The other night I had a crazy dream. Well, not so crazy in the sense that it had nonsensical or disjointed imagery, my dreams are very much like mini-films. First, they’re all in color. There appears to be a beginning, middle, and end (typically when I wake up), and they have sound.

In the dream, I had written an essay about Alvah Bessie and his book Men in Battle. Now let me back up a bit before I get into the details. In Julius, Corinne rereads Men in Battle when she finds herself in a quandary. For her, it’s a talisman of sorts.  In the real world, Alvah Bessie had hoped that there would be a day that Men in Battle would have been made into a film, unfortunately that never happened for a number of reasons–the major one was financing. My hope is that once Julius is published that Alvah Bessie will get the recognition he rightfully deserved and that maybe there’s a chance that Men in Battle will be adapted into a screenplay and turned into a movie (I see Adrian Brody as Aaron Lopoff), and, of course, the big dream is have my favorite film director, Roman Polanski, make the film.

Back to the nocturnal dream. I’m living in Paris near Parc Monceau. I have a lovely apartment on the top floor. The decor is very minimal.  It’s a gray spring afternoon and I am restless. I am expecting a visitor and keep looking out the window to see if he has arrived for a visit. My guest is Roman Polanski and it seems he had read my essay about Alvah Bessie and was impressed with it and wants to meet me. I’m flabbergasted that he would even take notice and also very nervous. While wait for him, I make sure that the place is spotless, I have food and coffee ready, the dogs have been told to stay in another room (surprisingly, they are very well-behaved).  A final look out the window, and I see a black Mercedes drive up and Polanski steps out. Now I’m about to self-combust from raw, nervous energy, but I force myself to keep calm. Within minutes the doorbell rings; I open the door, and there he is standing right in front of me with this beautiful smile. I just stand there like an idiot, amazed that this is all happening. I note every detail from the black cashmere crew neck sweater and black jeans to clear blue eyes and a headful of grey hair. He’s tinier than what I expected, although he’s in his 70s, he doesn’t look like an old man. There’s a youthful energy about him. A few seconds later after I get my bearings and that star-struck moment has passed, I introduce myself and lead him to the living room, excuse myself and bring out the coffee and food.

We talk about everything and then he broaches the topic of my essay and tells me that he was intrigued by Men in Battle so he bought the book, read it, and agrees it would make a good movie and he wants to make it He even says that Adrian Brody would make a great Aaron Lopoff!  But here’s the kicker…he asks me if I want to co-write the screenplay!  After ten seconds of internal panicking, I accept.

The conversation turns more into getting to know you type of exchanges. I confess my crush and he teases me about it.  During our conversation, Trumbo, the beagle, bays and he asks where are the dogs and I tell him that I put them in one of the back rooms (this is a huge apartment!) because they tend to get very excited when I have guests. He insists that I let them out and when I open the door, they charge over to him to get petted and just be general nuisances. He asks what’s the little one’s name and I tell him that’s Alvah. Then he asks if he can pick Alvah up and let him sit on his lap; I warn him that Alvah can get cranky and bit snippy. He shrugs, tells me he’ll take his chances and picks up the dog; instant bonding occurs. What’s the beagle’s name? he asks and I say Trumbo. He raises his eyebrows, laughs, and asks, “Where are the other eight?”

And that’s when I woke up. And if dreams come true, let this be the one.

Let’s start off with a little Alvah Bessie history: Way back in 1936 there was a nasty seamen’s strike. At the time Alvah was a an assistant editor and critic for the Brooklyn Eagle, and a member of the Communist Party. During the strike, the Brooklyn Eagle attacked the strikers, but Bessie, given his personal politics, drafted a rebuttal for the National Maritime Union and printed it on their letterhead. He brought the letter back to the newspaper, and they printed it and reversed their editorial position.

In Julius, I’m trying to create a modern parallel universe in which Corinne almost shadows Alvah’s actions. The timing is a bit off–she’s already working for a leftist journal, but many of her actions are similar to Alvah’s. My idea as part of a subplot was to have her get involved in a strike. At first I thought to have her help organize a group of workers at a trendy night spot, but that just didn’t work. The idea of her getting involved in a labor dispute still has merit, but the issue is which union, and how does she get pulled into the dispute?

In the meantime, my other subplot is the bringing down of Julius by an outside source. A mysterious and very conservative blogger launches Kirk’s Cannons (a take-off on Russell Kirk’s Six Canons of Conservative Thought from The Conservative Mind). This blogger is a “premature Tea Partier.” (which is my take on ‘premature anti-fascist).  He hates everything about Julius and attacks the publication as often as possible. Thanks to this blogger things will get difficult for my Merry Marxists.

