In the rush to hammer Miller into a non-Communist liberal mold, and thus show that domestic anti-communism was really directed against New Dealers, the obituary writers missed a key opportunity to get at the more complicated truth of the period—and of the playwright’s own life and political allegiances. Had they read his “heroic” testimony before HUAC, they would have come across Miller’s recollection of an essay he had written 10 years previously for a Marxist audience. Calling it the “best essay I ever wrote,” he recalled its thrust:

Great art, like science, attempts to see the present remorselessly and truthfully. If Marxism is what it claims to be, a science of society, then it must be devoted to the objective facts more. … The first job of a Marxist critic is to tell the truth.

It is a pity that HUAC didn’t ask Miller to elaborate. Had they done so, they would have found out that in addition to being a playwright, he was also Matt Wayne, theater critic for the New Masses from 1945 to ’46.

Like one of those Soviet spymasters in an Ian Fleming novel, Matt Wayne was never photographed going in or out of the New Masses offices. No autobiographical information was listed at the end of his essays.  When the historian Alan Wald questioned Wayne’s colleagues at New Masses as to whether Wayne was Miller, they were still so dedicated to keeping Miller’s identity a secret that Wald had to turn off his tape recorder before they would answer his questions.

This deliberate secrecy understandably led Wald to focus on connecting Miller to Wayne. But lost in this quest was what Wayne/Miller represented. Wayne was more than a party pseudonym protecting up-and-comers like Miller from later repercussions. Wayne/Miller represented a brief period of perestroika for the ’40s-era American Communist Party.

Toward the end of World War II, the party would briefly attempt liberalization under its leader, Earl Browder. Unlike in the previous decade, where the only good art was proletarian—Malcolm Cowley, a fellow traveler and New Republic editor, saw adherence to communist orthodoxy as the only way to “write good history” and “good tragedy”—Browder’s movement toward peaceful accommodation with capitalism in 1944 gave hope to the more liberal authors in the party. Isidor Schneider, the editor of the New Masses, characterized the new editorial policy of the magazine to be the following: “No writer need worry about being politically correct if he won’t be faithful to reality.”

Enter the mysterious Matt Wayne in a period when Miller had abandoned play-writing. On the surface, Miller would seem the least-likely candidate for being Matt Wayne. During the war he had been furious at the party’s portrayal of capitalists as “the salt of the earth.” Wayne, however, gave him the freedom to air his views about steering the cultural policies of the American Communist Party away from the rigid “Art as a Weapon” phase and into the mainstream rules for literature. In a 1945 article, Wayne/Miller wrote what might have been the essay the playwright recalled before HUAC: “The authentic theatre will rise again when a playwright comes along who will face the dirtiest corners of the earth and will set about cleansing with real characters.” Nothing must prevent the “artist’s search for the truth,” for the “truth itself is political.”

Wayne/Miller wrote two dozen columns for the Masses from 1945 to ’46 and then dropped down the memory hole. The reasons may have had to do with the infamous Maltz episode. Albert Maltz, one of the party’s more liberalized screenwriters, published an essay titled “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” which criticized communist orthodoxy  as “a straitjacket.” Surveying his and other comrades’ output over the previous decades, Maltz cited American Communist Party artistic rules as “restricted, narrow” and “turned away from life.”

Maltz followed Miller’s thesis, and he suffered for it. The reason had to do with when he wrote it: February 1946. In June 1945, four months after Miller’s essay, Earl Browder was cast out of the party and replaced with the rigid ideologue William Foster. Suddenly, a heresy hunt for “Browderism” was on, and Maltz became the target. The onslaught on Maltz was so intense that he recanted and wrote a “second thoughts” essay stating that he had been in “total error.”

Ironically, Miller was one of Maltz’s initial supporters. He even met with two Communists to debate whether to go public with their support but backed down. With Wayne in the trash heap, Miller subsequently moved from liberalism to Fosterism. Rather than opposing ideologues like Howard Fast (whose Marxism was so rigid that even Stalinist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo was repelled), Miller now signed petitions on his behalf against the HUAC. In a 1949 New Masses symposium titled “Should Ezra Pound Be Shot?” Miller typified what George Orwell criticized as the party’s inability to separate good literature from a writer’s politics. Answering in the affirmative, Miller castigated the literary establishment for recognizing Ezra Pound’s ability as a poet.

This orthodoxy continued in 1953 with The Crucible. In later years, Miller admitted that the inspiration for the play was his belief in the innocence of the Rosenbergs, which makes the Salem metaphor even more problematic. Children turning in elders—and husbands and wives committing adultery with politically unreliable people, thus assuring their executions—was more a feature of the Stalinist purge trials than McCarthyism.

In his testimony before the HUAC, Miller stated that he “had never been under Communist discipline.” But his behavior as Wayne and then as Miller shows otherwise. As Wayne, he followed the Browder phase of perestrokia in literature. When the tide shifted away, Miller followed the Fosterite policy that the only good literature was the politically correct kind. Miller was not only a party member, he was also an obedient one, who was willing to submerge his own ideas of good literature and politics to the shifting vagaries of the party line.

To drive home this commitment they assembled an impressive cast of older and younger writers for their first issue. It included poems by Wallace Stevens and James Agee, essays by Edmund Wilson and Lionel Abel, reviews by Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling. But at the head of the issue, surprisingly, was a story by a young, largely unpublished poet, Delmore Schwartz. “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” would become perhaps the most beloved piece of fiction ever to appear in the magazine.

Schwartz was born in 1913 to parents, Harry and Rose Schwartz, who were mismatched immigrant Jews. After innumerable quarrels, they would separate when he was 7 and his younger brother was 4. Their unfortunate marriage and its impact on his life would obsess Schwartz for many years. Harry’s real-estate dealings made him wealthy, but he was a chronically unfaithful husband. Full of recrimination, Rose was nonetheless proud of her husband’s success, driving him away yet unwilling to concede the end of their marriage. Delmore attributed his later unhappiness to his parents’ bitter alienation, punctuated by melodramatic demands that he choose between them.

After their divorce, Harry moved to Chicago, where his business prospered and he quietly remarried. Delmore spent summers with his father but grew up with his mother and brother in the lower-middle-class world of New York’s Washington Heights. There they were enmeshed in her extended family, whose lives he chronicled in a long story, “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life,” that provides rich background for “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities.” When Harry died in 1930, it was found that his fortune had evaporated, thanks in part to the onset of the Depression. As a result, Delmore, like so many writers who came of age in the 1930s, would always be hungry for work and short of money.

Though Schwartz studied philosophy with Sidney Hook at New York University and did graduate work with Alfred North Whitehead at Harvard from 1935 to 1937, his inner bent was toward poetry. He was also a brilliant talker and a restless, omnivorous reader. According to William Phillips, who met him in the 1930s, “one felt immediately one was in the presence of a strange and possessed being, endowed with some extraordinary nervous and intellectual energy.” Schwartz developed a prodigious mastery of poetic forms and a remarkable fluency at deploying them, but the influence of modern masters, especially Yeats and Eliot, kept him from becoming a genuinely original poet. His real breakthrough as a writer came one hot July weekend in 1935 when, at the age of 21, he wrote “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” its title borrowed from Yeats. The story was rooted in his own life, but its nightmarish quality, its brevity and ingenuity, its manipulation of time and place, linked it to the modernist writing of the 1920s. For the editors of the new Partisan Review, the story was a gauntlet laid down to the social muse, an implicit challenge to the naturalism and political engagement imposed on many writers during the Depression. It was at once personal and quietly experimental. The following year, it would serve as the title piece of a collection of poetry and prose that would make Delmore Schwartz the most celebrated young writer of the moment, acclaimed by poets as different as T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens, by New Critics like John Crowe Ransom, R. P. Blackmur, and Allen Tate, and by the most promising of his contemporaries, including Robert Lowell and John Berryman, who became his close friends.

Schwartz also became a central figure in the emerging group of New York intellectuals who would come into their own in the 1940s, but his writing was palpably different from theirs. Most of them were Jewish, but they showed little interest in their Jewishness, except for their urge to leave it behind. Marxist theory and the appeal of Western culture helped make them universalists, quickening their flight from their immigrant beginnings. Their facility with ideas typically made them critics rather than poets or novelists. Personal writing held little appeal for them, at least until they began to look back years later. During the Depression it seemed an indulgence, even an embarrassment. It could only drag them back to the poverty and, as they saw it, the cultural poverty of their family backgrounds.

For Delmore Schwartz, what lay behind him was everything. His family history, and especially his Jewishness, was the medium that would help him fathom the enigma of who he was. His most ambitious work was a failed book-length autobiographical poem called Genesis. No writer believed less in the Emersonian vision of personal freedom, with its faith in the individual’s power of self-making. In one of his short plays, titled Shenandoah, Schwartz derided the notion that “a man/ Creates his life ex nihilo.” Instead, he took up Freud’s exploration of the family romance, which fed his own bleak sense that family was destiny. He never tired of musing on the cultural contradictions of his own name and the burden it placed on him. In Shenandoah, the mock-tragic verse play, his 25-year-old alter ego, Shenandoah Fish, is transported back to the scene of his own bris, the moment when he, at eight days old, received his impossible name. He blames his parents for their eagerness to gain a foothold in the gentile world while at the same time being tone deaf to its language and culture. The incongruous name came to stand for his divided being, at once comically native and ethnic. He would use it again to join the stories collected in The World Is a Wedding (1948), his most telling book.

