Collected Essays

by Arthur Miller

  I was drawn to write The Crucible not merely as a response to McCarthyism. It is not any more an attempt to cure witch hunts than Salesman is a plea for the improvement of conditions for traveling men, All My Sons a plea for better inspection of airplane parts, or A View from the Bridge an attack upon the Immigration Bureau. The Crucible is, internally, Salesman’s blood brother. It is examining the questions I was absorbed with before—the conflict between a man’s raw deeds and his conception of himself; the question of whether conscience is in fact an organic part of the human being, and what happens when it is handed over not merely to the state or the mores of the time but to one’s friend or wife. The big difference, I think, is that The Crucible sought to include a higher degree of consciousness than the earlier plays.

  I believe that the wider the awareness, the felt knowledge, evoked by a play, the higher it must stand as art. I think our drama is far behind our lives in this respect. There is a lot wrong with the twentieth century, but one thing is right with it—we are aware as no generation was before of the larger units that help make us and destroy us. The city, the nation, the world, and now the universe are never far beyond our most intimate sense of life. The vast majority of us know now—not merely as knowledge but as feeling, feeling capable of expression in art—that we are being formed, that our alternatives in life are not absolutely our own, as the romantic play inevitably must presuppose. But the response of our plays, of our dramatic form itself, is to faint, so to speak, before the intricacies of man’s wider relationships and to define him further and redefine him as essentially alone in a world he never made.

  The form, the shape, the meaning of The Crucible were all compounded out of the faith of those who were hanged. They were asked to be lonely and they refused. They were asked to deny their belief in a God of all men, not merely a god each individual could manipulate to his interests. They were asked to call a phantom real and to deny their touch with reality. It was not good to cast this play, to form it so that the psyche of the hero should emerge so “commonly” as to wipe out of mind the process itself, the spectacle of that faith and the knowing will which these people paid for with their lives.

  The “heat” infusing this play is therefore of a different order from that which draws tears and the common identifications. And it was designed to be of a different order. In a sense, I felt, our situation had thrown us willy-nilly into a new classical period. Classical in the sense that the social scheme, as of old, had reached the point of rigidity where it had become implacable as a consciously known force working in us and upon us. Analytical psychology, when so intensely exploited as to reduce the world to the size of a man’s abdomen and equate his fate with his neurosis, is a re-emergence of romanticism. It is inclined to deny all outer forces until man is only his complex. It presupposes an autonomy in the human character that, in a word, is false. A neurosis is not a fate but an effect. There is a higher wisdom, and if truly there is not, there is still no aesthetic point in repeating something so utterly known, or in doing better what has been done so well before.

  For me The Crucible was a new beginning, the beginning of an attempt to embrace a wider field of vision, a field wide enough to contain the whole of our current awareness. It was not so much to move ahead of the audience but to catch up with what it commonly knows about the way things are and how they get that way. In a word, we commonly know so much more than our plays let on. When we can put together what we do know with what we feel, we shall find a new kind of theater in our hands. The Crucible was written as it was in order to bring me, and the audience, closer to that theater and what I imagine can be an art more ample than any of us has dared to strive for, the art of Man among men, Man amid his works.

  Again They Drink from the Cup of Suspicion

  1989

  I did not write The Crucible simply to propagandize against McCarthyism, although if justification were needed that would have been enough. There was something else involved. I’ll try to explain.

  A writer friend was recently telling me about a Moscow theater producer who is interested in putting on a play about the Vietnam War. Why Vietnam? It turns out that what he would really like to illuminate is the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, but with feelings about Afghanistan still running so high he felt he needed a metaphor that would go to the dilemmas underlying such a war, rather than attempting an outright confrontation with the thickets of feeling surrounding Afghanistan itself.

  That approach reminded me of my decision to write about the 1692 Salem witch trials, rather than trying to take on Joseph McCarthy and his cohorts directly. In the early fifties McCarthyism, so-called, began as a conservative Republican cavalry charge that in the name of anti-Communism helped scatter the left-liberal coalitions of Democrats and union people who had held together the only recently faded New Deal. But this was no ordinary political campaign. This time the enemy was not merely “The Democrat Party,” as McCarthy sneeringly renamed it, but the hidden foreign plot which, naively but often knowingly, it shielded. Thus a certain sublime gloss—national security—was varnished over a very traditional grab for domestic political power.

  With amazing speed McCarthy was convincing a lot of not unintelligent people that the incredible was really true, and that, say, General of the Army George Catlett Marshall was a Communist sympathizer, or that Senator Millard E. Tydings of Maryland was a buddy of Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party. (A photo of both of them standing happily together would only much later be proved to have been a fake manufactured by Roy Cohn, McCarthy’s right-hand bandido.)

  For a time it began to seem that Senator Joe was heading straight for the White House, the more so when the sheer incredibility of his claims appeared to be part proof that they were real; if the Communists were indeed hidden everywhere, it followed that they would certainly be found where common sense indicated they could not conceivably be.

