Radical Innocence

A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten

Bernard F. Dick

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780813152677
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

On October 30, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities concluded the first round of hearings on the alleged Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was ordered to "clean its own house, " and ten witnesses who had refused to answer questions about their membership in the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist party eventually received contempt citations. By 1950, the Hollywood Ten (as they quickly became known), which included writers, directors, and a producer, were serving prison sentences ranging from six months to one year. Since that time, the members of the Hollywood Ten have been either dismissed as industry hacks or eulogized as Cold War martyrs, but never have they been discussed in terms of their professions.

Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten is the first study to focus on the work of the Ten: their short stories, plays, novels, criticisms, poems, memoirs, and, of course, their films. Drawing on myriad sources, including archival materials, unpublished manuscripts, black market scripts, screenplay drafts, letters, and personal interviews, Bernard F. Dick describes the Ten's survival tactics during the blacklisting and analyzes the contributions of these ten individuals not only to film but also to the arts. Radical Innocence captures the personality of each of the Ten, including the arrogant Herbert J. Biberman, the witty Ring Lardner Jr., the patriarchal Samuel Ornitz, the compassionate Adrian Scott, and the feisty Dalton Trumbo.

1 SAMUEL ORNITZ
Mazel Tov! to the World

John Howard Lawson may have been the ideologue of the Ten, Herbert Biberman the organizer, and Ring Lardner, Jr., the wit; but Samuel Badisch Ornitz was the patriarch. Although Ornitz would have preferred Lawson’s title, Dalton Trumbo’s description of him as “a man of immense dignity, sincerity and learning”¹ is more suited to a gifted storyteller, a champion of human rights, and one of the few residents of Los Angeles who could claim to read the daily New York Times.

Like most of the Ten, Ornitz came from the middle class; although he was born on New York’s Hester Street, where the proletariat and the bourgeoisie intermingle, the Ornitzes, who were wool merchants, lived comparatively well. Samuel attended the Henry Street School; at ten, he underwent a political transformation, moving gradually to the left until at twelve he was a confirmed Socialist, mounting his soapbox on Lower East Side streets and haranguing passersby. After two years at City College he knew that his commitment to the underprivileged would not be realized by sitting in a classroom. Hence he became a social worker, a profession to which he devoted the next twelve years of his life, from 1908 to 1920, working for the New York Prison Association (where he also did penological research) and at the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Ornitz’s love of children remained with him throughout his life, manifesting itself in much of what he wrote, particularly in a children’s book, Round the World with Jocko the Great (1925), and his last screenplay, China’s Little Devils (1945).

As Ornitz became increasingly more intent on improving society, he started moving in radical circles that included left-wing theater companies. On 7 May 1919 the People’s Playhouse on East 15th Street presented an evening of “three proletarian plays at proletarian prices” (fifty cents) that included Don Orno’s Deficit. Samuel Ornitz, activist, was on the brink of a new career, writing under a pseudonym that conjures up a dashing man of letters in a cape and top hat instead of the associate superintendent of the Brooklyn Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Ornitz’s first published work appeared under the same pseudonym; The Sock: A Play of Protest² protests the left’s eternal bane, economic inequity, in a Dostoevskian setting where the characters speak in solemn epigrams (“Conscience is the pall with which the church stifles the soul”). Since the mercenary landlady in The Sock (so titled because that is where she keeps her money) is modeled after the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment, the hero must be modeled after Raskolnikov; if that is the case, he must kill the landlady. However, since Raskolnikov was not a Socialist, he had no humanitarian motive for murder; Ornitz’s hero does: to send a tubercular poet to a sanitarium (“I destroyed an ugly, strangling weed to preserve a beautiful plant”).

Ornitz would write more plays, only one of which would be produced. Still, his first appearance in print, even in a pamphlet that cost a quarter, demonstrated that it was possible to be both a writer and a radical. His next work was a novel, one of the most famous in American Jewish literature: Haunch Paunch and Jowl (1923). Subtitled An Anonymous Autobiography, it is part disguised memoir, part fictionalized life. Ornitz’s turn-of-the-century boyhood is narrated by an alter ego, Meyer Hirsch, but when the boy becomes a man, Ornitz and his persona part company, as do memoir and fiction: while Meyer Hirsch turned to law, Samuel Ornitz turned to writing. The book, then, is an account of what might have happened if Ornitz had betrayed his convictions and developed into a politico like Meyer, caricatured in cartoons for his ever expanding waistline and pendulous cheeks—his haunch, paunch, and jowl.

