In a word, the disciplined avoidances of the Left bespoke a guilt that the Right found a way to exploit. A similar guilt seems to reside in all sorts of American dissidents, from Jehovah’s Witnesses to homosexuals, no doubt because there is indeed an unacknowledged hostility in them toward the majority for whose cherished norms they feel contempt. It may be that guilt, perhaps, helped to account to some degree for the absence in our theater of plays that in any meaningful way confronted the deepening hysteria, which after all was the main event in our culture. Here was a significant part of a whole generation being forced to the wall, with hardly a word about it written for the stage. But it may simply have been the difficulty of finding a dramatic locution, a working symbolization that might illuminate the complex fog of the unspoken in which we were living.
To put it differently, stuffed in the pockets of both sides was a hidden agenda. On the Right it was, quite simply, their zeal to finally disgrace and wipe out what remained of New Deal attitudes, particularly that dreadful tendency in Americans to use government to help the helpless and to set limits around the more flagrant excesses of unbridled capitalism. Instead, their advertised goal was the defense of liberty against communism.
What the Left was not saying was that they were in truth dedicated to replacing capitalism with a society based on Marxist principles, and this could well mean the suppression of non-Marxists for the good of mankind. Instead, they were simply espousing constitutional protections against self-incrimination. Thus the fresh wind of a debate of any real content was not blowing through these hearings or these terrible years. The result was miasma, and on the Left, the guilt of the wholly or partially insincere. The Right, of course, convinced as it always is of its persecution, is certain that it represents the incoherent and stifled but genuine wishes of the majority and is thus a stranger to guilt.
How to express all this, and much more, on a stage? I began to despair of my own paralysis. I was a fisherman without a hook, a seaman without a sail.
On a lucky afternoon I happened upon a book, The Devil in Massachusetts, by Marion Starkey, a narrative of the Salem witch-hunt of 1692. I knew this story from my college reading more than a decade earlier, but now in this changed and darkened America it turned a wholly new aspect toward me, namely, the poetry of the hunt. Poetry may seem an odd word for a witch-hunt, but I saw now that there was something of the marvelous in the spectacle of a whole village, if not an entire province, whose imagination was literally captured by a vision of something that wasn’t there.
In time to come the very notion of equating the Red hunt with the witch-hunt would be condemned by some as a deception. There certainly were communists, and there never were witches. But the deeper I moved into the 1690s, the further away drifted the America of the 1950s, and rather than the appeal of analogy I found something somewhat different to draw my curiosity and excitement.
First of all, anyone standing up in the Salem of 1692 who denied that witches existed would have faced immediate arrest, the hardest interrogation, and quite possibly the rope. Every authority—the church in New England, the kings of England and Europe, legal scholars like Lord Coke—not only confirmed their existence but never questioned the necessity of executing them when discovered. And of course, there was the authority of the Bible itself [Exodus 22:18]: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” To deny witches was to deny the existence of the Devil’s age-old war against God, and this, in effect, left God without an opposite and stripped him of his first purpose—which was to protect the Christian religion and good order in the world. Without evil, what need was there for the good? Without the Devil’s ceaseless plotting, who needed God? The existence of witches actually went to prove the existence of God’s war with evil. Indeed, it became obvious that to dismiss witchcraft was to forgo any understanding of how it came to pass that tens of thousands had been murdered as witches in Europe, from Scandinavia across to England, down through France and Spain. And to dismiss any relation to the hunt for subversives was to shut down an insight into not only the remarkably similar emotions but literally the numerous identical practices, both by officials and victims, in both outbreaks.
Of course there were witches, if not to most of us then certainly to everyone in Salem; and of course there were communists, but what was the content of their menace? That to me became the issue. Having been deeply influenced as a student by a Marxist approach to society (if less so as I grew older) and having known any number of Marxists and numerous sympathizers, I could simply not accept that these people were spies or even prepared to do the will of the Soviets in some future crisis. That such people had thought to find some hope of a higher ethic in the Soviets was not simply an American but a worldwide irony of catastrophic moral proportions, for their like could be found all over Europe and Asia. But as the Fifties dawned, they were stuck with the past they had chosen or been led into. Part of the unreality of the great anti-Left sweep of the Fifties was that it picked up a lot of people to expose and disgrace who had already in their hearts turned away from a pro-Soviet past but had no stomach for naming others who had merely shared their illusions. In short, then, the whole business for me remained what Truman had initially called it, not a moral crusade but a political red herring.
Nevertheless, the hunt captured some significant part of the American imagination, and its power demanded respect. And turning to Salem was like looking into a petri dish, a sort of embalmed stasis with its principal moving forces caught in stillness. One had to wonder what the human imagination fed on that could inspire neighbors and old friends to suddenly emerge overnight as hell’s own furies secretly bent on the torture and destruction of Christians. More than a political metaphor, more than a moral tale, The Crucible, as it developed for me over the period of more than a year, became the awesome evidence of the power of the inflamed human imagination, the poetry of suggestion, and finally the tragedy of heroic resistance to a society possessed to the point of ruin.
