I meant to get this book when it came out, which it says here was in 2009. I didn't quite get round to it then but hearing one of the stories on the radio recently was a useful reminder. Bringing together two volumes of short stories with Homely Girl, A Life, it is ostensibly the Complete Short Stories.
The pieces vary in length from 50 pages to miniatures of just a few, and in subject matter but all of them serve to enhance Miller's already enormous reputation for those who know him as a very major C20th playwright by showing just what a fine fiction writer he was, too.
The Misfits might be most familiar as the original of a film. The story of desperado teamwork hunting mustangs in the wild is perhaps worthy of Hemingway for its machismo and raw nature. Perhaps we admire the the roughnecks making a living with such virile expertise but I hope I'm right in finding sympathy for the wild horse victims of their savage industry as the natural reaction.
I Don't Need You Anymore is an account of rites of passage, a young boy uncomprehending of adult ways and shamed and anguished by finding that he is not quite a part of that world yet.
I doubt if I'd be the first to feel that labelling Miller and Marilyn Monroe as 'the egghead and the hourglass' was a rather extravagant bit of double stereotyping in which surely both were somewhat more than those things. These are stories of great depth and naturalism, art of a high order and not overly intellectual except for their great literary technique. They are not out of place alongside the best of C20th American fiction, whether you think like I do, that that means Richard Yates, Raymond Carver and Salinger or others.
The Bare Manuscript is one of several pieces here, each very different, that carry a genuine erotic charge, in which a writer advertises for a model whose body he can use as the medium for composition. The title piece is shorter, involving a misunderstanding that might be but isn't attempted voyeurism. Bulldog is only partly about a 13 year old boy going to buy a pet dog that his family cannot afford. The kid's encounter with the woman he buys it from is one that he keenly ponders his chances of repeating on whatever pretext. Miller is brilliant in expressing the tension and the mind of his characters in each.
Perhaps the best, for its political context as well as its narrative involvement, is The Performance in which a tap dance troupe touring Europe are offered an alarming amount of money to perform for Hitler, who is impressed and thinks that tap dancing would be a fine thing for young Nazis to do for healthy exercise. It is made to seem that their Jewish identity would not be picked up by the screening they would have to undergo to take up a lucrative long-term contract taking tap to the reich. But having sailed so close to a very dangerous wind, they make their escape.
I'm glad I was reminded to get this book. I haven't read all the stories yet. It would be no surprise to find a few more equally impressive things among them. Arthur Miller was surely one of the most important dramatists of the C20th. That he might have been as highly regarded as a fiction writer had he cared to do more of it is easy to say but that doesn't mean it isn't worth saying.
