As Arthur Miller tells it, the writing of Death of a Salesman began in the winter of 1946/47 with a chance meeting between Miller and his Uncle Manny Newman outside the Colonial Theatre in Boston, where Miller’s All My Sons was having its pre-Broadway preview:

I could see his grim hotel room behind him, the long trip up from New York in his little car, the hopeless hope of the day’s business. Without so much as acknowledging my greeting, he said, "Buddy is doing very well."¹

Newman, Miller has written, "was a competitor, at all times, in all things, and at every moment" [T 122]. He saw Miller and his older brother Kermit "running neck and neck" with his sons Buddy and Abby "in some race that never stopped in his mind" [T 122]. Although Miller had not spent more than a few hours in Newman’s company, he had been fascinated by his traveling salesman uncle since his childhood. "He was so absurd," Miller remembers, "so completely isolated from the ordinary laws of gravity, so elaborate in his fantastic inventions, and despite his ugliness so lyrically in love with fame and fortune and their inevitable descent on his family, that he possessed my imagination until I knew more or less precisely how he would react to any sign or word or idea" [T 123].

Deeply involved in the production of All My Sons, Miller gave no more than a passing thought to the meeting with his uncle at the time, but the moment and its suggestiveness remained in his imagination. The sudden appearance of Manny Newman had "cut through time like a knife through a layer cake" [T 131], turning the promising young playwright into an uncertain nephew who felt that his success was something to apologize for. Miller has identified the incident as the spark that brought him back to an idea for a play about a salesman that he had had ten years earlier. Now he had a new focus of interest in the simultaneity of past and present that had occurred in that meeting. Miller had known that he and his cousins were as alive to Manny Newman at that moment as adolescent competitors as they were as men in their thirties. He thought that it would be wonderful "to do a play without any transitions at all, dialogue that would simply leap from bone to bone of a skeleton that would not for an instant cease being added to, an organism as strictly economic as a leaf, as trim as an ant" [T 131].

Manny Newman and his sons were not the sole origin of the Lomans, of course. Miller has acknowledged at various times that his own relationship with his father informs the play, and that one salesman in particular besides Manny had contributed to his conception of Willy.²  But it was Manny who lodged himself in Miller’s imagination and created a dramatic problem that he felt compelled to solve. The plot of the play might have come from Miller’s questions about

Manny’s death, not long after the All My Sons meeting. Miller wrote that he had known three suicides up to that point, two of them salesmen, and that "Manny had died with none of the ordinary reasons given" [T 129]. He sought a meeting with his cousin Abby, the younger of Manny’s sons, in order to ask him what had been the one thing Manny had wanted most. Miller’s suspicion about Manny’s death provided Salesman’s minimal plot; Abby’s answer to his question supplied its motive: "He wanted a business for us. So we could all work together... A business for the boys" [T 130]. Miller remembers, "I suddenly understood him with my very blood" [T 130]:

Manny was transformed into a man with purpose: he had been trying to make a gift that would crown all those striving years; all chose lies he told, all his imaginings and crazy exaggerations, even the almost military discipline he had laid on his boys, were in this instant given form and point. To be sure, a business expressed his own egotism, but love, too. That homely, ridiculous little man had after all never ceased to struggle for a certain victory, the only kind open to him in this society - selling to achieve his lost self as a man with his name and his sons’ names on a business of his own. [T 130]

The intense sexuality that drives the Lomans also came from the Newmans’ home, a house that seemed to the adolescent Miller "dank with sexuality" [T 124]. His aunt and uncle were "obviously bound to each other sexually"    [T 123], even in middle age. One of Manny’s attractions for the adolescent Miller, as no doubt for some of his customers, was the possession of a vast collection of pornographic postcards. His sons remained bachelors well into their thirties, boasting of their sexual conquests, which they saw as confirming their lifelong superiority to their cousin. In fact, Miller has described himself as a model for the young Bernard:

As fanatic as I was about sports, my ability was not to be compared to [Manny’s] sons’, and since I was gangling and unhandsome into the bargain I lacked their promise, so that when I stopped by I always had to expect some kind of insinuation of my entire life’s probable failure, even before I was sixteen [T 124].