This sense of an overwhelming fate, rooted as much in Greek tragedy and Jewish history as in Freud, is what Schwartz means by the enigmatic title of the story “The Child Is the Meaning of This Life.” There, he compares a young man’s insight into his family’s history to a series of lights turned on in dark rooms, beams that illuminate the shadowy places in himself. Disheartened, Schwartz revises Wordsworth’s reassuring faith that “the Child is father of the Man.” His conclusion is more desolating: “What was the freedom to which the adult human being rose in the morning, if each act was held back or inspired by the overpowering ghost of a little child? This freedom seemed to [him] like the freedom, dangerous, dark, and far-off, to become the father of new children without knowing at all what would become of them, what kind of human beings they would be.” He is haunted not only by the unalterable past but by the unknowable future, the blind responsibility of one generation for another. This is the psychological drama behind “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” Delmore Schwartz’s most poignant evocation of the power of the past over the mind of the present.

If Shenandoah sends Schwartz’s surrogate back to the moment in infancy when he was given his name, “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” takes him back even further—to his parents’ courtship, the very day his father, with little deliberation, asked his mother to marry him. The story is cast as a dream, though we don’t learn that until the last line. These scenes from the past unfold on the screen of an old movie theater, a dream within a dream, since movies have always been seen as dreamlike. The year in the story is 1909; the medium is new and modern, its technique still primitive. The scratchy, fragmentary print, its tintype settings, reflect the unbridgeable distance in time, the awkwardness of the characters, whose unhappiness is foreshadowed at every turn. We learn all we need to know about his parents’ marriage but obliquely, by way of metaphor. Each anecdotal twist of the narrative augurs a failure to which the clueless couple remains oblivious.

The most striking of these turns comes when they stroll along the boardwalk at Coney Island, looking out at the glaring sun and the pounding sea. At first this seems harmless, yet the language resonates. “Overhead the sun’s lightning strikes and strikes, but neither of them are at all aware of it.” Gradually the sea grows more menacing, crashing ominously with irresistible force. “The ocean is becoming rough; the waves come in slowly, tugging strength from far back. The moment before they somersault, the moment when they arch their backs so beautifully, showing green and white veins amid the black, that moment is intolerable.” The waves are beautiful yet shattering, intolerable not in themselves but in the agitated thoughts of the young observer, for whom they signal something painful and inexorable. “They finally crack, dashing fiercely upon the sand, actually driving, full force downward, against the sand, bouncing upward and forward, and at last petering out into a small stream which races up the beach and then is recalled.” But the couple feels nothing of their son’s preternatural sense of dread. “My parents gaze absentmindedly at the ocean, scarcely interested in its harshness. The sun overhead does not disturb them. But I stare at the terrible sun which breaks up sight, and the fatal, merciless, passionate ocean.” Vladimir Nabokov cited this last phrase in a 1972 essay on inspiration to illustrate why this was one of his half a dozen favorite stories. But he was no doubt inspired just as much by the author’s way of visualizing the past, playing with time, which anticipated his own scenic technique for conjuring up his early life in Speak, Memory.

What disturbs the young man is that the past is irreversible, its actors unconscious of the upshot of their choices, the long reach of their mistakes. Looking out at the blinding sun and pounding sea, he continues, “I forget my parents. I stare fascinated and finally, shocked by the indifference of my mother and father, I burst out weeping once more.” As the movie unreels, like his own run-on sentences, he turns into the troubled voyeur of his parents’ union, feeling helpless to alter the action as it unfolds. The people on the screen remain deaf to his dire warnings. “Don’t do it,” he says, in the story’s best-known lines. “It’s not too late to change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will come of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are monstrous.”

The story does little to flesh out this prophecy, except to show us the anguish in which he blurts it out. Each incident that follows subtly accentuates the dissonance between his parents. They step up to have their picture taken, as if to inaugurate their coming life together, but the photographer tries and tries again, somehow unable to get it right. They argue adamantly before entering a fortune-teller’s booth, a bad omen for what their future might hold, until the father angrily stalks out, as he would later walk out of the marriage. Watching the scene, the son feels more and more imperiled, “as if I were walking a tight-rope a hundred feet over a circus-audience and suddenly the rope is showing signs of breaking.” As he grows more vulnerable, more desperate, he shifts from being part of the audience to becoming the featured act.

When the story’s narrator talks back to what he sees on the screen, the other people in the theater object to his unruly behavior. He feels utterly apart from the people in the theater for they are mere spectators, engrossed in a story, annoyed at his disruptions. An usher threatens to put him out, while others plead with him or stare him down in dismay. His outbursts continue, and the usher, as in a scene from Kafka, drags him out with a stern warning: “You can’t act like this even if other people aren’t around.” Perhaps the usher’s meaning is that our lives may not be as starkly determined as he thinks. “Why should a young man like you, with your whole life before you, get hysterical like this?” The ending that follows is ambiguous. Expelled from the theater “into the cold light,” he wakes up “into the bleak winter morning of my 21st birthday, the windowsill shining with its lip of snow, and the morning already begun.” A man is coming of age, a new day is dawning, but it’s a harsh, wintry beginning. The morning’s “lip of snow” seems at once chilling and inviting, a cold initiation into maturity.

The story resists explaining why the young man is in such distress, but Schwartz’s other writing fills us in. Like the work of many second-generation American Jewish authors, including Bernard Malamud and Arthur Miller, Schwartz’s stories offer a tale of two generations. In his version, the older generation is emotionally confused, poorly acculturated to American life, and set mainly on material survival—making a living, creating a family, carving a place for themselves and their children in a new world. But some of their children turn out to be artists and intellectuals, doleful creatures, acutely self-conscious, alienated from both work and family, living too much in their own heads, their inactivity heightened by the harsh economics of the Depression. Schwartz’s best stories are either poker-faced satirical takes on the bohemians and outright failures of his generation, as in “The World Is a Wedding” and “New Year’s Eve,” or chronicles of the distressed lives of his parents’ generation, for whom the promise of American life has not panned out.

The later story most closely linked with “In Dreams” is “America! America!,” in which Shenandoah’s mother takes him through the history of their neighbors, the Baumanns, a gregarious, seemingly happy family whose early successes gradually peter out, like the faltering hopes of the Loman family in Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Their children go nowhere while they themselves drift downward. “The expectations of these human beings who had come in their youth to the new world had not been fulfilled in the least.” But the key to the story is not so much the fate of the Baumanns as his mother’s absorbing way of telling their story, her peculiar understanding and empathy. He interrupts her account not with protests but with pained reflections, for he realizes how far he is from ordinary people and their lives, the very people who formed him and made him who he was. Compared to what he learns from these stories, his own cast of mind feels self-conscious, abstract, even solipsistic. His mother “was never deceived about any actual things by words or ideas, as he often was.” The flat, awkward solemnity and almost biblical simplicity of his style, perhaps the most striking feature of his fiction, can be seen as his way of imitating this intuitive wisdom. He often uses a tone of mock-solemnity to take down the pretensions of his contemporaries, but also to point to ultimate things.

His mother’s stories crystallize his disaffection with his life, his way of thinking as a modernist intellectual. Yet channeling those stories makes him, for the time being, a different kind of author.

He reflected upon his separation from these people, and he felt that in every sense he was removed from them by thousands of miles, or by a generation, or by the Atlantic Ocean. … Whatever he wrote as an author did not enter into the lives of these people, who should have been his genuine relatives and friends, for he had been surrounded by their lives since the day of his birth, and in an important sense, even before then. … The lower middle-class of the generation of Shenandoah’s parents had engendered perversions of its own nature, children full of contempt for every thing important to their parents.

As Shenandoah tries to imagine the experience of the older generation—their arrival in America, their early hopes and struggles, their growing disappointments—an unexpected surge of empathy overcomes his usual limitations. “And now he felt for the first time how closely bound he was to these people. … As the air was full of the radio’s unseen voices, so the life he breathed in was full of these lives and the age in which they had acted and suffered.” In resonant lines like these, his language seems etched in granite.

Delmore Schwartz came to consider himself a historian of the great Jewish immigration, not with multi-generational family sagas but through modernist fragments and glimpses, seeing those lives through the eyes of the next generation. The movie scenes of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities,” like the mother’s recollections in “America! America!,” are spots of time salvaged from oblivion. Reading “In Dreams” soon after he wrote it, Delmore’s mother testified to its uncanny accuracy. On the back of the typescript she wrote, “If there is another word besides wonderful I don’t know[.] I don’t remember telling you all these so accurate.” Achieving this uncanny insight did not make the writer happy. “What will become of me?,” Shenandoah thinks at the end of “America! America!” as he gazes at himself in a mirror. “What will I seem to my children?,” he wonders. “What is it that I do not see now in myself?”

As people in the past could not imagine our present, we can scarcely envision the future. This leap of time, the projection forward that so exhilarated Whitman in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” weighed heavily on Delmore Schwartz. In (hopeful) dreams begin (awesome) responsibilities, not thanks to some iron law of fate but because our actions, our character, our choices are fraught with incalculable consequences. We can never know their ultimate impact. This would be a heavy realization at any age, but especially for a young man just turning 21. Amid his short-lived early triumphs and subsequent trials, including mental illness, addiction, and the loss of fluency as a writer, this comfortless knowledge would press on Delmore Schwartz’s mind for many years to come, turning his meteoric rise and fall into a cautionary legend, dimming our sense of his bright beginnings.

