I'D HATE MYSELF IN THE MORNING
By Ring Lardner Jr.
Nation Books. 198 pp. $22.95
On the 50th anniversary of the first Hollywood hearings conducted by the infamous House Unamerican Activities Committee, Hollywood itself threw a big celebratory bash. At the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences theater in 1997 the audience wept and cheered as Paul Jarrico and Ring Lardner Jr. were given plaques (and various other formerly blacklisted writers, directors and actors were honored as well). Lardner, who had been gaveled down by Rep. J. Parnell Thomas a half century before, finally had a chance to read in full the speech he had tried to give to the committee, and he did.
How young Lardner looked! How charming! It was a night of triumph, a night of formalized victory over the hated blacklist that had dated from even before Joseph McCarthy and had ruined dozens, hundreds of lives. (At the time, you were asked if you were now or had ever been a member of the Communist Party. The rest of your life depended on how you answered. You could lose your friends and keep your career, or vice versa.) It was a "Sophie's Choice," horrible in its consequences either way.
Lardner, the youngest of a group of political dissidents who would be labeled the "Unfriendly Ten," defied the government, went to prison and had to deal directly and indirectly with the effects of the blacklist for the rest of his life. But here he was now, giving his speech.
The next day in Los Angeles there was a brunch for blacklist survivors and that same night a PEN dinner, where the Writers Guild was to accept a major award. Halfway through the festivities the occupants of the guild table arose, clutching their cell phones, and left the room. Then, through tears of a different kind, the guild's president informed the audience that Paul Jarrico, in his eighties and tired from all the festivities, had fallen asleep on his drive home and died instantly when his car crashed, just hours after ceremonies that turned out to be both validation and valediction.
Ring Lardner Jr.'s memoir, "I'd Hate Myself in the Morning," recalls that anniversary night and the 50 years that led up to it. The author also throws in selected bits and pieces of the rest of his life, and the impression that emerges is fascinating. His father was the famous short-story writer and columnist, a man of such prodigious drinking habits that F. Scott Fitzgerald once remarked defensively that if he, Fitzgerald, scandalized Hemingway with his bibulous goings-on, well, then he, Fitzgerald, was properly scandalized by Lardner.
But despite Lardner Sr.'s heavy drinking and bad health, the Lardner boys -- four of them -- were raised in privilege, going to the best schools, enjoying the likes of Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker as family friends. The children were both rebellious and accomplished: All four sons grew up to write; two would die in war, one of them a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Because of his father's early death, Ring Jr. was forced to quit college and given a short vacation trip to the Soviet Union before he got a job. It was the depths of the Depression and he was so impressed by what he saw there that he came back a loyal supporter. Just a few years later, still in his twenties and writing in Hollywood, he would be recruited into the Communist Party.
All of it seems so strange now and so full of inconsistencies. Just a year after the end of World War II, Russia went from being our ally to an outpost of the Dark Kingdom. What had been thought of as "progressive," was now labeled "subversive." There were those who mercilessly derided the Communists working in Hollywood -- and with some reason: They certainly didn't seem to mind sampling the fruits of capitalism even as they worked for the good of the masses. (One of Lardner's most disconcerting complaints is that he never got rich and influential enough to become a producer because of the blacklist, although he was able to find plenty of employment as a writer working under various pseudonyms.)
It's hard to tell whether the author thinks of himself as hero or victim, and how you reacted to the list probably depended on the kind of person you were to start with. There were some suicides, some terribly blighted lives, but many writers, at least, were able to continue their work and seemed honestly to enjoy making fools of mid-level government bureaucrats. A youthful rebelliousness runs through this book -- except for a tiresome diatribe against Christianity that is just as ham-handed as when Lardner delivered it in his only novel, "The Ecstasy of Owen Muir." Other than that, the voice here is nimble and quick, defiant and boyish. How the man who wrote this had the emotional wherewithal to put up with hours and hours of boring Communist meetings -- as well as the legendary stupidities of Hollywood story meetings -- is a mystery he never directly addresses. But maybe that staying power had something to do with the unabashed triumph the author displayed on that fateful night in 1997, when he finally gave the speech he had waited 50 years to deliver.
