Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties by Murray Kempton

Author:Murray Kempton [Kempton, Murray]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Essays, Biography & Autobiography, Historical, United States, 20th Century
ISBN: 9781590175446
Google: GMFS5ww8v98C
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 2012-10-17T04:21:52+00:00

6

OF ALL the prisoners of the myth of the thirties, none seemed more fortunate for a little while than the Hollywood Communists and none have suffered such extremes of punishment for their enchantment.

While they were Communists, the reality of their environment was Hollywood, which is a theater and very little of a reality at all. When the very rich are very foolish, literary convention is likely to treat them as comic figures. Eugene Lyons once described a film colony banquet in the thirties with its sated guests creaking up after the dessert to sing “Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,” a satire dependent for its effect on the idea that starvation is a problem entirely of the flesh. But incongruity ceases to be comedy’s essence when it becomes the incongruity which destroys men’s lives.

The conflict between the Hollywood Communist’s idea of self and the reality of his life was always incongruous and his punishment was even more so. His sins of commission were very small ones; they were punished as capital crimes. He became the protagonist of most of the post-war dramas of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Except for the Hiss-Chambers interlude, the committee devoted the years 1947-51 almost entirely to subversion in Hollywood, and departed only when there were no actors left on the set.

When its ordeal was over, Hollywood remained almost as it had been, less some 300 inhabitants. They were people for whom most of Hollywood felt a certain sympathy, but whom it regarded as victims of one of those plagues which occasionally carry off one’s friends and which in Hollywood are familiar misfortunes of nature.

Hollywood itself has always seemed to me more a conception than a reality. And when I had finished thinking about its lost Communists, I found myself unable to consider them and their character apart from the very nature of Hollywood itself. They seemed to me persons who had lived and died not so much true to Bolshevik notions of conduct as according to the customs of this institution which they had hoped to divert to the service of their ideas and which had ended up, as institutions will, by diverting them for itself.

The most conspicuous of the Hollywood Communists did not find the roots of their conversion there. They were men who had their start with the revolutionary theater movement in New York in the early thirties and who came to Hollywood with very mixed impulses. The medium which had given them impetus as playwrights had burned out very quickly. Hollywood was an escape from its ruins. It offered comfort and success; if they thought of it as an instrument for the propagation of their ideas, that notion did not survive their initiation. Their function thenceforth became that of fat cats and decorations. When the Un-American Activities Committee came to root them out, the one thing none of their worst enemies could say against them was that they had left any permanent impress upon the screen.

Their story is a failure of

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