Jesus Wasn’t the Only Jewish Carpenter

By KEN GORDON

If you’ve ever taken high school English, you’ve read Arthur Miller’s classic play, Death of A Salesman. And somewhere along the way, you’ve doubtless learned the author’s high opinion of working-class people. “I believe that the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were,” he wrote in an essay called “Tragedy and the Common Man.” But how many students ever heard about Miller in shop class? The answer is (surely) very few—and that’s too bad. The renowned playwright, who died a year ago, on February 10, 2005, was perhaps the most notable Jewish carpenter since Jesus Christ.

In Timebends, Miller’s 1987 autobiography, the famed playwright confessed, “I seem to always have known that I was a carpenter and a mechanic. At fourteen or fifteen I bought lumber with my savings from my bread delivery job—a painful twelve dollars accumulated from work that earned four dollars a week—and built a back porch for the little house on Third Street.”

The building bug was a lifetime affliction for Miller. In 2002, critic Robert Brustein wrote that that the then 87-year-old Miller “may walk with a stoop, but he remains an expert carpenter.” Actor Brian Dennehey, who played Willy Loman in recent productions of Salesman, identified Miller in a USA Today obituary as furniture maker and “master carpenter.”

In fact, Miller's love of carpentry wasn’t a casual interest. It may have been responsible for Death of A Salesman. In 1948, before writing the play, he constructed a writing studio. "A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve cabin in two days at most," he wrote in Timebends, "but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself."

And indeed his sense of the authentic-self-as-craftsman is built directly into his greatest play. As Biff Loman, improvising a Kaddish for his dead father in the epilogue of Death of A Salesman, says, “There were a lot of nice days,” recalling Willy building a stoop, finishing his cellar, putting up a new porch, an extra bath, the garage. The most morose son in American literature concludes that “there's more of him in that front stoop than in all the sales he ever made.”

There’s something worth remembering about Miller’s woodworking fascination. It demonstrates a commitment to things of this earth. Too often writers, particular political writers, are detached from hammers and nails and such. Miller serves as a great reminder to intellectuals of all stripes that one needs to get out and work in the world. Plus Miller provides a good role model for those young scribblers, not to mention kids in shop class, who think that playwriting isn’t the manliest of activities.

Of course, Miller didn’t just spend time in his workshop. He was, in his work and in his life, an enemy of injustice, defending imperiled intellectuals abroad and standing up to Red-baiting politicians at home. I’m sure your high school English teacher hammered all this into your head long ago.

To drive in the final nail here: it’s really no surprise that Arthur Miller was a champion of the working man. He was one himself.