I am not one of those who responded strongly to Death of a Salesman when it was presented on the stage. Like many “great” American plays, it seems to me gross and ungainly, almost monstrous in its want of finesse, full of a self-conscious energy masquerading as profundity and a mechanical realism which hides a fundamental reluctance to give the real world its due. Lee J. Cobb’s performance in the leading role was undoubtedly masterful, but in a sense it agreed too well with the fixed intent of the play: one felt at times that the agonies of the elephantine figure on the stage came not so much from the ruin of his own life as from the merciless constrictions of the playwright’s vision, especially perhaps from that insanely “artistic” stagecraft which required him, like a great rat in an invisible maze, to play at walking through imaginary doors and around imaginary walls—no wonder that at last he pounded the floor in his frustration.

And if Willy Loman is a grotesque, his sons, with their pat “American” nicknames and their stilted confusions, are the merest cardboard: Andy Hardy broken on the wheel of social criticism. Only the mother, Willy’s wife, and the next-door neighbor Charley have any honest reality; on the whole, though not consistently, Arthur Miller does let these two speak for themselves. But their reality continually denies the reality of the play: Charley’s final summation of Willy’s tragedy (“. . . for a salesman there is no rock bottom to the life”) is his moment of greatest falsity, for he is no less a “salesman” than Willy, but a successful one; on the other hand, Mrs. Loman’s failure at the end to understand what has happened expresses her essential solidity, it has not occurred to her that she was married to a symbol. (It is curious that the mother-figure, which is the focus of so much falsehood in American culture, seems also occasionally to represent its firmest grasp on the real.)

Taken point by point, the movie Death of a Salesman is inferior to the play. Fredric March, a more commonplace actor than Cobb, is also less imposing as a physical presence. Cobb’s very bulk did much to disguise the pettiness of Willy Loman’s failure; March’s Willy, actually more believable than Cobb’s, is to that extent more pathetic and more ridiculous, a crazy man talking to himself. The film suffers also from that exaggerated respect which Hollywood sometimes offers to a recognized work of art; where most films made from Broadway plays are automatically better than their originals merely by reduction of the amount of undistinguished dialogue, this one manages to include almost as much as the play. Another difficulty is in the constant presentations of Willy’s memories and hallucinations, which were awkward enough on the stage but at least belonged to an accepted framework of theatrical convention; the film manages the transitions from the real to the hallucinatory more smoothly, but these sequences still wrench it out of shape: the very fluidity of the medium favors simpler and more direct exposition (even the accepted use of the “flashback”—Willy’s hallucinations do not quite belong to that convention—is almost never accomplished without a kind of purely technical sentimentality).

Nor have the makers of the film taken much advantage of the greater mobility of the medium. It is true that Willy’s house, which can now have solid walls and real doors, is more present than it was on the stage, though in fact the camera concentrates so obstinately on the figures of the actors that the house is never allowed the importance it ought to have. There is also a good opening sequence photographed from the back seat of Willy’s car as he drives slowly over the George Washington Bridge, peering anxiously through the windshield and now and then fidgeting a little to bring himself closer to the steering wheel, just his shoulders and the back of his head, with the two big sample cases sticking up in the foreground, all conveying the impression of an aging and pitiable masculinity, a man who works hard with little success. This sequence represents the film’s most intelligent use of March’s body, which is best taken for granted (later there is constant overemphasis on bowed shoulders, worried eyes and forehead, middle-aged belly); it is also the closest sight we ever get of Willy Loman as a real salesman—a man who might actually drive into a town in New England and try to sell some specific line of goods. It tells much about the limitations of Mr. Miller’s realism that he should have thought it a good idea not to mention just what it is that Willy sells, though in the play we are told the brand-names of his refrigerator and his various cars; the supposition that “universatility” is achieved by suppression of the particular is a characteristic error of American writers.

