Brianland

The Day I Thanked Arthur Miller

One of the nice things about living in Manhattan — you often bump into and sometimes get to talk to really smart people on the sidewalk.  When they’re famous, mostly you just nod acknowledgment and smile — like seeing Robin Williams walking and playing with his son on Fifth Avenue, or Timothy Leary in line at a street vender, or Colin Powell walking on the double military-straight in his uniform near the U.N.

But one of my favorites was seeing Arthur Miller crossing Third Avenue near my apartment on 70th Street.  I was going one way and he was coming the other and I looked up and, “Oh my gawd, that’s Arthur Miller!”  He was kinda looking at the ground and seemed lost in thought, so as usual I respected his space and didn’t bother him.  But I stopped on the other side of the avenue and turned back to soak in what was happening.

I’d studied the hell out of Death of a Salesman.  Maybe it’s obvious and too-often stated, but it’s the greatest American play ever written.  What Huckleberry Finn is to American novels.

I saw a production of Salesman back when I was a teenager in Winnipeg.  It was one of those moments when the lightbulb went on and you suddenly appreciated some great work of art that adults always praised but you’d been too young to understand.

When I moved to Washington Square North in Greenwich Village, I started going to plays and reading them.  The legendary actress Uta Hagen & her theater school founder husband Herbert Berghof lived in the apartment next door, and Phyllis & Eddie Condon’s apartment where I lived was a library of the greatest books ever written.  I went deep down rabbit holes of Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill and bought and saw a ton of Sam Shepard.  But Salesman was always in a class of its own.

I was in the orchestra for the Broadway production with Dustin Hoffman, John Malkovich, Kate Reid, Stephen Lang & David Huddleston, and they made a televised version for CBS which I taped on VHS and played over and over again, unconsciously memorizing whole passages.  Different lines have come back to me over the decades in all sorts of situations.

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I stood there looking at him from the other side of the avenue thinking about all this stuff and how much his art meant to me.  He’d stopped and was looking in the window of one of the little stores on the Upper East Side back when there were still places like shoe repair shops and hardware stores.  It was still a little neighborhood like any Main Street in any little town in America.

I thought of the story Kerouac tells of his architect friend Ed White suggesting he carry a notebook like architects do to sketch things he sees, and Jack stopping at a storefront and sketching in words what he saw.  And there was the wordsmith Arthur Miller mentally sketching a little old-world storefront on a quiet summer afternoon in Manhattan.  He was in no hurry.  He was already on Mount Rushmore.  He had nuthin left to do in this lifetime but enjoy the view.

After the light changed back to green I thought, “There’s Arthur Miller.  I gotta go talk to him and thank him.”  So I crossed back over the avenue and he was still standing on the empty sidewalk in the quiet afternoon sunshine looking into this small storefront window.  I walked up, and said hi, and he was a tallish fellow, and there was Arthur Miller’s big bald head above me, looking exactly like every picture I’d ever seen.
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My dad had recently passed, and sadly he was something of a Willie Loman, and we’d never really gotten along.  But when he was getting near the end, I remembered the Salesman’s mother’s impassioned admonition — “Attention must be paid.”
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It comes in her powerful Act One monologue — “I don’t say he’s a great man.  Willy 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 into his grave like an old dog.  Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.“

That passage about respecting a low-man’s passing guided me through the final scenes of my father’s drama — and it was this very playwright a million miles away from the Canadian prairies who wrote the motivation for how we played out our final act.
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So I told the smiling gentle face, “I just thought you should know how your words helped my family through a difficult time before it was too late.”

“Well . . . you’re welcome,” he smiled in his giant Buddhistic beatific way.  “Thank you for saying that,” 

It’s not all that often that an artist changes the life your family lives — and it’s even rarer that you get to thank them.  I’m forever grateful to the Great Spirits that this moment happened, and that he stood there appreciating a simple storefront so I could tell him how much I appreciated him wrapping up my relationship with my father with respect.

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Here’s another “meeting your heroes” excerpt from my book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac about first coming across Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, John Clellon Holmes & Herbert Huncke.

Here’s a helluvan Adventure at Shakespeare’s Globe in London that ends with hanging out with the cast after The Taming of The Shrew.

Here’s a hundred-plus Playbills that survived a life of madness and moving.

Here’s my ever-evolving Guide to Films — conveniently broken down into Dramas, Comedies, Documentaries, Music Movies and By Auteur among other distinctions.

Here’s the masterpiece production of Death of a Salesman as it aired on CBS in 1985:

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by Brian Hassett

karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

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