Alvah Bessie

Alvah Cecil Bessie, born June 4, 1904, in New York City, and died July 21, 1985, was an American actor, novelist, screenwriter, and journalist whose career spanned Broadway performance, Hollywood screenwriting, and political activism. He appeared on Broadway between 1924 and 1925 in three productions: the play Processional, the play They Knew What They Wanted, and the revue Garrick Gaieties.

Bessie was the younger of two sons born to Daniel Nathan Cohen Bessie and Adeline Schlesinger Bessie, a middle-class Jewish family residing in a prosperous section of Harlem. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he developed a reputation for rebelliousness, before enrolling at Columbia University in 1920 and earning a B.A. in English in 1924. His father Daniel died in 1921, which brought financial hardship to the family but also removed paternal opposition to Bessie's artistic pursuits. Through a personal connection, he was introduced to the Provincetown Players, the theater group whose guiding member was playwright Eugene O'Neill. His involvement with the group initiated a four-year period of theater work, both in Provincetown and in New York, where he worked as a performer and stage manager, including his credited Broadway appearances. Concluding that his acting abilities were limited, he redirected his focus toward writing.

In 1928, Bessie joined the community of American expatriates in France, where he was fluent in French and had already translated The Songs of Bilitis by Pierre Louÿs. He spent three months as a rewriteman for the Paris daily newspaper Le Temps, and his first published short story, "Redbird," written during this period, appeared in the French literary journal transition. He returned to New York in 1929. In the early 1930s, he and his wife Mary Burnett relocated to Vermont, where they lived as farmers for several years while he sold stories, essays, and reviews to publications including The New Republic, Scribner's, Collier's, Atlantic Monthly, and Saturday Review of Literature. He continued translating French literature during this period, including The Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau and Batouala by René Maran.

In 1935, Bessie received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his first novel, Dwell in the Wilderness, which earned critical praise despite poor sales. From 1935 to 1937, he served as drama and book editor for the Brooklyn Eagle. He joined the Communist Party in 1936, and in late 1937 volunteered for the International Brigades supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. After sailing for Spain in January 1938, he trained and served as a soldier in a front-line combat unit with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, participating in the Ebro offensive from July to September 1938 and attaining the rank of sergeant-adjutant. He also worked as a correspondent for the International Brigade publication Volunteer for Liberty. Upon returning to the United States in December 1938, he drew on notebooks kept during his service to write Men in Battle, which Ernest Hemingway praised as a true and honest account.

Following the Spanish Civil War, Bessie pursued work in the film industry, beginning as a film reviewer for The New Masses in 1939. In the winter of 1942, he signed a contract with Warner Bros., moved to California, and joined the Screen Writers Guild. He contributed screenplays for Northern Pursuit (1943), The Very Thought of You (1944), and Hotel Berlin (1945), and received an Academy Award nomination for Best Story for the wartime film Objective, Burma! (1945).

His screenwriting career ended abruptly in October 1947 when he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Refusing to confirm or deny membership in the Communist Party or to identify Communist associates, he became one of the group of ten film artists known as the Hollywood Ten. He and the others were cited for contempt of Congress, sentenced to a year in prison, and blacklisted from employment in film, television, and radio. Bessie served ten months of his sentence beginning in 1950 at the federal correctional facility in Texarkana, Texas. After his release, he sold one screenplay, for Passage West (1951), using Nedrick Young as a front, but further film work was unavailable to him.

Bessie moved to San Francisco in 1951, worked for a period with the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and subsequently was hired as the light and sound man at the hungry i nightclub, a position he held for more than seven years. He eventually took on stage manager duties at the venue and became known for his introductions of performers including Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce. He befriended Bruce and assisted in revising several of the comedian's screenplays. Bessie dropped out of the Communist Party in 1954. In 1957 he published The Un-Americans, a fictionalized account of his experiences with HUAC, followed by the nonfiction Inquisition in Eden.

After the blacklist period ended, Bessie co-wrote and acted in the 1969 Spanish film España otra vez, about a doctor returning to Spain for the first time since the Civil War, and documented the production in his 1975 nonfiction book Spain Again. His most commercially successful post-blacklist work was the satirical novel The Symbol (1966), which he adapted for the 1974 television film The Sex Symbol. He remained active in the Bay Area Chapter of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and was honored at the organization's 39th Anniversary Dinner in 1975. His 1941 novel Bread and a Stone was adapted into the feature film Hard Traveling (1986), starring J.E. Freeman and Ellen Geer, with the screenplay completed by his son Dan Bessie.