Susanna Andrews wrote in September edition of Vanity Fair about Arthur Miller’s choice to cut his son from his life because he had Down-Syndrome. The article is interesting because it shows how a great playwright such Miller whose plays emphasize morality can do something immoral without seeing as a contradiction with their persona:
Miller, says one friend, may have been afraid—"ashamed" is the word another uses—of the genetic problems in his family. Some believe Miller may have feared losing Inge's attention to a needy child; others suggest that he simply didn't want anything to interfere with his work. All agree that the issue of Daniel was extremely painful for him, and that he did not deal well with emotions. His plays were often acutely psychological—tackling the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, the corrosive effects of guilt and fear, and the price of self-deception—but in his personal life he could be shockingly devoid of emotional understanding. He was not cold, however. Although few people knew it, Miller did visit Daniel at Southbury on rare occasions. That he never acknowledged him as a son, though, is something friends find almost impossible to comprehend or accept. The author Donald Connery, who worked with Miller on the Peter Reilly wrongful-conviction case in the 1970s, says, "I speak with great affection for Arthur, and with admiration for all the good things he did in his life," but whatever led him to institutionalize Daniel "doesn't excuse painting his child out of his life."
"Arthur was detached, that's how he protected himself," says Copeland. "It was as though he thought if he didn't speak about it, it would go away."
Christopher Bigsby wrote a few days ago that this secretive and shameful part of Arthur Miller’s life just made him a fallible hero and didn’t change the fact that he was the moralist of a generation:
And if the decision [the one to institutionalize Daniel and to hide him] was wrong (though quite who would have been able to adjudicate is difficult to know) is it, anyway, so difficult to envisage that it is possible to be morally confident in the public world and unsure in private? Arthur Miller's work is precisely about such flawed men and women. In The Crucible a courageous public stance is taken by a man whose private behaviour is fallible. After the Fall is in part about a series of wrong choices. What are Willy Loman and Eddie Carbone, in Death of a Salesman and A View from the Bridge, if not men struggling to do right while unsure what form right action might take?
I disagree with Bigsby. Although I agree that artists should not be perfect and that therefore Arthur Miller still remains a great playwright for all of his imperfections, I am no longer able to see him as a hero even as a fallible one because I think that it takes more than talent or even genius to make one a hero.
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