JUNE

17, 1957

Behind bis courageous refusal to inform lies

a certain amount of moral and political confusion

Arthur Miller's Conscience

by RICHARD H. ROVERE
^^TwiLL PROTECT my sense of myself," Arthur Miller
J_ told the House Committee on Un-American Activities when he refused to identify some writers who
had once been Communists. "I could not use the name
of another person and bring trouble on him." The refusal brought Miller a conviction for contempt of Congress
from a judge who found his motives "commendable"
but his action legally indefensible.
A writer's sense of himself is to be projected as well
as protected. It becomes, through publication and production, a rather public affair. For this and other reasons,
it is fitting that what Miller saw as the testing of his
integritythe challenge to his sense of himselfwas a
question involving not himself but others. Of himself,
he had talked freely, not to say garrulously. He chatted,
almost gaily, about his views in the Thirties, his views in
the Forties, his views in the Fifties, about Ezra Pound
and Elia Kazan and other notables, about the Smith Act
and Congressional investigations and all manner of
things. When he was asked why he wrote "so morbidly,
so sadly," he responded patiently and courteously, rather
as if it were the "question period" following a paid lecture to a ladies club. His self-esteem was offended only
when he was asked to identify others.
Thus, one might say, it was really a social or political
ethic that he was defending, while of his sense of himself he gave freely. In legal terms, this might be a
quibble, for there is no reason why a man should not
have a right to his own definition of self-respect. In a
literary sense, it is not a quibble, for Miller is a writer of
a particular sort, and it was in character for him to see
things this way. He is, basically, a political, or "socially
conscious" writer. He is a distinguished survivor of the
Thirties, and his values derive mostly from that decade.
He is not much of a hand at exploring or exploiting his
own consciousness. He is not inward. He writes at times
with what may be a matchless power in the American

theatre today, but not with a style of his own, and those
who see his plays can leave them with little or no sense
of the author as a character. He is not, in fact, much
concerned with individuality of any sort. This is not an
adverse judgment; it is a distinction, or an attempt at
one. What interests Miller and what he can often convey
with force is the crushing impact of society upon its
members. His human beings are always on the anvil,
awaiting the hammer, and the act that landed him in his
present trouble was an attempt to shield two or three of
them from the blow. (It was, of course, a symbolic act,
a gesture, for Miller knew very well that the committee
knew all about the men he was asked to identify. He
could not really shield; he could only assert the shielding
principle.) What he was protecting was, in any case,
a self-esteem that rested upon a social rule or principle or
ethic.
One could almost say that Miller's sense of himself is
the principle that holds "informing" to be the ultimate
in human wickedness. It is certainly a recurrent theme in
his writing. In The Crucible, his play about the Salem
witchcraft trials, his own case is so strikingly paralleled
as to lend colorthough doubtless not truthto the
view that his performance in Washington was a case of
life paying art the sincere flattery of imitation. To save
his life, John Proctor, the hero, makes a compromise
with the truth. He confesses, falsely, to having trafficked
with Satan. "Did you see the Devil?" the prosecutor asks
him. "I did," Proctor says. He recognizes the character
of his act, but this affects him iittie. "Good, thenit is
evil, and I do it," he says to his wife, who is shocked.He has reasoned that a few more years on earth are
worth this betrayal of his sense of himself. (It is not to
be concluded that Proctor's concession to the mad conformity of the time parallels Miller's testimony, for
Proctor had never in fact seen the devil, whereas Miller
had in fact seen Comrnunists.) The prosecutor will not
let him off with mere self-incriminatlon. He wants
names; the names of those Proctor has seen with the
RICHARD H . ROVERE writes the Letter from Washington
which appears regularly in The New Yorker and is also Devil. Proctor refuses; does not balk at a self-serving iie,
but a self-serving lie that involves others will not cross
American correspondent for The Spectator.

