Willy Loman and Me
Seven members of the Martin High School class of 1995.
There’s a line in Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1949 play, Death of Salesman, that haunted me for thirty years. Without going into the specifics of character or plot, an adult son, Biff, and his father, Willy, engage in a heated conversation where the son says to the father:
“I am not a leader of men, Willy, and neither are you. You were never anything but a hard-working drummer who landed in the ash can like all the rest of them…”
The play was taught as part of a high school English class and, at some point after reading it, the AV cart (with its precariously perched TV connected by a stiff coax cable to a boxy VHS player) was rolled into the classroom so we could watch the 1985 made-for-TV adaptation starring John Malkovich as Biff and Dustin Hoffman as Willy. In Miller’s script, the Willy character is described as 63-year-old traveling salesman. In 1985, Dustin Hoffman was only 48, the same age as I was up until earlier this month. In addition to entering the final year of my 40s, this October also saw me attending my 30-year high school reunion. Those two events served as a catalyst for me engaging in some existential naval-gazing of the type I do every few months. Specifically, it has caused me to think about that Arthur Miller quote even more.
In high school, as you stand at the precipice of adulthood, it is easy to imagine a bright future where you are a leader of men (or a famous architect, or whatever). You can work hard to will that future into reality, but your ability to ultimately achieve that vague-yet-appealing goal of “success” is determined by countless factors beyond your control. How you choose to define success is also subject to change.
I’ve often wondered what the 18-year-old version of me would think were he to encounter version the middle-aged version of himself that exists today. Would he feel his future self turned out OK, or would he be baffled as to why this old guy in reading glasses compromised his dreams? The teenager would see a happily married man with two kids and an architecture firm that affords him the financial security and schedule flexibility to help support and spend time with that family, but would that be enough? Would the young man dismiss the amorphous concepts of “family life” and “home ownership" as a phony dream: a distraction form what was truly important? Would the aspiring adolescent see a hard-working drummer who squandered his potential? Would he see a mediocre architect who wasted his four thousand weeks running on a treadmill, working hard but going nowhere? Would he see a small man who was somehow just as exhausted as a great man?
Or, instead of seeing a middle-aged man who failed to be great, would he see an imperfect human who succeeded in doing some good? Would he hear the steady beat of a drummer who helped those around him as they marched together through the ash of a fallen world, finding beauty and humor along the way?
