Willy remembers him as “a man with a big beard, and I was in Mamma’s lap, sitting around a fire, and some kind of high music.” This is Willy’s only memory of his father, but he hungers for more. He is the first character to enter the stage, though in metonymic form: a flute melody, “small and fine, telling of grass and trees and the horizon.” We associate the sound with Willy’s father because he carved, played, and peddled flutes he was a salesman like Willy, but the preindustrial craftsperson version: both maker and marketer. Yet it has moved audiences in far-flung locations, packing theaters in China and Thailand, for example, even becoming a nightly ritual for Norwegian Arctic fishermen, and after the demise of the Soviet Union, offering special relevance for Russians seeking work. The play’s relevance seems specifically American. Though never acted on the stage, this character is so deeply embedded in the play’s structure that by means of him Miller not only awakens the shadow of his own future but also exhumes the ghost of our lost national character, probing our cultural ambivalence about identity and vocation and offering only uneasy resolution. Willy Loman’s lost father is at the core of Death of Salesman, whose debut made American audiences sweat and weep and run to pay phones.
It is important, therefore, to consider the theme of the lost father as a fixed idea Miller couldn’t shake by externalizing it in a play-in more than one play if we consider the nuances of lost patrimony in All My Sons, and even in The Crucible and The Misfits, where lost fathers are implied-and Miller’s distance from Daniel, who grew up to be a wonderful man by all accounts, as evidence of that deep irony. This imputation, of course, threatens to shadow our experience of the profound moral consciousness of Miller’s plays just when we most need their clarity. And like Willy, Daniel seems to have made his way without his father’s mentoring. We know only that Daniel Miller was born to Arthur Miller and Inge Morath in 1962, and that following the era’s protocol, they placed him in Southbury, an institution in a pastoral setting a few miles from their home and still some years away from serious overcrowding, not unlike baby Willy’s being left in a pastoral setting on the cusp of change as his father walks away in Death of a Salesman. The depth of Miller’s abandonment of Daniel, uncertain given the September 2007 Vanity Fair’s unnamed informers and snide photographic blurbs, remains vague. Recent revelations about Arthur Miller’s estrangement from his Down Syndrome son, Daniel, rebound like a prophecy Miller himself made early in his career when, in Death of a Salesman, he wrestled with but failed to subdue the legacy of the lost father.
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