Perhaps more disturbing to me than all the rest was the atmosphere being created, a pall of suspicion reaching out not only to radio and television and movie studios but into Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn Heights, whose minister, Reverend William Howard Melish, was hounded out of his pulpit, and his family out of their home, by an anti-Communist campaign among a divided vestry. While his aged father, John Howard Melish—in former years the handsome, popular minister of this immense and beautiful Episcopal church, the clergyman who for decades had sworn New York’s mayors into office—lay bedridden on the top floor, the son and his family were put out in the street. As head of a section of Russian War Relief, he had become a rather naive believer in the goodness of Soviet aims, if not of the system. That he had never ceased being a devout Christian no one seemed to question, and over the many long months of his self-defense, ending in a civil court case upholding his bishop’s right to fire him, I could only conclude that the country was intending to become a philosophical monolith where no real differences about anything important would be tolerated. In terms of my work, however, I had already adapted An Enemy of the People —which the Melish case almost amazingly duplicated, down to a certain muddleheaded stubbornness in the main characters—and that play had not worked.
I would not have put it in such terms in those days, but what I sought was a metaphor, an image that would spring out of the heart, all-inclusive, full of light, a sonorous instrument whose reverberations would penetrate to the center of this miasma. For if the current degeneration of discourse continued, as I had every reason to believe it would, we could no longer be a democracy, a system that requires a certain basic trust in order to exist.
I had known about the Salem witchcraft phenomenon since my American history class at Michigan, but it had remained in mind as one of those inexplicable mystifications of the long-dead past when people commonly believed that the spirit could leave the body, palpably and visibly. My mother might believe it still, if only in one corner of her mind, and I suspected that there were a lot of other people who, like me, were secretly open to suggestion. As though it had been ordained, a copy of Marion Starkey’s book The Devil in Massachusetts fell into my hands, and the bizarre story came back as I had recalled it, but this time in remarkably well-organized detail.
At first I rejected the idea of a play on the subject. My own rationality was too strong, I thought, to really allow me to capture this wildly irrational outbreak. A drama cannot merely describe an emotion, it has to become that emotion. But gradually, over weeks, a living connection between myself and Salem, and between Salem and Washington, was made in my mind—for whatever else they might be, I saw that the hearings in Washington were profoundly and even avowedly ritualistic. After all, in almost every case the Committee knew in advance what they wanted the witness to give them: the names of his comrades in the Party. The FBI had long since infiltrated the Party, and informers had long ago identified the participants in various meetings. The main point of the hearings, precisely as in seventeenth-century Salem, was that the accused make public confession, damn his confederates as well as his Devil master, and guarantee his sterling new allegiance by breaking disgusting old vows—whereupon he was let loose to rejoin the society of extremely decent people. In other words, the same spiritual nugget lay folded within both procedures—an act of contrition done not in solemn privacy but out in the public air. The Salem prosecution was actually on more solid legal ground since the defendant, if guilty of familiarity with the Unclean One, had broken a law against the practice of witchcraft, a civil as well as a religious offense; whereas the offender against HUAC could not be accused of any such violation but only of a spiritual crime, subservience to a political enemy’s desires and ideology. He was summoned before the Committee to be called a bad name, but one that could destroy his career.
In effect, it came down to a governmental decree of moral guilt that could easily be made to disappear by ritual speech: intoning names of fellow sinners and recanting former beliefs. This last was probably the saddest and truest part of the charade, for by the early 1950s there were few, and even fewer in the arts, who had not left behind their illusions about the Soviets.
It was this immaterial element, the surreal spiritual transaction, that now fascinated me, for the rituals of guilt and confession followed all the forms of a religious inquisition, except, of course, that the offended parties were not God and his ministers but a congressional committee. (Some of its individual members were indeed distinctly unspiritual, like J. Parnell Thomas, whose anti-Communist indignation was matched only by a larcenous cupidity for which he would soon do time in a federal prison, not far from the cell of Ring Lardner, Jr., who had been jailed for contempt of Congress—namely, for refusing to answer Thomas’s questions.) We were moving into the realm of anthropology and dream, where political terms could not penetrate. Politics is too conscious a business to illuminate the dark cellar of the public mind, where secret fears, unspeakable and vile, rule over cobwebbed territories of betrayal and violent anger. McCarthy’s rise was only beginning, and no one guessed that it would grow beyond the power of the president himself, until the army, whose revered chiefs he tried to destroy, finally brought him down.
My decision to attempt a play on the Salem witchcraft trials was tentative, restrained by technical questions first of all, and then by a suspicion that I would not only be writing myself into the wilderness politically but personally as well. For even in the first weeks of thinking about the Salem story, the central image, the one that persistently recurred as an exuberant source of energy, was that of a guilt-ridden man, John Proctor, who, having slept with his teenage servant girl, watches with horror as she becomes the leader of the witch-hunting pack and points her accusing finger at the wife he has himself betrayed. The story’s lines of force were still tangled, but instinct warned that as always with me, they would not leave me untouched once fully revealed. And so, in deciding to make an exploratory trip up to Salem, Massachusetts, where the original court records of the witch trials were still available, I was moving inward as well as north, and not without a certain anxiety in both directions. The day before I was to leave, Kazan phoned and asked to see me.
