THROUGHOUT his long and vital career, Arthur Miller returned repeatedly to short fiction. He enjoyed the genre not only as a kind of restorative solitude apart from the theater's collaborative demands, but also as a kind of artistic laboratory in which discrete themes that deeply mattered to him could be isolated and worked through.
He used the short story, in other words, in much the same way that a great painter uses drawings. Each is a work of art on its own, and yet part of its power comes from a certain lack of resolution, an "open endedness" that draws an important share of its power from what it suggests.
"Presence" collects the last half-dozen of Miller's published stories and, taken together, they give us a glimpse of an artist hard up against his ninth decade, still deeply preoccupied by that most particular and elemental aspect of the human condition -- the workings and uses of desire.
In the 1940s, when he had his first real theatrical success with "All My Sons," Miller told an interviewer: "In all my plays and books I try to take settings and dramatic situations from life which involve real questions of right and wrong."
In an era in which high literary culture seems to value irony, detachment and -- best of all -- ironic detachment above all else, Miller's declaration is apt to be read as a quaint and sentimental artifact of that blue-jeaned, work-booted and horn-rimmed period of socially conscious art that accompanied the Great Depression.
And yet, consider the opening paragraphs of two obituaries published when the playwright died in February 2005. This is how the New York Times began its piece:
"Arthur Miller, one of the great American playwrights, whose work exposed the flaws in the fabric of the American dream, died Thursday night at his home in Roxbury, Conn. He was 89.... The author of 'Death of a Salesman,' a landmark of 20th-century drama, Mr. Miller grappled with the weightiest matters of social conscience in his plays."
The National Review's obituary began this way:
"Attention must be paid to the attention that's been paid to Arthur Miller, playwright, darling of the Left, husband of Marilyn Monroe, self-appointed public moralist, and did I mention that he was married to Marilyn Monroe? The outpouring of sanctimonious twaddle that greeted Miller's death ... was partly queasy-making, partly comic.... The emetic side came from the pent-up liberal self-righteousness that erupted everywhere like a nasty boil. The comedy -- if such ghastliness can really be called comic -- followed from the yawning disproportion between cause (Miller's modest artistic accomplishment) and effect (wailing and gnashing of teeth as if a hybrid of Sophocles and Mahatma Gandhi had suddenly passed away)."
