A New Stage for Arthur Miller's Most Private Drama of Fathers and Sons

How typical of ES to say Arthur Miller is overwrought and ham fisted. Though they say it does take one to know one.

My cousin Roddy had severe Down's Syndrome. His parents cared for him, his mother pushed and prodded him to become a better person. His parents doted on him, our whole family loved him, he was included in everything. My brother wrote a moving poem for Roddy's funeral. There wasn't a mean bone in Roddy's frame. He was a happy, gentle boy who went to work at a sheltered workshop until pneumonia took his life.

Yet his parents prayed for him to die before them. The thought of him wasting away in some institution preyed on their minds. There was talk of institutionalizing him at at relatively early age, and the family discussed it at length when he was an infant, but his best interests were always kept in mind. There were good arguments for institutionalizing him, before he stabilized in one environment. My parents agreed to care for him should anything happen to his parents, and in turn, the responsibility would have passed to me and my brother. Mercifully, Roddy passed away before his parents.

We cannot see into the mind of the much-married Arthur Miller. It may be that Miller's detachment from his son Daniel was the product of some unseemly shortcoming in his character. But a Down's Syndrome child becomes a responsibility borne by more than the parents. Inevitably, either the rest of the family enters the equation, or the child is institutionalized. Unless you have party to those unhappy discussions, and I have, it behooves the rest of the world to shut the hell up about the Hobson's Choice made by those who must deal with the problem.

Ms. Andrews describes in detail how Miller rarely, if ever, accompanied his wife on weekly visits to see Daniel, almost never mentioned him to shocked friends and didn't mention him in his memoir, "Timebends."

"Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it," Ms. Andrews writes.

What makes the revelation of Daniel so upsetting is how it juxtaposes Miller's private decision with his public image, as one of the greatest American playwrights and the man who refused to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and eloquently and loudly opposed the Vietnam War.

Arthur Miller reminds me of Senator Larry Craig. It seems hypocrisy as no political affiliation.

I agree with James Kirchick of Commentary magazine: Arthur Miller reputation as a man of the left is completely and permanently ruined.

Jack,

I agree it doesn't affect his literary legacy.

I don't see how Miller's works can be judged to be now lesser than before; based on this recent revelation about fathering a child with Down syndrome and institutionalizing the child. If this wasn't revealed, then no one would pass judgement on his works in this context. Secondly, who are we to judge another person's action. Was it wrong for Miller to have made the decision? To some, I suppose (perhaps to any parent today with a child who has Down syndrome - it's an horrific thought).

To me, the two are mutally exclusive of the other. As I mentioned on epiphany's thread, institutionalization was the norm in 1966 - and very few families chose a different path. Much has been discovered about Down syndrome, and Inclusion has become a goal within this community of families - imho rightly so. Perhaps we are getting there in baby steps. But, we have very far to go - as with any case where society judges those who are different.

The following two paragraphs sum it for me.

Professor Dickstein cautions, however, against judging Miller too quickly. "How do we know what we would have done?" he asked. "The birth of a child with Down syndrome can be a tremendous trauma, to say nothing of a strain on a marriage." And it was more common in the '60s to institutionalize a child with Down syndrome than it is today.

One of the more controversial parts of the Vanity Fair article is its speculation on how Miller's relationship with Daniel affected his writing. His most famous plays, including "Death of a Salesman" and "The Crucible," were written at the beginning of his career in the late '40s and '50s, but his output slowed by the end of the next decade.

I thought all my sons which was about the Second World war and about how corporations made millions out of the war effort was brilliant. It still very poignent today with Hallibuton et al