AS I watched The Crucible taking shape as a movie over much of the past year, the sheer depth of time it represents for me kept returning to mind. As those powerful actors blossomed on the screen, and the children and the horses, the crowds and the wagons, I thought again about how I came to cook all this up nearly 50 years ago, in an America almost nobody I know seems to remember clearly.
In a way, there is a biting irony in this film's having been made by a Hollywood studio, something unimaginable in the 1950s. But there they are Daniel Day Lewis (John Proctor) scything his sea bordered field, Joan Allen (Elizabeth) lying pregnant in the frigid jail, Winona Ryder (Abigail) stealing her minister uncle's money, majestic Paul Scofield (Judge Danforth) and his righteous empathy with the Devil possessed children, and all of them looking as inevitable as rain.
I remember those years - they formed The Crucible's skeleton - but I have lost the dead weight of the fear I had then. Fear doesn't travel well; just as it can warp judgment, its absence can diminish memory's truth. What terrifies one generation is likely to bring only a puzzled smile to the next. I remember how in 1964, only 20 years after the war, Harold Clurman, the director of Incident At Vichy, showed the cast a film of a Hitler speech, hoping to give them a sense of the Nazi period in which my play took place. They watched as Hitler, facing a vast stadium full of adoring people, went up on his toes in ecstasy, hands clasped under his chin, a sublimely self gratified grin on his face, and they giggled at his overacting.
Likewise, films of Senator Joseph McCarthy are rather unsettling if you remember the fear he once spread. Buzzing his truculent sidewalk brawler's snarl through the hairs in his nose, squinting through his cat's eyes and sneering like a villain, he comes across now as nearly comical, a self aware performer keeping a straight face as he does his juicy threat shtick.
McCarthy's power to stir fears of creeping communism was not entirely based on illusion, of course; the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became an expanding empire. In 1949, Mao Zedong took power in China. Western Europe also seemed ready to become Red - especially Italy, where the Communist Party was the largest outside Russia, and was growing. Capitalism, in the opinion of many, myself included, had nothing more to say, its final poisoned bloom having been Italian and German fascism. McCarthy - brash and ill mannered but to many authentic and true - boiled it all down to what anyone: could understand we had "lost China" and would soon lose Europe as well, because the State Department - staffed, of course, under Democratic presidents - was full of treasonous pro Soviet intellectuals. It was as simple as that.
If our losing China seemed the equivalent of a flea's losing an elephant, it was still a phrase - and a conviction - one did not dare to question; to do so was to risk drawing suspicion on oneself. Indeed, the State Department proceeded to hound and fire the officers who knew China, its language, and its opaque culture - a move that suggested the practitioners of sympathetic magic who wring the neck of a doll in order to make a distant enemy's head drop off. There was magic all around; the politics of alien conspiracy soon dominated political discourse and bid fair to wipe out any other issue. How could one deal with such enormities in a play?
The Crucible was an act of desperation. Much of my desperation branched, out, I suppose, from a typical Depression era trauma - the blow struck on the mind by the rise of European fascism and the brutal anti Semitism it had brought to power. But by 1950, when I began to think of writing about the hunt for Reds in America I was motivated in some great part by the paralysis that had set in among many liberals: who, despite their discomfort with the inquisitors' violations of civil rights, were fearful, and with good reason, of being identified as covert Communists ifs they should protest too strongly.
In any play, however trivial, there has to be a still point of moral reference against which to gauge the action. In our lives, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, no such point existed any more. The Left could not look straight at the Soviet Union's abrogations of human rights. The anti Communist liberals could not acknowledge the violations of those rights by congressional: committees. The far Right, meanwhile, was licking up all the cream. The days of J'accuse were gone, for anyone needs to feel right to declare someone else wrong. Gradually, all the old political and moral reality had melted like a Dali watch. Nobody but a fanatic, it seemed, could really say all that he believed.
President Truman was among the first to have to deal with the dilemma, and his way of resolving it - of having to trim his sails before the howling gale on the Right - turned out to be momentous. At first he was outraged at the allegation of widespread Communist infiltration of the government and called the charge of "coddling Communists" a red herring dragged in by the Republicans to bring down the Democrats. But such was the gathering power of raw belief in the great Soviet plot that Truman soon felt it, necessary to institute loyalty boards of his own.
The Red hunt, led by the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities and by McCarthy, was becoming the dominating fixation of the American psyche. It reached Hollywood when the studios, after first resisting, agreed to submit artists' names to the House Committee for "clearing" before employing them. This unleashed a veritable holy terror among actors, directors, and others, from party members to those who had the merest brush with a front organisation.
