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Arthur Miller’s untold story

Despite all the fame and publicity in Arthur Miller’s life, the story of his son Daniel – who was born with Down-syndrome, institutionalized as an infant, and essentially cut out of the family – remained largely unknown, but Suzanna Andrews has written about Daniel Miller in the current issue of Vanity Fair.

Daniel spent much of his childhood in Southbury Training School in Connecticut, which was considered one of the best institutions of its kind when it opened in 1940, but the article includes a shocking description of conditions there when Daniel was a resident.

By the early 1970s, however, around the time Arthur Miller put his son there, Southbury was understaffed and overcrowded. It had nearly 2,300 residents, including children, living in rooms with 30 to 40 beds. Many of the children wore diapers, because there weren’t enough employees to toilet-train them. During the day, they sat in front of blaring TVs tuned to whatever show the staff wanted to watch. The most disabled children were left lying on mats on the floor, sometimes covered with nothing but a sheet. “In the wards you had people screaming, banging their heads against the wall, and taking their clothes off,” says David Shaw, a leading Connecticut disability lawyer. “It was awful.”

Daniel later moved to a group home and made great strides toward independent living, but his father’s virtual abandonment of him shakes Arthur Miller’s reputation. After the playwright’s death, the article notes that “The New York Times extolled his “fierce belief in man’s responsibility to his fellow man – and [in] the self-destruction that followed on his betrayal of that responsibility.”

Andrews’ article is even-handed and well worth reading. She points out that Miller was following the accepted medical opinions of the day that recommended institutionalizing disabled children, may have been haunted by the abandonment, and late in his life made moves to acknowledge Daniel as his son, including giving him an equal portion of his estate with his other children.

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 his story. What that cost him as a writer is hard to say now, but he never wrote anything approaching greatness after Daniel’s birth. One wonders if, in his relationship with Daniel, Miller was sitting on his greatest unwritten play.

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