Morris Dickstein, professor of English and theater at the Graduate Center of the City University in New York, is the author, most recently, of Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression. This essay will be published later this year as the afterword to a new edition of “In Dreams Begin Responsibilities” from Shackman Press.

The American release of The Mighty Walzer (Bloomsbury, $16), Jacobson’s acclaimed 1999 novel,  gives us the chance to see him in a different mode—less troubled, more nostalgic, more energetically hilarious. Writing quasi-autobiographically about his childhood in 1950s Manchester, Jacobson evokes the insularity of the Jewish community, made up of fairly recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, and their wary fascination with the “real” English. This Jewish world is doubly provincial: a generation removed from “some sucking bog outside Proskurov,” still able to feel “mud from the Bug and the Dniester” clinging to them, Manchester’s Jews regard “Shaygetsshire” with wary fascination.

At the same time, Jacobson notes, the England they are assimilating to is itself provincial, a lower-middle-class Manchester with a fatal taste for “swag”—that is, junk, kitsch, crap. The Walzers, in fact, make their living from swag; the father of the family is a peddler of knickknacks, “ornamental Dutch pee-pee boys with Chinese faces, and flowery wall plates that said ‘Too Grand Ma,’ and brass mirrors in the design of a ship’s porthole.” Oliver Walzer, Jacobson’s grubby adolescent hero, looks on with horror: “Under the influence of swag, we became confused. Aesthetically confused. Whether we also became morally confused is the big question. I believe it depressed us—I’ll go that far. I believe the ugliness of the tsatskes we sold, and then surrounded ourselves with, demoralized us.”

But then, Oliver is in no position to sneer. Egotistical, sex-obsessed, pathologically shy, he is the gauchest, grossest Walzer of them all. It seems hard on Jacobson that just about every American reviewer of his books compares him to Philip Roth—indeed, the cover of The Mighty Walzer features a quote from Janet Maslin that mentions Roth’s name three times in the space of one sentence. But it’s impossible to miss the family resemblance between Oliver Walzer and Alexander Portnoy, Roth’s horny, neurotic avatar. It may have been a desire to go Roth one better that led Jacobson to make Walzer an even more defiantly perverse masturbator than Portnoy, who famously employed a piece of liver. When Oliver locks himself in the bathroom, however, it’s to cut the heads out of photographs of his female relatives and paste them onto bodies from pornographic magazines. “And I did this even to my little Polish grandmother? Especially to my little Polish grandmother.”

This is skin-crawling, but as in Roth and Mordecai Richler—who is the Canadian member of this international brotherhood of literary tummlers—it is also psychologically revelatory. Personally, I have always found it hard to sympathize with the sexual hang-ups of that generation of Jewish male writers—especially their inability to have erotic feelings about Jewish women, their fixation on blond goddesses. But the phenomenon is so well-established that there must some sociological reason for it. Maybe the answer can be found in Isaac Rosenfeld’s 1949 essay “Adam and Eve on Delancey Street,” which equates kashrut with the incest taboo. If sexual desire is trayf, Rosenfeld writes, then it has to be kept outside the Jewish family, restricted to Gentiles. Walzer feels just the same way. As Jacobson writes in one of his mad riffs: “I’d been brought up, by precept and example, to believe that virginity was an exclusively Jewish property. Why would a hymen have been called a hymen if it wasn’t Jewish? I had cousins called Hymen. We all did. Becky and Shoshanna Hymen.”

If this doesn’t make you laugh, you won’t like Jacobson; if it does, you’ll feast on The Mighty Walzer. Here, as often, it’s in words themselves that the comedy of Jewishness erupts. The novel is packed with Yiddish words, which are never translated, helping to underscore the sense that Walzer and his friends literally speak a different language from their Gentile peers. The difference between unserer and anderer, us and them, is always on their minds. Even when they’re speaking English, Jacobson writes, they can’t shake “the belief that we could magic words and that none of them would hear what we were saying.”

There is just one place where Jacobson’s timid hero becomes strong, skilled, and competent, where he can be “the Mighty Walzer.” The joke is that this place is the ping-pong table: Oliver is a hero of an unheroic game, a champion of a sport no one cares about. Jacobson writes about ping-pong knowledgeably, lovingly, with Nabokovian lyricism; but the fact remains that he is writing about ping-pong, and he delights in the mock-heroic irony that results. Take his poetic little treatise on the difference between old-fashioned rubber paddles and new sponge-covered ones:

My own inclination was to leave well enough alone, not because I was a purist … but becasue I liked the control conventional rubber gave me, I liked the sound—plock plock, plock plock: like the clatter of high heels on a wet pavement—I liked its associations with my old club and team-mates, and I liked the game as I played it; I liked chopping deep, arresting the ball on my forehand, telling it who was boss, and that you could only do with pimples. No one in his right mind chopped with sponge. With sponge there was no call to chop. If you needed to chop you were using the wrong rubber. And if you were using the wrong rubber you were in the wrong game.

Surely no one has ever written, or ever will write, a better ping-pong novel than The Mighty Walzer. But Jacobson’s novelistic talent really shows in the way he makes ping-pong serve as a mirror, in which Oliver’s neuroses and appetites are ludicrously reflected. He becomes romantically obsessed with a female player, Lorna Peachley, but can only get aroused by losing to her—by being humiliated, even beaten and choked. “The last thing I wanted Lorna Peachley to do was hang me from the rafters and paddle me with her bat. Not the very last thing, but one of the last things. The point of the bat was that she should use me as she used it. I didn’t want to suffer the bat, I wanted to be the bat.”

Finally, Oliver’s perverse desire to lose at ping-pong—to surrender the game whenever he meets an opponent who seems to want to win more than he does—is shown to be his fatal flaw, bound up somehow with his Jewish alienation and family misery and sexual guilt. “Winning is a test of character, as every sporting commentator will tell you, and I didn’t have any character. Grandiosity, yes. Skills, yes. But character?” Jacobson’s verdict on his alter ego is ultimately very harsh, and the novel ends with a hurried flash-forward to the present day, allowing us to see how Oliver’s adolescent flaws have ruined his adult life. Walzer’s curse, really, is that he never learned to become a comic novelist. For as Jacobson shows, it takes a writer of genius to take all of life’s sordid humiliations and redeem them with laughter.

In the very next sentence of the monologue, Simon dispels that grave and nagging question with a punchline. Feeling the fever of puberty, knowing there is dessert waiting downstairs in the kitchen, Eugene cracks, “Actually, I’d give up writing if I could see a naked girl while I was eating ice cream.”

The bracing challenge and expedient retreat contained in that one short moment reveals a great deal about Neil Simon’s own gifts, anxieties, defensiveness, and ambition. The question Eugene raises is not rhetorical. It is the same one critics often asked of Simon as he became a Broadway staple and commercial phenomenon with comedies like The Odd Couple, Chapter Two, and The Sunshine Boys. And just as Eugene humorously deflates the issue of creativity and misery, so did Simon for the first 30 years of his career pull back from darker material to the default setting of getting lots of laughs.

As a matter of historical fact, though, Simon never needed to wonder if he had suffered sufficiently. His own youth in a turbulent home during the Great Depression supplied more than enough. The question was when, if ever, he was going to plumb the personal depths. The trilogy of memory plays first produced over a six-year period in the 1980s—Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues, and Broadway Bound—provided the answer, an answer that evolved with the progression of the plays themselves.

Now, Simon’s longtime producer Emanuel Azenberg is reviving the first and last of those plays in repertory. (Brighton Beach Memoirs opened on Oct. 25, and Broadway Bound starts previews on Nov. 18 and has its opening night on Dec. 10.) These productions, under the guidance of the acclaimed young director David Cromer and with Laurie Metcalf heading the ensemble cast, show how Simon struggled with and ultimately faced up to his memory’s demons. Taken together, Simon’s portrayals of the Jerome family deserve to stand with the work of Clifford Odets and Arthur Miller as definitive theatrical treatments of the American Jewish family in extremis.

Born in 1927, Simon is a full generation younger than Odets and a dozen years younger than Miller, and the distinction matters as more than trivia. The two older playwrights went through most or all of the Depression as adults, and came of age during the Popular Front era with its fervent left-wing politics. Simon experienced the Depression as a child, and its depredations coincided with the upheavals in his parents’ marriage.

So while Odets and Miller reckoned with the Depression very much in political terms, as a failure of the false god of capitalism, in Simon’s household financial calamity was conflated with familial collapse and marital betrayal. But it took him a long, very long time, to tell that story.

Instead, he honed his craft alongside Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Carl Reiner, and Larry Gelbart on the writing staff of Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Turning to theater, Simon expertly worked the theme of conflict—with the newlyweds of Barefoot in the Park, the divorced men rooming together in The Odd Couple, the feuding vaudevillians of The Sunshine Boys—without ever plunging deeper and risking an unhappy ending. When he turned serious, in the wake of his first wife Joan’s death at age 40 from cancer, he did so in a schematic, grad-student kind of way, doing his version of Chekhov in The Good Doctor and the Book of Job in God’s Favorite.

