The Man Who Had All the Luck (3 page)

The director Paul Unwin's response to the stylistic problems raised by the play, in the Bristol Old Vic production in England fifty years later, was in part to turn to music, specially composed by Andy Sheppard, and in part to rely on the designs of Sally Crabb, whose productions had included
The Master Builder
and
Our Town,
two plays whose style also moves away from realism and which, in effect, also offer themselves as fables.

In talking to Unwin before the production Miller observed that “the thing you've got to understand about my plays is that the background is the American dream and the foreground the American nightmare.”
⁴
And, in one way or another, the characters in
The Man Who Had All the Luck
are dedicated to a dream while the process of the play is to move from dream to nightmare, precisely the transition that offers such a challenge to directors, actors and designers. Meanwhile, like Susan Glaspell's
The Verge,
it also has to move from the comic not to the tragic but, briefly, to the psychotic.

David is the paradigm of that dream, beginning with nothing and rising to success and wealth, the “treasures that rust, from which his spirit has already fled.” He is even, in Willy Loman's term, well-liked, before, like Willy, though for wholly different reasons, developing a fevered need to justify his own existence. For Willy, the problem is failure; for David, it is success. He is, indeed, a mirror image of Job, who was stripped of everything in a test of his faith. David is given everything in a test of his. It is not the fallacy, or otherwise, of the dream, though, that compels Miller's attention here, nor primarily its social implications. Despite his remarks, the play is not a critique of the American dream, except insofar as David looks for meaning in the wrong place. What it is, in essence, is a debate about the source and nature of meaning in private and public life alike.

David feels the need to argue for the existence of God, or imminent justice, on the grounds that without such a concept, without a principle of order in the universe, nothing can have meaning. When, as it seems, sheer chance becomes the only observable mechanism at work in his own life and in that of those around him, he is terrified. The idea that things simply happen is intolerable. As far as he can see, some succeed and others fail and there is no reason for it.

In the play, as opposed to the novel, David emerges from his trial of the spirit, not yet secure, to be sure, but seemingly convinced that the logic for which he had looked does exist. People, he comes finally to believe, are responsible for their actions; causality is an operative principle. But the wound is not entirely healed. The thought that “anything can happen . . . at any time” is not purged and the desperate desire for a validating reason not entirely answered by acknowledging his responsibility for his own actions. The arbitrary still exists and, indeed, in invoking the Depression as a presence in the play Miller was doing no more than signal a social, economic and psychological truth of the period.

The collapse of the market was like one of Job's plagues. People lost livelihoods, relationships were attenuated, the future itself seemed suddenly to collapse. And if some people prospered, how much deeper the irony generated by that fact. Miller himself has said, “Until 1929 I thought things were pretty solid. Specifically, I thought—like most Americans—that somebody was in charge. I didn't know who it was, but it was probably a businessman, and he was a realist, a no-nonsense fellow, practical, honest, responsible. In 1929 he jumped out of a window. It was bewildering.”
⁵

The Depression was an economic fact but its consequences went beyond social effects. A machine had come apart. Order had dissolved. Something more than a political system had collapsed. The real itself seemed problematic. A life that had seemed so coherent, so inevitable, secure in its procedures, values, assumptions, disappeared overnight. David Beeves believed someone was in charge, not a businessman, to be sure, but someone, until suddenly he could no longer believe this to be true. God, it seemed, had jumped to his death.

Beyond the Depression, however, there was another source for this sense of abandonment, this sudden realization that anything could happen at any time, that there was no redeeming coherence to experience. The novel version of
The Man Who Had All the Luck
overlapped with the writing of
The Golden Years,
Miller's play about Montezuma and Cortez, and both were in part a response to events far removed from America. He was thinking then, as later, of the fact of facism. The terror that was to strike Sylvia Gellberg, in Miller's later play
Broken Glass
(1994), was prompted by Kristallnacht, in 1938, when Hitler unleashed his Brown Shirts, thereby announcing that he no longer recognized a system of law, of moral necessities and human values. Here, quite suddenly, all the comforting structures were swept away. Rationality, the whole complex of interlocking social, legal and moral obligations, were effectively declared null and void. The Jew was declared a victim whose fate was never again to be in his own hands.

As the Holocaust gathered pace, he was the ultimate embodiment of human insignificance, ordered to board the train to his own annihilation and invited to pay for the privilege as if irony would be the last emotion to be felt. Hope was sustained until the clang of the metal door and the hiss of the scattered powder sucked the souls of those seemingly born with no other fate than to die locked inside their own terror. Where were the assurances of a civilization? Where was the law? Where was God?

