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Chapter Five

A Memory of Two Mondays: Conflict Between Will and

Circumstances

This play is a critique of modern times reflecting the dilemma of

working class in the industrialized system. A young man caught in the

warehouse cannot understand what point there can be, beyond habit and

necessity, for men to live this way. He is too yo ung to find out, but it is hoped

that the audience will ponder over one answer. It is that men live this way

because they must serve an industrial apparatus which feeds them in body and

leaves them to find sustenance for their soul too.

In th e industrialized society in the play, there appears a stark division

between the classes, b roadly dividing them into two – first the privileged

capitalist class, having money and power; and the second category is of the

working class, running in the rut of life, struggling for even the most basic

things of life. In this mundane existence, the woman is not given a substantial

voice too and eventually she seems to merge with the suppressed class. She is

just presented as another cog in the wheel never reflect ing her individuality in

the process.

The play also expresses a preoccupation with the facts that everything

we do in this fragmented world is so quickly wiped away and the goals, when

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won, are so disappointing. It is also the beginning of a further search. For it

points the different roads taken by the people who are caught in the warehouses .

As Arthur Miller says:

The warehouse is our world – a world in which things are

sent and endlessly received; only time never comes

back. (TE 65)

About its one -act formation, Miller writes that he has chosen to say

precisely enough about each character to fo rm the image which drove him to

write the play – enough and no more. Also, there are perfectly wonderful things

one can say in one sentence, in one letter, one look, or one act.

He adds further in introduction to Collected Plays:

I was striving not to make people forget they were in theatre, not

to obliterate an awareness of form, not to forge a pretense of life,

but to be abrupt, clear, and explicit in setting forth fact as fact and

art as art so that the sea of theatrical sentiment, which is so easily

let in to drown all shape, meaning, and perspective, might be held

back and some hard outline of a human dilemma is allowed to rise

and stand.

(49-50)

A Memory Of Two Mondays is Mi ller’s simplest and most purely

autobiographical play. It expresses direc tly the experience of an intelligent

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young man doing manual labour amongst a group of people who are condemned

for ever to a hard way of life which he himself will rise out of. It suggests

the dreariness of these routine lives, together with the great

kindness and mutual loyalty which make them tolerable.

(Gascoigne 180)

The play has a story but not a plot , because Miller believes that the life it

reflects “appears to me to strip people of alternatives and will beyond a close

and tight periphery in which they may exercise a meager choice.” (CP 50)

On the play’s first production, most of the cri tics paid little attention to

it. However, Miller remarked in “Social Plays,” contained in The Theatre

Essays:

Nothing in this book was written with greater love, and for myself

I love nothing printed here better than this play.

(TE 65)

This reaction from the author is obvious as the play shows his own journey

in life in a subtle way. Miller had to do all kinds of menial jobs like Bert in order

to earn his university fees as his father was not in a position to support his son’s

higher studies in the times of Depression. It reaches back in his life to a moment

when he was poised to move forward, to set his feet on the path that would lead a

young man, who read Dostoevsky on the subway train to work, towards ultimate

success as a writer.

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A boy works among people for a couple of years, shares their troubles,

their victories, their hopes, and when it is time for him to be on his way , he

expects some memorable moment, some sign from them that he has been

among them, that he has touched them and been touched by them. In th e sea of

routine that swells around them , they barely notice his departure. Bert reflects

that he will remember them always . He finds it peculiar to leave the place

forever:

And still I know that in a month or two

They’ll forget my name, and mix me up

With another boy who worked here once,

And went. Gee, it’s a mystery!

(CP 371)

Bert seems to say good-bye to each one of them, but they are engrossed in

their work and don’t care. So he “gradually moves – almost is moved – toward an

exit, and with his book in his hand he leaves.” (376) Bert’s intense longing for

social relationship here reminds one of Willy’s itching for the same in Death of a

Salesman when he rues –

There was respect, and comradeship, and gratitude in it. Today,

it’s all cut and dried, and there’s no chance for bringing

friendship to bear . . . they don’t know me any more.

