I was possibly more scared than others because I was scared of being scared. But it was also that given my nature and time, I aspired to a rather exalted image of the dramatist as a species of truth-revealing leader whose brandished light would blind the monster Chaos in his approach. Dramaturgy was the physics of the arts, the one that failed when it lied and succeeded when it cut to the first principles of human life. With so joyously painful a burden, it was not easy to think of slipping away and taking to the hills.
When Bobby Lewis came to me with the idea of a new adaptation of Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, with Fredric March and his wife, Florence Eldridge, as the Stockmanns, it bucked me up that these veteran theatre people, whom I had never connected with radical politics, had awakened to the danger. I soon learned that the Marches were suing a man for libeling them as Communists; the charge had cost them film roles, and they saw themselves in the shoes of the Stockmanns, who were also crucified by a mob in the throes. Bobby Lewis, a veteran of the Group Theatre, whose tenderly imaginative staging of Saroyan’s My Heart’s in the Highlands I had vastly admired years before, had a witty detachment that had kept him out of partisan politics, and I tended to trust him as a showman despite my feeling that the project would do little more than move the lot of us closer to the bull’s-eye of the Red-hunters’ target.
The play, now that I read it again, seemed musty despite its thematic relevance to the current situation. But the producer, a wealthy young businessman named Lars Nordenson, the son of a Swedish senator, saw a swelling prefascist tide running in the United States and pressed me to work on the script. He would provide his own word-by-word rendering of Ibsen’s original Norwegian, which he claimed was not at all wooden, like the translations, but slangy and tough, with scatological outbursts. After all, it had been written in fury and, for Ibsen, in an unusually short time. With Nordenson’s first tentative pages of translation, in pidgin English with no attempt even to form sentences, I began the work and was soon convinced that I might capture Ibsen’s spirit in the kind of fight I was sure he would have enjoyed.
As always, I would find out what I really believed through my attempts to dramatize my sense of life. The more familiar I became with the play, the less comfortable I felt with one or two of its implications. Though Dr. Stockmann fights admirably for absolute license to tell society the truth, he goes on to imply the existence of an unspecified elite that can prescribe what people are to believe. For a democrat this was rather a large pill, until I recalled myself telling the meeting of Marxists years earlier that an artist had the duty to claim new territory, and that if I had obeyed either the Party line or the shibboleths of the national press during the war, I could not have written All My Sons —which, now that the war was over, was being praised for its courage, its insights, and its truth. Ibsen-Stockmann was simply making the artist’s immemorial claim as point man into the unknown.
Still, it is indefensible in a democratic society, albeit the normal practice, to ascribe superior prescience to a self-elected group, and the tangle only gets worse when Ibsen draws a parallel with biological selection, even introducing an element of breeding into the matter. Indeed, the great man himself had found it necessary to back away from the play’s implied social Darwinism by going before a trade union meeting in Norway and assuring the resentful members that he was only calling for recognition of a spiritual avant-garde with no power over other people but merely the right to advance new ideas and discoveries without a majority vote. In the play, however, this demurrer remained somewhat less forthright, it seemed to me.
And so I cut across the problem to its application to our moment in America—the need, if not the holy right, to resist the pressure to conform. It was a full-blown production with solid sets and a Freddie March in the flood of his considerable art, and bristling with his private anger besides. Eldridge did her damndest to rub some color into the rather gray role of Stockmann’s worried, faithful wife. If Lewis erred, it was in encouraging a certain self-indulgent picturesqueness and a choreographed quality, especially in the stirring crowd scenes where March stood over the townspeople with arms spread out like Christ on the cross, something dangerously off-putting in what was a teaching play to start with. But these were quibbles of my own. The production was strong and forthright, and in dozens of other productions in coming years the same script would electrify audiences, though on Broadway it never caught fire.
The play had always been a message work, Ibsen’s furious reply to the vilification in press and society of his play Ghosts, a scandal in its time. George S. Kaufman had warned long ago that a playwright with a message had better send it by Western Union, given Broadway’s historic allergy to uplift masked as entertainment, but my own feeling was that the play could have established itself with its natural public, the sizable number of people who resisted the threatening atmosphere of the time. Instead, the press reacted defensively, as if its virginity had been fingered. Some of the critics, clever as could be, claimed to have detected my anti-U.S. propaganda hand in the line spoken by the Stockmanns’ one consistent supporter, the Captain, a rugged fellow who at the end of the play commiserates with them in their mob-wrecked living room, where they sit dejectedly wondering what to do next: “Well, maybe you ought to go to America,” life being freer across the water. According to these critics, such Miller-injected irony was a typically heavy-handed misuse of the sainted Ibsen’s play for the purpose of sneering at American pretensions to civic freedom. I was tempted to point out that I had simply taken the line from Ibsen’s original Norwegian text, but I refrained, hopelessly aware that nothing would burn off the fog of suspicion that I had used Ibsen as a front for the Reds. That the critics sprang to the defense of Ibsen’s purity without bothering to read him was one more testimony to the power of the obsessive fear that we had hoped our production of the play might penetrate.
