The Genius and the Goddess (22 page)

In
The Crucible
Proctor commits adultery because of Elizabeth's
sexual coldness; in
View
Carbone's forbidden lust for Catherine (partly
based on Miller's love for Marilyn) makes him both guilty and impotent,
and he no longer sleeps with his wife (based on Mary). In
The
Crucible
Proctor is hanged for refusing to inform on his friends; in
View
Carbone is murdered for betraying Beatrice's cousin. In both
plays the revenge and betrayal by Abigail and Carbone are provoked
by sexual, not political, motives. In
The Crucible
Proctor remains faithful
to his principles; in
View
Carbone betrays not only Rodolpho, but
also his wife, his niece and his personal code of honor.

Arguing against the morality of
The Crucible
,
On the Waterfront
praised informers and portrayed them in a self-sacrificial light.
A View
From the Bridge
, in turn, challenged that view and revealed the true
motives of self-interest beneath the spurious displays of virtue. As
Eric Bentley
observed of
View
and
Waterfront
, "the climax of both movie
and play is reached when the protagonist gives the police information
which leads to the arrest of some of his associates. . . . In the
movie the act of informing is virtuous, whereas, in the play, it is
evil."
¹⁰
After taking a passionate stand against those, like Kazan and
Schulberg, who named names for HUAC, Miller would himself face
that difficult test and make that moral choice when he was also
summoned to testify before the committee.

In 1954 Joe McCarthy was formally condemned by the senate, rashly
attacked President Eisenhower and suddenly fell from power. In
turn, the House Un-American Activities Committee felt the decline
of its own influence and desperately sought public support to maintain
its inquisitorial Red-baiting. Miller was not a prime candidate
for their inquiries. He had never been a communist, did not work in
Hollywood and could not be questioned about communist subversion
in the movie industry. But after he and Marilyn resumed their
romance in New York, rumors of their liaison became widely known
and attracted the attention of HUAC. The committee summoned him
to appear during their investigation of passport abuse. They suspected,
given his association with left-wing and communist causes, that he
might spread anti-American propaganda abroad. After many anxious
months, Miller was finally called to testify before the committee on
June 21, 1956, and continued his legal battle with HUAC for the next
two years.

Miller's political ideas did not focus on any particular party or
program. He'd lived through the excesses of capitalism and the disaster
of the Depression, and had always sympathized with the working poor
and the unemployed. His left-wing activities, limited to supporting
various communist enterprises, seem surprisingly naïve. Like many
young writers and intellectuals of the 1930s, Miller thought Soviet
communism stood for hope, for an ideal of social equality and for
opposition to the growing threat of fascism in Spain, Germany and
Italy. This idealism blinded him to the true nature of communism in
Russia, even after Stalin's monstrous crimes of the 1930s (which had
disillusioned many previously hard-line communists) became well
known: the forcible collectivization of the peasants that caused widespread
famine and death, the political purges, the Moscow show trials,
the omnipotent secret police and the millions of innocent victims
sent to Siberian prison camps. He kept faith with Russia and continued
to support communist-front organizations until the end of the 1940s,
despite the cynical non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin,
the betrayal of the Warsaw rising during World War II and the postwar
occupation of Eastern Europe. He added his name to the lists of
those supporting the well-intentioned but propagandistic World Youth
Festival in Prague in 1947, the World Congress for Peace in Paris in
1948 and the Peace Conference at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New
York in 1949 – the latter also endorsed by subversive types like Albert
Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Miller's political activities, innocuous as they were, made him a
victim of the general paranoia about leftists and got him into trouble
with the authorities on two previous occasions. These incidents also
aroused the interest of HUAC. In 1954 the State Department,
asserting that it was not in the country's best interests, had refused
to renew his passport so he could attend the European premiere
of
The Crucible
in Brussels. This refusal prompted Miller's remark,
"It didn't harm me, it harmed the country; I didn't need any foreign
relations." The following year, when he was asked to write a film
script about juvenile delinquency in response to the rise of gang
violence in New York, his reputation cost him the job. "I spent the
summer of 1955 on Brooklyn streets," he recalled, "wrote an outline
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." After the rabid
headline of July 22, 1955, declared "Youth Board Filmster Has a
Pink Record," the twenty-two city commissioners voted to kill the
project.

