Exhibit Review: Arthur Miller at HRC

One highlight is a table tracking Miller’s relationship with Elia Kazan, a film and theater director who named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Miller wrote The Crucible soon after Kazan capitulated to the McCarthyists. Kazan, upset with what he saw as an attack from Miller, answered with the film On the Waterfront, the story of a dockworker who informs on a corrupt union boss, which mirrors a plot of one of Miller’s earlier, less successful plays. Those two famous works can be seen as a personal argument, played out in theater and film, between two immensely dramatists.

Not to say that the conflict was by any means gentlemanly. A 1953 letter from Molly Kazan, Elia’s wife, to Miller, after the disappointing first run of The Crucible, reads in part:

“God damn it, Artie. The last twelve months, more and more, you’ve gotten to feeling that you’re in a corner—a little, threatened corner, away from the mainstream of people in this country.

I don’t think that’s where you belong.

I think that’s what makes writing hard.”

With letters like this coming in from close friends, one is all the more impressed that Miller fought his way out of the corner McCarthyism had pushed him into and stuck with the hard sort of writing that made The Crucible a classic.

Other highlights include a short story, “In Memoriam” written when Miller was seventeen, about a Willy Loman-esque salesman; a collection of fan letters and correspondences from around the world, showing Miller’s impact beyond America; and a moving letter from the actor Hal Holbrooke, upset at losing the part of Willy Loman to Brian Dennehy for the 1999 revival of Salesman, reflecting both Holbrooke’s genuine love for the character and his desperation at having missed a big opportunity.

Then, of course, there is the presence of Marilyn Monroe, another American tragedy intersecting with those dreamed up by her husband. It’s true that Miller’s marriage to Monroe coincided with a drop-off in the quality of his work and an end to his era as the top playwright in America, but a viewer of this exhibit can appreciate the deep impact she made on him. In a letter to a colleague explaining why he would go ahead and defy the McCarthyists, even at the risk of jeopardizing Marilyn’s career, Miller closed:

“My wife is waiting for me now at the edge of the incredibly blue sea. As I see her standing there I know why the Greeks made Aphrodite from the foam of the wave, for she seems to have been born of water, air, and sunlight; she is of the world, a living moment of its beauty and oneness. I have only a spirit to share with her that will be at one with itself and the world and it leads me as it always has, despite dangers, and I believe in that spirit and I obey it now. If I fail to make myself understood, my need for freedom and my love for it, I must still believe that one day I will be understood, just as the world waits so long for such a woman so astonishingly and so real. She sends you her best wishes and both of us our thanks for your past kindnesses.”

Is the letter a gentle taunt, a romantic defense of his stance against McCarthyism, or an uncomfortably poetic statement of his love for Monroe? It’s well worth the trip to the HRC to see the history with your own eyes and decide for yourself.