Timebends (59 page)

Salem then was a town dribbling away, half-forsaken. It was originally the salt lick of the mother colony of Plymouth to the south and had been bypassed by the modernization of industry a generation before. Lapped by the steely bay, it was dripping this afternoon in the cold black drizzle like some abandoned dog. I liked it, liked its morose and secret air. I went to the courthouse, asked the clerk for the town records for 1692, and had to wait a few minutes while he got out similar tomes for last year and three or four years earlier, handing them to a pair of real estate agents searching deeds for a property deal. The room was silent, and I found good gray light near a tall window that looked out over the water, or so I remember it now, the same hard silver water that the condemned
must have beheld from the gallows on Witch Hill, of whose location no one is any longer sure.

In fact, there was little new I could learn from the court record, but I wanted to study the actual words of the interrogations, a gnarled way of speaking, to my ear—and some ten years later the subject of a correspondence with Laurence Olivier, who was seeking an accent for the actors in his magnificent London production of
The Crucible.
After much research he decided on a Northumberland dialect, which indeed is spoken through clenched jaws. And I heard it so in the courthouse, where it seemed from the orthography to be a burred and rather Scottish speech. After a few hours of mouthing the words—often spelled phonetically in the improvised shorthand of the court clerks or the ministers who kept the record as the trials proceeded—I felt a bit encouraged that I might be able to handle it, and in more time I came to love its feel, like hard burnished wood. Without planning to, I even elaborated a few of the grammatical forms myself, the double negatives especially, which occurred in the trial record much less frequently than they would in the play.

“When I passed his house my wagon was set [stuck] in the plain road,” a complainant testified, “and there he stood behind his window a-staring out at me, and when he turned away again the wheel was free.” A wagon bewitched by a stare. And so many other descriptions were painterly, action stopped as though by a camera—a man unable to rise from his bed, caught with uplifted head by a woman who floated in through his window to lay her body on his, just like that. Reading the testimony here beside the bay was an experience different from reading about the trials in New York. Here, it could have happened. The courthouse closed at five, and there was nothing to do in the town but walk the streets. In the early darkness I came on a candy store where a crowd of teenagers was hanging out, and excited laughter went up as two girls appeared around the corner snuggled one behind the other, hopping in time with a broomstick between their legs. How, I wondered, had they known I was here? Salem in those days was in fact not eager to talk about the witchcraft, not too proud of it, and only after
The Crucible
did the town begin exploiting it with a tourist attraction, the Witch Trail, a set of street signs indicating where so-and-so had been arrested or interrogated or condemned to hang. At the time of my evening walk, no Massachusetts legislature had passed so much as a memoir of regret at the execution of innocent people, rejecting the very suggestion as a slur on the honor of the state
even two and a half centuries later. The same misplaced pride that had for so long prevented the original Salem court from admitting the truth before its eyes was still alive here. And that was good for the play too, it was in the mood.

Like every criminal trial record, this one was filled with enticing but incomplete suggestions of relationships, so to speak, offstage. Next day in the dead silence of the little Historical Society building, two ancient lady guardians regarded me with steady gazes of submerged surprise; normally there were very few visitors. Here I found Charles W. Upham's quiet nineteenth-century masterpiece
Salem Witchcraft,
and in it, on my second afternoon, the hard evidence of what had become my play's center: the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail Williams's determination to get Elizabeth murdered so that she could have John, whom I deduced' she had slept with while she was their house servant, before Elizabeth fired her.

