The salesman in the family
During the podcast Steve talked about Arthur Miller’s uncle Manny Newman as one of the original sources of inspiration for the character of the salesman Willy Loman and his family. In his autobiography Timebends Miller shares several illuminating details about the Newman family who lived near the Millers in Brooklyn that could just as easily be describing the Lomans in the play. First is his description of the general air of hopeful energy that he says he sensed in the Newman household: “something good was always coming up – not just good but transforming, triumphant”, which sounds like the grand hopes that Willy continuously conjures. Like Willy, Manny was “lyrically in love with fame and fortune.” The endemic unpredictability of the salesman’s fortunes also “wove a romance around his life – the hope of making a killing” was always possible.

But Miller also admired the “intrepid valour” of the salesman who endured the long journeys through New England winters and withstood the put downs and failures. Salesmen he said lived “like artists, like actors, whose product is first of all themselves…imagining triumphs in a world that ignores them.” Manny Newman was a great talker apparently, always seeking like Willy to be “well-liked”. But Miller also saw the pain behind the performance, observing that “with no audience to confirm his existence his agonising uncertainty of identification flooded him with despair.”

And the echoes with the Loman family extend to Manny’s wife, who like Linda Loman “bore the cross of reality for them all…keeping her calm, enthusiastic smile lest he feel he was not being appreciated.” How often has this been a wife’s role?

Happy likes bowling
According to the stage directions that introduce Willy’s second son, Happy, he “like his brother, is lost, but in a different way, for he has never allowed himself to turn his face toward defeat, and is thus more confused and hard-skinned, although seemingly more content.” Despite occasional doubts Happy is much more able to find escape in the pursuit of pleasure, one of which is women with whom he is notably successful. Miller’s vivid stage direction paints a potent portrait: “Sexuality is like a visible colour on him, or a scent that many women have discovered.”

Hap himself confesses to having an “overdeveloped sense of competition”, which compels him to conquer the fiance of a colleague who’s edging ahead of him on the career ladder just for the sake of winning. His success is coloured with a twinge of disgust, but only a twinge: “It’s like this girl, see. I hate myself for it. Because I don’t want the girl, and, still, I take it and – I love it.” He has his own graphic metaphor for these easy, hollow victories: “The only trouble is it gets like bowling, or something. I just keep knockin’ them over and it doesn’t mean anything.”

The urban and the pastoral
The story of the Lomans trying to forge their lives in American capitalist society is set against the backdrop of the expanding urban environment they inhabit. As we noted when talking about the stage directions before the opening of the play, the Lomans’ house is surrounded by apartment blocks. It was not always like that. Willy remembers when they first moved in there were “two beautiful elm trees” and “lilac and wisteria” in their yard. “And then the peonies would come out, and the daffodils. What a fragrance in this room.”  Now the “street is lined with cars. There’s not a breath of fresh air in the neighbourhood”. With the new buildings around them blocking out the light “the grass don’t grow anymore, you can’t raise a carrot in the back yard.” Something good has been lost. He hearkens back to an unspoiled world that he longs to return to. Just as the house is boxed in by the inexorable expansion of the city, fueled by the fervour of the capitalist economy, so Willy is trapped in this life. He has a dream to “get a little place out in the country, and… raise some vegetables, a couple of chickens.” The futility of his pastoral dream is made heart-breakingly clear in the final scene of the play. Willy is out in the yard in the dark trying to plant new seeds; seeds of hope that we and he know won’t grow in the overshadowed city plot; and that he won’t be around to witness the failure of, or of his plan to leave the family the insurance payout.