(180-81)

The play depicts the picture of that sub-culture where the sinews of the

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economy are rooted. People are friends as long as they have their personal

interests. Simple courtesies become mere indulgence for them which they

cannot afford in the cut -throat competitive economy. Miller avers in his

introduction to Collected Plays contained in The Theatre Essays that it is

that darkest Africa of our society from whose interior only

the sketchiest messages ever reach our literature or our

stage.

(164)

The play is made up of two scenes six months apart, one in summer, the

other in winter. In the first scene, “the small triumphs and tragedies of life seem

rich.” (Helterman 98) The poetic language of the play breathes into it a sweet

fragrance that otherwise remains elusive in the shabby, smug and placid air of

the business environment of the play.

The two Mondays of the title are a Monday morning in summer when

young Bert is just beginning his job as a warehouse stock boy, and a winter

Monday when Bert is about to leave for college, having saved the five hundred

dollars’ tuition fees out of his weekly salary.

All the action takes place in “the shipping room of a large auto -parts

warehouse” (CP 332) with a long packing table and “factory -type windows

which r each from floor to ceiling and are encrusted with the hard dirt of the

years.” (332) Here the men take orders off the hook, go out into the bin -laden

alleys, fill the orders, bring the merchandise back to the table, where Kenneth

packs and addresses everything.

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The main characters include three middle -aged men: Raymond, who has

worked his way up to the position of manager; Larry, who is still a clerk in need

of a raise to support his family; and Tom, the accountant who is almost fired for

drunkenness the first Monday but who, by the second, has beaten the habit.

About t he same age is the boss, Mr. Eagle, who passes through the area

only through his way to the toilet but whose approach heralds instant animation

among the workers as well as attempts to shield absent or incapacitated fellow

employees. Bert courageously and cleverly outwits the boss in the charade to

protect a drunk colleague from being fired.

The two older men are sixty-eight years old Gus, and his pal Jim. Bert is

eighteen and Kenneth is a young Irish immigrant who sings and recites poetry.

Gus is the most colourful of the employees, although each has an area of

expertise which Bert admires. Gruff and outspoken, Gus, on his first appearance

is “not completely sober, not bright yet,” (336) for he and Jim have just spent

the weekend in carousing and heavy drinking.

Although Gus does not come out a good husband, he shows complete

solidarity with his colleague in trouble. Like Agnes, he is protective of drunken

Tom and is ready to be fired in first place if Tom is fired.

Gus’s life just as fully squashes him as Willy Loman’s did. But he is

different from others in the sense that -

he is more than a low man or a new man or a Joe Killer. He

also has his load of guilt, but he has a vigour about him, an

indomitability. (Unger 159)

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With one final fling Gus breaks the monotony of long years of work; all

the others are more cautious. They need their jobs.

Larry, no better than a cog in the wheel, knows where every auto part is

stored in the entire five -storeyed warehouse. He is the father of triplets, and an

efficient worker. Even though he is refused a five -dollar a week raise, he

defiantly buys an Auburn car because

I am sick of dreaming about things. They’ve got the most

beautifully laid-out valves in the country on that car, and I want it,

that’s all. (342)

Possessing it even earns him some attention from Patricia, the office

beauty. But by the second Monday, he has to sell the Auburn:

It’s out of my class anyway. (367)

His romance with Patricia, who was dreaming of this car, come s to an

end as well. How do the relationships get affected by material possessions , is a

naked truth in the modern commercial times. There is no warmth and true

feelings for each other. Only money decides everything.

The helplessness of working class is visible here, where a man’s hard

work and efficiency does not earn him t he simple pleasures of life. He is denied

a little raise in salary despite his hard work and sincere efforts in the harsh

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economic system which caters to the rich only. The moneyed class continues

making more money with existing money. This abysmal gap am ong the various

strata of society nudges the sensitive hearts to no end. Larry’s agony is touching:

Two years I’m asking for a five-dollar raise. Meantime my

brother’s into me for fifty bucks for his wife’s special shoes;

my sister’s got me for sixty-five to have her kid’s teeth fixed.

