Alvah's Books

“Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been . . . ?”

Naming Names
By Victor Navasky

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie
San Francisco Review of Books, January-February 1981

. . . Perhaps they did it because it was the right thing to do. By risking in some cases their careers and in other cases their freedom as well, by doing their time (in prison and in career-purgatory), they have emerged in the culture as moral exemplars; they have taught us how to act, and as a result appear to have made it more difficult to happen again . . . ”

Victor Navasky’s tribute here to Lillian Hellman, Dalton Trumbo, Albert Maltz “and their comrades (who) resisted” the assault on the entertainment industry in 1947-1952 by the defunct House Committee on Un-American Activities, is slightly fudged by what preceeds it in the same paragraph” “Perhaps they behaved as they did out of status-anxiety. Perhaps they were salivating in response to the bell of Party discipline. Perhaps they did it for the rest of us . . . ” etc.

Despite this sort of snide humor (if that is what it is) Navasky’s examination in depth of the informers who appeared before HUAC joins the recent book by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood, to form a body of work that examines The Cold War in Hollywood in such a way that the job will probably not have to be done again.

Where Ceplair and Englund recreated the history and development of the various American drives toward conformity, from the earliest witch-hunts following World War I through the Depression and World War II, down to the imprisonment in 1950 of The Hollywood 10 and the emergence of the Junior Senator from Wisconsin, Navasky, the new editor of The Nation, has concentrated less on those who resisted the inquisition than on the relatively few “friendly” witnesses who sent their colleagues into ostracism, blacklist, divorce, alcoholism, prison, and ultimately death.

While Ceplair and Englund are both trained in the disciplines of the historian, Navasky is not only a solid investigative reporter (who makes occasional small errors of fact), but is also a graduate attorney and something of a philosopher and metaphysician.

He has created here what he calls a “moral detective story” to solve the mystery: “How did it come to pass that scores of otherwise decent individuals were compelled to betray a moral presumption? What are the conditions under which good men do things they know to be wrong? What are the consequences of betrayal and collaboration?” His answers fill the 482 pages of this heavily researched and often brilliant book.

What made the stools and betrayers do their dirty work? Navasky divides their rationales into four general headings:

•  ”I didn’t hurt anybody.” I.e., the names I gave had all been named before;
•  ”They deserved what they got.” That is, they were enemies of our country;
• “I wasn’t responsible for my actions. ” I.e., I was out of my skull with worry about my health, my job, my wife and kids;
• “I was acting in obedience to a higher authority.” My country, right or wrong.

Perhaps the most contemptible informer of our time, Whittaker Chambers (you may prefer to give the accolade to Elia Kazan or even to Clifford Odets, who managed to put the finger on his dead friend, the actor J. Edward Bromberg), told a friend one time, “You know that the day I walk out of the Communist Party, I walk into the police station.”

This was a valid insight into the mentality of the stool-pigeon but with most of the Hollywood informers, there was a time-lapse: their “patriotism” waited upon the service of a subpoena from the House Committee; then they sang. And Navasky’s penetrating examination of their “reasons” for their behavior destroys each and every one of their arguments.

“The case for distinguishing among motives (for betrayal),” he says, “seems both compelling and appropriately compassionate. And yet it cannot be forgotten that for each informer there were two resisters, some in virtually identical circumstances, who refused to go along.” (There were far more than two. — A.B.)

“But the example of the Hollywood Ten,” the author continues, “of (Sidney) Buchman, Arthur Miller, Lillian Hellman, Pete Seeger and others are there to be reckoned with. There is no evidence that the informers as a class were subjected to greater pressure — by the state, vigilantes, or personal problems — than the resisters. . . ”

In fact, the pressure on the informers to name names, Navasky demonstrates, had no evidentiary purpose whatsoever. It was, however, an integral part of what he calls a “degradation ceremony” that established —for the witch-hunters and presumably the American public — the bona fides (or should we say the bad faith) of the stools.

His proof: the first 10 men to be blacklisted had not been named by any of the informers; their names were supplied to HUAC by the FBI and the House Committee announced they would be “unfriendly witnesses” months before a single question was propounded to them.

On the tortured trail Navasky must follow to explain and understand the contemptible human beings he is dealing with, he sometimes becomes the victim of his own virtues. For example: trained in the law, he permits himself to be thrown by the legal device The 10 utilized in 1947, at their lawyers’ instance, that they were not refusing to answer the Committee’s questions, but were trying to answer them in their own way. He calls that fudging.

Outright refusal guaranteed a peremptory demand for an answer and further refusal meant an automatic citation for contempt. But witness after witness stated this in his own way: “I am trying to tell you that I do not believe you have the right to ask that question;” “. . . either the Bill of Rights means what it says, or it does not. . . “; “The First Amendment prohibits Congress from making any law respecting belief, association or the right to speak or write freely; it is therefore obvious that you cannot investigate in those areas. . . ”

As an attorney, the author should have recognized the simple fact that The 10 intended to make an outright attack on the constitutionality of the HUAC and hoped thereby to put it out of business. Not wishing to invoke the Fifth Amendment, which had invidious connotations in the public mind that are not written into the Amendment at all, they relied on the First (which had been upheld by the Supreme Court as recently as 1943 in West Virginia Board of Education vs Barnette). The courts’ refusal to accept that as an argument or an issue ultimately affirmed their conviction for “contempt.”

Again, Navasky comes to close for comfort to the disgusting position set forth by Eric Bentley (Thirty Years of Treason), who, he says, “joined the issue most directly.” In effect, Bentley had said that: a. the Committee was contemptible, but so were those who refused to answer its questions; they deserved each other; b. any “radical” — and he stated that he was a radical, himself — should be proud to stand up and say what he believed in and if you don’t like it, Go fuck yourself.

How The 10 yearned to do just that! (Just like Woody Allen in the penultimate scene of The Front). But: 1. that was not the issue; the issue was the right of any governmental agency to ask any American any question about his associations or beliefs under penalty of ostracism, unemployment, and worse if he did not give the answer it required. And: 2. If you say, “Yes I am and what the hell business is it of yours?” the next question will be, “What about your friend Victor Navasky? Is he a member too? And if you say, “I never asked him,” they will produce a friendly witness who will swear “Of course he knows; we were all in the same ‘cell’ together.”

For granting HUAC the right to ask the question — and answering it — you were open, not to a misdemeanor called “Contempt of Congress” (one month to one year in a common jail and $100 to $1000 in fines), but you were charged with a felony — perjury (because the stool’s word is as good as yours), which brings a minimum of five years and who knows how many thousands of dollars.

But again, that was not the issue and never has been. The moralist-philosopher in Navasky feels real compassion both for the victims and the informers who made them pariahs in our society for as long as 20 years. Some of these stools had the gall to weep on Navasky’s shoulder because they were not understood by their fellow men and women, and Navasky sometimes gets bogged down in semantic arguments about candor, responsibility, vengeance and forgiveness.