Last year I read all three of Stieg Larsson’s books–The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, and The Girl who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest--and when I learned the first book was made into a film in Sweden, I was curious of how it would play on the silver screen.

Thanks to Netflix, I had the chance to watch The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  Impressions? Had I not read the book, I would have thought it was a bit on the slow side. Playing the role of critic, I would have liked the characters more drawn out, and know more of their back story. The secondary subplot–Blomquist’s slander trial–was almost swept under the carpet, and the conclusion to me seemed rushed.

However I did read the first book (to read my review go to Alvah’s Books), and although the film it is long (it clocks at two hours and twenty six minutes), I think another forty minutes would have helped with my comments from above. Now who knows what was left on the cutting room floor or what the screenwriter kept in the first draft of his adapted screenplay.  All I know, since I did read the entire series, that the director and editor made a huge mistake tying the story up the way they did.  I say this because the relationships in the second book are different and there’s a reason why as shown in the last page of the first book (you can see I’m trying very hard not to divulge any spoilers). I’ve never written a screenplay, and I can see that you have to have a sharp and discriminating eye of what to dump and keep. The goal is to keep the story moving forward with the appropriate weighted amounts of action, tension, and worthy dialogue.  Not easy if you’re adapting a 600 page book that spans at least eight months into a two hour time frame.

Confession time: When I first seriously started to write, my goal was to write a screenplay because I LOVE the movies. Big film buff here. There was a time I used to go to the movies at least four times a week. The first story I wrote was supposed to be a screenplay, but I decided to make it into a novel because it was too long. And yes, I am a fan of epic-long films. I can easily sit through a four hour long movie.  But it appears that brevity is key to modern-day film making, and my  script would have probably been at least 500 pages long (its a very chatty story, long silences thrown in, and not much action. Hmm, sounds a little Swedish, eh?). So no screen-writing for me. At least not yet.

Does that mean I’m fooling around with the idea? Oh yes. In fact most of my story ideas play out like movies so it wouldn’t be too surprising that I try my hand at it. But the one book  I would like to be adapted into a film–one that’s mentioned multiple times in Julius–is Alvah Bessie’s Men in Battle.  It’s about Bessie’s experiences in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Published in 1939, Men in Battle received great reviews, unfortunately, it didn’t sell well. In part because World War II had just started and people were more concerned with current events and not to a recent one–that, by the way, was the precursor to the war.

Bessie did try at some point to adapt it into a screenplay, but he wanted to add a love interest, and also include Jim Lardner’s (son of short story writer Ring Lardner and brother of Ring Jr, Hollywood Ten compatriot of Bessie’s) within the story. It was titled The Volunteer. There was some interest, but it never panned out.

Personally, I feel that Men in Battle doesn’t need the romance or even the Lardner contribution to it. In my humble opinion, it should be adapted as the book stands, but with the emphasis on the relationship Bessie had with Aaron Lopoff, his young company commander. But, I would append an extra story within the story and that would include incorporating “My Brother, My Son” in series of flash forwards.

So among the numerous writing projects, Men in Battle is on the list. Maybe I’ll get to it sometime in the near future. In the meantime, I have a short story to write.

Alvah Bessie is Spain, 1937

Alvah Bessie Testifying before HUAC, 1947.

I thought I would share what I’m learning from the online writing course. The first lesson is about story ideas. Where do we get them. Anita offers some very good suggestions like taking classic stories and tweaking them. Changing the sex of the main character or changing his or her age. Maybe change the locale and weave in local customs. Other ideas can come from from proverbs or sayings. Or, the most obvious one write what you know best.

For each suggestion, Anita gives good examples then she provides two exercise questions. The first one asks what do I do to generate story ideas? I basically get a lot of my ideas from a lot of the non-fiction I read, and from past travel or living experiences. Although Julius is not a short story, the plot was based on several personal experiences: living on the lower east side and my own fascination with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, my family’s involvement in the Spanish Civil War, and, of course, my admiration for Alvah Bessie.

The second question Anita asks is to choose a short story and analyze it.  This was a bit difficult because I rarely read short stories (I know, it’s ridiculous that I want to write one, but I don’t read them. It’s because they intimidate me, and that’s why I’m taking this course: to write one and overcome this feeling of intimidation.)  In any event, I finally settled on Alvah Bessie’s My Brother. My Son.

