Marilyn Monroe by Barbara Leaming

April, Arthur Miller drove from Roxbury to Kazan’s farmhouse at Newtown, Connecticut. Having already talked to Bloomgarden, he guessed what he was about to hear.
    The rain stopped and the sun came out. As they walked together in the fragrant woods, Kazan told Miller of his decision to name names. Miller put his arm around Gadg and awkwardly pressed the side of his body against his friend. The gesture was familiar. It was the same tense, guilty gesture Miller performed when, called on to embrace a young woman, he did so while turning his body to the side.
    Miller had been thinking a lot about guilt lately. His encounter with Marilyn Monroe continued to preoccupy him. In a thin, brown, wire-bound composition book, he had been taking notes on a contemporary play about adultery he hoped to write. The notebook contained ideas and snippets of dialogue. Possible titles included “The Men’s Conversation” and “Conversation of Men.” The protagonist, Quentin, has recently had an adventure that causes him to confront how much he despises married life, which he compares to a trap. His wife, refusing to forgive, declares that the man she knew could never transgress as Quentin has done. She insists that he crush his daimon—that is, his desire for sex outside the marriage. Quentin longs to free himself of the need for his wife’s acceptance and the respectability she represents. Only when it is possible to leave will his decision to stay have any meaning. Quentin seeks a way to remain in the marriage not simply because that is what his wife demands but because that is what he chooses. At the same time, he wonders whether he really wants to abandon the possibility of ever experiencing ecstasy again.
    Miller did not progress beyond these notes. Though he customarily found his material in his own life, perhaps he was just too close to it here. He was still in the marriage he was trying to write about. In his notebook, he was working out his own problems rather than those of a fictional character. The wife was transparently Mary. Quentin’s dilemma was transparently Miller’s.
    After hearing what Kazan had to tell him, Miller drove directly to Salem, Massachusetts, to research a new play. Since 1950, Miller had wanted to write something about the Red hysteria. He studied Marion Starkey’s
The Devil in Massachusetts
and saw a parallel between the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692 and the hunt for Communists in America. At one point he had given a copy of the book to Kazan, with an eye to their doing a play together. Not until Miller actually went to Salem, however, did he see a way to personalize the material, to make it his.
    Poring over old court records, he imagined there might have been an affair between John Proctor and a young servant girl named Abigail Williams, who went on to accuse Proctor’s wife, Elizabeth, of witchcraft. In this story, Miller discovered an armature for the adultery play he wanted to write. The historical characters and setting provided the distance that his earlier effort lacked, and the adultery theme invigorated the political, witch-hunt material with a deeply-felt conflict of his own. In his notebook, the playwright skipped three pages and started to take notes on a scene in which Abigail attempts to seduce John Proctor. Those lines were the germ of
The Crucible.
    On April 10, Kazan went to Washington, D.C. to reopen his HUAC hearing. Kazan, who took pride in his ability to conceal his feelings, made it clear that he had returned not because anyone had forced or threatened him, but because he wanted to—he was fully in control. He insisted on testifying in writing. That way he would say precisely what he chose to say and no more. The committee didn’t object, so long as he did as they asked and named names.
    Kazan identified eight of his former colleagues at the Group Theater, including Paula Strasberg and Clifford Odets. He detailed his own association and disenchantment with the Communist Party.