Arthur Miller, Reconsidered

The obit for Arthur Miller that the Doc linked below is positively celebratory compared to Terry Teachout's retrospective glance. I mean to say, check this out:

I recently described "After the the Fall," the 1964 play in which Miller first made fictional use of his unsuccessful marriage to Marilyn Monroe, as "a lead-plated example of the horrors that result when a humorless playwright unfurls his midlife crisis for all the world to see," written by a man "who hasn't a poetic bone in his body (though he thinks he does)." For me, that was his biggest flaw. He was, literally, pretentious...

Ouch! And that's from the positive bit!

Seriously, though, I believe Teachout is saying that Miller was the drama equivalent of the other 50's wunderkind, J.D. Salinger. Take this:

The irony is that the smartest critics of Miller's own generation, virtually all of whom shared his left-wing views, held his plays in a different kind of contempt. Back then he took his roughest beatings from the likes of Eric Bentley, Mary McCarthy, Kenneth Tynan and Robert Warshow, who found him heavy-handed and insufferably preachy. Tynan, for instance, wrote that "The Crucible" "suggests a sensibility blunted by the insistence of an outraged conscience: it has the over-simplifications of poster art." Bull's-eye.

Poster-art, just like Salinger's novels; no wonder why high school drama students go from reading Catcher in the Rye as freshmen to starring in The Crucible as seniors.