“Why semantic? Because Dalton Trumbo was dead wrong when he made the cockeyed formulation — on receiving the highest award his fellow screenwriters can confer on their peers — that in that Time of the Toad (his own felicitous phrase) there were no “villains or heros or saints or devils. . . there were only victims.”

There were plenty of heros (and Dalton was one of them) and plenty of villains and there still are. Because the purpose of the “degradation ceremony” (and the resisters were degraded by HUAC and its allies far more than any stool), was to establish in the public mind that there actually existed an international conspiracy, activated by the “Godless Communism” of the USSR, to subvert, not merely the motion picture industry, but our government and our nation itself. Navasky knows this well and states it candidly.

The existence of such a conspiracy, of course, was the rationale used by Mussolini, Hitler, Tojo and Franco to save Italy, Germany, Japan and Spain from communism — and by all the Axis powers in concert, to save the entire world, and they nearly did.

The fact that there never was such a conspiracy goes no way at all to prevent its non-existence being used again in an American crusade to save us all over again — and any other country that shows signs of moving out of the orbit of American imperialism and the multi-national corporations that control it.

This fact, of course, is the link between the stunning Ceplair-Englund-Navasky examination of Cold War America in Hollywood, and the way the world could go today, if we do not exercise the eternal vigilance that is the guarantee of our liberty.

For it is scarcely an accident that one of the friendly witnesses before HUAC in 1947 was a man who hailed its victory (1n 1951) in these words:

“For many years the Red propagandists and conspirators concentrated their big guns on Hollywood. They threatened to throw acid in the faces of myself and some other stars, so we would never appear on screen again. I packed a gun for some time. Policemen lived at my home to guard my kids. But that was more than five years ago. Those days are gone forever.”

Here is the same man, interviewed in the Los Angeles Times on 6 March, 1980:

“. . . But the reason for the godlessness with regard to communism — here is a direct teaching of the child from the beginning of its life that it is a human being whose only importance is its contribution to the state. . . and that there is no God, they are just an accident of nature. . . The result is, this is why they have no respect for human life. . . And I remember one night, a long time ago, in a rally in Los Angeles, 16,000 people in the auditorium, and this was at the time when the local Communists. . . and this is all well-documented — was actually trying, had secured domination of several unions in the picture business, and was trying to take over the motion picture industry. . . believe me, the persecutors were the Communists who had gotten into positions where they could destroy careers, and did destroy them. There was no blacklist of Hollywood. The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the Communists. . . ”

Please pay no attention to the man’s splendid command of the English language, his grammar, syntax and felicitous prose. Or to the fact that every statement in that paragraph is a blatant lie. What is important is that the international conspiracy of Godless Communism is still the bedrock of his Weltpolitikik and his “vision” of a new America.

In 1947 he was merely the president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. Barring some accident before 20 January of this coming year, he will be the President of the United States of America.

Marx was correct when he chided Hegal for saying that history repeated itself, but did not also add: “The first time as tragedy. . . the second as farce.” (Or should it be the other way around?)

The Inquisition in Hollywood
by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie

In These Times, April 23-29, 1980

Thirty years after HUAC’s “investigation of the motion picture industry and the incarceration of the Hollywood 10(1950), their case has finally been recognized for what it was: a frontal attack on thought-control in the U.S. A case that was “lost,” it initiated the so-called McCarthy Era.

Following The 10, hundreds of workers in film, theater, radio and TV, in education and medicine, on newspapers and magazines, in federal, state and local administrations followed them into blacklist ostracism and unemployment, although they escaped prison terms by invoking the Fifth Amendment instead of the First.

The First was the considered choice of The 10 — or rather the 19 motion picture writers, directors, producers and actors who received the original subpoenas in 1947. They and their attorneys decided that the correct way to attack the House Committee on Un-American Activities was to strike at its right to exist at all.

If Congress, they argued, can make no law about opinion or association, neither can it investigate those areas. Their position was supported by the Supreme Court itself in a notable decision: West Virginia State Board of Education vs. Barnette (1943).

In ringing language upholding the First Amendment as a shield against any attempt by the state to force a citizen to declare his “loyalty” or punish him for remaining silent, Justice Jackson’s majority opinion seemed to have “destroyed the whole super-patriotic cable. . . including the proponents of the House Un-American Activities Committee.” (Charles Katz, one of the lawyers for The 10.)

The very same Justice Jckson was still on the high court and concurred with his colleagues when they refused in 1950 to grant a hearing to the case of The 10.

What had happened between 1942 and 1950? The Cold War, carried in the womb of World War II, was born and flourished mightily. Our glorious ally, the USSR, became our enemy; our enemies — Germany, Italy and Japan — became our client states and shortly our allies. And — irony of fate — two liberal justices — Murphy and Rutledge — who would most certainly have voted for certiorari — died within two months of each other in 1949.

Yet the 1947-1950 fight of The 10 was a major factor in giving the quietus to HUAC and its Senate counterpart in 1975.

There have been a handful of books devoted to the case, or touching on it. The late Gordon Kahn, one of the original 19, was a journalist who practically wrote Hollywood on Trial (1948) as the 1947 hearings were in process. There are three smart-ass books: Walter Goodman’s The Committee (1969), Eric Bentley’s shameless paste-up of HUAC testimony called Thirty Years of Treason (1971) and Stefan Kanfer’s A Journal of the Plague Years (1973) which share a common point of view: the Committee was disgusting but so were those who fought it. Serious books like The American Inquisition (1973) and my Inquisition in Eden (1965) achieved no circulation at all.

But this new book by Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund is the most ambitious and the most successful to date. It is a definitive study of the case and the period that gave it birth, and the story will probably not have to be told again.

Both young writers have benefitted by training in sociology and history. There is scarcely a detail of the elaborate and complicated scene from 1930 to 1960 that has escaped their meticulous and exhaustive attention and their solid analysis.

Their examination of the subject is based soundly in an understanding of the political history of World War II, both abroad and at home. They start even earlier, in the Depression that created labor and radical militancy in our country. That period also saw the development of the first American “Popular Front,” which was almost destroyed by the original Dies Committee and its unremitting attack on the reforms of Roosevelt’s four administrations.

The case of the Hollywood 10, Englund and Ceplair make plain, was something more than a successful attempt to control the content of film and dictate who could and who could not work in the industry. it was a flanking attack on the American people and it sparked a nationwide assault on progressive ideas and organizations.

We have not yet recovered from the McCarthy period, which could be repeated any time Peanut Carter and those who run him decide that they will brook no opposition to their endless maximization of profits and their drive toward World War III.

The Ceplair-Englund book is therefore crucial to our time. It has already created resentment in certain literary and industrial circles, notably in Hollywood, because it puts the finger on who, what, when, where and why. It displays uncommon objectivity that can both praise the role of the Communist Party during that period, and point out the errors of judgement committed by Communists, The 10 and the liberal organizations that supported them.

If it misses a point, it cannot be faulted for that fact. The decision in West Virginia etc. vs. Barnette on which The 10 had relied, had been brought by parents who belonged to Jehovah’s Witness and had told their young son not to salute the flag because it was a “graven image.”

