For those readers who can never get enough of the works of Arthur Miller, Penguin has released three collections of Miller's plays, essays, and stories in its Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions to commemorate the centennial of Miller's birth: The Penguin Arthur Miller: Collected Plays, Collected Essays, and Presence: Collected Stories.Collected Plays includes eighteen of Miller's most famous and popular works as well as some of his less often performed pieces. The “Note on the Text” indicates that the versions in this edition are those “preferred by Arthur Miller and should be considered authoritative texts.” In her foreword titled “Letter to a Young Playwright,” Lynn Nottage explains why she was drawn to Miller's works, offers some salient comments about All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and A View from the Bridge, and remarks how all of Miller's plays deal with “imperfect men and embattled dreamers.” She discusses in brief the influence of the House Un-American Activities Committee on Miller's ideas and canon and declares that “no other playwright of his era devoted as much time and care to dramatizing the anxieties, aspirations, and sacrifices made by men in pursuit of the elusive American dream.”Collected Essays is organized into three sections labeled “On the Theater,” “On His Works,” and “On Society and Politics.” Susan Abbotson, in a lucid introduction, explains and summarizes the focus of each section, paying particular attention to connect the facets of Miller's varying ideologies to the works and the political and social events that inform the substance of the essays. Abbotson is comprehensive and unbiased in her appraisal of the essays, noting that Miller himself “is also fully aware of his own potential biases.” Abbotson captures the essential purpose of Miller's essays when she writes, “Forthright and willing to tackle even the most sensitive issues with a calm deliberation, he writes to make sense of the world for himself as much as for his reader.” The “On the Theater” section is further subdivided into essays that discuss “Concerning Tragedy,” “General Commentary,” and “Concerning Language.” The “On His Works” part includes essays on The Golden Years and The Man Who Had All the Luck, Focus, All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, An Enemy of the People, The Crucible, A View from the Bridge, After the Fall, Incident at Vichy, The Price, The Archbishop's Ceiling, The American Clock, and Mr. Peter's Connections. Finally, the “On Society and Politics” segment includes essays that consider the topics of Juvenile Delinquency, The McCarthy Era, Conditions in America, the Holocaust, Politics Abroad, and Satire.Presence: Collected Stories offers three groups of stories with varying themes and characters that, ultimately, address familiar Miller ideas. The collection titled “I Don't Need You Anymore” includes nine stories; “Homely Girl, A Life” includes one story of the same title, and “Presence” contains six stories, as did the Penguin Viking edition of 2004. Whether Miller is depicting the romantic and seemingly aimless assignations of Janice Sessions from “Homely Girl, A Life,” the seaside walkers watching as the fish die in “Please Don't Kill Anything,” the Jew Harold May performing his tap dance for Hitler in “The Performance,” or a man confronting a family of beavers in “Beavers,” what consistently emerges in Miller's stories, as is evident in his drama, is a collection of individuals who are seeking comprehension and connection with the natural world, the social world, or the political world. Miller is always illustrating some “other” with which his protagonist is either wrestling or embracing, and the characters in his stories are no different from his dramatic figures. His briefest story in his “Presence” collection is the story of the same title in which an unnamed protagonist wanders a beach, sees a man and woman making love, later meets that woman, and then eventually wonders whether her presence was reality or vision. The character suspended between the real world and the imagined one often appears in Miller's plays. Although Miller admits in his foreword to the collection that “some of these stories could never be plays, but some perhaps could have been,” he explains in the final lines of his foreword that his stories offer “the rending of a particular vision at its proper distance, the discovery of the tone appropriate to one's feeling for a thing, a person, an event.”Though Miller scholars and readers may have encountered the works discussed in this review in previous editions, they will find that each Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition presents the works in a new logical and well-constructed sequence that makes each edition easy to approach, whether the reader is using the edition for research or enjoyment.
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Aug 29, 2023
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