So I buy a car, and they’re all on my back – how’d I dare buy

a car! Whose money is it? Y’know Gus? (349)

Although the dramatist puts th e words in Larry’s mouth – Whose money

is it? - showing the anguish of the marginalized class, he does not depict the

upper strata of the society fully in this play, giving all the space to the working

class. We are not allowed to see Eagle’s life and view point, who is the boss

here, as we peep into Howard’s life who comes out an ordinary family man in

Salesman.

Kenneth, another employee working in the same warehouse, has love for

poetry and literature like Bert. He desires to quit his shabby, dul l and

monotonous job as he tells Bert –

You’ve got to keep movin’, and – I’ll move . . .

(375)

He abhors the dirty window glass panes of his office through which no

clear sky is visible but is destined to live with them as he cannot keep his mind

steady to anything thus reflecting the frustration of the common man, his weak

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will-power, and la ck of focused approach in the suffocating life. For him the

circle ends where it has begun.

Miller wrote this play in order to relive a sort of reality where necessity

was bare and open. He himself had worked in such type of a warehouse in order

to earn money in his younger days. He intends to assert here the value of hope,

why it must arise, as well as the heroism of those who know, at least, how to

endure its absence. As the protagonist in the play asserts:

I don’t understand;

I don’t know anything:

How is it me that gets out?

I don’t know half the poems Kenneth does,

Or a quarter of what Larry knows about an engine.

I don’t understand how they come every morning,

And no end in sight.

That’s the thing - there’s no end!

Oh, there ought to be a statue in the park –

“To All the Ones That Stay.”

One to Larry, to Agnes, Tom Kelly, Gus . . .

(370-371)

Thus the pathetic condition of the lower class generates empathy in us

for whom the struggle for survival is hard. Christopher Bigsby remarks:

The prevailing mood is one of entropy. Marriages are in

disrepair. Alcohol substitutes for something lost along

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the way, death is in the wings.

(174)

Bert feels something terrible in the office atmosphere but is unable to

comprehend it fully. As he tries to explain:

Gus, and Agnes, and Tommy and Larry, Jim and Patricia –

Why does it make me so sad to see them every morning?

It’s like the subway;

Every day I see the same people getting on

And the same people getting off,

And all that happens is that they get older. God!

(358)

His fears are the ones anybody can identify with in the modern

industrialised world. As he says

Sometimes it scares me; like all of us in the world

were riding back and forth across a great big room,

from wall to wall and back again,

And no end ever! Just no end!

(358)

Though Bert always hated coming to his work place, the same dried-up

jokes and the dust; he finds it difficult to leave it as he knows he will remember

the people as long as he lives. And still he knows that in a month or two , they

will even forget his name.

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How can a person be so ruthless? How can another be so emotional?

Perhaps this is the enigma about human nature that has puzzled Shakespeare and

other great writers too, thereby providing them precious, infinite material about

human nature to brood over. One may call it the question of resilience too, how

some are able to preserve their sensitivity in spite of the harsh winter cold winds

of the socio-economic times, while the others fall an easy prey to it.

Therefore, the insensitivity of the c olleagues in the office at Bert’s

departure reflects the insecurities of their life, the rut, the web in which they are

entrapped which has robbed them of all warmth and culture once associated with

man. Their days begin and end with subway rides, as they travel not so much in

hope or expectation as resignation. They share a fate and very little else. They

are capable of unity, if only to resist the power of their employer, but that

solidarity is momentary. Miller himself retuned to be met by blank faces at his

former work place.

But Bert is also living in the same conditions. How does he manage to

walk out of the dull and drab environment without nurturing any bitterness in his

heart? Perhaps the boy has conquered the circumstances with a strong will. He

sees poetry in life, has guts to see dreams and the age is also on his side. This

winning over the circumstances with iron-will is very much near to Miller’s own

heart as the optimist advocates this philosophy in the character of Charley in

Salesman and in his other plays too.