In New Hampshire a few years ago another member of that contentious sect was arrested for covering the state slogan on his car license plate: “Life Free or Die.” He didn’t object to the slogan, but saw no reason to advertise New Hampshire on his car.

He took his case to the Supreme Court, which in April 1977handed down its decision, written by Nixon’s Chief Justice Burger. He said that the First Amendment “includes the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all . . . [both are] complementary components of the broader concept of ‘individual freedom of mind.’.”

This decision made a two-paragraph item in some newspapers but the ever-alert Carey McWilliams, writing in The Nation (July 23, 1977) said: “That, of course, was precisely the contention of the Hollywood 10 . . . now, nearly three decades later, a majority of the Court has confirmed their contention. . . The experiences suggests that New Hampshire’s motto. . . should, in pragmatic terms, be interpreted to mean “live free or somehow manage to survive until the Supreme Court, in the fullness of time, changes its mind.”

Perhaps Ceplair and Englund will add this victory as a footnote in the next edition of their invaluable book.

Inquisition in Eden
By Alvah Bessie
Seven Seas Books, 1967
308 pages

Part screenplay and parrt narrative, Inquisition in Eden opens with a Cast of Characters, The book’s leading man, the narrator is, of course, Alvah Bessie; his leading lady is his second wife, Helen Clare. Supporting characters are the other nine blacklisted writers, producers and directors, Mr. McDonald, the warden of U.S. Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas; a slew of cameos by actors including Gary Cooper, Bette Davis, Errol Flynn and Lee J. Cobb; and bit players from inmates to guards, FBI agents, Ayn Rand, Richard M. Nixon, Jack Warner, Ernest Hemingway and “various varieties of ass kissers”.

Fade in. The reader is placed right at Texarkana. It’s July 1950. And Bessie writes in a straightforward manner with enough detail to put the reader right into the scene. We learn that Bessie is in prison to serve a year’s sentence “for a misdemeanor called contempt of Congress,” and is sitting with his parole official’s office. The conversation is as follows:

Huber: This where I get your side of the story; why you think you’re here.

Huber pauses, lights a cigarette, nods when the inmate gestures toward the pocket of his blue-denim shirt. Inmate, seated in a chair across from Huber, lights his own cigarette.

Huber (continuing): But before you start, let me tell you that in twenty years of custodial work, I have yet to meet an inmates who wasn’t here on a bum rap.

Narrator (all officers are “sir”): Sir, in my opinion, I’m a political prisoner.

Huber (deadpan): Bessie, we don’t have any political prisoners in the United States.

(glances at dossier on his desk, points with finger)

You’re here for violation of Section 192, Title 2, U.S. Code, which means refusal to testify before a duly constituted committee of Congress . . .

The likelihood that these sections of dialogue are remembered verbatim almost 20 years after the fact really doesn’t matter because Bessie has a natural ear for dialogue and he’s written several scenes that are very funny and biting,  but Inquisition is not entirely a prison memoir.  Bessie writes about his early acting ambitions as a young man on the New York stage, life in during the Depression in Vermont, struggling to survive with his first wife Mary Burnett and their children Dan and David, his first novel Dwell in the Wilderness and Spain.

It’s after his return from Spain that he writes (and which was endorsed by Hemingway) Men in Battle. Well-reviewed in Time, Bessie writes, “…it never sold. For it appeared the week that Hitler invaded Poland, and people had other things to read—the newspapers.” But his luck changed when he was offered the drama critic position at the New Masses, where he remained for four years as the drama, book, film critic and feature writer until Hollywood beckoned.

Gossip-mongers of old Hollywood will be disappointed because Bessie doesn’t dish any dirt. He writes of the studio politics, the haggling with producers and studio executives over stories and scripts. He cuts these scenes with life in prison and his friendships with some of the inmates. Yet it’s the road to HUAC, that Bessie documents so well. And when the pink subpeona comes and the jobs peter out, Bessie writes of his financial problems. Determined to not borrow money to survive and feed his family, writes of how he pitched a modern-day version of Don Quixote to Charlie Chaplin with no success. After his meeting with Chaplin, Bessie leaves with no job offer, but with a handshake and a $100 bill slipped in his hand.

As for the charges agaisnt the Hollywood ten Bessie provides a reader-friendly legal explanation of why the Hollywood Ten chose to plead the first amendment rather than the fifth. Although the book’s pace slows down at this juncture, it immediately picks up after his release from prison and life as a blacklisted writer.

Of all the books and articles written on the Hollywood Blacklist, Inquisition in Eden is one of the most honest accounts of a terrible time in this country’s history, and Bessie tells his story with wry wit of his life before, during, and after the blacklist.

A Worthy Legacy
By Tomi Akinyanmi
Tommie Books, 2008,
112 pages,
$15.95

Reviewed by Leanne Flanagan

The Nigerian sun blazes as the author answers a phone call from her father. Her grandfather, who has been seriously ill, faces imminent death, and Akinyanmi must return home to the family’s village. Thus begins A Worthy Legacy and the author’s own spiritual journey. As she begins her travels, she relives vivid memories spent with her grandfather as a child. She was the first girl grandchild after eight boys and there were another eight boys born before the next girl. He had called her his little girl, and she coveted the feeling that she was his favorite. These thoughts magnified the urgency she felt to get to the village so that she could be with her grandfather before his death. In the old traditions of her people, being near a relative’s deathbed to say farewell was considered a most honored opportunity.

Upon her arrival in the village, she reverts back to another old tribal tradition; the women’s show of respect for elders by kneeling when greeting them. In this tribe, there was more than one wife. Because Ms. Akinyanmi’s grandmother was the first of three wives, it was her duty to stay with Grandfather in his sick room and relay his wishes to the rest of the family. The story continues when Grandfather is carried into a courtyard by his sons as his entire family gathers around him. He begins to speak, and after persuading all to wear a smile, he proceeds to offer his last words.

He gives advice of how to live honorably. He speaks of fulfilling our destiny, developing and keeping self-respect, respecting others, believing in God and finding happiness in truth. There is poetry included about trusting others, not giving up and having hope. After his death, his family and the entire village mourn a beloved husband, father, brother and grandfather as well as a valued member of the village. He was buried within the estate of his home the next day, as he requested. After his burial, his granddaughter, Akinyanmi, came back to the city to resume her life, often remembering her grandfather’s last words, she writes.

A Worthy Legacy started out telling the story of an honest, simple man who taught his family to live with love, dignity and respect. This reader was drawn into the work and was fascinated by some of the old customs relayed in the story. However, as the book progressed, it stopped being a story about a family and its culture and became almost like a text of proverbs. There were too many pages of wise words that the reader has heard before, and book was reminiscent of the famous Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament of the Bible where Jesus Christ was teaching principles for living while looking down on his devoted followers. The length and the tone of the grandfather’s last words spoken made this portion of the book a segment of preaching rather than part of a story.

Because of the tone Ms. Akinyanmi uses to tell the story and the lack of narrative, this book would probably be more appropriate for spiritual groups or inspirational speakers rather than the general reader.

