Why can’t I “pour it out—tell the truth? And I know all this I deserve—for the falseness that was in me.”
—Tillie Lerner, journal [late 1937]
For New Year’s 1937, from a Los Angeles address on Whiteside Avenue,1 Tillie sent Cerf and Klopfer a postcard picturing a man passed out on a bench. A woman in a frilly dress is asking “Are you a Dead One?” Tillie scribbled, “I guess the dead one is me,” at least to Random House. Her sense of extinction echoed the country’s fears. New Deal reforms had reached a dead end, the country was slipping back into recession, the world into fascism. Supposedly demilitarized after World War I, Germany’s mighty army occupied the Rhineland. Italian bombers attacked Catalonia, Spain. Tillie and Jack briefly escaped such worries at a rowdy New Year’s Eve party in the smoky Western Worker office on Washington Avenue. They danced and boozed it up, celebrating the Worker’s fifth and their first (unofficial) anniversary. Recalling their kiss outside the Steffens’s Getaway, Tillie said she regretted not making love the previous New Year’s Eve.
More than a year after its command performance at the White House, Dead End opened to the public in Washington, D.C., Morris Lerner, who had renamed himself Gene, played “Milty,” a juvenile delinquent displaying “the horrors of improper environment,” as he explained in a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt. She reciprocated by encouraging FDR to tackle the problem of urban slums.2 He was hampered however by aged Republican Supreme Court justices, who repeatedly ruled New Deal programs unconstitutional. FDR now proposed adding liberal younger justices to the Court. Congress rejected the plan and accused FDR of “court-packing” and demagoguery.3 An anti-Roosevelt backlash benefited conservative Republicans and southern Democrats and seemed to open a door for Communist influence. Like the Pied Piper, Tillie recruited new members, founded new YCL branches, organized YCL dances, sold Western Worker subscriptions, and helped Jack at the San Pedro port.4 She typed up bulletins and calls to action and ran them off on a mimeograph machine at 3019 Winter Street, clearly a party address, as Ethel sensed after Tillie said she could always be reached there.5 Her frequent speeches praised plebeian “Trade Unions” who joined the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) after the more elitist and reputedly corrupt American Federation of Labor (AFL) ousted them. Her outlines include uplifting but vague phrases like: “United in the rearguard, like the vanguard, We Shall Win.”6 Her notes outline “false neutrality,” “Catalonia—1,600,000 refugees,” and fascism’s threat to “our children.” Her lines are often powerfully cadenced: “Black shirts and German passports; Italian bombs and German bullets.” She challenged audiences not to “stay home, as if nothing is happening in Spain.” But Tillie herself sometimes struggled “to be absorbed to believe in what I am doing.”7
Reports from the Soviet Union detailed dire stories of oppression and brutality, worse, some said, than any atrocities the czar had committed. Such reports tested party loyalty, especially when Stalin exiled Leon Trotsky, who had led, with Lenin, the 1917 October Revolution. Mainstream papers in the States saw Trotsky’s exile as proof of Stalin’s villainy; leftist papers linked Trotsky with Hitler, Judas, and even John Wilkes Booth.8 Abe Goldfarb labeled Stalin’s critics as “counter-revolutionary Trotskyites.” He wrote Rae, now on her way west, a grandiose letter calling his sister “Diana of the Chase—nimblefooted skirted gentleman of the road—oh fair wanderer on this frenetic mundane sphere.” More practically, he thought Rae was a trustworthy friend, unlike “certain unpleasant individuals who have taken advantage of my patience and kindness.” He meant Tillie. He hoped to offer Rae a “haven of security whenever you come to L.A.” She had no more need for Abe’s haven than for his inflated rhetoric. She rented a room in San Francisco and got a part-time job.9 When Jack traveled to San Francisco’s CP headquarters, he at last met Rae and assured her of his love for Karla as well as Tillie.
