Indeed, no one in this play is without culpability, without cruelty, without guilt. Kate’s obsession with one son’s fate makes her behave with a callous disregard for the future of the other. Ann and George act in some degree out of guilt for the cruelty with which they have treated their father. Even Joe Keller’s suicide is, in part, an act of self-justification and “a counterblow to his wife and son.” Reminding us that the Chinese reportedly hang themselves in the doorways of the people who have offended them, and that many suicides are motivated by a desire to accuse or leave a residue of guilt, Miller sees Joe as laying before his wife and son, the two people he had invoked as a justification for his actions, their own responsibility. Certainly Chris “would feel a burden of guilt to the end of his life, in part because . . . he really knew . . . that he should not have participated in the business without clearing this up earlier on.”18
Joe Keller knows he is guilty but has to preserve the idea of his innocence. Kate knows, on some level, that her son is dead yet has to sustain the idea that he has survived, or deal not only with that calamity but also with the corrosive truth about her husband’s actions. Chris knows, or suspects, on some level, that his father is suppressing the truth but has an agenda of his own which makes him deny it to others and himself and which makes him break his mother’s last grasp on hope.
This, then, is in part a play about repression, about the compromises effected by individuals negotiating between their private needs and their public obligations. Joe is not the only character to substitute the story of his life for his life. They all construct fictions that enable them to justify themselves in their own eyes, as much as in the eyes of others. That is equally true of the neighbors and, beyond them, of a society that generates its own myths about innocence. What we witness is in part a collision of fictions, which are mutually destructive, and, hence, their slow erosion, as what has been repressed begins to force its way to the surface. George Deever is the embodiment of this. He is, Miller insists, the return of the repressed, though the playwright has also acknowledged that “you can’t live without denial,” that “the truth and mankind are cousins, not brothers and sisters. . . . You have to deny something in order to survive. I think they are all denying something.” The difference is that what Joe is denying is a crime. But if George is a reminder of what is being denied he also represents the innocence of the prewar world, when he was a friend and neighbor to the Kellers. He is, Miller has said, “the broken promise of the past.”19
Such themes, however, are secondary to the principal thrust of the play, whose title is a reflection, as Miller saw it, of John Donne’s concept of human solidarity. As he explained in 1999, “The concept behind it was that Joe Keller was both responsible for and a part of a great web of meaning, of being. He had torn that web; he had ripped apart the structure that supports life and society . . . that web of meaning, of existence. And a person who violates it in the way he did has done more than kill a few men. He has killed the possibility of a society having any future, any life. He has destroyed the life-force in that society.”20
As its title implies, All My Sons is concerned with connectiveness. What is at stake is the connection between act and consequence, past and present, individual and society, the very concerns, incidentally, to be found in the work of Henrik Ibsen. The Pillars of Society, Ghosts, and The Wild Duck all turn on concealed guilt, past crimes, and sudden revelations, which, as in All My Sons, could be said to imply a moral order disturbed and exposed. But for all Miller’s supposedly careful carpentry, there are issues which he consciously chooses to leave unresolved.
These are people whose flaws, like those in the cylinder heads supplied by Joe Keller, may have been covered up but still exist. But Keller’s acceptance of culpability is not the only issue in the play. Meaning is not wholly disclosed, nor is character as neatly aligned with dramatic function as at times it is in the work of Ibsen. The Wild Duck, for all its virtues, is rather too content to present characters who are, essentially, defined on their first appearance. There is little, for example, to be said for Ibsen’s sanctimonious Gregers Werle, who presents his “demand of the ideal,” beyond his sanctimony. Chris Keller’s commitment to idealism, by contrast, is carefully motivated, rooted in wartime experience but also tainted with a self-concern that he is unwilling, and perhaps unable, to address. Gregers remains unconcerned by the death he provokes; Chris Keller is broken and left with a residue of guilt that cannot easily be discharged.