14

his lips. "I speak my own sins," he says, either metaphorically or hypocritically, since the sins in question are a
fiction. "I cannot judge another. I have no tongue for it."
He is hanged, a martyr.
In his latest play, A View from the Bridge, Miller
returns to the theme, this time with immense wrath. He
holds that conscienceindeed humanity itselfis put to
the final test when a man is asked to "inform." Eddie, a
longshoreman in the grip of a terrible passion for his
teen-age niece, receives generous amounts of love and
sympathy from those around him until his monstrous
desire goads him into tipping off the Immigration officers to the illegal presence in his home of a pair of aliens.
His lust for the child has had dreadful consequences for
the girl herself, for the youth she wishes to marry, and
for Eddie's wife. It has destroyed Eddie's sense of himself and made a brute of him. Yet up to the moment he
"informs" he gets the therapy of affection and understanding from those he has hurt the most. But once he
turns in the aliens, he is lost; he crosses the last threshold
of iniquity. "In the garbage can he belongs," his wife
says. "Nobody is gonna talk to him again if he lives to a
hundred."
A View from the Bridge is not a very lucid play, and
it may be that in it Miller, for all of his wrath, takes a
somewhat less simple view of the problem of the informer than he does in The Crucible. There is a closing scene
in which he appears to be saying that even this terrible
transgression may be understood and dealt with in terms
other than those employed by Murder, Incorporated. I
think, though, that the basic principle for which Miller
speaks is far commoner in Eddie's and our world than
it could have been in John Proctor's. The morality that
supports it is post-Darwinian. It is more available to
those not bound by the Christian view of the soul's
infinite preciousness or of the body as a temple than it
could have been to pre-Darwinian society. Today, in
most Western countries, ethics derive mainly from society and almost all values are social. What we do to and
with ourselves is thought to be our own affair and thus
not, in most circumstances, a matter that involves morality at all. People will be found to say that suicide, for a
man or woman with few obligations to others, should
not be judged harshly, while the old sanctions on murder
remain. Masochism is in one moral category, sadism in
another. Masturbation receives a tolerance that fornication does not quite receive. A man's person and his
"sense of himself" are disposable assets, provided he
chooses to see them that way; sin is only possible when
we involve others. Thus, Arthur Miller's John Proctor
was a modern man when, after lying about his relations
with the Devil, he said, "God in heaven, what is John
Proctor, what is John Proctor? I think it is honest, I
think so. I am no saint." It is doubtful if anyone in the
17th Century could have spoken that way. The real John

THE NEW REPUBLIC

Proctor surely thought he had an immortal soul, and if
he had used the word "honest" at all, it would not have
been in the sophisticated way in which Miller had him
use it. He might have weakened sufficiently to lie about
himself and the Devil, but he would surely not have said
it was "honest" to do so or reasoned that it didn't really
matter because he was only a speck of dust. He was
speaking for the social ethic which is Arthur Miller's
and he resisted just where Miller did, at "informing."

T IS, I think, useful to look rather closely at Miller's

social ethic and at what he has been saying about the
problems of conscience, for circumstances have conspired to make him the leading symbol of the militant,
risk-taking conscience in this period. I do not wish to
quarrel with the whole of his morality, for much of it I
shareas do, I suppose, most people who have not found
it,.possible to accept any of the revealed religions. Moreover, I believe, as Judge McLaughlin did, that the action
Miller took before the committee was a courageous one.
Nevertheless, I think that behind the action and behind
Miller's defense of it there is a certain amount of moral
and political confusion. If I am right, then we ought to
set about examining it, lest conscience and political morality come to be seen entirely in terms of "naming
names"a simplification which the House Un-American
Activities Committee seems eager to foist upon us and
which Miller, too, evidently accepts.
A healthy conscience. Miller seems to be saying, can
stand anything but "informing." On the one hand, this
seems a meager view of conscience. On the other, it
makes little political sense and not a great deal of moral
sense. Not all "informing" is bad, and not all of it is
despised by the people who invariably speak of it as
despicable. The question of guilt is relevant. My wife
and I, for example, instruct our children not to tattle
on one another. I am fairly certain, though, that if either
of us saw a hit-and-run driver knock over a child or even
a dog, we would, if we could, take down the man's
license number and turn him in to the police. Even in
the case- of children, we have found it necessary to
modify the rule so that we may be quickly advised if anyone is in serious danger of hurting himself or another.
(The social principle again.) Proctor, I think, was not
stating a fact when he said, "I cannot judge another"
nor was Miller when he said substantially the same thing.
For the decision not to inform involves judging others.
"They think to go like saints," Proctor said of those he
claimed he couid not judge, and Miller must have had
something of the sort in mind about the writers he refused to discuss. He reasoned, no doubt, that their
impulses were noble and that they had sought to do good
in the world. We refuse to inform, I believe, either when
we decide that those whose names we are asked to reveal
axe guilty of no wrong or when we perceive that what
they have done is no worse than what we ourselves have

