Alvah's Books

TWO FINGERS AND A THUMB, by Dan Bessie

With just those three digits my Pop (we never called him Dad, Father, or Alvah), pecked out, during his 65 year writing life, six novels, three book length works of non-fiction, several translations from the French, dozens of shorts stories, perhaps a dozen screenplays, hundreds of articles, poems, theater pieces, speeches (to be delivered by himself and others), and countless book, theater and film reviews, flyers, leaflets, essays and newspaper copy. And he edited two anthologies. In a career that began during high school with indignant letters to the New York Times, blasting hunters who callously shot American eagles, to an affectionate piece on his pet Iguana Jaime (written a few years before his ancient typewriter was stilled), Pop’s literary output dealt almost exclusively, as does that of many writers, with what he knew, or what intimately concerned him.

He had initially hoped for a career dealing with reptiles and amphibians. But when a departmental head at New York’s Museum of Natural History let him know- after he’d spent weeks misclassifying 7,826 specimens of Hyla crucifer (the spring peeper), that “You don’t a scientific mind, Alvah,” he gave it up. And went on to author, among so much other writing:

A first book, of which writer and editor Whit Burnett (who he met in Paris in 1928) said, “That was a novel. Full of humor and young love which became, we think, slightly contaminated due to the indiscretions of the young protagonist’s merry old aunt.” Pop never did tell me what caused him to finally burn the manuscript instead of submitting it to a publisher. Was it because he passed out from the immense “glass washtub” of Spatenbrau he downed at the Café Balzar one evening? Or perhaps he decided that since he himself was the young protagonist, and his cousin’s mother, Ella, the model for the merry old aunt, he’d be revealing too many purple family secrets?

Dwell in the Wilderness: his first published novel (and best in my view), tracing the life of a Michigan family from 1876 to 1925, was culled from my mother’s memories during a long Vermont winter that she and Pop spent “gracefully starving to death” (as he once put it), and closely details my mother’s early life and those of her parents and brothers. (Some in her family were not too happy with the portrait.)

Men in Battle / Alvah Bessie’s Spanish Civil War Notebooks (the latter published posthumously, and on which Men in Battle is based), detail his 1938 experience, along with other American and international volunteers, opposing Franco’s revolt against the Spanish Republic. Gritty and honest, the memoir and notebooks reveal his hope to return alive, and his eagerness to shed himself of a privileged early life by submerging himself in a body of ordinary men championing a cause. Hemingway, who Pop (as both a foot soldier and as a front line reporter) met in Spain, called Men in Battle “A true, honest book … Bessie writes finely of all that he could see of it and he saw enough for one man.”

Bread and a Stone: once again drawing on my mother’s life, this time Pop, who appears in the novel as brother-in-law Bill Hogan, recounts a Pennsylvania case in which Mom’s new husband (she and my father had been divorced for three years) is tried for a murder committed during a muddled armed robbery, carried out in an effort to keep our family’s head above water during the last days of the Great Depression.

Objective Burma: an original story for Warner Brothers, for which Pop received an Oscar nomination, the film finds Errol Flynn leading a troop of American soldiers on a search and destroy mission against a Japanese radar facility. The character of a middle-aged journalist clearly represents Pop. (Shown in London, the audience pelted the screen with rotten vegetables, because it was well known that Allied activity in Burma was strictly a British operation.)

The Heart of Spain: an anthology of writing about the Spanish Civil War. This fine collection, edited by my father, and introduced by Dorothy Parker, includes work by such writers as Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Martha Gellhorn, Frederico Garcia Lorca and Lillian Hellman – as well as by many veterans of the war, including Pop. Significantly, Hemingway isn’t included; because at that point the American vets who had volunteered for Spain felt that his For Whom the Bell Tolls was a dishonest view of the war.

