Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - Mária Kurdi: "You just have to love this world." Arthur Miller's The Last Yankee.

with her husband's lack of material success carries some resonance of the contempt Miller's mother felt for his father's financial collapse during the Depression. His mother's two brothers both died young, which fact is echoed in Patricia's brothers' respective suicides before they would have reached middle age. The differences between the outlook of Patricia's family and that of her husband, Leroy, recall Miller's own experiences in connection with his first wife's, Mary's piously Catholic family. The most important of all the autobiographical references, however, is Lero/s being a carpenter, a craft Miller himself cultivated and probably considered an art. In Timebends he describes how he built a little shack, where I could block out the world and bring into focus what was still stuck in the corners of my eyes. ... A pair of carpenters could have put up this ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in two days at most, but for reasons I still do not understand it had to be my own hands that gave it form, on this ground, with a floor that I had made, upon which to sit to begin the risky expedition into myself.

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0 It was in that self-built shack that Death of a Salesman started to take shape. Leroy Hamilton, the last Yankee of our present play can be regarded as a kind of self-portrait, presenting the craftsman part of the artist that wishes to live and create independently of the world's hustling ways. Scene One contains the encounter between the two husbands while waiting for their wives to join them. Occupied in "idly leafing through an old magazine" (1), I^eroy's behaviour becomes immediately contrasted with that of Frick, who looks at his watch as soon as he has entered and taken a seat. A man of business, he is always short of time, even when on a visit to his hospitalized wife. The ensuing conversation focuses on the two women and the nature of their illness. Soon it turns out that not only the two husbands' material background is widely different, with the Hamiltons sometimes not being able to pay the bills they get and the Fricks having more than the average, but also their approach to their wives' depression. Frick keeps on 1

0 Arthur Miller, Timebends, 183. 66