The scientists wanted to remove the skeletons and try to identify them. But some quite aged parishioners, descendants not only of the witchcraft victims but no doubt of their persecutors as well, were adamantly opposed. The younger church members were all for it but decided to wait until the elders had passed away rather than start a ruckus about the matter. In short, even after three centuries, the thing, it seems, cannot find its serene, uncomplicated end.
And, indeed, something very similar occurred in Salem three hundred years ago. After the hunt had blown itself out, after Cotton Mather, having whipped up the hysteria to and beyond the point of murder, finally conceded that demanding the admission of spectral evidence had been his dreadful mistake, the legislature awarded to some, though not all, of the victims’ families a few pounds’ damages along with a mild apology: “Sorry we hanged your mother,” and so forth. But in the true Salem style of solemn bewilderment, this gesture apparently lacked a certain requisite disorder, so they also included reparations to some informers whose false accusations had hanged people. Victims and victimizers, it was all the same in the end. I suppose it was just the good old American habit of trying to keep everybody happy.
The Crucible is my most-produced play, here and abroad. It seems to be one of the few shards of the so-called McCarthy period that survives. And it is part of the play’s history, I think, that to people in so many parts of the world its story seems so like their own. I think it was in the mid-Seventies—dates at my age take on the viscosity of poached eggs—but in any case, I happened to be at my publishers when another Grove Press author came in. Her eyes filled with tears at our introduction, and she hastened to explain: She was Yuen Cheng, author of Life and Death in Shanghai, the story of her six-year solitary confinement during the Cultural Revolution. It seems that on her release, an old friend, a theater director, took her to see a new production of his in Shanghai, The Crucible, a play and author she had never heard of. As she listened to it, the interrogations sounded so precisely the same as the ones she and others had been subject to by the Cultural Revolutionaries that she couldn’t believe a non-Chinese had written it. And picking up the English text, she was amazed, she said, not least by the publication date, which of course was more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution. A highly educated woman, she had been living with the conviction that such a perversion of just procedure could happen only in the China of a debauched revolution! I have had similar reactions from Russians, South Africans, Latin Americans and others who have endured dictatorships, so universal is the methodology of terror portrayed in The Crucible. In fact, I used to think, half seriously—although it was not far from the truth—that you could tell when a dictator was about to take power in a Latin American country or when one had just been overthrown, by whether The Crucible was suddenly being produced there.
The net of it all, I suppose, is that I have come, rather reluctantly, to respect delusion, not least of all my own. There are no passions quite as hot and pleasurable as those of the deluded. Compared with the bliss of delusion—its vivid colors, blazing lights, explosions, whistles, and sheer liberating joys—the dull search for evidence is a deadly bore. In Timebends, my autobiography, I have written at some length about my dealings with Soviet cultural controllers and writers when as president of International PEN I would attempt to impress its democratic values upon them in their treatment of writers. Moving about there and in East Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia in communist times, it was only by main force that I could dredge up memories of my old idealism, which I had attached to what in reality had turned out to be little more than a half-feudal society led by an unelected elite. How could this possibly be? I can only think that a man in a rushing river will grasp at any floating thing passing by. History, or whatever piece of its debris one happens to connect with, is a great part of the answer. For me it was my particular relation to the collapse of key institutions in the Great Depression, the sometimes scary anti-Semitism I kept running into and the Left’s thankful condemnation of it, the Spanish Civil War and the all-but-declared pro-fascist sympathies of the British, and Roosevelt’s unacknowledged collaboration with their arms blockade of the republic (the so-called Non-Intervention Policy). Indeed, on Franco’s victory, Roosevelt told Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, according to Ickes’s autobiography, that his Spanish policy was “the worst mistake I ever made.” In a word, out of the Great Crash of 1929, America and the world seemed to awaken to a new sense of social responsibility, something which to the young seemed very much like love. My heart was with the Left if only because the Right hated me enough to want to kill me, as the Germans amply proved. And now, of course, the most blatant and foulest anti-Semitism is in Russia, leaving people like me filled not so much with surprise as a kind of wonder at the incredible amount of hope there once was and how it disappeared and whether in time it will ever come again, attached to some new illusion.
