McCarthyism: When history is just a vibe (2)

When Robert Warshow reviewed The Crucible in 1953 he noted that Arthur Miller had shown an "almost contemptuous lack of interest in the particularities -- which is to say, the reality -- of the Salem trials." This is indisputably true. At every turn, the playwright flaunts his proud, willful ignorance of the historical reality of 1692 Salem. But Miller was not unconcerned about all "particularities". He saw fit to invent one crucial bit of back story and place it at the heart of his drama.

In 1996 Miller explained his "Eureka!" moment in The New Yorker:

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.

Miller's "discovery" was a work of pure imagination. There is no evidence for it (and much against it). But the man had his reasons.

My own marriage of twelve 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 paralyzing personal guilt and become the most forthright voice against the madness around him was a reassurance to me, and, I suppose, an inspiration: it demonstrated that a clear moral outcry could still spring even from an ambiguously unblemished soul.

Our sainted author is praising himself with faint damns here. His marriage was failing because he was having an affair with Marilyn Monroe. He was getting ready to jettison the wife who supported him when he was a struggling critic and playwright so he could take up with a rich, famous, and beautiful film star.

William Styron described Miller as "strangely and fanatically opportunistic." This is certainly true when it comes to writing The Crucible. The adulterous husband invented an adulterous hero. The doctrinaire communist wants to pretend that real communists are as rare as witches. The slinking propagandist now dons the mantle of a fearless truth-teller.

Miller had to invent his "history" out of whole cloth. Not only is there no evidence of an affair between John Procter and Abigail Williams, there is no evidence the two ever met. Even more telling is the fact that the John Procter of The Crucible is a man in his 30s while Miller makes Abigail Williams a young woman of 16 or 17.

The real John Procter was 59. Abigail Williams was 11 or 12.

If Miller had kept to the facts, his flawed hero would have been much worse than a man who gave in to a moment of weakness. He would have ben a child rapist. Even a leftwing New York audience would have trouble taking that kind of man as a hero in 1953.

Carol Iannone:

the single animus that has long driven Miller's work-the willed resentment toward American society, the overwrought, obdurate sense of condemnation and outrage. In Miller's hands, tragedy consists not in the individual's encounter with solemn powers greater than himself. Rather, tragedy is the failure to stand against patent corruption and foolishness, in the form of such life-crushing American villains as demanding fathers, witless salesmen, and witch-hunting anti-Communists.

In his apologia for The Crucible, Miller shows just how deeply he was enmeshed in the mental world created by Willi Munzenberg.

Stephen Koch:

Munzenberg provided two generations of people on the left with what we might call the forum of righteousness. More than any other person of his era, he developed what may well be the leading moral illusion of the twentieth century: the notion that in the modern age the principal arena of the moral life, the true realm of good and evil, is politics.

Miller created a wholly fictional John Procter as his hero: a flawed man who achieved nobility by denouncing witch-hunters. In The Crucible private frailty is redeemed via public words. It is hard not to suspect that that Miller was hoping to do just that for himself. His oblique attack on Joseph McCarthy serves as a counter-weight to his failings as a husband.

Roger Scruton described this mindset perfectly:

For what matters is what people say, not what they do, and what they say is redeemed by their theories, however stupidly or carelessly pursued, and with whatever disregard for real people.

It seems to have worked. Despite his manifest cruelty as a husband and father, Miller still serves as a sort of ersatz-Orwell for the American Left.

Related:

Arthur Miller’s Missing Act
For all the public drama of Arthur Miller’s career—his celebrated plays (including Death of a Salesman and The Crucible), his marriage to Marilyn Monroe, his social activism—one character was absent: the Down-syndrome child he deleted from his life.