Back in Brooklyn, I veered between congratulating myself on having escaped destruction and wondering why I had left. A day and another day with no word from Kazan, and I began to feel relief. Cohn must finally have turned the script down, which meant that I needn’t return to Hollywood again; maybe writing was too sexual to be truly done for hire. Mary, meantime, was doubtless reading my uneasiness, and I was as helpless to forgive myself as she was. At last the phone rang. It was Kazan speaking in his softest tone, I thought, almost as though others were in an office with him, which was probably not true at all; I may simply have caught a kind of public apprehension in him.
Cohn wanted some changes; if I agreed, the film would be doable, he said. The main one was that the bad guys in the story, the union crooks and their gangster protectors, should be Communists. I started to laugh even as my heart froze. Kazan said he was merely transmitting what Cohn had told him, in the belief that I should have it uninflected by his own comments. Roy Brewer, the head of all the Hollywood unions, had been brought into the matter—by the FBI, presumably; he had read the script and said flatly that it was all a lie, that he was a personal friend of Joe Ryan, head of the International Longshoremen’s Association, and that none of the practices I described took place on the piers. Finally, he informed Cohn that if the film was made he would pull all the projectionists across the country out on strike so that it could never be shown. The FBI, moreover, regarded it as a very dangerous story that might cause big trouble on the nation’s waterfronts at a time when the Korean War was demanding an uninterrupted flow of men and materiel. In effect, unless Tony Anastasia was turned into a Communist, the movie would be an anti-American act close to treason.
Nearly speechless, I said that I knew for a fact that there were next to no Communists on the Brooklyn waterfront, so to depict the rank and file in revolt against Communists rather than racketeers was simply idiotic, and I would be ashamed to go near the waterfront again. His voice even and hopeless, Kazan repeated that idiotic or not, it was what Cohn-Brewer-FBI insisted on. In an hour or two I wired Harry Cohn that I was withdrawing my script as I was unable to meet his demands. Next morning a boy delivered a telegram to my Brooklyn Heights door: “ITS INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU PULL OUT. HARRY COHN.”
Once again I was roaming Brooklyn Heights, crossing the liberating bridge on foot or bike, finding my way down to the Battery to watch people boarding the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. By now years of grimy rain had washed away the “Dove Pete Panto” graffiti, and I knew I would never rescue this man whom I had never seen from his fate as anonymous fish food at the bottom of the bay. That the trade union idea, into which my generation had poured so much idealistic hope, was in this case just another racket was a commonplace, but that it should be so systematically protected from one coast to another, and under the name of patriotism to boot, was something to gag on. It was not even a question of my personal credibility; the corruption on the waterfront had by now been documented in a Republican newspaper, the New York Sun, by an investigative reporter named Malcolm Johnson, who had laid out the whole skein of racketeering controls for all to see and had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize on the same day I received mine for Salesman. In fact, Joe Ryan himself would shortly be sent to Sing Sing for his crimes as head of the ILA. So there was no longer a duty to cry out the facts. That had been done. But the blind tides of traffic continued to roll mindlessly over the bridge, above the scenes my screenplay had portrayed and the conditions Johnson had meticulously exposed. The country clutched corruption to its breast while it sent its sons to cleanse the earth eight thousand miles away in Korea.
A perpetual night of confusion was descending, I thought. Years later I came to see this as a narrow view when I learned from new and younger friends—William Styron and James Jones in particular—that the early fifties was their budding time and America to them seemed destined to guide, if not to lead, the world. For them, as writers living in Rome or London or Paris, the heirs of a victorious war, it was an America that might on bad days win the booby prize but withal was still liberty’s home.
It did not look quite like that from the bridge where I did my walking. I thought of writing an article about my Hollywood misadventure to demonstrate the state of freedom in America, but it seemed an absolutely pointless exercise in self-pity when in the face of Johnson’s exposés a Brewer could still call my script an untruth and make tough Harry Cohn fold up and run with him, cloaking his retreat in the American flag. If I did speak out, I thought, I must do so where it would count and not be brushed aside like yesterday’s paper. I did not expect anybody to be outraged because a playwright had had his film script suppressed; on the contrary, I might even have to face new attacks for having conceived a story that might obstruct the smooth delivery of arms to Korea. Such were the times. I was all alone, as so many felt who could not quite make it aboard the American Century, that train one sensed was bound for nowhere, its tracks ending in the desert where the vast pauperized majority of mankind lived.
Behind my despairing sense of being treed there were more than general impressions. A year or so earlier I had been invited by Jack Goodman, a senior editor at Simon and Schuster, to join a weekly discussion on what writers might do to combat the rising hysteria in the country, the spreading fear of uttering any opinion that could be remotely interpreted as left or even liberal, let alone pro-Soviet. We were heading straight into the time when an American senator could just about call Defense Secretary George C. Marshall, former general of the army and secretary of state, a Communist in league with Stalin, and without arousing a convulsion of disgust for doing so.