Since he was not a man to idly chat, at least not with me, and since this was his second or third such call in the past few weeks, I began to suspect that something terrible had come to him and that it must be the Committee. I drove into a dun and rainy Connecticut morning in early April 1952 cursing the time. For I all but knew that my friend would tell me he had decided to cooperate with the Committee. Though he had passed through the Party for a brief period fifteen years before, as he had once mentioned to me, I knew that he had no particular political life anymore, at least not in the five years of our acquaintance. I found my anger rising, not against him, whom I loved like a brother, but against the Committee, which by now I regarded as a band of political operators with as much moral conviction as Tony Anastasia, and as a matter of fact, probably somewhat less.
The sun briefly appeared, and we left his house to walk in the woods under dripping branches, amid the odor of decay and regeneration that a long rain drives up from the earth in a cold country forest. He was trying, I thought, to appear relieved in his mind, to present the issue as settled, even happily so. The story, simple and by now routine, took but a moment to tell. He had been subpoenaed and had refused to cooperate but had changed his mind and returned to testify fully in executive session, confirming some dozen names of people he had known in his months in the Party so long ago. He felt better now, clearer about everything. Actually, he wanted my advice, almost as though he had not yet done what he had done. Confirmation was what he needed; after all, he had no sympathies with the Communists, so why should he appear to by withholding his testimony?
But as much as the issue itself mattered, it was our unreality that I could not grasp. I was never sure what I meant to him, but he had entered into my dreams like a brother, and there we had exchanged a s
mile of understanding that blocked others out. Listening to him now, I grew frightened. There was a certain gloomy logic in what he was saying: unless he came clean he could never hope, at the height of his creative powers, to make another film in America, and he would probably not be given a passport to work abroad either. If the theatre remained open to him, it was not his primary interest anymore; he wanted to deepen his film life, that was where his heart lay, and he had been told in so many words by his old boss and friend Spyros Skouras, president of Twentieth Century Fox, that the company would not employ him unless he satisfied the Committee. It would be easy, I thought as he spoke, for those with less talent to sneer at this, but I believed he was a genius of the theatre, where actors and scripts were concerned a seer who worked along an entirely different trajectory than other directors. To be barred from his metier, kicked into the street, would be for him like a nightmarish overturning of the earth itself. He had always said he came from survivors and that the job was to survive. He spoke as factually as he could, and it was a quiet calamity opening before me in the woods, because I felt my sympathy going toward him and at the same time I was afraid of him. Had I been of his generation, he would have had to sacrifice me as well. And finally that was all I could think of. I could not get past it.
That all relationships had become relationships of advantage or disadvantage. That this was what it all came to anyway and there was nothing new here. That one stayed as long as it was useful to stay, believed as long as it was not too inconvenient, and that we were fish in a tank cruising with upslanted gaze for the descending crumbs that kept us alive. I could only say that I thought this would pass and that it had to pass because it would devour the glue that kept the country together if left to its own unobstructed course. I said that it was not the Reds who were dispensing our fears now, but the other side, and it could not go on indefinitely, it would someday wear down the national nerve. And then there might be regrets about this time. But I was growing cooler with the thought that as unbelievable as it seemed, I could still be up for sacrifice if Kazan knew I had attended meetings of Party writers years ago and had made a speech at one of them. I felt a silence rising around me, an impeding and invisible wash of dulled vibrations between us, like an endless moaning musical note through which we could not hear or speak anymore. It was sadness, purely mournful, deadening. And it had been done to us. It was not his duty to be stronger than he was, the government had no right to require anyone to be stronger than it had been given him to be, the government was not in that line of work in America. I was experiencing a bitterness with the country that I had never even imagined before, a hatred of its stupidity and its throwing away of its freedom. Who or what was now safer because this man in his human weakness had been forced to humiliate himself? What truth had been enhanced by all this anguish?
As I got into my car to leave, Molly Kazan came out of the house into the drizzle that had begun again; she could tell, I suppose, that it had not gone well. It was impossible to keep looking into her distraught eyes. History prints certain lines directly on the mind that stay there into the grave. She was a rather moralistic woman who had, as I’ve said, an analytical talent for spotting where a play’s theme had managed to slip out of sight or the author’s exuberance had led him away from the central conflict. She had repeatedly pressed me, long before the Salesman rehearsals began, to eliminate Uncle Ben and all the scenes in the past as unnecessary in the strictest sense. It was, I thought, an amazing example of the “nothing-but” psychoanalytical reductionist method of peeling away experience only as far as its quickly recognizable conventional paradoxes, in the misconceived belief that color, tone, and even longing in themselves do not change fate.
