Timebends

by Arthur Miller

  “. . . During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam both made offer to strike at said Procter; but, when Abigail’s hand came near, it opened,—whereas it was made up into a fist before,—and came down exceeding lightly as it drew near to said Procter, and at length, with open and extended fingers, touched Procter’s hood very lightly. Immediately, Abigail cried out her fingers, her fingers, her fingers burned. …”

  The irony of this beautifully exact description is that its author was Reverend Parris, who was trying to show how real the girls’ affliction was, and hence how dangerous people like Elizabeth Proctor could be. And irony, of course, is what is usually dispensed with, usually paralyzed, when fear enters the mind. Irony, indeed, is the supreme gift of peace. For it seemed obvious that Parris was describing a girl who had turned to look into her former mistress’s face and experienced the joyous terror of the killer about to strike, and not only at the individual victim, the wife of a lover who was now trying to deny her, but at the whole society that was watching and applauding her valiant courage in ridding it of its pestilential sins. It was this ricocheting of the “cleansing” idea that drew me on day after day, this projection of one’s own vileness onto others in order to wipe it out with their blood. As more than one private letter put it at the time, “Now no one is safe.”

  To make not a story but a drama of this parade of individual tragedies—this was the intimidating task before me, and I wondered if it would indeed be possible without diminishing what I had come to see as a veritable Bible of events. The colors of my determination kept changing with the hour, for the theme of the play, the key to the compression of events, kept its distance as I groped toward a visceral connection with all this—since I knew that to simply will a play into existence was to insure a didactic failure. By now I was far beyond the teaching impulse; I knew that my own life was speaking here in many disguises, not merely my time.

  One day, after several hours of reading at the Historical Society, where it now seemed no one but I had ever entered to disturb the two gray guardians’ expressionless tranquility, I got up to leave, and that was when I noticed hanging on a wall several framed etchings of the witchcraft trials, apparently made at the time by an artist who must have witnessed them. In one of them, a shaft of sepulchral light shoots down from a window high up in a vaulted room, falling upon the head of a judge whose face is blanched white, his long white beard hanging to his waist, arms raised in defensive horror as beneath him the covey of afflicted girls screams and claws at invisible tormentors. Dark and almost indistinguishable figures huddle on the periphery of the picture, but a few men can be made out, bearded like the judge, and shrinking back in pious outrage. Suddenly it became my memory of the dancing men in the synagogue on 114th Street as I had glimpsed them between my shielding fingers, the same chaos of bodily motion—in this picture, adults fleeing the sight of a supernatural event; in my memory, a happier but no less eerie circumstance—both scenes frighteningly attached to the long reins of God. I knew instantly what the connection was: the moral intensity of the Jews and the clan’s defensiveness against pollution from outside the ranks. Yes, I understood Salem in that flash, it was suddenly my own inheritance. I might not yet be able to work a play’s shape out of this roiling mass of stuff, but it belonged to me now, and I felt I could begin circling around the space where a structure of my own could conceivably rise.

  I left Salem in the late afternoon, and the six o’clock news came on the radio with the black night like a cloak thrown over the windshield. The rain had not ceased. The announcer read a bulletin about Elia Kazan’s testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and mentioned the people he had named, none of whom I knew. I had almost forgotten him by now, so deep had I been in the past. The announcer’s voice seemed a violent, vulgar intrusion into a private anguish; I remember thinking that the issue was being made to sound altogether political when it was really becoming something else, something I could not name.

  I was heading down toward New York, back into the world. A numbness held me. The bulletin was repeated again on the half-hour. I wished they would stop. I felt something like embarrassment, not only for him, but somehow for all of us who had shared the—comradeship, I suppose the word is, born of our particular kind of alienation. The political element was only a part of it, maybe even a small part. We had all cheered the same heroes, the same mythic resisters, maybe that was it, from way back in the Spanish war to the German antifascists and the Italians, brave men and women who were the best of our identity, those who had been the sacrifices of our time.

  What we had now seemed a withering parody of what was being advertised as high drama. When the Committee knew all the names beforehand, there was hardly a conspiracy being unveiled but rather a symbolic display that would neither string anybody up on a gallows nor cause him to be cut down. No material thing had been moved one way or another by a single inch, only the air we all breathed had grown somewhat thinner and the destruction of meaning seemed total when the sundering of friendships was so often with people whom the witness had not ceased to love.

  Approaching New York, I felt as always the nearness of the circumstantial, the bedrock real. As I headed downtown toward the Brooklyn Bridge on glistening wet roads, I found myself keeping to the slow side of the speedometer as though to protect what truth there was in me from skidding into oblivion. That I was committed to this play was no longer a question for me; I had made the decision without thinking about it somewhere between Salem and this city.

