a paid-up mortgage at the moon, victorious at last.” (184) The play, of course, goes beyond such particularities. If it did not it would not be played as often as it is around the world. At the same time it has a distinctly American accent and places at its heart a distinctly American figure—the salesman.
In choosing a salesman for his central character Miller was identifying an icon of his society seized on equally by other writers before and since, not least because a salesman always trades in hope, a brighter future. In The Guilded Age Mark Twain sees the salesman as a trickster, literally selling America to the gullible. Sinclair Lewis chose a car salesman as the key to his satire of American values, as, decades later, John Updike was to do in his Rabbit Angstrom books. The central figure in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh is a salesman, as is Stanley Kowalski in Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire and Rubin Flood in William Inge’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross once again featured real estate salesmen, the symbolism of which is obvious. But what did Hickey sell, in The Iceman Cometh? He sold the same thing as Willy Loman, a dream of tomorrow, a world transformed, only to discover that meaning resides somewhere closer to home.
Willy’s real creative energy goes into work on his house (“He was a happy man with a batch of cement”). But that is not something he can sell. What, then, does he sell? There were those who thought that a vital question, including Mary McCarthy and Rhoda Koenig (for whom his failure to offer this answer was a certain sign of the play’s insignificance). But as Miller himself replied, he sells what a salesman always has to sell, himself. As Charley insists, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell.” As a salesman he has got to get by on a smile and a shoeshine. He has to charm. He is a performer, a confidence man who must never lack confidence. His error is to confuse the role he plays with the person he wishes to be. The irony is that he, a salesman, has bought the pitch made to him by his society. He believes that advertisements tell the truth and is baffled when reality fails to match their claims. He believes the promises that America made to itself—that in this greatest country on earth success is an inevitability.
Willy Loman is a man who never finds out who he is. He believes that the image he sees reflected in the eyes of those before whom he performs is real. As a salesman he stages a performance for buyers, for his sons, for the father who deserted him, the brother he admired. Gradually, he loses his audience. First the buyers, then his son, then his boss. He walks onto the stage no longer confident he can perform the role which he believes is synonymous with his self, no longer sure that anyone will care.
Death of a Salesman, Miller has said, is a play with “more pity and less judgment” than All My Sons. There is no crime and hence no ultimate culpability (beyond guilt for sexual betrayal), only a baffled man and his sons trying to find their way through a world of images—dazzling dreams and fantasies—in the knowledge that they have failed by the standards they have chosen to believe are fundamental. Willy has, as Biff alone understands, all the wrong dreams but, as Charley observes, they go with the territory. They are the dreams of a salesman reaching for the clouds, smiling desperately in the hope that people will smile back. He is “kind of temporary” because he has placed his faith in the future while being haunted by the past. Needing love and respect he is blind to those who offer it, dedicated as he is to the eternal American quest of a transformed tomorrow. What else can he do, then, but climb back into his car and drive off to a death which at last will bring the reward he has chased so determinedly, a reward which will expiate his sense of guilt, justify his life, and hand on to another generation the burden of belief which has corroded his soul but to which he has clung until the end.
When a film version was made, Columbia Pictures insisted (until a threatened lawsuit persuaded them otherwise) on releasing it with a short film stressing the wonderful life-style and social utility of the salesman. They might be said to have missed the point somewhat. However, in one respect they recognized the force of the salesman as a potent image of the society they evidently wished to defend. He sells hope. And to do that he must first sell himself. However, the success of the play throughout the world, over a period of nearly fifty years, shows that if Willy’s is an American dream, it is also a dream shared by all those who are aware of the gap between what they might have been and what they are, who need to believe that their children will reach out for a prize that eluded them, and who feel that the demands of reality are too peremptory and relentless to be sustained without hope of a transformed tomorrow.
NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION
1. If the play were set at the time of its composition the scenes from the past would date back to 1931, but we have Miller’s assurance that “For Willy it meant the American 1920s, the time when it all seemed to be coasting, expanding opportunity everywhere, the dream in full bloom” (Salesman in Beijing [New York and London, 1984], p. 108).
2. Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life (New York and London, 1987), p. 122. All future references are incorporated in the text.
3. Jo Mielziner, Designing for the Theater: A Memoir and a Portfolio (New York, 1965), p. 25.
4. Robert A. Martin and Steven R. Centola, eds., The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (New York, 1996), p. 423.
5. Kenneth Thorpe Rowe, A Theater in Your Head (New York, 1960), pp. 48-49.
6. Salesman in Beijing, p. 27.
7. Eric Bentley, In Search of Theater (London, 1954), p. 85. Interestingly, in another book, What Is Theatre?, he argues that there is a confusion between the political and the sexual realm, with the key scene being that with the tape recorder, if it is a political play, or that set in the Boston hotel room, if it is a sexual play, quite as though the two acts of betrayal and denial were wholly separate. In fact, for Miller, the private and the public are intimately connected and betrayal all of a piece.
