Daniel Miller
August 30, 2007The current issue of Vanity Fair has an outstanding article about Daniel Miller, the son of Arthur Miller, the playwright, and Inge Morath, Miller’s third wife. Daniel Miller was born with Down syndrome and, according to Vanity Fair, he was placed in a mental institution shortly thereafter.
The article describes Miller as someone who rarely, if ever, visited Daniel at the mental institution. By all accounts, Miller has never publicly acknowledged Daniel’s existence, and certainly not in the memoir, “Timebends”, that he wrote shortly before his death. Even Miller’s closest friends know little, if anything, about Daniel’s existence and whereabouts. Vanity Fair describes Miller’s cool relationship and general lack of empathy for Daniel as a state of denial, a character flaw in Miller that people often discussed privately but rarely exposed on a pedestal, especially during Miller’s lifetime. Appropriately, Vanity Fair also explores whether such powers of denial have any effect on Miller’s writing, and whether Miller’s works should be viewed any differently in light of this chilly, perhaps non-existent, father-son relationship.
The New York Times writes today that while renewed scrutiny of Miller in light of Daniel’s existence may not amount to much new thoughts regarding Miller’s writings, Miller’s stature as a humanist and an empathetic conscience of the human kind will be forever tainted, especially because Miller had always portrayed himself, and allowed others to portray him, as a rigid moralist (his refusal to “name names” in the McCarthy era) and an apt social commentator (his description of Willy Loman as someone who must not be “allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog”).