  Molly’s instant reaction against the Salem analogy would be, as I already sensed, the strongest objection to such a play. “There are Communists,” it would be repeatedly said, “but there never were any witches.” I did not wish to evade this point, there was no need to; my obligation was still solely to myself and to the material. But I did not want it to sidetrack me either, not before I clearly knew the theme. All I had so far was a mass of stories, evidence of an imploded community that distrust and paranoia had killed—literally so, for it was a hundred years before people bought some of the farms owned by those who had been hanged, such was the reality of the curse upon them.

  It was thus not true that “there never were any witches.” I had no doubt that Tituba, Reverend Parris’s black Barbados slave, had been practicing witchcraft with the girls, but more important, the best minds of the time, here and in Europe, inside and outside the churches, would have been indignant to be told there were no witches when the Bible on three different occasions warns against dealing with them. Addison, Dr. Johnson, King James, and the entire British church hierarchy shared the view of Blackstone, the voice of English jurisprudence himself, who declared, “To deny the possibility, nay the actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God, in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of commerce with evil spirits.” John Wesley summed it up: “The giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.” As always, these affirmations had a cause: an alarming rise in what was called “infidelity,” which is to say, skepticism, deism, even atheism—and witchcraft was the ultimate sneer at God. The witch-hunt was a way of saying, “You must gather to us in the church since we alone stand between you and the Devil’s overwhelming the world.” Beneath high moral dudgeon, then as now, lay our old friend power, and the lust for it. When several hundred thousand people had been executed in Europe for witchcraft, it was hardly wisdom to say that the cause was merely imaginary.

  But a theme is not an idea; it is an action, an unstoppable process, like a fetus growing or, yes, a cancer; it is a destroyer as it changes and creates or kills, a paradox that nothing can keep from unwinding through all of its contradictions down to its resolution, which in its right time illuminates the
whole from the beginning. After weeks of attacking from every side, writing scene after experimental scene, I came on the layers of internal parallelisms in the Salem experience that suggested a path toward a climax, and I found myself asking what, if it had been present in Salem, would have made it impossible to set these people against one another like this.

  Almost every testimony I had read revealed the sexual theme, either open or barely concealed; the Devil himself, for one thing, was almost always a black man in a white community, and of course the initial inflammatory instance that convinced so many that the town was under Luciferian siege was the forced confession of the black slave Tituba. But apart from that, men rarely accused another man of having bewitched them, and almost all the bewitched women were tempted by a warlock, a male witch. Night was the usual time to be subverted from dutiful Christian behavior, and dozens were in their beds when through window or door, as real as life, a spectral visitor floated in and lay upon them or provoked them to some filthy act like kissing or bade them sign the “Devil’s book,” a membership roll of the underground party of the damned. The relief that came to those who testified was orgasmic; they were actually encouraged in open court to talk about their sharing a bed with someone they weren’t married to, a live human being now manacled before them courtesy of God’s lieutenants.

  Here was guilt, the guilt of illicit sexuality. (And indeed, blessed as they were by their godly crusade, august New England judges soon took to playing shovelboard with their holy adolescent witnesses and sharing an ale with them in the local tavern—devilish business certainly, but permissible now that they were battling for God in this open war with Hell.) Had there been no tinder of guilt to set aflame, had the cult and culture of repression not ruled so tightly, no outbreak would have been possible. John Proctor, then, in being driven to confess not to a metaphoric guilt but to actual sex with an identified teenage partner, might save the community in the only way possible—by raising to consciousness what had been suppressed and in holy disguise was out to murder them all.

  The political question, therefore, of whether witches and Communists could be equated was no longer to the point. What was manifestly parallel was the guilt, two centuries apart, of holding illicit, suppressed feelings of alienation and hostility toward standard, daylight society as defined by its most orthodox proponents.

  Without guilt the 1950s Red-hunt could never have generated such power. Once it was conceded that absolutely any idea remotely similar to a Marxist position was not only politically but morally illicit, the liberal, with his customary adaptations of Marxist theory and attitudes, was effectively paralyzed. The former Communist was guilty because he had in fact believed the Soviets were developing the system of the future, without human exploitation and irrational waste. Even his naivete in seeing Russia not as an earthly empire but rather as a kind of spiritual condition was now a source of guilt and shame.

  The House Un-American Activities Committee had been in existence since 1938, but the tinder of guilt was not so available when the New Deal and Roosevelt were openly espousing a policy of vast social engineering often reminiscent of socialist methods. But as in Salem, a point arrived, in the late forties, when the rules of social intercourse quite suddenly changed, or were changed, and attitudes that had merely been anticapitalist-antiestablishment were now made unholy, morally repulsive, and if not actually treasonous then implicitly so. America had always been a religious country.

  I suppose I had been searching a long time for a tragic hero, and now I had him; the Salem story was not going to be abandoned. The longer I worked the more certain I felt that as improbable as it might seem, there were moments when an individual conscience was all that could keep a world from falling.

  By midsummer I had found the moment when Proctor, able at last to set aside his guilty feelings of unworthiness to “mount the gibbet like a saint,” as I had him say, defies the court by tearing up his confession and brings on his own execution. This clinched the play. One of the incidental consequences for me was a changed view of the Greek tragedies; they must have had their therapeutic effect by raising to conscious awareness the clan’s capacity for brutal and unredeemed violence so that it could be sublimated and contained by new institutions, like the law Athena brings to tame the primordial, chainlike vendetta.

