Really interesting article on Arthur Miller in Sept Vanity Fair

I can't link to it (interesting which articles they make available online and which they don't. You can read about Rupert Murdoch, Judith Nathan Giuliani, and the boys who date Lindsay, Paris, Nicole, & Mischa but not Arthur Miller.) -- but this month's Vanity Fair (Sept 2007) has an extremely interesting article called Arthur Miller's Missing Act. Written by Suzanna Andrews, it's about Miller's son born with Down syndrome that he almost entirely wrote out of his public life, including his late wife's (and the mother of the child) obituary. Fascinating secret. Fascinating reminder of how differently this syndrome was handled just a couple of generations ago. Fascinating as always, the schism between one's work and their life. Heartbreaking and fascinating.

some excerpts:

...In 1966 he was dealing with the fallout from his most controversial play, After the Fall, a thinly disguised account of his troubled marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Produced in 1964, two years after Monroe's suicide, and greeted with some disgust by critics and the public, it was widely viewed as an attempt by Miller to cash in on her fame. Th public outcry had left Miller angry and wounded, and professing not to understand how anyone could have thought that the play was based on Monroe. "There is no better key to Arthur's personality," says a woman who was a close friend of Miller's wife, than "his refusal to acknowledge that people who knew After the Fall, and who loved Marilyn, would be offended. Like all of us, he had powerful powers of denial."...

...Some believe Miller may have feared losing Inge's attention to a needy child, others suggest that he simply didn't want anything to interfere with his work. All agree that the issue of Daniel was extremely painful for him, and that he did not deal well with emotions. His plays were often acutely psychological - tackling the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, the corrosive effects of guilt and fear, and the price of self-deception - but in his personal life he could be shockingly devoid of emotional understanding....

...It would be easy to judge Arthur Miller harshly, and some do. For them, he was a hypocrite, a weak and narcissistic man who used the press and the power of his celebrity to perpetuate a cruel lie. But Miller's behavior also raises more complicated questions about the relationship between his life and his art. A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn't fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear- or, more likely, all three - Miller's failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of the story. What that cost him as a writer is hard to say now, but he never wrote anything approaching greatness after Daniel's birth....