The failure in 1950 of An Enemy of the People opened wide the door to my time of confusion, and as always, it was through my work that I tried to find clarity. I began sketching what I called An Italian Tragedy, which after several months I laid aside. Initially, I had the bones of the story from Vinny Longhi, but in its first murky draft in 1950 it was more a probe into the mysterious world of incestuous feelings and their denial, leading to a murder-suicide. I could not really understand why I was writing it, but growing more and more anxious for light, I threw open any and every window; it was a painful time of rebirth, perhaps even a second adolescence when I seemed to be turning into a stranger to myself and everyone else in a world I had unaccountably made. But the trail of the play vanished before I could complete it, and I felt defeated again. It was some five years before it resurfaced as A View from the Bridge in its original one-act form. And it was more than a decade before I finally glimpsed something of myself in this play, when I saw Robert Duvall, a young actor I had never heard of until then, in Ulu Grosbard’s powerful off-Broadway revival. As I watched Duvall, the most unimaginable of incarnations came through to me from his Eddie Carbone—I suddenly saw my father’s adoration of my sister, and through his emotion, my own. When I wrote the play, I was moving through psychological country strange to me, ugly and forbidding. Yet something in me kept to the challenge to push on until a part of the truth of my nature unfolded itself in a scene, a word, a thought dropping onto my paper.
Another of these unfinished probes of 1950 was the story of a group of research physicians employed by a wealthy pharmaceuticals maker who inspires them to important discoveries while suborning them to his business interests, subtly taking over their very wills as he strokes their ambitions. Alternately mocking his crude commercialism and sucking up to him, they typify what I then saw as the captive artist-creator.
Into their midst comes the mistress of Dr. Tibbets, Lorraine, a character modeled rather distantly on Marilyn, whom I still barely knew. With her open sexuality, childlike and sublimely free of ties and expectations in a life she half senses is doomed, she moves instinctively to br
eak the hold of respectability on the men until each in his different way meets the tragedy in which she has unwittingly entangled him—one retreats to a loveless and destructive marriage in fear of losing his social standing; another abandons his family for her, only to be abandoned in turn when her interests change. Like a blind, godlike force, with all its creative cruelty, her sexuality comes to seem the only truthful connection with some ultimate nature, everything that is life-giving and authentic. She flashes a ghastly illumination upon the social routinization to which they are all tied and which is killing their souls—but she has no security of her own and no faith, and her liberating promise is finally illusory.
Behind the whole story stands an idealistic image of the humane role they had originally believed their science to play, a redemptive power they no longer have the strength and faith to grasp. They have matured into the ego-time when there is no ideal that cannot be seen through, no belief that can fill its adherents with creative hope in a culture that has prized man’s sexuality from his social ideals and made one the contradiction of the other.
The play remained unfinished because I could not accept the nihilistic spiritual catastrophe it persisted in foretelling. That is, I believed it as a writer but could not confess to it as a man. I could not know, of course, that in the coming years I would live out much of its prophecy myself. Putting it aside, I adapted Ibsen’s play, which of course is a clear statement of resistance to conformity but also an affirmation of hope and human integrity, and a play, incidentally, with no sensual eruptions. It was in some part a reflection of my own split, which I could not stop from widening, between the willed determination to keep my family together and fulfill my role as father and the corrosive suspicion that family, society, all “roles,” were just that—conventions that would pour me in concrete, forbidding my nature and vision their evolutionary changes. What I had repressed was indeed returning, and the self-accusations of insincerity that hounded me were deserved. For I knew in my depths that I wanted to disarm myself before the sources of my art, which were not in wife alone nor in family alone but, again, in the sensuousness of a female blessing, something, it seemed, not quite of this world. In some diminished sense it was sexual hunger, but one that had much to do with truthfulness to myself and my nature and even, by extension, to the people who came to my plays. I deeply wanted to be one, not divided, to speak with the same voice in private and publicly. I did not see why marriage and family necessarily imposed strategies of subtle self-censorship, not so subtle subterfuge, and implicit betrayal. But I lacked the courage to declare in so many words that I was no longer speciously whole, as I had been, and that the future for me was no longer known. I retreated into silence, uncertain of what I might say and what was prohibited, for I had already passed beyond the conventions, beyond a commonsensical awareness of what one’s partner could or should be called upon to bear. My life was havoc, seizures of expansive love and despairing hate, of sudden hope and quick reversals of defeat.
