Death of a Salesman and the ambiguities of intention and identity

Eric Alterman has an affecting essay about, among other things, the ultimately quite complex question of the relationship between an author’s intentions for a text and the meaning interpreters choose to give it.

I first met the salesman Willy Loman in 1975. I was 15 when I sat beside my father at the Circle in the Square Theater. I’ll admit that on that first encounter, what I was seeing onstage did not make much of an impression. What did, however, was my seeing tears streaming down my dad’s face for virtually the entire performance.

I had never seen him cry before (nor have I since). I had trouble believing that he was not only weeping, but doing so in public. This was not something, as I understood it, that grown men did.

Weeping, it should be said, is not an uncommon reaction to Arthur Miller’s “Death of a Salesman.” If you happened to be seated next to me at the play’s fourth revival, in 2012, you would have seen yet another middle-aged man sobbing in his seat — though in my case, not for myself so much as for the man who raised me. From its opening night in February 1949 to the current sixth and ecstatically reviewed revival, “Salesman” has been a play that cracks the steeliest of men and women.

Alterman grapples with the extent to which Death of a Salesman is or should be interpreted as a Jewish text — a question that Miller himself changed his mind about in the fifty years between the play’s debut and Miller’s response to it at the end of the century.

It’s clear that Miller went out of his way, in his original text, to give no indication to the reader/audience that the Lomans were Jewish. I happen to be the same age as Alterman, and like a lot of other people of our generation I encountered the play as a high school sophomore, at the very same time he was first seeing it with his father. It certainly never occurred to me that Willy Loman might really be Jewish, whatever the word “really” can be taken to mean in this situation. I don’t think I knew Miller was Jewish, or that he had been married to Marilyn Monroe (IIRC correctly, Alex Portnoy in the eponymous Philip Roth novel interprets Miller’s marriage to the ultimate shikse avatar as an extreme attempt to escape Miller’s Jewish identity), or even that he was an alumnus of the University of Michigan, where my own father worked.

Side excursion: Miller grew up rich on 110th Street on the border of Harlem, but his family lost everything in the 1929 crash, and were exiled to a modest apartment in Brooklyn when he was in high school. Miller had to work blue collar jobs to save money to pay college tuition. He went to Michigan because it was one of the very few universities in the country at the time that had a creative writing program, as well as well-known and quite professional student newspaper, but also because it was cheap — out of state tuition was $124 in 1933 when he enrolled, which is just over $3,000 in 2026 money — and because it was, in Miller’s mind, practically the Wild West: an exotic place utterly unlike New York City.

Anyway, Miller was still a Marxist or at least marxisant when he wrote the play, and no doubt felt a certain ideological obligation to make it a universal text about the depredations of the capitalist system, as opposed to a “parochial” text about the Jewish experience in America. Still . . .

I don’t say he’s a great man. Willie Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.

That final sentence “sounds” Jewish/Yiddishkeit, in a way that writer as careful as Miller must, I imagine, have had some sense of, if not precisely intended at the time he wrote it. In any event, as time went by Miller eventually re-wrote the text in his own head to embrace a potentially self-consciously Jewish reading of it, which again merely emphasizes how complex the relationship between original authorial intention and a historically wandering text can be or become. Death of a Salesman is or can be, among other things, about a Jewish man who wants more than anything to be an American success story — who wants to be “well-liked,” even if that means losing his original identity. It is, in other words, a story of liminality: of being on the edge of becoming something that one both longs to become, while suspecting that one can never really be that, whether that is a success or an American or a father who is loved and respected by his children.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters — whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitler isn’t here. Perhaps he is on his way, however. You hear the usual dark rumours about the Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

‘Yes, mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They’re the real rulers of this country, you know. They’ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance — everything.’

‘But,’ I said, ‘isn’t it a fact that the average Jew is a labourer working for about a penny an hour?’

‘Ah, that’s only for show! They’re all money-lenders really. They’re cunning, the Jews.’

In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

George Orwell, “Marrakech” (1939)

Joe DiMaggio lives with his widowed sister, Marie, in a tan stone house on a quiet residential street not far from Fisherman’s Wharf. He bought the house almost 30 years ago for his parents, and after their deaths he lived there with Marilyn Monroe. Now it is cared for by Marie, a slim and handsome dark-eyed woman who has an apartment on the second floor, Joe on the third. There are some baseball trophies and plaques in the small room off DiMaggio’s bedroom, and on his dresser are photographs of Marilyn Monroe, and in the living room downstairs is a small painting of her that DiMaggio likes very much; it reveals only her face and shoulders and she is wearing a wide-brimmed sun hat, and there is a soft, sweet smile on her lips, an innocent curiosity about her that is the way he saw her and the way he wanted her to be seen by others – a simple girl, “a warm, big-hearted girl,” he once described her, “that everybody took advantage of.”

The publicity photographs emphasizing her sex appeal often offend him, and a memorable moment for Billy Wilder, who directed her in The Seven-Year Itch, occurred when he spotted DiMaggio in a large crowd of people gathered on Lexington Avenue in New York to watch a scene in which Marilyn, standing over a subway grating to cool herself, had her skirts blown high by a sudden wind blow. “What the hell is going on here?” DiMaggio was overheard to have said in the crowd, and Wilder recalled, “I shall never forget the look of death on Joe’s face.”

He was then 39, she was 27. They had been married in January of that year, 1954, despite disharmony in temperament and time; he was tired of publicity, she was thriving on it; he was intolerant of tardiness, she was always late. During their honeymoon in Tokyo an American general had introduced himself and asked if, as a patriotic gesture, she would visit the troops in Korea. She looked at Joe. “It’s your honeymoon,” he said, shrugging, “go ahead if you want to.”

She appeared on 10 occasions before 100,000 servicemen, and when she returned, she said, “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”

“Yes, I have,” he said.

Gay Talese, “The Silent Season of a Hero” (1966)