FRESH YARN PRESENTS:

Another Day, Another Dollar
In memory of Arthur Miller
By Barry Edelstein

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Arthur's apartment, as I recall it, was decorated according to two schemes. The first, and the nicer, was the photography of Inge Morath, his third wife and one of the great, and greatly underappreciated, photographers of the twentieth century. At a memorial service shortly after she passed away, I heard Arthur tell a story about how she had once saved a drowning man by jumping in the water, taking off her bra, instructing him to hold it, and then using it as a tow rope as she swam him to shore. She was a force of nature, which made them an ideal couple. Who else but an Austrian refugee with a will of iron could have tamed the man whose innate force was enough to do that which most mere mortals would have thought beyond human power: Make Marilyn Monroe convert to Judaism?

The apartment's second decorating scheme was posters of Death of a Salesman. I could be misremembering, but it seemed like there were dozens, in almost every language. What made the sight so arresting was that, though maybe fifteen different alphabets were represented -- Cyrillic, Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Hebrew -- the image on every single poster was exactly the same: A silhouette of a stoop-shouldered man in an ill-fitting overcoat, lugging a pair of heavy sample cases into his dismal future. It was as though there had been some contractual stipulation binding every graphic designer on planet Earth to illustrate the play in precisely the same way. Muerte De Un Viajante -- A Spanish Willy Loman strains under his load. Tod Eines Handlungsreisenden -- A German Willy Loman schleps his. It was a United Nations of dying salesmen, with oversized coats and hulking cases.

This quirky art gallery reminded me of an interview with Arthur I found in some library while preparing to direct All My Sons. He had been asked to comment on the longevity of one of his plays. Here's what he said:

All these years later when I see a play of mine that I wrote [many] years ago, and I see that the audience is screwed into it in the way they were in the first place, I like to believe that the feeling they have is that man is worth something. That you care about him that much is a miracle, I mean considering the numbers of ourselves that we have destroyed in the last century. I think art imputes value to human beings and if I did that it would be the most pleasant thought I could depart with. … I guess the other thing is the wonder of it all, that I'm still here, that so much of it did work, that the people are so open to it, and that we sort of grasped hands somehow, in many places and many languages. It gives me a glimpse of the idea that there is one humanity. … And I think it's a sort of miracle.

For years, when I was running a theater in New York, I kept that quote pinned to the wall next to my desk. "Art imputes value to human beings" is an awfully lovely thought. And so is the idea of wonder, the notion that there are, every day and in all our lives, certain things that are quite simply ineffable. People in China cry at the end of All My Sons, just as they do in Massachusetts. That is, in its way, a miracle. A play written decades ago still means something. That too, is somehow rather remarkable.

Willy Loman likes that word. "Isn't that remarkable," he says, a half-dozen times, about Uncle Ben who walked into the jungle and "by God, came out rich;" about Bernard, who grew up to argue cases in front of the Supreme Court while Biff, to whom he used to give the answers, failed to hang onto even a dead-end job; about the voice of Howard Wagner's kid on his fancy new tape recorder, shrilly reciting the state capitals. "Isn't that remarkable."

Inge Morath took a picture of Arthur and me when she came to see my production. She signed the back, and Arthur inscribed the front. "Wishing you well in the work and all things," he wrote. Looking at that photo, and thinking about it in the fortnight since his death, I've come to understand that while he was of course sincere in his well-wishes for "all things" in my life, what Arthur really cared about, what mattered to him most, was "the work."

He wrote every day, his friends report, right up to the week he died. That tells me this: You've got to get up, go out, and do the work. You just have to. Every morning, every week, every year. Whether it's laying bricks or dancing, constructing buildings or spinning fantasies. "Another day, another dollar." That seems to me a pretty good inspiration to draw from the life of this giant, whom I had the great good fortune to have in my life, all too briefly.

There's something I always wanted to tell Arthur, but now that he's gone, I won't get the chance. I'll say it here instead.

My Grandpa Louis was a traveling salesman in Paterson, New Jersey. He died when I was three. I have no conscious memories of him at all, only one vague and faded image of who he might have been.

I see him standing on a street, bent over, a little sad. He's wearing a black coat that's too big for him. And in each hand, he's holding something. A large, heavy sample case.

Isn't that remarkable.

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