And so there is hardly a week that passes when I don’t ask the unanswerable—what am I now convinced of that will turn out to be ridiculous? And yet one can’t forever stand on the shore; at some point, even if filled with indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede that life is forever elsewhere.
Which I daresay was one of the major impulses behind the decision to attempt The Crucible. Salem village, that pious, devout settlement at the very edge of white civilization, had taught me—three centuries before the Russo-American rivalry and the issues it raised—that a kind of built-in pestilence was nestled in the human mind, a fatality forever awaiting the right conditions for its always unique, forever unprecedented outbreak of alarm, suspicion, and murder. And to people wherever the play is performed, on any of the six continents, there is always a certain amazement that the same terror that had happened to them had happened before to others. It is all very strange. On the other hand, the Devil is known to lure people into forgetting precisely what it is vital for them to remember—how else could his endless reappearances always come with such marvelous surprise?
A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE
Introduction to A View from the Bridge
(TWO-ACT VERSION)
1960
A play is rarely given a second chance. Unlike a novel, which may be received initially with less than enthusiasm, and then as time goes by hailed by a large public, a play usually makes its mark right off or it vanishes into oblivion. Two of mine, The Crucible and A View from the Bridge, failed to find large audiences with their original Broadway productions. Both were regarded as rather cold plays at first. However, after a couple of years The Crucible was produced again Off-Broadway and ran two years, without a line being changed from the original. With McCarthy dead it was once again possible to feel warmly toward the play, whereas during his time of power it was suspected of being a special plea, a concoction and unaesthetic. On its second time around its humanity emerged and it could be enjoyed as drama.
At this writing I have not yet permitted a second New York production of A View from the Bridge principally because I have not had the desire to see it through the mill a second time. However, a year or so after its first production it was done with great success in London and then in Paris, where it ran two years. It is done everywhere in this country without any apparent difficulty in reaching the emotions of the audience. This play, however, unlike The Crucible, I have revised, and it was the revision which London and Paris saw. The nature of the revisions bears directly upon the questions of form and style which interest students and theater workers.
The original play produced on Broadway (Viking, 1955) was in one act. It was a hard, telegraphic, unadorned drama. Nothing was permitted which did not advance the progress of Eddie’s catastrophe in a most direct way. In a Note to the published play, I wrote:
What struck me first about this tale when I heard it one night in my neighborhood was how directly, with what breathtaking simplicity, it did evolve. It seemed to me, finally, that its ve
ry bareness, its absolutely unswerving path, its exposed skeleton, so to speak, was its wisdom and even its charm and must not be tampered with. . . . These qualities of the events themselves, their texture, seemed to me more psychologically telling than a conventional investigation in width which would necessarily relax that clear, clean line of his catastrophe.
The explanation for this point of view lies in great part in the atmosphere of the time in which the play was written. It seemed to me then that the theater was retreating into an area of psycho-sexual romanticism, and this at the very moment when great events both at home and abroad cried out for recognition and analytic inspection. In a word, I was tired of mere sympathy in the theater. The spectacle of still another misunderstood victim left me impatient. The tender emotions, I felt, were being overworked. I wanted to write in a way that would call up the faculties of knowing as well as feeling. To bathe the audience in tears, to grip people by the age-old methods of suspense, to theatricalize life, in a word, seemed faintly absurd to me if not disgusting.
In The Crucible I had taken a step, I felt, toward a more self-aware drama. The Puritan not only felt, but constantly referred his feelings to concepts, to codes and ideas of social and ethical importance. Feeling, it seemed to me, had to be made of importance; the dramatic victory had to be more than a triumph over the audience’s indifference. It must call up a concept, a new awareness.