The darling of a mass audience, Simon was the favorite whipping boy for cultural mandarins. His expertly crafted comedies received condescending sniffs, partly because of their expert craft, and his attempts at drama were smacked down with a ferocity meant to make him know his place. At one time in the 1980s, when August Wilson was serving on an awards committee of the Dramatists Guild with two other playwrights, he nominated Simon for a career-achievement award. The other two scoffed in such derision that Wilson later wondered what possibly could have caused such animus.

During the mid-1970s, though, Simon had written 35 pages of a memory play called Brighton Beach Memoirs. Aware that it was “a turn in style for me, probing more deeply into myself,” as he later put it in a Paris Review interview, Simon stuck the partial manuscript in a drawer for nine years.

If Simon could only tiptoe at that point into his family history, rather than fully immerse, then one can understand the reluctance. Simon’s mother, Mamie Levy, had been disfigured as a young girl, scarred inside and out when her dress caught fire. The man she married, a piece-goods salesman named Irving Simon, left the household “as least eight different times” for periods ranging from a month to a year, Simon recounted in his memoir, Rewrites. In his absence, Mamie gave up her bedroom in the family’s Washington Heights apartment to two tenants, butchers who paid half their rent in cash and the rest in unsold meat. She also ran card parties, essentially a small-scale gambling parlor, to make money.

On the occasions Irving Simon did return home, he specialized in a certain kind of emotional torment, not just to his wife but to Neil. He would buy fireworks for the boy’s birthday, then hand them all out to other kids, claiming he didn’t want Neil to hurt himself. His means of expressing tenderness was to tell Neil to pull a stick of gum or piece of candy from the stash in his overcoat pocket. One time, Mamie brought Neil to stand outside the apartment building of Irving’s mistress, so that the child could witness and even testify in court to his father’s infidelity. When Neil ran a high fever that his mother’s cold compresses couldn’t break, he recalled in Rewrites, “She would curse my father for his absence and run out to the hallway, banging on the doors of neighbors to help her find a remedy, screaming up to a God who had once again abandoned her.”

Even these public recollections did not come from Simon until the 1990s. The first inkling all but his closest friends had of his actual upbringing came with the autobiographical trilogy. And in the original production, the emotional honesty came fitfully. In a vivid and indelible way, Brighton Beach Memoirs does convey the fragility of subsistence during the Depression. Any bump or twist to the family breadwinners, whether an injury or a shop shut-down or a 17-dollar loss at poker, brings penury right to the threshold.

In the current revival, director David Cromer has raised the grain on the serious aspects of the play, and thus diminished the quaint ones, much as he did in his highly praised production of Our Town. And in this production, it is the beleaguered but resourceful mother Kate Jerome, indelibly embodied by Laurie Metcalf, rather than exuberantly youthful Eugene who commands the psychic center of the action.

Yet, as Simon himself later acknowledged, the Jerome family in Brighton Beach Memoirs was “the family I wished I’d had instead of the family I did have.” The father Jack, a garment worker, valiantly takes on second and third jobs to keep the household afloat. The mother Kate argues bitterly with her sister Blanche but reconciles. Jack’s cousin in Poland miraculously escapes with his wife and children and, at the play’s final curtain, the refugees are heading toward their waiting relatives in Brighton Beach. And the character of Eugene, especially as played by the young Matthew Broderick, put an infectiously charming patina on all the goings-on.

In ways that may have been precise engineering or may have been intuitive candor, Simon also wrote some passages in Brighton Beach Memoirs that would lay explosive charges for Broadway Bound. At one point in the play, for instance, Kate says to Jack about the bookkeeper in the garment factory, “Just promise me one thing. If anything ever happened with you and that Helene, let me go to my grave without hearing it.”

As the final chapter of the trilogy reveals, she does not get such blissful ignorance. If Brighton Beach Memoirs was Simon’s equivalent to Eugene O’Neill’s sunlit fantasy of family life, Ah, Wilderness, then Broadway Bound was the closest thing in his oeuvre to A Long Day’s Journey into Night. For all of its lighter elements, most involving Eugene and his older brother Stanley starting to make it as comedy writers, Broadway Bound is surely, as O’Neill described his own masterpiece, “a play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.”

Where Brighton Beach Memoirs opens with Eugene joyfully practicing his baseball pitches, Broadway Bound raises its curtain on Kate’s elderly father sneaking out of the Jerome house with the bedsheets he had soiled. That Kate discovers him in the act is the first indication that, in this play, the dirty linen will indeed be aired. The indomitable Kate of the first play, who assures her worried husband that “God has time for everybody,” is by now bitter and suspicious; the audience is told, as it wasn’t in the first play, that similarly to the actual Mamie Simon she “burned half the skin off her back” in a garment-factory fire.

As for Jack, the steadfast provider in Brighton Beach Memoirs has aged into an ineffably unhappy and serially unfaithful man. “If I’m not enough for you anymore, then tell me and get out,” Kate declares. A bit later, in as naked a sentence as he ever wrote, Simon has her ask, “How is it possible I could hate you so much after loving you all my life?”

Simon grants Kate a touch of redemptive escape when Eugene coaxes her into remembering and reenacting the high point of her womanly life—the time in a ballroom decades earlier when the movie star George Raft asked her to dance. This is no happy ending, though; this is the tragedy of unfulfilled life and shattered dreams; this is Mary Tyrone in her morphine haze recalling the doting sisters at her convent school, the one she left when she met the dashing actor James Tyrone.

The Eugene of Broadway Bound, 23 years old, intones some of the lessons about writing this his creator certainly learned, too. Writing a joke isn’t the same as writing comedy. And writing about the people you know sometimes means hurting them in the process. Eugene worries aloud that he is divided between “this nice likable funny kid” and “the part that writes, that’s an angry hostile real son of a bitch.”

Neil Simon kept that part of himself caged for a long time. When he liberated it in the trilogy, he set free part of his talent, too, the part that won the Pulitzer Prize for Lost in Yonkers. He didn’t lose the ability to entertain his audiences, but he did take a hint from something the grandfather says in Broadway Bound: “I don’t trust affection. Sometimes people give it to you instead of truth.”

Arthur Miller could hardly have hoped for a more sympathetic biographer than Christopher Bigsby. He is the director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia, and the author of a long commentary on Miller’s work and a book-length interview with the playwright. To write this biography, Miller granted Bigsby exclusive access to his papers, including unpublished manuscripts, and sat for what Bigsby describes as “many hours of interviews” over a twenty-five-year friendship.

So it is not surprising that the substance of Bigsby’s book is wholly admiring of Miller, and takes his stature as a great American writer for granted. What is surprising is the peculiar form of the book, because it makes a rather severe judgment. Bigsby spends 650 pages narrating Miller’s life and times, from his birth in 1915 to 1961, the year he divorced Marilyn Monroe. The last forty-four years of Miller’s life are covered in the remaining twenty-five pages of the book, almost all of them dealing with his courtship of Inge Morath, who became his third wife in 1962. This would make sense if Bigsby’s book, enormous as it is, were merely the first of a two-volume biography. But while the book’s title page includes the subtitle “1915–1962,” the years do not appear on the cover, and there is no suggestion that Bigsby is working on a sequel.

It is as though Miller’s life effectively ended when he was forty-seven years old. In Bigsby’s hands, its entire second half was a superfluous coda.

If this is Bigsby’s implied judgment, it seems also to have been Miller’s. Timebends, the entertaining and voluble autobiography that Miller published in 1987, also effectively cuts off in the early 1960s, with only a few episodes from the later years that saw Miller flourish as the president of PEN and an elder statesman of American letters. He has little to say even about the many plays that he continued to write and stage in those years, and he confesses that the 1960s marked a rupture in his creative life: “It was no good simply saying the past was canceled. But why did it seem to have no particular connection with the present and who I was now? Cancellation was the beginning of the sixties for me, the great disconcerting wipeout of all that had gone before.”

This sudden cancellation—the abrupt expulsion of Arthur Miller from the living heart of the American theater to the more serene eminence of the textbook and the anthologyis the real mystery of his life. Bigsby’s biography brings home to the reader just how brief Miller’s period as a major playwright really was. His reputation rests primarily on four plays—All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible, A View From the Bridge—that debuted between 1947 and 1955. And even that span might be misleadingly broad, since A View From the Bridge, first produced as a one-act in 1955, grew out of a story Miller had been pondering since the late 1940s, and had already treated in a screenplay, never produced, called The Hook. So if you date the end of his most fertile period to the writing of The Crucible in 1952, you find just five or six years of greatness, preceded by a decade of apprenticeship and followed by more than fifty years of respectability.

“There is never a moment when an Arthur Miller play is not being staged somewhere in the world,” Bigsby claims on the last page of the book; but that play is not The Creation of the World and Other Business or The American Clock or Broken Glass. Bigsby does not offer a new solution to the problem of Miller’s career. Rather, his biography annotates, at length, the explanation that Miller himself provided—directly in Timebends and his autobiographical play After the Fall, indirectly in other late works from The Price to The Ride Down Mount Morgan. Melodramatic as it sounds, it seems to be true that his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, which lasted from 1956 to 1960, was what broke the spring of his imagination.