By the same token, Joe Keller is more deeply mired in denial, more confused by a world he had taken to be so clear in its necessities, than his counterpart in Ibsen’s play. The doctor neighbor, Relling, in The Wild Duck, is there as a humane counterpoint, cynical but clearheaded; the doctor neighbor in Miller’s play is given a history of his own, an ambivalent marriage and an unresolved tension that make him something more than a marker. And so it continues: Kate, Ann, and George are not so many pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, fragments of a completed picture. They are individuals whose motives are deeply ambiguous and whose actions are suspect even to themselves. We never get to the bottom of this because they never get to the bottom of it themselves.
This is not a well-made play whose energy is fully discharged with the final pistol shot, whose meaning is wholly revealed in the telling. When, in the final speech, Kate instructs the son, who has just precipitated his own father’s death, that he should not “take it on” himself, she is offering him advice wholly at odds with what we have seen in the play—in which the necessity to “take it on” oneself is precisely the point. Why else, finally, does Joe Keller kill himself if not because he does, finally, take it on himself? Only moments before, Chris’s mother had asked her son: “Are you trying to kill him?”*; and the dead son, Larry, has said in a letter, “If I had him there now I could kill him” (83). The death occurs. It does not conclude the play. The guilt survives. Joe’s pain (like Larry’s) is ended: Chris’s is about to begin. He will have to take it on himself. Both are culpable. When Joe cries out, “A man can’t be a Jesus in this world!”* he hints at a flawed human nature not finally to be resolved by a bullet in the brain. Joe asks of his son that he “see it human.” Chris, desperate to recover a lost idealism, fails to do so, and this failure, in its own way, makes him complicit in the very crime he would condemn.
All My Sons expresses the familiar faith of the 1930s in the necessity for human solidarity. The play’s true strength, however, comes from the ambivalence that seeps into it. A work that could easily have resolved itself into a moral melodrama which, in stripping away self-deceit and lies and separating performance from actuality, assumed that the residue was untrammeled truth, becomes instead a drama in which motives remain problematic and the demand of the ideal is as suspect as a life lived with no transcendent purpose. It is, finally, a play whose triumph comes precisely from Miller’s own ability to “see it human,” to embody confused values, flawed ambitions, betrayals, denials, and profound disillusionments, in characters who, fifty and more years later, still speak to us not simply because the issues they embody remain relevant but because blood still beats in their veins.
* * *
All My Sons was an immediate and considerable success. It ran for three hundred and twenty-eight performances. In one sense it was a success that scared its author, as he found himself embraced by the very system he had spent more than a decade assaulting. His immediate response was to visit an employment agency in search of manual labor, as if he were at risk of losing touch with a certain authenticity, as if his success were a contaminant. He abandoned the job after a few days. There was no going back. It was also a success, however, that would haunt him in another way as for decades afterward critics generalized about what they took to be his commitment to realism, a commitment which, in truth, he abandoned with his next play, Death of a Salesman.
For the truth is that, throughout most of his career, Miller has sought to strike through the pasteboard mask, to explore the way in
which what we choose to call reality is a blend of memory and desire, given form and shape by a mind in search of order and self-justification. It is not that he believes we live in a world defined only by competing fictions, though Willy Loman, in Death of a Salesman, places his faith in a dream and the stern Puritan judges in The Crucible declare their faith in the reality of witches. Rather, reality is clouded by our fears and anxieties, and is constantly reshaped to serve our psychic and social needs. The details of a crime are indeed laid out for our inspection in All My Sons, but this in itself is not the reality of these characters’ lives, nor is this a play adequately understood as a realist text. There are many more stories in it than that of a baffled man who, out of a curious admixture of fear and love, single-mindedness and cowardice, commits an act whose implications he refuses to confront.
FOR ELIA KAZAN
A Note on the Text
The text in this volume is the version preferred by Arthur Miller and should be considered the authoritative text.