  The case being circular, it was finally all but unarguable. Worse yet, you could not rely on the too-trusting police, the naively legalistic courts, or even the slow-moving F.B.I. to root out the conspiracy. As for the press, it was all but sold to Moscow, secretly, of course. Who then was absolutely reliable? McCarthy, naturally, and those who had his blessing.

  This was colorful and fascinating stuff for the stage, but a play takes a year to write and months to see through production, and I could not imagine spending so much time on what seemed to me so obvious a tale. But as the anti-Communist crusade settled in, and showed signs of becoming the permanent derangement of the American psyche, a kind of mystery began to emerge from its melodramas and comedies. We were all behaving differently than we used to; we had drunk from the cup of suspicion of one another; people inevitably were afraid of too close an association with someone who might one day fall afoul of some committee. Even certain words vibrated perilously, words like organize, social, militant, movement, capitalism—it didn’t do to be on too familiar terms with such language. We had entered a mysterious pall from which there seemed no exit.

  Returning around that time to my alma mater, the University of Michigan, to do a story for Holiday magazine, I discovered that students were avoiding living in the co-op rooming houses because the very idea of a nonprofit organization was suspiciously pro-left. The F.B.I. was paying students at Michigan to report secretly on teachers’ political remarks, and teachers to report on students.

  • • •

  Why was there so little real opposition to this madness? Of course there was the fear of reprisals, of losing jobs, or perhaps only bad publicity, but there was also guilt, and this seemed to me the main crippler, the internalized cop.

  No doubt instinctually, McCarthy and Roy Cohn were handing around full plates of guilt which were promptly licked clean by people who in one way or another had brushed the sleeve of the Communist movement in the thirties—some by joining the party or supporting one of its front organizations, a left-wing union or professiona
l guild, or in whatever manner had at some point in their lives turned to the left. Of course such people were used to being guilty—why else would they have bothered to worry about the poor, the blacks, the lynch victims, the Spanish Republicans, and so on when real Americans were only remotely aware of such inequities around them?

  It was a charm, a kind of spell. McCarthy could call the Roosevelt New Deal “20 years of treason” with hardly a rejoinder from the vast multitude of Americans for whom New Deal measures, hardly more than a decade before, had meant the difference between living on the street or in their own homes, between hunger and real starvation. It was a sort of benighted miracle that just about anything that flew out of his mouth, no matter how outrageously and obviously idiotic, could be made to land in an audience and stir people’s terrors of being taken over by Communists, their very religion in danger.

  I had known the Salem story since college, over a decade earlier, but what kept assaulting my brain now was not the hunt for witches itself; it was the paralysis that had led to more than twenty public hangings of very respectable farmers by their neighbors. There was something “wonderful” in this spectacle, a kind of perverse, malign poetry that had simply swamped the imaginations of these people. I thought I saw something like it around me in the early fifties.

  The truth is that the more I worked at this dilemma the less it had to do with Communists and McCarthy and the more it concerned something very fundamental in the human animal: the fear of the unknown, and particularly the dread of social isolation.

  Political movements are always trying to position themselves as shields against the unknown—vote for me and you’re safe. The difference during witch-hunts is that you are being made safe from a malign, debauched, evil, irreligious, wife-swapping, deceitful, immoral, stinking conspiracy stemming from the very bowels of hell. In Wisconsin in the early fifties a reporter went door to door asking residents if they agreed with certain propositions, ten in number, and discovered that very few people did, and that most thought the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, unnamed of course in the inquiry, were Communistic. To propose that we should be free to express any idea at all was frightening to a lot of people.

  • • •

  The Colonial government in the 1690s saw itself as protecting Christianity (while unknowingly propagating a thrilling counter-religion of Satan worship) by seizing on the ravings of a klatch of repressed pubescent girls who, fearing punishment for their implicitly sexual revolt, began convincing themselves that they had been perverted by Satan. There were economic and social pressures at work, but the nub of it all as it appeared to the locals at the moment was that the Archfiend had been sneaked into the spotless town by an alien who, even better, was black, the Barbadian slave of the Lord’s very own man, the church minister himself. Authority quickly converted the poor girls back to the true religion and made them celebrities for their agonizing bravery in pointing out likely adherents of the Devil.

  But were there not really Communists, whereas there never were any witches? Of course. And there are also paranoids who are really being followed. There was a very real military face-off in the fifties between America and the Soviet Union, and we had only recently “lost” China, but were these grounds for blacklisting actors and writers in Hollywood, or destroying professionals in many other fields, and for turning the country into a whispering gallery? What research showed me, and what I hoped the play would show the country and the world, was the continuity through time of human delusion, and the only safeguard, fragile though it may be, against it—namely, the law and the courageous few whose sacrifice illuminates delusion.