8. Matthew C. Roudane, Conversations with Arthur Miller (Jackson, Mississippi, 1987), p. 15.
9. Rhoda Koenig, “Seduced by Salesman’s Patter,” The Sunday Times, London, October 20, 1996, 10.4.
10. Mary McCarthy, Sights and Spectacles: 1937-1958 (London, 1959), pp. xxiii, xv.
The action takes place in Willy Loman’s house and yard and in various places he visits in the New York and Boston of today.
Throughout the play, in the stage directions, left and right mean stage left and stage right.
ACT ONE
A melody is heard, played upon a flute. It is small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon. The curtain rises.
Before us is the SALESMAN’S house. We are aware of towering, angular shapes behind it, surrounding it on all sides. Only the blue light of the sky falls upon the house and forestage; the surrounding area shows an angry glow of orange. As more light appears, we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home. An air of the dream clings to the place, a dream rising out of reality. The kitchen at center seems actual enough, for there is a kitchen table with three chairs, and a refrigerator. But no other fixtures are seen. At the back of the kitchen there is a draped entrance, which leads to the living-room. To the right of the kitchen, on a level raised two feet, is a bedroom furnished only with a brass bedstead and a straight chair. O
n a shelf over the bed a silver athletic trophy stands. A window opens on to the apartment house at the side.
Behind the kitchen, on a level raised six and a half feet, is the boys’ bedroom, at present barely visible. Two beds are dimly seen, and at the back of the room a dormer window. (This bedroom is above the unseen living-room.) At the left a stairway curves up to it from the kitchen.
The entire setting is wholly or, in some places, partially transparent. The roof-line of the house is one-dimensional; under and over it we see the apartment buildings. Before the house lies an apron, curving beyond the forestage into the orchestra. This forward area serves as the back yard as well as the locale of all Willy’s imaginings and of his city scenes. Whenever the action is in the present the actors observe the imaginary wall-lines, entering the house only through its door at the left. But in the scenes of the past these boundaries are broken, and characters enter or leave a room by stepping “through” a wall on to the forestage.
[From the right, WILLY LOMAN, the Salesman, enters, carrying two large sample cases. The flute plays on. He hears but is not aware of it. He is past sixty years of age, dressed quietly. Even as he crosses the stage to the doorway of the house, his exhaustion is apparent. He unlocks the door, comes into the kitchen, and thankfully lets his burden down, feeling the soreness of his palms. A word-sigh escapes his lips—it might be “Oh, boy, oh, boy.” He closes the door, then carries his cases out into the living-room, through the draped kitchen doorway. LINDA, his wife, has stirred in her bed at the right. She gets out and puts on a robe, listening. Most often jovial, she has developed an iron repression of her exceptions to WILLY’S behavior—she more than loves him, she admires him, as though his mercurial nature, his temper, his massive dreams and little cruelties, served her only as sharp reminders of the turbulent longings within him, longings which she shares but lacks the temperament to utter and follow to their end.]
LINDA [hearing WILLY outside the bedroom, calls with some trepidation]: Willy!
WILLY: It’s all right. I came back.
LINDA: Why? What happened? [Slight pause.] Did something happen, Willy?
WILLY: No, nothing happened.
LINDA: You didn’t smash the car, did you?
WILLY [with casual irritation]: I said nothing happened. Didn’t you hear me?
LINDA: Don’t you feel well?
WILLY: I’m tired to the death. [The flute has faded away. He sits on the bed beside her, a little numb.] I couldn’t make it. I just couldn’t make it, Linda.
LINDA [very carefully, delicately]: Where were you all day? You look terrible.
WILLY: I got as far as a little above Yonkers. I stopped for a cup of coffee. Maybe it was the coffee.
LINDA: What?
WILLY [after a pause]: I suddenly couldn’t drive any more. The car kept going off on to the shoulder, y’know?
LINDA [helpfully]: Oh. Maybe it was the steering again. I don’t think Angelo knows the Studebaker.
WILLY: No, it’s me, it’s me. Suddenly I realize I’m goin’ sixty miles an hour and I don’t remember the last five minutes. I’m—I can’t seem to—keep my mind to it.
LINDA: Maybe it’s your glasses. You never went for your new glasses.
WILLY: No, I see everything. I came back ten miles an hour. It took me nearly four hours from Yonkers.
LINDA [resigned]: Well, you’ll just have to take a rest, Willy, you can’t continue this way.
WILLY: I just got back from Florida.
LINDA: But you didn’t rest your mind. Your mind is overactive, and the mind is what counts, dear.
WILLY: I’ll start out in the morning. Maybe I’ll feel better in the morning. [She is taking off his shoes.] These goddam arch supports are killing me.
LINDA: Take an aspirin. Should I get you an aspirin? It’ll soothe you.