For this story, Bessie took what he knew best: His personal experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War and his relationship with his Company Commander Aaron Lopoff. Bessie was ten years senior to the Brooklyn-born Lopoff, and they became friends, but the friendship was short-lived. Lopoff was mortally wounded in Spain, and his death affected Bessie for most of his life.  ”My Brother, My Son” deals with grief, incomprehension, and anger over the death of a idealistic young man.

I may not have selected the best story to read or analyze, but it since it was written by one of my heroes and it deals with the Spanish Civil War I thought it was an appropriate choice for this first lesson.

I love research. I can spend hours digging up stuff I know at some point I’ll use somewhere. In Julius, a future story, or even in conversation. My latest obsession is Trotsky. That’s right, Leon Trotsky–revolutionary, part of the Bolshevik troika (Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin) and Commander of the Red army.

What’s with the obsession? It appears that I need more conflict between my MC and narrator and her beloved. I made her a very academic Marxist and he’s leaning more towards Trotskyism. Will the two characters knock heads over theory and ideology that it causes a rift in the magazine they plan to publish? That’s my intention. Is Julius a polemic as one person who critiqued the first few chapters accused it to be? Not at all, at least I hope not.

Back to the research . . . because I decided to add this little twist to the story I was curious what my beloved Alvah Bessie thought about Trotsky, and I jotted a quick email to his son Dan Bessie. According to Dan, it wasn’t a topic that was discussed between the two, but he imagined that:

Like most “good” CP members, during the time when the “Trots” were regarded by the USSR (and the American CP) as “wreckers,” that he went along with that. As did I, until I began to associate with some during the 1960s. This was in connection with an attempt we in the L.A. CP (among my generation) made to have joint meetings with them. This was also in connection with the New Left School, a radical educational institution that I helped organize and run for a time. (We had folks of different left persuasions teaching there.). While we didn’t always agree with those in the SWP (Socialist  Worker’s Party), we didn’t regard them as “enemies.”  We also had, in L.A., in the person of Dorothy Healey (read about her online) a great, dynamic leader; much smarter and very very open to ideas. Ben Dobbs, her co-leader in L.A., was just as great. Both eventually quit the CP and joined the Democratic Socialists of America.

Of course when he mentioned that I take a look at Dorothy Healey online I had to Google her, and I found this entry on Dorothy in Wikipedia. It said:

Her story is told in a book she wrote with historian Maurice Isserman, Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990). In the book, Healey revealed “the aspirations, commitment, illusions — and, ultimately, disillusionment — of a generation of young Communists” who joined the movement before and during the Great Depression. She, as they, had to deal with and “the Party [being] reduced to a remnant of its former strength through the battering it received in the McCarthy era and through its own sectarian mistakes.

Book? Uh-oh. I knew after I read that line I was going shopping.  And so off to Amazon I went, and found a reasonably priced copy, and it’s on its way to me.

But what about the Old Man aka Trotsky? Ah, that’s another story down the meandering research path. In this month’s Internet Review of Books, Robert Sinsheimer reviewed Trotsky: Downfall of a Revolutionary, by Bertrand M. Patenaude. In his review Sinsheimer wrote:

Perhaps the inconsistencies are less the fault of the author than of his subject. Trotsky was a complex, moody man. At times paranoid, he met his death because he let his guard down. An ideological purebred, he was nonetheless “a practiced philanderer.” More than willing to accept donations to the cause, the anti-capitalist was nonetheless forced to write to earn a living. Having penned Literature and Revolution and The History of the Russian Revolution, he was respected as a writer and his books were in some demand. Patenaude notes that Trotsky was pleased that the passport issued upon his exile listed his profession as writer. His powerful turn of a phrase drew the attention of George Bernard Shaw, who once wrote that “when Trotsky cuts off an opponent’s head, he holds it up to show there are no brains in it.” Trotsky was well along in the process of a Stalin biography at the time of his assassination.

The fact that he was a writer drew me even more to Trotsky; however, this book is about Trotsky in Mexico. I was more interested in a good biography so I Googled and saw that a spanking new book, Trotsky, by Robert Service was recently published. This time I restrained myself from buying it because the reviews were mixed (not that I put much faith in some of the Amazon reviews). So I started to Google more and came across a series of interviews by Peter Robinson of  The Hoover Institute’s “Uncommon Knowledge” program with Christopher Hitchens and Robert Service. It’s a five part interview and the one thing that stood out for me was that mention on Trotsky’s autobiography My Life. I put off buying Service’s biography for the time being and downloaded  My Life for free.

