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political considerations, although Navasky chooses most of the time
to accent the former.
The Hollywood blacklist doubtless lends itself to moral
dramatization. But dramatization need not take the form of a stark
morality play passing categorical sentence on the gui lt or exemplary
virtue of its central characters. More subtle, realistic, and
compassionate judgments are possible, given the diversity of motives
and personal situations of the men and women forced to run the
gauntlet of the blacklist. Navasky reports just such a verdict by the
late Dalton Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, who asserted in
1970 that "the blacklist was a time of evil and no one on either side
who survived it came through untouched." "Some," Trumbo
continued, "suffered less than others, some grew and some
diminished, but in the final tally we were
all
victims because almost
without exception each of us felt compelled to say things he did not
want
to
say,
to
do things he did not want to do, to deliver and receive
wounds he truly did not want to exchange." Trumbo's att itude
would seem to have stronger affin ities with "the Judeo-Christian
tradition" than the absolute rejection of informing ascribed to it by
Navasky.
Yet Navasky himself unmistakably favors the "v isceral outrage"
still preserved after so many years by Albert Maltz, another member
of the Hollywood Ten, whose disagreement with Trumbo emerged
during Navasky's interviewing and provoked a lengthy
correspondence that ended only with Trumbo's fatal illness. Maltz
comes across in this exchange, aired and partly cited by Navasky, as
a champion prig; another of Navasky's respondents describes him as
an "injustice collector ." He does not hesitate to compare the namers
with informers in the French Resistance who were paid by the
Gestapo. Maltz has the excuse of having suffered from the blacklist,
but the same cannot be said of Navasky, who often employs the
familiar rhetorical technique of suggesting such comparisons in the
very act of denying their appropriateness, usually mentioning
victims of the Nazis but referring a few times to Stalin's purges and
forced confessions.
One senses a displacement of moral energy in the intense
preoccupation of Maltz and other Navasky subjects with the nature
and degree of gui lt of the "informers," let alone with the burning
issue of whether today the named shou ld snub the namers when they
run into each other in the expensive restaurants and resort hotels
frequented by both. Base though HUAC may have been, the
