Why Willy Loman lives
TWO men stand on a stage. One is the hulking figure of Willy Loman, gradually becoming smaller in front of the audience's eyes; the other is his younger and weedier boss, Howard, gradually downsizing his old employee. "You can't eat an orange and throw the peel away," roars the broken salesman. "A man is not a piece of fruit." Meanwhile, Howard patronises the old man (who decades before had helped christen him) by calling him "kid".
Most of the muffled sobs from the audience during the current, heavily Tony-ed version of "Death of a Salesman" on Broadway occur during the final reconciliation between Willy and his useless son, Biff. But the moment when Howard sacks Willy still stands out in its viciousness. When Arthur Miller's play opened in 1949, one conservative critic called it "a time bomb expertly placed under the edifice of Americanism." Willy Loman, the relentless competitor, became a symbol of the dark side of the American dream that he so firmly believed in. As his wife, Linda, says to Biff: "He's not the finest character that ever lived. But he's a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid."
But who is paying attention now? At first sight it seems odd that New Yorkers are flocking to see such a depressing play. Figures for consumer confidence are sky-high, unemployment at a 29-year low. When people lose their jobs they find new ones pretty quickly. During the interval, young investment bankers sip champagne and express their astonishment that America could ever have been "like that". The most modern figure in the play seems to be the ghost of Willy's brother Ben -- an early version of an Internet entrepreneur who keeps on telling his brother how he "walked into the jungle" at 17, walked out at 21, and "by God, I was rich."
Somehow America's chattering classes seem to have forgotten the much-ballyhooed age of uncertainty. Those days in the early 1990s, when the New York Times seemed to have a permanent section on insecurity in the workplace and George Bush senior was wandering around New Hampshire mumbling "Message: I care" to laid-off workers, seem almost as distant as the days when salesmen still wore hats. "The current election will be about health care, education, values," one senator says, echoing the views of pollsters. Asked whether her boyfriend, who makes his living selling T-shirt logos round the country, feels insecure, Carol, a fitness instructor who works just round the corner from the Eugene O' Neill theatre, says flatly: "How should I know? He's playing golf in Myrtle Beach."
Yet the notion that Willy Loman has left the American political scene for the 19th hole in the Carolinas is wrong. To make the obvious point first, as Alan Greenspan, the chairman of the Fed, made it to Congress this week, "The rate of growth cannot increase indefinitely." A nasty stockmarket correction and slightly higher interest rates, and many families across America could be looking at their Visa and MasterCard bills in the same anxious way that the Lomans fret about the payments on the fridge.
A cyclical downturn would certainly push Willy back to centre-stage. But the salesman's tragedy was set at the start of America's postwar boom. As Mr Greenspan has pointed out repeatedly, one reason why wage inflation remains relatively low is the simple fact that many Americans are terrified of losing their jobs. And with good reason. Some 55,231 jobs were shed in May, according to consultants at Challenger, Gray & Christmas. The total for job cuts in the first five months of 1999 was nearly 50% higher than the equivalent figure in 1998. The typical worker changes jobs nine times before the age of 32. "Any Monday morning you can be told you are no longer needed," Mr Miller recently told the Los Angeles Times. "The company is moving to Guatemala." If you pick up any book about the Internet, you will be told that "salesmen" are the next class of people to be "disintermediated". Instead of sending out Willy and his suitcase, Howard would only need to set up a website.
Unsurprisingly, the long-term structural trends about insecurity are all up. One poll earlier this year of 500,000 workers showed anxiety about jobs to be three times higher than it was during the 1980-81 recession. And men of Willy's age seem particularly vulnerable. John Schmitt at the Economic Policy Institute points out that if you exclude women (whose careers have become slightly more secure), many of the standard insecurity measures are still worsening. Even if jobs are easy to find, it is hard to take your pension and health care with you. And the older you get, the less likely you are to want to move in search of work.
Nor is it just a matter of losing your job; the problem lies in the whole stress-producing environment of modern corporate America. Mr Miller once thought of calling his play "The Inside of his Head". It is easy to imagine a modern Willy Loman bemoaning the passing of seniority, being tormented by group evaluation sessions and spending half his day arguing with his HMO. Even Carol, the Manhattan fitness instructor, complains that her job is now judged on the basis of salesmanship as well as muscle tone. Everybody in America, it often seems these days, is on commission and on trial.
And so, in many ways, they should be. Every country in Europe would kill to have a capitalism that spits out inefficient people like Willy as ruthlessly as America does. Willy's frantic desire to compete, his merry recital of the management clichés of the day ("It's not what you sell; it's how you sell"), his determination to imitate the legendary Bill: all these things are what keeps America ahead of its peers.
Yet the problem of what to do with Willy Loman, and America's other losers, remains. The issues cited by the senator-health care, education, even values-all lead directly or indirectly to the Lomans' door. Last week, Andy Grove, the famously tough boss of Intel (motto: "Only the paranoid survive"), gave a speech on Capitol Hill giving warning to politicians that the social and economic dislocation caused by new technology had only just begun, and that they needed to "grease the skids" to protect the weak. For all its period detail, "Salesman" seems eerily timeless. Willy Loman is far from dead.
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Carl Remick