Change is certainly one of the facts of a critic's life. Having been enthralled and perplexed by art for many years, and having struggled to find a useful articulation of his enthusiasms and dislikes, he discovers one day that his pleasures have been restructured, that his intellectual energies are no longer nourished by works that once earned his joy and approval. His opinion of a poet may be the same, but he finds that he can no longer read that poet's poems. Perhaps life has made the truths of the poems too evident; perhaps the critic has become too fragile to sustain the dilemmas they raise in his mind; perhaps he has simply outgrown their passions or their peculiar rhetoric. As I said, his judgment may remain unaltered; he can still, without any hint of hypocrisy, pronounce these verses “good.” But they no longer belong to him in a special way, nor he to them. Only accident will bring them together in the future for an embarrassed meeting.

There is also another, mellower kind of change, something closer to resignation than to a violent alteration of sensibility. It is the amused acceptance of that which has outlasted the critic's rage. As one can finally tolerate and even grow fond of an ugly neighborhood building, so one can also come wearily to terms with an artist who has almost always proved himself abrasive in the past. One begins to admire, if nothing else, his endurance, to find something admirable in his continuing, in the face of one's absolute dismissal of his abilities, to offer again and again examples of a dull imagination and inept style. Finally, one comes to feel a morbid comradeship for such an artist, and it seems nothing but pettiness to go on dredging up bits of evidence for his indictment. After all, the man has produced a large body of work, he does have his admirers, he has not created such absolute rubbish that criticism has no business wallowing in it at all. What is one doing, the critic thinks, railing against one particular example of human fallibility? Can there not be just a final parting of the ways in silence?

It was with this second, phlegmatic sense of critical duty that I went to see Arthur Miller's new play, The Creation of the World and Other Business. The play had already been fatally injured by the daily reviewers, and word-of-mouth gossip had led me to expect little enjoyment from this dramatic paraphrase of part of Genesis. Still, I was determined to greet this offering by the man the world considers to be America's leading playwright with nothing harsher than a little benign neglect, no matter how flawed it proved itself to be. I had raged too often against Arthur Miller in the past, and now, between his spirit and mine, I sought a détente. Indeed, I hoped I had at last reached that point in maturity where even the worst play could not provoke me into a diatribe against its author. As a critic, I was growing tired of squabbles, bored with defending the distinctions necessary for talking seriously about art's aspects. I was certain that The Creation of the World and Other Business would come and go in my life with no greater incident attached to it than my suffering a few hours' wonder about a society that believed Arthur Miller to be one of its important spokesmen. In short, I was a dangerously moribund critic. I was ready to understand and forgive everything, which is no better than the method practiced by so many of my colleagues—namely, to misunderstand and thus accept everything.

Well, I owe Arthur Miller my gratitude. With less than three hours of dramaturgy he rescued me from my lethargy and restored in me the desire to give a meretricious play no quarter. With each sentimental line, with each cute rendering of divine and mortal difficulties, Miller reawakened in me that wonderful feeling of anger that seems so inexplicable to those who do not believe art to be of earnest consequence. By the time he had finished with his interpretation of the creation and fall of man, all of my complacency had been purged, and it seemed a fine thing again to revive the charges that I had often made against him.

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Some time ago, in the middle of a harsh review of The Price,¹ I singled out Death of a Salesman as the one play in Miller's canon that is truly a success. I mentioned as a possible reason for this the fact that Miller had confined some of his heavier notions about human tragedy to the little essay that preceded the play's printed version and had allowed Willy Loman a dramatic existence unfettered by too much extraneous portent. To be sure, there was a bit of fustian lyricism in the play and a good deal of self-pity, but Willy Loman's quest for success in American terms and the details of his failure were honestly enough wrought so that the work's excesses could be forgiven. Alas, that was the final bit of restraint Miller showed as a dramatist. Since then, he has been intent on coercing our concern with moral parables (The Crucible), forcing us to accept rough melodramatics in a tragic framework (View From the Bridge), insisting that we do not miss the human ambiguities in history (Incident at Vichy), and offering us a dramatized autobiography (After the Fall) that has tottered between embarrassingly personal tidbits and inflated generalizations.

Whatever signs of life these plays possessed were entombed in philosophizing, smothered by facile psychological insights, and obfuscated by cloudbursts of woolly speeches that floated about in the theater evoking nothing more concrete than their own sonority. Whatever else Miller wanted to be taken for, he insisted that one should never think him anything but serious. And if it proved too difficult to attain this consideration through a personal and original art, there were always weighty decorations that could be used to keep up pretenses. A little speech here about guilt, a choral aside about destiny, a spurious historical analogy, a gratuitous introduction of the recently momentous—all these tricks that made him the darling of social realism abroad also kept up his reputation among those critics in America who thirst after significance so long as it is not given them in too precise and complex a manner.

One must suppose Miller secure in his seriousness, for he has now, in The Creation of the World and Other Business, not only seized upon a theme that no one could consider trivial, but has dared to treat it with fits of paradoxical humor. Last year we had Jesus Christ as a superstar, this year we have Man as a shmuck—the word is not mine, it is the epithet used by God immediately after Adam's fall. The creation, temptation, fall, and banishment of man from grace, Miller sees as a sort of domestic comedy in which God, as head of the household, presides over a simple-minded family easily led astray by Lucifer, the bad boy on the block. It would be uncharitable to deal with the play's theology: on the question of divine omnipotence and human free will, for example, Miller's God blusters somewhere toward the end of the third act that He wants men to be free to choose; Lucifer says something about the Almighty's being in need of evil in the world in order that man might need his forgiveness, and that is about the sum of the playwright's interpretation of the problem.

