The Man Who Had All the Luck (2 page)

The Man Who Had All the Luck,
in its various versions, “wrestled,” Miller explained, with the unanswerable—the question of the justice of fate, how it was that one man failed and another, no less capable, achieved some glory in life. Miller later speculated that his interest might have been fired by his sense of his own talents and success and the contrasting lack of them in others. Also, kept out of war as a result of a football injury, he was aware that he flourished where others, including his own brother, risked death on a daily basis. For them, life was suspended and even forfeit; for him it offered opportunity, a family life and, if as yet only to a modest degree, success. Where was the justice in that? Was there some underlying moral order in the world or was everything the product of mere chance? And if the latter, could that be the basis for anything but despair?

The novel, which preceded the play, concerns David, a young man in his twenties, talented and successful, in everything he does. Setting himself up as a mechanic, he manages to get by on instinct until confronted with a car whose fault he cannot diagnose. He takes it to a specialist garage in a neighboring town but accepts the credit for the repairs they effect. As a result his reputation as a mechanic is enhanced and he secures a contract to work on the tractors of a neighboring farmer. From there his business grows. Slowly he adds other ventures, in which he is equally successful. But he is increasingly aware that he is surrounded by those who have failed in life, as he is of the lie on which his own career had been constructed.

One friend, Shory, had lost his legs during the war and as a result feels unworthy of the woman he loves. Another, Amos, was trained by his father to be a baseball pitcher but, despite his talent, fails to be taken on by the major leagues because his training, directed by his father in the basement of their house, has made him insensitive to other aspects of the game. A third friend, J.B. Fellers, appears to thrive, even having the child that he and his wife had desperately wanted, only inadvertently to kill that child when drunk.

For David, by contrast, everything goes well. He has the child he wanted and succeeds in everything he tries; but his very success breeds a deepening paranoia. He awaits the catastrophe he feels must balance his luck, if there is to be true justice in the world. He begins, like the man on whom he was in part modeled, to inspect the books of the gas station he owns. He prepares himself for what he feels must be the death of his own child, in some kind of perverted trade-off for a life otherwise without blemish. And, finally, he commits suicide, vaguely feeling that he will thereby lift the curse that surely must be on his family.

Perhaps that death is a sign that the novel was still too close to its origins, but perhaps it is also evidence of the fact that, to Miller, death raised the stakes, gave a deepening significance. He was reaching for the tragic but being snared by the merely pathological. When he came to write the play version he chose a different ending. He also introduced a number of changes, at least one of which would prove of lasting significance.

The play finds David Beeves's marriage to Hester blocked by her father. A bitter and cynical man, he is abruptly killed off in a traffic accident. The first obstacle to success is thus conveniently removed, that very convenience being a clue to the style of a play that Miller chooses to call “A Fable.” Its very improbabilities (David buys a gas station, and a highway development fortuitously makes it profitable; he invests in mink, and survives an accident that wipes out a rival's holdings) are indicators of its status as a moral tale and, indeed, it was the inability of the director to define a style appropriate to this that in part accounted for its initial failure.

When David is confronted with a fault in a car that defies his skills, he is saved not, as in the novel, by taking it to another garage but by the arrival of an Austrian mechanic called Gus. Two elements of the novel are thus tied together while the second obstacle to David's success is removed. And so he emerges as the man who had all the luck, in contrast to those around him, though the subplots that had overloaded the novel are now pared back. Meanwhile, the would-be young baseball player is integrated into the story when Miller makes him David's brother, a crucial change not only for this play but for his future work.

As he later explained, “
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
through its endless versions, was to move me inch by inch toward my first open awareness of father-son and brother-brother conflict. . . . One day, quite suddenly, I saw that Amos and David were brothers and Pat their father. There was a different anguish in the story now, an indescribable new certainty that I could speak from deep within myself, had seen something no one else had ever seen.”
¹
Only now recognizing that two of his university plays had also featured brothers, Miller, who was himself one of two brothers, felt he understood something of the tension that underlay the play.

Father/son relationships, those between brothers, suddenly opened up new possibilities that Miller would deploy in his work for another two decades and more. Within the family unit, he came to feel, are contained alternative possibilities, tensions that are, in some senses, the fragmented parts of a self (spiritual/material, poetic/prosaic, blessed/cursed). The evidence for that seems clear in
Death of a Salesman
and
The Price,
where the brothers have a dialectical relationship to one another, albeit one suffused with ambiguities. Father/son relationships, meanwhile, bring past and present together, hopes and fulfillments, or otherwise. They are the locus of anxieties about identity, of contested values, of an ambivalent love, of guilt. In the context of
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
though, Miller's decision to make David and Amos brothers seems primarily to have rooted the piece in a psychology he could understand and inhabit.

 

At the heart of the play is a concern with the extent of human freedom. Beyond offering an account of a man's decline into madness, and eventual redemption, it explores the degree to which so many of the characters become complicit in their own irrelevance, the extent to which they collude in the idea of man as victim, a mere object of cosmic ironies. At its center is the existential conviction, resisted by most of the characters, including David in his madness, that we are the sum of our actions. If not believers in God, a number of them are believers in fate, which is the word they choose to give to their own personal and social paralysis. For them chance
is
the operative principle in life and if that is so it is illusory to believe that one can deflect one's fate. Destiny is an excuse for inaction. Identity is a product of contingency. A Darwinian logic, selecting in favor of some and against others, appears the only observable principle.

As the play develops, David himself is a convert to this faith. He looks for some justice, some sense of social and perhaps even metaphysical coherence in existence. Finding none, he comes close to destroying himself, sure now that he has no power or reason to intervene in his own life, as if his suicide might constitute that balancing justice whose absence has brought him close to despair.