The UnAmericans: drawn from his experience in Spain and that during the witch-hunt period, this somewhat didactic work (as I consider it retrospectively) melds several former Communist Party comrades (among them, CBS correspondent Winston Burdett), with non-communist individuals Pop knew (such as journalist Vincent Sheean) into the fictionalized informer Frances Xavier Lang. Ben Blau, the novel’s protagonist, combines several veterans my father knew (principally Joe Hecht and Aaron Lopoff) with aspects of his own personality.

Inquisition in Eden: a straightforward, often amusing, sometimes revealing and always colorful account of Pop’s two year internment as a screenwriter at “Warners concentration camp,” followed by his ten-month incarceration at the Federal Correctional Institute in Texarkana, Texas, for Contempt of Congress, following his appearance before the House Committee on UnAmerican activities.

The Symbol: though not terribly successful at marriage, Pop often had an uncanny knack of getting into the minds of women for whom he had great sympathy. In this case Marilyn Monroe is the thinly disguised subject, in the person of movie star Wanda Oliver. Trashed by several reviewers, writer and journalist Martha Gellhorn nevertheless felt that “Bessie has accomplished a superb feat of the imagination by inventing a woman who is not a man-made puppet; she is a breathing female, alive on her own. That is a magical achievement and cannot be explained. It has happened.”

One for my Baby: the Night Box stands in for San Francisco’s legendary hungry i. Headlining comedian Dr. Sour is a composite of the hungry i’ mainstay, “Professor” Irwin Corey – along with Aaron Sussman, an aesthetic young man Pop had known as a youth. Jose “Pepe” Gonzales, the proprietor, is loosely modeled on hungry i owner Enrico Banducci. And the character of Dan Noble, a blacklisted actor who announces the acts, is Pop himself. (He later wrote an excellent screenplay based on the novel. It has never been filmed.)

Alvah Bessie’s Short Fictions / The Serpent Was More Subtil (that’s the Biblical spelling), comes full circle, combining my father’s youthful and often hysterical misadventures as an aspiring herpetologist, with several of his early short stories. Fictionalizing himself as Julian Leonard, the thinly disguised Serpent memoir also reveals a great deal about life in the Bessie family, including Pop’s dislike (that’s too mild a word) of his stuffy and conservative father.

With the exception of a few comments herein, I don’t feel it’s my job to analyze Pop, my relationship with him, or his writing. But I can honestly say that I’ve enjoyed his work, and found him to be an unusually skilled and often perceptive writer. (And once in a while a less than adequate one.)

In spite of our occasional differences, the angst that crops up now and then between fathers and sons (or mothers and daughters), I’m enormously proud of the part he played in the drama of our times; of his standing shoulder to shoulder with the Spanish people in their fight against fascism, and for the courageous and self-sacrificing position he took against our own native reactionaries. Not too many sons can say that. It pleases me that I can.

And that the vast majority of his creative life was accomplished with just two fingers and a thumb is something I find quite astonishing.

About Dan Bessie
Dan Bessie began his film career in 1956, with MGM’s animation department. Later staff and freelance assignments saw him contributing to TV cartoon series such as Spiderman, Lineus the Lionhearted, and Mr. McGoo, Moving on to educational films, he wrote, produced and, or, directed more than 125 titles, including several award winners. In 1973 he co-produced Executive Action (Burt Lancaster), a dramatic feature dealing with the assassination of JFK. From 1979 until 1995 he was a partner in Shire Films of Santa Cruz, California, writing and directing the feature Hard Traveling (New World Pictures, 1986), and Turnabout: the Story of the Yale Puppeteers (PBS,1993)., along with Peter and the Wolf, The Ugly Duckling and Beware the Jabberwock (all starring Ray Bolger), which appeared on CBS, HBO, Showtime and the Disney Channel. Author of the family memoir Rare Birds (University Press of Kentucky, 2000) and Reeling Through Hollywood (Blue Lupin Press, 2006), detailing his 40 years in film, Dan also critiques and consults on screenplays and novels, and takes freelance assignments as a writer and cartoonist. With his wife Jeanne Johnson, also a writer, he lives in southwestern France.

