Keynote Address, The Third International Arthur Miller Conference, Utica College, September 18, 1996.

When I think of Jean Muir—which I do very infrequently—I think of her spirited Helena quarreling with Olivia de Haviland's Hermia in Max Reinhardt's A Midsummer Night's Dream. When Jean Muir died in July 1996, her Helena and her other screen and stage credits were listed well down in her obituary in the New YorkTimes. It opened with a notorious 1950 event, her dismissal from the television series The Aldrich Family after she was listed as a suspected Communist sympathizer in Red Channels, that self-anointed arbiter of national purity. Her name set off an avalanche—a small one, I suspect—of angry calls from telephone patriots, whose voices would continue to sound throughout the decade. NBC and General Foods gave in to the pressure, and, when The Aldrich Family, which had been temporarily postponed, finally aired, Jean Muir, who had been cleared of any charges against her, did not appear as Mother Aldrich because, as General Foods so smarmily said, she was "a controversial personality." As the first victim of Red Channels, Muir's name "was to become symbolic in the radio-TV industry," as John Cogley said in the Report on Blacklisting he prepared for The Fund for the Republic. The initial outrage within the industry and in organizations like Actors Equity quickly died down, and by 1952 the blacklist—never acknowledged, of course—was a potent force.

Actors, directors, and writers, whether actual Communists or only "somewhat mentioned," to use Mary Warren's phrase from The Crucible, found themselves unable to work. Some went into exile. Some changed professions, temporarily or permanently. Lionel Stander told an interviewer in 1971 that "I went to work on Wall Street, where there is no blacklist." Some of them—John Garfield, Canada Lee, J. Edward Bromberg, Mady Christians—were said to have died because of the pressure on them. Some of them became friendly witnesses, clearing themselves in ritual sessions with the House Un-American Activities Committee, giving the investigators names that they already had.

It was particularly difficult for actors. "It's the only face I have," said Lee J. Cobb, the original Willy Loman, who became a friendly witness in 1953. Writers could and did work under pseudonyms. Dalton Trumbo, as Robert Rich, won an Academy Award for The Brave One in 1956, and in 1959 Nedrick Young admitted that he was the Nathan E. Douglas who wrote The Defiant Ones and was allowed to accept his award. By that time, the blacklist and the decade were coming to an end. Even Jean Muir returned to television in 1958. It was not until 1997, however, that the Screen Writers Guild West restored the pseudonymous screen credits to their rightful owners.

Although my emphasis here is on film and theater, it is important to remember that the Red-hunters reached into factories, schools, unions, publishing houses, and government offices where the names were much less glamorous. The most distressing thing about the anticommunism of the 1950s was the way it infected almost everyone. I was teaching at the Newark College of Engineering in 1955, and one of my assignments in Freshman English was to ask for reactions to news stories. One day, as I collected the papers at the end of the hour, the next class began to move in. The instructor, a colleague from one of the sciences, studied my theme suggestions on the board: the morality of wiretaps, the idea of paid informers, a proposed union merger. He allowed as how we English teachers were luckier than the scientists. "Every year some of the seniors take jobs that demand clearance, and the FBI men are always coming around to ask questions," he said. "All you would have to do is remember what they say on these papers and I bet you'd have plenty to tell." I still shudder when I recall the moment.

Three other less personal images from the early 1950s stay with me. The first is of Richard Nixon delivering the famous Checkers speech. Nixon had made his reputation as a Congressman during the Alger Hiss investigations in 1948 and had moved on to the Senate in 1950 by trashing Helen Gahagan Douglas. In 1952, he was chosen as General Eisenhower's running mate, but when a scandal broke about a special, perhaps illegal fund put together for his use by some California businessmen, he began to look like a liability to the ticket. Eisenhower was not about to come to Nixon's defense (after all, later in the campaign the General would plan and then discard a defense of General Marshall, who had been attacked by Senator McCarthy). So Nixon had to save himself. This was one of his Six Crises. In the television speech on September 23, Nixon, all put-upon innocent, tried to explain away the fund, an exercise that might not have worked had it not been for the inspired hokum with which he brought the speech to a close. After a bit about poor Pat, who did not own a mink, only "a respectable Republican cloth coat," he segued into the "little cocker spaniel dog" which a Texas admirer had sent to his family. Six-year-old Tricia named it Checkers and both girls so loved it that their father took a firm stand on the dog question, which no one had raised. "I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it." There was not a dry eye in the nation. Oh, maybe a few. Walter Lippmann is supposed to have told a dinner guest, "That must be the most demeaning experience my country has ever had to bear." Still, there were enough wet eyes to keep the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket intact.