It is not hard to see how Miller regarded this as in some ways addressing that political and moral paralysis that he saw infecting Europeans and Americans alike in the face of fascism. To him, such inaction revealed something more than a failure of will, something beyond mere political pragmatism. It was as if belief in the possibility of action had been destroyed, as if the march of fascism across Europe were a natural and hence irresistible phenomenon. Beyond that, he seems to have detected a more fundamental defeatism, since this is a novel and then a play in which characters, acknowledging what seems to them to be the sheer arbitrary nature of experience, appear to accept the role of victim, to welcome the sense of vertigo that comes with staring into the depths of a self-generated despair.

For David, this was not always so. At the beginning of the play he is a man who seizes the day. In the words of his brother, Amos, he knows “how to do.” Others are more quiescent. Thus his father wants success for Amos, having trained him for years, but it is David who finally calls the baseball scout, asking, “Can you
just wait for something to happen
?” By contrast, Shory, in part an echo of the figure of Moe Axelrod in Clifford Odets's
Awake and Sing,
has been made cynical by his wartime experience. For him, “A man is a jellyfish. The tide goes in and the tide goes out. About what happens to him, a man has very little say.” Gus, the Austrian mechanic, likewise initially insists that “there is no justice in this world.”

This is a view that David at first resists, if only because not to resist it would bring him to the brink of madness. As he says, “If one way or another a man don't receive according to what he deserves inside . . . well, it's a madhouse.” Yet this principle seems not to be operative. Many of those around him fail, and as evidence of this accumulates he feels a rising tide of hopelessness and a despair that transmutes into madness. He can take no pleasure in a success that he feels no less arbitrary than the failure of those others. He becomes increasingly desperate. Like Willy Loman, he buys a life insurance policy as though the balance he looks for could be secured by trading his life for the future of his family. It is a bargain whose irony escapes him.

Whom, after all, is he bargaining with except the God for whose existence he can find no convincing evidence? If we do not exist in God's eye, then what is our sanction to exist at all? If God does not exist, then all things are possible. It was a question that fascinated both Sartre and Camus and that also concerned Miller, if not his Broadway audience or, perhaps more accurately, the critics who were Broadway's gatekeepers. There is a world of difference between Miller's protagonist and Camus's Caligula, but both of them test out the absurdist proposition that there is not only no moral sanction but no moral system at all. In the novel David goes to his death, a victim of his own belief in the absurd. In the play he learns a social ethic born out of a private understanding of agency.

David's identity and social role, then, are initially invested in the idea that he is literally the maker of his own future: but as doubts begin to intrude, that meaning starts to dissolve. The focus shifts to his deepening anxieties. His state of mind begins to determine the shape if not of events then of his perception of them. The play, in effect, takes an inward track as David filters experience for its meaning, or, increasingly, its perceived lack of meaning. His life, and what he chooses to make of the lives of those around him, is less lived than shaped by himself into an exemplary tale. He stands outside himself, watching, as if powerless to act.

He is alienated from his life because he cannot identify the transcendent purpose that he believes alone can charge it with significance. His identity comes close to being destroyed because he chooses to see it in terms of that absent force. Balanced between hope and despair, he fails, for much of the play, to recognize the truth that he holds his own life in his hands and that there are connections—those with wife, child, friends—that contain the essence of the very meaning he has sought in an abstract principle. In this he is close kin to Willy Loman, in
Death of a Salesman,
who would be dazzled by a dream that blinds him to those who value him for himself.

It is Gus who explains what David has lost, in doing so making the most explicit reference to the wider issues involved: “What a man must have, what a man must believe. That on this earth he is the boss of his own life. Not the leafs in the teacups, not the stars. In Europe I seen already millions of Davids walking around, millions. They gave up to know . . . that they deserve this world.” Man, he explains, is his own God and “must understand the presence of God in his hands.”

In the novel David dies; in the play he lives. He does so because he is finally convinced that his success has indeed been a product of his own hands, just as the failure of some of those around him can be traced to their own culpability. Shory, it turns out, bore responsibility for the loss of his legs which occurred not on the battlefront but in an accident at a whore-house. J.B.'s life has never been what he hoped because of his drinking, though in this version he does not suffer the loss of his child. Amos and his father have narrowed their lives down until they have lost sight of what living might be. Such lives are still in part the product of contingency, but that contingency is not definitional. The thunder, representing arbitrariness, rumbles but, despite his apprehension, David calls out the central existential truth: “I'm here!”

Writing later, Miller remarked that “the play's action seemed to demand David's tragic death, but that was intolerable to my rationalist viewpoint. In the early forties,” he added, “such an ending would have seemed to be obscurantist.”
²
But the point was that in the novel it
had
ended with David's death. It was a death, however, that seemed to owe rather more to melodrama than tragedy, and in the play version Miller was stepping back from melodrama and tragedy alike. For him,

 

That last remark is especially interesting, both in its stress on the absences felt so acutely by his characters and in the biblical language. Miller recounts a conversation with John Anderson, critic for the
Journal-American,
who asked him, in the context of this play, whether he was religious. At the time he found the question absurd, yet of course the play in many ways focuses on the protagonist's fear of abandonment, his sense that some coherent principle is in abeyance. David wishes to invent the God in whom, on one level, he does not believe in order to discover justification, explanation, a sense of justice for which he can otherwise find no evidence. He resists the truth, which is resisted by so many of Miller's later protagonists, that he is his own connection, his own god, fully responsible for who he is and what he does.