All My Sons was first presented by Elia Kazan, Harold Clurman, and Walter Fried (in association with Herbert Harris), at the Coronet Theatre on the evening of January 29, 1947, with the following cast:
JOE KELLER Ed Begley
KATE KELLER Beth Merrill
CHRIS KELLER Arthur Kennedy
ANN DEEVER Lois Wheeler
GEORGE DEEVER Karl Malden
DR. JIM BAYLISS John McGovern
SUE BAYLISS Peggy Meredith
FRANK LUBEY Dudley Sadler
LYDIA LUBEY Hope Cameron
BERT Eugene Steiner
The production was directed by Elia Kazan. The setting was designed by Mordecai Gorelik.
SYNOPSIS OF SCENES
ACT I
The back yard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town. August of our era.
ACT II
Scene, as before. The same evening, as twilight falls.
ACT III
Scene, as before.
Two o’clock the following morning.
ACT ONE
The back yard of the Keller home in the outskirts of an American town. August of our era.
The stage is hedged on right and left by tall, closely planted poplars which lend the yard a secluded atmosphere. Upstage is filled with the back of the house and its open, unroofed porch which extends into the yard some six feet. The house is two stories high and has seven rooms. It would have cost perhaps fifteen thousand in the early twenties when it was built. Now it is nicely painted, looks tight and comfortable, and the yard is green with sod, here and there plants whose season is gone. At the right, beside the house, the entrance of the driveway can be seen, but the poplars cut off view of its continuation downstage. In the left corner, downstage, stands the four-foot-high stump of a slender apple tree whose upper trunk and branches lie toppled beside it, fruit still clinging to its branches. Downstage right is a small, trellised arbor, shaped like a sea-shell, with a decorative bulb hanging from its forward-curving roof. Garden chairs and a table are scattered about. A garbage pail on the ground next to the porch steps, a wire leaf-burner near it.
On the rise: It is early Sunday morning. Joe Keller is sitting in the sun reading the want ads of the Sunday paper, the other sections of which lie neatly on the ground beside him. Behind his back, inside the arbor, Doctor Jim Bayliss is reading part of the paper at the table.
Keller is nearing sixty. A heavy man of solid mind and build, a business man these many years, but with the imprint of the machine-shop worker and boss still upon him. When he reads, when he speaks, when he listens, it is with the terrible concentration of the uneducated man for whom there is still wonder in many commonly known things, a man whose judgments must be dredged out of experience and a peasant-like common sense. A man among men.
Doctor Bayliss is nearing forty. A wry self-controlled man, an easy talker, but with a wisp of sadness that clings even to his self-effacing humor.
At curtain, Jim is standing at left, staring at the broken tree. He taps a pipe on it, blows through the pipe, feels in his pockets for tobacco, then speaks.
JIM: Where’s your tobacco?
KELLER: I think I left it on the table. Jim goes slowly to table on the arbor at right, finds a pouch, and sits there on the bench, filling his pipe. Gonna rain tonight.
JIM: Paper says so?
KELLER: Yeah, right here.
JIM: Then it can’t rain.
Frank Lubey enters, from right through a small space between the poplars. Frank is thirty-two but balding. A pleasant, opinionated man, uncertain of himself, with a tendency toward peevishness when crossed, but always wanting it pleasant and neighborly. He rather saunters in, leisurely, nothing to do. He does not notice Jim in the arbor. On his greeting, Jim does not bother looking up.
FRANK: Hya.
KELLER: Hello, Frank. What’s doin’?
FRANK: Nothin’. Walking off my breakfast. Looks up at the sky. That beautiful? Not a cloud.
KELLER, looks up: Yeah, nice.
FRANK: Every Sunday ought to be like this.
KELLER, indicating the sections beside him: Want the paper?
FRANK: What’s the difference, it’s all bad news. What’s today’s calamity?
KELLER: I don’t know, I don’t read the news part any more. It’s more interesting in the want ads.
