All Our Sons: Joe Paterno, Joe Keller
What makes a great work of literature great?
I was pondering this question last weekend at a performance of Arthur Miller’s cerebral drama After the Fall at Theater J in Washington, DC. It’s a fine production, skillfully directed, well acted, and featuring a truly beautiful set design. But you may be forgiven if you’ve never even heard of After the Fall—it’s not one of Miller’s better-known works, certainly nowhere near the Olympian fame of Death of a Salesman, say, or The Crucible. Written in 1963 (the premiere came a year later), After the Fall is a semi-autobiographical work which takes place in the mind of its protagonist, Quentin, a New York Jewish intellectual examining his life and relationships. Though Quentin is a lawyer rather than a writer, it’s impossible to miss the connections to Miller’s own life, especially when Quentin remembers the break with a friend who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, just as Miller’s great pal Elia Kazan did; and, most especially, in the scenes detailing Quentin’s relationship with his unstable, suicidal second wife, Maggie, an internationally famous singer addicted to drugs and alcohol.
Need I remind the patient reader that Arthur Miller’s second wife was Marilyn Monroe?
[image error]
After the Fall isn’t a great play, in large part because it’s simply too personal: for all of Miller’s later denials, it’s impossible to watch it without thinking that everything Quentin says is what Miller really thought, and that the relationships are more or less as they were with their real-life analogues. It’s unfair, of course, and many a writer living a less celebrated life than Mr. Miller’s has no doubt gotten away with the same kind of mildly-disguised autobiography without anyone being the wiser. But when the play premiered in New York only a year and a half after Monroe’s suicide, critics savaged it as crass and tasteless exploitation.
That charge isn’t fair—the play is in many ways brilliantly written—but it’s unlikely that After the Fall will ever be truly embraced by audiences, at least until Miller’s life, and Monroe’s, are completely forgotten. And it’s going to be a long time before that happens.
Still, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Miller and his career in the week since I saw the play. But not because of the production itself.
I’m thinking of Arthur Miller because of Joe Paterno.
I’ll confess right here and now that until the Penn State football scandal broke, I had never even heard of Joe Paterno. I’d barely even heard of Penn State, and hadn’t the slightest idea they had a world-class football team. Really, I don’t do football. My ignorance of the sport is almost total—though, like anyone who has grown up male in America, I do know the basic rules of the sport thanks to any number of pickup games at recess when I was in middle school. So, yes, I know what “second and six” means. I know how many points a touchdown gets you. I know what a “point after” is. But beyond that very basic level, the world of football is dark to me—as are a lot of other worlds, alas. (Can someone please tell me who the hell “Kim Kardashian” is?)
But there’s something primal about the Penn State scandal, and Coach Paterno’s role in it—something that’s very much akin to the world of Arthur Miller’s work, which was always filled with moral and ethical dilemmas his characters had to face. To be specific, Paterno’s downfall very closely mirrors that of one of Miller’s finest creations, Joe Keller, the protagonist of one of Miller’s greatest plays, All My Sons.
All My Sons was the drama that, in 1947, made its young author famous. It focuses on a day and night in the life of the Keller family, seemingly ordinary middle-class Americans whose paterfamilias, Joe, harbors a terrible secret. As the play proceeds, hints at the nature of the secret begin to be revealed as Joe, the owner of a successful machine-parts factory, is involved in emotional exchanges with his wife, Kate, and particularly his son Chris, a war hero who has come back to America disillusioned and sick at the sight of an America in which “there was no meaning” to the war. “Nobody was changed at all,” Chris bemoans. To the average American, he says, the entire conflict “was a kind of a—bus accident.” Eventually it becomes clear that Joe’s crime was to knowingly sell defective airplane parts to the Army during the war—parts which failed, leading to the deaths of twenty-one men.
Why did he do it?
Because he panicked. In the midst of frantic wartime production, he had to make a fast decision about what to do with the bad parts—and he made the wrong decision, the exact kind of defining moral moment so common in Miller’s writing. From Keller’s perspective, he had built his business for his sons, and he had to do anything he could to save it. Those other boys, those twenty-one American pilots who went down in flames? They weren’t family. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, but he had a choice to make and he made it—“for you,” he tells Chris. “A business for you.”
Confronted by his horrified son, Joe tries to justify his actions: “I’m in business, a man is in business; a hundred and twenty-one cracked, you’re out of business; you got a process, the process don’t work, you’re out of business…they close you up, they tear up your contracts, what the hell’s it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes!”
Do you see what I’m getting at here?
Joe Paterno, it seems, put forty-six years into his “business”—a beloved figure, “a big man,” just as Joe Keller was. Yet at some point in 2002 Joe Paterno was faced with a moral choice—and he made the wrong choice.
True, Paterno’s choice was not as catastrophic as Keller’s. No one died as a result of it. And it’s certainly important to remember that Paterno himself did not abuse a single child. But when faced with the information that a coach was abusing young boys—information presented to him in the form of eyewitness testimony of a ten-year-old being raped in a locker-room shower—Joe Paterno thought it was adequate to mention it to his superior and then drop the matter completely and forever. He did what he was legally required to do, and absolutely nothing else.
So was Paterno as bad as Joe Keller? No. But then there’s something appalling about trying to quantify moral demerits in these situations. And after all, if Paterno followed the letter of the law, then what’s the problem?
Again, Miller’s play addresses this question directly, when Joe talks to his son Chris near the end, pointing out that plenty of others were doing just what he did (just as plenty of others apparently knew about Jerry Sandusky, the abusive coach on the Penn State staff).
Given that lots of others were doing it, “Why,” Joe asks Chris plaintively, “am I bad?”
To which Chris offers this devastating rejoinder: “I know you’re no worse than most, but I thought of you as better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
Countless people—players, coaches, fans—saw Joe Paterno as their father. If not literally, then certainly as an example of a beloved father figure. Joe Pa. A great man. Countless people saw Joe Keller the same way.
One article on the Paterno scandal quotes the coach as saying, “Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.”
I wonder what Joe Paterno’s success tastes like now.
At the end of All My Sons, Keller finally drops his defenses and admits defeat, realizing his disastrous error—that his flesh-and-blood children were not his only responsibility, his only “sons.”
“They were all my sons,” he acknowledges
.
I wonder if Joe Paterno understands, even now, that all those abused boys were his sons, too.
What makes a great work of literature great? One element is what might be called continuing relevance. When we recognize a human tragedy from literature played out in life, even decades or centuries after the fictional work was created, then we may be in the presence of a great work. All My Sons is a great work
.
Joe Paterno might want to read it.
#
I was pondering this question last weekend at a performance of Arthur Miller’s cerebral drama After the Fall at Theater J in Washington, DC. It’s a fine production, skillfully directed, well acted, and featuring a truly beautiful set design. But you may be forgiven if you’ve never even heard of After the Fall—it’s not one of Miller’s better-known works, certainly nowhere near the Olympian fame of Death of a Salesman, say, or The Crucible. Written in 1963 (the premiere came a year later), After the Fall is a semi-autobiographical work which takes place in the mind of its protagonist, Quentin, a New York Jewish intellectual examining his life and relationships. Though Quentin is a lawyer rather than a writer, it’s impossible to miss the connections to Miller’s own life, especially when Quentin remembers the break with a friend who named names before the House Un-American Activities Committee, just as Miller’s great pal Elia Kazan did; and, most especially, in the scenes detailing Quentin’s relationship with his unstable, suicidal second wife, Maggie, an internationally famous singer addicted to drugs and alcohol.
Need I remind the patient reader that Arthur Miller’s second wife was Marilyn Monroe?
[image error]
After the Fall isn’t a great play, in large part because it’s simply too personal: for all of Miller’s later denials, it’s impossible to watch it without thinking that everything Quentin says is what Miller really thought, and that the relationships are more or less as they were with their real-life analogues. It’s unfair, of course, and many a writer living a less celebrated life than Mr. Miller’s has no doubt gotten away with the same kind of mildly-disguised autobiography without anyone being the wiser. But when the play premiered in New York only a year and a half after Monroe’s suicide, critics savaged it as crass and tasteless exploitation.
That charge isn’t fair—the play is in many ways brilliantly written—but it’s unlikely that After the Fall will ever be truly embraced by audiences, at least until Miller’s life, and Monroe’s, are completely forgotten. And it’s going to be a long time before that happens.
Still, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about Miller and his career in the week since I saw the play. But not because of the production itself.
I’m thinking of Arthur Miller because of Joe Paterno.
I’ll confess right here and now that until the Penn State football scandal broke, I had never even heard of Joe Paterno. I’d barely even heard of Penn State, and hadn’t the slightest idea they had a world-class football team. Really, I don’t do football. My ignorance of the sport is almost total—though, like anyone who has grown up male in America, I do know the basic rules of the sport thanks to any number of pickup games at recess when I was in middle school. So, yes, I know what “second and six” means. I know how many points a touchdown gets you. I know what a “point after” is. But beyond that very basic level, the world of football is dark to me—as are a lot of other worlds, alas. (Can someone please tell me who the hell “Kim Kardashian” is?)
