Martin Gottfried: Arthur Miller: A Life

Reviewed by PETER CALDER

Everyone knows three things about Arthur Miller: that in Death of a Salesman, he wrote one of the great works of 20th-century theatre, that he stood firm before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which was trying to root out the Communist rot in Hollywood in the 1950s, and that he married Marilyn Monroe.

Gottfried, a veteran theatre critic (New York Post and Saturday Review), ranks those aspects of Miller's life in that order of importance, so there is little in this patient and exhaustive biography to satisfy those with an appetite for celebrity trivia. The Miller-Monroe romance is assigned its proper place as a potent myth of the age — the sex symbol and the artist whose Lincolnesque appearance assisted his elevation to the status of moral hero.

While never stinting on biographical detail (birth into an affluent family ruined by the Depression, the university years in which he fatefully brushed up against Communist ideas) Gottfried takes a critic's approach: the book, excellently indexed and annotated, links most of its 19 chapters with close reading of the writer's work.

This approach means the book is often closer to a critical biography than a life. But in allowing us to see works like Salesman and The Crucible as springing from the artist's personal life, it sheds new light on old classics.

To some extent, that answers the misgivings of the subject who "decided not to co-operate when he realised [this biography] would deal with not only his work, but his life". Miller is notoriously guarded about his private life; he has, since Monroe's death, frequently terminated interviews whenever her name was mentioned and he "turned grim and tight-lipped" with Gottfried when, working on another project, he simply asked why an actress was made up to look like Monroe in the original production of After The Fall.

Miller did, however, grant permission for Gottfried to access a wealth of private material in research libraries, and the writer has built up a detailed and persuasive portrait of the artist which unerringly fingers the contradictions that emerge from other biographies in which Miller features, and from Timebends, Miller's highly readable 1987 autobiography.

Constantly referring to the latter volume, Gottfried often admits that he cannot reconcile competing versions of history, but points to "the dubious credibility of autobiography".

Most strikingly, he reveals the 1962 birth of Daniel, a son who was diagnosed early with Down's syndrome. His mother, the photographer Inge Morath — Miller's third and present wife — visited Daniel weekly for his entire short life, but Miller disowned him; he is not mentioned in Timebends and in any official chronologies, and that story is one of many that depict Miller as less generous than the carefully cultivated image of him that other portraits have given us.

Fittingly, the book's central third focuses on Miller's problematic relationship with Elia Kazan, the director who brought his finest works to life on stage and who is intimately connected with the other two significant threads in the writer's life (Kazan introduced — one might even say gifted — Monroe to Miller, and famously told all to the Un-American Activities Committee to save his own skin).

Miller's moral heroism emerges slightly tarnished from Gottfried's account — his behaviour before the committee appears more calculating and pragmatic than principled. But that clear-eyed analysis is one of the triumphs of this life.

As a piece of writing it is, perhaps, more precise than inspired, and it treats the past three decades almost in passing. But it is hard to imagine that it will ever be bettered as a definitive account of the great dramatist.

Faber and Faber, $79.95