This is Frank Johnstone in "The Telegraph". I have seldom seen such vindictive and
mean-spirited writing.

"Saturday 19 February 2005


NotebookBy Frank Johnson(Filed: 19/02/2005)
'Arthur Miller sold Left-wing solace to the educated classes'

Yesterday's Daily Telegraph had a story about a daughter ordering a young woman to "get out" of the Connecticut farmhouse which she had shared with the daughter's late father, even though the woman had been dutiful to him in his illness. Ah, American callousness and acquisitiveness.
Would that Arthur Miller, who died last week at 89, were alive to write a searing play about it. He would use it as another metaphor for the dark side of the American dream.
The trouble is that Miller was the deceased. The daughter, and her actor husband, are impeccably Leftish theatre people. Years and years of propaganda from the father that was implicitly anti-private property, anti-suburban, anti-bourgeois has had no effect on the daughter.
But plays are one thing, real life another. Only the greatest plays depict real life. Miller's distort it in order to make many a well-worn political point.
His daughter understands that one cannot hand over a valuable property to someone just because that someone happened, late in his life, to live with the man whom the capitalist marketplace allowed to earn it. Miller, after all, was a salesman. He sold Left-wing solace to the educated classes that helped them feel superior to the rest of us.
His fictional salesman, Willy Loman, constantly talks of the need to be "well-liked". Business becoming bad, he kills himself, though I suspect that rather more people killed themselves for economic reasons under communism.
Miller, the real salesman, lived a wealthy life on the Connecticut estate that his daughter is determined will stay in the family. He took care to be, by enough people, well-liked."

What a bastard.