Once the camera has brought Willy to his home—that is, to the point at which the play begins—it abdicates in favor of the playwright, and we never really get back to the figure in the car. Willy’s Brooklyn—and his New England—remain as shadowy and unlocalized as ever; he dwells in an America not even of the imagination, but only of the idea. When one of the scenes of hallucination is placed in the subway, it is only to emphasize more strongly the refusal to fill in the concrete background of Willy’s sufferings: everything is kept neat and blank, the other people no more than an orderly group of extras, the posters carefully out of focus in the background, and the camera never leaves Willy. Who would dream that a movie director could refuse the invitation of the subway? But of course it is in the nature of this picture to refuse every such invitation; the subway may be unpleasant, but we use it every day; if the subway or the streets or the real Brooklyn were permitted to exist, then it would be clear that Willy Loman had, if not a good life, at least a style of life, and the point of the film, as of the play, is that he had no life at all, he didn’t “put a bolt to a nut or tell you the law or give you medicine,” above all he did not work with his hands, which for Mr. Miller seems to represent the true meaning of failure—again, a characteristic American abstraction.

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Yet the picture has a certain power which for me at least—apparently not for others—was lacking in the play. No film ever quite disappears into abstraction: what the camera reproduces has almost always on the most literal level the appearance of reality; that is one reason why the movies can afford to be so much more banal than the theater: when we complain of their “unreality” we do not mean exactly that they fail to carry conviction, but more probably that they carry conviction all too easily. In the blankest moments of Death of a Salesman one sees, if not Willy Loman, who is always more a concept than a human being, at least the actor Fredric March, brought so close and clear that his own material reality begins to assert itself outside the boundaries that are supposed to be set by his role. On the stage, this would be a fault, for it would mean that the actor was seeking to impose himself on the play; here there is no need for him to put himself forward: he need only be present, a passive object merely available to the camera’s infinite appetite for the material. This is not to say that the actor’s “real” personality replaces that of the character he portrays—though that may happen—but only that the actor as an object of perception is real and important irrespective of whether we believe in the character: the screen permits no vacancies, it will be filled one way or another. Thus as we lose interest in the aging salesman of the play, there emerges this other spectacle with its own quality and pathos, indeed its own drama, which is not at all foreign to the play though beyond its presumed limits: the spectacle of the aging movie star attempting to express what he believes is to be found in the play, exposing to inspection the bags under his eyes, the unpleasing sag of his thin mouth, as if to insist at whatever cost that he is engaged in a serious enterprise. There are moments when one becomes aware with almost too much clarity that March feels himself suddenly at the heart of the matter—for instance when he looks with his sick face at Bernard, the boy who stuck to his books and has become a “success,” and asks, “Bernard. . . what’s the secret?”—and at such moments he compels one’s respect, not so much for what the playwright has written (though this line has some brilliance) as for the intensity of his own concern with it.

In the end, the quality of seriousness which is most visible in the presence of March becomes the dominant tone of the whole production—in the deliberate direction, in the solemn lighting, in the very rejection of cinematic opportunities which a “routine” film would take up as a matter of course—and though one need not finally acknowledge any personal involvement with the fate of Willy Loman, it is not so easy to deny an involvement with the film as such: not Willy Loman, but Death of a Salesman is the American phenomenon that demands examination. Granted that the drama does not come to life in its own terms, what is the nature of the aura that undeniably surrounds it?