WILLY [with wonder]: I was driving along, you understand? And I was fine. I was even observing the scenery. You can imagine, me looking at scenery, on the road every week of my life. But it’s so beautiful up there, Linda, the trees are so thick, and the sun is warm. I opened the windshield and just let the warm air bathe over me. And then all of a sudden I’m goin’ off the road! I’m tellin’ ya, I absolutely forgot I was driving. If I’d’ve gone the other way over the white line I might’ve killed somebody. So I went on again—and five minutes later I’m dreamin’ again, and I nearly—[He presses two fingers against his eyes.] I have such thoughts, I have such strange thoughts.
LINDA: Willy, dear. Talk to them again. There’s no reason why you can’t work in New York.
WILLY: They don’t need me in New York. I’m the New England man. I’m vital in New England.
LINDA: But you’re sixty years old. They can’t expect you to keep traveling every week.
WILLY: I’ll have to send a wire to Portland. I’m supposed to see Brown and Morrison tomorrow morning at ten o’clock to show the line. Goddammit, I could sell them! [He starts putting on his jacket.]
LINDA [taking the jacket from him]: Why don’t you go down to the place tomorrow and tell Howard you’ve simply got to work in New York? You’re too accommodating, dear.
WILLY: If old man Wagner was alive I’d a been in charge of New York now! That man was a prince, he was a masterful man. But that boy of his, that Howard, he don’t appreciate. When I went north the first time, the Wagner Company didn’t know where New England was!
LINDA: Why don’t you tell those things to Howard, dear?
WILLY [encouraged]: I will, I definitely will. Is there any cheese?
LINDA: I’ll make you a sandwich.
WILLY: No, go to sleep. I’ll take some milk. I’ll be up right away. The boys in?
LINDA: They’re sleeping. Happy took Biff on a date tonight.
WILLY [interested]: That so?
LINDA: It was so nice to see them shaving together, one behind the other, in the bathroom. And going out together. You notice? The whole house smells of shaving lotion.
WILLY: Figure it out. Work a lifetime to pay off a house. You finally own it, and there’s nobody to live in it.
LINDA: Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way.
WILLY: No, no, some people—some people accomplish something. Did Biff say anything after I went this morning?
LINDA: You shouldn’t have criticized him, Willy, especially after he just got off the train. You mustn’t lose your temper with him.
WILLY: When the hell did I lose my temper? I simply asked him if he was making any money. Is that a criticism?
LINDA: But, dear, how could he make any money?
WILLY [worried and angered]: There’s such an undercurrent in him. He became a moody man. Did he apologize when I left this morning?
LINDA: He was crestfallen, Willy. You know how he admires you. I think if he finds himself, then you’ll both be happier and not fight any more.
WILLY: How can he find himself on a farm? Is that a life? A farmhand? In the beginning, when he was young, I thought, well, a young man, it’s good for him to tramp around, take a lot of different jobs. But it’s more than ten years now and he has yet to make thirty-five dollars a week!
LINDA: He’s finding himself, Willy.
WILLY: Not finding yourself at the age of thirty-four is a disgrace!
LINDA: Shh!
WILLY: The trouble is he’s lazy, goddammit!
LINDA: Willy, please!
WILLY: Biff is a lazy bum!
LINDA: They’re sleeping. Get something to eat. Go on down.
WILLY: Why did he come home? I would like to know what brought him home.
LINDA: I don’t know. I think he’s still lost, Willy. I think he’s very lost.
WILLY: Biff Loman is lost. In the greatest country in the world a young man with such—personal attractiveness, gets lost. And such a hard worker. There’s one thing about Biff—he’s not lazy.
LINDA: Never.
WILLY [with pity and resolve]: I’ll see him in the morning; I’ll have a nice talk with
him. I’ll get him a job selling. He could be big in no time. My God! Remember how they used to follow him around in high school? When he smiled at one of them their faces lit up. When he walked down the street . . . [He loses himself in reminiscences.]
LINDA [trying to bring him out of it]: Willy, dear, I got a new kind of American-type cheese today. It’s whipped.
WILLY: Why do you get American when I like Swiss?
LINDA: I just thought you’d like a change—
WILLY: I don’t want a change! I want Swiss cheese. Why am I always being contradicted?
LINDA [with a covering laugh]: I thought it would be a surprise.
WILLY: Why don’t you open a window in here, for God’s sake?
LINDA [with infinite patience]: They’re all open, dear.
WILLY: The way they boxed us in here. Bricks and windows, windows and bricks.
LINDA: We should’ve bought the land next door.
WILLY: The street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighborhood. The grass don’t grow any more, you can’t raise a carrot in the back yard. They should’ve had a law against apartment houses. Remember those two beautiful elm trees out there? When I and Biff hung the swing between them?
LINDA: Yeah, like being a million miles from the city.
WILLY: They should’ve arrested the builder for cutting those down. They massacred the neighborhood. [Lost] More and more I think of those days, Linda. This time of year it was lilac and wisteria. And then the peonies would come out, and the daffodils. What fragrance in this room!