《Thered crucible 2怎么玩》by arthur miller 急需这本书的中文版!!

Arthur Miller, Why I Wrote The Crucible (October 21, 1996)
The New Yorker, October 21, 1996
Why I Wrote The Crucible: An Artist's Answer to Politics
By Arthur Miller
As I watched The Crucible taking shape as a movie over much of the past
year, the sheer depth of time that 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 fifty 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 fifties. 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' 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 twenty 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, his body swivelling
rather cutely, 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,
the paranoid, real or pretended, always secretes its pearl around a grain
of fact. From being our wartime ally, the Soviet Union rapidly became a 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 -- that one did
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
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
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 if 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 nineteen-forties and early
nineteen-fifties, no such point existed anymore. 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 itself 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 Un-American 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 had the merest brush with a front organization.
The Soviet plot was the hub of a grea 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 marvelous 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" teen-age accusers,
and Abigail was Parris's niece -- "both made offer to strike at said P but
when Abigail's hand came near, it opened, whereas it was made up, into a fist before,
and came down exceeding 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 center
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 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. Moving crabwise across the
profusion of evidence, I sensed that 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 to those employed by the congressional
committees that I could easily be accused of 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 seventeenth century,
however, the existence of witches was never questioned by the loftiest minds in
Europe and A and even lawyers of the highest eminence, like Sir Edward Coke,
a veritable hero of liberty for defending the common law against the king's arbitrary
power, believed that 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." There had to be witches in the world or the Bible lied. Indeed, the very
structure of evil depended on Lucifer's plotting against God. (And the irony is
that klatches of Luciferians exist all over the country today, there may even be
more of them now than there are Communists.)
As with most humans, panic sleeps in one unlighted corner of my soul. When I walked
at night along the empty, wet streets of Salem in the week that I spent there, I
could easily work myself into imagining my terror before a gaggle of young girls
flying down the road screaming that somebody's "familiar spirit" was chasing them.
This anxiety-laden leap backward over nearly three centuries may have been helped
along by a particular Upham footnote. At a certain point, the high court of the
province made the fatal decision to admit, for the first time, the use of "spectral
evidence" as proof of guilt. Spectral evidence, so aptly named, meant that if I
swore that you had sent out your "familiar spirit" to choke, tickle, poison me or
my cattle, or to control thoughts and actions, I could get you hanged unless you
confessed to having had contact with the Devil. After all, only the Devil could
lend such powers of visible transport to confederates, in his everlasting plot to
bring down Christianity.
Naturally, the best proof of the sincerity of your confession was your naming others
whom you had seen in the Devil company -- an invitation to private vengeance, but
made official by the seal of the theocratic state. It was as though the court had
grown tired of thinking and had invited in the instincts: spectral evidence -- that
poisoned cloud of paranoid fantasy -- made a kind of lunatic sense to them, as it
did in plot-ridden 1952, when so often the question was not the acts of an accused
but the thoughts and intentions in his alienated mind.
The breathtaking circularity of the process had a kind of poetic tightness. Not
everybody was accused, after all, so there must be some reason why you were. By
denying that there is any reason whatsoever for you to be accused, you are implying,
by virtue of a surprisingly small logical leap, that mere chance picked you out,
which in turn implies that the Devil might not really be at work in the village
or, God forbid, even exist. Therefore, the investigation itself is either mistaken
or a fraud. You would have to be a crypto-Luciferian to say that -- not a great
idea if l you wanted to go back to your farm.
The more I read into the Salem panic, the more it touched off corresponding ages
of common experiences in the fifties: the old friend of a blacklisted person crossing
the street to avoid being the overnight conversions of former
leftists into born- and so on. Apparently, certain processes are
universal. When Gentiles in Hitler's Germany, for example, saw their Jewish neighbors
being trucked off, or rs in Soviet Ukraine saw the Kulaks sing before their eyes,
the common reaction, even among those unsympathetic to Nazism or Communism, was
quite naturally to turn away in fear of being identified with the condemned. As
I learned from non-Jewish refugees, however there was often a despairing pity mixed
with "Well, they must have done something." Few of us can easily surrender our belief
that society must somehow make sense. The thought that the state has lost its mind
and is punishing so many innocent people is intolerable. And so the evidence has
to be internally denied.
I was also drawn into writing The Crucible by the chance it gave me to
use a new language -- that of seventeenth-century New England. That plain, craggy
English was liberating in a strangely sensuous way, with its swings from an almost
legalistic precision to a wonderful metaphoric richness. "The Lord doth terrible
things amongst us, by lengthening the chain of the roaring lion in an extraordinary
manner, so that the Devil is come down in great wrath," Deodat Lawson, one of the
great witch-hunting preachers, said in a sermon. Lawson rallied his congregation
for what was to be nothing less than a religious war against the Evil One -- "Arm,
arm, arm!" -- and his concealed anti-Christian accomplices.
