The Crucible Read Online Free Page B

more than his own conscience. That oscillation between the public and the private is a part of the rhythmic pattern of the play.
    Miller was not unaware of the danger of offering the public such a play in 1953 and thereby “writing myself into the wilderness politically but personally as well.” He knew that his refusal to name names in 1956 would be to invite charges of being unpatriotic. Indeed, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he was stung into insisting on his patriotism while defending his right to challenge the direction of American policy and thought: “It is not for me to make easy answers and to come forth before the American people and tell them everything is all right, when I look in their eyes and see them troubled ... my criticism, such as it has been, is not to be confused with a hatred. I love this country, I think as much as any man, and it is because I see things that I think traduce certainly the values that have been in this country that I speak.” The result was much as he had anticipated. The Crucible ran for only 197 performances (compared with 742 for Death of a Salesman) and was sustained on Broadway only by virtue of the cast’s accepting a pay cut. Miller’s next play, A View from the Bridge, ran for 149 performances, and for the following nine years no new play by Miller appeared on the American stage, though he did write the screenplay for The Misfits. He was, meanwhile, cited for contempt of Congress, and received a fine and prison sentence, subsequently quashed on appeal. He later explained, “I was just out of sync with the whole country ... I simply couldn’t find a way into the country anymore.... I had a sense that the time had gotten away from me.” He found himself increasingly ostracized, but he recognized in that sense of isolation not only a fate he shared with others called before the Committee but one that the French writer Alexis de Tocqueville had identified well over a century earlier when he observed,
    In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within those barriers a man may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them. Not that he is in danger of auto-da-fé, but he is exposed to continual obloquy and persecution.... Every sort of compensation, even that of celebrity, is refused to him. Before making public his opinions, he thought he had sympathizers; now it seems to him that he has none any more since he has revealed himself to everyone; then those who blame him criticize him loudly and those who think as he does keep quiet and move away without courage. He yields at length, overcome by the daily effort which he has to make, and subsides into silence, as if he felt remorse for having spoken the truth.
    It was a passage that Miller knew and later quoted in recalling the mood of this period. Yet in the end it was clear that if Miller was out of sync it was because he marched to a different drummer, and in time others came to hear the same beat. The House Un-American Activities Committee lost all credibility, the Red Scare passed, and if the accusers did not stand in a church, as Ann Putnam did in 1706, and listen as the minister read out her public apology and confession (“As I was the instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust and be humbled for it ... I desire to ... earnestly beg forgiveness of all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence, whose relations were taken away and accused”), they quickly lost their power and influence. Nor did Arthur Miller remain silent for long.
    Today, compilers of program notes feel as great a need to explain the history of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee as they do the events of seventeenth-century Salem. In fact, the play’s success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written. It stands, instead, as a study of the