Before Monroe, Miller wrote out of the conviction—necessary to all great writers, perhaps, but especially to playwrights—that his private experience was representative of the public’s experience. When All My Sons, his second play to be produced on Broadway, was a smash hit in 1947—the first, The Man Who Had All the Luck, had closed after three days in 1944—Miller became convinced that “some kind of public business was happening inside me, that what perplexed or moved me must move others. It was a sort of blessing I invented for myself.”

All My Sons ran for 328 performances. His next play, Death of a Salesman, ran for 742, amply justifying Miller’s sense of being in tune with the times. On Salesman’s opening night, February 10, 1949, Irene Mayer Selznick, one of the show’s producers, sent Miller a telegram: “TONIGHT AT EIGHT AND THEN THE WORLD IS YOURS.” “Her Hollywood background may have been showing through,” Bigsby comments, “but she was far from wrong.” Box office was assured when Brooks Atkinson, the influential theater critic of The New York Times, gave the play a rave review: “masterly,” “heroic,” “superb.” (A friend of Miller’s read him the review over the phone as Atkinson typed it, in a scene that itself reads like something out of a play.) The Pulitzer Prize and the Tony followed, as well as less conventional honors, which showed how deeply Miller had touched the American public. The National Council of Salesman’s Organizations named him an “outstanding spokesman for the selling profession,” which was rather as if the American Legion had given an award to Johnny Got His Gun.

It would hardly have been possible for Miller to score a bigger success than Death of a Salesman, and the plays that followed—The Crucible in 1953 and A View From the Bridge, on a bill with another one-act, A Memory of Two Mondays, in 1955—had shorter, though still respectable runs. But in 1956, Miller divorced his first wife, Mary Slattery, and married Marilyn Monroe, whom he had met in 1951, when he went to Hollywood with Elia Kazan to try to interest a studio in The Hook. For the next seven years, Miller wrote no new plays. The only substantial work he did during his marriage to Monroe was the screenplay for The Misfits, designed as a vehicle for his wife, and unsettlingly proficient in the Hollywood conventions that he had previously scorned.

The next play Miller brought to the stage was After the Fall, in 1964—three years after his divorce from Monroe, and just a year and a half after her death by drug overdose. This only heightened the scandal of the play, which was a nakedly autobiographical treatment of Miller’s divorce from Mary, his troubled romance with Monroe—named Maggie in the play, and transformed from a movie star to a singer—and his redemption through the love of Holga, as he called his third wife, Inge Morath. Robert Brustein, never a fan of Miller’s, described the play in these pages as “the kind of document that playwrights publish posthumously, if at all, since it implicates so many people living, and so many recently dead.”

Today, when the participants in Miller’s private drama are gone, and we are more used to this kind of literary confession, After the Fall does not seem so troubling. A passionately self-justifying play, at once moving and frustrating, it belongs with Robert Lowell’s The Dolphin and the Zuckerman novels of Philip Roth in the literature of male mid-life crisis. But in 1964 it seemed that the “blessing” Miller once enjoyed had been withdrawn, and indeed reversed: where once he had transacted the public’s business in the privacy of his art, now he was exposing his private life in public. He had been transformed from an artist into a celebrity, and he never quite recovered.

The sheer improbability of the marriage between Miller and Monroe was one reason why it attracted so much attention: the egghead and the airhead, New York and Hollywood in human form. Perhaps recognizing what a romance with Monroe would involve, Miller denied the attraction that he felt at their first meeting, until four more years in his unhappy marriage left him ready to succumb to Monroe’s near-idolatry. Immediately, he began to pay the price for his newfound, unwanted fame, which made his old prestige as a playwright seem like positive obscurity.

Even before Miller and Monroe were officially engaged, while Miller was still waiting out his Reno divorce, he found himself subpoenaed by HUAC. The timing was not coincidental: as Bigsby notes, by 1956 the Committee’s influence was on the wane, and Miller’s connection with America’s biggest sex symbol made him a witness guaranteed to draw attention. Bigsby repeats the well-known story that the HUAC chairman, Francis Walter, offered to cancel the subpoena if Monroe would pose for a photo with him. (Miller told this story with relish, but it would be nice to have it confirmed by someone else. As Bigsby points out, several episodes in Miller’s memoirs are contradicted by other witnesses or evidence.)

Miller refused, and appeared before a not entirely hostile committee. One congressman asked him why he didn’t direct “some of that magnificent ability you have to fighting against well-known Communist subversive conspiracies in our country and the world.” Nor was Miller openly confrontational, as Paul Robeson had been the week before. He was happy to declare, “I think it would be a disaster and a calamity if the Communist Party ever took over this country.” But his refusal to name names earned him a contempt citation, which was eventually overturned on appeal.

No sooner was Miller done testifying than he went back to Roxbury, Connecticut, where he lived for much of his adult life, to marry Monroe. On the day of the wedding, June 29, the couple planned to give a press conference, hoping to sate the huge appetite for stories about what one columnist called “America’s foremost foremosts.” On the way home from picking up the marriage license, Miller and Monroe witnessed a car crash: a reporter from Paris Match, following their car, had run into a tree, and the bride and groom watched her die on the roadside. They then continued home, where the assembled reporters went ahead with the press conference. It was an omen of the life to come. As Bigsby puts it, “Miller was being ushered into a new moral universe.”

Then it was off to England, where Monroe was to star with Laurence Olivier in a light comedy called The Prince and the Showgirl. Here the private misery began, as Miller began to fathom Monroe’s bottomless insecurity and paranoia. Certain that the great Olivier held her in contempt, Monroe responded by sabotaging the picture—taking sleeping pills, showing up late, refusing to learn her lines. One scene required thirty takes, “which Olivier called ‘an historic amount.’ ” When Miller tried to point out, reasonably, that Olivier was not really out to get her, Monroe reacted as though her husband had joined the conspiracy against her. The only person she trusted, Miller discovered, was Paula Strasberg, her acting guru, who fed her delusions endlessly. On one occasion, Miller remembered, Strasberg told Marilyn: “You are the greatest woman of your time, the greatest human being of your time; of any time, you name it; you can’t think of anybody, I mean—no, not even Jesus—except you’re more popular.” (John Lennon at least had a sense of humor about it.)

Within months, Miller told Bigsby, he grasped that the marriage had been a mistake. By 1960, when Miller was on the set of The Misfits, he and Monroe were openly at war. It was especially bitter because the movie had been Miller’s love offering, written for Monroe in the wake of a traumatic miscarriage. In the romance between the young, guileless, vulnerable Roslyn, Monroe’s character, and the older, tougher Gay Langland—Miller’s surrogate, played in the film by Clark Gable—the playwright imagined a happy ending that life could not provide. Bigsby quotes Montgomery Clift, who played a younger rival for Monroe’s affection in The Misfits, arguing that his character should logically have ended up with Roslyn. But “Arthur was doing some wish-fulfillment. He identified with the character played by Gable. Arthur wanted him to keep Marilyn because he wants her to himself. But this marriage is over, and he might as well face it.” By the time The Misfits premiered, early in 1961, they had split up.

II.

For another kind of writer, life with Marilyn Monroe, however trying, might not have been so imaginatively damaging. But for Miller, the decision to divorce his wife of fifteen years, the mother of his two children, and marry one of the world’s most beautiful women was more than just a personal one. It meant publicly embracing fame and fortune, in the most literal sense; and it as much as implied that Monroe was Miller’s reward for his plays. Yet for his entire adult life—ever since he came to political and artistic consciousness, in the trough of the Depression—Miller had been powerfully suspicious of the very idea of success. It is no accident that his greatest creation was the great failure Willy Loman, who acquiesces in every article of the American Dream—he wants to be rich, successful, “well-liked”—and ends up a suicide.

Bigsby shows that Miller knew about such failure at first hand. His father, Isidore Miller, was in some ways an even more dramatic example than Willy Loman, since he had actually known success and then suddenly lost it. Isidore came to America from Poland in 1890, at the age of six; his parents and older siblings had gone on ahead, leaving him to cross Europe and the Atlantic alone. Bigsby cites Miller speculating, late in life, that his father had been considered mentally defective, which would explain why he was initially left behind, and why he was never taught to read or write. (Though Bigsby tactfully avoids mentioning it, this speculation may reflect Miller’s own guilt over his son Daniel, born with Down syndrome in 1967, whom he consigned to an institution and never talked about.)

But Isidore turned out to be the best businessman in the Miller family. He quickly graduated from sewing clothes in a Broome Street sweatshop to selling coats for the family firm, travelling across the country at the age of fifteen. After World War I he struck out on his own, and his Miltex Coat and Suit Company flourished in the 1920s. Family legend had it that in 1915, William Fox, a garment-business associate of Isidore’s, asked him for a $50,000 loan to help him start a movie studio in Hollywood. Isidore turned him down, and so missed out on becoming an owner of Twentieth Century Fox (which, coincidentally, became Marilyn Monroe’s studio).

Until Arthur Miller was 13, he lived with his parents, his older brother, and his younger sister in a grand apartment in Jewish Harlem, with a view over Central Park down to the Battery. Every morning, chauffeur-driven cars would pick up Isidore and the other businessmen in the building. Miller’s mother, Augusta, had intellectual and artistic leanings, and was frustrated at having been married off to an illiterate man. But it was not until the money disappeared, in the crash of 1929, that the elder Millers’ marriage was exposed as a loveless business arrangement, a merger that now failed. In After the Fall, Miller recreates the traumatic scenes that took place when Augusta learned that her husband had lost all their money in the stock market: “You mean you saw everything going down and you throw good money after bad? Are you some kind of a moron? I should have run the day I met you!” Despite repeated efforts, Isidore would never be prosperous again.