Seen in this context,
The Man Who Had All the Luck
seems to reflect that deep sense of abandonment felt by so many as hope was not only transmuted into its opposite but itself became a component element of absurdity. David Beeves's sense of an arbitrary good fortune is merely the other side of the same coin. His question—“Why?”—becomes the question of all. If life ends in death, where can meaning be born?

It was against this that Miller pitched his own native existentialism, his belief that man is the source of his own identity, obliged to accept responsibility for himself and the society which he joins in shaping. History, to Miller, is not some implacable force crushing the human spirit. It is made by men and can be challenged and changed by those who acknowledge this truth. And if suicide might be a logical response to a sense of abandonment, renewed commitment is no less logical. The story of David Beeves was apparently about the personal dilemma of an individual in an obscure location. For Miller, though, here and throughout his work, the private and the public were intimately connected so that the questions posed by his protagonist reach out into the world.

As he remarked, “
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 forces. . . . David Beeves arrives as close as he can at a workable, conditional faith in the neutrality of the world's intention toward him.”
⁶

The Man Who Had All the Luck
is, Miller has said, “trying to weigh how much of our lives is a result of our character and how much is a result of our destiny.” For him, there was “no possibility . . . to come down on one side or the other.”
⁷
In that sense he backed off from the severity of Sartrean existentialism, which made the individual bear the full burden of responsibility for action and inaction alike. For Miller, the arbitrary nature of experience could not be denied. What was necessary was to shape it into meaning, which is, after all, precisely what he saw the writer as doing in giving form to experience.

 

Reviews of the play were negative or, in Miller's words, baffled, and he himself came to feel that both he and the director had failed to understand its antirealist thrust. It needed a style of presentation they never found. A note at the bottom of the
Variety Review
for November 29, 1944, announced, “Withdrawn Saturday after four performances.” Since one of these was a matinee, the play ran for just three days. It was a disaster. As Miller later remarked, “Standing at the back of the house . . . I could blame nobody.” It was “like music played on the wrong instrument in a false scale. . . . After the final performance and the goodbyes to the actors, it almost seemed a relief to get on the subway to Brooklyn Heights and read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.”
⁸

But he never forgot
The Man Who Had All the Luck.
Inspired in part by the Depression and wartime concerns, it proved a fable capable of speaking to people in other times and other places. In 1988 a staged reading convinced him that there was still life in the play. In 1989 it was republished by a British publisher (along with
The Golden Years
) and staged by the Bristol Old Vic and the Young Vic in a production that, Miller insisted, captured “the wonder and naivete and purity of feeling of a kind of fairytale about the mystery of fate and destiny,” a play that he now saw had “the bright colors of youth . . . all over it, and the fixation of youth on the future and what heaven has in mind for one's life.”
⁹
It was favorably reviewed.

There was a further staged reading in Los Angeles, in 2000, and then a production the following year at the Williamstown Festival in Massachusetts, with Chris O'Donnell as David Beeves. It was this production that reached Broadway in 2002, fifty-eight years after the play's precipitate failure. This time
The New York Times,
which had dismissed it in 1944, welcomed it as “compelling” and asked how it could ever have been so easily dismissed over half a century earlier.
The Man Who Had All the Luck
had finally arrived.

Cast

DAVID BEEVES
SHORY
J.B. FELLER
ANDREW FALK
PATTERSON (PAT) BEEVES
AMOS BEEVES
HESTER FALK
DAN DIBBLE
GUSTAV EBERSON
AUGIE BELFAST
AUNT BELLE

 

 

The Time
Not so long ago.

Scene i
An evening in early April. Inside a barn used as a repair shop.

Scene ii
The barn, near dawn.

Scene i
June. About three years later. The living room of the Falks'—now David's—house.

Scene ii
Later that day. The living room.

Scene i
The following February. The living room.

Scene ii
One month later. The living room at evening.

ACT ONE

 

 

 

DAVID BEEVES
is filling a can from an alcohol drum. He is twenty-two. He has the earnest manner of the young, small-town businessman until he forgets it, which is most of the time. Then he becomes what he is—wondrous, funny, naïve, and always searching. He wears a windbreaker.

 

Enter
J.B. FELLER
from the right. He is a fat man near fifty, dressed for winter. A certain delicacy of feeling clings to his big face. He has a light way of walking despite his weight.

 

J.B.: Sure doing nice business on that alcohol, huh David? [
Thumbing right
] They're freezing out there, better step on it.

DAVID: Near every car in town's been here today for some. April! What a laugh!