Arthur Miller

摘要

For most of his life, Arthur Miller was a carpenter. At 14, with the money made from delivering bagels on his bike round Harlem, he bought enough wood to build a back porch on the family house. In his old age, living on 360 acres in Connecticut, he made tables, chairs, a bed, a cabinet. To make extra-sure the angles were right, he once consulted a mathematician. He loved making plays-which he did better than any other American of the 2oth century, with the possible exception only of Tennessee Williams—for much the same reason. They gave him "an architectural pleasure". He tried novels occasionally and wrote, in "Timebends" in 1987, a chaotic autobiography. But he revelled in the structure of the drama. He thought of Ibsen and Sophocles, his early influences, as master-carpenters, and of his own best plays as careful constructions of "hard actions, facts, the geometry of relationships". It was no accident that his male characters were often skilful with their hands, even if they were good at little else.