At the age of 14, then, Arthur Miller was expelled from the upper middle class to the lower middle class, and from Harlem to the Midwood area of Brooklyn, where the family moved into a small house on East 3rd Street. When he graduated high school, where he was a poor student, he took a job filling orders at an auto-parts warehouse; it took him two years to save the $500 needed to enroll at the University of Michigan. It is no wonder that the Depression, which ruined his family in the most intimate ways, turned Miller, like so many Jews of his generation, into a radical and a Communist sympathizer—though never, he insisted, a party member. One reason it took HUAC so long to subpoena Miller was that even the committee’s investigators could not find a party card with Miller’s name on it.

In fact, unlike the young New York intellectuals who spent the 1930s poring over Marx and Engels at City College, Miller was never very interested in Marxism as a theory. The radicals at Michigan were not that sophisticated, as Miller recalled in a late interview: “I’ll never forget, there was a professor of economics who at one point asked, ‘Who has read volume two of Das Kapital?’ Somebody stuck his hand up and said, ‘There isn’t one.’ I’m sure nobody read it. It was just taken as an article of faith that we understood what this was all about.” What made him a fellow traveler was, rather, the shock of the Depression, the rise of fascism in Europe, and a completely uninformed admiration of the Soviet Union, which seemed the only home of social hope. It was because Miller’s communism was so emotional, so uncompromised by either theory or practice, that he could remain a vocal fellow traveler into the 1950s, even after he acknowledged the truth about Stalinism and the Soviet Union. As Bigsby remarks, “he would never accept that the feelings that inspired his radical commitments were ever invalidated. What was his faith if not a conviction that we are responsible for our own actions and the state of our society?”

Miller’s politics were irresponsible, but they fertilized his artistic imagination. From the moment he started writing plays, as a student at Michigan, his goal as an artist was to redeem the world. “In a word,” as he wrote in one essay, “there lies within the dramatic form the ultimate possibility of raising the truth-consciousness of mankind to such a level of intensity as to transform those who observe it.” But this required solidarity with the world’s oppressed with the poor, with persecuted leftists, with his bankrupt father—as well as a puritanical scorn of those who “made it.” It was his fascination with failure, and with the virtue of failure, that allowed Miller to create Willy Loman, and to make the audience love Willy more the more futile and pathetic he becomes.

Starting with All My Sons, however, Miller suffered from the paradox that his plays about failure were making him rich and famous. “I had been scratching on the glass from the outside for thirty-one years,” he writes in Timebends, “until now I was scratching on it from the inside, trying to keep contact with the ordinary life from which my work had grown. For the slow dread was descending on me that I might have nothing more to say as a writer.” To atone for his success and avert the punishment of silence, Miller imposed penances on himself. When All My Sons starting bringing him $2,000 per week, he took a job assembling beer-box dividers at a factory in Long Island City for forty cents an hour. He only lasted a few days—Miller was no Simone Weil, and could not blink the absurdity of the gesture—but the sense of guilt remained.

Death of a Salesman opened in February 1949, and the next month Miller momentously agreed to chair a panel at the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace—the infamous “Waldorf Conference,” sponsored by the Soviet Union, which became a flashpoint in the cultural cold war. The low points of that event—to which Bigsby devotes an insightful chapter—included the humiliation of Dmitri Shostakovich, who was compelled to read a statement denouncing “bourgeois formalism” and apologizing for his music’s failure “to meet with approval among the broad masses of listeners.” At another session Dwight Macdonald, one of a number of anti-Stalinists who infiltrated the conference, read off a list of names of vanished Soviet writers, asking Aleksandr Fadeyev, the head of the Union of Soviet Writers, to account for their whereabouts. Fadeyev responded with details about where each writer was living and what they were currently working on. It later emerged that “all those of whom Fadeyev had spoken were either already dead from torture or firing squad, or were in prison, to die later.”

As Bigsby notes, a photograph from the conference shows Miller posing alongside Shostakovich and Fadeyev. His participation was a disgrace. It was also a danger, bringing him once again to the attention of HUAC and the FBI, and landing him in a Life photo spread headlined “Dupes and Fellow Travelers,” along with Charlie Chaplin and Langston Hughes. But for Miller it was a necessary act of contrition. “I might not have agreed to chair one of the panels,” he wrote in Timebends, “had Salesman not continued to be such a universally acclaimed success. I simply felt better with one foot outside the standard show business world, and once invited, I could not refuse.”

Miller drives the point home with one of the most telling anecdotes in his memoir. Among the speakers at the Waldorf-Astoria was Clifford Odets, who in the 1930s had shot to fame as a “stormbird of the revolution,” the author of stirring radical plays such as Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing. But Odets, notoriously, had gone Hollywood, trading the stage and the revolution for the screen and a fat studio contract. By 1949, his best days were long behind him. It was a terrible irony, then, when Odets got up at the Waldorf and demanded, “Why is there this threat of war?”

The question hung in silence, and the audience pressed forward, straining to hear his voice. Now, slowly, his hand rose above his head and his fist closed, and at the raging top of his voice he yelled, “MONEEY!”

Astonishment. A few grins breaking out. But on the whole his inner urgency was having an effect.

There was another pause, and again a series of questions demanding the source of our danger, and once more the scream: “MONEEEY!”

Four or five repetitions had the audience tittering, and even worse was Odets’s apparent unawareness that he was stepping over the edge into the ridiculous. I sat there thinking unjust thoughts: what had he been doing in Hollywood but wasting his time making money? …Why were there so few Americans so far beyond corruption that their voices were undeniable by any honest person?

The spectacle of Odets’s self-betrayal, coming at the very moment when Miller himself was rocketing to heights that even Odets had never known, was a fearful warning. For it was Odets’s plays, which Miller saw in their legendary Group Theatre productions in the 1930s, that ignited Miller’s calling as a writer. Strangely for a professional playwright, he claimed to “have never loved the brick and mortar of the theater…. The sole sense of connection with theater came when I saw the productions of the Group Theatre.” Hearing the cry of “Strike! Strike!” taken up by the audience at the end of Waiting for Lefty, Miller thought he could recognize “the Greek situation when religion and belief were the heart of drama.” From Odets, Miller took the conviction that “writing had to try to save America, and that meant grabbing people and shaking them by the back of the neck.”

III.

This, of course, has always been the standard criticism of Miller’s plays: that they amount to left-liberal sermons, with the playwright always shoving the audience toward the desired social and political conclusions. For Eric Bentley, Miller was “the playwright of American liberal folklore.” Robert Brustein, reviewing A View From the Bridge, found “melodramatic preachment,” “truth—life in its concreteness … obscured by a fog of false rhetoric.” It is, in fact, all too easy to reduce Miller’s major plays to their messages—to say that All My Sons is about war profiteering, Death of a Salesman about the false values of capitalism, The Crucible about McCarthyism, A View From the Bridge about the evil of informing. That is why these plays are so amenable to the high school classroom—Bentley ruefully noted that textbooks already used the rubric “From Aeschylus to Arthur Miller”—and why they are so easy for more experienced theatergoers to disdain.

One of the most useful services that Bigsby performs for Miller is to show the difference between Miller’s major plays and simple agitprop. He does not do so directly, but rather by digging up the unproduced plays and radio scripts that Miller was writing between 1938, when he graduated from the University of Michigan and returned to New York, and the end of the war. These really were left-wing propaganda pieces, sentimental and condescending, and Miller passes over them in silence in Timebends. It is easy to see why, reading lines like these from Jobs for Tomorrow, a radio series sponsored by the CIO, for which Miller wrote about shipbuilders: “One thing that’s come out of the war is this–a lot of bosses are learning that the man on the job has got eyes and ears to see and hear what’s wrong. And if he’s got an organization–a union–to come to he can improve things.”

Ironically, in Timebends, Miller writes in a very different spirit about his own experience working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where he signed on in 1942 after his draft board classified him 4-F, on account of a childhood sports injury. In reality, Miller recalled, the workers at the yard were mostly dishonest and incompetent: “Whenever a drydock was finally flooded and a ship instead of sinking floated safely into the harbor and sailed out into the bay, I was not the only one who stared at it thinking it miraculous that out of our chaos and incompetence, our bumbling and goofing off and our thefts and our dedicated moments in the wind, we had managed to repair it.” Once, Miller recalls, a notice was put up reminding the workers not to waste cadmium, a scarce rustproof metal. Immediately the men began stealing as much cadmium as they could get their hands on, turning it into rings and bracelets for their wives.

The workers Miller saw at the Navy Yard, or at his post-high-school job at an auto-parts warehouse (later memorialized in A Memory of Two Mondays), were not the brave, simple, loyal men whom Odets depicted. Most troublingly for Miller, they were often openly anti-Semitic. In Waiting for Lefty, Odets devotes one sketch to the plight of a young doctor who is denied promotion because he is Jewish. In his production notes on the play, Odets suggests that “a voice might announce at the appropriate moments in [this] scene that the USSR is the only country in the world where anti-Semitism is a crime against the State.” Many Jews were communists or fellow-travelers for exactly this reason.

