The Man Who Had All the Luck

Table of Contents

 

THE MAN WHO HAD ALL THE LUCK

ARTHUR MILLER was born in New York City in 1915 and studied at the University of Michigan. His plays include
All My Sons
(1947),
Death of a Salesman
(1949),
The Crucible
(1953),
A View from the Bridge
and
A Memory of Two Mondays
(1955),
After the Fall
(1964),
Incident at Vichy
(1965),
The Price
(1968),
The Creation of the World and Other Business
(1972), and
The American Clock
(1980). He has also written two novels,
Focus
(1945) and
The Misfits,
which was filmed in 1960, and the text for
In Russia
(1969),
In the Country
(1977), and
Chinese Encounters
(1979), three books of photographs by Inge Morath. His most recent works include a memoir,
Timebends
(1987), the plays
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
(1991),
The Last Yankee
(1993),
Broken Glass
(1994), and
Mr. Peters' Connections
(1999),
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000,
and
On Politics and the Art of Acting
(2001). He has twice won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, and in 1949 he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

 

CHRISTOPHER BIGSBY has published more than twenty-five books on British and American culture. His works include studies of African-American writing, American theater, English drama, and popular culture. He is the author of four novels,
Hester, Pearl, Still Lives,
and
Beautiful Dreamer,
and he has written plays for radio and television. He is also a regular broadcaster for the BBC. He is currently professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich, England.

BY ARTHUR MILLER

DRAMA
The Golden Years
The Man Who Had All the Luck
All My Sons
Death of a Salesman
An Enemy of the People (
adaptation of the play by Ibsen
)
The Crucible
A View from the Bridge
After the Fall
Incident at Vichy
The Price
The American Clock
The Creation of the World and Other Business
The Archbishop's Ceiling
The Ride Down Mt. Morgan
Broken Glass
Mr. Peters' Connections

ONE-ACT PLAYS
A View from the Bridge,
one-act version, with
A Memory of Two Mondays
Elegy for a Lady (
in
Two-Way Mirror)
Some Kind of Love Story (
in
Two-Way Mirror)
I Can't Remember Anything (
in
Danger: Memory!)
Clara (
in
Danger: Memory!)
The Last Yankee

OTHER WORKS
Situation Normal
The Misfits (
a cinema novel
)
Focus (
a novel
)
I Don't Need You Anymore (
short stories
)
In the Country (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)
Chinese Encounters (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)
In Russia (
reportage with Inge Morath photographs
)
Salesman in Beijing (
a memoir
)
Timebends (
autobiography
)
Homely Girl, A Life (
novella
)
On Politics and the Art of Acting

COLLECTIONS
Arthur Miller's Collected Plays (Volumes I and II)
The Portable Arthur Miller
The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller (
Robert Martin, editor
)
Echoes Down the Corridor: Collected Essays, 1944-2000

VIKING CRITICAL LIBRARY EDITIONS
Death of a Salesman (
edited by Gerald Weales
)
The Crucible (
edited by Gerald Weales
)

TELEVISION WORKS
Playing for Time

SCREENPLAYS
The Misfits
Everybody Wins
The Crucible

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

First published in Great Britain in a volume with
The Golden Years
by Methuen Books 1989
This edition with an introduction by Christopher Bigsby published in Penguin Books 2004

 

Copyright © Arthur Miller, 1989

Introduction copyright © Christopher Bigsby, 2004
All rights reserved

 

The amateur stage performance rights in
The Man Who Had All the Luck
are controlled exclusively by the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., 440 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016. No non-professional performance of the play may be given without obtaining in advance the written permission of the Dramatists Play Service, Inc., and paying the requisite fee.

 

Inquiries concerning other rights should be addressed to the author's agent, International Creative Management, Inc., 40 West 57th Street, New York, New York 10019.

