ARTHUR MILLER: FRONT AND CENTER

"I don't know a critic who penetrates to the center of anything," the late, great playwright Arthur Miller once said, according to his front-page obituary in The New York Times.

But it would be hard to find a better understanding of what was central in Miller's work than this morning's appreciation, "A Morality That Stared Down Sanctimony," by Charles Isherwood, a Times drama critic. He writes:

Arthur Miller may or may not be the greatest playwright America has produced -- Eugene O'Neill and Tennessee Williams both have equal, if not more, claim to that phantom title -- but he is certainly the most American of the country's greatest playwrights.

He was the moralist of the three, and America, as some recent pollsters rushed to remind us, is a country that likes moralists. The irony, of course, is that Mr. Miller's strongest plays are fired by convictions that assail some of the central ideals enshrined in American culture.

If O'Neill's concerns were more cosmic, and Williams' more psychological, Miller wrote most forcefully of man in conflict with society. His characters have no existence outside the context of their culture; they live only in relation to other men. Indeed, it was a fierce belief in man's responsibility to his fellow man -- and the self-destruction that followed on his betrayal of that responsibility -- that animated Mr. Miller's most significant work.

His greatest concerns, in the handful of major plays on which his reputation will last, were with the moral corruption brought on by bending one's ideals to society's dictates, buying into the values of a group when they conflict with the voice of personal conscience. To sell out your brother is to sell out yourself, Mr. Miller firmly believed.

At a time when America has sold itself out -- the jury's guilty verdict against Lynne Stewart earlier this week is only the latest instance -- the central meaning of Miller's work couldn't be more exemplary, nor Isherwood's appreciation more appropriate.