I was young enough and irreverent enough to find Nixon's performance as comic as it was unnerving, a parody turn that might have served Sid Caesar on his very successful Your Show of Shows if his talent for subversion had been political rather than cultural. I was also innocent. I thought that Nixon's exercise in calculated sincerity was no more than a standard politician's role-playing. It was much later, in books about Nixon—by Roger Morris, by Herbert S. Parmet—that we were told how orchestrated the broadcast had been, how television professionals and advertising mavens had shaped it to call up the tears of the viewers.

The second image came near the end of the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, the conflict of charge and countercharge in which Senator McCarthy finally ran up against opposition that he could not bulldoze. Following his famous "I have here in my hand . . ." speech in Wheeling in 1950, his name became a noun designating flamboyant anticommunism that went for the jugular and the headline, and left a trail of oddly unverified documents in its destructive wake. If McCarthyism can be said to have had an ideology, it was, as Richard Rovere said in 1954, "essentially nihilistic." McCarthy was a master of verbal manipulation, able to shift easily from belligerence to hurt innocence to patriotic rhetoric. At one touchy point in the hearings, he threw up a diversion by attacking Joseph Welch, outside attorney for the Army, through Fred Fisher, a young lawyer in Welch's Boston firm, who had once belonged to the leftist Lawyers' Guild. Ignoring both Welch's open presentation of fact and the attempts by Senator Karl E. Mundt, who was presiding over the session, to correct inaccuracies in McCarthy's accusations, McCarthy kept harping on Fisher and his presumed political sins. Finally, Welch put aside the fey and ironic role that he had used through most of the hearing. He turned on McCarthy and, speaking with clear if controlled outrage, said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" Of all the two million words spoken at those hearings, those are the ones that have stayed with me.

Of course, McCarthy had no sense of decency. He kept on talking although by now—after 188 hours of the hearings on television—it was clear that he was no longer in control of himself or his crusade. There is a marvelous sequence at the end of Point of Order!, the documentary that Emile de Antonio and Daniel Talbot carved out of the extended footage of the hearings. McCarthy's voice goes on and on as the Senators, the staff, the press, the spectators get up and leave, as the room empties around him. There may be a certain amount of directorial tinkering in that scene (the documentary was made in 1964), but it is essentially true. The Senate voted to censure McCarthy at the end of 1954. His power, which had been injured by earlier broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow on See It Now, was broken by the Army-McCarthy hearings, largely because of his own behavior.

There is a coda to these events which illustrates that the 1950s is not an easy decade to characterize. Joseph Welch, the unlikely hero of the hearings, became a celebrity. At one point, McCarthy tried to put him down by saying, "I get the impression that while you are quite an actor, you play for a laugh." David T. Bazelon, in his introduction to the printed text of Point of Order!, called the televised hearings "the greatest political show on earth" and said, "In the end, everyone played to the camera." McCarthy miscalculated his effect on the audience. Joseph Welch did not. He went on to a second career. In 1956, he became the narrator on Omnibus, a high-toned television program, and in 1959 he made his film debut as the judge in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder. Although he used some of the tricks that had endeared him to viewers during the hearings, he was not nearly as effective as he had been, probably because he was less comfortable when a scripted situation robbed him of his own words.