  “Every playwright has to have Jed Harris once,” George Kaufman had said, “like the measles.” After two productions with Kazan and our sharing of ideas about plays and life, finding a new director was a hard thing to face. Jim Proctor, who had done the publicity for All My Sons and Salesman, was old enough to recall, as I was not, the string of triumphs Harris had directed in the late twenties and early thirties, when, as sometimes happened on a Broadway that still had dozens of straight plays running at the same time, a star director would rise and spin off show after show for years and even decades and dominate an era with his personality. Harris had produced Coquette with the ingenue Helen Hayes, Broadway, The Royal Family, and The Front Page, and had directed Uncle Vanya, The Inspector General, A Doll’s House, Our Town, and Sartre’s Red Gloves, among others, but by the fifties his legend had all but faded. A couple of years earlier, however, he had taken over and revised a failing production of The Turn of the Screw, retitled it Washington Square, and turned it into a success. He had fathered a son with Ruth Gordon and had fought with practically everybody who was anybody in the Broadway theatre, something I was not privy to when Jimmy brought us together for the first time on a gleaming sixty-foot motor yacht in the Westport, Connecticut, harbor.

  Jimmy Proctor had a flattened nose, a thick neck, a bald head, and the pigeon-toed lope of a myopic wrestler, which he had been at Cornell in the mid-twenties. He also had a lisp and, like so many newspapermen of his era, was incurably sentimental, especially about people with talent, whether for tightrope walking or play-writing. His father had showed up periodically during his boyhood on home leave from one or another South American revolution, or sometimes from an expedition into some gold-rumored jungle. Early on, therefore, Jimmy had developed a tendency to romanticize people with unusual or exotic personas—of whom Jed Harris, as it turned out, was one of the foremost examples in the twentieth century. “A lot of people will badmouth Jed,” warned Jimmy in one of his rare understatements, “but he’s a kind of genius, and I don’t believe a man can ever lose that.”

  As I later learned, Harris had temporary use of the yacht, a venerable and immaculately kept vessel, pending his decision to buy it (although surely not with money, of which he had none). There was also a totally silent and lovely young woman on board, doubtless on a similar trial basis. I quickly surmised that what was good about Jed was what was bad, a visceral, physical power and an appetite that brooked no denial. When it was Sunday and he said it was Tuesday and you corrected him, he would grin mischievously with his heavy lower jaw jutting forward and say, “I never argue with talent.” I had suspicions from the outset that he was just too classy for me and would be trouble, but he was also refreshingly knowledgeable about plays and actors, as well as a self-confessed connoisseur of poetry and literature in general. He was one of those men who, without saying it in so many words, could get up from dinner and leave you with the feeling that he had rather intimately known Winston Churchill, Mahatma Gandhi, and maybe Gertrude Stein. Jed had style, which is always suspicious, especially when it is not only a form of entertainment but also a weapon.

  But like all stylish fellows he had his blind, naive side, as when I drove him up to Boston in my Ford and he yelled for me to stop just as I was passing through a tollbooth after paying the attendant. I braked and asked him what the problem was. Gesturing back to the tolltaker, Jed said, “You didn’t tip him.” As an introduction to a new director this boded ill for a shared sense of reality, but even better news was on its way. I was taking him to Boston to see Arthur Kennedy in a new show there. Kennedy had been in two plays of mine, and I thought of him as a possible John Proctor. But Jed had detested the ide
a from the moment I first mentioned it.

  “Where’s he come from?” he asked.

  “Worcester, Mass.”

  “I thought so. He’s got those feet.”

  “What feet?”

  “Those feet !Didn’t you ever see his feet, for Chrissake, and you had him in two shows?”

  “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”

  Seeing Kennedy onstage that evening, Jed nudged me and pointed. “There! You see? He’s a fucking potato farmer, see how he puts his feet down? He’s in mud, clump, clump, clump!”

  On the way down to New York I insisted that Kennedy was capable of great lyricism, and we ended up hiring him, but Jed’s ludicrous objection to his feet was a signal of his misconception of the play, which with my usual optimism I preferred to overlook. Kennedy was too common, he felt, ignoring the fact that John Proctor is not an actor but a Salem peasant. Indeed, Harris saw the production as a “Dutch painting,” a classical play that had to be nobly performed—an invitation to slumber, I thought. But he was correct about the rest of the casting, which was decidedly on the majestic side, with the eighty-year-old Walter Hampden a magnificent presence as Danforth, knife-mouthed Philip Coolidge as Hathorne, E. G. Marshall as Reverend Hale, Beatrice Straight playing Elizabeth, and an aged vaudevillian named Joseph Sweeney with a knowing and bitter wit as the octogenarian farmer Giles Corey, who is pressed to death with stones for refusing to testify.