As I stood in the stillness of the Salem courthouse, surrounded by the miasmic swirl of the images of the 1950s but with my head in 1692, what the two eras had in common was gradually gaining definition. In both was the menace of concealed plots, but most startling were the similarities in the rituals of defense and the investigative routines. Three hundred years apart, both prosecutions were alleging membership in a secret, disloyal group; should the accused confess, his honesty could be proved only in precisely the same way—by naming former confederates, nothing less. Thus the informer became the very proof of the plot and the investigation’s necessity.
Finally, in both eras, since the enemy was first and foremost an idea, normal evidentiary proof of disloyal actions was either deemphasized, left in limbo, or not required at all; and indeed, actions finally became completely irrelevant; in the end, the charge itself, suspicion itself, all but became the evidence of disloyalty.
And, most interestingly, in the absence of provable disloyal actions both societies reached for very similar remedies. Something called the Attorney General’s List was promulgated, a list of communist-front organizations, membership in which was declared not so much illegal as reason to suspect subversive conduct or intentions. If membership in an organization could not be called illegal, it could at least be made disgusting enough to lose you your job and reputation.
One might wonder whether many spies would be likely to be joining communist fronts, but liberals very possibly might and indeed had done so at various turns in the road, frequently making common cause with the Left and with communists during the New Deal period a decade earlier. The witch-hunt in 1692 had a not dissimilar evidentiary problem but a far more poetic solution. Most suspected people named by others as members of the Devil’s conspiracy had not been shown to have actually done anything—not poisoning wells, setting barns on fire, sickening cattle, aborting babies or calves, nor somehow undermining the virtue of wives (the Devil having a double, phenomenally active penis, as
everybody knew). Rather than acts, these suspect folk needed only to have had the bad luck to have been “seen” by witnesses consorting with the Devil. The witnesses might be dismally addled hysterics, but they might also be sober citizens who’d somehow gotten themselves suspected of practicing witchcraft and could clear themselves only by confessing and naming coconspirators. But, as in the Fifties, there was a supply of nonhysterical lawyers in and around the witch-hunt, as well as Harvard-educated ministers, and as accusations piled up one obvious fact was more and more irritating to them; as they well knew, the normal fulcrum of any criminal prosecution, namely, acts, deeds, crimes, and witnesses thereto, was simply missing. As for ordinary people, as devout as they might be and strictly literal about Biblical injunctions, they still clung to the old habit of expecting some sort of proof that an accused was guilty, in this case, of being an accomplice of the Devil.
To the rescue came not an Attorney General’s List but a piece of poetry smacking of both legalistic and religious validity; it was called “spectral evidence.” Spectral evidence, in normal jurisprudence, had been carefully winnowed out of the prosecutorial armory by judges and lawyers as being too manifestly open to fabrication. But now, with society under this hellish attack, the fateful decision was made to bring it back in, and the effect was like the bursting of a dam. Suddenly all the prosecution needed do was produce a witness who claimed to have seen not an accused person but what was called his familiar spirit, his living ghost, as it were, in the act of poisoning a pig or throwing a burning brand into a barn full of hay. You could be at home asleep in your bed, but your spirit could be crawling through your neighbor’s bedroom window to feel up his wife. The owner of that wandering spirit was thereupon obliged to account to the court for its crime. With the entrance of spectral evidence, the air was quickly filled with the malign spirits of those identified by good Christians as confederates of the Beast, and with this, of course, the Devil himself really did dance happily into Salem village and proceeded to take the place apart.
And in no time at all, people in Salem began looking at each other with new eyes and hearing sounds from neighbors’ throats that they had never heard before and thinking about each other with new insights far deeper than their former blind innocence toward one another could have given them. And now, naturally, a lot of things that had been bewildering before suddenly made sense. Why, for instance, had London annulled all property deeds, causing everybody to be fighting with everybody else over boundary lines? Why was the congregation forever turning in on itself in fierce doctrinal fights and bitter arguments with ministers who one after another had had to flee the contentiousness of Salemites? Clearly, it was the Devil who had been muddling people’s brains to set them against each other. But now, now at last, with the Lord’s help, they had the gift of sight; the afflicted children had opened up their eyes to the plot in which, unknowingly, like innocent birds in a net, they were all caught. Now, with the admission of spectral evidence, they could turn to the traitors among them and run them to their deaths.
I spent some ten days in the Salem courthouse reading the crudely recorded trials of the 1692 outbreak, and it was striking how totally absent was the least sense of irony, let alone humor. I can’t recall whether it was the provincial governor’s nephew or son who with a college friend had come from Boston to watch the strange proceedings; at one point both boys burst out laughing at some absurd testimony. They were promptly jailed and were saved only by friends galloping down from Boston with a bribe for a guard, who let them escape from a very possible hanging.
Irony and humor were not exactly at a premium in the Fifties either. I was in my lawyer’s office one afternoon to sign some contract, and a lawyer in the next office was asked to come in and notarize my signature. While this man was stamping the pages, I continued a discussion with my lawyer about the Broadway theater, which at one point I said was corrupt, that the art of theater had been totally displaced by the bottom line, that being all that really mattered anymore. Looking up at me, the notarizing lawyer said, “That’s a communist position, you know.” I started to laugh until I saw the constraint in my lawyer’s face, and despite myself I quickly sobered up.
