Believe it or not, there is at least one deceased Caucasian man of letters still revered in academia—playwright Arthur Miller, whose dramas attacked both capitalism and the American way of life even while he personally benefited from both.
Thus, it is with a heavy heart that media figures report on the son with Downs Syndrome whom their sensitive hero institutionalized but never publicly acknowledged. “What makes the revelation of Daniel so upsetting is how it juxtaposes Miller’s private decision with his public image, as one of the greatest American playwrights and the man who refused to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and eloquently and loudly opposed the Vietnam War,” Jason Zinoman wrote in The New York Times on August 30. “For many of those who came of age in the middle of the last century a saintly glow hovers around Miller, whose plays have often examined questions of guilt and morality through the prism of family.”
“ He was a hero of the left and a champion of the downtrodden.” In the Ivory Tower, he still is. “How do we know what we would have done?” Morris Dickstein, who teaches English at the City University of New York Graduate Center asks. “The birth of a child with Down syndrome can be a tremendous trauma, to say nothing of a strain on a marriage.”
In an e-mail message this week that Zinoman quoted, Professor Dickstein argued that “the truth is that very few great artists were admirable people.”
“At heart they’re killers who’ll do anything to get the work done.” Perhaps that is a good description of Professor Dickstein’s favorite writers.
Would it work as well for Flannery O’ Connor?
Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.