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Some of the more illuminating recent sociological writing—I think especially of David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd—has described the typical American as abnormally concerned with personal attractiveness. We are all familiar with the advertising that plays upon our social anxieties, most often in a sexual context but also in the more general terms of status: if you don’t use the right tooth paste or the right soap, if you have not read the right books and learned correct grammar, then you will not get a girl and you will miss that promotion you have been hoping for. These advertisements are only the most practical expression of a broad concept of American society which in fact we all assent to. The American stands outside any fixed social framework, and so he must create his own place, indeed he must create himself, out of the resources of his personality. If he believes still that the world lies open to him, he believes also, and with a greater clarity, that if he fails to measure up to his opportunity he will find himself an outcast. At one time this struggle for status was seen to have a certain logic: if you worked hard you would probably get along respectably, since it was more or less in your own power to find some useful area of activity; the danger of failure, though real enough, belonged to the accepted hazards. But now the individual must in most cases attach himself to some large bureaucracy over which he has no control and where his fate depends primarily on his pleasing his superiors, or if not his superiors, then simply “pleasing” in the most general sense; the roads to success have become vague and infinitely complex, the very content of success is no longer clear, and failure is a kind of insidious disease, like cancer: you may find put at any moment that you have had it all along. And our defenses become correspondingly vague, moving toward fantasy and propitiation; so long as our smiles are returned, we know that we are not yet cast away. In short, the American is a “salesman” with nothing to sell but his own personality. Mr. Miller’s Charley sums it up in his speech at Willy Loman’s grave: “. . . you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you’re finished. . . . A salesman is got to dream. . . . It comes with the territory.”

No doubt this picture is true. We still teach our children that the world lies open to them and they must make their way—what else should we teach?—and we watch over them continually in fear that they may miss that exact balance of the physical, intellectual, and social graces without which their gifts will go to waste. It is true that we expend our energies in childish fantasies of success and power, and that on some level of our minds we go in expectation of the word of rejection that will leave us jobless, loveless, without a place. As admirers of Death of a Salesman have said, we are all Willy Lomans.

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But this identification is taken more seriously than it deserves; on the upper levels of our culture it is assumed that literature is a form of explicit social criticism, and consequently all “negative” social images tend to be given undue weight as representing a “truer” reality, just as on lower cultural levels certain “positive” images—of home, religion, and the like—are still assured of an automatic response. If we look soberly at Willy Loman—this absolute “salesman” with his obsession about being “well liked” and his utter emptiness of values, behaving as if he himself had read The Lonely Crowd and been seized with a sociological delusion—it is obvious at once that we are not all Willy Lomans except in the sense that we are all sadists or homosexuals or “schizoids”; psychological and sociological types have their own reality, but only a lunatic runs true to type, perhaps not even a lunatic, and the dramatic uses of lunacy are limited. If Willy Loman were a valid creation, if we could believe thoroughly even in his lunacy, then the distortions of his personality would have to operate within a surrounding reality that might give them dramatic meaning; but the “purity” of the playwright’s conception defeats all drama: one cannot quite believe that Willy ever sold anything, and even his death does not seem more a fact than the hallucinations that lead up to it

Actually, the most illuminating analogy to Willy Loman is to be found not in life but in an earlier literature: he is a man possessed by a “humor.” The fact that his particular humor is constructed out of a more advanced social science than that of the 17th century does not essentially alter its character; the more profound a scientific insight, the more it demands a kind of aesthetic appreciation: taken literally, its profundity becomes only a new shallows (we might be spared much boring amateur psychoanalysis if this truth were more widely accepted). The Jacobean comedy of humors was also in the most direct sense related to life—its characters were “recognizable” with the same excessive clarity as Willy Loman—and it had its special validity (which was not, however, the validity of social criticism). But there has never been a successful tragedy of humors: the protagonist of tragedy must walk whole upon the stage.

Death of a Salesman belongs to that culture of ideology which may eventually be all the culture we shall have. It is serious and in the most obvious ways honest, but if we take it as seriously as it asks to be taken, that is only one more evidence of our ability to refuse to recognize our own boredom (for another example, consider the reception of The Cocktail Party). As the mass audience escapes into easy sentiment, so the educated audience escapes into ideas, a tendency which does not necessarily reflect a real interest in ideas: Death of a Salesman offers us not the fact but the atmosphere of thought.