“. . . During the examination of Elizabeth Procter, Abigail Williams and Ann Putnam both made offer to strike at said Procter; 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. …”

The irony of this beautifully exact description is that its author was Reverend Parris, who was trying to show how real the girls' affliction was, and hence how dangerous people like Elizabeth Proctor could be. And irony, of course, is what is usually dispensed with, usually paralyzed, when fear enters the mind. Irony, indeed, is the supreme gift of peace. For it seemed obvious that Parris was describing a girl who had turned to look into her former mistress's face and experienced the joyous terror of the killer about to strike, and not only at the individual victim, the wife of a lover who was now trying to deny her, but at the whole society that was watching and applauding her valiant courage in ridding it of its pestilential sins. It was this ricocheting of the “cleansing” idea that drew me on day after day, this projection of one's own vileness onto others in order to wipe it out with their blood. As more than one private letter put it at the time, “Now no one is safe.”

To make not a story but a drama of this parade of individual tragedies—this was the intimidating task before me, and I wondered if it would indeed be possible without diminishing what I had come to see as a veritable Bible of events. The colors of my
determination kept changing with the hour, for the theme of the play, the key to the compression of events, kept its distance as I groped toward a visceral connection with all this—since I knew that to simply will a play into existence was to insure a didactic failure. By now I was far beyond the teaching impulse; I knew that my own life was speaking here in many disguises, not merely my time.

One day, after several hours of reading at the Historical Society, where it now seemed no one but I had ever entered to disturb the two gray guardians' expressionless tranquility, I got up to leave, and that was when I noticed hanging on a wall several framed etchings of the witchcraft trials, apparently made at the time by an artist who must have witnessed them. In one of them, a shaft of sepulchral light shoots down from a window high up in a vaulted room, falling upon the head of a judge whose face is blanched white, his long white beard hanging to his waist, arms raised in defensive horror as beneath him the covey of afflicted girls screams and claws at invisible tormentors. Dark and almost indistinguishable figures huddle on the periphery of the picture, but a few men can be made out, bearded like the judge, and shrinking back in pious outrage. Suddenly it became my memory of the dancing men in the synagogue on 114th Street as I had glimpsed them between my shielding fingers, the same chaos of bodily motion—in this picture, adults fleeing the sight of a supernatural event; in my memory, a happier but no less eerie circumstance—both scenes frighteningly attached to the long reins of God. I knew instantly what the connection was: the moral intensity of the Jews and the clan's defensiveness against pollution from outside the ranks. Yes, I understood Salem in that flash, it was suddenly my own inheritance. I might not yet be able to work a play's shape out of this roiling mass of stuff, but it belonged to me now, and I felt I could begin circling around the space where a structure of my own could conceivably rise.

I left Salem in the late afternoon, and the six o'clock news came on the radio with the black night like a cloak thrown over the windshield. The rain had not ceased. The announcer read a bulletin about Elia Kazan's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and mentioned the people he had named, none of whom I knew. I had almost forgotten him by now, so deep had I been in the past. The announcer's voice seemed a violent, vulgar intrusion into a private anguish; I remember thinking that the issue was being made to sound altogether political when it was really becoming something else, something I could not name.

I was heading down toward New York, back into the world. A numbness held me. The bulletin was repeated again on the half-hour. I wished they would stop. I felt something like embarrassment, not only for him, but somehow for all of us who had shared the—comradeship, I suppose the word is, born of our particular kind of alienation. The political element was only a part of it, maybe even a small part. We had all cheered the same heroes, the same mythic resisters, maybe that was it, from way back in the Spanish war to the German antifascists and the Italians, brave men and women who were the best of our identity, those who had been the sacrifices of our time.

What we had now seemed a withering parody of what was being advertised as high drama. When the Committee knew all the names beforehand, there was hardly a conspiracy being unveiled but rather a symbolic display that would neither string anybody up on a gallows nor cause him to be cut down. No material thing had been moved one way or another by a single inch, only the air we all breathed had grown somewhat thinner and the destruction of meaning seemed total when the sundering of friendships was so often with people whom the witness had not ceased to love.

Approaching New York, I felt as always the nearness of the circumstantial, the bedrock real. As I headed downtown toward the Brooklyn Bridge on glistening wet roads, I found myself keeping to the slow side of the speedometer as though to protect what truth there was in me from skidding into oblivion. That I was committed to this play was no longer a question for me; I had made the decision without thinking about it somewhere between Salem and this city.

