Alvah Bessie

Alvah Cecil Bessie (June 4, 1904 – July 21, 1985) was an American novelist, screenwriter and journalist. He was one of nearly 3,000 American volunteers who joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and fought in the Spanish Civil War. He is perhaps best known as a member of the "Hollywood Ten", the group of film artists blacklisted by the entertainment industry for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Alvah Bessie
Bessie in 1938 while fighting in Spain
Born	(1904-06-04)June 4, 1904 New York City, U.S.
Died	July 21, 1985(1985-07-21) (aged 81) Terra Linda, California, U.S.
Education	Columbia University
Known for	Abraham Lincoln Brigade Oscar nomination for Objective, Burma! Hollywood Ten
Spouse	Mary Burnett ​ ​ (m. 1930; div. 1938)​ Helen Clare Nelson ​ ​ (m. 1940; div. 1957)​ Sylviane Martin ​ (m. 1963)​
Children	3; Daniel Bessie, David Bessie, Eva Bessie Wilson
Military career
Allegiance	Spanish Republic
Service / branch	International Brigades
Unit	The "Abraham Lincoln" XV International Brigade
Battles / wars	Spanish Civil War

Early life

Alvah Bessie was the younger of two sons of Daniel Nathan Cohen Bessie and Adeline Schlesinger Bessie. They were a middle-class Jewish family living in the prosperous section of Harlem in New York City. In a 1983 interview, Bessie remembered his stern father as a successful businessman, inventor, and "hard-ribbed Republican, completely sold on the free-enterprise system." Alvah attended public schools, including DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx where he had the reputation of being rebellious. He subsequently enrolled in Columbia University in 1920, graduating in 1924 with a B.A. in English. Daniel Bessie died in 1921 and the family finances took a serious downturn. However, this reversal of fortunes also freed Alvah to pursue his artistic ambitions without the opposition of his father.

Career

Through a friend, Bessie was introduced to the Provincetown Players whose guiding member was playwright Eugene O’Neill. Bessie became an actor in the group, which led to a four-year period of theatre work in Provincetown as well as in the New York theatre world as a performer and stage manager. Recognizing his acting talents were limited, Bessie refocused his energies on writing. In 1928, he joined the colony of American expatriates in France. He was fluent in French and had already translated The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs. He was employed for three months as a rewriteman for the daily newspaper Le Temps. His first published short story, "Redbird", was written in Paris and appeared in the French literary journal, transition. But Bessie's stay in France was brief, and he returned to New York in 1929.

In the early 1930s, Bessie and his first wife Mary Burnett moved to Vermont after getting a job as caretakers of a summer home. They ended up living in Vermont for several years. He sold stories, essays and reviews to The New Republic, Scribner's, Collier's, Atlantic Monthly, and Saturday Review of Literature. He later cited Scribner's editor Kyle Crichton (also known by his pen name Robert Forsythe) as an important mentor in his life, both from a political and writing standpoint. Bessie continued to translate avant-garde French literature, including The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. In 1935, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first novel, Dwell in the Wilderness. The book earned critical praise but sold poorly. According to reviewer Gabriel Miller, Dwell in the Wilderness introduced a recurring theme of Bessie's fiction: "human isolation and the resultant painful loneliness."

Spanish Civil War

From 1935–1937, Bessie was the drama and book editor for the Brooklyn Eagle. Alarmed by the rise of European fascism, he began working for the anti-fascist cause. In 1936, he joined the Communist Party (CPUSA). In late 1937, he became one of the approximately 3,000 Americans who volunteered for the International Brigades that were aiding the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

After sailing for Spain in January 1938, Bessie was assigned to a front-line combat unit with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. He participated in the Ebro offensive from July to September 1938, eventually attaining the rank of sergeant-adjutant. He also served as a correspondent for Volunteer for Liberty, an International Brigade publication. Upon his return to the U.S. in December 1938, he wrote a book about his experiences, Men in Battle, which was praised by Ernest Hemingway as "[a] true, honest, fine book. Bessie writes truly and finely of all that he could see ... and he saw enough."