A novel whose gaslight quaintness masks the sadness of hopes betrayed and dreams unrealized, Haunch Paunch and Jowl has an unsettling effect; at first, one wishes Ornitz had been as ruthlessly ambitious as Meyer and pursued a career in fiction instead of succumbing to the blandishments of Hollywood—where, instead of making his fortune, he became a full-time antifascist and a part-time screenwriter. Haunch Paunch and Jowl reveals a writer, perhaps not of depth but certainly of substance, who is able to sketch a milieu in strong, decisive lines, leaving the remaining details to the reader’s imagination. Ornitz’s was a careful style, made up of words interlocking in epithetic combinations and phrases evocative of the rotogravure era: prostitutes are “available to the scanty purses of boys”; a singer is “desperately painted beyond her magnificent years.”³ This is a time of street lamps burning orange in the winter night, teenage soapboxers, potatoes roasting in milk cans, and rathskellers where Irish tunes are sung with Jewish inflections.

As Meyer moves into adolescence, he becomes an atheist, leaving the cheder for the law courts and hustling clients for whiskey lawyers until he becomes a lawyer himself. He gains in weight what he loses in principles, supporting capital at the expense of labor at one time; strengthening labor by subverting capital at another. Ornitz, writing in his early thirties, is looking back at the types he encountered in his youth—sweatshop owners, Socialists, anarchists, unionists; the Hester Street Jews and the uptown German-Jewish barons with their contempt for their Lower East Side co-religionists; and the Jews who preferred to be known as God’s scapegoats rather than God’s chosen—and wondering into what category he would have fallen had he not embraced radical politics and the muse simultaneously. While Ornitz favors assimilation in this book, it is with the Socialist Avrum, who would solve the problem of Jewish clannishness—and nationalism in general—through a classless society, that his sympathies lie: “But it will be different when the workers of America become a racial identity. Then they will see each other as brothers, in sympathy, comradeship and understanding, as Americans all. Meanwhile we must keep at them to learn, to rise above their clannishness, and mean aspirations; stop the sporadic struggles and unite as one. When we break down the class lines, the snobbery of nationalism, replace it with a commonality of spirit, then labor in its dignity and knowledge will share equally with capital the good things of the earth.”⁴

It was probably on the basis of this and similar speeches in Haunch Paunch and Jowl, one of which attributes anti-Semitism to extreme Jewishness, that the Encyclopedia Judaica dismissed Ornitz as “a professed atheist [who] saw no virtues in Jewish immigrant life and wished to end Jewish isolation by a policy of downright assimilation.”⁵ As a Socialist, Ornitz could not believe in a chosen people; since his goal was a classless society, he naturally favored assimilation over parochialism. Yet he did see virtues in immigrant life, as some of his later work shows.

That Ornitz’s second novel was for children is not surprising; having worked with them for twelve years, he knew the sort of book that would appeal to them. He also kept a file on child abuse and planned a book showing “what we do to children in the name of protecting them.”⁶ While he never lived to write that book, he could have, and from a child’s point of view. In Round the World with Jocko the Great, a charming tale of a monkey who becomes an international circus attraction, Ornitz neither condescends to children nor allegorizes for them. As he knew, there is a distinction between propaganda and entertainment. The moral to be drawn and the lessons to be learned from Jocko are so traditional that they can be found in any grade school primer: “Warriors conquer for a moment … but a song, or an idea lives forever”; “Wars nearly never decide things one way or another.”⁷

Ornitz teaches as he entertains, subtly undermining received ideas and popular misconceptions. Jocko weeps at man’s inhumanity when he attends a bullfight in Madrid; a Martian complains of the identification of his planet with the Roman god of war when in fact Martians war only against disease and ignorance; a stork champions the bat who is discriminated against because it is not favored by folklore. The book is most impressive, however, not in its Aesopic wisdom but in its vivid turns of phrase (the earth’s burned surface is compared to the skin of a baked apple), playful descriptions (scholarly frogs, grasshoppers playing on their fiddle legs), and unforced allusions (Jocko visits Westminster Abbey where Browning’s Pippa “passes” by; at Dickens’s house he is greeted by Tiny Tim).