A Look Back at LOLITA by Randall Radic

In one of the most beautiful places on earth, or at least in Europe, is one of the most beautiful ‘walks’. Kind of like the boardwalk at Santa Barbara, California, or the cement sidewalk along Mission Beach near La Jolla, California. Only much longer. The ‘walk’ goes all the way from Villeneuve to Vevey. Along the way you pass the Place du Marche’. And there, disconcerting to some and admired by others, stands a statue of a rock star. Freddy Mercury, facing the brilliant blue waters of Lake Geneva. And why not? The rock band Deep Purple made the city famous in their song ‘Smoke on the Water’.

The city is Montreux, Switzerland. Numerous small villages surround Montreux, including La Tour-de-Peilz, Clarens, Territet, and Villeneuve.

The grave marker is large and rectangular, cut from a single piece of purplish stone. The façadeof the stone is very rough, like just-poured cement that hasn’t been smoothed. Behind the marker, carefully trimmed, stands a hedge of white oleanders, flat-faced with flowers. In front of the grave marker is a single, double-wide slab of cement, which covers the graves. The slab is smooth and surrounded by green grass and flowering plants.

This is the Cimitiere de Clarens, the Cemetery of Clarens, Clarens being one of the villages near Montreux.

The two names engraved on the rough face of the purplish stone are Vladimir Nabokov, and just below it, in somewhat smaller font, Vera Nabokov. Vladimir and his wife, Vera, lived in a suite at the Montreux Palace Hotel from 1960 until 1977. They now live together in a somewhat smaller suite in the Cemetery Clarens.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov wrote many novels, including the controversial Lolita, and demonstrated how a memoir should be written in his Speak, Memory, which may be the best memoir ever produced. Nabokov was also an accomplished lepidopterist, and a master of chess.

His childhood, which he himself called “perfect,” was spent in St. Petersburg (Stalingrad), Russia. The family spoke three languages, Russian, English and French on a daily basis, and enjoyed the privileged lifestyle of their aristocratic heritage.

With the revolt of 1917, the blue-blooded Nabokovs fled Russia for the relative safety of Crimea. After eighteen months in Crimea, the family moved to England. Vladimir became a student at Trinity College. He graduated from Cambridge and moved to Berlin, where a large ghetto of Russian emigres resided. Taking the nom de plume of Vladimir Sirin, he began writing and married Vera Slonim.

Tragic and mysterious events chaperoned the family: Nabokov’s father was assassinated by Russian monarchists in 1922, a case of mistaken identity. Nabokov himself, like Kandinski, was a synesthete, which, in Nabokov’s case, means he not only associated letters with colors, but that the letters were actually colored. Later on, Nabokov’s brother, Sergei, who was homosexual, died in a Nazi concentration camp.

Vladimir Nabokov moved his family to Paris in 1937. Then because of Germany’s invasion of France, Nabokov fled to the United States in 1940. He taught comparative literature at Wellesley College, simultaneously working as a curator of lepidoptery at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Biology. In his spare time, he wrote.

Then Lolita, after much hesitancy on the part of publishers, was published. This hesitancy, due to obscenity laws and potential lawsuits, once overcome, eventually resulted in Lolita becoming an international bestseller. The story of the twelve-year old girl’s affair with an older man provided Nabokov with fame and financial independence. He continued to write, producing many other fine novels, and devoted much of his time to studying the blue butterfly, Polymmatini Lycaenidae, his favorite.

Lolita, to the average, ignorant-white-trash-tornado-bait reader, is detestable, and described as the disgusting story of pederasty glorified. It is not. Actually, Lolita is the story of obsession, the obsession of humanity with love. It is the strange, sad story of one man’s search for love, initially, through sex with a twelve-year old girl. Here, then, is the – still – common contemporary confusion of sex with love.