Each Tuesday evening in his comfortably worn ground-floor Greenwich Village living room, Jack managed to collect a couple of dozen stars of the magazine and fiction worlds. Edgar Snow, then an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, Jack Belden, novelist and reporter on China, John Hersey, novelist and New Yorker reporter, Richard Lauterbach of Life, Ira Wolfert, novelist and Reader’s Digest reporter, and Joe Barnes, foreign editor of the Herald Tribune, were some of the regulars, and photographer Robert Capa was among the faces that came and went each week. Soon there were lawyers and businessmen, people disturbed by the know-nothingism of the hour, twenty or thirty of us sitting around drinking and smoking and trying to conceive a countertide in the media to the overwhelming propaganda of the right. Essays were suggested, themes kicked around, and some of us contacted other writers outside New York asking for their ideas. The novelist Louis Bromfield, then scientifically farming in Ohio, wrote back angrily damning us all as conspiring Communists. Such were the times.
After many months, many proposals, many actual attempts to publish one or another reply to the prevailing paranoia, not a single line from any of us had seen print anywhere. The shock, if not dramatic, was noticeable: whatever our reputations, we were little more than easily disposable hired hands. Everywhere teachers were being fired for their associations or ideas, real or alleged, as were scientists, diplomats, postmen, actors, directors, writers—as though the “real” America was rising up against all that was not simple to understand, all that was or seemed foreign, all that implied something slightly less reassuring than that America stood innocent and pure in a vile and sinister world beyond the borders. And from this there was no appeal. One lived in an occupied country where anyone at all might be a spy for the enemy. Indeed, within a year, Goodman would be hauled before HUAC, not accused of Communism but called to explain why these gatherings had been held and how as a non-Red he could have sponsored such an anti-American campaign involving so many first-class authors and editors. In short, within our little hard-drinking band there had been an informer, for the Committee knew the name of every participant.
Ten, twenty, thirty years later it became clear that a good part of what drove this domestic campaign was a conscious decision, first by a sector of the Republican Party, out of power for nearly two decades, to equate the basic New Deal i
deas with disloyalty, and then by acquiescent Democrats to see the light. But at the time, to most people, it all had the feel of a natural phenomenon, an unstoppable earthquake rolling through the political landscape. Despite the Democrats’ only spotty resistance to him, McCarthy would soon be calling the whole Roosevelt-Truman era “twenty years of treason.” And indeed, by the eighties under Reagan, the structural supports of the New Deal had largely been repudiated even if they could not be totally dismantled without the country collapsing.
My wife, Inge, as yet unknown to me, arrived in 1951 as a photojournalist on brief assignment in Hollywood, to find herself harshly interrogated by an immigration inspector, under suspicion of Communist connections because she had a novel in her suitcase published by the Left Book Club of London. Having spent the war in Nazi Germany, part of the time as a forced laborer under the bombs at Berlin’s Tempelhof airport, she could finally take no more and, polite as she was, had to inquire how the inspector imagined a Communist would have survived the war in Nazi Germany, and why she was never asked if she perhaps had some Nazi sympathies. But of course we were too busy admitting Nazi war criminals under patently false identities, men and a few women who in later decades would at last be extradited and tried for war crimes in Europe. Such were the times.
I had grown used to living with a rage that had no form. Apart from I. F. Stone, whose four-page self-published weekly newsletter persistently examined the issues without obeying the rule that every question had to be couched in anti-Communist declarations, there was no other journalist I can now recall who stood up to the high wind without trembling. With the tiniest Communist Party in the world, the United States was behaving as though on the verge of bloody revolution. In my lawyers’ office on some business problem that had no connection with politics, I happened to say that the Broadway theatre was becoming “corrupt,” with its galloping commercialism, and one of the attorneys glanced up from a document and reprimanded flatly, “That’s a Communist position.” For an instant the breath went out of me, not from fear, but in astonishment at how this blanket of suspicion was really smothering any discussion at all. Was I now to take care never to use that word in reference to Broadway’s commercialization, which I sensed was going to end where it has, in the present sterility?
But along with rage marched guilt, the guilt of the naysayer whose very skepticism implies his betrayal of the credulous mass. The threat of public obloquy caused a defensiveness in me that I came to hate. As if this were not enough unreality, I had still another level of existence, as celebrated playwright treated to every kind of glorification, including Father of the Year—an honor too ironical when I was so at odds with myself, with Mary, and with the undeniable inner pressure to break out of what had come to seem an emptied, self-denying carapace. I wanted to stop turning away from the power my work had won for me, and to engorge experience forbidden in a life of disciplined ambition, at the same time dreading the consequences—less to myself, perhaps, than to those I loved. What Freud had named the return of the repressed I was unwittingly inviting up from the depths. Cautiously at first, or so I fatuously thought, I let the mystery and blessing of womankind break like waves over my head once or twice, enough to shatter for me the last belief that social arrangements, including marriage, had something to do with inevitability. Fluidity and chance soon poured in to swamp all law, that of the psyche as well as the courts. We were all mythmaking creatures, it seemed, who created not only art but lives no less fictional, no less willed into existence, if only we knew it.