The Soviet plot was the hub of a great wheel of causation the plot justified the crushing of all nuance, all the shadings that a realistic judgment of reality requires.
Even worse was the feeling that our sensitivity to this onslaught on our liberties was passing from us - indeed, from me. In Timebends, my autobiography, I recalled the time I'd written a screenplay (The Hook) about union corruption on the Brooklyn waterfront. Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, did something that would once have been considered unthinkable: he showed my script to the F.B.I. Cohn then asked me to take the gangsters: in my script, who were threatening and murdering their opponents, and simply change them to Communists. When I declined to commit this idiocy (Joe Ryan, the head of the longshoremen's union, was soon to go to Sing Sing for racketeering), I got a wire from Cohn saying, "The minute we try to make the script pro American you pull out." By then - it was 1951 - I had come to accept this terribly serious insanity as routine, but there was an element of the marvellous in it which I longed to put on the stage.
In those years, our thought processes were becoming so magical, so paranoid, that to imagine writing a play about this environment was like trying to pick one's teeth with a ball of wool: I lacked the tools to illuminate miasma. Yet I kept being - drawn back to it.
I had read about the witchcraft trials in college, but it was not until I read a book published in 1867 - a two volume, thousand page study by Charles W. Upham, who was then the mayor of Salem - that I knew I had to write about the period. Upham had not only written a broad and thorough investigation of what was even then an almost lost chapter of Salem's past but opened up to me the details of personal relationships among many participants in the tragedy.
I visited Salem for the first time on a dismal spring day in 1952; it was a sidetracked town then, with abandoned factories and vacant stores. In the gloomy courthouse there I read the transcripts of the witchcraft trials of 1692, as taken down in a primitive shorthand by ministers who were spelling each other. But there was one entry in Upham in which the thousands of pieces I had come across were jogged into place. It was from a report written by the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was one of the chief instigators of the witch hunt. "During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam" - the two were "afflicted" teenage accusers, and Abigail was Parris's niece - "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 exceedingly 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 . . ."
In this remarkably observed gesture of a troubled young girl, I believed, a play became possible. Elizabeth Proctor had been the orphaned Abigail's mistress, and they had lived together in the same small house: until Elizabeth fired the girl. By this time, I was sure, John Proctor had bedded Abigail, who had to be dismissed most likely to appease Elizabeth. There was bad blood between the two women now. That Abigail started, in effect, to condemn Elizabeth to death with her touch, then stopped her hand, then went through with it, was quite suddenly the human centre of all this turmoil.
All this I understood. I had not approached the witchcraft out of nowhere, or from purely social and political considerations. My own marriage of 12 years was teetering and I knew more than I wished to know about where the blame lay. That John Proctor the sinner might overturn his paralysing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, It suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring: even from an ambiguously unblemished soul. Moving crabwise across the profusion of evidence, I sensed I had at last found something of myself in it, and a play began to accumulate around this man.
But as the dramatic form became visible, one problem remained unyielding: so many practices of the Salem trials were similar tot those employed by the congressional committees that I could easily be accused oft skewing history for a mere partisan purpose. Inevitably, it was no sooner known that my new play was about Salem than I had to confront the charge that such an analogy was specious - that there never were any witches but there certainly are communists. In the 17th century, however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in Europe and America and even lawyers of the highest eminence, such as Sir Edward Coke, a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary power, believed witches had to be prosecuted mercilessly. Of course, there were no communists in 1692, but it was literally worth your life to deny witches or their powers, given the exhortation in the Bible, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live".
I AM not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know its paranoid centre is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that it did in the 1950s. For some, the play seems to be about the dilemma of relying on the testimony of small children accusing adults of sexual abuse, something I'd not have dreamed of 40 years ago. For others, it may simply be a fascination with the outbreak of paranoia that suffuses the play - the blind panic that, in our age, often seems to sit at the dim edges of consciousness.
Certainly its political implications are the central issue for many people; the Salem interrogations turn out to be eerily exact models of those yet to come in. Stalin's Russia, Pinochet's Chile, Mao's China, and other regimes. (Nien Cheng, the author of Lid and Death in Shanghai, has told me that she could hardly believe that a non Chinese - someone who had not experienced the Cultural Revolution - had written the play.) But below its concerns with justice the play evokes a lethal brew oft illicit sexuality, fear of the supernatural and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar these days.