I had known the story of A View from the Bridge for a long time. A waterfront worker who had known Eddie’s prototype told it to me. I had never thought to make a play of it because it was too complete, there was nothing I could add. And then a time came when its very completeness became appealing. It suddenly seemed to me that I ought to deliver it onto the stage as fact; that interpretation was inherent in the very existence of the tale in the first place. I saw that the reason I had not written it was that as a whole its meaning escaped me. I could not fit it into myself. It existed apart from me and seemed not to express anything within me. Yet it refused to disappear.
I wrote it in a mood of experiment—to see what it might mean. I kept to the tale, trying not to change its original shape. I wanted the audience to feel toward it as I had on hearing it for the first time—not so much with heart-wringing sympathy as with wonder. For when it was told to me I knew its ending a few minutes after the teller had begun to speak. I wanted to create suspense but not by withholding information. It must be suspenseful because one knew too well how it would come out, so that the basic feeling would be the desire to stop this man and tell him what he was really doing to his life. Thus, by knowing more than the hero, the audience would rather automatically see his life through conceptualized feelings.
As a consequence of this viewpoint, the characters were not permitted to talk about this and that before getting down to their functions in the tale; when a character entered he proceeded directly to serve the catastrophe. Thus, normal naturalistic acting techniques had to be modified. Excessive and arbitrary gestures were eliminated; the set itself was shorn of every adornment. An atmosphere was attempted in which nothing existed but the purpose of the tale.
The trouble was that neither the director, the actors, nor I had had any experience with this kind of staging. It was difficult to know how far to go. We were all aware that a strange style was called for which we were unsure how to provide.
About a year later in London new conditions created new solutions. Seemingly inconsequential details suggested these solutions at times. For one, the British actors could not reproduce the Brooklyn argot and had to create one that was never heard on heaven or earth. Already naturalism was evaporated by this much: the characters were slightly strange beings in a world of their own. Also, the pay scales of the London theater made it possible to do what I could not do in New York—hire a crowd.
These seemingly mundane facts had important consequences. The mind of Eddie Carbone is not comprehensible apart from its relation to his neighborhood, his fellow workers, his social situation. His self-esteem depends upon their estimate of him, and his value is created largely by his fidelity to the code of his culture. In New York we could have only four strategically placed actors to represent the community. In London there were at least twenty men and women surrounding the main action. Peter Brook, the British director, could then proceed to design a set which soared to the roof with fire escapes, passageways, suggested apartments, so that one sensed that Eddie was living out his horror in the midst of a certain normality, and that, invisibly and without having to speak of it, he was getting ready to invoke upon himself the wrath of his tribe. A certain size accrued to him as a result. The importance of his interior psychological dilemma was magnified to the size it would have in life. What had seemed like a mere aberration had now risen to a fatal violation of an ancient law. By the presence of his neighbors alone the play and Eddie were made more humanly understandable and moving. There was also the fact that the British cast, accustomed to playing Shakespeare, could incorporate into a seemingly realistic style the conception of the play—they moved easily into the larger-than-life attitude which the play demanded, and without the self-conscious awkwardness, the uncertain stylishness which hounds many actors without classic training.
As a consequence of not having to work at making the play seem as factual, as bare as I had conceived it, I felt now that it could afford to include elements of simple human motivation which I had rigorously excluded before—specifically, the viewpoint of Eddie’s wife, and her dilemma in relation to him. This, in fact, accounts for almost all the added material which made it necessary to break the play in the middle for an intermission. In other words, once Eddie had been placed squarely in his social context, among his people, the mythlike feeling of the story emerged of itself, and he could be made more human and less a figure, a force. It thus seemed quite in keeping that certain details of realism should be allowed; a Christmas tree and decorations in the living room, for one, and a realistic make-up, which had been avoided in New York, where the actor was always much cleaner than a longshoreman ever is. In a word, the nature of the British actor and of the production there made it possible to concentrate more upon realistic characterization while the universality of Eddie’s type was strengthened at the same time.