  In the 35 years since the play was written it has become my most produced work by far. I doubt a week has gone by when it has not been on some stage somewhere in the world. It seems to be produced, especially in Latin America, when a dictatorship is in the offing, or when one has just been overthrown.

  • • •

  There is so often a telltale social sidelight connected to its production. Years ago in South Africa, black Tituba had to be played by a white woman in blackface, but the director, Barney Simon, terrified though he was of attack, wanted the white audience to contemplate the story. Last year I happened to meet Nien Cheng, the seventy-year-old author of Life and Death in Shanghai, an account of her six-year imprisonment during the Cultural Revolution. Tears formed in her eyes when she shook my hand, tears, as it surprisingly turned out, of gratitude.

  Released from prison, she had spent months recuperating when a director friend, Huang Tsolin, invited her to see his production of The Crucible in a Shanghai theater. She said she was astounded: “I could not believe the play was not written by a Chinese because the questions of the court were exactly the same ones the Cultural Revolutionaries had put to me!”

  I saw the play in Tbilisi, Soviet Georgia, where John Proctor wore seventeenth-century Turkish pantaloons and a gorgeous wide moustache and was chased through a forest by a crowd waving scimitars. At Olivier’s fabulous 1965 National Theatre production, with Colin Blakely and Joyce Redman, I overheard a young woman in front of me whispering to her escort, “Didn’t this have something to do with that American Senator—what was his name?” I have to admit that it felt marvelous that McCarthy was what’s-his-name while The Crucible was The Crucible still.

  Simone Signoret and Yves Montand did a stirring French film, a version of their Paris stage performance, with a screenplay by Jean-Paul Sartre in which the New England farmers were, inexplicably, Roman Catholic. The Long Wharf Theater in New Haven is about to open it under Arvin Brown’s direction—it was Long Wharf’s first production 25 years ago—and the Roundabout Theater will be doing it later this season. An HBO film of it is to be made this winter for both television and theatrical distribution. In Glasgow recently two productions were running at the same time, one by a young Soviet company. The Schiller Theater in Berlin will have it on in a few months.

  I have wondered if one of the reasons the play continues like this is its symbolic unleashing of the specter of order’s fragility. When certainties evaporate with each dawn, the unknowable is always around the corner. We know how much depends on mere trust and good faith and a certain respect for the human person, and how easily breached these are. And we know as well how close to the edge we live and how weak we really are and how quickly swept by fear the mass of us can become when our panic button is pushed. It is also, I suppose, that the play reaffirms the ultimate power of courage and clarity of mind whose ultimate fruit is liberty.

  It Could Happen Here—And Did

  1967

  I keep no file of reviews, but if memory serves, The Crucible was generally dismissed as a cold, anti-McCarthy tract, more an outburst than a play. A relatively small band of rooters kept it on the Broadway stage for six months or so.

  It is certain that a reading now of those reviews would leave unexplained, to say the least, why the play has continued to be produced here and around the world these fifteen years, or why it should have run through several seasons in France and remains in many permanent repertories, including Olivier’s National Theatre in Britain. There have been years when it was more often performed than Death of a Salesman. Something living must thrive in the play which, I was told on its opening, was a dead husk.

  Perhaps its victory over adversities has made me prouder of it than of anything else I have written, and perhaps it is permissible to say why I think it has refused to be dismissed.

  The prime point at issue in 1953 when it opened was whether the analogy was a sound one between the Massachusetts witch hunt and the then-current hysteria about Communists boring from within the government, labor, education, entertainment and the intellectual community. After all, there never were any witches while there certainly were Communists, so that The Crucible appeared to some as a misreading of the problem at best—a “naïveté,” or at worst a specious and even sinister attempt to whitewash th
e guilt of the Communists with the noble heroism of those in 1692 who had rather be hanged than confess to nonexistent crimes. Indeed, the critic Eric Bentley wrote that one never knew what a Miller play was about.

  I believe that life does provide some sound analogies now and again, but I don’t think they are any good on the stage. Before a play can be “about” something else, it has to be about itself. If The Crucible is still alive, it can hardly be due to any analogy with McCarthyism. It is received in the same way in countries that have never known such a wave of terror as those that have. The bulk of the audiences, for example, in the British National Theatre, are too young to have known McCarthyism, and England is not a hysterical country. Nor, quite rightly, is it for them a play about a “problem” to be “solved.”

  The truth is that as caught up as I was in opposition to McCarthyism, the playwriting part of me was drawn to what I felt was a tragic process underlying the political manifestation. It is a process as much a part of humanity as walls and food and death, and no play will make it go away. When irrational terror takes to itself the fiat of moral goodness, somebody has to die. I thought then that in terms of this process the witch hunts had something to say to the anti-Communist hysteria. No man lives who has not got a panic button and when it is pressed by the clean white hand of moral duty, a certain murderous train is set in motion. Socially speaking this is what the play is and was “about,” and it is this which I believe makes it survive long after the political circumstances of its birth have evaporated in the public mind.