Arthur Miller writes from the experience of Depression and the civil

war as it provided him the ground u pon which he learned to stand. It was a

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terrible time as there was no money, but it was also a “strong” time. I ntroducing

a 1970 National Education Television version of A Memory Of Two Mondays ,

Arthur Miller commented that it was -

a common experience when everybody was in the same boat, and

perhaps we understood each other a little better then.

(Griffin 95)

The Depression period here, reminds one of Albert Camus’s famous

novel The Plague (1947) where the epidemic inspires a courageous resistance in

people of Oran, an A lgerian town. It is a “town without intimations; in other

words completely modern.” (Camus 6) With no gardens or trees, people work

hard, but solely with the object of getting rich. Doing business from morning to

evening, they are left with little time fo r living. But the indifferent people

suddenly become aware of each other’s existence when the terrible disease

stalks the city. The narrator comments:

Say what you like Tarrou, but let me tell you this: the one

way of making people hang together is to give ‘em a spell

of plague. You’ve only got to look around you.

(158)

What Miller seems to assert in the play is that hardships do always

wrench out the negativity out of men. He observes that the dusty warehouse,

cold in winter and hot in summer, along with the endless days of work, five and

a half days a week for a pittance, may seem awful to viewers today, but it was “a

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haven in the thirties. It was a place to go; at least you had a job - this was a great

thing – that’s what remained with me – that I was so lucky.” (Griffin 96)

Thus the dirty and unmanageably chaotic setting of the warehouse

becomes a little home to which, unbelievably perhaps, these people like to come

every Monday morning despite what they say.

Within the space of ninety minutes , Miller manages to make his viewers

and readers care about the characters, each of whom is an individual, even

though the workplace and the frustrations are the same.

Kenneth, who only recently has arrived from Ireland and is nearest Bert

in age, evokes the most pathos in this “pathetic comedy.” Singing and reciting

poetry, when asked as to how he learned it all, his reply is:

Why, in Ireland, Bert; there’s all kinds of useless occupations in

Ireland. (CP 339)

Some of his dialogues are real poetic:

“It’s the poetry hour, Gus,” (339)

He announces:

this is the hour all men rise to thank God for the blue of the sky,

the roundness of the everlasting globe, and the cheerful

cleanliness of the subway system. And here we have some axels.

Oh, Bert, I never thought I would end me life wrappin’ brown

paper around strange axels. (339)

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In such a state of wonder and loss , Kenneth enquires from Gus whether

Bert is “only kiddin” about going to college someday:

I suppose he’s just got some strong idea in his mind. That’s

the thing, y’know. I often conceive them myself, but I’m

all the time losin’ them, though. It’s the holding on - that’

what does it. (340)

While inertia seems to grip others, Kenneth, after a few months there, is

still full of energy. He decides, with Bert’s help, to wash the dirt -encrusted

windows, which reach from floor to ceiling. As they do so, Miller signals the

passage of time:

They make one slow swipe of the window before them

and instantly all the windows . . . burst into the yellow

light of summer that floods into the room. (357)

Then the changing of the season is conveyed by the verse dialogue of the

young men: “a real summer sky and a little white cloud goin’ over . . . the leaves

falling on the gray days . . . tree is turning red . . . don’t cats walk dainty in the

snow!” (357) gradually, as they speak, all light hardens to that of winter, finally.

By the second Monday, in winter, Kenneth is disillusioned with life; he

has forgotten his poetry, lost his optimism, and turned to drink ing. About to

depart for college, Bert suggests that Kenneth, being smarter than he is, could

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learn anything. Kenneth replies in hopelessness, his manner - rougher, angrier,

lacking decency:

Eleven dollars a week room and board,

And all she puts in the bag is a lousy pork sandwich . . .

How’s a man to live,

Freezing all day in this palace of dust

And night comes with one window and a bed

And the streets full of strangers

And not one of them’s read a book through,

Or seen a poem from beginning to end

Or knows a song worth singing.

Oh, this is an ice cold city, Mother,

And Roosevelt’s not makin’ it warmer, somehow.

