Presence: Collected Stories
By Arthur Miller
Bloomsbury £25, 389 pages
FT Bookshop price: £20

Arthur Miller is best known as the author of politically charged plays such as Death of a Salesman and The Crucible. His indictments of postwar American society remain relevant and are regularly staged to great acclaim. This may explain why another facet of his work has so often been overlooked – that of Miller as an author of short stories.

Presence, a collection of Miller’s short fiction first published in the US two years ago, is finally appearing in Britain. It includes his 1967 short story volume, I Don’t Need You Any More; his critically acclaimed long short story “Homely Girl, A Life” (1995); and six stories published before his death in 2005.

This compilation reproduces Miller’s prologue to the first edition of I Don’t Need You Any More, in which the author explained his views on the short form. The short story, he says, is placed “at the lower end of the scale of magnitude, like bungalows in the architectural world”. Yet it remains “a vessel for those feelings ... which, unelaborated, are truer.” The attraction is that “one can more quickly catch wonder by surprise, which is, after all, why one writes”.

Nowhere does Miller succeed in catching wonder by surprise better than in “The Misfits”, the story on which the film starring Marilyn Monroe was based. Its protagonists are gruffly laconic drifters, herding wild mustangs for a handful of dollars. They say little. Their silences do all the talking. Into those silences Miller insinuates deep hinterlands of character and rich dramatic potential. A less restrained writer would have composed a novel.

Whether exploring the anxieties of childhood and separation, as in the award-winning I Don’t Need You Any More, or examining the weight of past relationships on present ones, as in “Homely Girl, A Life”, Miller manages to be both succinct and descriptively bold. A child feeling “silvery” with some secret knowledge, or a sunset flaring “like damp paper suddenly catching fire”, are only two of his typically arresting images.

Stories, unlike plays, Miller claims, allow an author to isolate a moment in stillness. He is rightly celebrated for his stagecraft. But it is a shame he did not write more stories like these.