About Leanne Flanagan
Leanne has renewed her passion for writing after a 30 year sabbatical at experiencing real life—raising a family and having a career in health care. She now spends her free time writing most often, light, tongue-in-cheek observations of life in American suburban society, limericks and poetry. At present, she is working towards publication of a memoir written as a collection of essays and poetry.

[Editor's Note: In his email to me regarding this review, Dan Bessie wrote, "The review sounds quite sectarian, especially with the hindsight of time. While I'm really not conversant with the history of the Preito vs Negrin strategy and tactics in relation to Spain, it seems to me that the CP's main tactic at the time ought to have been to champion ANYONE who was working for the re-establishment of the Republic.

More importantly, the review really has very little to say in relation to what the author wrote about, preferring to concentrate on the ideological stuff (which is what the CP did quite a bit in those years)"

I decided to add it to this month's reviews so readers could see how the CP sometimes let its ideology get in the way of a good review.RS]

Smouldering Freedom, by Isabel de Palencia

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie, New Masses, November 6, 1946

The story of the Spanish Republican exiles cannot be told to often. These days it is a live issue again in the mass meetings throughout the length and breadth of the land through which individuals and organizations strive to sever the diplomatic relations that still exist between our country and the fascist regime that sent these people into exile.

Isabel de Palencia, who was the last minister plenipotentiary to Sweden of the Spanish Republic, tells the story again in her new book, and tells it very well indeed. Prefacing her narrative with a thirty-six-page summary of the war itself, she follows with the personal stories of many exiles — distinguished and humble — who were driven from their native land by the invading armies of Hitler and Mussolini.

These stories gain poignancy over other refugee stories by virtue of the fact that the Spanish refugees alone among the European peoples oppressed by fascism have no place to go. Their homeland, protected by a spurious neutrality, has not yet been liberated, and this fact alone is of consummate irony. For the neutrality of Franco served only to guarantee the continuity of international fascism, to guarantee the continuing murder of Spain’s republican populations.

While Señora de Palencia tells her many stories with patent heart and sound conclusions, one has the feeling that there is something lacking in her book. I would describe it as partisanship — not for republican Spain, for she is an iron-bound artisan of the Republic. What seems lacking is a proper allegiance to those forces within and outside Spain who are going to liberate her country in the near future. By maintaining a strange neutrality between the contending groups of Spaniards in exile, Palencia fails to strengthen the hand of the one group she concedes is really capable of rallying the majority — the Negrin group.

It is a sad fact that the recently convened Cortes in Mexico succeeded in isolating Juan Negrin — together with substantial groupings without whose support no unified movement for the re-conquest of Spain is possible. While admitting that the Prieto group now holds the balance of power among the exiles, it is curious not to find Palencia evaluating Prieto and his junta as they must be evaluated. For Prieto himself has long since been exposed by Premier Negrin as a traitor to the Republic, and Prieto’s influence at all times has been toward a narrow, nationalistic understanding of the Spanish problem — and toward a vicious anti-Sovietism and anti-communism that is the hallmark of greater villains than he.

Spain will be re-conquered, however by the people who remained behind after the war, and while the exiles (if they achieve real unity) can help materially toward the reconstitution of their republic, the fight itself when it comes, will be carried on by those who could not escape from Spain. They will bring to life a slogan whose memory depressed us all for many years: Madrid Will Be the Tomb of Fascism. That slogan has been reborn again, and it will triumph. Isabel de Palencia’s new book will add to the understanding of those people whose assistance and understanding is needed to make it a reality.

For those who don’t follow me on Twitter (and shame on you, if you don’t) that’s my handle. However, this post isn’t about Twitter or me (well, a little about me, but really more about books). It’s all about that favorite pastime that many bibliophiles have and that’s the beach read or the pool read, or the cabin read. We’re five days away from the Summer Solstice and it’s time to do some thinking of what might be good reads for the summer.

For yours truly, I have an esoteric list that might make some eyes glaze over or maybe roll up to the ceiling–that’s what my husband does accompanied by a muttered, “Fun stuff, Boo.” But then again HE’s reading a book about the Romany (which does seem fascinating).

For  the next three months, my reading will focus on the Spanish Civil War, the history of Communism and two classics, but don’t fret I do have some “fun stuff” thrown in between the serious subjects. So here’s a rundown of my Beach Reads:

June (fun stuff in italics)

Men in Battle, Alvah Bessie

The Un-Americans, Alvah Bessie

A World I Never Made, James LePore

If the Buddha Came to Dinner, Hale Sofia Schatz

July

The Spanish Civil War, Hugh Thomas

A Passionate War, Peter Wyden

The Spanish Civil War: A Very Short Introduction, Helen Graham

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen

From Where the Rivers Come, Terin Tashi Miller

The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl

August/September

The Rise and Fall of Communism, Archie Brown

The Roots of Amercan Communism, Theodore Draper

The Communist Party of the United States, Fraser M. Ottanelli

Black Boy, Richard Wright

Stardust, Joseph Kanon

Fun stuff,eh? I think so…

[Editor’s Note: At the time this review was written, Bessie was the drama and literary critic at the New Masses. He was also a Lincoln Brigade veteran.]

For Whom the Bell Tolls, By Ernest Hemingway

Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940, 471 pages

Reviewed by Alvah Bessie, New Masses, November 5, 1940

“No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”

This is the quotation from John Donne which Ernest Hemingway sets as rubric for his new novel, and this is the touchstone by which that novel must be evaluated. Since we must assume that Donne was speaking of the universal brotherhood of man, of the inter-relationship of human life and its indivisibility, we have a right to expect that Hemingway’s long novel of the war in Spain will illuminate that text and not obscure it, will demonstrate the novelist’s realization of the significance of that war, and find him at the peak of his achievement.  For that war, which Hemingway witnessed at close hand, is being revealed with every day that passes to have been a touchstone and a turning point in human history which those who had foresight in 1936 stated it would be: “the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind.”

Ernest Hemingway’s relationship to the war was intimate and varied. In many senses he was as much a participant as those men he knew and loved who now are gone—Lucasz, Werner Heibrunn, and the many anonymous dead of the glorious Twelfth International Brigade. The novelist gave freely of his substance and his spirit in the cause for Spain; he wrote and he spoke and he acted.  And he commanded the admiration and respect of the men of many nationalities who fought there and who knew his name. It was during that war that he wrote a novel that represented what should have been—and what many thought was—a transition book: To Have and Have Not. It was both interesting and inevitable that the novel should have been the first work from his hand that was not greeted with unanimous enthusiasm by the critical fraternity of the bourgeois press. For in its pages a new note had been sounded. The old Hemingway of the postwar what-the-hell-boys and the old let’s-have-another-drink was gone. A new Hemingway made his appearance, a new theme emerged, Whereas in his short stories and in two previous novels the author had exasperated his most perspicacious admirers by his inconclusive treatment of the necessity for manliness and the pervasive horror of death, a maturing artist, found another subject—the problem of making a living, the necessity of human solidarity.  “One man alone ain’t got,” whispered the dying Harry Morgan, an honest man who had found that he could not feed his wife and children by honest labor.  “No man alone now.” He stopped “No matter how a man alone got no bloody —ing chance.”

