Friends, there was a scene in the play when a seventeen year old Biff, at the peak of his charismatic powers and bound for the University of Virginia on a football scholarship, ventures to Boston where Willie is on business for the Wagner Company, it's a sales trip.

Biff is in a bit of a state of panic. He has failed his mathematics final exam - by four points - and therefore he will not be able to graduate and go off to university. Biff wants his father to talk to the math teacher, and convince him to simply grant Biff the four points. Biff expresses to Willie the belief (and this is very important - he verbally expresses the belief) that he will be able to talk the math teacher into it. "You know how you can talk," Biff said.

This is the scene in the hotel and the hotel room to where Biff has tracked him to. Meanwhile, Willie's longtime lover, the secretary, is hiding in the bathroom. But the woman, drunk on alcohol and forbidden passion, is unable to contain herself, revealing her presence in the room.

Willie tries to lie his way out of it, saying that the woman is staying in the room next door, and there has been some plumbing accident and people are fixing up her accomodations, and she is merely holding out in Willie's room until the repairs are complete. And so on and so forth.

But Willie is a poor salesman and a worse liar. Everything is almost instantly quite clear to Biff, who reacts with predictable hurt and anger.

Willie hustles the woman out the door and tries to forcefully banish the event from existence. He tells Biff to help him back, for he is on his way back to New York to have a talk with that math teacher who is so vexing his Golden Boy.

Biff said to this, "He wouldn't listen to you." This is very interesting. He does not say "Don't bother," or "I don't want anything from you." He does not say that. He declares that the math teacher would not listen to his father.

It is intellectually possible to maintain a belief in the persuasive powers of Willie, but not want him to deploy them in light of this enormous betrayal Biff has witnessed. But no, Biff denies those powers.

We suspect that he is right. But he must have known this all along to have reached this conclusion so quickly, instantaneously in fact. I like to compare this incident to a situation in which a transplanted organ is ultimately rejected by the body, despite the best intervention of doctors, because of the fundamental incompatibility of the organ and the perspective host body.

In that moment when Biff says to Willie, "He wouldn't listen to you," the young man repudiates everything Willie has ever stood for - I say stood for, not what he was (indeed, it is at this moment that he begins to draw to the neglected aspect of the Loman legacy, working outdoors with one's hands).

Biff rejects the propaganda that he has been inundated with all his life, that Willie is a great salesman, persuasive, well liked, the heir to the great Dave Singleman, and that this is Biff's specific inheritance, legacy for Biff the carry on.

But as this organ is rejected by the body which is the personality of Biff, takes strong root, decades later, in the personality of Hap. Hap's assertion that "he [Willie] had a good dream and here's where I'm gonna win it for him."

In this case an organ transplant is attempted, the outcome is uncertain but ultimately the graft holds.

Biff has never told anyone, not Hap and especially not his mother, about what he learned about Willie's affair. Linda, being a woman of her time, would not have appreciated the dislosure had Biff told her about it. Hap would not have been able to work up any indignation about it, in fact quite the opposite.

One interesting question we can pose is: how might Hap have reacted if he had been the one to seek out Willie in Boston, and found Willie in such a delicate situation with the secretary?

Everything we know about Hap says that his reaction would have been very different. He would not have been upset. He would have rather thought he was a chip off the old block. He would have solemnly promised to keep Willie's secret and not tell his mother.

This Hap would do, not out of a desire to spare his mother pain, but as a means of connection to his father, as a means of finally feeling important to his father.

But at the end of the play, well after Willie's suicide and funeral, when the rest of the family and uncle Charlie is all assembled back at the Loman house, Biff once again asked Hap to come out west with him. This is the scene in which Biff says Willie had the wrong dreams and Charlie, irrelevantly, replies that "a salesman's got to dream, boy."

Hap defends Willie's dream saying that it was a "good dream." One can aruge whether or not it is a worthy dream to be a successful salesman, but aside from that that term "good dream," again, misses the point of the issue Biff raised, that Willie's dream was the wrong one for him, given who he was.

"... and here's where I'm gonna win it for him," Hap says about his determination to stick it out in New York and be a successful salesman. He refuses Biff's invitation to go out west with the additional epithet "The Loman brothers," he spits out with contempt.

Hap might have well as said "I am Willie Loman now." I will make one more point about this next time.

wingedcentaur