I was half inside the car when Molly came out and asked, unforgettably, if I realized that the United Electrical Workers union was entirely in the hands of Communists. Standing in the drizzle there, a woman fighting for her husband’s career, she seemed to have been lashed to this frantic question, which in a calmer time would have made her laugh at its absurd remoteness from the dilemma before us. I muttered that I had heard about the UEW many years ago. Then she pointed out toward the road and told me that I no longer understood the country, that everybody who lived on that road approved of the Committee and what had been done. I didn’t know what to say anymore across the crevasse widening between us. In the awkward predeparture moment, after I had said that I could not agree with their decision, she asked if I was staying at my house, half an hour away, and I said that I was on my way to Salem. She instantly understood what my destination meant, and her eyes widened in sudden apprehension and possibly anger. “You’re not going to equate witches with this!” I told her I wasn’t at all sure I could write the play but I was going to look into the stuff they had up there. We all waved rather grimly as I pulled away.
Once on the road nosing the car north, I thought she was probably right about the people in the comfortable homes I was passing, and felt myself drifting beyond the pale. The strangeness was sharper because as usual I was carrying several contradictions at the same time, my brother-love as painfully alive in me as it had ever been, alongside the undeniable fact that Kazan might have sacrificed me had it been necessary. In a sense I went naked to Salem, still unable to accept the most common experience of humanity, the shifts of interests that turned loving husbands and wives into stony enemies, loving parents into indifferent supervisors or even exploiters of their children, and so forth. As I already knew from my reading, that was the real story of ancient Salem Village, what they called then the breaking of charity with one another. The gray rain on my windshield was falling into my soul.
Salem then was a town dribbling away, half-forsaken. It was originally the salt lick of the mother colony of Plymouth to the south and had been bypassed by the modernization of industry a generation before. Lapped by the steely bay, it was dripping this afternoon in the cold black drizzle like some abandoned dog. I liked it, liked its morose and secret air. I went to the courthouse, asked the clerk for the town records for 1692, and had to wait a few minutes while he got out similar tomes for last year and three or four years earlier, handing them to a pair of real estate agents searching deeds for a property deal. The room was silent, and I found good gray light near a tall window that looked out over the water, or so I remember it now, the same hard silver water that the condemned must have beheld from the gallows on Witch Hill, of whose location no one is any longer sure.
In fact, there was little new I could learn from the court record, but I wanted to study the actual words of the interrogations, a gnarled way of speaking, to my ear—and some ten years later the subject of a correspondence with Laurence Olivier, who was seeking an accent for the actors in his magnificent London production of The Crucible. After much research he decided on a Northumberland dialect, which indeed is spoken through clenched jaws. And I heard it so in the courthouse, where it seemed from the orthography to be a burred and rather Scottish speech. After a few hours of mouthing the words—often spelled phonetically in the improvised shorthand of the court clerks or the ministers who kept the record as the trials proceeded—I felt a bit encouraged that I might be able to handle it, and in more time I came to love its feel, like hard burnished wood. Without planning to, I even elaborated a few of the grammatical forms myself, the double negatives especially, which occurred in the trial record much less frequently than they would in the play.
“When I passed his house my wagon was set [stuck] in the plain road,” a complainant testified, “and there he stood behind his window a-staring out at me, and when he turned away again the wheel was free.” A wagon bewitched by a stare. And so many other descriptions were painterly, action stopped as though by a camera—a man unable to rise from his bed, caught with uplifted head by a woman who floated in through his window to lay her body on his, just like that. Reading the testimony here beside the bay was an experience different from reading about the trials in New York. Here, it could have happened. The cour
thouse closed at five, and there was nothing to do in the town but walk the streets. In the early darkness I came on a candy store where a crowd of teenagers was hanging out, and excited laughter went up as two girls appeared around the corner snuggled one behind the other, hopping in time with a broomstick between their legs. How, I wondered, had they known I was here? Salem in those days was in fact not eager to talk about the witchcraft, not too proud of it, and only after The Crucible did the town begin exploiting it with a tourist attraction, the Witch Trail, a set of street signs indicating where so-and-so had been arrested or interrogated or condemned to hang. At the time of my evening walk, no Massachusetts legislature had passed so much as a memoir of regret at the execution of innocent people, rejecting the very suggestion as a slur on the honor of the state even two and a half centuries later. The same misplaced pride that had for so long prevented the original Salem court from admitting the truth before its eyes was still alive here. And that was good for the play too, it was in the mood.
Like every criminal trial record, this one was filled with enticing but incomplete suggestions of relationships, so to speak, offstage. Next day in the dead silence of the little Historical Society building, two ancient lady guardians regarded me with steady gazes of submerged surprise; normally there were very few visitors. Here I found Charles W. Upham’s quiet nineteenth-century masterpiece Salem Witchcraft, and in it, on my second afternoon, the hard evidence of what had become my play’s center: the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail Williams’s determination to get Elizabeth murdered so that she could have John, whom I deduced’ she had slept with while she was their house servant, before Elizabeth fired her.
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