The critics deplored this new and serious note in their pet disillusioned author, an author they had praised being above the political arena, who dealt with eternal realities in a “lean, athletic prose.” It was whispered freely among those objective gentlemen that Hemingway was slipping; he was a member of the League of American Writers; he had discovered that non-existent figment of the Reds’ imagination—the Class Struggle. But many who had thought Hemingway was dead (for more valid reasons) took new hope with the appearance in his work of this wider realization of man’s humanity, this deeper understanding of his struggle. Sex and death were eternal verities, but it was not until 1937 that Hemingway discovered taxes.  To Have and Have Not was a vastly imperfect work; the author’s satirical treatment of the human parasites who lived on luxury yachts of the Florida keys was both brittle and jejune, and his old limitations were amply manifest: the interchangeability of his conversation; his feeble understanding of female character; his inability to fully explore and plumb character at all. For with the rarest of exceptions few characters that Hemingway has dealt with  up to date have been more than pegs on which to hang those moods and intimations of mortality which have been the author’s forte, and which reveal his greatest gifts.

That those gifts are considerable no sensitive person could doubt. He has an ear for the language (in dialogue) that is unique. No human being ever talked the way Hemingway’s characters talk, but every word they speak makes the reader say, “How true to life.” This is real artistic triumph. This man can create moods and crystallize certain fundamental emotions in a way few writers have ever been privileged to achieve.  And it is these moods and these emotions that the reader generally remembers, not the people who live through them—the futility  of the life of the expatriate, his emptiness and his frantic search for a kick; the horror of the retreat from Caporetto; the loneliness that surrounds the death in childbed of the heroine in A Farewell to Arms, the brutality of The Killers, and the frustration of Fifty Grand; the loneliness and incongruity of drunkenness, and the sense of decay that pervaded all his work up to To Have and Have Not, where the wider significance of living made a momentary appearance.

Many expected that Hemingway’s experience in Spain would so inflame his heart and talents, that his long-announced novel of that war would be both his finest achievement and “the” novel about Spain. It is not. It is his finest achievement only in the sense that he has now perfected his extraordinary technical facility and touched some moments of action with a fictional suspense that is literally unbearable. But depth of understanding there is none; breadth of conception is heartbreakingly lacking; there is no searching, no probing, no grappling with the truths of human life that is more than superficial. And an astounding thing has happened, that anyone who was even remotely concerned with what happened in Spain will find almost incredible: Hemingway has treated that war (in an essential way) exactly as he treated the first world war in A Farewell to Arms. Touched in his own flesh and spirit by the horrors of that first great imperialist conflict, struck into a mood of impotent despair by its utter lack of meaning and its destruction of everything all decent human beings value, Hemingway proclaimed the futility of life and love and happiness. He killed his heroine and in a memorable evocation of utter human loneliness, his hero “walked home in the rain.” The Farewell was so bitter a condemnation of imperialist war that it aroused the ire of Archibald MacLeish, who found that it had been largely responsible for destroying the new generation’s faith in its misleaders.

Let us examine For Whom the Bell Tolls, and see what the author (who only recently aptly replied to MacLeish) has done with one of the greatest human facts of our century—the two and a half years during which the Spanish people held in check, with their bare hands, the forces of international fascism. His hero this time is Robert Jordan, American volunteer who is a partizan fighter—one of that small band of extremely courageous men who worked behind fascist lines. Jordan is sent behind the lines again to blow up a strategic bridge—his signal for the explosion is to the beginning of a government attack upon Segovia.

The action takes place in three days’ times. Jordan makes contact with a group of Spanish guerilleros, meets a Spanish girl who had been captured and raped by the fascists, falls in love with her, makes his plans to blow the bridge—a difficult enterprise in which he fully expects to lose his life.  His guerillas attack the fascist garrison, and he blows the bridge as what is to be a futile attack gets under way—for the fascists have learned of the plans for the offensive and are prepared to meet it. In escaping, Jordan’s horse is wounded, falls upon the man, and breaks his leg. He is too badly injured to be carried, and must be left behind to do what damage he can with a light machine-gun, and then to end his life.

This is a story of action, and the action is fast and furious, fused with a suspense that is magnificently handled in every incident. But this is also A Farewell to Arms, slightly in reverse. For the total implication of the novel is, again, the necessity for the virility, the pervasive horror of death, the futility—nay, the impossibility of love. Given only seventy-two hours in which to live, Robert Jordan must live his life within that span. He accepts that fate, but the reader’s disappointment in his fate is Hemingway’s disappointment with life—for there is no tragedy here, merely pathos. Here, again, are long and fruitless and somewhat meaningless disquisitions upon the significance of death and killing (in war, in murder, in the bull-ring, by accident, by design). Here again is the small and personal (and the word personal is the key to the dilemma of Ernest Hemingway’s persistent lack of growth) frustration of the individual, and here again is the author’s almost pathological preoccupation with blood and mutilation and sex and death—they all go together and are part and parcel of his attitude toward life, and they are the only facts of life with which he has consistently dealt. I do not mean to imply that these subjects are unworthy or incapable of profound treatment, singly or together; I do mean to insist that in Hemingway’s hands they have never achieved the stature of universality, perhaps because Hemingway cannot see them in perspective, cannot see them more than sentimentally.

It must be clearly stated that Hemingway’s position in this novel is unequivocally on the side of the Spanish people; there can be no question of his defection from that cause. It is, however, a tragic fact that the cause of Spain does not, in any essential way, figure as a motivating power driving, emotional, passional force in this country. In the widest sense, that cause is actually irrelevant to the narrative. For the author is less concerned with the fate of the Spanish people, whom I am certain that he loves, than he is with the fate of his hero and his heroine, who are himself. They are Hemingway and Hemingway alone, in their (say rather his, for Jordan is the mainspring of the narrative, and the girl Maria is only lightly sketched) morbid concentration upon the meaning of individual death, personal happiness, personal misery, personal significance in living and their personal equation is not so deeply felt or understood as to achieve wide significance. For all this groping, the author of the Bell has yet to integrate his individual sensitivity to life with the sensitivity of every living human being (read the Spanish people); he has yet to expand his personality as a novelist to embrace the truths of other people, everywhere; he has yet to dive deep into the lives of others, and there to find his own.

The personal constriction has long been evident and has made inevitable other aspects of Hemingway’s personality that are, to say the least, reprehensible. I refer to his persistent chauvinism, as referred to the Italian people, and to women; to the irresponsibility he has shown in publishing in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan such a story as Below the Ridge, a story whose implications gave deadly ammunition to the enemy—Hemingway’s enemy, the fascist-minded of America; to the irresponsibility in permitting his play, The Fifth Column, to be mutilated and distorted out of all semblance of what he originally wanted to say, to the point where it was actually a slander to the Spanish people.