FRANK: Why, you trying to buy something?
KELLER: No, I’m just interested. To see what people want, y’know? For instance, here’s a guy is lookin’ for two Newfoundland dogs. Now what’s he want with two Newfoundland dogs?
FRANK: That is funny.
KELLER: Here’s another one. Wanted—Old Dictionaries. High prices paid. Now what’s a man going to do with an old dictionary?
FRANK: Why not? Probably a book collector.
KELLER: You mean he’ll make a living out of that?
FRANK: Sure, there’s a lot of them.
KELLER, shakes his head: All the kind of business goin’ on. In my day, either you were a lawyer, or a doctor, or you worked in a shop. Now . . .
FRANK: Well, I was going to be a forester once.
KELLER: Well, that shows you; in my day, there was no such thing. Scanning the page, sweeping it with his hand: You look at a page like this you realize how ignorant you are. Softly, with wonder, as he scans page: Psss!
FRANK, noticing tree: Hey, what happened to your tree?
KELLER: Ain’t that awful? The wind must’ve got it last night. You heard the wind, didn’t you?
FRANK: Yeah, I got a mess in my yard, too. Goes to tree. What a pity. Turns to Keller. What’d Kate say?
KELLER: They’re all asleep yet. I’m just waiting for her to see it.
FRANK, struck: You know?—It’s funny.
KELLER: What?
FRANK: Larry was born in August. He’d been twenty-seven this month. And his tree blows down.
KELLER, touched: I’m surprised you remember his birthday, Frank. That’s nice.
FRANK: Well, I’m working on his horoscope.
KELLER: How can you make him a horoscope? That’s for the future, ain’t it?
FRANK: Well, what I’m doing is this, see. Larry was reported missing on November 25th, right?
KELLER: Yeah?
FRANK: Well, then, we assume that if he was killed it was on November 25th. Now, what Kate wants . . .
KELLER: Oh, Kate asked you to make a horoscope?
FRANK: Yeah, what she wants to find out is whether November 25th was a favorable day for Larry.
KELLER: What is that, favorable day?
FRANK: Well, a favorable day for a person is a fortunate day, according to his stars. In other words it would be practically impossible for him to have died on his favorable day.
KELLER: Well, was that his favorable day?—November 25th?
FRANK: That’s what I’m working on to fin
d out. It takes time! See, the point is, if November 25th was his favorable day, then it’s completely possible he’s alive somewhere, because . . . I mean it’s possible. He notices Jim now. Jim is looking at him as though at an idiot. To Jim—with an uncertain laugh: I didn’t even see you.
KELLER, to Jim: Is he talkin’ sense?
JIM: Him? He’s all right. He’s just completely out of his mind, that’s all.
FRANK, peeved: The trouble with you is, you don’t believe in anything.
JIM: And your trouble is that you believe in anything. You didn’t see my kid this morning, did you?
FRANK: No.
KELLER: Imagine? He walked off with his thermometer. Right out of his bag.
JIM, gets up: What a problem. One look at a girl and he takes her temperature. Goes to driveway, looks upstage toward street.
FRANK: That boy’s going to be a real doctor; he’s smart.
JIM: Over my dead body he’ll be a doctor. A good beginning, too.
FRANK: Why? It’s an honorable profession.
JIM, looks at him tiredly: Frank, will you stop talking like a civics book? Keller laughs.
FRANK: Why, I saw a movie a couple of weeks ago, reminded me of you. There was a doctor in that picture . . .
KELLER: Don Ameche!
FRANK: I think it was, yeah. And he worked in his basement discovering things. That’s what you ought to do; you could help humanity, instead of . . .
JIM: I would love to help humanity on a Warner Brothers salary.
KELLER, points at him, laughing: That’s very good, Jim.
JIM, looks toward house: Well, where’s the beautiful girl was supposed to be here?
FRANK, excited: Annie came?