My third image is of the little girl from Little Rock. I do not mean Carol Channing's Lorelei Lee, although Gentlemen Prefer Blondes was a major Broadway hit in the early 1950s. I mean Elizabeth Eckford, the 15-year-old girl who in September 1957 walked alone to the door of the supposedly desegregated Central High School, followed by the taunts of the crowd, only to find her way barred by the national guardsmen whom Governor Faubus had called out to protect the school and the city from the menace of a handful of teen-agers. She turned back, still alone, and walked to what she hoped was the safety of a bus stop, passing through an escalation of abuse ("No nigger bitch is going to get in our school"). I no longer remember whether or not I actually saw that confrontation on television or if I imposed on that terrible moment all the distorted faces of shouting venomous mobs that came later—in Birmingham, in New Orleans, in Boston. It was an event that sent shame and outrage through a great many people and produced some unexpected reactions. Louis Armstrong, who was never political, became so angry that he denounced President Eisenhower and canceled a State Department tour that was to take him to Russia. When later in September the president sent the troops to escort the black students into the school, Armstrong sent him a telegram: "If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, daddy. God bless you." Eisenhower passed on what would have been a great photo opportunity.

It could not have been easy for Elizabeth Eckford and her fellow pioneers to settle into academic life at Central High. After all, integration is a legal concept, not a state of mind. Still, it was a beginning. The encounter in Little Rock, like Rosa Parks's refusal to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, was a 1950s promise of the Civil Rights movement which would take fire in the next decade.

What of Louis Armstrong's proposed tour to Russia? Senator McCarthy might have made something of that (a Communist plot in the State Department?), but McCarthy was dead. Besides such tours had become routine. Truman Capote had gone to Russia with a Porgy and Bess company in 1955 and reported back to the American people in the pages of The New Yorker. American artists had apparently become the front-line troops in an ideational battle which raged all during a decade that feared—perhaps expected—imminent takeover from what a movie star, in professional decline in the fifties, would later label "the evil empire."

The decade had begun with a hot war in Korea, but once the armistice was signed in 1953, it was the Cold War that dominated the decade. Take, as an indication of the ambiguity of the period, Pork Chop Hill, the only serious movie to come out of the Korean War. It is the story of a company that is almost completely destroyed, but whose remnants hang onto the hill which has no military value except as a pawn in the Panmunjon negotiations. The film was directed by Lewis Milestone, who back in 1930 directed one of the great pacifist war films, All Quiet on the Western Front. Given that the taking of the hill was an essentially pointless and very costly operation, here was material for a potentially tough antiwar film. But it came out in 1959, not 1930, and, although it scored points by showing the soldiers as victims of negotiation ploys, the tone was very like that of World War II films. As the exhausted soldiers straggle down the hill at the end of the film, the implications of the visual comment are lost in a voice-over that is certainly not intended to be ironic. The captain (Gregory Peck) compares Pork Chop Hill to Bunker Hill and says, "Millions live in freedom today because of what they [the King Company boys] did."

Hot and cold running wars; the overhanging danger of the atom bomb (whatever happened to all those backyard shelters?); the perceived threat of Communist infiltration and the obvious threat of reckless self-styled patriots like McCarthy; the beginning of overt opposition to institutional racism and the angry reaction to those first steps. How, with all this going on, did the 1950s get the reputation that it still has as a placid decade, one in which material well-being and personal security safely insulated a man and his family from outside dangers? Perhaps through "The Power of PositiveThinking," to borrow the title of Norman Vincent Peale's self-help masterpiece—more than three years on the New YorkTimes best-seller list. Perhaps through the power of positive self-deception. In a writer's note in Fiction of the Fifties, Herbert Gold's 1959 anthology, R. V. Cassill wrote, "the Cold War and the McCarthy Era have so compromised the common vision and vocabulary that honesty, even at simple levels of communication, is harder to achieve than in any other time I have heard about." In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," the narrator describes a housing project: "It looked like a parody of the good, clean, faceless life." Baldwin had his own uses for the phrase in his story, but it might be possible to take it out of context and use it as an epitaph for the decade: "It looked like a parody of the good, clean, faceless life." A television producer told Herbert Gold, "I don't think you understand what we want. We want happy stories about happy people with happy problems." Gold's interview came in mid-decade, after the industry, having purged itself of the politically suspect, decided it was time to turn away from the kind of television drama—socially and psychologically untidy—that had produced the plays that are now remembered as The Golden Age of Television. In "The Age of Happy Problems," the essay that took its title from that interview, Gold saw his generation embracing the accommodating Zeitgeist: "Now some of us say we are cool, say we are beat; but most of us are allrightniks—doing okay. We are successful." In "All the Sad Young Men," a sympathetic essay on the post-World War II generation, John Cogley wrote: "They made Brooks Brothers the uniform of a nation. They followed their brothers to the suburbs, make more money than their fathers ever did, have more babies than any generation in a long time." Rummaging through my files, I came across my review of Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit and, although it appeared in the same magazine (Commonweal) and at about the same time as Cogley's article, I was less understanding. "What is the moral of the novel supposed to be anyway: the self-pitying shall inherit the earth?"

