Alvah Cecil Bessie (1904–1985)

In October 1947, Alvah Bessie and nine other Hollywood screenwriters refused to answer questions from the House Un-American Activities Committee which they considered to be outside the scope of the committee's constitutional authority. For this largely symbolic act of moral courage, they were prosecuted for contempt of Congress, and most received a prison sentence of twelve months (a couple who were old and unwell "only" got six months). With a delicious irony that Bessie restrains himself from making too much of, their main tormentor, J Parnell Thomas, the then chairman of the HUAC, had been convicted on corruption charges in the meantime, and actually got to prison before them. Of course, as tends to happen to corrupt politicians, Thomas received a presidential pardon and only served nine months; the Hollywood Ten were of course ineligible for parole (because they didn't accept the justice of their conviction and show remorse) and had to serve their full sentences.

Bessie's memoir, written some fifteen years after the event, is — with deliberate irony, knowing that such a film could never be made — written in the form of a film treatment, alternating between scenes of Bessie in federal prison in Texarkana and the story of his life as journalist and screenwriter between his return from service in the Abraham Lincoln Battalion and his arrest.

The prison part of the book is similar to many other prison-memoirs by intellectuals, dividing its attention between the author's own confrontation with the oddities and indignities of institutional life and a growing interest in and sympathy for the much worse plight of the "normal" prisoners around him. It was already clear to him in 1950 that there was something very seriously wrong with the American penal system and its crazy urge to lock up as many poor people as possible, and equally clear that no-one was ever going to lift a finger to fix it.

In the Hollywood part of the narrative, he's mocking the idiocy of the HUAC-bigots' notion that the film industry had been infiltrated and subverted by communists. "I've tried it and it can't be done," is his essential, slightly tongue-in-cheek, message.

Anyone who works in the film business, Bessie shows us, soon learns that the raison d'être of Hollywood is not artistic integrity, it's making high-quality entertainment that earns large amounts of money for investors. Those investors — big financial institutions — always have the ultimate say over what the studios can and can't do, and the content of Hollywood films is therefore driven firstly by the prejudices and self-interest of the investors, and secondly by their (not always accurate) perception of what the public will pay to see. Hollywood doesn't drive public opinion, it does its best to follow fashion. Subverting Hollywood is about as realistic a notion as subverting Wall Street.

Directors and screenwriters in the forties might have been as red as a tomato in their personal convictions, but they still wouldn't have been able to make a film that was sympathetic to trade-unions or to Our Russian Allies in the World War (or for that matter one that represented Jews, black people or women fairly...). The "men in New York" would have used their veto.

Bessie describes how, every time someone came to him with a good idea (about Spain, Russia, or the labour movement, for instance) and he wrote it up the way he thought it should be treated, it was either abandoned or re-written by someone else and produced in unrecognisable form. And he also describes how the studio bosses (and even the newspapers) initially showed their support for the persecuted screenwriters and publicly rejected any notion of a blacklist, only to backtrack rapidly after being summoned to a meeting by their financial backers.

A personal and obviously not at all impartial account of an old conflict, but fun to read and also a reminder of how easy it is to get ourselves into a situation where "people in general" start to believe that there is an emergency giving us good reasons to suspend basic human rights and constitutional principles, when with hindsight it's clear that there was no threat at all. Whether that's relevant to our own times we'll only be able to say for sure a few decades further on...… (mais)

This is Bessie's second novel, from 1941, later made into a film (Hard Traveling, 1986) by his son Dan Bessie.

It's a crime novel that attempts to put flesh on the bones of that defence-lawyer's cliché, "victim of society". Ed Sloan has had an absolutely appalling life, abused in childhood, in and out of institutions, illiterate, bruised and damaged in every possible way and barely surviving in Depression America with short-term work as a farmhand and odd-job man. Just about the only good thing that has ever happened to him is meeting the widowed schoolteacher Norah and her little daughter Katy, the first people who have ever taken the trouble to get to know him and find out what sort of a man he really is. Yet, only nine months after Norah surprises all her friends by marrying Ed, he is arrested and charged with murder and armed robbery.

Although the story is framed rather like a mystery, and there are elements that we don't discover until the end of the book, there's not much mystery about what has happened: what Bessie wants us to do is to think about why it happened. How does someone who clearly isn't violent by nature or inclination get pushed into a position where the only way out he can see is to borrow a gun and go out and rob someone? Bessie doesn't come up with a single answer, naturally, but he shows us Ed has not only been deprived of education by the system he's grown up in, but he's also systematically been kept away from any opportunities he might have had to express himself or to take any decisions about his own life. Poverty, unemployment, and social prejudice — as the title suggests, all the people who give him stones when he asks for bread — have pushed him into a corner; for the first time in his life he feels responsible towards someone other than himself, but he has no other idea what he could do to save his new wife and stepdaughter from hunger and debt.

It's a very sad story, and Bessie is careful not to sound as though he's excusing Ed's crime or absolving him from responsibility for it. But he is indicting society for the way it has neglected its responsibility to look after people like Ed. (As well as careless left-wing writers who have hung on to guns brought back from the last war...)… (mais)