The Man Who Had All the Luck Read Online Free

with no other fate than to die locked inside their own terror. Where were the assurances of a civilization? Where was the law? Where was God?
    Seen in this context, The Man Who Had All the Luck seems to reflect that deep sense of abandonment felt by so many as hope was not only transmuted into its opposite but itself became a component element of absurdity. David Beeves’s sense of an arbitrary good fortune is merely the other side of the same coin. His question—“Why?”—becomes the question of all. If life ends in death, where can meaning be born?
    It was against this that Miller pitched his own native existentialism, his belief that man is the source of his own identity, obliged to accept responsibility for himself and the society which he joins in shaping. History, to Miller, is not some implacable force crushing the human spirit. It is made by men and can be challenged and changed by those who acknowledge this truth. And if suicide might be a logical response to a sense of abandonment, renewed commitment is no less logical. The story of David Beeves was apparently about the personal dilemma of an individual in an obscure location. For Miller, though, here and throughout his work, the private and the public were intimately connected so that the questions posed by his protagonist reach out into the world.
    As he remarked, “ The Man Who Had All the Luck tells me that in the midst of the collectivist Thirties I believed it decisive what an individual thinks and does about his life, regardless of overwhelming forces. . . . David Beeves arrives as close as he can at a workable, conditional faith in the neutrality of the world’s intention toward him.” 6
    The Man Who Had All the Luck is, Miller has said, “trying to weigh how much of our lives is a result of our character and how much is a result of our destiny.” For him, there was “no possibility . . . to come down on one side or the other.” 7 In that sense he backed off from the severity of Sartrean existentialism, which made the individual bear the full burden of responsibility for action and inaction alike. For Miller, the arbitrary nature of experience could not be denied. What was necessary was to shape it into meaning, which is, after all, precisely what he saw the writer as doing in giving form to experience.
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    Reviews of the play were negative or, in Miller’s words, baffled, and he himself came to feel that both he and the director had failed to understand its antirealist thrust. It needed a style of presentation they never found. A note at the bottom of the Variety Review for November 29, 1944, announced, “Withdrawn Saturday after four performances.” Since one of these was a matinee, the play ran for just three days. It was a disaster. As Miller later remarked, “Standing at the back of the house . . . I could blame nobody.” It was “like music played on the wrong instrument in a false scale. . . . After the final performance and the goodbyes to the actors, it almost seemed a relief to get on the subway to Brooklyn Heights and read about the tremendous pounding of Nazi-held Europe by Allied air power. Something somewhere was real.” 8
    But he never forgot The Man Who Had All the Luck. Inspired in part by the Depression and wartime concerns, it proved a fable capable of speaking to people in other times and other places. In 1988 a staged reading convinced him that there was still life in the play. In 1989 it was republished by a British publisher (along with The Golden Years ) and staged by the Bristol Old Vic and the Young Vic in a production that, Miller insisted, captured “the wonder and naivete and purity of feeling of a kind of fairytale about the mystery of fate and destiny,” a play that he now saw had “the bright colors of youth . . . all over it, and the fixation of youth on the future and what heaven has in mind for one’s life.” 9 It was favorably