When Arthur Miller died in 2005 at the age of 89, as Charles Bigsby tells us on the last page of his latest Miller book, it was on the anniversary of the opening night of the first Broadway production of “Death of A Salesman” –  the sixth Broadway revival of which is opening tomorrow night. It’s thus as good a time as any for the publication of the interviews Bigsby had recorded with the playwright over the three decades of their friendship: “The Arthur Miller Tapes: A Life in His Own Words” (Cambridge University Press, 384 pages.)

Bigsby, a British scholar, novelist and something of a one-man Arthur Miller industry, began corresponding while still in graduate school with the famous American writer who was twenty-five years his senior. Bigsby would soon become a regular houseguest at Miller’s home in Roxbury, Connecticut (“He mended my tape recorder and fixed my car. No home should be without an Arthur Miller.”)  He has authored many books about the playwright, including a two-volume biography and a critical study, and is the founding director of the Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies at the University of East Anglia.

“The Arthur Miller Tapes” is not one of his scholarly works (there is no index nor annotations; there is a time line of his life and career as a preface, but few of the interviews are even dated), and the back-and-forth can take on the feel of a casual conversation:

If he hadn’t been a playwright, Bigsby asks at one point, what would he had been happiest doing?

“…I probably would have written movies, I think, and ended up shooting myself.”

“I had this vision of you becoming a carpenter,… 

“I could have made a living as a carpenter, sure.”

“You made the bed you sleep on.”

“Our bed is made of cherry, and I get a great satisfaction from creating something out of nothing, which is really what a writer is doing anyway.”

But we learn plenty — about his childhood, his politics (and political persecution), his marriages, and above all, each one of his plays.

The son of Jewish New Yorkers who had immigrated from Poland, Miller was an indifferent student who had no interest in literature, much less writing, until he stumbled onto Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” in the library, which led him to other of the great Russian writer. Enrolled at the University of Michigan, mostly to get away from his family, he took a writing class and tried his hand a first play: .”It just seemed the most important thing you could do. …in those times…writing a play seemed to be socially important..People took the theater extremely seriously as a way of stating something.” (He gives a hilarious account of his one effort at acting in college.)

His first play on Broadway, in 1944, ironically titled “The Man Who Had All The Luck,” closed in four days. “I resolved never to write another play, so I wrote a novel.” The novel, “Focus,” was successful, but he went back to playwriting (and his first success, “All My Sons”) because a novel had “just too many words.” And he needed an audience. “I have a pretty good ear, and I could use that in a way I could not do in the novel. Playwriting is a largely auditory talent. People with dead ears are at a disadvantage when they are writing plays. O’Neill struggled with this problem all his life…he is a great exception.”

It’s perhaps because there is an apparent rapport between Bigsby and Miller that he can venture into areas other interviewers might avoid, such as his first two marriages, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the results are revelatory.

Bigsby: “You must be aware how intriguing, and I suppose in a sense how baffling, that marriage with Marilyn seemed to people.”

Miller: “There is something baffling about all my relationships. …I cannot say that I really understand what happened….The fundamental problem I had with the marriage was that it became clear that she needed constant help all the time.”

There are several memorable remarks that Bigby elicits from Miller in the chapter about  “Death of a Salesman.” Miller agrees with the observation made over the years that the play, first produced in 1949, seems to take place both during the Depression and post- War War II: “All I can tell you is that I think it is suspended out of chronological time. I simply melded two periods together. It sounds absolutely insane, but that is really the case.”   Miller makes it clear throughout these interviews that the Great Depression – the 1929 crash occurred when he was 14, and eventually wiped out his parents’ wealth —  had a profound effect on his life, and on his subsequent art.

The entire approach to time in the play is based not just on a theatrical strategy but on his personal psychology: “I’ve never been able to make time real for myself. I can’t remember when something happened two weeks ago, three years ago, or when I was in England last time. The calendar doesn’t seem to exist in my head.” (This helps explain why he entitled his 1987 autobiography “Timebends.”)

 Asked about the “powerful, surviving love” between Biff anthey are d Willy, despite the father’s betrayal, Miller says: “It is a love story between Biff and his father Willy. They are trying to get together at the same time they are being driven apart.”

Bigsby observes that “the central character in all four of your first major plays dies” and asks him whether he did this to make them more significant 

“Why I would have done this,…is mysterious to me, but at the same time one element is clear, that is that the tragic structure is based upon a death, and I was deeply involved in trying to create tragedies.”

Bigsby doesn’t tell us which four plays he’s talking about – he clearly means All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, but is “A View from the Bridge” a major play or does Bigsby mean “After The Fall”?  More evidence that the sense of these interviews as conversations between friends has both its drawbacks and advantages.