There are many references in Bell to various political aspects of the struggle in Spain. And few of these references do more than obscure the nature of that struggle. Robert Jordan, his American anti-fascist fighter, wonders ‘what the Russian stand is on the whole business.” If Jordan, who is pictured as an utterly inflexible anti-fascist, did not understand what the Soviet Union felt about Spain, surely his creator did and and does. And just as in his story Below the Ridge, Hemingway’s sins of omission in the Bell allow the untutored reader to believe that the role of the Soviet Union in Spain was sinister and reprehensible. For certainly he must himself know—and it is his obligation to clearly state—that the role was clear and well-defined, and so honest as to command the entire respect and adherence of the Spanish people, who hung banners in their towns which read: Viva La U.R.S.S.; Mejor Amigo del Pueblo Español (Long Live the Soviet Union, Best Friend of the People of Spain!).

Now this concentration, this constriction of Hemingway’s indubitable genius, to the purely personal, has resulted in the intensification of his idiosyncratic tendencies to the point where he, an inflexible supporter of the loyalists and avowed admirer of the International Brigades, can conceive and execute as vicious a personal attack upon Andre Marty, the organizer of the International Brigades, as could be and has been delivered upon him by French fascist deputies themselves! This attack upon Marty, who is portrayed in the novel under his own name, and upon whom Hemingway exercises the presumption (both personal and artistic) of thinking for him, is entirely irrelevant to the narrative. To understand it all, one would have to know, at first hand, the nature of Hemingway’s personal contact with this man—a revolutionary figure of the first magnitude, organizer of the Black Sea mutiny of the French navy (an achievement that could scarcely have been conceived and executed by the criminal imbecile Hemingway portrays), a monolithic representative of the French working class, and the man who was the organizational genius and spirit of the Brigades. Hemingway makes such protestation of admiring. Both as novelist and reporter Hemingway had an obligation to understand this man, whatever his personal experience with Marty, whatever his personal opinion of Marty’s personality might have been. He cannot plead that his intentions in attacking Marty were good; that it was his honest conviction that Marty was a part of the incompetence, the red tape, and the outright treachery that strangled Spain, for such “facts” simply will not hold water; they are lies. And I am afraid that Hemingway will live to see his book hailed by our universal enemy precisely because of his attack upon Marty; I am afraid he will live to see every living and dead representative of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion attacked and slandered because of the great authority that attaches to Hemingway’s name and his known connection with Spain.

Yet this man Marty is the man the author portrays as a fool, a madman, and categorically indicts as a murderer! And I wonder, when he wrote these pages, whether he considered for a moment that he was attacking him with the very terms that have been leveled at him by the French fascists who sold France down the river to Hitler. I wonder if he considered he was accusing him in the very same way that were used by American deserters who appeared before the Dies committee and attempted to smear the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade, with the very words of the Hearst press which, throughout the war in Spain, characterized the Internationals as the scum of the earth, international bums, gangsters, and murderers.

This is the trap into which the individualism Hemingway’s bourgeois critics so admired, has led a man who is still one of our most greatly endowed creative artists. For he has written a novel of Spain without the Spanish people, a Hamlet without the Dane. And he has forgotten the words he wrote earlier this year: “There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write them truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.” For the author of the Bell does not convince us, with this novel, that “any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde.” He only convinces us—no matter how tenderly he may write of the love of Robert Jordan and Maria—that the imagination of his own death may yet destroy him as an artist.

It seems certain that Hemingway did not intend to write a Cosmopolitan love story against a background of the Spanish Civil War; yet this what he has done. It is certain that he did not intend to slander the Spanish people or the Soviet Union; yet his method of telling the story has resulted in both. With minor exceptions, the Spanish people portrayed here are cruel, vindictive, brutalized, irresponsible. Throughout the long narrative there is evidence of much confusion: Hemingway praises the individual heroism of individual Communists, impugns and slanders their leadership, their motives, and their attitudes. He admires the Brigades, and assails their leadership (and surely he knows enough about military affairs to realize that no soldier can fight well unless his officer commands his respect).

Already this great endowed writer, who on innumerable occasions has placed himself without equivocation on the side of the people against their enemies, has been readmitted by the most reactionary critics to the Valhalla of the Literary Giants. J. Donald of the New York Times has forgiven him for writing To Have and Have Not; the defected liberal, John Chamberlain, absolves him for having (in the same novel) made “a common murderer of inferior sensibility and no moral sense whatever. . .do duty as a symbol of downtrodden humanity,”  cheers the fact “If Archibald MacLeish still thinks of Hemingway as an underminer of the soldierly virtues he will have to change his mind,” and becomes shrill with joy over the attack on Marty, Hemingway’s “turn(ing) on the politicos of  Moscow” and finally arriving at the point announced by John Dos Passos in Adventures of a Young Man. (This should be news to Hemingway, for Dos Passos ultimately became an avowed enemy of the republican government of Spain.) Edmund Wilson also points the Dos Passos parallel in the New Republic, lauds Hemingway for being more interested in “The kind of people. . .rather than social-economic relations. . . .”

But this is strange company for a man like Hemingway, a man who transcended the futility created in him by the first world war, was vitalized, as a man and as an artist, by Spain; a man who won the respect and admiration of almost every International Brigade man who met him, and who gave liberally to these men of his own substance. For at the moment he is found in bad company; in the company of his enemies, and the people’s enemies—clever enemies who will fawn upon him and use him, his great talents and his passion for the people’s cause, to traduce and betray those talents and those people.

[Editor's Note: As I wrote in the previous post, this is Alvah Bessie's response to Maltz's article, “What Shall We Ask of Writers?” Special thanks goes to Dan Bessie for all his help in bringing this article to my attention.]

What is Freedom for Writers?

By Alvah Bessie,

The New Masses, March 12, 1946

Alvah Bessie, novelist, a veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, currently working in Hollywood, is the author of the article below, on the issues that have arisen since the publication of the article by Albert Maltz several weeks ago.

Albert Maltz’s recent article (NM February 12) would not have been half so astonishing had it appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature, a publication that is forced by its very nature as an organ of bourgeois tought perpetuate the utterly baseless categories Maltz resurrects in his article.

Let us first examine his overlying thesis, a cliché with which anyone can readily agree: that left-wing criticism in America for too long a time tended to be too narrow, doctrinaire and paralyzing in its effects on both writers and critics. As a former critic for NM who suffered acutely under its sectarian approach to books, plays, and motion pictures, I can utter a fervent Amen to Maltz’s attack.

At the same time it is possible to contend that Maltz is beating a dying horse, for there is more than ample evidence that the Left has been building—slowly and painfully as must be—a sounder Marxist approach to the arts. (The sounder the party of Marxism becomes, the sounder will be its approach to the arts, as well as its approach to the people.)

What is more important, however, is the fact that the approach Maltz castigates, narrow as it was, was never erected into a principle. We have had good Marxists who were bad critics and vice versa (and we still have both), but I cannot remember anyone ever insisting, in the name of Marxism, that art works of any category were automatically to be praised because they said the “right” thing or damned because they said the “wrong” –irrespective of their attributes.

