LAHR: What was the suffering you saw that you wanted to dramatize?
MILLER: Failure in the face of surrounding success. He was the ultimate climber up the ladder who was constantly being stepped on. His fingers were being stepped on by those climbing past him. My empathy for him was immense. And I mean, how could he possibly have succeeded? There was no way. Excepting that he’d been a pretty decent salesman in his young years. You know, he brought home enough money to raise a family of several boys. He had two daughters as well. And they lived reasonably well…. He committed suicide. That helped confirm my feeling that this man was always half in darkness. The darkness split him in half. The play was basically looking from the edge of the grave at life.
LAHR: Was that implied in the name you gave him? Loman. Low man.
MILLER: I’ll tell you exactly where it came from, because it surprised me. I picked that out of the air. It was always Loman. But I would say roughly ’53 or ’54, I’m walking down Forty-second Street, where all these old movie houses were. And I see the “The Last Will of Dr. Mabuse,” Fritz Lang’s picture.
Well, I had seen that in the thirties or early forties sometime. Way back. I thought, gee, boy, remember that picture was a marvellous movie. I’m gonna go in and see it again. I went in. Briefly, the story is of a detective in Paris—well, a lot of fires are going on in Paris. The chief detective of Paris is bewildered, because they cannot find a profit motive in any of it. An orphanage is burned, a hospital. So on and so on.
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