Nor are these two audiences and their cultures so far apart as might appear. Thus, faced with the need to give his play some kind of dramatic movement, Mr. Miller confusedly allows himself to suggest that Willy Loman’s having been unfaithful to his wife may be the only important factor in the collapse of his family—a possibility that threatens continually to make nonsense of the play’s main point. And one is only momentarily surprised to learn that Stanley Kramer, the producer of the film, having refused to permit any sentimental alteration of the play’s “negative” conclusion, has soothed the feelings of certain salesmen’s associations by making a “positive” short film about the advantages of salesmanship as a career; I have not seen this short, but there is no reason why Mr. Kramer should not have brought to it all the honest conviction that can be seen in his handling of the longer film.

In the end, perhaps the most valid reaction to Death of a Salesman is the philistine one, which has at least the virtue of judging the play in terms of actuality. Perhaps as much to the point as anything I have written is the comment of that playgoer who is reported to have said as he left the theater, “That New England territory never was any good.” The fact that this remark seems stupendously naive is testimony to the play’s distance from reality.

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As I have said, one of the basic appeals of Death of a Salesman lies in its pessimism. So much of “official” American culture has been cheaply optimistic that we are likely almost by reflex to take pessimism as a measure of seriousness. Besides, the element of pessimism is often for educated people an aid to identification: Willy Loman gains much of what reality he seems to have from the fact that we are all secretly inclined to think ourselves “failures.” But a pessimistic falsehood is no less false—and no less an escape—than an optimistic one.

A more “affirmative” picture of American life is offered in Samuel Goldwyn’s production I Want You, which presents the vicissitudes of two generations of an American family at the time of the outbreak of the Korean war. Those concerned in the production of this movie doubtless believed in what they were doing, but none of the critics, so far as I know, has spoken of it as a significant work of art, and it has joined the endless ranks of “Hollywood” productions. On the whole, it deserves the reception it has got. Yet it is in many ways better and more serious than Death of a Salesman.

I Want You is apparently an effort to repeat the success of Mr. Goldwyn’s earlier and greatly overrated The Best Years of Our Lives (1947), which attempted to give a generalized picture of American life soon after the end of the last war. The Best Years of Our Lives was a tissue of cheerful platitudes, using a notable technical virtuosity to present the surface of reality with such hard clarity as to discourage any looking beyond the film’s narrow ideological boundaries; social tensions were presented only to be smoothly denied, political and economic problems were evaded (usually, in a characteristic American fashion, by reducing them to the plane of personal morality), and in the episodes concerning the veteran who had lost his hands a particularly dreadful example of personal suffering was used as one more occasion for a vulgar sentimental optimism.¹ In I Want You, too, there is much falsity, but since the film does not pretend to be concerned with any broad social problems, only with the simpler fact of a threat of war, it does not have to make so many evasions. In addition, the external situation discourages any crude optimism: The Best Years of Our Lives was about the end of a war, this film is about the beginning of one, and its “affirmation” must be more subtle, residing not so much in the characters’ larger actions or their occasional set speeches as in the unspoken assumption that they will prove equal to whatever may be demanded of them. This is an arrogant assumption, but it is presented with a kind of innocence; the chief falsification is in giving the characters a greater dignity than one would expect of them, and the result is something like an American version of those British films which do not so much extol the British character as quietly take its virtues for granted. Beneath their personal anxieties and emotional crudities, which are presented usually with external honesty and now and then with something more, the characters have an astonishing serenity, expressing not the absence of tensions but, more realistically, a confidence that the tensions will remain under control; even the very young characters, despite their deliberate gracelessness (and rather sickening graces), and even the weak and somewhat shiftless father, display at bottom the same self-containment. Actually this quality is far from new in American movies; it is the special quality of the most fully realized Western and soldier heroes, and in many other movies it has been offered, if unsuccessfully, as the essential component of the “American” character. But here for the first time one can sense a possibility of its being absorbed without violence into realistic pictures; it is still an untruth, but the precise area of its falsity seems no longer so easy to define: it may yet become an untruth organically assimilated, which is to say a myth. (It is hard to believe that such a development would be desirable, though it might produce good pictures, as it has done in the Westerns.)

Inseparable from this self-containment of the characters is a pervasive temperate melancholy which adds to the impression of a maturity not truly achieved but yet not easily to be called false. This melancholy has really nothing in common with the gross ideological pessimism of Death of a Salesman, but belongs precisely to the “affirmation” of practical people who have accepted the burdens of their lives, however narrowly they may conceive them, and expecting no final victory or full satisfaction, are still unable to believe in the possibility of defeat, if only because a certain stupidity makes them incapable of imagining a threat to their inner selves. Again, it is a quality most clearly realized in film portraits of men of action—Western heroes and soldiers—but it is also one of the interesting elements in soap opera, sentimental popular fiction, or an occasional “serious” comic strip (“Mary Worth,” for instance), and even in the novels of such writers as J. P. Marquand and James Gould Cozzens. And one finds again some difficulty in discerning the precise boundaries between the true and the false. When Dorothy McGuire hangs out her wash in the back yard, a contrived image of the conscientious young wife and mother, and expounds her “mature” view of life, certainly we are in the area of the false; but at other times, when the sharp, “refined” lines of her face and the controlled tension of her voice are allowed to make their effect without emphasis, one begins to believe even in the picture she was trying to create at the clothesline,

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In general, what line of demarcation can be found between the true and the false is in the difference between what the actors with too much contrivance are made to rep resent and what in their mere physical appearance they seem “naturally” to be, a difference that remains even when the purpose of contrivance is only to “interpret” what is already there. The plot is of course ideologically determined: it concerns mainly the decision of a reserve officer (Dana Andrews) to go back into the army, and the initial rebellion and final reconciliation of his young brother (Farley Granger) at being drafted, these events set against a background designed to display the virtues of the American character and a general calm solidarity in the face of danger. The story is presented with unusual tact and in some ways a surprising honesty (it would have been unthinkable for a movie during the last war to show that a young man might regard a postcard from his draft board as a major calamity), and most of the action is in itself quite credible, but one is continually disturbed by the way everything agrees tidily with the initial purposes: honesty itself becomes only a part of the “effect,” like the candor of a statesman. The film’s real virtue is in the degree to which, despite its ideological commitment, it remains tied to physical appearances, and this not with the rigidity of intent that made The Best Years of Our Lives visually so shallow, but professionally, with that less purposive compulsion simply to make the most of visual opportunities which is the film camera’s peculiar justification. Thus Dana Andrews’ face of a thoughtful frog and his undistinguished competent body, which might easily with misguided artistry be built into an “American” symbol (as has been done with the more extreme lines of James Stewart, for instance), are wisely left to carry conviction in their own way; Andrews is an ideal film actor in the sense that his physical appearance never ceases to be interesting and “real,” and almost never fails to carry suggestion, no matter what situation he may be placed in; here, he is completely believable even when he must sit with his little daughter on his lap telling her a bedtime story, and if any note of falsity does creep in, it is immediately redeemed by the clumsy line of his shoulders as he carries her to her crib.

In special contrast to Death of a Salesman is this picture’s concentration on the material background. In Death of a Salesman the background is deliberately suppressed, apparently from a belief that the “essential” quality of American life is only obscured by its material basis—a curious assumption for a movie that might claim to be precisely a materialist interpretation of our society, but, as I have remarked, a necessary one if it is to make its point. The more normal American view, though perhaps a less intellectual one, and certainly the natural view for anyone starting out to take pictures, is that the “essential,” if it is to be found at all, will turn out to reside in the material. In I Want You, we are shown a good many details of the family business and are given opportunities to see Dana Andrews at work. When young Farley Granger goes for his appearance before the draft board, the waiting room is crowded with other young men, not empty extras as in the subway scene of Death of a Salesman, but actors adding their particular touches of fact (not very happily, it is true). And no opportunity is lost to fill in the appearance of the streets, the stores, a bar, the insides of homes.