Miller has also suggested that his relationship with his father was similar to that of Bernard and Charley:

My father was a very ordinary kind of businessman really and his attitude was very tolerant. Whatever you wanted to do, you did. If not he was uninterested, basically. He just assumed you would come out all right... he never leaned on his son. He never insisted that he become something that he might not want to be [CB 12].

As the pieces of the play took shape in his imagination, Miller made notes in his Brooklyn Heights home, bought with the royalties from All My Sons. But the time came when he felt the need to write the play out "in a single sitting, in a night or a day" [T 82], and in a space of his own making. In April of 1948, he drove up to the Connecticut farm he had bought the previous summer, and built himself a ten- by twelve-foot studio to work in. As he sat down to write, he remembers, "all I had was the first two lines and a death" [T 183], although the play’s plot, originally in three acts, had been worked out fairly carefully in his notes.³  What he needed was a form that would allow for the simultaneity of past and present and for the tragic trajectory of events to proceed from the fragmented logic of Willy’s subjective experience. When he finally sat down to write, he worked all day and most of the night, skipping the parts that he knew would be easy to write. In one sitting he drafted the whole first act of the now two-act play. In six weeks he had a draft of the play.

Miller has spoken often of the initial image of the play that was called at one early point in its development The Inside of His Head. The image "was of an enormous face the height of the proscenium arch which would appear and then open up, and we would see the inside of a man's head . . . it was conceived half in laughter, for the inside of his head was a mass of contradictions."⁴   The image is a clear visual representation of expressionism, the dramatization of subjective reality; in direct opposition to the realism in which Miller had composed All My Sons. Miller did not want, however, to represent Willy’s experience as a subjective nightmare, detached from the reality around him, which is the usual method of expressionism. Miller said in an interview that, while he had been moved by expressionist plays, he found the traditional expressionist aesthetic perverse: "there are no people in it any more . . . it’s the bitter end of the world where man is a voice of his class function, and that’s it."⁵

In Salesman, Miller was after a more complex representation. He wanted the audience to see reality as Willy saw it, but also to recognize it as objectively real. Onstage there would be three epistemological levels: Willy’s fantasies of the past, Willy’s perception of the present, and the audience’s perception of present stage-reality. Miller needed a dramatic form that would combine the subjectivity of expressionism with the illusion of objectivity afforded by realism.

One important step in the development of his form was going with director Elia Kazan to see Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire during its New Haven preview in November of 1947. Miller has written that Streetcar "opened one specific door for me...the words and their liberation, the joy of the writer in writing them, the radiant eloquence of its composition" [T 182]. This new freedom in the use of language was clearly important to the poetry of the mundane that infuses Salesman, but Kazan has suggested an even more important contribution. After seeing the performance, he wrote, Miller "appeared to be full of wonder at the theatre's expressive possibilities. He told me he was amazed at how simply and successfully the non-realistic elements in the play - 'Flores! Flores para los muertos!'- blended with the realistic ones."⁶ Streetcar’s style of subjective realism, which Kazan and Williams had created with designer Jo Mielziner, went a long way toward solving Miller's dramatic and theatrical problems.

Subjective realism provides an anchor in reality - a series of events that are accepted by the audience as the objective reality of the play - but presents them through the mediating consciousness of a single character, a Blanche DuBois or a Willy Loman, whose mind is often in the process of breaking down. While the audience can share the nightmare experience of the protagonist, it never quite loses touch with the "real" events that the character is interpreting in what is perceived to be a distorted way. As Miller puts it, Willy "is literally at that terrible moment when the voice of the past is no longer distant but quite as loud as the voice of the present...the form, therefore, is this process, instead of being a once-removed summation or indication of it" [TE 138]. From this dual perspective, the audience can both empathize with the character’s ordeal and judge it objectively. This mode of drama combines the strengths of expressionism with those of realism. Miller has explained, "Death of a Salesman was conceived literally on two dimensions at the same time. On one level there are autonomous characters while on another there are characters who exist as symbols for Willy Loman" [CB 59].