But how could a workers’ state be safe for Jews when the workers at the warehouse were so hostile to Miller, the first Jew ever to be employed there? Or when Mikush, the gruff superintendent of his family’s apartment building, appeared to the Jews who lived there as a “mythic enemy”? “Had we lived in Germany, Mikush would likely have been the Nazi representative in the building,” Miller observes in his memoir, and Bigsby shows that Miller’s sensitivity to anti-Semitism was acute until the end of his life. In 2001, after reading Constantine’s Sword, James Carroll’s fine book about the history of Catholic anti-Semitism, Miller mordantly told his biographer that “I’ve decided to give up being Jewish so I can sleep better at night.”

This is remarkable, coming from a man who had been so beloved, and so iconically American, for so long. It is also notable as a response to the critics who reproached Miller for not writing more explicitly as a Jew, especially in Death of a Salesman, where the Lomans are almost but not quite Jewish. Mary McCarthy complained that Willy Loman “could not be Jewish because he had to be ‘America.’ ” Leslie Fiedler wrote that Miller, like Paddy Chayefsky, created “crypto-Jewish characters; characters who are in habit, speech, and condition of life typically Jewish, but are presented as something else.” In an interview in 1969, Miller insisted that he was happy to make a character explicitly Jewish when it was thematically necessary—for instance, in Incident at Vichy—but in Willy’s case his “religious or cultural background” was “irrelevant.”

This approach to identity is not very fashionable today, when we are inclined to see universalism as a species of false consciousness. And in fact, Bigsby demonstrates, Miller’s real feelings about Jewishness as a literary subject were more complicated. He quotes a speech that Miller delivered to a Jewish organization in 1947, in which he insisted that he had “graduated out of … Jewish life,” that “the Jewish writer [had] no other identity than his American identity.” Yet he went on to say that “to face away from Jewish life when one has a story to tell is not to be more universal and less parochial; it is to refuse to do best what no one else can do at all”—which is just what Fiedler, in particular, accused Miller of not believing.

To make sense of this confusion or contradiction in Miller’s approach to Jewish subjects, it is necessary to remember how intensely vulnerable Miller felt the Jews to be in Depression and wartime America. As he said in the same speech, “I have been insulted, I have been scorned, I have been threatened, I have heard of violence against Jews, and I have seen it … when I confront the prospect of writing about Jewish life my mood is defensive, and combative.” Yet Miller was not merely defensive. He believed that his writing somehow had to heal the breach between Jew and Gentile, as also between rich and poor. In Timebends, he went so far as to put this impulse at the center of his writing: “By whatever means, I had somehow arrived at the psychological role of mediator between the Jews and America, and among Americans themselves as well.” He even suggested that, if hoped for big audiences, it was not because he wanted money or fame, but because he wanted to save the Jews: “should I ever win an audience it would have to be made up of all the people, not merely the educated or sophisticated, since it was this mass that contained the oceanic power to smash everything, including myself, or to create much good.”

This fear and this hope were the motives for Miller’s first notable work, which appeared before he had made any mark on Broadway—his novel Focus, which was published in 1945. It was part of the first wave of post-Holocaust books to address anti-Semitism in America, along with Gentlemen’s Agreement and The Victim. The premise of Focus makes its “mediating” purpose clear: it is the story of an anti-Semite, Lawrence Newman, who finds that putting on his new glasses makes him look Jewish. Forced to experience life as a Jew, Newman can no longer justify his own hatred of Jews, especially once he becomes a target of the Christian Front, a vigilante group that Miller suggests is planning an American Holocaust: “You know as well as me that everybody, pretty near, has no use for the Jews. That’s true, isn’t it? All right. A depression comes along, and you know as well as me that it’s coming … and it’s the end of the Hebrews.”

The author of Focus could hardly be accused of downplaying his Jewish identity. Yet there was a good deal of merit in Fiedler’s complaint that, as Bigsby writes, “the tactic of making Newman a gentile derived from Miller’s conviction that while Jew-baiting was real, Jews were imaginary, just as he would suggest of The Crucible that witch-hunting was real but witches not.” Bigsby notes the parallel with Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, which appeared in 1946. Like Sartre, Miller suggested in Focus that Jewish identity is nothing more than the product of persecution—that the Jew is constituted by the anti-Semite, so that a non-Jew becomes Jewish as soon as he is treated like a Jew. Take away anti-Semitism and the Jew will disappear. It is a false analysis, of course; but Miller’s view of the Jew was of a piece with the image of the Jew as a hero of alienation that was so prevalent in the postwar years. Bigsby’s book does not extend to the period of Incident at Vichy, which premiered at the end of 1964, but there, too, Miller writes that “Jew is only the name we give to that stranger, that agony we cannot feel, that death we look at like a cold abstraction. Each man has his Jew; it is the other.”

This thin description of Jewishness is part of what makes the play historically unconvincing: all the Jews awaiting deportation bear standard French names (Leduc, Lebeau), whereas the actual first victims of Vichy anti-Semitism were German and Polish immigrants, who were quite distinguishable from Frenchmen in their names, their appearances, and their personal histories.

On the subject of Jews, as on the subject of communism, Miller’s ideas suffered from precisely the lack of critical rigor, the credulous readiness to take intention for reality, that the anti-Stalinists in New York decried. Bigsby dwells rather darkly on the criticism that Miller received from such corners: “In the early 1970s, the critic Malcolm Cowley warned him that the Trotskyites had been plotting against him from the beginning and, looking back from 2001, Miller regarded the attacks launched on him by this group … as being of crucial importance … it seemed to him that they had been instrumental in shaping the reception of his plays in the United States.” To which one can only reply that, if Partisan Review was out to stop Miller’s rise, it did not do a very good job. In 1949, more people saw Death of a Salesman in a month than read Partisan Review in a year.

Still, it cannot be a coincidence that it was in the late 1940s and early 1950s, exactly when Miller’s Popular Front views were under the strongest pressure, that he produced his best work. Earlier, when Miller could luxuriate in the group- and Group-think of the left, his writing was too blunt and simplistic. Afterward, when he had been through the Monroe whirlwind, and when the radicalism of the 1930s was superseded by the radicalism of the 1960s, he was bewildered, and could only look inward and backward for subject matter. But from 1946 to 1955, he was energized by the difficulty of using the theater to save a country that evidently did not want saving, at least not his way.

Thus, as wartime collectivism gave way to postwar selfishness, Miller produced All My Sons, about an airplane manufacturer who sells defective parts to the military, defending himself on the grounds that “a man can’t be a Jesus in this world!” Just in time for what Robert Lowell called “the tranquillized Fifties,” Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, in which cars and refrigerators and mortgages become nooses for a man’s soul. As HUAC turned former radicals such as Elia Kazan and Clifford Odets into compliant witnesses, Miller used The Crucible to defend the virtues of loyalty, honor, and sanity in the face of moral panic. In each case, Miller allowed the full weight of history to test what he called “the weld between my personal ambition as a playwright and my hopes for the salvation of the Republic.” That imagined connection, at once noble and delusive, was what allowed Miller to write such moving plays—until his life and times severed it, by forcing him to recognize that even that the best-intentioned art cannot bring redemption.

Adam Kirsch is a contributing editor to Tablet Magazine and the author of Benjamin Disraeli, a biography in the Nextbook Press Jewish Encounters book series. This piece originally appeared in The New Republic.

After emptying my winter coat of coins, I still set off the impressive metal detector at the Center’s entrance. As the guard moves his beeping wand up and down my body—my arms held aloft as if for flight—I think of my old roommate, the Yiddish actress Esta Salzman, who died in 2007 at the age of 94. Remembering the spark of energy that ran through her every movement, I see her gracefully punctuating a conversation with her quickly moving hands, her once storied—now unsteady—legs rooted to the plastic cushion of her kitchen chair.

Walking through the exhibit, which is curated by the American Jewish Historical Society, I remember discussing Molly with Esta over bowls of chopped salad, smoked white fish, and sweet potatoes baked perfectly in her ancient electric dome-topped baker. Esta toured with Molly for decades, as well as appearing with her on Broadway and at the Anderson Theater on Second Avenue. Molly even sang at the bar mitzvah of Esta’s son Jamie. What, I would ask her again and again, made Molly so spectacular, so winsome, so beloved? Esta’s only answer would be that whenever Molly came onstage, she had the audience eating out of the palm of her hand in seconds, and that was it: they were hers, never to be lost again.

Curator Ari Y. Kelman shows us why, capturing the variety and scope of Picon’s career, which transcended gender, age, and nationality. As a teenager in Philadelphia, Molly played an aging Jacob Adler’s wizened grandmother. At a time when the leading ladies of the Yiddish theater were buxom matriarchs and lithe sirens, this saucer-eyed pixie became a star playing orphans and yeshiva boys. She wrote her own song lyrics, and took over classic male leads from major comedians like Ludwig Satz. In 1964, Molly earned a Golden Globe nomination for portraying Frank Sinatra’s mother in Come Blow Your Horn. In addition to Kelman’s written narrative, the exhibit displays Molly’s actual scrapbooks in front of posters, photos, and sepia-toned enlargements of newspaper articles from her career.