(359)

Throughout the play Kenneth sings the Irish ballad “The Minstrel Boy,”

symbolic of both himself and Bert. Although, like the minstrel boy, Kenneth has

hope and optimism at first, he has lost it by the second Monday. He has thoughts

of joining the civil service, but, he tells Bert:

I’ve a feelin’ I’d never dare leave it, y’know? And I’m not ready

for me last job yet, I think. I don’t want nothin’ to be the last,

yet. (360)

Even this hope dims when, in his drunkenness, he has thrown over a bar

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and will have to pay for all the ruined liquor and glasses.

Drinking seems to be one escape sh ared by employees in the play. Miller

writes in Timebends about the young men in America in those times that “they

knew that there was absolutely no future for them here and at the same time they

had to be thankful for working at all in those days. The repression of anger,

though, was not always successful.” (219)

With this, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot like situation comes t o

mind, as characters there settle for fantasies or deaden themselves to the

circularities of their lives. One Monday is much like another. As a character in

Godot says – “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful.”

(Abrams 87)

Bert, however, is on his way elsewhere, passing through, while the

others are caught by necessity and by their lives. Like th e minstrel boy in

Kenneth’s song , who concludes the play, Bert sets out for the war of life with

his book in his hand, wearing a “wild harp slung behind him.”

(CP 376)

A point that Mil ler constantly makes about the class he represents in this

play is that, despite difficulties, people have spirit; they can laugh and joke

about the hard times as well as lament them. As a critic remarks:

The characters seem imbued with a strength and dignity that goes

beyond their petty stations in life.

(Helterman 98)

One may also observe that the slightly lecherous advances of an old

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man seem to breathe energy of life; or a man with the ability to find a part for

an antique auto seems almost the keeper of the racial memory; and Bert’s

determination to read Tolstoy’s War and Peace on the subway appears to be the

triumph of intellect over circumstances. All the characters seem to be filled with

hope about new cars, getting married, or next weekend’s date.

The humour springs naturally from the situations. Gus is so outrageously

larger than life that everything he does is in the realm of hyperbole, rising to a

climax in the final spree, as described by Jim. The reaction of the workers is both

humorous and characteristic when Bert’s and Kenneth’s washing of windows

discloses a next-door bordello.

So one may observe that the play, othe rwise appearing sad and a hopeless

comment on life is not pessimistic. After all, from this endless, timeless, will -

less environment, a boy emerges who will not accept its defeat or its mood as

final, and literally takes himself off on a ques t for a higher gratification. Miller

rightly avers in his introduction to the Collected Plays:

In fact we simply do not want to see how empty the lives of so

many of us are even when the depiction is made hopefully and

not at all in despair. (49)

The play speaks not of obsession but of rent and hunger of different classes

and beyond that, the need for a little poetry in life. It becomes more the matter of

individual preference and will -power. Instead of condemning the s ystem, Miller

shows the worth of individual spirit above everything, as it is capable of turning

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the tide in one’s favour, howsoever bleak the situation may be. Raymond has

made a considerable progress in life and Bert is also able to move forward.

The question of gender is not addressed much in the play, albeit the

subjugation of woman does appear in the presentation of the female employees

and the wives. Gus’s indifference to his ailing wife puts him in the class of Joe,

Willy and Pro ctor in patriarchal structure. The husband is roaming around

having a good time by indulging in booze, bothering little a bout the ailing wife

back home.

Gus’s wife, Lily is incurably ill. He telephones her from his office as

she is going thr ough the excruciating pain but he hangs up in disgust when she

doesn’t hear anything. He, like a typical husband in Miller’s earlier plays, seems

to be oblivious of his responsibilities towards his sick wife. At the end of first

Monday, his wife dies and h e has never recovered from her death whom he left

to die alone while he was drunk in Staten Island.

He goes on one last spree on the second Monday with Jim, splurging his

wife’s insurance money of five thousand dollars. With Gus in one cab, Ji m in

another and a third cab to follow in case of a flat tyre, they go to “some real

high-class places” and finally Gus dies in one of the cabs on the way.

