The Children of Willy Loman Updated

This is the second draft of a post I will work on for a while, but I'm putting it up in case anyone has any comments along the way.

All my life, I have struggled with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. The language feels sifted of any ethnic connection, yet it only makes sense to me within the context of being Jewish in Brooklyn in the 1940's. That other cultures have been able to adapt it doesn't take away the feeling for me that to thoroughly understand it, you have to imagine it from my mother's point of view.

Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman in 1949, when my mother was nine year's old. One year earlier, she had lost her 38 year old father to a heart attack precipitated by pneumonia and a life working as many hours as possible and filling what remained with whatever it took to become an accountant. On the wall, next to the dinner table was a black and white photograph of an entire generation of Greenbergs who had been recently slaughtered, each one with a story more gruesome of how his/her death took place. One had her baby tossed in the air and shot before her own throat was slit, another starved to death and some of the rest followed the now familiar last walk into a gas chamber. At eight years old, my mother had accompanied her mother to her father's funeral because she was expected by that age to understand death and be ready. For all she knew, the Nazis were still waiting around the corner to grab her by the neck and march her into a pile of bodies. The sense of expectation that your life could be ripped away from you by evil forces -- and that little would stand in their way -- took hold of children in the 1940's the same way it did Miller's Willy Loman. He held onto the idea of being "Well-liked" as his last armament against a city which had gone from being lush with space to one literally closing in on him.

Industry had made it nearly impossible for him to do more than scratch out a living at a job he committed to because it held more practical promise, say, than being a carpenter or a bricklayer at the turn of the century. For that reason, he also dreamed repeatedly of his brother Ben's magificent and seemingly luck-driven landing in riches. The "America" my grandmother knew when she came here in 1922 was a place you called, "charming," "enthusiastic," and "gay," and "full of opportunity." Whether you were 14 year old Benny Goodman playing with major Jazz bands or you sold paper or fur coats, you could put together a living and eventually you could rise in stature enough to have some kind of savings. The 30's took away the opportunity, but not initially, the promise it might be back. Benny Goodman's father never got to see his son perform because he did not want to be seen in shabby clothes (and he was hit by a car and killed early in his son's career.) In that refusal, lay the belief that there would be a time in which he would have the right clothes. I don't know if it was the rise of Hitler or the mercilessness of unchecked capitalism or both which gave Americans, especially new immigrants, their first sense of themselves as corpses.

Perhaps it was this sense that helped The New Deal to be passed and allowed the government to just create jobs in an economy which had been eager for cheap and disposable labor. Some of the audience who heard Willy Loman's famous complaint, "A man is not a piece of fruit!" had memories of a time, place and government which didn't tolerate the abuse Loman railed against. The children, however, grew up with the tension that remained around the frailty of the government created jobs at which their parents worked. This combined with growingly vivid pictures of mass genocide was part of their normal day. For the baby-boomers, things were not the same. Their parents were coming home after a conquest and were eager to make things safe and pleasant and better for their children. A friend told me that the baby boomers were the first group of teenagers to be targetted as a specific market.

My mother found dolls like Ken and Barbie very frivolous. For her, the 60's were not a time to blossom and dream big, but a time to corner a piece of the stock market in male form and to guard your every posession in plastic or moth balls. The many elegant services of silverware remained in the closet. She said they were supposedly for me, but I knew intuititively that no one, not even I would use them. They remained as possible barter for hard times. Though she dyed her hair and she wore the full "Jackie-O" make-up, she could not and cannot to this day smile convincingly. Most of her life was spent with a simple cloth or vinyl hat on her head, a "car coat," and bags and bags of food in her arms, on her hips and stomach. We stored food in our house in permanent fear of the inevitable day of either joblessness or homelessness or what we would now call, "the haters" appearing at our doorstep. "You can't trust anybody," and "Nobody will appreciate you," were two of the mantras in the tiny apartment across from the Belt Parkway, in which we lived.

As though it were expected of her, my mother effectively killed the part of her that wanted joy, improvement, education, sex, physical activity -- any part of young life. At 8 years old, she'd been prepped for the life of Willy Loman. She worked a job in the civil service -- the one place left you couldn't be disposed of when you hit a certain age or lack of production. And she was forced to retire at 55, anyway, because the mindlessness of the job contributed to the overall destruction of her mind that a life without pleasure induced. She had no hope of pleasure, except in prurient gasps -- in cheating. In taking me out of school to go to the theater (it was okay because it would be educational for me, so it wasn't just a joyride.). In looking too closely at the teeth or the legs of someone nearby. She clobbered through her days and her muscles stretched the skin around her broad cheekbones to their limits. No rouge could make her look anything less than a heavyweight boxer, too thick to move quickly enough to win, but strong enough to make people afraid and give her dominion over the tiny space within our apartment which was hers.

