ARTHUR MILLER—ELITIST.

ARTHUR MILLER—ELITIST. I think it can be hard for a gifted writer not to look down on people of lesser ability. I want to juxtapose two sentences from a single paragraph in Morris Dickstein’s review of Christopher Bigby’s biography of Arthur Miller in the July 24 Times Literary Supplement. The first sentence: “In TIMEBENDS….[Miller] dismisses …’the ineffectual and the artistically failed, the sentimental drones of the literary left from whose ranks I was forever separating myself.’” The second sentence: “in his memoir [Miller] portrayed his Marxism as ‘far less a political than a moral act of solidarity with all those who had failed in life….” Miller was proud that he was not an elitist, but he was more willing to express solidarity with economic failure than with artistic failure.