One pities the wife more when her insurance money provides the reckless

man a chance to have a gala time with his friend in toe. Why should men have

all the fun mostly, and that too, at the expense of their wives? – this seems to be

a perennial question to ponder over after reading this play or after so many years

in the present times too , in the male dominated society . Has the position of

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woman really changed to enable her to stand with man , keeping her self- respect

and dignity intact?

There are two women working in the warehouse. Agnes, the switchboard

operator, is described as “spinster in her late forties, always on the verge of

laughter.” (334) She carries serious demeneour at work place and encourages

Bert in his dreams:

Don’t let any of them kid you, Bert. You go ahead. You read

the New York Times and all that. (335)

Her interest in the current political events, and reference to her nephew who

“is only thirteen, but he reads the New York Times too” (335) reveals her longing

for learning too, which she is deprived of. Her loud laughter exposes the hardships

of her life which she desperately tries to conceal.

Patricia, on the other hand, is

twenty- three, blankly pretty, dressed just a little too tightly. She

is not quite sure who she is yet. (335)

Like All My Sons, here also, one can perceive a sharp difference between

the old and new generation of women. Gus’s wife suffers silently, and Larry’s

wife too, is not aware of her husband’s fling at the work place. Patricia, on the other

hand, conveniently breaks off from Larry when he has to dispose of his car.

The presence of a brothel nearby, Patricia’s frailty of mind, Agnes’ plastic

smiles, and the subjugated wives remind one of the society presented in Albert

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Camus’ The Plague where:

The men and women consume each other rapidly in what is

called ‘the act of love’, or else settle down to a mild habit of

conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two

extremes. (6)

In America of those times, or anywhere else, even today, for lack of time

and thinking, people love each other without knowing much about it. Sincerity

in relationships has become a rarity in the competitive, materialised society.

One may conclude by saying that it is heartening to see one reticent spirit

attempting to speak and we discover our own relationship s at work place in the

process. In fact, the history of man is a ceaseless process of overthrowing one

determinism to make way for another. And it is a process inconceivable without

the will of man. His will is as much a fact as his defeat.

Any determinism is only stasis without the application of man’s will. And

the play depicts it well. There is at least one character that is able to turn his back

on those others who saw no stars projected from the rooftops and settled for what

they could grasp rather than what they could reach.

Miller has delineated the struggle of middle a nd lower middle classes

starkly in the play who journey to and fro each day but never really arrive,

having no destination beyond their working place. In fact, ther e is a respect for

these people living uninspected lives of quiet desperation, as there is a pride in

finding a form and a language to invest those lives with signifi cance in the

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theatre which Miller suggests they lacked in a world whose reality had seemed

so oppressive. Kenneth’s singing of Norman Macleod’s song in the play lifts up

the sagging spirits and reinstates the triumph of will over circumstances:

Courage, brother! Do not stumble

Though thy path be dark as night;

There’s star to guide the humble;

Trust in God, and do the right. (339)

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Works Cited

Abrams, M.H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, 7th ed. Bangalore: Prism, 2003.

Print.

Bigsby, Christopher. A Critical Study. UK: Cambridge UP, 2005. Print.

Camus, Albert. The Plague.Trans. Stuart Gilbert. London: Penguin,

1960. Print.

Gascoigne, Bamber. “Arthur Miller 1915 - .” Twentieth Century Drama. 11

(1967): 174-183. Print.

Griffin, Alice. Understanding Arthur Miller. Columbia: Caroline

Press, 1996. Print.

Helterman, Jeffery. “Arthur Miller.” Concise Dictionary of American

Literary Biography: The New Consciousness, 1941–1968. 7 (1987):

358-385. Print.

Martin, Robert A. ed. The Theatre Essays of Arthur Miller.

New York: The Viking Press, 1978. Print.

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Miller, Arthur. Collected Plays. New Delhi: Allied, 1973. Print

---. Timebends: A Life. New York: Grove Press, 1987. Print.

Hogan, Robert. “Arthur Miller 1915 - .” American Writers: A Collection of

Literary Biographies 3 (1974): 145-169. Print.