Socialist Action /May 2002
Sex, Politics and the American Way
By GAETANA CALDWELL-SMITH
The title of Arthur Miller's play, "After the Fall," performed
recently at Speakeasy Theatre in Berkeley, invites speculation.
Some say it refers to the Biblical fall of innocence; others, the suicide
of Marilyn Monroe, who once was married to Miller. Still others contend
that the title has to do with the breakup of the American Communist Party
(of which Miller was a member) in the decades after the Second World War.
A forward to the play, published in The Saturday Evening Post in
1964, appears to favor the former. In it, Miller referred to the paradisiacal
innocence that existed before knowledge; that is, before Eve tempted Adam
with that apple.
Quentin, the play's protagonist, says: "Is the knowing all? To
know, and even happily that we meet unblessed; not in some garden of wax
fruit and painted trees, that lie of Eden, but after, after the Fall, after
many, many deaths. Is the knowing all?"
Throughout most of the Berkeley performance, Quentin (Peter Carlstrom)
spoke to the audience in a stream-of-consciousness litany as if it were
a collective therapist, as various characters from his past and present
appeared, declared expository lines, then exited.
Quentin, a lawyer, had been a member of the American Communist Party,
but makes it clear that he did not want to be labeled as "Red"
lawyer. Act II focuses on Quentin's failed marriage to Maggie, a famous
singer addicted to sleeping pills and alcohol, and on Quentin's "finding"
himself in his discovery of his love for a German woman, Holga (Sylvia Burboeck).
One line from the play is as apropos now as during the anti-communist
witch-hunts: "We must be careful not to adapt a new behavior just because
there's hysteria in the country." Quentin responds: "Not to see
one's evil; there's evil."
Another character states, "Don't say no to evil; we say yes to anything."
Today, in the United States, many are saying "yes" to new laws
drafted by the Bush administration that will effectively divest us of many
our civil liberties, and "yes" to increases in military spending
to the detriment of domestic issues.
Arthur Miller wrote, in his 1987 autobiography, "Timebends,"
that in his search for God, he found "salvation" in Marx. He also
claimed that should he not have found Marx, he would not have been in Salem
two decades later, studying the records of the1692 witch trials, when he
was writing "The Crucible," the play that served as an analogy
to the McCarthy subversion trials of the early 1950s.
Though Miller joined the American Communist Party, he was never a party
stalwart. His analytical thinking led him to the conclusion that the hard
Stalinist line the party advocated was not for him. He had joined, he wrote,
because the Great Depression "was a moral catastrophe, a violent revelation
of the hypocrisies behind the facade of American society."
In "Communists, Cowboys, and Queers" (1992), David Savran wrote,
"In Miller's autobiography ... he remembers those years [1930s and
'40s] as a time when he believed with passionate moral certainty that in
Marxism was the hope of mankind. In the course of his testimony before the
House Committee, Miller defended his support for a number of causes and
organizations that the committee deemed subversive."
Miller's beliefs coincided with a specific historical movement. He came
out of a generation of Left intellectuals that cast its impression on 1930s
and '40s American culture. He was in his teens during the Depression of
the 1930s, when the Communist Party was at the height of its political influence
and had its largest membership.
Paul Bhule, in "Marxism in the United States," points out that
the late 1930s was the era of the Popular Front, in which the Stalinized
Communist Party prospered in the eyes of many intellectuals when it turned
to the support of so-called "progressives" like Roosevelt.
But the party's history, "from 1945 to 1960, was branded not only
by McCarthyism, but by the animosities of its former supporters trading
accusations and counter-accusations over the errors and crimes of Stalinism."
Bhule adds, "Miller's recantation before the House Committee [witch-hunt
hearings] neatly conforms to the attack on utopianism launched by the Cold
War Liberals who persistently associated it with 'totalitarianism.' In Miller's
final confession, he mourned, 'I was looking for the world that would be
perfect.'" As Miller confessed in "Timebends," his journey
"from a Popular Front Communist to a Cold War liberal was a slow process."
At a short recess during his testimony, Miller announced that he was
going to be married "to the woman who will then be my wife." Bhule
wrote that the question had been asked if Miller "deliberately staged
his announcement [of his marriage to Marilyn Monroe] to coincide with the
day of the hearing in order to deflect attention from his testimony and
clear his name in the public eye. On June 21, Miller had become the protagonist
in a drama uncannily like the one of his own."
Bhule added, "The drama of his announcement presages the complications
that would plague Miller in regard to his next play, 'After the Fall'-the
capricious, yet inexorable slippage between sexuality and politics, and
the difficulty in separating oneself from one's texts."
Miller had been indicted for contempt for refusing to give or confirm
names of writers he had met at meetings of communist writers. It didn't
hold so they arrested him on a previous passport denial. A year later, the
Court of Appeals "threw the whole thing out," Miller said, in
an interview in 1966 in The Paris Review.
Asked in the same interview if his political views had changed since
the 1950s, Miller responded that he was in deadly fear of people with too
much power: "Now it's a day-to-day fight to stop dreadful things from
happening."
Miller stated in his 1969 book, "From Russia," that at the
time (the 1950s) there were millions of Americans who shared the HUAC chairman's
feelings about rooting out and arresting all suspected subversives. "Given
the right political atmosphere, the kind we had in the 1950s," he said,
"these deeply angry people will come out on the streets to picket movies
and plays by authors they regard as hostile to American values, and given
the legal power would unquestionably clean up our production in a matter
of weeks."
In December 2001, Arthur Miller, now 85, gave an exclusive interview
to the BBC World Service, during which he voiced his concerns about the
U.S. government's emergency measures introduced after 9-11. In September,
he said, he had spoken out against the government's attacks, describing
them as part of a "war against humanity."
Also in the interview, he expressed his views on matters such as non-citizens
accused of helping the country's terrorist enemies being tried outside the
normal courts by a military tribunal. He said that he fears for our civil
rights and that the U.S. government could be seen as "taking advantage
of the situation and increasing its power over the individual."
Widely considered the preeminent American dramatist of the past 50 years,
Arthur Miller continues to speak of stopping "dreadful things"
from happening.
Socialist Action /May 2002 |