At the end, Ornitz promises a sequel, but his next novel was not for children. A Yankee Passional: The Biography of a Synthetic Self (1927) is his only non-Jewish novel; still, it reflects his preoccupation with the ethnic and religious conflicts he witnessed on the Lower East Side. Here the milieu is Irish-Catholic but no less provincial than that of Haunch Paunch and Jowl, as one of the characters emphasizes: “It is well to remember the Irish-Catholic is like no other Catholic people in the world. Religious oppression has made us racial religionists, like the Jews.”⁸

A Yankee Passional is the most populous of Ornitz’s novels; it is a sprawling narrative that, only as it nears the end, begins telescoping events and summarizing years with a speed quite different from the gingerly pace set in the first chapter. Whatever its faults, the book suggests that had Ornitz continued to pursue fiction, he could have become a respected novelist, probably a successful one as well. He had a gift many popular writers lack: a sense of the poetic in both life and language. Irish doctors and ex-hooch dancers here speak not only colorfully but also poetically and rhythmically, in multiple images and compound epithets (“sweetseducing humility,” “warmbreath fire,” “shamefear”) that go beyond archaism into folk poetry.

The inspiration for the main character, Daniel Matthews, was Father Isaac Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers. Although Father Hecker died two years before Ornitz was born, Ornitz grew up hearing about him; the Heckers had at one time also lived on Hester Street. Given his interest in religion, Ornitz may well have read the early biographies of Father Hecker by Walter Elliott or Henry D. Sedgwick, Jr.; he might even have read Hecker’s own Aspirations of Nature and Questions of the Soul. Certainly he knew of the priest’s concern for the rights of workers, his interest in social justice, and his introduction through Orestes Brownson to the communal life of Brook Farm.

In A Yankee Passional, Daniel Matthews is a Maine woods primitive in search of the peace that passeth understanding; ultimately he finds it in Catholicism, though he stops short of becoming a priest. His sanctity makes him a surrogate son to childless men, a fantasy lover to unfulfilled women, and an inspiration to youths in need of a model of masculine purity. To embody such ideas in characters who are still believable—particularly characters alien to the author’s own religious background—is a mark of Ornitz’s awareness of Catholicism’s other side, which is not so much dark as crepuscular; those recesses of the Catholic psyche which, if suddenly illuminated, blur into grayness. Ornitz does not merely depict the mutual antagonism of Catholic and Protestant and their history of retaliatory persecution; he dramatizes that strange correlation between sex, guilt, and chastity which, though not peculiarly Irish, is much in evidence in Irish literature. Those like Liam, the alcoholic doctor, who enjoy sex find no joy in it; those like Daniel who could find joy in it forswear it because of the guilt it brings.

Ornitz’s best writing appears in the lyrical exchanges between Dan and Mame, the carnival dancer-poet. Torn between flesh and spirit, Dan exclaims: “Mame, I prayed for the peace of purity. Always your warm-breathed face came between me and God. Then a great light divided the cloud and made a clearing for the stars. I then knew if I could face you with pure eyes, I could see God through you.” Mame replies simply, “It’s better for you to burn out your fire in me” (90)—which, of course, he cannot do. Ornitz also poeticizes Dan’s relationship with Liam, who feels a homoerotic but not homosexual attraction to Dan, warning him against men who would mistake gentleness for effeminacy, yet at the same time wanting that gentleness for himself. Liam’s love of Dan illustrates a uniquely spiritual form of male bonding: males who are attracted to each other because of the presence or absence of the feminine in themselves. To Liam, sex is an escape from the reality of professional failure and thus no different from alcohol or morphine; what under ordinary circumstances he would have sought in a woman, he seeks in Dan, who becomes his anima.