Finally, at the end of the story, Lolita is older, has a child and is not lovable. She is used up, ugly and hard. Yet it is at this point that Humbert Humbert, the older man, falls truly in love with her, and comes to appreciate love for the wonderful thing it is. He loves the unlovable.

Like Joseph Heller’s Major Major in Catch-22, Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert is an example of reduplication. Reduplication, in linguistics, means to double a word, so as to form an inflected or derived form of the word. It’s a grammatical change, which indicates a change of relationship. Thus, Humbert the lover of the unlovable at the end of Lolita, is the derivation of Humbert the pederast at the beginning of the story. The relationship has changed. Humbert has changed. And Lolita is the elegant production of that process: a nasty worm entering its chrysalis and coming forth a splendid butterfly, someone new and different both in the story and in the repetition of the name.

Lolita, then, is an instance of symmetry, two stories within one story. There is a dividing line in the story. In the beginning there is no love, confusion about what love is, and ugly pederasty. At the end there is love, the confusion has disappeared, and the beauty of love reigns.

The genius of Nabokov.

In person, Nabokov was a handsome man, tall and well-formed, who radiated an aristocratic air. He loved detail and contemplation. However, he was boring, as if all his parts were subtly tightened from within. This tightness of being is evident in his memoir Speak, Memory, and probably explains his being a sentimental, but meager father.

Nabokov definitely failed his siblings, shrugging off the vaunted Russian sensibility of family ties. This is clear from his guilt over his relationship with his brother Sergei. Nabokov couldn’t get around his brother’s homosexuality. His mood toward Segei was tightly complex, composed of sour indifference, flippant disdain, and a deeper zone of doubt and foreboding: all the product of three basic factors: his own aristocratic snobbishness, the security provided by his fame and wealth, and the simple fact that Nabakov could not imagine any other response. Such as forgiveness, understanding, tolerance and love. It never entered his mind to be anything but judgmental and disapproving. Yet when Sergei died, Nabokov felt as if a piece of his own flesh had been torn from him. He realized he loved his brother and that if had tried, perhaps he could have done something for him. Too late.

Lolita, too, despite the genius of the story’s construction and its depiction of the sublime quandary of love, is banal. The story does not have the staying power of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Lolita, because of the very symmetry previously exposed, has no magnetism, and thus fails to engage the reader on any level but the intellectual. There is no visceral response in the reader.

Controversy imputed life and longevity to the book, not the sheer majesty of storytelling. Lolita, as a story, lacks emotional breadth; it is neutral. And I, for one, believe this neutrality stems from Nabakov himself. For he was neutral in his emotions, which explains why he moved to neutral Switzerland, where passion is controlled, shoved down to subterranean levels. There will be no political upheavals in Switzerland, nothing worth fighting over that’s for sure, and none at all in Nabokov either. Both the writer and the country he chose to live in put a premium upon gentility, which they considered high among the virtues.

Like Rumpelstiltskin, who turned straw into gold, Nabokov transformed words into works of art. But like the King in Rumpelstiltskin, Nabokov had no zest for life, no real personality. He just played his part, then when things went his way, lived happily ever after. The King remains outside, aloof from, the struggle in Rumpelstiltskin. And so did Nabokov. Unlike the blue butterflies, which were his favorites, he remained trapped in his pod. The blue butterflies twitch and spasm their way out of the pod, escaping the casing. Once out, they can expand their wings and fly. If they don’t fight their way out of the pod, they can’t fly, and if they can’t fly, they can’t mate. Even if they do get out and fly, if they’re not pretty, they get rejected.

Nabokov mated, and he was pretty. But he didn’t fly the way he could have.

Randall Radic, a former Old Catholic priest and a convicted felon, lives in Northern California where he reads, writes and smokes cigars. He is the author of A Priest in Hell: Gangs, Murderers and Snitching in a California Jail, and the forthcoming Gone To Hell: True Crimes of America’s Clergy.