But let us get back to God's little household. Everything begins well enough. God, anticipating Michelangelo's version of the event, wakes Adam with a touch of the finger, and they fall to naming things. (“Labbit,” says Adam. God looks doubtful. “Rabbit,” Adam amends. God agrees.) God is pleased with His work and Adam is a contented extension of God's will except for one detail. When pressed, the obedient son admits to wondering why all the creatures except him have a companion. Miller's God, who improvises at creation, admits His oversight and brings forth Eve in the traditional manner. Except for a tendency to answer God's explanations and interdictions with a dazed “Why?,” there is nothing about her to suggest that she will prove susceptible to temptation. Both she and Adam seem embarked on nothing more harmful than a pre-pubescent date.

However, back in heaven, surrounded by Raphael, Chemuel, and Azrael, a trio of imbecile angels who bore Him with perpetual hosannas, God begins to fret. Unlike the animals around who share their garden, His pet creatures are not multiplying. Their innocence keeps them from being fruitful. That He might have provided them with an instinct similar to the one which keeps the rest of the animal world humming, doesn't occur to God. In His quandary, He calls on Lucifer for advice. Lucifer has an easy solution—a little sex education. “Look,” says the angel who will soon rule in hell, “he's sticking it in her ear now. He's got to learn where to put it.”

Thus is introduced one of the grand themes of Western theology—the knowledge that will bring death to mankind. “All they do is screw all the time,” says Azrael, the Angel of Death, with distaste. “How can they keep thinking up these positions?” muses God as Adam and Eve, now expelled from Eden, make up for time lost through innocence.

By now Miller's notion of humor should be apparent. It is simply to juxtapose a “realistic” notion of behavior with the Bible's grand but schematic conception of the beginning of man's existence and woes. In itself, not a bad idea; but what a delicate mastery of divine and human comedy it would take to make it a successful one. Simply following a biblical quotation with some down-to-earth prose is not enough. Neither are a few burlesque anachronisms, such as having a still innocent Adam walk on stage, stare at Eve's upturned rump, and ask, “How about some volleyball?” I would never presume to suggest how such an enterprise in comedy could be carried off, but I am certain it would have to be done by someone who was in no way fettered by belief in, or nostalgia for, the tale he was elaborating upon. Only a true infidel, amazed that such a mass of contradictions and inconsistencies could enthrall the imagination of an entire culture, could make us laugh at the very essence of our theological bafflement instead of at the coy problems it presents for a modern narrator with a mundane wit.

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Now Miller is certainly no infidel. Having struggled so long to find a subject that would easily contain his thoughts about suffering, guilt, and other human flaws, he has no intention of settling for a drama filled with light conceits. Once out of Eden, the jokes become fewer and fewer, and the serious battle between Lucifer and God for sovereignty over man goes on until the death of Abel. Lucifer, as conceived by Miller, is a petulant sophist, pleased whenever he can turn a paradox to his own ends. Like so many other literary devils, he affects a more logical and compassionate approach to man than that which God has ordained. However, unlike his more successful literary forerunners, the Lucifer of The Creation of the World and Other Business has no power to his being—no evil grandeur, no fresh temptation makes him compelling. He is little more than a whining raisonneur in Miller's conception, a product of a liberal imagination that cannot believe in evil, only in its sentimental consequences. Thus this Lucifer is neither a fierce rebel nor a seductive intelligence: he is merely a poor theologian.

Against this personification of denial, played by George Grizzard with a certain self-satisfied impishness and a near-perpetual sardonic smile, we have a God who, as I mentioned earlier, can give no better defense of His actions than that He wanted man to have a free choice in the destiny of the world. Apart from this and some scenes of comic exasperation with the lower order of beings He has created, angels included, He bumbles about the stage in unmemorable fits of divine anxiety. He ends by being the kind of enlightened parent who, having refused to dictate what is right or wrong to his children, nevertheless punishes them when, to His mind, they go astray.

All this comes to a tepid conclusion when Cain, described by Lucifer as a religious fanatic, slays his brother. Then the world's first murderer, indifferent to God's entreaties, refuses to feel remorse and even vaguely accuses Him, through His omnipotency, of being an accomplice. God is shocked. The devil senses victory. But wait. This is, after all, a modern interpretation. A devil's triumph lacks sophistication and ambiguity, so we must have Cain renounce both God's comfort and the devil's aid, and go off to become, with a certain doomed pride, his species' mottled future.

It is hard, even in a schematic retelling of the play, to be as simple-minded as its author. It is also hard to believe that such unoriginal insights into the relationship between man and his divinity could cause such a feeling of outrage. Of course, Miller has added some new vulgarity to the story of creation, but that alone should not be enough to prompt one to excoriate a play that has already come to a brief and timely end. The fact is that the faults in The Creation of the World and Other Business allow one to see more clearly the lapses of so many of the author's earlier works that escaped without proper censure. It is easier, after experiencing the excesses of this last play, to understand how, as an artist, Miller has so often cheapened life in the past through his readiness to understand it too quickly and to festoon it with gaudy pronouncements. And it is this that refuels critical anger. Not the violation of some precious aesthetic principle, but the insult, however unwitting, to human existence itself. When this is understood, then silence and fashionable indifference become sins that are in every way far worse than those committed by Arthur Miller's befuddled Adam.

¹ COMMENTARY, April 1968.