On the back cover of this book there is a picture of Arthur Miller looking smug with his arm round the waist of Marilyn Monroe, who looks, of course, perfect — and also smug. They’d just got married. He’s hanging on to the sexiest woman in the world; she’s hanging on to a world-class playwright, alpha male and, as they said at the time, “egghead”. They needed each other, or thought they did. Within five years they were divorced, and six years later Marilyn was dead from an accidental drug overdose.

Not long after they separated Miller married his third wife, the photographer Inge Morath, in February 1962. And it is in that year that Christopher Bigsby chooses to end this colossal biography. I can see his point. The second half of Miller’s life — he died in 2005 — is tame in the extreme compared with the first. Not only had there been Marilyn, there had been his artistic struggles and his persecution as a suspected communist by the American government.

The persecution and the sex bomb were linked in two ways. First, the FBI and assorted paranoids in Congress were incensed at the idea of a highbrow lefty seizing such a distractingly blonde slice of the American Way. In fact, Bigsby says, simply by spreading Marilyn around a little Miller could have avoided grilling and prosecution by a congressional committee. Francis Walter, chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee (Huac), which investigated communist infiltration, offered to drop the case if he could be photographed with Marilyn. Miller refused.

Second, and much more importantly, Marilyn and Huac were linked by Miller’s agonised conception of the truth. His wife, he said, made men more true to themselves. “Most men become more of what they natively are when they are around her: a phoney becomes more phoney, a confused man becomes more confused, a retiring man more retiring. She’s a kind of lodestone that draws out the male animal.”

She was not so much sexy as sex itself. Not to want Marilyn was not to want sex. In this, she was the embodiment of an elemental truth.

Meanwhile, over at Congress, the truth at stake was whether Miller was or ever had been a communist. Certainly he had been a Marxist, but it remains unclear whether he had joined the party. He was such an incontinent signer of things in his youth that he could have joined without knowing it. Or he knew he had joined and successfully managed to conceal the fact. Either way, there was no political correlative for the elemental truth of Marilyn. There was evasion and confusion, a terrible thing for a man who believed in the pursuit of truth as his artistic vocation.

Miller was born into a rich family of Jewish clothiers in Manhattan. Their wealth was founded on sweatshops and they were wiped out by the Depression, a period Miller was to describe as “my time”. “The Depression taught him,” writes Bigsby, “that no system was reliable, that everything could disappear.” It also led directly to his engagement with the failure, the underdog, the man struggling through a life of suffering devoid of meaning — Willy Loman, in fact, the antihero of Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman. Such depths of pointlessness can become intolerable to the sensitive imagination. Miller wanted a transcendent narrative to make sense of such lives and, like many others, he found it, for a time, in Marxism — “Miller long remembered the sense of shock and thrill that this reordering of the world gave him, and the transformation it wrought in his family relationships.”

In time, however, it became clear that Marxism in the form of party membership demanded subjugation of the artist’s imagination, a price that Miller was not prepared to pay. He distanced himself from the party, but not before he had provided the FBI with enough suspicious material to land him before Huac. Luckily, this was a relatively tame committee, Senator Joe McCarthy having, by then, been disgraced. But Miller was indicted with contempt for failing to betray others — something that his friend Elia Kazan had done and for which Miller never forgave him — although the charge was eventually dropped. Miller as hero of the left survived the ordeal.

As artistic hero, he was equally unassailable. All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge established him as the leading playwright in America, if not the world. They were solid works, drawn from the 19th-century world of Ibsen, Dostoevsky and Chekhov more than from the 20th-century world of modernism. The story and the drama came before formal innovation — they, not Marxism, were what ordered and transformed his universe.

And, through it all, there was guilt. He suffered guilt about his family — primarily about his brother Kermit, who went off to war, effectively so that Miller could pursue his education and his art. Bigsby quotes at length from Kermit’s letters — he was, plainly, a good writer and a good man. The war left him with terrible depression. Miller also suffered a generalised guilt about what he should be doing about a world of massacre, injustice and the holocaust. Leaving Mary, his first wife, for Marilyn seemed to engender less guilt, perhaps because the marriage had failed. But later, after the period of this book, he was to reject Daniel, a child suffering from Down’s syndrome who he had with Inge. Like many artists, he could be ruthless about any threat of distraction.

This is a fat, endlessly informative book, the work of a lifetime — indeed, Bigsby is the director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia. It could be better written — sentences can get unnecessarily clogged — and it lacks the smell of sweat and perfume. Even after more than 700 pages I am not sure what it would be like to meet Miller. (My wife tells me I did years ago, but I can’t remember, so perhaps the point is that meeting Miller himself was not such a striking experience.) But it is as definitive as we are likely to get, with plenty of new material. It also reveals much more than Miller did in his autobiography, Timebends. Above all, it is a book about the puzzle of politics and art and about the unreliable solution provided by sex — or Marilyn Monroe as it was once called.

Attraction of opposites

Miller and Monroe were Hollywood’s odd couple. If it was easy to understand what Miller saw in her — ‘the eye sought in vain to find the least fault in the architecture of her form’, he confessed after their first dance — it was less easy to know what she saw in him. But in the sexually rapacious film world, his courtesy, and the fact that he didn’t make an immediate play for her, deeply impressed Monroe. Meeting him, she explained, ‘was . . . like a cool drink when you’ve got a fever’.

www.bryanappleyard.com

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