I saw the civilities of public life deftly stripped from the body politic like the wings of insects or birds by maniac children, and great and noble citizens branded traitors, without a sign of real disgust from any quarter. The unwritten codes of toleration were apparently to be observed no longer. I might resolve not to relinquish my public self, the only part of America I could hope to control, but the chaos within remained; a youth was rising from a long sleep to claim the feminine blessing that was the spring of his creativity, the infinite benediction of woman, a felicity in the deepest heart of man, as unmaterial, unrepayable, and needful as the sky. It was as though great success, like an immense hot fire that sucks all the oxygen out of the air, had used up all the love that my life had collected around me, and if I blamed myself or my wife or the confusions of a seductive mother from one moment to the next, it would later, much later, all come toward me from the past as simply the price I was called upon to pay for what I had been given.
If under the pressures to go to the right I moved even further left for a time, it is explicable, if it is at all, as a willful act of self-abandonment and defiance of my new-won standing in the world. Respectable conformity was the killer of the dream; I was sick of being afraid, of life and of myself and of what on many days seemed the inexorable march of the cheerful totalitarian patriots.
I attended a few meetings of Communist writers in living rooms, but I felt as unreal there as I had as a loner. Decent enough middleclass people, they were probably searching out much the same species of self-realization that would later be sought in one or another of the cults or self-improvement klatches. But in this time, self-cleansing came through sacrificing the present to the perfect socialist future in order to banish emptiness, contradictions, ambiguities, and arrive at a solid and straightforward moral position. A certain smugness and mutual congratulation on the left was hard to reconcile with all the uncertainties bedeviling me, distant as I felt from self-knowledge then. In any case, it was one of my paradoxes that I could call for community and human solidarity while finding it all but impossible to sit at any kind of meeting or really to accept the leveling implied. And when I was finally unable to return, I had to wonder what had happened to the possibility of a philosophical, transpolitical ideal of the kind attributed to an Ibsen or a Chekhov. What seemed to have displaced the nobility of the ideal was a tactical or strategic maneuvering, vis-á-vis oneself as well as the nation and the world. Later I came to think of the dilemma in terms of the absence of transcendence, but I was not yet at a point where politics was an evasion in a particular sense; it still seemed like the ultimate reality to which one ought to be attached. If I turned away from it here, it was as much from a sense of bewilderment and dissatisfaction with myself as from disillusionment with others.
By this time, the early fifties, the woods were filling up with ex-radicals disillusioned not only with the Soviets but with liberalism and even the promise of science itself as an enhancement of the spirit. Jews were embracing Catholicism, socialists were joining the Communist witch-hunt with no regard for its civil liberties implications, and lifelong pacifists were banging the Cold War drums. It all seemed another version of escape from the moral tangle we all knew life had become. Some distaste clung to the spectacle of the born-again anti-Soviet ex-radical, in part because the time was so opportune for such conversions. Besides, I was taunted by my own tenuous hold on steadfast faithfulness in general, and my fears aroused the self-accusation of egoism that I had carried with me since early years. In any case, castigating the Soviets, fashionable as it had become, was not the issue, it seemed to me; the question was what one was for. How had these conversions transformed these people, lifted them from the dead flat plane on which most lived? If the left was telling its beads, repeating its ritual prayers to the always receding future of a classless and just society, the new orthodoxy of the right was demanding a confirmation of American society that I could hardly give, with such examples before me as the forbidden screenplay in the drawer, revealing not only the mass oppression of thousands of people under the bridge but now the repressive power of a right-wing union reaching across the country into the studios of Columbia Pictures.
I should have exulted in my aloneness and taken heart from Ibsen’s signature line in An Enemy of the People —“He is strongest who is most alone.” But the Jew in me shied from private salvation as something close to sin. One’s truth must add its push to the evolution of public ju
stice and mercy, must transform the spirit of the city whose brainless roar went on and on at both ends of the bridge.
In the early fifties the so-called theatre of the absurd was still in the offing, and I would resist most of its efforts as spurious, but each generation of writers has an investment in its accomplishments that it is obliged to defend. Had I really obeyed the logic of my daily observations, however, I would have been an absurdist myself, for most of the time I was shaking my head at what was going on and laughing the dry laugh of incredulous amazement.
I had sold Salesman to Stanley Kramer, who made the film for Columbia. My sole participation was to complain that the screenplay had managed to chop off almost every climax of the play as though with a lawnmower, leaving a flatness that was baffling in view of the play’s demonstrated capacity for stirring its audiences in the theatre. Stanley Roberts, the author of the screenplay, flew east to sit with me and bring me to reason, and I recall one response of his that may illuminate the problem.
In the first act, after Linda pleads with her sons to have compassion for their father, Biff relents and agrees to stay on in New York and look for a job, saying that he will simply keep out of Willy’s way. But Linda rejects this as inadequate; he must give his father psychological support. To Biff this means relinquishing his opposition to Willy’s ideas about how he should live his own life, and he explodes, “I hate this city and I’ll stay here! Now what do you want?” To which Linda replies, “He’s dying, Biff,” and proceeds to describe Willy’s preparations for suicide.
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