In My Life’s forward, Trotsky writes:

This is a book of polemics. It reflects the dynamics of that social life which is built

entirely on contradictions. The impertinence of the schoolboy toward his master; the pinpricks

of envy in the drawing-room, veiled by courtesies; the constant competition of commerce;

the frenzied rivalry in all branches of pure and applied science, of art, and sport; the

parliamentary clashes that reveal the deep opposition of interests; the furious struggle that

goes on every day in the newspapers; the strikes of the workers; the shooting down of participants in demonstrations; the packages of explosives that civilized neighbors send each

other through the air; the fiery tongues of civil war, almost never extinguished on our planet

– all these are the forms of social “polemics,” ranging from those that are usual, constant

and normal, almost unnoticed despite their intensity, to those of war and revolution that are

extraordinary, explosive and volcanic. Such is our epoch. We have all grown up with it.

We breathe it and live by it. How can we help being polemical if we want to be true to our

period in the mode of the day?

Unless you’re a Spanish Civil War and film buff, not many people know the name Alvah Bessie. I knew a little  about him when I started Julius, but during my research, I became more acquainted with his background and work, and then he became a full-blown obsession. I had, no, needed, to know as much as I could. Thanks to Dan Bessie, Alvah’s son, that obsession was fed. After reworking the first draft of Julius I knew Alvah Bessie would have a prominent role in the story, and to top that he’s also become my phantom muse.

Sometimes when I get frustrated with the entire writing process, I remind myself of  the obstacles Bessie faced. Even with the blacklist, he continued to write. When I procrastinate, I can almost see Alvah giving me this look with his eyebrows raised, disappearing into his wrinkled forehead, saying, “And you want to be a writer?” So I sit myself down to write, hoping that I’ve earned his approval and respect. 

On occasion I’ve ”talked” to the great warrior writer, asking for advice of how I can improve, or make Julius stronger. Of course there’s no reply back, but when I get stuck I turn to his short stories, his reviews, and his books. Afterwards, I write fueled and inspired by his humorous dishing, his biting wit, and his political observations.  

Today is one of those days that I’m at a loss with Julius. I’m all over the place and I don’t know where to rein things in. It’s time to turn to Alvah for some advice. I hope he’s listening. . . .

Am I taking a creative cheat by basing a character on a real person? The Alvah Bessie that I’ve made up is mischievous. He has an agenda and knows that by insinuating himself with the story’s narrator, he’ll get what he wants. That’s the fiction part. I have no idea whether the real one was manipulative or not, and this imagined trait just adds a little color.  Otherwise, I’m trying to stick to his real personality quirks, and he had plenty.

Some of the feedback I recently received has been about other characters that come purely from my imagination and who appear briefly in a few scenes or just in name only, but they’ve resonated with a few readers. I’ve been fooling around with the idea of expanding one specific character’s role and see whether she moves the story forward and adds a little mystery. I already see her very clearly in one scene, and she just might appear in only that one, but you never know…. 

I guess it’s time to take her out and see how well she plays with others.

For almost three years, I’ve been working on a novel that I’ve titled Julius. It started with the NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month ) challenge to complete a 50,000 word draft in one month. After I completed the task, I saw that the silly and spoofy story I had imagined had become something much more substantial.  Now, two and one-half years after the fact, I’m still researching, rewriting and revising. It’s an endless process.

How did  the story begin and what is it today? For starters, it all had to with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, a car drive through the town of Ossining and my father’s comment about prison towns and the electric chair.

How did the novel change? Here’s an example of one sentence I wrote in the very first draft:

Too bad it’s not 1936, we could have run off to Spain with the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, fight the fascists along with Alvah Bessie and George Orwell and feel like we accomplished something worthwhile.

What was a passing mention of Alvah Bessie, the Abraham Lincoln Brigades, and the Spanish Civil War became a quest to know everything about the war, Bessie and ALBA (Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive), and the CPUSA, and with that, the research became an all-consuming obsession.

When do you stop researching and start writing? For me, they go hand-in-hand. I may find something and discover it might be a good fit–so in it goes. Does it make the final cut? Maybe, maybe not. Research,like revisions, can be an endless task. If you’re like me, a notorious procrastinator, they can be impediments to writing and finishing your novel.

And on that note, it’s time to do some writing. . . .