Despite its overwhelmingly Catholic atmosphere, A Yankee Passional is not a Catholic novel in the same sense as Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer. Ornitz’s main purpose in writing it is made evident by the denouement: at the outbreak of World War I an interventionist monsignor burns Dan’s appeal to the Pope to make pacifism an article of faith. Catholic Machiavellianism, then, is the peg on which Ornitz has hung his plot; the life of Father Hecker is only an exemplary subtext, a point of reference. The story of Daniel Matthews is not an edifying biography like that of Father Hecker, the Yankee Paul, but a Yankee passional, a book of sufferings culminating in Dan’s death in the Maine woods, victim of the elements and right-wing extremists. Dan is Ornitz’s recreation of what Isaac Hecker might have been if he had never become a priest and if he had been living at the time of World War I. Yet both Isaac Hecker and Dan Matthews had a faith that Samuel Ornitz could never embrace, because it had no name: they believed in both God and humankind; Ornitz, only in the latter. What Ornitz admired in both was the purity of their commitment, a state oblivious to the tugs of the flesh and the call of ideology. While Ornitz wrote eloquently of Dan’s spiritual goals, they could never be his. Socialism became, to use the novel’s subtitle, Ornitz’s synthetic self; it was also the tegument of his real self, the novelist. While his involvement in left-wing politics sustained him through two of the worst periods in twentieth-century history, the Great Depression and World War II, it also made him less of a writer: “1929 saw the crash and the rise of Hitler and fascism. To write novels seemed as puerile as they were profitless. I wrote pictures and barnstormed against fascism.”⁹

Not until his career in Hollywood was over did he return to fiction and allow the creative self to reemerge. In Bride of the Sabbath (1951), Ornitz recalls the Lower East Side with a magnanimity that is at the same time gently critical of its insularity. Ornitz’s Jews are magnificently unassimilated; although he himself believed in assimilation, he portrays them with such compassion and humor that in admiring them one is almost tempted to admire their parochialism, which is founded on faith so strong one is ashamed not to share it. The world of Bride of the Sabbath is one of religion based on fear as well as love; of households dominated by the extremes of a grandmother who believes in silver wine cups for Seders and a Marxist uncle who believes in Comrade Jesus; of Jews who try to pass for Christians by kissing a crucifix; of Yids and Micks, rebbes and ministers, sweatshop workers and pushcart peddlers—in short, the world of the ghetto opens miraculously at the author’s bidding.

Although Ornitz considered himself an atheist, he still wrote about the Sabbath with the veneration of an awestruck child. The sabbath he describes is observed by unassimilated Jews, who feel it more deeply than their coreligionists uptown; it is a special Sabbath, a ghetto Sabbath, made holy by the cessation of activity and transfigured by love. Whenever Ornitz describes the holy days, it is with reverence—the reverence not of a believer but of a witness to a sanctified moment. What he remembers and evokes so eloquently is the purity of the ritual. He recalls the grace with which women braid their hair into a crown covered with a white handkerchief; the sculpting movement of their hands encircling their necks with coral; the finishing touch of a paisley shawl thrown around their shoulders. These are memories unsullied by adult cynicism, the true destroyer of innocence.

“Innocent,” in fact, is an apt description of Bride of the Sabbath; it is also innocence that keeps it from being a true novel. Ornitz is so eager to capture each moment in its pristine state that he creates a series of vignettes, as delicately strung as the coral encircling a woman’s neck, making the novel a series of poetic hand movements. But once the chain of coral has fallen decorously over the breast, the portrait is complete; likewise, the other images, conjured up and exquisitely rendered, pass into pictures. The book is more a reminiscence than a novel, a storyteller’s meditation on the past rather than reminiscence reshaped as narrative.

It is understandable that Ornitz was admired in Hollywood as a storyteller. The beginning of Bride of the Sabbath is typical: an anecdote expands into a vignette with a punch line. Baba, the grandmother of Saul Kramer, the main character, spots a man smoking on the street as the Sabbath approaches; slapping the cigarette out of his mouth, she mutters, “For this Columbus discovered America?” The man, who is not even Jewish, cries, “Hell, I can’t hit a woman”; instead, he crosses the street and knocks down a Jew.

Occasionally, the novelist interrupts the storyteller; it is at such moments that one knows Ornitz never achieved as much in fiction as he might have. While Bride of the Sabbath purports to be Saul Kramer’s story, it is dominated by the character of Baba as so many Bildungsromans are haunted by secondary figures (Magwitch in Great Expectations, Mrs. Morel in Sons and Lovers) who are already formed and therefore possess a depth the protagonist has not yet reached. For all Baba’s faults, such as her perpetuation of a scapegoat mentality in teaching her grandson to expect persecution from the goyim, she remains an individual rather than a type of the unassimilated Jew. One cannot help smiling at some of her ways, which include spitting three times at the mention of Christ’s name. Even her death, poignant as it is, is an event not lacking in humor. Knowing she will die before Saul’s bar mitzvah, she asks him to recite his speech and expires during the reci...