All His Sons
Except that for most of his life, he forgot about one of them… This Vanity Fair article by Suzanna Andrews is about Daniel, Arthur Miller’s fourth child, who was born in 1966 with Down Syndrome. Miller had the child institutionalised almost immediately.
The Broadway producer Robert Whitehead, who died in 2002, would tell Martin Gottfried that Miller called him on the day of the birth. Miller was “overjoyed,” Whitehead said, and confided that he and Inge were planning to name the boy “Eugene”—possibly after Eugene O’Neill, whose play Long Day’s Journey into Night, which had won the Pulitzer in 1957, had awed Miller. The next day, however, Miller called Whitehead again and told him the baby “isn’t right.” The doctors had diagnosed the infant with Down syndrome. Born with an extra 21st chromosome, children with Down syndrome are often recognized by their upward-slanted eyes and flattened facial features. They suffer from hypotonia—decreased muscle tone—and mild to moderate retardation. Many are born with heart problems, and in 1966 they were not expected to live past the age of 20.It’s not an easy read. Institutional care in those days was not pretty:“Arthur was terribly shaken—he used the term ‘mongoloid,’” Whitehead recalled. He said, “‘I’m going to have to put the baby away.’” A friend of Inge’s recalls visiting her at home, in Roxbury, about a week later. “I was sitting at the bottom of the bed, and Inge was propped up, and my memory is that she was holding the baby and she was very, very unhappy,” she says. “Inge wanted to keep the baby, but Arthur wasn’t going to let her keep him.”
Some children never had any visitors. Their parents put them in Southbury and never saw them again. Other parents, like Inge Morath, were dedicated visitors. “They came like clockwork, every visiting Sunday,” says Richardson, who wonders how many of them were fully aware of the conditions in which their children were living. “If you were a parent who had left your child in that situation, would you ever want to admit that Southbury was like that? How could you live with yourself? You had to tell yourself it was all right.” Inge, however, appears to have seen things more clearly. After a Sunday visit to Southbury, du Plessix Gray recalls, Inge said, “‘You know, I go in there and it’s like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.’ That was the image she gave.”Today, four decades after Daniel was born, the situation is very different:
Experts say it is difficult to measure how much Daniel had been held back by years of living in an institution. Early-intervention programs, nurturing families, and special-education classes—all of which Daniel missed out on—have contributed to a 15-point rise in the I.Q. scores of Down-syndrome children in the last 30 years, says Stephen Greenspan, a professor of psychiatry and former president of the Academy on Mental Retardation. Today, many higher-functioning Down-syndrome children can read and write; some graduate from high school and even college. Chris Burke, the actor with Down syndrome, who played Corky on the television show Life Goes On, lives in his own apartment in New York and commutes to work. Daniel, by contrast, had to learn basic reading skills. He had to work on his speech, and people say it is still difficult to understand him unless you know him.
Suzanna Andrews wonders about the price that Miller would ultimately have to pay for his decision:
A writer, used to being in control of narratives, Miller excised a central character who didn’t fit the plot of his life as he wanted it to be. Whether he was motivated by shame, selfishness, or fear—or, more likely, all three—Miller’s failure to tackle the truth created a hole in the heart of his story. What that cost him as a writer is hard to say now, but he never wrote anything approaching greatness after Daniel’s birth. One wonders if, in his relationship with Daniel, Miller was sitting on his greatest unwritten play.
After reading the article, I was sure only of one thing: that I would not like to be judgemental about the decision that Arthur Miller made forty years ago. It was 1966, after all. Children born with Down syndrome were generally being put into institutions. But not all. Many remained at home, in the nurturing environment of their families; and one of Daniel’s cousins, also born with Down syndrome, was being cared for at home.
And what could explain Miller’s inexplicable silence, for so many years, about Daniel’s existence?
Read the whole thing. It makes you think.
