The Genius and the Goddess (21 page)

In his historical account,
The Devils of Loudon
– published in 1952,
the year before
The Crucible
–
Aldous Huxley also drew analogies
between the religious mania and demonic possession in seventeenth-century
France and the modern method of demonizing victims to
incite and justify political persecution."In medieval and early modern
Christendom," Huxley observed, "the situation of sorcerers and their
clients was almost perfectly analogous to that of Jews under Hitler,
capitalists under Stalin, communists and fellow travelers in the United
States. They were regarded as agents of a Foreign Power, unpatriotic
at the best and, at the worst, traitors, heretics, enemies of the people."
⁴

In Huxley's book Sister Jeanne, provoked by a malicious mixture
of sexual desire and jealousy, accuses Father Grandier of bewitching
her. Similarly, in Miller's play, the young Abigail Williams, a servant
in the Proctors' household, accuses John Proctor's wife, Elizabeth, of
witchcraft. By taking revenge on Elizabeth, who'd dismissed her, she
hopes to recapture John, who'd ended their brief liaison. Proctor,
known for his truthfulness, tries to save his wife by confessing his
adultery and revealing Abigail's treacherous motives. But Elizabeth,
lying to protect him, denies his guilt and condemns them both to
death. Proctor is offered the chance to save his life by confessing to
the crime of witchcraft, but saves his name and his soul by refusing
to do so. Like Father Grandier, Proctor is innocent and shows exemplary
courage in the face of death.

The play's title is striking and vivid, but Miller later admitted that
"nobody knew what a crucible was." Though the word suggests "crucifixion,"
it is actually a vessel for heating substances to high temperatures
and thus, a severe and searching test. Miller used it to suggest the burning
away of impurities, especially of sexual guilt. To emphasize this theme,
he changed the ages of the historical figures – Proctor from sixty to his
mid-thirties, Abigail from eleven to seventeen – and invented Proctor's
adulterous relations with her. The play's dramatic center, he wrote, then
became more personal and concerned "the breakdown of the Proctor
marriage and Abigail Williams's determination to get Elizabeth murdered
so that she could have John."

In
The Crucible
, in which Proctor and Elizabeth (in one
interpretation) represent Miller and his intransigent wife Mary,
Elizabeth has been guilty of coldness toward John, which prompted
his lechery, and has punished him for his sin by her emotional and
sexual withdrawal. After discovering his infidelity, Elizabeth "has
suddenly lost all faith in him." John both accuses her and pleads
for mercy by exclaiming: "Spare me! You forget nothin' and forgive
nothin'. Learn charity, woman."
⁵
Miller's friends immediately recognized
his confession of guilt in the work. Odets said, "No man
would write this play unless his marriage is going to pieces." Kazan
agreed that "the central character in it expresses contrition for a
single act of infidelity. I had to guess that Art was publicly apologizing
to his wife for what he'd done."

Before Miller's affair with Marilyn became public, the contemporary
political allegory (which merges with the autobiographical elements)
attracted the most interest. The core of the play is Proctor's expiation
of his sexual guilt. The characters who falsely confess in the play do
so only to save themselves from death. But, as the critic
Robert
Warshow noted, Proctor's "tormentors will not be satisfied with his
mere admission of guilt: he would be required to implicate others,
thus betraying his innocent friends." Like his accused townsmen,
Proctor must either confess to the imaginary crime of witchcraft or
maintain his innocence and hang for it. Thinking of the witnesses
who cooperated with HUAC and betrayed their friends, Miller
explained Proctor's complex motives: "his pride, and a mixed sense
of unworthiness, which is, I suppose, a very Christian idea. Literally,
life wouldn't be worth living if he walked out of there having been
instrumental in condemning people."
⁶

The analogy between the witch trials in Salem and the witch hunts
of HUAC, though imperfect, is vivid and convincing. The argument
of Miller's play is that those accused of being communists were just
as innocent as those accused of being witches, that the American
congressmen were as deluded and hysterical as the religious leaders
of Salem. The Salem witnesses were eager to confess and incriminated
others by telling lies to save their own lives; the HUAC witnesses
were pressured to name names and incriminate others. They told the
truth to save their own careers. If Proctor confesses he can live; if the
communists confess they can work.