In writing Salesman, Miller had to deal with the exciting but complex problems of his formal experiment simultaneously with the more workmanlike problems of the plot on which it was hung. His early notes indicate that he had a clear tragic trajectory in mind, leading to Willy’s suicide, but he had trouble linking it up with Biff’s story. At one point, he reminded himself that he would have to find a way to make Biff responsible for Willy’s life through the events of the play, wondering whether the incident with the Woman would be retrievable dramatically. He also noted that he had to find a link between Biff ’s attitude toward work and his feelings against Willy [NB]. At this early stage, Miller planned that the climax would arise from Biff ’s conflict between his desire for success in New York and his hatred of Willy. His climactic action would be his refusal to return the pen he has stolen from Bill Oliver, thus ending his chances for business success.

In the play's earlier versions, including the preproduction script that was distributed to the production team in September, 1948, Biff ’s two confrontations with Willy, in the restaurant and later, when Biff tells Willy that he is leaving for good, were considerably different from the same scenes in the published texts. In the earlier versions, Biff does not come into the restaurant with the intention of revealing his disastrous meeting with Oliver and forcing his father and brother to face the truth about the family myths. Instead, he tells both Hap and Willy a lie about having a lunch meeting with Oliver, covering it with the story of taking the pen. His revelation in the final, climactic scene is not about the rubber tubing with which Willy plans to kill himself and his own past convictions for stealing, but that he has lied about the appointment with Oliver. In the earlier versions, the reasons for the opposition between Biff and Willy were less clearly defined than they were to be after the production process, but the functions of Willy as motivating force and of Biff as both object of and obstacle to his desire were clear. The play's trajectory was to be an inevitable and relentless march toward Willy’s death with only the simplest of plots to propel it.

Miller put his effort into the play’s narrative, the telling of the tale, the juxtaposition of incidents from Willy’s internal and external experience that would bring the audience to a sympathetic understanding of his inevitable fate. He has written that "the structure of events and the nature of its form are also the direct reflection of Willy Loman's way of thinking at this moment of his life...The way of telling the tale, in this sense, is as mad as Willy and as abrupt and as suddenly lyrical" [TE 138]. In order to represent reality as Willy experienced it, Miller juxtaposed the scenes of the play's present with what he called from the beginning not "flashbacks," but "daydreams," reminding himself in his notebook that daydreams black out when they become threatening. Miller has explained several times that "there are no flashbacks in this play but only a mobile concurrency of past and present...because in his desperation to justify his life Willy Loman has destroyed the boundaries between now and then" [TE 138-39]. In the early versions, the line between past and present was much clearer than it was to become. The daydreams were more sharply defined against the scenes in the present, but the line of the narrative was clear from the beginning. The events of the play are the events of twenty-four hours in Willy’s life as Willy experiences them.

In creating his characters, Miller naturally went back to their images in life, building on the characteristics that had impressed him as central to their meaning for him. In life, "Manny Newman was cute and ugly, a Pan risen out of the earth, a bantam with a lisp, sunken brown eyes, a lumpy, pendulous nose, dark brown skin, and gnarled arms" [T 122]. In the preproduction script, Willy Loman is described as "a very small man. His several auto accidents have marred his face, but not in a repulsive way. His nose is bent and a little flattened. A healed scar makes his right jaw different from his left. He wears little shoes and little suits. He is a little man, and not handsome either. His emotions, in a word, are mercurial."⁷   The small size and the physical distortions that Miller saw in his uncle were central to his first conception of Willy, as were Manny’s need for success and his need to pass that success on to his boys. Central to Willy’s motivation was his guilt in regard to both Biff and Linda. Over and over in his notebook, Miller reminded himself that Willy’s guilt must be clear, both as a cause of his current state and as a motivation for Biff ’s revenge. As for Linda, Miller noted that Willy resents Linda's patient and consistent forgiveness because he knows that there must be great hatred for him hidden in her heart.

