The play’s the thing

The early life of Arthur Miller reads a bit like the first chapters of The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow: a precocious Jewish boy during the Great Depression, an influential older brother, an adolescent sexual awakening with a prostitute. Indeed, his life as a whole — in which he was to marry and divorce Marilyn Monroe, be found in contempt of Congress for refusing to name (fellow) communists and write his century’s greatest play — contains narrative, novelistic elements that cannot fail to compel: sex and celebrity, politics and theatrics, tragedy and Tragedy. In 1987, Arthur Miller turned it into a narrative work in the sprawling, creatively crafted memoir Timebends, the Miller’s Tale against which any biography will inevitably be compared.

However, as Martin Gottfried strongly suggests in this consistently enthralling work and first biography of Miller, Timebends cannot be the final word on the matter. An autobiographer will always ‘stand too close to the subject’ to gain a full perspective, which a critical biographer — especially someone kept at arm’s length by that subject, who although ‘willing to discuss his plays … would not talk about his life’ — is more likely to be given.