(Page 2 of 6) But Mr. Miller called playwriting the hardest work of all. "You know," he said, "a playwright lives in an occupied country. He's the enemy. And if you can't live like that, you don't stay. It's tough. He's got to be able to take a whack, and he's got to swallow bicycles and digest them." 'I'm a Fatalist' What Mr. Miller could not swallow was critics. During a 1987 interview, he dismissed them as "people who can't sing or dance." It was a reprise of a bitter theme he had sounded throughout his working life. "I'm a fatalist," he said. "I consider I am rejected in principle. My work is and, through my work, I am. If it's accepted, it's miraculous or the result of a misunderstanding." He also once said, "I never had a critic in my corner in this country," and that he never saved the reviews of his plays, even the raves: "There's an instinct in me that I had to exist apart from them, lest I rely on them for my esteem or despair. I don't know a critic who penetrates the center of anything." Mr. Miller's antipathy was understandable. At one moment he was hailed as the greatest living playwright, in the same rarefied company as Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill, and at another as a has-been whose greatest successes were decades behind him. Even at the height of his success, Mr. Miller's work received harsh criticism from some prominent critics. Eric Bentley, the drama critic for The New Republic in the 1950's, simply dismissed "The Crucible," writing, "The world has made this author important before he has made himself great." Mr. Miller also despaired of the American theater, which he believed was too profit-oriented to allow writers and actors to flourish. He noted that opera and ballet in America were supported through contributions but that what he called the "brutal inanity" of Broadway required that the American theater pay for itself. "If the thing is gonna be regarded the same as the fish business, it ain't gonna work," he said in the feisty tones of his New York City boyhood. "In the whole entertainment enterprise, the theater has become a fifth wheel. People only take parts hoping it will lead to the movies." Arthur Miller was born on West 110th Street in Manhattan on Oct. 17, 1915, to Augusta and Isidore Miller. His father was a coat manufacturer and so prosperous that he rode in a chauffeur-driven car from the family apartment overlooking the northern edge of Central Park to the Seventh Avenue garment district. For a child, as Mr. Miller remembered in "Timebends," life unfolded as "a kind of scroll whose message was surprise and mostly good news." The Depression changed everything for the family, and it became a theme that etched its way through Arthur Miller plays, from "Death of a Salesman" and "The Price" to "After the Fall," "The American Clock" and "A Memory of Two Mondays." The crash meant the collapse of the coat business and a move from the apartment overlooking the park to considerably reduced circumstances in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, where the teenage Arthur worked as a bakery delivery boy and developed a knack for carpentry, which left him fascinated, he said, with "the idea of creating a new shadow on the earth." He attended James Madison High School, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School in 1932, and then went to work in the auto-parts warehouse, earning $15 a week and saving $13 a week for college. Mr. Miller said he was not much of a student, but he knew by the time he was 16 that he wanted to be a writer. He recalled a terrific urge to tell stories, a talent that he said made him a center of attention. Prizes Pay Tuition When he had put away enough money for his freshman year, Mr. Miller went to the University of Michigan with the hope that he could write a play good enough to win the Avery Hopwood Award, an honor administered by the university that carried a prize of $250, enough for a second year at college. He did not win the first year, but managed to scrape together enough money to go back. He went on to win two Hopwood Awards, as well as a $1,250 Bureau of New Plays Award from the Theater Guild. He earned more money by winning that one prize than he had earned in three years at the warehouse. It became clearer than ever that playwriting was for him. -- Esc_ --

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