I am glad, of course, that I managed to write The Crucible, but looking back I have often wished I’d had the temperament to have done an absurd comedy, since that is what the situation often deserved. There is something funny in the two sophisticated young Bostonians deciding to trot down to Salem to look in on the uproar among the provincials, failing to realize that they had entered a new age, a new kind of consciousness. I made a not dissimilar mistake as the Fifties dawned, and I continued to make it. A young film producer I didn’t know asked me to write a script for a film about what was then called juvenile delinquency. A mystifying, unprecedented outbreak of gang violence had exploded all over New York. The city, in return for a good percentage of the profits, had contracted with this producer to open police stations, schools, and so on to his camera. I spent the summer of 1955 on Brooklyn streets, wrote an outline, which, incidentally, was much praised by the Catholic Youth Organization’s leadership, and was ready to proceed with the script when an attack on me as a disloyal leftist was opened in the New York World-Telegram and Sun. The cry went up that so long as I was the screenwriter the city must cancel its contract with the producer. A hearing was arranged, attended by some twenty-two city commissioners, including those of the police, fire, welfare, and not least the sanitation departments, as well as two judges. At the long conference table there also sat a lady in sneakers and a sweater who produced a thick folder of petitions and statements I had signed, going back to my college years, provided to her, she said, by the House Un-American Activities Committee. I defended myself; I thought I was making some sense when the lady began literally screaming that I was killing the boys in Korea. She meant that I personally was doing it, as I could tell from the froth at the corners of her mouth, the fury in her eyes, and her finger pointing straight into my face. The vote was taken and came up one short of continuing the city’s collaboration, and the film was killed that afternoon. As we were filing out, the two judges came up and offered their sympathy. I always wondered whether the crucial vote against me came from the sanitation department. But it was not a total loss; it would soon help with the writing of The Crucible, the suffocating sensation of helplessness before the spectacle of the impossible coming to pass.
Since you, or some of you, are historians, I have emphasized history in these remarks, but I doubt if I’d have written the play had the question of language not so powerfully drawn me on. The trial record in the Salem courthouse, of which I was allowed to borrow a photocopy, was written by ministers in a primitive shorthand. This condensation gave emphasis to a gnarled, densely packed language that suggested the country accents of a hard people. (A few years on, when Laurence Olivier staged his London production, he used the gruff Northumberland accent.) In any event, to lose oneself day after day in that record of human delusion was to know a fear, not perhaps for one’s safety precisely but of the spectacle of perfectly intelligent people giving themselves over to a rapture of such murderous credulity. It was as though the absence of real evidence was itself a release from the burdens of this world; in love with the invisible, they moved behind their priests closer to that mystical communion that is anarchy and is called God. Evidence, in contrast, is effort; leaping to conclusions is a wonderful pleasure; and for a while there was a highly charged joy in Salem, for now that they could see through everything to the frightful plot being daily laid bare in court sessions, their days, formerly so eventless and long, were swallowed up in hourly revelations, news, surprises. The Crucible, I think, is less a polemic than it might have been had it not been filled with wonder at the protean imagination of man.
As a commercial entertainment, the play failed, of course. To start with, the title: Nobody knew what a crucible was. Most of the critics, as sometimes does happen, never caught on to the play’
s ironical substructure, and the ones who did were nervous about validating a work that was so unkind to the same basic principles as underlay the current hunt for Reds, sanctified as it was. On opening night, old acquaintances shunned me in the theater lobby, and even without air-conditioning the house was noticeably cool. But the problem was also with the temperature of the production. The director, a great name in the theater of the Twenties, Thirties, and into the Forties, had decided that the play, which he believed a classic, should be staged like what he called a Dutch painting. In Dutch paintings of groups, everyone is always looking front. We knew this from the picture on the wooden boxes of Dutch Masters cigars. Unfortunately, on a stage such rigidity only propels an audience to the exits. It would be several years before a gang of young actors, setting up chairs in the ballroom of the McAlpin Hotel, set fire to the audience and convinced the critics; and the play at last took off and soon found its place in the world. There were cheering critics this time, but now of course McCarthy was dead, and the fever on whose waves of heat he had spread his wings had cooled, and more and more people found it possible to face the dying embers and read the terrible message in them.
It is said that no one would buy land in Salem for a hundred years. The very ground was accursed. Salem’s people, in the language of the time, had broke charity with one another.
But the Devil, as he usually does after such paroxysms, had the last laugh. Salem refuses to fade into history. A few years ago the foundation of an old colonial-era church in a town near Salem began to sag. The contractor engaged to make repairs dug out some of the loose stones and crawled underneath to inspect matters. There he discovered what looked like barely buried human skeletons. Harvard scientists were called in and confirmed that the remains of some twenty-two people were under the church. Now no one has ever known exactly where in Salem the gibbet was located, but the bodies of the twenty-two people hanged there for practicing witchcraft had never been found. Moreover, according to one legend, as their ultimate punishment they were denied Christian burial.
Collected Essays Page 33