Witches did not exist; communists were real, but (with very few
exceptions) HUAC persecuted people who had left the Party and
were no longer communists. But both governments, driven by mass
hysteria, believed the accused people actually
were
a menace to their
security. In eighteenth-century Salem and twentieth-century America,
the individual was forced to make a moral choice and decide his own
fate. In Salem, confessions saved them from hanging; in contemporary
America, naming names preserved their careers. But with HUAC,
no one was ever acquitted. The victims either betrayed others or
refused to testify, were blacklisted as communists and sent to jail.

Kazan responded to
The Crucible
, continued his moral debate with
Miller and tried to defend his cooperation with HUAC by directing
On the Waterfront
(1955). The film was written by Budd Schulberg
and co-starred Lee J. Cobb, both of whom had also named names.
Though Miller condemned informing and Schulberg's screenplay justified
it,
Waterfront
was strongly influenced by Miller's own screenplay,
The Hook
(1949), which was never produced. Miller wrote that
The
Hook
– itself influenced by the solidarity and strike themes and by
the rousing speeches to workers in Odets'
Waiting for Lefty
(1935) –
"described the murderous corruption in the gangster-ridden Brooklyn
longshoremen's union, whose leadership a group of rebel workers was
trying to overthrow." The propagandistic theme of his script was "Give
them a little organization and they'll come out fightin' . . . and they'll
throw all these racketeers in the river."

Though
The Hook
clearly preceded
Waterfront
, Kazan's extremely
partisan biographer quoted Schulberg's dubious claim that he had
"never read
The Hook
" nor discussed it with Kazan, and maintained
that the charge of plagiarism "is absurd."
⁷
In fact, the similarities of
the two scripts are unmistakable. When Miller pulled out of the
projected film of
The Hook
after Harry Cohn insisted that the gangsters
be changed to communists, Kazan took the idea to his fellow
informer, Budd Schulberg. In both
Hook
and
Waterfront
the villains
are not communists, but gangsters. Both take place around the New
York waterfront, describe the corruption of labor unions by criminals
and portray the hero's struggle to lead the longshoremen against
the racketeers who exploit them. Both have scenes of desperate
dockers gathering for jobs in the cold mist of dawn, a rough crowd
fighting for work tokens that are thrown among them, a fatal accident
when a winch drops a heavy load on a worker in the hold of a ship,
and a man on foot pursued and hunted down by a car. Both
have a tender scene set in a park playground, in which the main
character sits on a children's swing. Miller's hero, Marty Ferrara, sees
his wife Therese (whom he calls Terry) in the park; Schulberg's hero,
Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) courts Edie Doyle (Eva Marie Saint)
on the swings of the playground. Both heroes rather bitterly lament
that they've never been able to realize their potential and both hope
to achieve something better in their lives. Another critic has pointed
out that "Farragut, Rocky, and Jack Uptown in
The Hook
are essentially
revived in
On the Waterfront
as Big Mac, Charley Malloy, and
Johnny Friendly," and that "the ending of
On the Waterfront
owes
much to the ending of
The Hook
, in which Miller has a final shot
of 'Marty walking, silent, Old Dominick beside him, and the Gang
near him. . . . Walking toward us, his face elated, determined,
serious . . . and as he walks the crowd of men behind him thickens
as they all pour out of the hall. And it keeps thickening, widening
. . . FADE OUT.'"

Martin Gottfried speculated that Miller and Kazan came to an
understanding about
The Hook
and
On the Waterfront
before the director
testified at HUAC. The bargain was that "Kazan would not inform
on Miller and in return Miller would not object to his making a
movie about labor unions on the waterfront." But this theory fails to
note that Kazan was a Party member in 1934–35, when Miller was
still a teenager and not yet involved with left-wing organizations. It
also fails to explain why Miller never condemned the obvious plagiarism
in
Timebends
, in his essays or in his numerous interviews. When
questioned directly about this in the 1980s, Miller was unaccountably
vague and apparently unconcerned:

B
IGSBY
: [
The Hook
] sounds remarkably like a film that Kazan did
eventually make,
On the Waterfront
.

