Playwright Arthur Miller looks back at The Man Who Had All the Luck and sees a response to history.

Both The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck came out of the years leading up to World War II, between 1938, my college graduation year, and 1944 when the fighting was raging. For me they are a kind of unadulterated evidence of my reactions to that time and it strikes me oddly that, as up to my neck as I was in the feverish anti-Fascism that swept my generation, the plays I chose to write were so metaphorical. This is especially strange when the only tradition in American theatre of which I was aware was realism. I can’t imagine what I thought I was doing.

The Man Who Had All the Luck was given a regular Broadway production in 1944 and lasted less than a full week after the critics, with one or two interested but puzzled exceptions, could make absolutely nothing of it. I recall at the time being unable to find the slightest connection between the production and the play I imagined I had written, and after watching one bewildering performance fled back to my desk and began a novel, resolved never to write for the theatre again. It was 45 years later, in 1988, that I began to understand the reason for my alienation from my own play, as well, very possibly, for the total incomprehension of the critics.

A staged reading of the play under the direction of Ralph Bell, an old friend who had always had a soft spot in his heart for this play, quickly revealed that it is, indeed, a fable with no relation to realistic theatre. A fable, of course, is based on the obsessive grip of a single idea bordering on the supernatural and it is the idea that stands in the forefront, rather than the characters and the verisimilitudes of the tale. The coincidences are errantly unapologetic in this play and so they should be played, rather than attempts made to rationalize them and dim them down.

I recall the original production lit in reassuring pink and rose, a small-town genre comedy. Given the threatening elements in the story, this atmosphere must indeed have been puzzling. The play is after all attacking the evaluation of people by their success or failure and worse yet, denying the efficacy of property as a shield against psychological catastrophe.

From a distance of half a century, I am struck by a certain optimistic undercurrent. I must say that, at the time, life at best seemed headed for a bloody showdown with Fascism, or at worse a hapless surrender to it, but while there is plenty of worry in the play, there is no real despair or defeat of the spirit. This will strike some as perhaps a reflection of a callow Leftism, but in truth it was the way most Americans felt even after a very long decade of Depression. By the late thirties and early forties we had, of course, known much social violence and all kinds of vileness, but not yet a Holocaust, not yet the bursting of the banks of evil. I can still recall my incredulity at the daylight bombing of Guernica in the Spanish Civil War. As bombings go, it wasn’t a very big one. The big ones were still on the way. But I simply could not believe that a European flying low in an airplane on a sunny day over an undefended town, could, whatever his politics, drop live bombs on women out shopping with their baby carriages, on old men sitting before their doorways, on young lovers strolling across the ancient square! It was hard to sleep for weeks afterwards. It was still possible to be shocked. At least within one’s mind the lines of some sort of order of permissible human behavior still held.

"The Man Who Had All the Luck tells me that in the midst of the collect-ivist thirties I believed it decisive what an individual thinks and does about his life, regardless of overwhelming social forces."

In the West since the War of 1914-1918 every period has known its main menace, some single force threatening life on the planet. From the mid-thirties to the outbreak of war with the Axis powers it was the Fascist threat—and for some its promise—that pervaded every discussion. An important source of the energy in these plays was my fear that in one form or another Fascism, with its intensely organized energies, might well overwhelm the wayward and self-fixated Democracies.

The telltale mark of this preoccupation, as I now see quite clearly, is much the same in both plays, even if The Golden Years is a tragedy about the Cortés invasion of Montezuma’s Mexico in 1522 and The Man Who Had All the Luck a tale of a very successful young man in a pastoral Ohio village. They are both struggling against passive acceptance of fate or even of defeat in life, and urge action to control one’s future; both see evil as irrational and aggressive, the good as rational and benign. Plainly, I was hounded at the time by what seemed the debility of Americans’ grasp of democratic values or their awareness of them. And I must recall—to fill out this picture—that these plays were written after a decade of Depression, which had by no means lifted with any certainty as yet, and that the Depression had humbled us, shown us up as helpless before the persistent, ineradicable plague of mass unemployment. Reason had lost a lot of her credentials between 1930 and 1940.

If, as the decade ended, the devaluation of the individual—the main lesson of the Depression—was still spiked to the common consciousness, these plays are somewhat surprising testimony to me that I had not lost the belief in the centrality of the individual and the importance of what he thought and did. On this evidence I suppose I might even have been called an individualist—there is nothing like writing a play for unveiling one’s illusions! The Man Who Had All the Luck tells me that in the midst of the collectivist thirties I believed it decisive what an individual thinks and does about his life, regardless of overwhelming social forces. There is no force so powerful, politically as well as personally, as a man’s self-conceptions.

Arthur Miller

Hearing The Man Who Had All the Luck read after four decades, it only then occurred to me that I had written the obverse of the Book of Job. The story of a man who cannot come to terms with the total destruction of his property and all his hopes, when he has done nothing to earn such treatment from God or fate, is very much the same as that of a man who can’t seem to make a mistake and whose every move turns out to be profitable and good. What had Job done to deserve such disasters? David Beeves had very much the same question in mind, oppressed by his invariably good luck in everything he attempts. And he projects an imminent disaster that will even things up between himself and the rest of humanity. For both these characters the menace is much the same—anarchy in the high command of the universe, a yawning breach between effect and conceivable causation, and they are both an argument with God.

There is mitigation in the Book of Job, of course, since we are shown a purpose behind Job’s catastrophe. God starts all the trouble by wagering with the devil that nothing he can do will shake good Job’s faith in Himself. So it is clearly the Evil One who strips Job of his good life in order to destroy his belief in God’s justice. And indeed, it turns out that after much twisting and backsliding Job, despite everything, clings to God—and he is promptly rewarded with the return of all his worldly goods plus God’s personal gratitude for his having kept the faith. Of course this won’t do in our time if only because most of God’s argument with Job consists of reminding the poor man of the incomprehensibility of his obscure powers—"Can you draw out the Leviathan with a fishhook?" and so on. This sort of humiliation is less impressive now when we can press a trigger and destroy whales and might even lift them up with helicopters, and the atom in our hands has the power of a sun. It is the question of justice that we haven’t come any closer to clearing up, and indeed the goal of achieving it may be moving further away, so perhaps there is still a little room for The Man Who Had All the Luck.

As for the ending of the play —which I am sure I have rewritten twenty times over the past half century, it is as satisfactory as it is possible to be, as complete, let’s say, as Job’s, which also doesn’t quite come down on both feet. The simple fact is that, as moving and imperative as our questioning of our fates may be, there is no possibility of answering the main question—why am I as I am and my life as it is? The more answers one supplies the more new questions arise. David Beeves in this play arrives as close as he can at a workable, conditional faith in the neutrality of the world’s intentions toward him.

So—perhaps despite appearances—these anti-Fascist plays were written quite close to the abyss. But perhaps more importantly, this play was one very young writer’s wrestling with enormous themes.

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Last Update:
September 15, 2006