In 1956, as HUAC continued to attack Hollywood, the most popular
films of the year were lavish crowd-pleasers: Mike Todd's wide-screen
extravaganza
Around the World in 80 Days
, Yul Brynner as the ruler of
Siam in
The King and I
and Charlton Heston as Moses in
The Ten
Commandments
. That year Eisenhower, with Nixon as his runningmate,
was re-elected president; Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal;
Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Stalin; and Russia, intent on
maintaining its power in Eastern Europe, crushed the Hungarian
revolution.

To defend himself Miller engaged
Joseph Rauh, one of the best
lawyers in the country. Four years older than Miller and a graduate
of Harvard Law School, Rauh was one of the most influential liberals
in the postwar era. Active in Democratic politics, he'd worked for
two Supreme Court justices and for several agencies in Roosevelt's
administration. Throughout his career he had fought for civil rights
and represented labor unions. Miller described him as a hero: "A giant
of a fellow who somehow looks even broader and taller because of
his bow ties, Joe Rauh is a combative lawyer, formerly head of
Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal pressure group whose
adherents included men like Hubert Humphrey and Adlai Stevenson."
¹

On May 18, testing the waters, Miller applied for a passport, as if
he'd never before had trouble with the passport office. He wanted to
attend the London premiere of
A View from the Bridge
in October
and to accompany Marilyn, who would be making
The Prince and the
Showgirl
in England. He also submitted an affidavit that declared he
was not a member of the Communist Party. Rauh arranged for him
to swear, in return for being granted a six-month passport, that he
would return to America if cited for contempt of Congress. On May
22 Miller informed his other eminent attorney,
Lloyd Garrison, that
his passport application included a letter which stated his business
reasons for traveling to England, but did not mention his romance
with Marilyn. The clerk, he said, was very nice and did not even try
to arrest him. But he was getting tired of holding his breath and
wondering what would happen to him in the immediate future, and
looked forward to a quiet, uneventful year. This was a vain hope, since
peace and quiet would be quite impossible once he married Marilyn.

Miller's FBI file quoted from an article in the
New York Times
of
June 22, the day after Miller appeared before HUAC, and reported
that the committee questioned him about

the signature on a 1947 statement against the outlawing of the
CP; a signature on a statement defending [the Red agent]
GERHART EISLER before he fled this country to become a
top Communist official in East Germany; a statement attacking
the HUAC; and statements opposing the Smith Act [of 1940,
which made it a criminal offense to advocate the overthrow of
the U.S. government]. The article reflected that MILLER stated
he had no memory of most of these things but that he would
not deny them.

He'd applied to take a course in Marxism in about 1939 and in 1947
attended several writers' meetings sponsored by the Communist Party.
But he told the committee that "he came away from CP meetings
convinced that his temperament and viewpoints were diametrically
opposed to those of Marxists." Another article included in his FBI
file, from the conservative
Plain Talk
magazine of June 1947 (the year
of
All My Sons
), sneeringly linked Miller and Kazan, who later became
political adversaries, saying that "Miller, and his director, Elia Kazan,
might both be awarded the Order of Lenin."
²

All those who faced the committee had to deal with a barrage
of negative reporting in the press and on television. To be hauled
before them suggested the witness was guilty, and it took great self-possession
and expert legal advice to deal with the hectoring
questions. HUAC, ironically enough, failed to see that they themselves
were playing the role of Grand Inquisitor. They adopted the
methods of the Soviet Purge Trials by reenacting the "typical communist
scene of [victims] crawling and apologizing and admitting the
error of their ways." The informers, by confessing imaginary crimes,
joined their accusers and seemed to prove the existence of a secret
plot that HUAC felt compelled to investigate. "Only through the
humiliating ritual of informing on former colleagues," as David
Caute observed, "could the penitent ex-Communist purge and purify
himself and so regain the confidence of the inquisition."
³

Miller, as an unfriendly witness, had three strategic options. He
could plead the Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which
protected him from self-incrimination; he could testify about himself,
but be deliberately vague about the names of other people; or he could
answer all the questions about himself, but refuse to name names.
Miller, advised by Rauh, chose the latter course, invoked the right
to free speech and, by implication, the right to silence guaranteed by
the First Amendment. Mary McCarthy pointed out that his principled
stand was quite unusual and that "he was almost the only prominent
figure heard by the committee who did not either tell all or take
refuge in the Fifth Amendment."

