Biography: The observation by F. Scott Fitzgerald that there are no second acts in American lives must surely make Arthur Miller smile.
Half a century after Death Of A Salesman, he continues to write prolifically; 40 years of marriage to the recently deceased photographer Inge Morath followed his spotlit years with Marilyn Monroe; decades since he famously refused to name names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he continues to "speak truth to power".
His latest play, Resurrection Blues, currently playing in the US, tackles the very contemporary subject of advertising and media manipulation in politics. At the age of 87, Miller has succumbed neither to burnout nor cynicism - except perhaps about critics ("who are these guys?") for whom he has contempt.
The exception, evidently, is the author of this authoritative biography, with whom he co-operated over the professional but not the personal details of his life. Martin Gottfried has been a New York theatre critic for 40 years and is attuned to the hustling energies of Broadway in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and the talent and influence of directors such as Elia Kazan, who, as well as being an important friend, was heavily instrumental in creating Miller's early successes. He traces the intricacies of relationships between playwrights, producers, financiers, directors, publicists and critics in the American commercial theatre that first lionised Miller and then, in recent decades, rejected him.
It was a fate for which his formative years had prepared him well. Born in 1915 into a luxurious home in Manhattan to Polish-Jewish parents, his childhood circumstances altered irrevocably when his factory-owning father's fortune was lost in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. The shadow of the ensuing Depression hovers over much of Miller's writing: he derived a sense from those years of the fragility of things, the speed with which people could plunge into destitution.
Moral indignation and a sense of outrage at injustice are given emotional force by Miller's guilt at having hauled himself out of family poverty to get to Michigan University, where his writing life began. His early years of creative trial and error were financed largely by his brother Kermit, who sacrificed himself in a series of jobs as a salesman. Painful relationships between fathers and sons - filled with "contempt, admiration, anger and love" - and between brothers, are central to Death of a Salesman and The Price, in particular. The opening run of Salesman in 1949 was characterised by the sound of men weeping in the auditorium, responding to the spectre of failure and humiliation embodied in the figure of Willy Loman, the 60-year-old Brooklyn salesman who says "I still feel - kind of temporary about myself".
Miller was dismayed that his play was being received as merely "an emotional entertainment" and in a series of essays accurately described by Gottfried as "pontificating", he compared it to Oedipus Rex and King Lear, both of which he admired enormously. But his most important model, formally and thematically, was Ibsen, with whom he shares a highly developed awareness of moral responsibility, a sense that, as he wrote in his letters, "a hand had been laid" upon him.
When this was severely tested during the McCarthy anti-Communist investigations, he emerged invigorated. He received a suspended prison sentence for contempt of the committee, having refused to divulge the names of former Communist associates. His testimony was couched in phrases that echoed the impassioned speech of his protagonist, John Proctor, in The Crucible, pleading for his name during the Salem witch trials of the 17th century. Author and character had merged.
Without being excessively reductive in linking the life to the work, Gottfried's close and empathetic readings of texts such as The Crucible and After The Fall illuminate the ways in which Miller's concerns with political questions, with social and personal guilt and with relative morality are animated by his own feelings, both consciously and unconsciously. Sometimes he chose to deny the autobiographical elements in his work; at other times he simply didn't recognise them.
In After the Fall, written in 1964, he created one character based on the director Elia Kazan, who had betrayed his former Communist friends to the Un-American Activities Committee, and another, who, like Miller himself, Gottfried suggests, is afraid that he cannot love. Miller's apparent unawareness, until the play went into rehearsal, that After the Fall was about Marilyn Monroe, was something that audiences and critics would find impossible to swallow: the play's portrait of her, in the character of Maggie, seemed cruel and vindictive to a public keen to sentimentalise, if not canonise, Monroe shortly after her death. It was this that shattered Miller's image of moral integrity, and, together with a discomfort at a perceived vaunting of high principles, edged him out of favour with Broadway audiences and critics.
Theatre too was changing: Waiting for Godot ushered in a wave of Absurdism and experimentation in the late 1950s that left Miller cold. The existentialism that informed the work of the new international generation of playwrights had little to interest a writer whose championing of realism was rooted in an active engagement with the world, in an ameliorative imperative. As each new play he wrote in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s was panned by the New York press, and his earlier works neglected, Miller increasingly looked abroad, especially to London, for an appreciative reception.
His reputation has risen internationally in inverse proportion to its dip in his home country. It is this "shameful disrespect" that prompted Gottfried to write his book, as well as an obvious, but not uncritical, admiration for the author of plays which, like those Miller himself admires, "seek out mystery to illuminate it with insight".
Helen Meany is a freelance journalist and editor
- Arthur Miller: A Life By Martin Gottfried Faber & Faber, 484pp. £25