Applause for the Playwright-as-Hero : Arthur Miller: At 80, he is feted for his genius in wedding the great moral issues to the small, unconsidered moments.

Arthur Miller’s is not only a great life; it is also a magnificent book, “Timebends,” an autobiography that reads like reads like a great American novel--as if Saul Bellow’s Augie March had grown up to be a tall Jewish playwright, and had, in Bellow’s famous words, “made the record in his own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent.”

In an age when much literature and even more literary criticism has turned inward, losing itself in halls of mirrors, Arthur Miller’s double insistence on the reality of the real and on the moral dimension of writing sounds once again as radical as it did in his youth. “The effort to locate in the human species a counterforce to the randomness of victimization,” he calls it, adding, “but, as history has taught, that force can only be moral. Unfortunately.”

When a great writer reaches a great age, the temptation to turn him into an institution, into a statue of himself, is easily succumbed to. But to read Miller is to discover on every page the enduring relevance of his thought: “The ultimate human mystery,” he writes, “may not be anything more than the claims on us of clan and race, which may yet turn out to have the power, because they defy the rational mind, to kill the world.” The sharpness of such perceptions makes Miller very much our contemporary, a man for this season as well as all his others.

Willy Loman’s line, “I still feel kind of temporary about myself,” is also the way Arthur Miller says he has always felt. “This desire to move on, to metamorphose--or perhaps it is a talent for being contemporary--was given me as life’s inevitable condition.” In Miller, the temporary and the contemporary are united and turn out to be the same thing.

Miller’s genius has always been to reveal what the opening stage directions to “Death of a Salesman” call the “dream rising out of reality.” By paying attention, he discovers the miraculous within the real. His is a life dedicated as passionately to the remembrance, and the enlivening through art, of the small and the unconsidered, as it is to the articulation of the great moral issues of the day. Here, in his autobiography, is an endless sequence of men and women caught in wonderful cameos: the great-grandfather who was “an orchestra of scents--each of his gestures smelled different”; and the rabbi who stole the dying patriarch’s diamonds and had to be beaten up by the dying man before he returned them; and Mr. Dozick the pharmacist, who sewed up Miller’s brother’s ear on his drugstore table; and the Polish school bully who taught Miller some early lessons in anti-Semitism; and Lucky Luciano exiled in Palermo, nostalgic for America and scarily overgenerous, so that Miller began to fear being lost in the Bunyanesque “swamp of Something for Nothing, from which there is no return.”

Moral stature is a rare quality. In these degraded days, very few writers possess it. Miller’s seems innate, but was much increased because he was able to learn from his mistakes. Like Gunter Grass, who was brought up in a Nazi household and had the dizzying experience, after the war, of learning that everything he had believed to be true was a lie, Arthur Miller has had--more than once--to discard his worldviews. Coming from a family of profit-minded men, and discovering Marxism at 16, he learned that “the true condition of men was the complete opposite of the competitive system I had assumed was normal, with all its mutual hatreds and conniving. Life could be a comradely embrace, people helping one another rather than looking for ways to trip each other up.” Later, Marxism came to seem less idealistic. “Deep down in the comradely world of the Marxist promise is parricide,” he wrote, or, again, when he and Lillian Hellman found themselves unable to believe a Yugoslav man’s testimony of the horrors of Soviet domination, he says, unsparingly: “We seemed history’s fools.”

But he has not really been history’s fool. On the contrary, through his stand against McCarthyism, in his presidency of [the international writer’s organization] PEN, his fight against censorship and his defense of persecuted writers around the world, he has grown into a giant figure. When I needed help, I am proud that Arthur Miller’s was one of the first and loudest voices raised on my behalf.

When Arthur Miller says, “We must re-imagine liberty in every generation, especially since a certain number of people are always afraid of it,” his words carry the weight of lived experience, of his own profound re-imaginings. Most of all, however, they carry the authority of his genius. We celebrate the genius, and the man. Happy birthday.