 

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

 

Miller, Arthur, 1915-
The man who had all the luck : a drama in three acts / Artur Miller ; with
an introduction by Christopher Bigsby.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

eISBN : 978-0-142-43786-5

1. Alienation (Social psychology)—Drama 2. Failure (Psychology)—Drama
3. Success in business—Drama I. Title.
PS3525.I5156M36 2004
812'.52—dc22 2003068909

 

 

 

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Introduction

In 1938, Arthur Miller left the University of Michigan, at Ann Arbor, with high hopes. He had twice won the prestigious Hopwood Award for drama and once been runner-up. One of his plays had even been staged, albeit for a single night, by the Federal Theatre in Detroit. He returned to New York confident that he could conquer Broadway. After all, the Hopwood judges had been drawn from the New York theatre world and he did quickly join the Federal Theatre, an invention of FDR's Works Progress Administration.

Even as he tried to sell one of his Michigan plays, revising it in the basement of his family's Brooklyn home, he was writing another—the story of Montezuma and Cortez—perfect for the large casts that the Federal Theatre could afford. Despite encouraging words from his agent, from producers, actors and fellow writers, however, nothing happened, and in 1939 the Federal Theatre was closed down, suspected of Communist subversion. Broadway, meanwhile, showed no interest.

The theatre, though, was only one possibility and if it proved resistant there were always short stories or the novel. He wrote both but failed to place them. The only market he succeeded in penetrating was that for radio drama, though this in itself opened up other possibilities. He worked, briefly, for the Library of Congress and was also commissioned to write the screenplay for a film inspired, in part, by the dispatches of war correspondent Ernie Pyle. This took him to military bases around the country and though the final film—
The Story of GI Joe
—was written by others, in 1944 he published a book about his experiences:
Situation Normal.

These ventures were financially rewarding but scarcely satisfying for a man whose eyes were still on Broadway. Then came his breakthrough. A play he had originally written as a novel was accepted. At twenty-nine, and after six years, he had, seemingly, arrived. He was to be produced on Broadway, today, of course, a virtual impossibility for a first-time writer. The play,
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
was to star Karl Swenson, who had appeared in several of Miller's radio plays. Its out-of-town tryout was in Wilmington, its premiere at the For-rest Theatre in New York on November 23, 1944. It should have been a triumph; instead it was a disaster. Luck, it seemed, was in short supply.

Both novel and then play were inspired by a story he had originally heard from his wife's mother. She told of a relative who had hanged himself from a rafter in his Ohio barn. What intrigued Miller, and bewildered the man's wife, was that he had been popular, never wanting for a job even in the middle of the Depression. Then he developed what was plainly a mental disorder. By then the owner of a filling station, one of several properties he acquired while still in his twenties, he had begun obsessively to check the books, afraid of embezzlement by his staff. The paranoia grew and, despite treatment, he killed himself. What interested Miller was not his psychosis but the notion of a successful man being drawn toward death, more especially in a rural setting, away from urban pressures.

He was intrigued not least because his cousin's husband, Moe, had also died suddenly. Another successful man, he, too, prospered even during the Depression when others were failing. Going for a swim at Brighton Beach, he had collapsed, his body, bizarrely, driven back to his home by the doctor who had tried in vain to revive him. The arbitrary seemed at work both in his rise and his fall.

If he had seemingly been chosen for preferment, he was just as capriciously transformed into cosmic victim, born, it seemed, with no greater purpose than to die.
The Man Who Had All the Luck,
at least in its first form, was thus an exploration of the absurd, of the fact that, as a Beckett character would observe, humankind gives birth astride of a grave. By reversing the polarity and staging the plight of the man seemingly immune to disaster—a man who has all the luck—Miller explores, by inference, the implications of the man for whom disaster is an unearned fate, indeed of mankind for whom it is arguably likewise.

This is a dark fable reminiscent in certain respects of Camus's 1938 play
Caligula,
as the central character tests the proposition that there is no governing principle to existence, no inherent meaning, while desperately hoping for evidence to the contrary.