There was obviously a layer of doubt under the shiny surface of suburban success. Hence the popularity of The Power of Positive Thinking.McCall's invented "Togetherness" and peddled it to a receptive country. Good Housekeeping offered a gift with the issue of May, 1957: a pamphlet, Dwight D. Eisenhower's Favorite Poetry, Prose and Prayers. There was a religious revival, partly real and partly cosmetic. In The Reporter in 1954, William Lee Miller, a clergyman turned political essayist, wrote an article called "Piety along the Potomac," in which he said, "After his election, the President joined a church." Elmer Davis wrote of Independence Day, 1953, "The greatest demonstration of the religious character of this administration came on July Fourth, which the President told us all to spend as a day of penance and prayer. Then he himself caught four fish in the morning, played eighteen holes of golf in the afternoon, and spent the evening at the bridge table." Despite the ease with which an intelligent observer could play on the idea of Eisenhower as spiritual leader, that he and other government figures felt the need to insist on their religious bona fides reflects a strain of discontent and searching amid the smugness of the decade.

"The decade began for me with more promise than I can remember since my earliest youth," John Cheever said in his note in Fiction of the Fifties. "However, halfway through the decade, something went terribly wrong . . . and I do not have the language, the imagery, or the concepts to describe my apprehensions." He is exaggerating—perhaps not about his apprehensions but certainly about his literary equipment for dealing with them. One of the best chronicles of the subsurface angst of the 1950s is The Housebreaker of Shady Hill and Other Stories, the collection that Cheever published in 1958, and "The Country Husband" may be the most revealing, the most moving of those stories. It begins with an airplane crash outside Philadelphia. There are no casualties, and Francis Weed, Cheever's protagonist, is able to get to New York in time to catch his usual commuter train to Shady Hill. No one—not his fellow commuters, not his wife, not his children—can pause in their daily routine long enough to listen to the story of his misadventure. What might have befallen him and their indifference to it so disturb the even flow of his days that, without recognizing what is pushing him, he insults the social arbiter of Shady Hill, falls in unrequited love and lust for the babysitter, almost loses his wife, maliciously lies about the sitter's boyfriend, throws himself on the mercy of a psychiatrist and ends by building a therapeutic coffee table in his basement workshop. In the final unnerving paragraph, we see first a cat stumbling in the doll's dress that someone has buttoned on it and then Jupiter, the free-spirited tom, prancing through the tomato vines. "Then it is dark; it is a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains."

"The Country Husband" is the 1950s, but so, too, is John Cheever, the man who made it. It was a strange decade.

For Arthur Miller this troubled and troubling decade began on a high note. If he did not enter the 1950s, as the Reverend Hale in The Crucible says he entered Salem, "like a bridegroom to his beloved" (there is a certain ironic appropriateness to the simile, considering the part that Marilyn Monroe played in Miller's 1950s), then we might at least assume that he came, like Cheever—John, not Ezekiel— with some sense of promise. After all, Death of a Salesman, which had opened in 1949, came with him, wearing its prizes (Pulitzer, Critics Circle) and its commercial success, and would continue its Broadway run until November 18, 1950. Despite the carping of some critics, Salesman was embraced by audiences at home and abroad, and Miller was quickly recognized as one of the two leading American playwrights. Tennessee Williams was the other. Unlike Norman Mailer, another literary star of the fifties, Miller did not conceive of the history of American literature—American drama, in his case—as a boxing match in which the serious writer was always fighting to be the champion. Yet, he takes the trouble in Timebends to indicate the resentment that Lillian Hellman and Clifford Odets—fellow writers on the left of an earlier generation—felt toward him, "no doubt the consequence of my own arrogance as much as theirs." With that odd mixture of pushiness and propriety that he often gets into a single sentence, he added, "It is no great credit to me to say that I felt no such hostility toward either of them, probably because I was sure that if there was a competition among us I had won it."