By now, even after only those few hours with Marilyn, she had taken on an immanence in my imagination, the vitality of a force one does not understand but that seems on the verge of lighting up a vast surrounding plain of darkness. I was struggling to keep my marriage and family together and at the same time to understand why I felt as though I had lost a sort of sanction that I had seemed to possess, since earliest childhood. Whom or what was I writing for? I needed the benediction of something or someone, but all about me was mere mortality. I came to see that I had always assumed I was writing in the service of some worthy cause in which I no longer believed. I had learned how to be alone for very long periods, but someone, I had always supposed, was secretly watching over me unseen. It was of course the mother, the first audience—actually the concept of her in a most primordial sense that perhaps only the boy-child, half lover and half rebel against her dominion, really knows in his mythifying blood. My own mother was mortally flawed by her very normal expectations for a successful son, far too grossly material to leave intact the gossamer of her ancient authority; her love was too real, too mixed with the needs of her own impure, transactional self. I could not live, not happily, without the myths of childhood, which at bottom feed our everlasting becoming and our faith in self and world. The muse has always been a sanctifying woman, God help her. And she was gone.
Finally sick of pretending to be a landlord, especially Henry Davenport’s landlord, I managed to sell our Grace Court house and buy a mid-nineteenth-century single-family house on nearby Willow Street, one block from the river. (I learned later that the anonymous purchaser of our house, acting through an agent for fear that no one would sell to him directly, was W. E. B. Du Bois, the great black historian.) Trying to send up all the signals of a confident marriage, I spent a week installing a new subfloor in the entrance hall, laid a cork floor on that, built all sorts of conveniences in the kitchen, did fifty things a man does who believes in a future with his family, but the ease of mutual trust had flown from us like a bird, and the new cage was as empty as the old where no bird sang.
Occasionally I got a note from Marilyn that warmed my heart. In strangely meandering slanted handwriting that often curled down margins and up again on the other side of the paper, using two or three different pens with a pencil thrown in, she talked about hoping we could meet again when she came east on business, and offered to come without any excuse if I gave her some encouragement. I wrote back a muddy, formal note saying that I wasn’t the man who could make her life happen as I knew she imagined it might, and that I wished her well. Still, there were parched evenings when I was on the verge of turning my steering wheel west and jamming the pedal to the floor. But I wasn’t the man who was able to do that either.
At the same time that I was wrestling with this inner turmoil, rumors of weird games going on under HUAC pressure were rocking the theatrical community. There was still nothing like a blacklist in the theatre, no doubt because there was no single group of powerful producers to be bulldozed, as the controlling companies in Hollywood had been, into policing their artists. In the theatre, financing came from dozens of small investors, and most producers were simply temporary occupants of tents that were struck and vanished with the end of each show. Furthermore, few theatre actors were known across America where the votes were, and the Committee was manifestly uninterested in “investigating” if the results would land on the back page with the crossword puzzle. But there were a few HUAC forays into New York, and one heard now of prospective witnesses making deals to name each other before the Committee, thus to ease their consciences about informing. Inevitably, some individuals refused to play and were named without their agreement, but their resistance only justified their newly reborn former comrades in nailing them as hardcore Communists.
For me the spectacle was depressing, and not only for the obvious reasons. Certainly I felt distaste for those who groveled before this tawdry tribune of moralistic vote-snatchers, but I had as much pity as anger toward them. It bothered me much more that with each passing week it became harder to simply and clearly say why the whole procedure was vile. Almost to a man, for example, the accused in 1950 and 1951 had not had a political connection since the late thirties or early forties, when in their perfectly legitimate idealism they had embraced the Russian Revolution as an advance for humanity. Yet the Committee had succeeded in creating the impression that they were pursuing an ongoing conspiracy. For another thing, they were accused of having violated no law of any kind, since the Communist Party was legal, as were its fronts, which most often espoused liberal positions that did not so much as hint at socialist aims.
Swirling about the hearings was a moral confusion that no one seemed able to penetrate and clarify, even by bending history now and then; for example, there were militant actors who defied the Committee by taking the Fifth Amendment, imagining themselves heirs of Georgi Dimitrov, the hero who in a Nazi courtroom, in the face of torture and the threat of summary execution, threw the charge of set
ting fire to the Reichstag back at the Nazis and accused them of having torched it themselves, as they doubtless had. (Amazingly, he survived and became, after the war, the premier of Communist Bulgaria.) This act of defiance was a thrilling legend in the thirties and had stamped itself upon the radical movement as the ideal way to confront the fascists. The problem was that in New York the Committee members had all been elected democratically and were not plotting to take over the republic by violent terror. At least some of them, moreover, were genuinely alarmed by the recent Red victory in China, the Russian demonstration of the atomic bomb, and the expansion of Soviet territory into Eastern Europe. The mixture, in other words, of authentic naivete, soundly observed dangers, and unprincipled rabble-rousing was impossible to disentangle, especially when the public exposure of a bunch of actors who had not been politically connected for years would never push one Red Chinaman out of the Forbidden City or a single Russian out of Warsaw or Budapest.
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