The early versions of Linda physically resemble Miller’s Aunt Annie Newman as much as the early Willy resembles Manny. Annie Newman was "big and broad-chested," and overweight, "with her gale of a laugh, her pink, pockmarked face often reddening with the hypertension that would kill her at sixty" [T 123]. The Linda of the early scripts is "taller, and much larger than Willy" [R 1:1], and she has a heart condition. As in the published script, "most often jovial, she has developed an iron repression of her objections to him. Her struggle is to spiritually support him while trying to insinuate guidance and her superior and calmer intelligence."⁸  Linda’s physical size and power, in contrast to Willy’s small stature, were important to Miller’s original conception of the character, as was her repressed resentment. Miller has noted in an interview that the women characters in his plays are very complex:

They’ve been played somewhat sentimentally, but that isn’t the way they were intended. There is a more sinister side to the women characters in my plays. These women are of necessity auxiliaries to the action, which is carried by the male characters. But they both receive the benefits of the male’s mistakes and protect his mistakes in crazy ways. They are forced to do that. So the females are victims as well.⁹

While the characters of Willy and Linda seem to have been clear in his mind from the start, Miller had as much trouble in conceptualizing Biff ’s character as he did in conceiving the motivation for his necessary function in the plot. As mentioned earlier, Miller at first saw Biff ’s central conflict as being between hatred for Willy and his own desire for success, but Miller had trouble in developing a motivation for Biff ’s hatred. He also wrote in his notebook that Biff was not really bright enough to make a businessman and that he wanted everything too fast.

As Miller first wrote the climactic confrontation between father and son, Biff ’s conflict in the scene was based on his feeling that "to tell the truth {about not having an appointment} would be to diminish himself in his own eye. To admit his fault" [NB]. Miller specifically noted that Biff ’s actions in this scene were not directed toward Willy’s elucidation or salvation, but "toward a surgical break which {Biff} knows in his heart Willy could never accept" [NB]. His motive, then, was to "destroy Willy, free himself " [NB]. Biff ’s guilt came about because, although his vengeance on Willy was justified in some sense by Willy’s having built up his ego and then betrayed him, Biff knew at some level that he was incompetent, and could never have had the success that he desired. Over the course of the production, both Biff ’s character and the play’s plot were to undergo some significant changes, but traces of Miller’s original lack of clarity about Biff remain in the published script.

The character who was to undergo the most substantial change during the production process was Uncle Ben. Appearing solely in Willy’s daydreams, Ben is the most expressionistic character in the play. Miller has said that he "purposefully would not give Ben any character, because for Willy he has no character - which is, psychologically, expressionist because so many memories come back with a simple tag on them: somebody represents a threat to you, or a promise."¹⁰

In his notebook, Miller described Ben as "a heavy-set man. Pompous, the father." And it is as a representation of the father that he figured most prominently in the early versions of the play. Ben’s function as a symbol of success was secondary to his function as a representative of the absent father, whom Willy kept asking Ben to go and find. In the early drafts, Miller emphasized the link between Willy’s loss of his father and his failure in bringing up his sons, noting that the point of the scenes with Ben was to establish, first, that Willy has "an unusual, superior family" and, second, that "something great is in store for him too" [NB].

Miller’s vision of the set for Salesman was far less detailed than his vision of the characters. He has mentioned that his first notion of the set, in keeping with his idea for the play as The Inside of His Head was ‘the inside of Willy's skull in which he would be crawling around, playing these scenes inside of himself," a purely expressionistic notion.¹¹ As the play took shape, however, he dropped this notion in favor of a minimal set, which he has variously described as "without any setting at all,"¹² "three unadorned black platforms" [T 195], and "three bare platforms and only the minimum necessary furniture for a kitchen and two bedrooms, with the Boston hotel room as well as Howard’s office to be played in open space" [T 188].

Elia Kazan has described Salesman’s preproduction script as "a play waiting for a directorial solution" [K 361]. As Kazan has noted, the script the production team received had a minimal description of the scene: "A pinpoint traveling spotlight hits a small area on stage left. The salesman is revealed. He takes out his keys and opens an invisible door" [K 361]. Jo Mielziner, who was to conceive and develop the design for the set that is described in the published scripts, commented in his memoir that, in the script he was first given: "At the end of his forty-odd scenes Miller says, "The scenic solution to this production will have to be an imaginative and simple one. I don’t know the answer, but the designer must work out something which makes the script flow easily.’"¹³ Based on Mielziner’s design concept, Kazan and Miller were to find a key to the play’s realization on stage, but the playwright’s vision while writing was of his characters enacting his play on a bare stage.

NOTES