So the 1950s began for Miller with a sense of achievement, on a note of assurance. Yet, in 1974, as part of New York magazine's twenty-five-years-after reconsideration of 1949, Miller contributed, "The Year It Came Apart," which I think is one of his best occasional pieces. "An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted," he wrote, "and my oneness with the Broadway audience was among these then." He is not simply making the point, which he has made often over the years, that Broadway was disintegrating after World War II, ceasing to be a viable setting for all kinds of theater, from kitsch to art. The death of diversity in the Broadway audience, the uncoupling of a loosely connected mixture of tastes and beliefs, was a symptom for Miller of a general dissolution in American society and a concomitant growth of distrust and harshness. Speaking of Salesman and the responses to it, he wrote, "'49 would seem in later years to be the last time so much tenderness and pity would seem authentic in a play, the last time the humanity of the audience could be so totally assumed. And it seemed less than accidental that the two plays which marked the hour, Streetcar and Salesman, different as they are, both share an unabashed compassion for their characters, an open flow of pity for the failed which would soon be insupportable in the coming subliminal defensiveness." The article suggested that in 1949 Miller already knew or sensed—"something tugged at the sleeve of triumph," he said of the success of Salesman—that a newer, uglier decade was about to be born. Although there were already prophetic signs in the late 1940s—the first of the Congressional investigations, for instance—I suspect that much of his remembered discontent is an ex-post-facto re-creation. Commenting on the difficulty of "transmitting historical experience," he said, "the fact of survival already skews The Past." Yet, he did not have to wait until 1974 to recognize that something was awry. In a New YorkTimes article in 1952, he lamented the absence of new serious plays: "A lizardic dormancy seems to be upon us; the creative mind seems to have lost its heat." But a lot had happened between 1949 and 1952, to the country and to Miller—the rejection of his film script on waterfront corruption and his first Broadway flop since The Man Who Had All the Luck.

The flop was Miller's adaptation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, which opened in late 1950 and ran for just 36 performances. In the introduction to the published play, Miller lamented that "In recent years Ibsen has fallen into a kind of respectful obscurity." In the late 1940s, I not only read Ibsen in Joseph Wood Krutch's drama class at Columbia but I squeezed into a cheap balcony seat at the International Theatre to see Eva Le Gallienne's production of John Gabriel Borkman. What Miller presumably meant by "respectful obscurity" was that Ibsen was not big box office on Broadway, which he certainly never was. Perhaps, after the success of All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, Miller was hoping to introduce Ibsen to that wide, welcoming Broadway audience which he would later say was already disappearing. He would learn, through the history of The Crucible, that the artistic life of a play is not coterminus with its initial run.

An Enemy of the People was never a viable commercial prospect, and surely everyone involved in its production knew that. It was a political statement. It is difficult—as it always is with Miller—to use his own words to sort out exactly what happened when in his professional and personal lives. In interviews and articles spread out over forty years—and even in Timebends—details, including dates, become confused. He was apparently approached some time in 1950 by Fredric March and his wife Florence Eldridge, who would play the Stockmanns, and Robert Lewis, who would direct the play—or some combination of those three—to do a new adaptation of Ibsen's Enemy. He told Phillip Gelb in 1958 that it was difficult to raise money for the production because "it was too evidently a counter-statement to McCarthy"; elsewhere he says that the production was backed by either Lars Nordensson, the "wealthy young businessman" from Sweden who produced the play and who provided the literal translation which became the basis of Miller's adaptation, or by the Marches, who, Miller says in Timebends, "were suing a man for libeling them as Communists" and who, faced with a possible loss of film roles, "saw themselves in the shoes of the Stockmanns." The Marches' libel suit had been settled out of court in late 1949 when Counterattack, a Red Channels clone, retracted its false charge against the actors, but—after two years in litigation—the Marches had reason to find Ibsen's Enemy an appealing prospect.