But it was not yet my language, and among other strategies to make it mine I enlisted
the help of a former University of Michigan classmate, the Greek-American scholar
and poet Kimon Friar. (He later translated Kazantzakis.) The problem was not to
imitate the archaic speech but to try to create a new echo of it which would flow
freely off American actors' tongues. As in the film, nearly fifty years later, the
actors in the first production grabbed the language and ran with it as happily as
if it were their customary speech.
The Crucible took me about a year to write. With its five sets and a cast
of twenty-one, it never occurred to me that it would take a brave man to produce
it on Broadway, especially given the prevailing climate, but Kermit Bloomgarden
never faltered. Well before the play opened, a strange tension had begun to build.
Only two years earlier, the Death of a Salesman touring company had played
to a thin crowd in Peoria, Illinois, having been boycotted nearly to death by the
American Legion and the Jaycees. Before that, the Catholic War Veterans had prevailed
upon the Army not to allow its theatrical groups to perform, first, All My Sons,
and then any play of mine, in occupied Europe. The Dramatists Guild refused to protest
attacks on a new play by Sean O'Casey, a self-declared Communist, which forced its
producer to cancel his option. I knew of two suicides by actors depressed by upcoming
investigation, and every day seemed to bring news of people exiling themselves to
Europe: Charlie Chaplin, the director Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, the harmonica
virtuoso Larry Adler, Donald Ogden Stewart, one of the most sought-after screenwriters
in Hollywood, and Sam Wanamaker, who would lead the successful campaign to rebuild
the Old Globe Theatre on the Thames.
On opening night, January 22, 1953, I knew that the atmosphere would be pretty hostile.
The coldness of the crow Broadway audiences were not famous
for loving history lessons, which is what they made of the play. It seems to me
entirely appropriate that on the day the play opened, a newspaper headline read
"ALL 13 REDS GUILTY" -- a story about American Communists who faced prison for "conspiring
to teach and advocate the duty and necessity of forcible overthrow of government."
Meanwhile, the remoteness of the production was guaranteed by the director, Jed
Harris, who insisted that this was a classic requiring the actors to face front,
never each other. The critics were not swept away. "Arthur Miller is a problem playwright
in both senses of the word," wrote Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune, who
called the play "a step backward into mechanical parable." The Times was
not much kinder, saying, "There is too much excitement and not enough emotion in
The Crucible." But the play's future would turn out quite differently.
About a year later, a new production, one with younger, less accomplished actors,
working in the Martinique Hotel ballroom, played with the fervor that the script
and the times required, and The Crucible became a hit. The play stumbled
into history, and today, I am told, it is one of the most heavily demanded trade-fiction
paperb the Bantam and Penguin editions have sold more than
six million copies. I don't think there has been a week in the past forty-odd years
when it hasn't been on a stage somewhere in the world. Nor is the new screen version
the first. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his Marxist phase, wrote a French film adaptation
that blamed the tragedy on the rich landowners conspiring to persecute the poor.
(In truth, most of those who were hanged in Salem were people of substance, and
two or three were very large landowners.)
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, especially in Latin America, The
Crucible starts getting produced wherever a political coup appears imminent,
or a dictatorial regime has just been over-thrown. From Argentina to Chile to Greece,
Czechoslovakia, China, and a dozen other places, the play seems to present the same
primeval structure of human sacrifice to the furies of fanaticism and paranoia that
goes on repeating itself forever as though imbedded in the brain of social man.
I am not sure what The Crucible is telling people now, but I know that
its paranoid center is still pumping out the same darkly attractive warning that
it did in the fifties. 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 forty 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 i 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 "Life and Death
in Shang- hai," 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 of illicit sexuality,
fear of the supernatural, and political manipulation, a combination not unfamiliar
these days. The film, by reaching the broad American audience as no play ever can,
may well unearth still other connections to those buried public terrors that Salem
first announced on this continent.
One thing more -- something wonderful in the old sense of that word. I recall the
weeks I spent reading testimony by the tome, commentaries, broadsides, confessions,
and accusations. And always the crucial damning event was the signing of one's name
in "the Devil's book." This Faustian agreement to hand over one's soul to the dreaded
Lord of Darkness was the ultimate insult to God. But what were these new inductees
supposed to have done once they'd signed on? Nobody seems even to have thought to
ask. But, of course, actions are as irrelevant during cultural and religious wars
as they are in nightmares. The thing at issue is buried intentions -- the secret
allegiances of the alienated hearts always the main threat to the theocratic mind,
as well as its immemorial quarry.

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