[Marxism] The Happy Jack Fish Hatchery papers

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On March 8th, a subscriber to the H-HOAC (History of American Communism) 
mailing list posted a query:

>>In the early 1970s, Dalton Trumbo (him again) and Steve Allen had a 
debate carried out in the Esquire letters' section and eventually made into 
an article.  Does anyone know where this article is and if it can located 
online?
regards
ron capshaw<<

I read H-HOAC for the occasional tidbit that helps deepen our understanding 
of the CPUSA experience, but most of the discussion that goes on there 
amounts to what might be called witch-hunting for the carriage trade.

Capshaw's query resonated deeply with me. When I read the Trumbo-Allen 
exchange when they first appeared in Esquire, I marvelled at what a wit and 
great human being Trumbo was, even though I tend to look askance at 
Hollywood left politics (an exception made for Larry David.) The 
controversy emerged over a letter Allen had written calling attention to 
Trumbo's Communist past on the occasion of a fund-raiser for Tom Bradley, 
an African-American Democrat running for Mayor of LA, at Trumbo's house. 
Trumbo's letters are filled with biting wit. He was one of the great letter 
writers of the past 50 years and have had occasion to read through his 
collected correspondence titled "Additional Dialogue".

That collection regrettably did not contain the correspondence with Allen, 
since it would have entailed including Allen's letters, something that was 
not really germane to "Additional Dialogue's" purpose. It also contains 
correspondence from the wretched Arthur Schlesinger Jr., weighing in on 
Steve Allen's side.

Since I have such fond memories of the exchange, I ordered an out-of-print 
book by Steve Allen titled "But Seriously..." that contains the full 
exchange under the heading "The Happy Jack Fish Hatchery Papers". The 
exchange gets its cryptic title from one letter by Trumbo that fully 
expresses his mixture of outrage and penetrating wit over Allen's 
red-baiting. It is included in its entirety below along with a link to the 
entire exchange.

Just a word or two about Allen and Trumbo. Steve Allen was the host of the 
original Tonight Show on NBC that was taken over by Johnny Carson after 
Allen stepped down. Allen was a genial host and clever wit himself, but 
obviously trapped inside the cold-war mindset. Dalton Trumbo was one of the 
Hollywood 10 who wrote the classic antiwar novel "Johnny Got His Gun" and 
such screenplays as "Lonely Are the Brave" (which I reviewed at: 
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/culture/Lonely_Are_The_Brave.htm)

Miss Betty Drew June 2, 1969

Secretary to Mr. Steve Allen
Encino, California

Miss Brew:

Thanks for informing me of Mr. Allen's absence from the city and his 
intention to answer my letters when he returns. I must tell you, however, 
that from my point of view his Indianapolis and Northern California 
commitments have not come at a convenient time.

He won't believe this (at first I didn't either) but Sunday evening Mrs. 
Trumbo and I were invited to dine person to person and face to face with 
he-knows-who in the house of a mutual friend. Knowing how gross an abuse of 
free speech and assembly my presence at such an affair would constitute, 
dreading the impact of a second apostolic interdiction while not yet fully 
recovered from the first, I heard a voice remarkably like my own begging 
off with the idiot's excuse that we were departing the city Friday noon for 
a Mexican holiday which hadn't entered my mind until that moment.

Since a chap in my position has to be even more scrupulous with the truth 
than Caesar with his wife's, or vice versa, there was nothing for it but to 
transmute my lie into its opposite by immediate proclamation of a 
southbound hegira to begin no later than Friday noon, June 6, 1969.

Mrs. Trumbo, I'm sorry to report, didn't take the news at all well. For 
some years she has been doing whatever she can for a group of young 
preteenage and hopefully prepregnant sub-Aquarians who foregather 
throughout the mating season (June 1 through August 31) each Saturday 
afternoon at Happy Jack's Fish Hatch­eries, 8041 North San Gabriel Canyon 
Road in Azusa, where they receive much enlightenment from pisciculture in 
general, and in particular from unblinking observation of the relatively 
chaste tech­niques which characterize the breeding habits of even the most 
concupiscent among the fishes.

At their last meeting (end of August, 1968), in a somewhat rowdy but 
nonetheless moving demonstration of gratitude and loyalty, the youngsters 
unanimously chose Mrs. Trumbo to be Vice-Den Mother for their 1969 season 
which begins, as anyone with a calendar at hand can see, on Saturday next.

I had written for the occasion a rather stirring First Inaugural Address 
(based in part on Mr. Allen's Epistle to the Thespians) which can be 
rattled off in just under forty-seven crackling minutes; and Mrs. Trumbo, 
having memorized and come to believe it, thought poorly of a command 
holiday which was bound to spoil what she has lately taken to 
calling?sentimentally, perhaps, but not unjustifiably?her Vice-Den Mother's 
Day among the pisciculturians.

Ethics, however, is ethics, and my honor, when it comes to a showdown, 
invariably takes precedence over hers. Result: we depart Los Angeles 
International Airport on Western Airlines' Flight Number 601 on Friday, 
June 6, 1969, for Mexico City, where we shall be met by chartered car, 
driven forthwith to Cuernavaca, and lodged at Privada de Humboldt 92. Our 
mailing address, however, will be Apartado 1292, Cuernavaca, Morelos, etc. 
We can be reached by telephone almost daily between the hours of three and 
six-thirty A.M., central standard time, at Cuernavaca 2-31-38.

And why, do you ask, have we been put to all this hurly and scurly and 
involuntary aggravating unexpected burly? Because I, in Sunday's moment of 
mistruth, had no stern critic at hand to straighten my morals and narrow 
the range of my political and social pretensions. So much for NCLers who 
rush off to rival Communists for the political affections of the masses 
without preschooling their own acolytes in the mysteries of honest 
unilateral action.

Most respectfully, Dalton Trumbo

P.S. The Ninth Earl has somehow leapt to the untidy conclusion that Burt 
Lancaster is under house arrest as a carrier of Huntington's chorea. 
Although I have done everything in my poor power to explain that no man on 
earth can carry a pestilence like H's c (he has to haul it), I might just 
as well have spent my time hollering down some neighbor's empty grain 
barrel. He has filed an emergency application with the Chula Vista branch 
of Travelers Aid for immediate transport to the Control Institute in Oman 
and Muscat, and compels his entire household, including two of the most 
dejected old family retainers you've ever seen, to wallow with him thrice 
daily in tubs of boiling Lysol hugely adulterated with white lye, sheep 
dip, and magnums of granulated loblolly flambe en brochette.

Raw-wise, the skins around that house have passed the point of no return, 
and for some reason I can't fathom old Linster has tried four nights 
running to deposit the whole begrutten mess (the Sixth Earl married a 
Scotswoman described by a contemporary as "begrutten of face, large of wen 
and warp but small woof) at rnv doorstep. For all his breeding, which I am 
told has been prodigious the big L shows every sign of becoming, as we say 
in my middle-class but hopeful precinct, just one more unwanted and 
ungrateful anguis in herba.

cc: Mr. Eason Monroe, Mr. Tom Bradley, Mr. Burt Lancaster, Mr George 
Plimpton, The Hon. Mr. Lyndon B. Johnson, The Ninth Earl of Linster, Estate 
of Harold Bell Wright, Mr. Haroldson Lafayette Hunt, Mr. Gus Hall, The Rev. 
Dr. Billy Graham, Al-Ibrahim Institute for Control of Huntington's Chorea, 
Princess Conchita Pignatelli, Estate of Miss Brenda Holton, Happy Jack Fish 
Hatcheries

full correspondence: http://www.marxmail.org/HappyJackFish.htm


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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