JUNE 17. 1957

15

often done. Wherever their offenses are clearly worse ing, cannot be made a universai rule or a poiiticai right.
as in the case of a hit-and-run driver or a spy or a thief For it is one thing to say in The New Republic that a
committee is frivoious or mischievous and another to
^we drop the ban.
If the position taken by Miiler were in ali cases right, assert before the iaw that such a judgment gives a witthen it wouid seem wise to suppiement the Fifth ness the right to stand mute without being heid in conAmendment with one hoiding that no man couid be tempt. As matters stand today, Miiier was piainiy in
required to incriminate another. If this were done, the contempt. At one point in The Crucible, John Proctor
whoie machinery of iaw enforcement wouid coiiapse; it is caiied upon to justify his faiiure to attend the church
wouid be simpiy impossibie to determine the facts aix>ut of the Reverend Mr. Parris and to - have his children
a crime. Of course, Congressionai committees are not baptized by that divine. He repiies that he disapproves
courts, and it might be heid that such a mie wouid be of the ciergyman. "I see no iight of God in that man,"
usefui in their proceedings. It wouid be usefui oniy if he says. "That is not for you to decide," he is toid. "The
we wished to destroy the investigative power. For we man is ordained, therefore the iight of God is in him."
live, after all, in a community, in the midst of other And this, of course, is the way the worid is. In a free
people, and aii of our probiemscertainiy aii of those society, any one of us may arrive at and f reeiy express a
with which Congress has a iegitimate concerninvoive judgment about the competence of duly constituted auothers. It is rareiy possibie to conduct a serious inquiry thority. But in an orderiy society, no one of us can expect
of any sort without taiking about other peopie and with- the protection of the iaw whenever we decide that a
out running the risk of saying something that wouid hurt particular authority is unworthy of our cooperation. We
them. We can honor the conscience that says "I speak may stand by the decision, and we may seek the law's
my own sins. I cannot judge another," but those of us protection, but we cannot expect it as a matter of right.
who accept any principle of sociai organization and cer- There are many courses of action that may have a sanctainly those of us who believe that our present social tion in morality and none whatever in iaw.
order, whatever changes it may stand in need of, is worth
Yet the iaw is intended to be, among other things, a
preserving cannot make a universai principle of refusing codification of moraiity, and we cannot be pieased with
to inform. If any agency of the community is authorized the thought that a man shouid be penaiized for an act of
to undertake a serious investigation of any of our com- conscienceeven when his conscience may seem not as
mon problems, then the identities of othersnames fuiiy informed by reason as it ought to be. In a much
are of great importance. What would be the point of more serious matter, war, we excuse from participation
investigating, say, industrial espionage if the labor spies those who say their consciences wiii permit them no part
subpoenaed refused to identify their employers? What in it. One of the reasons the order of American society
would be the point of investigating the Dixon-Yates seems worth preserving is that it aiiows, on the whoie, a
contract if it were impossible to learn the identity of the free piay to the individuai's morai judgments. In recent
businessmen and government officials involved?
years, Congressionai committees have posed the iargest
singie threat to this freedom. The issues have often been
HE joker, the source of much present confusion, lies confused by the bad faith of witnesses on the one hand
in the matter of seriousness. Milier and his attorneys and committee members on the other. Stiii and aii, the
have argued that the names of the writers Milier had problem is a reai one, as the Miiier case shows. If there
known were not relevant to the legislation on passports is not sufficient latitude for conscience in the iaw, then
the Committee was supposed to be studying. This wouid there ought to be. It wouid be unreaiistic, I think, simpiy
certainly seem to be the case, and one may regret that to permit anyone who chooses to witlihoid whatever inJudge McLaughlin did not accept this argument and formation he chooses. The Fifth Amendment seems to
acquit Milier on the strength of it. Nevertheiess, the go as far as is generaiiy justified in this direction.
argument reaiiy fudges the centrai issue, which is that Changes in committee procedures have often been urged,
the Committee wasn't reaiiy investigating passport but it is doubtfui if much ciarification of a probiem such
abuses at aii when it caiied Miiier before it. It was oniy as this can be written into niies and by-iaws. The probpretending to do so. The rambling taik of its members iem is essentiaiiy one of discretion and measurement;
with Miiier was basicaiiy frivoious, and the Un-Ameri- it is, in other words, the most difficuit sort of probiem
can Activities Committee has aimost aiways iadced and one of the kind that has, customariiy, been deait
seriousness. In this case, as Mary McCarthy has pointed with by the estabiishment of broad and moraily inout, the most that it wanted from Miiier was to have him formed judicial doctrines- It is sureiy to bte hoped that
agree to its procedure of testing the good faith of wit- in the severai cases, inciuding Arthur Miller's, now in
nesses by their wiliingness to produce names. It was mi one stage or another of review, the courts wiii find a
this that Miiier was moraily justified in his refusal.
way of setting forth a realistic and workable charter
Stiii, Miiier's principie, the social ethic he was defend- for the modern conscience.