By 1950, as the Jean Muir case shows, the climate which was to characterize much of the decade was already established. For Miller, his adaptation was a response to the times. "I had no interest in exhuming anything," he said, indicating that he would not rescue Ibsen for Ibsen's sake from his presumed neglect, but "I believed this play could be alive for us because its central theme is, in my opinion, the central theme of our social life today. Simply, it is the question of whether the democratic guarantees protecting political minorities ought to be set aside in time of crisis." He tried to make the dialogue less stilted than it was in earlier translations and he cut away passages that he found dated, but for the most part he stuck, scene by scene and character by character, to the Ibsen original. He did, however, introduce material that seemed particularly pertinent to 1950—even in added stage directions. It is Miller not one of the characters who says, "It is not a bad thing to have a courageous, quiet man for a friend, even if it has gone out of fashion." The line would have been more evocative two years later after Elia Kazan testified before HUAC as a friendly witness. Miller's major changes come in Act II, Scene 2, a much rewritten version of Ibsen's Act IV, primarily in a speech he gives to Peter Stockmann, which has no equivalent in the original. "Now God knows, in ordinary times I'd agree a hundred per cent with anybody's right to say anything," Peter says and goes on to insist, "But these are not ordinary times." In Timebends, Miller suggests that the production might eventually have found its audience if "the press [had not] reacted defensively, as if its virginity had been fingered." In fact, the notices were mixed and those reviewers who recognized the contemporary analogy were not distressed by it.

Whoever was or was not supposed to be fingered by Miller's Ibsen adaptation, the play did not last. Miller would not get back to Broadway until The Crucible opened on January 22, 1953. Once again, Miller was responding to the contemporary situation, this time the deepening sense of distrust and fear in the country, and, once again, even though he re-staged the play and wrote a new scene for it after it had opened, it was not a commercial success. It did run for almost six months, however, and it played for more than a year when it was revived off-Broadway in post-McCarthy 1958. More important, for the play and its author, The Crucible outgrew its immediate political context and has become one of Miller's most often produced plays.

"I am not pressing a historical allegory here," Miller told Henry Hewes in a pre-opening interview in Saturday Review, "and I have even eliminated certain striking similarities from The Crucible which may have started the audience to drawing such an allegory." Perhaps this I-am-not-doing-what-I-am-doing nonsense was designed to avoid pre-labeling his play. When The Crucible was published later in 1953, the playwright was certainly pressing an analogy if not an allegory. In one of those ruminative historical mini-essays that punctuate the text, he wrote of his characters, "When one rises above the individual villainy displayed, one can only pity them all, just as we shall be pitied someday." Later, in commenting on "contemporary diabolism," he offered a neat if suspicious balance between East and West, Left and Right: "In the countries of the Communist ideology, all resistance of any import is linked to the totally malign capitalist succubi, and in America any man who is not reactionary in his views is open to the charge of alliance with the Red hell."

Miller went on to dismiss—rightly, I think—what became a favorite bone of contention about the play—whether its political point foundered on the fact of Communists versus the fantasy of witches. Before the play was ever written, the analogy was attacked by Molly Kazan, the wife of Miller's friend and heretofore favorite director. According to Elia Kazan in A Life, Molly read Marion Starkey's The Devil in Massachusetts, which Miller was using as a source, and told her husband and Miller, "What's going on here and now is not to be compared with the witch trials of that time. Those witches did not exist. Communists do." Miller remembers the scene differently and more dramatically with Molly, standing in the rain, desperately arguing Communist infiltration in the unions, "a woman fighting for her husband's career," as he drives off to do his research in Salem. Kazan's biography, like Timebends, is heavily marked with doctored memory, but it is Miller's account that concerns me here. En route to Salem in April, 1952, he says in Timebends, he stopped to visit the Kazans, at Elia's request. The director, presumably in search of Miller's blessing, wanted to tell him that he had decided to cooperate with the Committee, in fact that he had already testified in executive session. More in sorrow than in anger, Miller drove on. As he returned from Salem, his car radio carried a bulletin about Kazan's testimony and "mentioned the people he had named, none of whom I knew." Either the radio announcer was derelict or Miller is being disingenuous to protect the mood of his scene, for among the people named by Kazan were Morris Carnovsky and Art Smith, both of whom had played in An Enemy of the People.