Molly’s husband and collaborator—yeshiva drop-out-turned-actor-writer Jacob Kalich—is featured in several images together with his wife, reminding me of the many great artistic couples that formed that backbone of the Yiddish theater: Joseph Buloff and Luba Kadison, Seymour Rexite and Miriam Kressyn, Jacob Jacobs and Betty Jacobs. Looking at a picture of Molly performing for the Maxwell House Coffee radio show in 1938, I think of the Yiddish crooner Rexite, who dueted with Molly on that show while backed by a full orchestra. I remember sitting in his living room, lined floor-to-ceiling with reel-to-reel tapes while he played his Yiddish version of “Tea for Two” on a Wallensach machine for me. Looking at the photo of Molly’s Broadway debut in Sylvia Regan’s Morningstar in 1940 opposite fellow Yiddish actor Buloff, I am reminded of the countless Sunday afternoons I spent in an Irish pub on the Upper West Side with Buloff’s widow, Kadison, discussing her and Buloff’s artistic triumphs, from a play that influenced Eugene Ionescu in 1924 Romania to an acclaimed Yiddish production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman at the Parkway Theater in Brooklyn in 1951.

In conjunction with the exhibit, there is a reading of a new play, Stella in the Bois de Bologne, about the relationship between the Yiddish actress Stella Adler and the celebrated founder of the Moscow Art Theater, Konstantin Stanislavski. Stella later became an influential acting teacher who was championed by Marlon Brando and Warren Beatty. Waiting for the play to begin, I recognize the languid voice of Stella’s daughter, Hamptonite Ellen Alder, holding court with her cousins, the Freeds, in the row behind me. Dr. Freed, a retired physician, grew up in the wings of Yiddish theaters, listening to his father, Lazar, perform the mystical lead in The Dybbuk or the wrongly accused rabbi’s son in Kidush haShem.

Directed by Stella’s former student Donald T. Sanders, the docudrama by Jane Wood and Tara Prem is full of characters from a time when theater was practically synonymous with political revolution: Strassberg, Clurman, Carnovsky, and Chekhov’s wife, the actress Olga Knipper. Academy Award-winner Mira Sorvino and her father, veteran actor Paul Sorvino, powerfully portray the filial relationship between Stella and Stanislavski. After the show, the elder Sorvino eloquently recalls his acting apprenticeship in the 50s, when the proclamations of various acting gurus were parsed like Talmudic commentary. His daughter speaks movingly about how her father is her first and best acting teacher, reminiscent of Jacob Adler’s formative influence on Stella. The excited crowd is reluctant to leave. Everyone wants to share their own connection to Stella, to the Yiddish theater, to acting.

Later, YIVO archivist Krysia Fisher spirits me to the second floor to see the remnants of a Yiddish theater exhibit she designed two years ago. An inspiring altar to the artistic majesty that is Second Avenue, the air fairly buzzes with proximity to great artists and their work. I stare at a copy of Jacob’s Gordin’s play The Jewish King Lear, written in his own hand. I read a passionate typewritten poem to the dramatic actress Bertha Kalisch. I look at a glamorous photo of Stella’s half-sister Celia, a letter from the impresario Sol Hurok to Ludwig Satz, a prompter’s notebook: all artifacts representing the formidable talents of a hundred years of artists who created theater to change their world, and who lived and died by their art less than a mile from where the Center for Jewish History, the repository for these treasures, now stands.

When I heard Miller accept a Lifetime Achievement Award from New Dramatists in 2001, I was midway through writing a play about my own grandfather, Harry Hartman, the first radio baseball announcer for the Cincinnati Reds, who coined the phrase “Going, going, gone.” An obese immigrant with a grade-school education, he was voted the most popular Major League announcer in America twice during the 1930s before losing his job to Red Barber and the sleeker shape of network broadcast. He died shortly after my father’s bar mitzvah, so my research involved more holes than facts—an attempt to retrace and resurrect.

Miller addressed his remarks that day to the playwrights in the room, a few dozen among a group of 700. He was honored to be honored by writers, he said, and spoke plainly about a playwright’s capacity to shape truth, as if theater’s relevance were not a slogan but a fact. He seemed to urge each of us to get to the business at hand, his vital, cogent presence suggesting that such a business—an artist’s version of the American dream—may be embattled, but is not extinct.

I had already consulted what I believed were the sources for Going Gone, my family play. I read newspaper files in Cincinnati, spoke to the Society of American Baseball Research, tried—and failed—to find recordings of Hartman’s voice. I interviewed my father, whose terminal illness informed my wish to understand his past. I studied Yiddish intensively for two summers at the YIVO Institute, determined that if I could not hear my grandfather, I would learn his language, to put it onstage directly (Yiddish dialogue conceals secrets from the youngest son) and indirectly (English speech patterns mimic Yiddish grammar). I structured Going Gone around what seemed to be an idea inspired by baseball: cramped domestic scenes punctuated by “ups”—direct observations of the characters’ urgent fantasies, memories, and hopes. The family’s idolization of Hank Greenberg, for example, buoys each of them, particularly the mother, otherwise a souring fountain of nostalgia.

As Miller spoke, I recognized that my heritage-play-in-progress was more or less ripped off from Death of a Salesman. I never met my grandfather, so the man who becomes the voice of the all-American pastime but feels rootless as the airwaves is as much Loman as Hartman. So are the “ups,” which oscillate between material reality and an internal treadmill of aspiration and despair. Less embarrassingly, my decision to pay attention, to reexamine a man in my family who had the right gifts for the times until the times changed, to look at a chain of fathering through a foggy, cracked lens rather than not at all, probably started with Death of a Salesman.

I grew up in San Diego, so I first saw it on television. My high-school English class watched a tape of the 1985 Broadway revival, and I stayed in the classroom through lunch and wherever I was supposed to be after lunch, glued to that nine-inch-high epic family, unclear why I was sobbing. I did not know Arthur Miller was Jewish. I knew Dustin Hoffman was Jewish. Did I see Willy Loman as Jewish?

I saw him as haunted. That’s what terrified me about the slump of Hoffman’s shoulders, the visions that sprang forth when he settled into a chair or turned a corner. These are of an American salesman past, of course—a brother’s wealth, a father’s disappearance, sexual regret. Yet they reminded me of my father’s jokes about visitations from “the ancestors” before he married my stepmother, who is Catholic. My father was missing a father whom he never discussed (the baseball stories came later); my stepfather was a former wholesale dealer who hadn’t worked in five years. I recognized the jungle of worry inside the Lomans’ home, where Willy’s carried, buried grief erupts until it kills him. As a teenage girl, I took Death of a Salesman to be an insider’s view of manhood.

Death of a Salesman suggests but does not explain an immigrant anxiety, the fallout from Anatevka with all clues removed. The Lomans seem alone in the world, or at least in Brooklyn. The sense of them as a displaced family comes through the absence of any other relatives (Willy, the son of an unnamed Midwestern peddler, has lost his only brother two weeks before the play begins) or history, rather than culturally specific referents—no pogroms, no old country yarns, no particular cause for feeling “kind of temporary” about oneself. The play’s Judaism, like that of its characters, lies in its not being anything else—not rooted New England, not a sweetly rotting South. Details have been erased, leaving a sparse, attenuated world that is universal and also incomplete.

I’d suggest that the psychically fluid structure of Salesman tends to stick for contemporary playwrights, while its resistance to naming Jewish content has changed for now. For example, it’s impossible to envision the shifting structure of Angels in America without Death of a Salesman, but equally difficult to imagine Tony Kushner holding back cultural detail. Or I think about the tone of direct attack in Donald Margulies‘ early writing about Flatbush, including his Loman Family Picnic, which directly names and satirizes Jewish life by emphasizing that, of course, Lomans don’t picnic. Then again, I remember that Margulies, who was one of my teachers, spoke of receiving praise for finally writing a play, Dinner With Friends, that was universal instead of Jewish.

My grandfather’s name, like his Yiddish, seemed integral to the project of writing his story. It felt odd to sit in an audience and listen to “Hartman” throughout the theater, but I couldn’t match the pun—he died of a heart attack. And anyway, I liked it, as I liked hearing the Yiddish out loud. Cincinnati Playhouse received complaints that my portrayal was anti-Semitic because the family was unhappy, but I saw their Jewishness as compatible with their Americanness. I assumed that Jewish and American could be explicitly the same thing.

Death of a Salesman translates and travels because any culture can see itself within its gaps, the excruciating portrayal of father and sons. A grandchild of immigrants might also place herself within the fact of those gaps. Characters without context become everyone, and also a specifically severed kind of Jew. Rather than asking what is Jewish, Death of a Salesman asks, what is real? Chasmic fears are reduced to insurance payments and stolen fountain pens; the characters grab at artifacts because selling, like history, is intangible. Is reality the visible world, with whipped cheese and refrigerator debt to the penny, or the psychic riot of what has been lost? Or is it the migratory careening between those two?

Arthur Miller, our last living grandparent, has gone. His abstract portrait of Judaism helped forge American realism. He presented a domesticity built around absence, an ache the size of history. American Jewishness has become a cultural identity in a multicultural society, to be freely and concretely invoked. Writers of my generation and beyond will continue to work in detail, spilling more personal information than the young Arthur Miller would ever have considered. Yet I wonder when anyone will next build a play that is so clearly, cleanly real.