But it was not only external additions, such as a new kind of actor, sets, and so forth, which led to the expansion of the play. As I have said, the original was written in the hope that I would understand what it meant to me. It was only during the latter part of its run in New York that, while watching a performance one afternoon, I saw my own involvement in this story. Quite suddenly the play seemed to be “mine” and not merely a story I had heard. The revisions subsequently made were in part the result of that new awareness.
In general, then, I think it can be said that by the addition of significant psychological and behavioral detail the play became not only more human, warmer and less remote, but also a clearer statement. Eddie is still not a man to weep over; the play does not attempt to swamp an audience in tears. But it is more possible now to relate his actions to our own and thus to understand ourselves a little better not only as isolated psychological entities, but as we connect to our fellows and our long past together.
AFTER THE FALL
Foreword to After the Fall
1964
This play is not “about” something; hopefully, it is something. And primarily it is a way of looking at man and his human nature as the only source of the violence which has come closer and closer to destroying the race. It is a view which does not look toward social or political ideas as the creators of violence, but into the nature of the human being himself. It should be clear now that no people or political system has a monopoly on violence. It is also clear that the one common denominator in all violent acts is the human being.
The first real “story” in the Bible is the murder of Abel. Before this drama there is only a featureless Paradise. But in that Eden there was peace bec
ause man had no consciousness of himself nor any knowledge of sex or his separateness from plants or other animals. Presumably we are being told that the human being becomes “himself” in the act of becoming aware of his sinfulness. He “is” what he is ashamed of.
After all, the infraction of Eve is that she opened up the knowledge of good and evil. She presented Adam with a choice. So that where choice begins, Paradise ends, Innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action? And two alternatives open out of Eden. One is Cain’s alternative—or, if you will, Oswald’s; to express without limit one’s unbridled inner compulsion, in this case to murder, and to plead unawareness as a virtue and a defense. The other course is what roars through the rest of the Bible and all history—the struggle of the human race through the millennia to pacify the destructive impulses of man, to express his wishes for greatness, for wealth, for accomplishment, for love, but without turning law and peace into chaos.
The question which finally comes into the open in this play is, how is that pacification to be attained? Quentin, the central character, arrives on the scene weighed down with a sense of his own pointlessness and the world’s. His success as an attorney has crumbled in his hands as he sees only his own egotism in it and no wider goal beyond himself. He has lived through two wrecked marriages. His desperation is too serious, too deadly to permit him to blame others for it. He is desperate for a clear view of his own responsibility for his life, and this because he has recently found a woman he feels he can love, and who loves him; he cannot take another life into his hands hounded as he is by self-doubt. He is faced, in short, with what Eve brought to Adam—the terrifying fact of choice. And to choose, one must know oneself, but no man knows himself who cannot face the murder in him, the sly and everlasting complicity with the forces of destruction. The apple cannot be stuck back on the Tree of Knowledge; once we begin to see, we are doomed and challenged to seek the strength to see more, not less. When Cain was questioned, he stood amazed and asked, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Oswald’s first words on being taken were, “I didn’t do anything.” And what country has ever gone into war proclaiming anything but injured innocence? Murder and violence require Innocence, whether real or cultivated. And through Quentin’s agony in this play there runs the everlasting temptation of Innocence, that deep desire to return to when, it seems, he was in fact without blame. To that elusive time, which persists in all our minds, when somehow everything was part of us and we so pleasurably at one with others, and everything merely “happened” to us. But the closer he examines those seemingly unified years the clearer it becomes that his Paradise keeps slipping back and back. For there was always his awareness, always the choice, always the conflict between his own needs and desires and the impediments others put in his way. Always, and from the beginning, the panorama of human beings raising up in him and in each other the temptation of the final solution to the problem of being a self at all—the solution of obliterating whatever stands in the way, thus destroying what is loved as well.
Collected Essays Page 34