What is so astonishing Maltz’s article, however, after he has disposed of this moth-eaten straw man, is the fact that his basic contentions are not only in-Marxist, but actually anti-Marxist. Perhaps I do Maltz a disservice in this associating him with Marxism, for he nowhere identifies himself in his article as anything more than “a working writer,” whatever that may be. He nowhere states his frame of reference or identifies the point of departure from which he launches what is, objectively, not only an attack on Marxism but a defense of practically every renegade writer of recent years who ever flirted with the working class movement: Farrell, Wright, Fearing. (And why not John Dos Passos?)

The un-Marxist character of Maltz’s approach is revealed in the almost endless series of idealist categories into which he divides writers and writing: “artistic activity” and “journalism”; the social “social novelist” and the “political novelist” and perhaps, by extension, the “working” novelist; the writer “qua citizen”; works written for an “immediate political end” and works written, presumably, for eternity.

I think a Marxist would contend that these categories are idealist, unreal, and basically reactionary. I think a Marxist would contend that when Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath he was at least under the influence of working class ideas—and people; that the served him as powerful inspiration, gave him a springboard into a work that served both “an immediate political end” and the questionable standards of “eternity.”

Now it is common knowledge that not only Steinbeck but also Farrell, Wright, Fearing, and Dos Passos have consciously repudiated the working class movement; all have found a place, or hope to find a place, in the very bosom of a class they once affected to despise. And the contention could be supported with every kind of evidence that not one of them has written anything since that repudiation that is worth reading—either “artistically” or “politically.” (And I include in this Black Boy, which, whatever the obvious distortions of Native Son, cannot hold a candle to that work, in either depth of conception, scope or penetration.) This is not a question of “literary taste”—nor do I understand what Maltz is talking about when he opposes literary taste to “an immediate political utility.” Did Grapes of Wrath possess both immediate political utility and literary taste? Or didn’t it? Did The Silent Don? Or even The Cross and the Arrow?

But the attempt to perpetuate these idealist categories (a daily phenomenon in the literary columns of The New York Times) leads Maltz to dangerous conclusions: that an “artist” is a self-contained phenomenon whose “art” bears no “inevitable, consistent connection” with what the artist thinks or believes. An artist may be “confused, or even stupid and reactionary in his thinking” and still do “good, even great work” as an artist.

This sort of thinking is a product of the bourgeois concept that regards artists as sacred idiots who should be protected from popular anger even when they are fascist traitors (Ezra Pound)—but Maltz himself told us (NM, Dec. 25, 1945) that Pound “is more guilty because he is a poet.” And yet he echoes the concept that says, “You don’t have to have any brains” to be an actor, a writer, dancer, painter, composer; all you have to have is talent—whatever the hell that is—and you should be “free’ to create without it being “incumbent upon [you] that [you] relate [your] broad philosophic or emotional humanism to a current and transient political tactic.”

Maltz quotes us Engles on Balzac, who was a great writer and a “reactionary” at the same time. Well, what about Balzac? He was a monarchist at a time when the rising bourgeoisie of France was the historically progressive class; that made him a reactionary, for his time. He loathed, hated and despised the power of money and the corruption of his own beloved aristocracy, whom he castigated more bitterly than the shopkeepers, merchants and bankers themselves. What is more, to quote Engels’ famous letter to Miss Harkness: “And the only men of whom he speaks with undisguised admiration are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloitre Saint-Merri, the men who at the time (1830 -1836) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses.”

If this is true then it is not enough to catalog Balzac as a reactionary and thus “prove” that it is possible to be a reactionary and a great writer at the same time, Q.E.D. To do so is to remove Balzac from his historical context and to isolate the word reactionary as though it were a constant, equally applicable to all times, places and persons. For it has frequently happened that what was progressive yesterday is reactionary today and vice versa.

Balzac was a monarchist in a period when industrial proletariat was practically nonexistent. Can Maltz cite us a monarchist writer today who could at the same time be a “great” writer? Today’s ultra-reactionaries are fascists. The proletariat rules a country covering one-sixth the land surface of the globe. Can Maltz cite us a fascist writer who is “great”? Will he contend that it is even possible for a fascist to write a great novel when the mere fact of being a fascist premises an attitude toward human beings that makes it categorically impossible for a person to see or write the truth about anything?

No one will deny the possibility of a writer coming out of the mountains of Wyoming, never having heard of Karl Marx in his entire life, and still writing a book that will be great—because he has profoundly observed, deeply felt and honestly and felicitously set down what he has seen. But if it is true that Marxist historical materialism can equip the writer with an insight into human relations that is more valid than that provided by any other philosophy of life, that it can be denied that a writer, having once accepted that philosophy and then repudiated it (talent being equal), will thereafter write anything possessing the validity of the work he wrote under the influence of that philosophy.

I am not saying here that a bad writer automatically becomes a good one when he becomes a Communist; nor am I saying that a writer who is not a Communist is necessarily a bad writer. But I am saying that there is a correlation between the quality of a writer’s work and his grasp of human history. And I am proceeding from the assumption that a sound understanding of Marxist theory and practice will provide a writer with a sounder grasp of human history—which is human character.

What Maltz actually seems to be saying when he defends such pipsqueak talents as Farrell, Fearing and Blankfort is that the trouble with them is not that they are minor writers who never developed but that Marxism itself, applied as a critique to their work at the time they fondly imagined themselves of the Left, stunted their development. They failed because we failed to appreciate them, nourish them, praise them, tolerate their peculiar political, social and personal vagaries!

The facts simply will not support such a contention. Not one of them was major talent to begin with—and neither was Dos Passos. But it is a fact that when they were on the periphery of the Left, when they themselves—for the moment—placed their work at the service of the working class, they wrote better than they ever wrote before or have written since. And the same is true of Clifford Odets—the only real talent of them all—who, since he became separated from the people he new best, loved best, and whose interests he attempted to defend (as an artist and a man), has “gone downhill”—both as an artist and a man. For the artist and the man are inseparable, and there is “a commanding relationship between the way an artist votes and any particular he writes.” It may not be immediately evident in “any particular work” but it is evident in the totality of his work, and Maltz himself is an example of this relationship.

Maltz springs of the middle class, yet in the depression he first made an identification with the working class and he has maintained that identification.

The stories he wrote in the thirties are instinct with a true—if scarcely profound—understanding of the people who suffered most during that crises. In The Underground StreamMaltz wrote a poor novel. It is not, however, a poor novel because it possessed immediate political expediency—in frankly asking sympathy and understanding for the auto workers and their Communist leader. It was a poor novel simply because Maltz did not profoundly understand either the Communist leader, his party, the workers he was trying to lead or their antagonists. So the characters become well-intentioned stereotypes (the workers), and the fascist became a rubber stamp.