Presumably, the immediate significance of The Crucible for Miller lay not simply in the crying out of innocent people but in society's acceptance of the practice and the manipulation of the process by characters as different as Putnam and Abigail. This can be heard in lines like John Proctor's "Is the accuser always holy now?" and Reverend Hale's "Is every defense an attack upon the court?" It is certainly apparent in the court's insistence that the accused not only confess to serving the Devil but that they name their co-conspirators. Although the ritual naming of names was common practice by 1952, it must have been Kazan's testimony that fed the drumbeat of names, names, names all through the play. In an article in Encounter on the Miller hearings before HUAC in 1956, Mary McCarthy wrote, "For the committee's purpose, it was not necessary that Mr. Miller be an informer; he was merely being asked to act like one." He chose not to act like one. "I take the responsibility for everything I have ever done, but I cannot take responsibility for another human being," he said—which was not surprising. His John Proctor has already delivered a cleaner, neater expression of those sentiments: "I speak my own sins; I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it."

Miller's next appearance on Broadway—his last for the 1950s—came in 1955 with the double bill of A Memory of Two Mondays and A View from the Bridge.Memory, he would say later, "was written in a cold time to keep warm." View, for all of Alfieri's attempt to call up echoes of ancient Sicilian, ancient Calabrian passions, belonged to its own cold time. Re-enter Elia Kazan. In 1980, in Naming Names, in what he calls his "moral detective story" about informers, Victor S. Navasky resurrected an old story about Miller and Kazan, which he admitted might be apocryphal. Miller is supposed to have sent a copy of A View from the Bridge to Kazan, who, assuming that he was being asked to direct it, responded enthusiastically, only to be told that it had been sent to show Kazan what Miller thought of informers. The story first appeared, as "a piece of theater gossip," in Murray Kempton's column in the New YorkPost on January 3, 1956. Ten days later, the Post printed an angry letter from Miller, not only denying the truth of the story but protesting "a slur upon my elementary sense of decency and the integrity of my work." Kempton apologized, but the tone of his apology suggested that he was not quite convinced by Miller's denial; he may have been touchy on the subject of informers because James Wechsler, his friend and colleague at the Post, had given Kempton's name when he appeared before the McCarthy Committee in 1953 as what he called "a responsive but not a friendly witness."

Even if one chooses to disbelieve the story, as I do, it is impossible to ignore the way Miller and Kazan and the Brooklyn waterfront were all mixed together in the early 1950s. In 1951, Miller wrote The Hook, which he describes in Timebends as "the screenplay about [Pete] Panto's doomed attempt to overthrow the feudal gangsterism of the New York waterfront." He and Kazan, who was to direct it, went to Hollywood to do a deal with Harry Cohn at Columbia. (It was on this trip that Miller met Marilyn Monroe and initiated the personal story that was to play alongside the political story of the 1950s.) Both Miller and Kazan describe the negotiations and both agree that the project died when Cohn brought in Roy Brewer, the reactionary union leader, a leading Hollywood anticommunist, to vet the script. When Brewer suggested that the labor racketeers be turned into Communists, Miller withdrew his script and, as he says in Timebends, got this telegram from Cohn: ITS INTERESTING HOW THE MINUTE WE TRY TO MAKE THE SCRIPT PRO-AMERICAN YOU PULL OUT. In Kazan's version, he is shocked that Miller refused to stay and fight for their script, even in the face of the potential dangers of Brewer's opposition, and, playing his own variation on Cohn's telegram, he asks in A Life, "What was Art protecting—his script or himself?"