Miller began by truthfully declaring, "I was never under the discipline
of the Communist Party, the communist cause," and "would
not support now a cause or movement which was dominated by
communists." He openly criticized the committee itself, whose "rather
ceaseless investigating of artists was creating a pall of apprehension
and fear among all kinds of people." His testimony covered a wide
range of political topics. He advocated the repeal of the Smith Act;
defended his contribution to a fund that supplied vitally needed
medicines to Red China; discussed the ideas of his plays; condemned
Ezra Pound's anti-Semitic broadcasts from wartime Italy; and denied
that he had any connection with Howard Fast, the American communist
writer and winner of the Stalin Peace Prize. When asked if he'd
attacked "Kazan because he broke with the Communist Party and
testified before a congressional committee," Miller stood firm and
declared, "I have never attacked Kazan. I will stand on that. That is
it." Instead of trying to deny his former beliefs, he staunchly defended
his support of the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War: "I have
always been, since my student days, in the thirties, a partisan of
Republican Spain. I am quite proud of it. I am not at all ashamed.
I think a democracy was destroyed there."
⁴

Miller forthrightly answered all the questions about himself. When
provocatively asked, "Do you consider yourself more or less a dupe
in joining these communist organizations?" he disagreed. He was
idealistic and his political experience had been valuable: "I wouldn't
say so because I was an adult. I wasn't a child. I was looking for the
world that would be perfect. I think it necessary that I do that if I
were to develop myself as a writer. I am not ashamed of this. I accept
my life. That is what I have done. I learned a great deal." He also
made an important distinction, relevant to the issue of his passport,
between his criticism of America at home and overseas: "there is no
case that I would say I was ready to support criticism of this country
abroad. . . . I do draw a line between criticism of the United States
in the United States and before foreigners."

In his profile of Miller, written the following October, the English
theater critic
Kenneth Tynan pointed out the absurdity of the HUAC's
questions: "To clinch its case, the committee confronted him with a
revue scene on which he had collaborated in 1938: it presented the
committee as a mad Star Chamber where witnesses were gagged, bound
and tortured." They read the opening passage of Miller's broadly satiric
sketch,
Listen My Children
, written with Norman Rosten, to prove his
incorrigible anti-American tendencies: "In the center of room, in a
rocker, sits a man. He is securely tied to a chair, with a gag in his mouth
and a bandage tied over his mouth. Water, coming from a pipe near
ceiling, trickles on his head. Nearby is a charcoal stove holding branding
irons. Two bloodhounds are tied in the corner of the room." "Having
read the scene," Tynan wrote, "the committee's attorney triumphantly
asked:'Well, Mr. Miller?' Ruminant over his pipe, Miller sharply replied:
'But – that was
meant
to be a farce.'" Tynan's version improved on
Miller's reply. He actually said, rather mildly, "I find it amusing. I don't
see what is so horrific about that. I think it is a farce. I don't think
anybody would take it seriously that way."

Indignant at his effrontery, the committee continued to press Miller
about his criticism of their work. They asked him if
The Crucible
was
the subject "of a series of articles in the communist press drawing
parallels to the investigations of communists and other subversives by
congressional committees." Instead of backing down, Miller confirmed
the parallel by responding, "I think that was true in more than the
communist press. I think it was true in the non-communist press,
too. The comparison is inevitable."
⁵
In this instance, as in the exchange
about
Listen My Children
, his quick wit and calm rationality made the
committee look absurd.

In October 1947, when the screenwriter
Ring Lardner, Jr., one of
the Hollywood Ten, was pressured to name names before HUAC, he
famously replied, "I could answer the question, but if I did, I would
hate myself in the morning." (Lardner was sentenced to a year in jail
for contempt and, by an ironic twist of fate, wound up in the same
Connecticut prison as the chairman of his investigating committee,
who'd been convicted of corruption.) The high point of Miller's testimony
came when, remembering Lardner's exemplary statement, he
also took his stand and refused to name names: