Art and life …

… Arthur Miller’s shame – TheTLS. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I came to understand shame as a structure for Miller’s life and work when I learned about his son, Daniel, who was born in 1966 with Down’s syndrome. Miller and his third wife, Inge Morath, chose not to raise Daniel at home. Instead they placed him in a state facility in Connecticut which, according to someone who worked there at the time, “was not a place you would want your dog to live” (quoted in Vanity Fair, September 13, 2007). According to Martin Gottfried’s Arthur Miller: A life (2003), Miller neither visited his disabled son there, nor mentioned him in his memoirs or interviews.