The homes above all, of course: the dingy home of the older generation, with streaks of dust on the walls after Mildred Dunnock in her big scene has torn down her husband’s collection of guns, bayonets, and helmets from the First World War, and the newer home of the younger couple with modern paneling and brighter upholstery, but just as cluttered and conventional, a ten-cent-store picture of a ship over the mantel and a big wing chair beside the fireplace; if the business does not do well, this house too will in its turn become dingy and characterless, not from any want of care but chiefly from a want of self-assertiveness: the home is so obviously important that it carries its meaning in its mere existence, like a business office—there is no need to make it a vehicle of self-expression. Presented with an unthinking conviction that makes the symbol something more than a cliché, the homes of this film do actually represent what these Americans are seeking to defend. They ask only to be left in undisturbed possession of their lives and their property: one could almost weep at the innocence which makes them think this a small thing to ask. But that innocence is in its own way a form of worldly wisdom; it belongs to that famous American materialism which, if it limits our understanding of other peoples and of ourselves, also offers some protection against the murderous “spiritualities” of ideology; perhaps one of the American virtues is that our slogans so often ring hollow. In the end, the “representative American” of this movie decides to go back into the army very much as he might decide that the time has finally come when he must fix the lawn-mower, but this “materialist” decision is both wiser and more serious than the kind of “spiritual” impulse that might have sent his father into the army in 1917.

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There is another illuminating point of comparison between I Want You and Death of a Salesman in their treatment of relations between the generations. Like Willy Loman, the father of I Want You is a liar and boaster, and the moment comes when his lies are exposed: the souvenirs of the First World War which clutter his living room were bought in the pawnshops of New York; he spent the time of the war in Paris as a general’s orderly. But when the father on the night before his older son’s return to the army feels it necessary to tell him the truth, the son surprisingly refuses this invitation to drama: he knew the truth all along, but “there are some lies that a son doesn’t call his father on.” Willy Loman is of course a more extreme case, and I would not claim that his sons could have reacted similarly. On the other hand, there is no implication in this film that the father’s lies were not important; what is significant is the refusal to go too far below the surface: we are left to feel the importance of the scene without having it interpreted to us. This refusal is a wise one, both in terms of the film medium itself, which is almost always embarrassed by a too conscious concern with profundities, and in terms of the particular characters of this film, whose common-sense relation to reality involves the assumption that their inner psychological conflicts are of no practical relevance so long as they can be kept under control. No doubt this assumption belongs to the film’s superficiality; let me repeat that I Want You is not particularly good. But when we consider that no one in Death of a Salesman ever suggests that Willy Loman should be taken to a psychiatrist—again a philistine consideration—that superficiality begins to seem a kind of virtue.

It would be a mistake, however, to set up too sharp an opposition between these films. Death of a Salesman owes much of its success to the illusion of just such an opposition: it appeals to people who are dissatisfied with pictures like I Want You. And their dissatisfaction is justified; taken in the abstract, perhaps Arthur Miller’s falsifications are in some sense better than Samuel Goldwyn’s, since after all we are not entirely wrong in feeling that the more pessimistic view is usually the more serious one. But the point is that Mr. Miller’s view forces him continually to slight the claims of the material world which constitutes all our experience, and Mr. Goldwyn’s does not. This is not enough to make I Want You a successful work of art, or even, except in the remotest sense, a “hope” for art: those who hope for the improvement of American movies are usually hoping for more films like Death of a Salesman. But we are left with the fact that I Want You achieves almost as a matter of course that immediate contact with material reality which, in the world as we know it, is the only possible basis for serious drama or literature, but which seems to be conspicuously lacking in much that now passes for serious. This may help to explain why the “problem” of the movies continues to intrude itself, like some awkwardly literal questioner from the back row, into the criticism of American culture.

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¹ I discussed this movie at length in a review published in Partisan Review, May-June 1947.