“The Man who had all the Luck” by Arthur Miller

While reading, I had forgotten that the first page called this play a fable, which is the best way to describe it. Fable: A moral tale, a myth, or a fabrication. It’s unrealistic because every possible tragic ending was averted by some unforeseen fortuitous accident, that helps the protagonist, Davey, get ahead in life. By the end, I learn that this is the point of the fable. In the first act, his girlfriend, Hester, loses her Dad in a car accident, devastating Hester while benefiting Davey. In her father’s accidental death, Davey escapes the need for permission to marry. Every scene is like this. I liked how much it felt like a play I needed to read. In a spiritual, weird-coincidence way. I plan on reading Gus’s monologue for Instagram. The play is about accepting God’s blessings without worrying about the catastrophes God can cause. Every time Davey thinks it’s the end to his good fortune, there is something about his own character that saves him. God seems to reward/reveal his upright nature and intelligence. His attention to detail, for example, that saves his mink stock from bad fish. He forgets to trust himself. Like I do. Making moves that are self sabotaging, then dreadfully regretful, but after, inaccurate in their ability to spoil his good luck. Like when he mortgages every property/business of his to invest in mink rats. He keeps waiting for the punishment from God, but it doesn’t come.

Somewhere in there, his brother and father have a falling out. Their jealousy and cynicism grow from Davey’s rising success in all areas of life. Gus, a German mechanic, loses his business and has to work for Davey, though he is initially enthusiastic, he decides to leave because he is unsatisfied in life. J.B., Davey’s cousin, can’t have children, and desperately tries to get Davey to appreciate what Davey has while Davey panics waiting for his child to be born. Dan Dibble, a wealthy businessman, loses thousands in his mink stock just as Davey smartly avoids the same fate with his mink stock. There’s enough tragedy around to keep Davey paranoid about all the bad that has yet to come his way. And people like Shorey, his other cousin, don’t help. Shorey tells his own moral story, of being in France during WWII, and becoming disabled from a roof caving on him. Shorey claims to have avoided every bullet and lived, but the rubble he was under, that changed him forever, came from a collapsed brothel. This ultimately doesn’t help Davey, whose moral dilemma is not about committing sins or anything that could be considered bad. His problem is about how he lets his fears stop him from living peacefully. So many things he wants from life, he hesitates to get, wanting to plan or prove something. All the good things end up happening for him and it’s himself that eats him up. Whether its his shame for his luck, after its been revealed, or his deep feelings of anxiety as he anticipates every outcome. Davey has all the luck, he just needs to be faithful, be grateful for it.

Something I love, that I think Lynn Nottage talks about in the Foreward, is how packed Miller’s lines are with mystical philosophy, stuff that seems old and wise, but somehow not American. As if Buddhism is infused into his very American settings. Miller may have actually been trying to do just that. I’m reading All My Sons and already, they’re talking about horoscopes. It kind of reminds me of Mike White with The White Lotus. It’s like, when the unexplainable happens, who can you turn to for answers, for wisdom? Jesus would be great, but the bible feels like a political document, with all of Christianity’s historical reverberations, it also feels inaccessible and contradictory in basic ways like syntax and word choice. Maybe it was Philip Seymour Hoffman who described Miller as cosmic. He has a Foreward in my online copy of Death of a Salesman. And that’s kind of fitting, for Hoffman, to be so revered by people who watched his performance of Willy Loman. Because Hoffman was an addict, and so am I, to a degree, which connects us, addicts, to stories about spirituality. The thing that makes me feel so connected to the vibes of Miller’s writing, besides my own addiction issues, is the very philosophically bleak way in which people talk. And how that reminds me of how my family talks to each other. The way every sentence I can picture my Dad saying, is filled with a dramatic rollercoaster word-movement of emotions and events, which ends where it started. Like alcoholics speak to each other in painful squid ink rounds, where language tells the future and the past, like the aliens in Arrival, that movie directed by Denis Villeneuve. That’s what Miller feels like at this point in my reading of his work. Melancholic, Moody, Sincere, Tragic, Sardonic, Foreboding, etc.

I’m sure stuff will come up the more I discover. If anyone knows a good Arthur Miller doc. or biography, lmk!

Rolling Ferro