IT IS TRUE, AS SHARON PEARCE POINTS OUT, that what my mother (and her generation or her clique within it) could've learned from the baby-boomers' was, simply, to fight back. As a rule, the Lomans expect to be treated fairly for mostly playing by the rules -- or not deviating anymore than anyone else. And they didn't "make waves." Even in the 1970's, my Hebrew school was still teaching us "Don't break away from the group," -- don't be strange, don't protest, don't act up. An entire generation's impulse against this hadn't made an impact on the lower-middle class Jewish community in Brooklyn in which I grew up. I didn't get a full sense of the power of civil disobedience until college when I was taught by professors who had participated within the civil rights movement.

The boomers were asked to do two completely hideous things -- to continue to repress civil rights even as African-Americans laid down their lives for basic freedoms and to fight in Vietnam. And mostly they refused. My unde went for the Loman reasons -- "America is this great country and I thought I should give something back." I don't disparage those reasons. They are the response of grateful immigrants who tried to be everything they thought that this country wanted them to be. I don't know what gave the boomers the power to protest, except for the heinous and un-American nature of what was being asked of them. I guess, also, having not been inundated with WWII and the Holocaust, they didn't have the sense that you can't stop a gigantic hate machine. At least, that's where I get that feeling from. That and my mother's insistence, "you can't fight City Hall." The fervor left from her unqueched passion went into the chaotic raising of me -- the second generation of Lomans. I, too, became a civil servant. I've never expected to travel, own a car or a house. I snatch pleasure in the quick and cheap --- chocolate soy milk, soy pudding, etc. My fervor goes into my cats whose lives are built on simple pleasures, too. My education was carefully planned as Jews didn't let go of that trope within The American Dream publicly. Sure, we knew imbeciles who opened delicatessens and made fortunes, but the pristine nature of the intellect has not yet been fouled by the cruelties of industrialization. Look who beat Willy Loman? Bernard, the nerdy kid next door who went on to defend cases in The Supreme Court. How had he done so? By avoiding the "evil eye" of talking about what you do before you do it. And Miller maintains a belief that academic achievement will help an individual survive in the corporate world, which I don't think people share commonly today.

Never forget, however, how nervous Bernard is for Biff -- he sees the edge of doom coming toward him in the same way that Willy does. But, he never gave up his end of the bargain with Biff, either -- he was always assisting him in the hopes that his athletic efforts would pull him out of high school and safely to a career, after all. I wonder, if when Willy Loman talked about being "well-liked," and not being "a piece of fruit," if there weren't people in the audience who never expected that he would be treated so badly. True, he's not perfect. But, one year earlier Harry Truman had just won the presidency. Describing his campaign, David McCullough writes
No president ever campaigned so hard or so far. Truman was sixty-four years old. Younger men who were with him through it all would describe the time on the train as one of the worst ordeals of their lives. The roadbed was rough and Truman would get the train up to 80 miles an hour at night. The food was awful, the work unrelenting. One of them told me, "It's one thing to work that hard and to stay the course when you think you're going to win, but it's quite another thing when you know you're going to lose." The only reason they were there, they all said, was Harry Truman. For Truman, I think, it was an act of faith--a heroic, memorable American act of faith. The poll takers, the political reporters, the pundits, all the sundry prognosticators, and professional politicians--it didn't matter what they said, what they thought. Only the people decide, Truman was reminding the country. "Here I am, here's what I stand for--here's what I'm going to do if you keep me in the job. You decide." (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/character/essays/truman.html)

The country had just voted, essentially for Willy Loman. All the more reason that Linda Loman is so shocked that the businessworld has shown such disrespect for her husband, when they are even debt free. Why is it, now, it is so hard to feel that same disgust and how did Miller know we would become such traitors to ourselves? It isn't Biff that's right, Bernard that's right -- but in fact, the country agreed with Willy Loman at the time. You rewarded people for steadfastness and you permitted them faults. However terrible a salesman (and I'll take the fifth on arguments that technology would've helped him to be better as some articles say, missing the whole point of the play) Willy had been loyal, mostly hard-working and had trudged down those roads on an act of faith, just like Harry Truman had come to the White House. He deserved better, and though it was clear he wasn't going to get it, I think the audience would've been much more outraged at the end of the play than we usually believe. Maybe they wouldn't have protested or "made waves," but they would've expected more from the people they worked with -- or hoped for more, against their best instincts and fears. Just as people didn't leave New York City for Wyoming at that time, I think no one expected anyone to be put out on the street after long years of service. It wasn't supposed to be done. My grandmother would've been disgusted with the company. My mother would've hoped for better, but not been surprised. I grew up learning that Biff had the right idea and that Loman's tragedy was his own failure to see his own flaws. That never made complete sense to me, I think because I was raised to expect the worst from my mother -- but to know it was "the worst" -- that it was treacherous. If we are supposed to feel horror about Willy then why not stop the play after we find out he cheats on his wife? Why not kill him off there? The horror is to see this Everyman be treated so miserably by his company -- yes, he should've seen it coming, like his children did, but there was no way he could've. Abandoning someone to the streets was unheard of -- there had been a New Deal and even my grandmother's family moved into the new government sponsored housing projects built after World War Two. My mother clinged to hope against hope and she practically made it, small pension and insurance and all. What Willy wanted was NOT unheard of, and it really shouldn't ever be.