Tragedy and Farce

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEARS

by STEFAN KANFER 306 pages. Atheneum. $7.95.

"Farce is tragedy out for a good time." So begins Stefan Kanfer's chronicle of one of the saddest, stupidest chapters of American political history --a time when the political blacklist was used in show biz in the 1940s and '50s and how that came about.

The proceedings grew out of the peculiar frenzy that seized America during the early cold war years, and an attempt by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to suggest that many actors and writers were dangerous, dedicated agents of a Communist conspiracy to undermine the American way of life.

Wisely, Kanfer, an associate editor of TIME, wastes little space on the Neanderthal committee itself, and its questionable methods. (At one point, it soberly listened as Walt Disney cited the League of Women Voters as one of many "Commie-front organizations.") His humane concern is with the victims --those who cooperated with HUAC and those who did not.

Among the latter, the best-known group was the Hollywood Ten, an oddly assorted collection of men who went to jail for refusing to testify about their political beliefs. They included Dalton Trumbo (Kitty Foyle), one of the highest-paid screenwriters in town, and Ring Lardner Jr. (Forever Amber), one of the most talented. The rest were largely fringe figures, creators of Charlie Chan and Boston Blackie epics, who as writers and directors probably could never have earned anything like the fame they won collectively in political martyrdom.

Whatever their aims, their ideological effect on the Hollywood "product" was slight. John Howard Lawson (Action in the North Atlantic), chief ideologue among the writers, was finally reduced to such fatuities as advising Hollywood actors that even if they were only extras in a country-club scene, they could "do your best to appear decadent ... create class antagonism."

Most of the Ten, however, and not a few of the others who came later before the committee, had been members of the Communist Party, a fact which lent the appearance of urgency to the committee's hearings. The situation was exacerbated, moreover, by the strategy that the Ten employed when they were called as witnesses in 1947. Membership in the Communist Party was not illegal. They decided, therefore, to challenge Congress's right to inquire about their political affiliations at all. They were cited for contempt of Congress and indicted by a grand jury. The Supreme Court refused to review the case.

Eventually many of them did time in jail. More important, their evasiveness whetted the committee's--and later Senator Joe McCarthy's--appetite for further proscriptions. A swifter result was the easy intimidation of the film industry, which created a blacklist barring not merely the Ten but hundreds of others from work in Hollywood and in theater, radio and the infant television business. The inquiries also led to the creation of a new and vicious class of entrepreneurs, freelance "experts" in subversion, who made a good thing out of compiling and peddling lists of half-forgotten contributions (of money, tal ent, names) to left-wing causes.

Kanfer does not speculate enough about what obscure guilts, flaws and frustrations led prosperous, intelligent men to embrace Stalinism. But nothing they had done justified the various fates that overtook them, or the sloppiness with which some kind of guilt was soon attached to them in the industry. Actor Everett Sloane, for example, suddenly found his name on the list and was un able to find work, solely because he had the same surname as another performer who had once attacked the American Legion and the hydrogen bomb.

One case like that might have been laughable. But in fact hundreds of men and women were denied the elementary right to earn a living for things like be ing "observed at a left-wing party" or campaigning for Henry Wallace. Some, indeed, paid with their lives for such paltry indiscretions: the book touchingly traces how Character Actor Philip Loeb ("Papa" in The Goldbergs) was literally hounded into suicide by the investigators.

Kanfer's account is a valuable summary of a lunatic melodrama, rarely described with such compassion and accuracy, in which the players, flinging themselves recklessly into their roles, drew real blood, maiming and crippling one another for life.

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