But there’s something primal about the Penn State scandal, and Coach Paterno’s role in it—something that’s very much akin to the world of Arthur Miller’s work, which was always filled with moral and ethical dilemmas his characters had to face. To be specific, Paterno’s downfall very closely mirrors that of one of Miller’s finest creations, Joe Keller, the protagonist of one of Miller’s greatest plays, All My Sons.
All My Sons was the drama that, in 1947, made its young author famous. It focuses on a day and night in the life of the Keller family, seemingly ordinary middle-class Americans whose paterfamilias, Joe, harbors a terrible secret. As the play proceeds, hints at the nature of the secret begin to be revealed as Joe, the owner of a successful machine-parts factory, is involved in emotional exchanges with his wife, Kate, and particularly his son Chris, a war hero who has come back to America disillusioned and sick at the sight of an America in which “there was no meaning” to the war. “Nobody was changed at all,” Chris bemoans. To the average American, he says, the entire conflict “was a kind of a—bus accident.” Eventually it becomes clear that Joe’s crime was to knowingly sell defective airplane parts to the Army during the war—parts which failed, leading to the deaths of twenty-one men.
Why did he do it?
Because he panicked. In the midst of frantic wartime production, he had to make a fast decision about what to do with the bad parts—and he made the wrong decision, the exact kind of defining moral moment so common in Miller’s writing. From Keller’s perspective, he had built his business for his sons, and he had to do anything he could to save it. Those other boys, those twenty-one American pilots who went down in flames? They weren’t family. It wasn’t pretty, maybe, but he had a choice to make and he made it—“for you,” he tells Chris. “A business for you.”
Confronted by his horrified son, Joe tries to justify his actions: “I’m in business, a man is in business; a hundred and twenty-one cracked, you’re out of business; you got a process, the process don’t work, you’re out of business…they close you up, they tear up your contracts, what the hell’s it to them? You lay forty years into a business and they knock you out in five minutes!”
Do you see what I’m getting at here?
Joe Paterno, it seems, put forty-six years into his “business”—a beloved figure, “a big man,” just as Joe Keller was. Yet at some point in 2002 Joe Paterno was faced with a moral choice—and he made the wrong choice.
True, Paterno’s choice was not as catastrophic as Keller’s. No one died as a result of it. And it’s certainly important to remember that Paterno himself did not abuse a single child. But when faced with the information that a coach was abusing young boys—information presented to him in the form of eyewitness testimony of a ten-year-old being raped in a locker-room shower—Joe Paterno thought it was adequate to mention it to his superior and then drop the matter completely and forever. He did what he was legally required to do, and absolutely nothing else.
So was Paterno as bad as Joe Keller? No. But then there’s something appalling about trying to quantify moral demerits in these situations. And after all, if Paterno followed the letter of the law, then what’s the problem?
Again, Miller’s play addresses this question directly, when Joe talks to his son Chris near the end, pointing out that plenty of others were doing just what he did (just as plenty of others apparently knew about Jerry Sandusky, the abusive coach on the Penn State staff).
Given that lots of others were doing it, “Why,” Joe asks Chris plaintively, “am I bad?”
To which Chris offers this devastating rejoinder: “I know you’re no worse than most, but I thought of you as better. I never saw you as a man. I saw you as my father.”
Countless people—players, coaches, fans—saw Joe Paterno as their father. If not literally, then certainly as an example of a beloved father figure. Joe Pa. A great man. Countless people saw Joe Keller the same way.
One article on the Paterno scandal quotes the coach as saying, “Success without honor is an unseasoned dish; it will satisfy your hunger, but it won’t taste good.”
I wonder what Joe Paterno’s success tastes like now.
At the end of All My Sons, Keller finally drops his defenses and admits defeat, realizing his disastrous error—that his flesh-and-blood children were not his only responsibility, his only “sons.”
“They were all my sons,” he acknowledges
.
I wonder if Joe Paterno understands, even now, that all those abused boys were his sons, too.
What makes a great work of literature great? One element is what might be called continuing relevance. When we recognize a human tragedy from literature played out in life, even decades or centuries after the fictional work was created, then we may be in the presence of a great work. All My Sons is a great work
.
Joe Paterno might want to read it.
#
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