The Cross and the Arrowhas many of the faults of The Underground Stream, in its earnest and uninspired attempt to understand project people with whom its author is really unfamiliar. And while it deals with one of the crucial issues of our time (political expediency) its faults spring from an imperfect (a synthetic and researched) examination of the German people under Hitler. And its virtues—which are far greater than any Maltz displayed in his earlier work—spring from the growing maturity of the writer, both as a man, a novelist, and a student of politics. This is a contradiction which is the essence of the truth about Maltz.

For there are no constants—in the individual or in society. We cannot say, “This is a social novel,” this is “art” and this is “journalism” (Paine was a journalist—and he was an artist, Ehrenbourg is an artist—and he is a journalist. So is Aragon). Should “a new headline in the newspapers” cause a writer to rewrite a novel? No—if it is a headline and nothing more. Yes—if the “headline” involves a fundamental reorientation of human history. So far as the American Communist movement is concerned, the Duclos letter was not a headline. Neither was it a strategy or “a current and transient political tactic,” to which a Communist writer must willy-nilly “relate his broad philosophic or emotional humanism.”

For if we should accept Maltz’s contention that we all need ask of writers is that they work “deeply, truly, honestly recreating a sector of human experience” within “the great humanistic tradition of culture” (whatever that may be), then surely there is no need for a Communist Party so far as writers are concerned, and certainly there is no for them to join it, for it would only cramp their style. By the same token, there is no need for the Party or even a trade union, so far as workers are concerned, if we only ask them to behave themselves, keep their noses clean, live deeply, truly and honestly—and if they will only do so.

I do not mean to vulgarize Albert Malt’s approach to this complicated problem or offer ready-made solutions for it. But this is what he seems to be asking for in his article—“freedom” for the artist to “create” irrespective of party working-class needs, aspirations and criticisms. “Let them leave us alone,” he seems to say, “to work deeply, truly and honestly, and we will automatically write the truth.” This is nonsense, but it follows inevitably from the separations Maltz makes between the artist qua artist and the artist qua citizen.

No. We need more than “free” artists. We need “Party” artists. We need artists deeply, truly and honestly rooted in the working class who realize the truth of Lenin’s assertion that the absolute freedom that they seek “is nothing but a bourgeois or anarchist phase (for ideologically an anarchist is just a bourgeois turned inside out). It is impossible to live in a society and yet be free from it. The freedom of the bourgeois writer, artist, or actress is nothing but a self-deceptive (or hypocritically deceiving) dependence upon the money bags, upon bribery, upon patronage.” Lenin wrote these words in 1905 and they still touch the very heart of the liberal dilemma.

We need writers who will joyfully impose upon themselves the discipline of understanding and acting upon working-class theory, and they are the writers who will possess the potentialities of creating a truly free literature.

“This literature will be free,” said Lenin, “because rather than careerism and pecuniary motives it will be the socialist cause and sympathy with the workers that will draw ever new forces into its ranks. This literature will be free because it will serve not the overfed heroine, not the overweight and bored ‘upper ten thousand,’ but the millions and tens of millions of workers who are the flower of the country, its strength, its future.”

And this is what we shall ask of writers. And in time we will get it.

As part of the June tribute to Alvah Bessie, I’ve been posting a few of his book reviews, and for the remaining part of the month, I’ll be posting my own reviews of his books. However, I’m feeling a little mischievous and I thought I would mix things up a bit and even stir up some controversy by including a piece  that the late Albert Maltz (screenwriter and Hollywood Ten associate) wrote in February 1946 in The New Masses, “What Shall We Ask of Writers” and follow it up with Bessie’s response.

Below is a summary that was borrowed (okay, taken) from the 1946 Communist Review via Reason in Revolt. This will give readers some context when they read Bessie’s article that appeared later in March 1946. Below is essentially an annotated version of Maltz’s position

SUMMARY OF THE “NEW MASSES”

CONTROVERSY ON ‘”WHAT SHALL WE ASK OF WRITERS?”

MAX BROWN

Maltz commences his argument by defining its limits. He says, “the left wing has also offered a number of vital intellectual assets to the writer . . . Schneider enumerated these assets and 1 take them here for granted.” Within such limits Maltz states a case which abbreviate by the following selections:

1. “To the degree that works of art reflect or attack these values (i.e., class values), it is broadly -not always specifically-true to say that works of art have been and can be weapons in men’s thinking and therefore in the struggle of social classes.”

2. ‘ . . . . as interpreted in practice for the last fifteen years of the left wing in America, it (i.e., the concept ‘art is a weapon’) has become a hard rock of narrow thinking . . . . the nature of art-how art may best be a weapon …. has been slurred over. 1 have come to believe that the accepted understanding of art as a weapon is not a useful guide but a straitjacket . . . . Finally in practice it has been understood to mean that unless art is a weapon like a leaflet, serving immediate political ends, necessi-ties and programmes, it is worthless or escapist or vicious.”

3. “… under the domination of this vulgarised approach, creative works are judged primarily by the formal ideology.”

4. ‘… from this type of thinking comes the approach which demands of each written work that it contain ‘the whole truth….. This …. demand rests upon the psychological assumption that readers coma to each book with an empty head.”

5. “A creative writer … works intellectually in an atmosphere in which the critics. the audience, the friends he respects-while revering art-actu-ally judge works on the basis of their immediate political end. If the end is good, it would be absurd to say that this may not be socially useful … but he is led by his goal into idealistic conceptions of character, into wearing rose-colored glasses which will permit him to see in life that which he wishes to find in order to prove his thesis.”

6. “I am convinced that the work-in-progress of an artist who is deeply, truly, honestly recreating a sector of human experience, need not be affected by a change in the political weather.”

7. “In his appreciation of Balzac Engels understood two facts about art: First, the writer qua citizen making an election speech, and the writer qua artist, writing a novel, is performing two very different acts. Second, Engels understood that a writer may be confused or even stupid or reactionary in his thinking – and yet it is possible for him to do good, oven great work as an artist – work that serves even ends he despises. This point is critical for the understanding of art and artists I”

8. “Writers must be judged by their work, and not by the committees they join.”

9. “The political convictions of a writer or his lack of political convictions may have something to do with his growth or creative decline. Writing is a complex process . . . . There are many, many reasons why writers grow and sometimes retrogress.”

10. “The great humanistic tradition of culture has always been on the side of progress. The writer who works within this tradition-is writing a political work in the broadest meaning of the term.”

Such is Maltz’ main thesis. In the same issue Isidore Schneider, New Masses Literary Editor, takes no exception to any of the above statements, but does stress the positive achievement of left criticism in establishing the analysis of the social relationships of a work of art as a standard critical procedure, against the bitter opposition of the American ruling class.

. . . I hit the jackpot!

Via snailmail, I recieved

• Picking Bones from Ash by Marie Mutsuki Mockett

Special thanks goes to Marie, a fellow Tweeter, and to her publisher Graywolf Press. Can’t wait to get started

Via United Postal Service

• The Rise and Fall of Communism by Archie Brown
• Germany 1945: From War to Peace by Richard Bessel

Another special thanks to Van Luu at HarperCollins!