Molly's instant reaction against the Salem analogy would be, as I already sensed, the strongest objection to such a play. “There are Communists,” it would be repeatedly said, “but there never were any witches.” I did not wish to evade this point, there was no need to; my obligation was still solely to myself and to the material. But I did not want it to sidetrack me either, not before I clearly knew the theme. All I had so far was a mass of stories, evidence of an imploded community that distrust and paranoia had killed—literally so, for it was a hundred years before people bought some of the farms owned by those who had been hanged, such was the reality of the curse upon them.

It was thus not true that “there never were any witches.” I had no doubt that Tituba, Reverend Parris's black Barbados slave, had been practicing witchcraft with the girls, but more important, the best minds of the time, here and in Europe, inside and outside the
churches, would have been indignant to be told there were no witches when the Bible on three different occasions warns against dealing with them. Addison, Dr. Johnson, King James, and the entire British church hierarchy shared the view of Blackstone, the voice of English jurisprudence himself, who declared, “To deny the possibility, nay the actual existence, of witchcraft and sorcery, is at once flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God, in various passages both of the Old and New Testament; and the thing itself is a truth to which every nation in the world hath in its turn borne testimony, either by examples seemingly well attested, or by prohibitory laws, which at least suppose the possibility of commerce with evil spirits.” John Wesley summed it up: “The giving up witchcraft is, in effect, giving up the Bible.” As always, these affirmations had a cause: an alarming rise in what was called “infidelity,” which is to say, skepticism, deism, even atheism—and witchcraft was the ultimate sneer at God. The witch-hunt was a way of saying, “You must gather to us in the church since we alone stand between you and the Devil's overwhelming the world.” Beneath high moral dudgeon, then as now, lay our old friend power, and the lust for it. When several hundred thousand people had been executed in Europe for witchcraft, it was hardly wisdom to say that the cause was merely imaginary.

But a theme is not an idea; it is an action, an unstoppable process, like a fetus growing or, yes, a cancer; it is a destroyer as it changes and creates or kills, a paradox that nothing can keep from unwinding through all of its contradictions down to its resolution, which in its right time illuminates the whole from the beginning. After weeks of attacking from every side, writing scene after experimental scene, I came on the layers of internal parallelisms in the Salem experience that suggested a path toward a climax, and I found myself asking what, if it had been present in Salem, would have made it impossible to set these people against one another like this.

Almost every testimony I had read revealed the sexual theme, either open or barely concealed; the Devil himself, for one thing, was almost always a black man in a white community, and of course the initial inflammatory instance that convinced so many that the town was under Luciferian siege was the forced confession of the black slave Tituba. But apart from that, men rarely accused another man of having bewitched them, and almost all the bewitched women were tempted by a warlock, a male witch. Night was the usual time to be subverted from dutiful Christian behavior, and dozens were in their beds when through window or door, as real
as life, a spectral visitor floated in and lay upon them or provoked them to some filthy act like kissing or bade them sign the “Devil's book,” a membership roll of the underground party of the damned. The relief that came to those who testified was orgasmic; they were actually encouraged in open court to talk about their sharing a bed with someone they weren't married to, a live human being now manacled before them courtesy of God's lieutenants.

Here was guilt, the guilt of illicit sexuality. (And indeed, blessed as they were by their godly crusade, august New England judges soon took to playing shovelboard with their holy adolescent witnesses and sharing an ale with them in the local tavern—devilish business certainly, but permissible now that they were battling for God in this open war with Hell.) Had there been no tinder of guilt to set aflame, had the cult and culture of repression not ruled so tightly, no outbreak would have been possible. John Proctor, then, in being driven to confess not to a metaphoric guilt but to actual sex with an identified teenage partner, might save the community in the only way possible—by raising to consciousness what had been suppressed and in holy disguise was out to murder them all.