Miller went on to do The Crucible and, in 1954, Kazan finally made a film for Harry Cohn about corrupt—not Communist—union leaders. It was On the Waterfront. It was written by Budd Schulberg and the villain was played by Lee J. Cobb, both of whom, like Kazan, had become cooperative witnesses before HUAC. The point of the film is that Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) learns slowly that the waterfront code of silence is not intrinsically honorable, that it can be the tool of the oppressor. There is a defining scene early in the film when his brother (Rod Steiger), who works for the big boss, asks him to report on "people you may know." Terry gets angry: "I'd just be stoolin' for you." His brother tries to assure him: "Stooling is when you rat on your friends." What Terry has to decide is who his friends are and when testifying is not stooling. There is an odd exchange—almost an inside joke—between Terry and the investigator for the Waterfront Commission, who had seen him fight in his boxing days. According to Terry, the investigator misremembers the kind of punch Terry used, although the investigator insists that it "looked like a hook." Whatever it looks like, Kazan seems to be saying, On the Waterfront is not The Hook, but then Miller would not have wanted to claim it.

Some reviewers, like Eric Bentley, assumed that A View from the Bridge was Miller's response to On the Waterfront. In his letter to the Post, Miller said that his play "is not about a political informer" and angrily suggests that Kempton "has fallen prey to the wish fulfillment assertions of Left dogmatists who join with the Right in finding secret plots, angles, and smirking analogies wherever it serves them to do so." Whether or not View is an answer to Waterfront or provides an analogy, smirking or not, between Eddie's fingering Rodolpho and the naming of names, it is obvious that the ideational base of the play, the social code that Eddie violates, is the waterfront rule of silence. Early in the play, Beatrice describes a young man who "snitched on somebody to the Immigration" and was beaten and spit upon by his father and brothers. "A guy do a thing like that—how could he show his face again?" Eddie says. That Eddie accepts the code and breaks it, knowing the punishment he will get, is an indication of the implacable passion that destroys him. Miller wants that tragedy, and perhaps a strong production of View today would show that it, like The Crucible, has escaped the constraints of its time. In 1955, however, it was difficult to look at it without being aware that it, too, was a product of the family quarrels among Liberals, Leftists, and Communists, ex- and still.

With A View from the Bridge, Miller's stage career ended for the 1950s. There was the remaking of View as a two-act play in 1956 (a mistake, I think) and there were a number of revivals, but there was no new theater piece until the 1960s. That does not mean that Miller settled into inactivity. In an interview in 1972, Josh Greenfeld asked about the critical perception that Miller was "essentially barren" during "those years with Marilyn Monroe," which was also a time of political troubles for the playwright. Miller rejected that designation, citing The Misfits and the New York Youth Board film, which went unproduced because of "a big red-baiting campaign. Barren? That whole period I never had an empty day." He might also have pointed out that in the second half of the decade he wrote most of the extended, often theoretical discussions of theater that are the substantive heart of Robert A. Martin's collection, The Theater Essays of Arthur Miller.

It was during this period that Miller was drawn to the chief dramatic cliché of the fifties, faith in the curative power of love. This attraction shows up in unusual places. In the introduction to Collected Plays, he redefines Biff Loman as embodying "the system of love which is the opposite of the law of success." In "Bridge to a Savage World," the notes for the unproduced Youth Board film that he published in Esquire in 1958, he describes his protagonist as "a carrier of love" and the picture as "a kind of love story." A central theme of the film, he says, is "the measure of love which we must bring to our lives if we are not to slide back into a life of violence." Love as a system, love as a measure. These are abstractions that could be stated in other ways and still retain the thematic thrust of the two works. The Misfits is something else. It began as a short story about the male bonding of three societal misfits who identified with the mustangs they caught to sell for dogfood. When Miller turned the story into a screenplay, a vehicle for Marilyn Monroe, the sentimentality of redemptive love took over. "How do you find your way back in the dark?" asks Roslyn (Monroe) at the end of the film, and Gay (Clark Gable) answers, "Just head for that big star straight on. The highway's under it; take us right home."

By the time Miller returned to the theater with After the Fall in 1964, he had gone back to guilt, now more communal than personal. Quentin, facing the figures in his life at the end of After the Fall, is not John Proctor, facing the gallows. Still, Quentin is a suitable stalking horse for Miller, for his struggle to come to terms with both his marriage to Marilyn Monroe and his now uncertain certainties about the informer and the informed against in Congressional investigations. To come to terms with the 1950s. As though to bring that decade to an end, the director was Elia Kazan. As Miller said before HUAC: "I accept my life."