Screenwriting

After the Spanish Civil War, Bessie pursued his longtime interest in working in the film industry. In 1939, he became film reviewer for the left-wing magazine The New Masses. He hired a Hollywood agent who shopped around Bessie's published fiction. Finally, in the winter of 1942, Bessie was signed by Warner Bros. as a contract writer. He moved to California, joined the Screen Writers Guild and contributed screenplays for films such as Northern Pursuit (1943), The Very Thought of You (1944), and Hotel Berlin (1945). He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Story for the patriotic WWII film Objective, Burma! (1945).

Blacklisted

Bessie's screenwriting career came to a halt in October 1947 when he was summoned by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was one of the first ten "unfriendly" film artists to testify before the HUAC. These ten screenwriters and directors came to be known as the "Hollywood Ten". They were labeled "unfriendly" for refusing to deny or confirm their involvement in the CPUSA, or to name names of Communist associates. They were cited for contempt of Congress, sentenced to a year in prison, and blacklisted from working in movies, television or radio. Bessie's prison term in the federal correctional facility in Texarkana, Texas began in 1950 and lasted ten months.

After release from prison, he obtained a job with San Francisco's hungry i nightclub (an experience he later described in the novel One for My Baby), where he ran the lights and sound board and frequently introduced performers. He left the Communist Party in the 1950s. In 1957, he published, The Un-Americans, a fictionalized rendering of his struggles with the HUAC. He followed this with a non-fiction account entitled Inquisition in Eden. In the latter book, Bessie jokingly boasted of inserting pro-Soviet propaganda that was "subversive as all hell" into the 1943 film Action in the North Atlantic.

Later years

After being blacklisted, Bessie never returned to Hollywood. His greatest commercial and critical success came with the satirical novel The Symbol (1966) about the exploitation by Hollywood of an unhappy actress who resembles Marilyn Monroe. He served as a co-writer and actor in the 1969 Spanish-made film, España otra vez, about a doctor returning to Spain for the first time since the Spanish Civil War. Bessie later offered reminiscences of the film production in his 1975 non-fiction book, Spain Again.

He remained active in the Bay Area Chapter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was honored at the 39th Anniversary Dinner in 1975.

Bessie was partly involved in the screen adaptation of his 1941 novel Bread and a Stone, which eventually became the feature Hard Traveling (1986) starring J.E. Freeman and Ellen Geer. The screenplay was completed by Alvah's son, Dan Bessie.

On 21 July 1985, Alvah Bessie died of a heart attack in Terra Linda, California. He was 81.

In 2001, Dan Bessie published some of his father's previously uncollected work, notably his Spanish Civil War Notebooks. In that same year, Dan wrote a memoir entitled Rare Birds (University Press of Kentucky, 2001), which listed the diverse accomplishments of the extended Bessie family that included well-known 1960s poster artist Wes Wilson (husband of Alvah's daughter Eva) and the prominent advertising executive Leo Burnett (brother of Alvah's first wife Mary).

Books

Fiction

• Dwell in the Wilderness (1935)
• Bread and a Stone (1941)
• The Un-Americans (1957)
• The Symbol (1966)
• One for My Baby (1980)
• Alvah Bessie's Short Fictions (1982); Introduction by Gabriel Miller.

Non-fiction

• Men in Battle; A Story of Americans in Spain (1939)
• Soviet People at War (1942)
• This Is Your Enemy; A Documentary Record of the Nazi Atrocities Against Citizens and Soldiers of Our Soviet ally (1942)
• The Heart of Spain: anthology of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry (1952)
• Inquisition in Eden (1965)
• Spain Again (1975)
• Our Fight: Writings by Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Spain, 1936–1939. (1987)
• Alvah Bessie's Spanish Civil War Notebooks, edited by Dan Bessie (2001)

See also

• Lost Gay Novels

Further reading

• Brook, Vincent; Renov, Michael (2016). From Shtetl to Stardom: Jews and Hollywood. Purdue University Press. ISBN 978-1557537638.

External links

• Works by or about Alvah Bessie at the Internet Archive
• Alvah Bessie at IMDb
• Alvah Cecil Bessie Papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research
• "Sneak Preview of a Hollywood Flashback" – Full scans of article by Alvah Bessie on his experience as one of The Hollywood Ten (The Realist No. 68, pgs August 1, 19–23, 1966)
• Finding aid to Alvah Cecil Bessie letters at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
• Subversives: Stories from the Red Scare. Lesson by Ursula Wolfe-Rocca (Alvah Bessie is featured in this lesson).