Feature

The Big F

“We’re free,” Linda is saying as Biff, Willy’s other son, lifts her up and carries her off the stage as the lights go down. My mother and father and I are sobbing now, as devastated as if someone we love had died. I stumble upstairs to my room and sit at my desk, drained. I try to focus on my American-history textbook—what was Manifest Destiny, anyway?—but I’m too haunted by Happy Loman’s words to concentrate: “It’s the only dream you can have—to come out number-one man.”

Many years later, I read Arthur Miller’s memoir, Timebends, in which he gives an account of how he came to write Death of a Salesman. He had already experienced success with his first play, All My Sons, when he struck—or was struck by—his theme. As he wrote, hour after hour, day after day, he laughed and wept, stunned by the power of his discovery: that Willy Loman was a vessel designed to contain the essence of our human longing “to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count.” That Miller tapped something deep and powerful in the human psyche was evident from the audience’s response on opening night: “As sometimes happened later on during the run, there was no applause at the final curtain of the first performance . . . With the curtain down, some people stood to put their coats on and then sat again, some, especially men, were bent forward covering their faces, and others were openly weeping.”

Yet I wonder if his explanation for the play’s success is right. Miller, who died last week at 89, was at heart an optimist, blessed with the American belief that things work out in the end, and so perhaps oblivious to his own work’s darker side. (Just because he wrote it doesn’t mean he understood it.) Is it the play’s let’s-hear-it-for-the-little-guy message that makes people weep, or is it the experience of recognizing their own struggles with failure? The crushing reversals that Willy suffers—getting fired, being humiliated by his associates, watching his sons turn into losers—resonate because they’re so familiar. “I don’t know what to say,” the director Elia Kazan stammered when Miller showed him a draft of his play. “My father . . . ”

“He broke off,” Miller reports in his memoir, “the first of a great many men—and women—who would tell me that Willy was their father.” Their father and, eventually, them. Like father, like son. The story of literature—and thus of life—is a story not of success, but of failure.

I’m so obsessed with this theme that I actually keep a “failure file.” What stands out for me in the biographies of Faulkner and Fitzgerald are the months and years they wasted out in Hollywood, getting sodden over their squandered gifts. Cyril Connolly, one of the most distinguished critics of his day, made his name with a book, Enemies of Promise, that elegiacally bemoaned his lack of distinction. And the novelist Paul Auster writes in his memoir, Hand to Mouth, “In my late twenties and early thirties, I went through a period of several years when everything I touched turned to failure.” Ah!

Everybody was on the way to somewhere, in a hurry, purposeful. I stirred my coffee. I had nothing to do.

Let’s see: Here’s Norman Mailer summing up his legacy in an interview with the New York Times: “Part of the ability to keep writing over the years comes down to living with the expectation of disappointment . . . You just want to keep the store going. You’re not going to do as well this year as last year probably, but nonetheless let’s keep the store going.” If Norman Mailer feels this way about his achievement, imagine how the rest of us feel.

And here is Michael Eisner to illustrate how the power of failure to move us correlates with the power of the person who fails. Was there ever a guy more unlikely to acknowledge his failings than the CEO of Disney, destroying Michael Ovitz on the stand week after week in the severance case we’ve read more about than nuclear stockpiles in Iran? Yet in a memo to Tony Schwartz, co-writer of his autobiography, Work in Progress, Eisner sounds like Dr. Johnson on King Lear: “Most tragedy comes to those who simply make a mistake. The higher the position of the person making the mistake, the more interesting the fall, and the further the fall. That is drama and that is life.” The other day, I studied that hard, money-coarsened face in a photograph in the business section of the Times and thought, You, too?

Athletics is particularly fertile failure terrain. “All good sports reporters know that the best stories are in the loser’s locker room,” wrote Pete Hamill in a review of A Pitcher’s Story, Roger Angell’s anatomy of David Cone’s agonizing decline. What if the Yanks had swept the Red Sox in four straight last fall? Sure, we would have cheered our invincible home team. But wasn’t it more incredible—and in the end more satisfying—the way they let victory slip from their grasp? “Losers are more like the rest of us,” observes Hamill. “They make mistakes they can’t take back.”

Lying awake one night rehearsing my own litany of mistakes—why didn’t you write the biography of Edmund Wilson when you had the chance? Why did you quit your job at the New York Times?—I recall a moment when I was 40 and between assignments. It was ten o’clock on a weekday morning, and I sat at the counter of the Four Brothers coffee shop, staring out the window at the stream of traffic. Buses, delivery trucks, taxis stormed by, jouncing over the rough pavement of Amsterdam Avenue. Everybody was on the way to somewhere, in a hurry, purposeful. The coffee shop was nearly empty. In a corner sat an elderly woman reading the Post, her cane leaning against the seat. Another booth was occupied by a middle-aged man in a windbreaker. He had long sideburns and thick glasses; his hair was thinning in front. A cigarette smoldered in a tin ashtray by his side. He was studying a letter, reading it over and over. I stirred my coffee. My heart was a stone in my chest. I had nothing to do. I thought, This is your life. You took a wrong turn, missed the boat, bet the wrong horse. Blew it.

That night, I was walking down a street in my neighborhood when I glimpsed, through a brightly lit window, a tableau of seeming harmony—a man hunched over a desk, reading a book by the soft light of an Oriental lamp. I was seized with envy. What a perfect life was framed by that window! The man was a well-known writer, a journalist putting the last touches on his weekly column for a prestigious journal of opinion; he was just back from a lively dinner party, looking up a reference to Yeats . . . I was making it up: For all I knew, he was an out-of-work accountant with a drinking problem; his wife wanted a divorce; his mother had just died; his son was into drugs. All of us, I suspect, imagine that a world exists from which we alone have been excluded; all of us have our noses pressed against the glass. But if we contemplate our own lives, not the phantom life on the other side, we might find things in them to envy—a family that’s intact; a job we like; excellent health (the thing we take for granted and on which all happiness depends). Good fortune is there, however sporadic, however modest, however difficult to achieve. The trick is to recognize it.