M
ILLER
: Well, that was later, after his problem with the Un-American
Activities Committee.

B
IGSBY
: Is there a direct relationship between your script and that
one?

M
ILLER
: I have no way of knowing. Of course they are both waterfront
pictures. The one succeeded the other but they were
quite different pictures.
⁸

In fact, Miller
did
have a way of knowing and could easily have
compared the two pictures, which were very similar and
not
quite
different. But he did not wish to criticize Kazan after patching up
their friendship and working with him again on
After the Fall
.

In
On the Waterfront
– as in Conrad's
Under Western Eyes
(1911) –
the hero, after betraying a friend and causing his death, falls in love
with the friend's sister and, risking the loss of her love, feels driven
to confess his crime to her. In the film, Terry is torn between a refusal
to rat on his friends and (influenced by the saintly Edie) a willingness
to testify for a righteous cause and do his duty as a conscientious
citizen. At first, Terry refuses to accuse his brother Charley (Rod
Steiger), who works for the corrupt union officials. But after the mob
kills Charley because he cannot guarantee Terry's silence, Terry redeems
himself and tells the big boss, Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb), "I'm
glad what I done. . . . I was rattin' on myself all them years and didn't
know it, helpin' punks like you." In his autobiography, Kazan maintained
that there was a clear analogy between Terry's testifying against
the corrupt mobsters and his own testimony before HUAC. Terry's
crucial line "was me saying, with identical heat, that I was glad I'd
testified as I had."

But the justification for naming names in
On the Waterfront
is
specious and corrupt. Terry testifies against a criminal gang, Kazan
and Schulberg against their own friends and associates. Terry testifies
to send a murderer to jail, Kazan and Schulberg to advance their
careers. Terry, at great risk to himself, testifies to help his colleagues,
Kazan and Schulberg to destroy innocent people. Unwilling at first
to work with the tainted Kazan, Brando was finally persuaded to take
the role. He later felt he'd also been betrayed by the director and
writer, who "made the film to justify finking on their friends."
⁹

A View from the Bridge
(1955, revised 1956) – which reprises Miller's
portrayal of the informer in
The Crucible
– continued his dialogue
with both Mary and Kazan. Miller recalled that the play was inspired
by the story "of a longshoreman who had ratted to the Immigration
Bureau on two brothers, his own relatives, who were living illegally
in his very home, in order to break an engagement by one of them
and his niece." In
View
the Italian longshoreman Eddie Carbone is
obsessed by a quasi-incestuous passion for his orphaned niece,
Catherine, who lives in his house. When the illegal immigrants,
Rodolpho and his brother Marco, secretly move in, Catherine falls
in love with Rodolpho. Carbone, who becomes increasingly deranged
and cannot persuade Catherine to break with her fiancé, betrays them
to the immigration officials and is killed by Marco.

In the revised version, Miller deleted the pretentious passages and
use of verse, and expanded the original one-act play to a full-length
work "by opening up the viewpoint of Beatrice, Eddie Carbone's
wife, toward his gathering tragedy." He noted that "both
The Crucible
and
A View from the Bridge
are about the awesomeness of a passion
which, despite its contradicting the self-interest of the individual . . .
despite every kind of warning, despite even the destruction of the
moral beliefs of the individual, proceeds to magnify its power over
him until it destroys him."

A View from the Bridge
is filled with tragic irony. Eddie, hinting that
Rodolpho is homosexual, keeps repeating that he's "not right," but
he himself is impotent. Eddie blindly demands a public apology from
Marco, whom he's betrayed. Marco, whom Eddie likes, is threatened
with deportation and will be jailed for murder. Rodolpho, whom
Eddie hates, marries Catherine and remains in America. The play is
a study in sexual frustration. Eddie has no sex life with Beatrice;
Marco is separated from his wife, who remained in Italy; Eddie does
everything in his power to prevent the love affair of Catherine and
Rodolpho.