Bennett Cerf reacted to Tillie’s zany card by remarking that she could write something really big once she got “such trivial things as sex out of your system.” Cerf’s remark made her further reconsider—not sex—but “what I am doing,” especially writing anonymous, throw-away bulletins instead of “something really big.” Giving art and ambition one more chance, she petitioned party bureaucracy for time off and was granted a few months to resuscitate her proletarian novel, with a 1 June deadline. Tillie, however, worried that writing fiction was bourgeois, a worry she let leech into her resolve.10
Tillie’s ambition to write was further interrupted when she discovered once again the hazards of unprotected sex. She told Karla she had a baby in her stomach. She could hardly take care of her four-year-old, much less a new baby, though female comrades sent baby gifts and promised help. She faced the “knowledge of failure, of my pregnancy. Strength, strength. I have the hardness in me to break what is necessary to be broken.” Just then Tillie received a report from Random House’s bookkeeper: her debt for the “advance to date” was $1201.98.11 When Jack was sent to New York on party business, she summoned the “hardness” to break her pregnancy, at least her third abortion. Later she recalled the lost child as the “dead rich baby,” with its unused baby gifts.12
Tillie’s spirits lifted a bit when she got a reprieve from Cerf, who had his bookkeeper send a notice: “author agrees to deliver ms when ready.” Calling Cerf “comrade psychoanalyst,” Tillie said Jack had shrugged off his “impudent” remarks about her sex life by asking, “what do you expect from a guy like that?” Cerf retorted, “How the hell” did the “Jack” she mentioned “know what kind of a guy I am?” To Jack and their comrades he was a wealthy capitalist and hence an effete man.
Without editorial guidance from Abe and babysitting from Sue, Ida, and Rae, Tillie found writing was harder than ever. Her excuses for not writing had included poor health, her hyperemotional state, and party work. For the first time, Tillie’s excuse to Cerf was domestic: “a job a child and a house to keep alongside,” but she was not even feeding Karla well. She claimed that septic poisoning kept her from writing for two and a half weeks and that the novel was “DONE except the going over.” She said, “I hafta have a book for you by June 1st at the latest or I’ll be disgraced forever as far as the movement and myself and everything that means anything to me is concerned.” Cerf concluded that the movement meant more to her than her contract with and debt to Random House.
Along with about eight thousand others in Los Angeles, Tillie was thrilled to hear André Malraux speak about the Spanish people’s heroic defense of democracy and freedom. Now a Random House author, Malraux’s opposition to Franco made Tillie feel indeed a “dead one” and regret no longer being Random House’s most “promising young novelist.” Calling herself “Tillie the Moocher,” she asked for more free books.13 Cerf sent her ones by Malraux and Angelo Herndon, now also a Random House author, thanks to Tillie’s recommendation. Rather than stimulate her writing, however, these gifts made her admit that others were saying what she “should have.” Her own novel had captured the Holbrooks’ heart-wrenching struggles, rendered little Mazie’s mind-boggling insights, and offered breath-taking descriptions, but those achievements seemed dated when Josephine Herbst had “gone beyond me” to address the threat of international fascism. In late April, Nazi planes bombed the Basque town of Guernica and machine-gunned fleeing citizens. But in May, Congress passed the Neutrality Act, preventing the United States from sending military aid, even to Spanish Loyalists. Tillie could not bear to “read the accounts of Spain anymore. 70 school children bombed in Spain.” With murderers winning in Spain, her stamina sapped by her latest abortion, Jack often away on party business, Karla a resentful child, and her novel endless, in several senses, Tillie could not settle back to writing. News that Abe and Frances Schmulowitz had a daughter, born on 15 April 1937, and that he named the baby Olive Schreiner Goldfarb, after one of Tillie’s literary heroes, did not lift her from a slough of despondency.14
Realizing that Rae was in San Francisco only temporarily, Tillie rushed a special delivery letter begging Rae to take Karla back to the Midwest. Rae was furious that Tillie never wrote, then suddenly wasted “stamps on specials,” and treated her like “a jumping bean.” She said Ida Lerner was planning to head for California herself “because you don’t write and when you do you still don’t say anything.” Then Tillie fired off a special to her parents, saying that Karla was in Rae’s care, that Jack was her new husband, and that Ida was not needed. Ida accepted Tillie’s “monkey business,” as Rae called such ruses, and Rae agreed to take Karla away if Tillie would first have her tonsils out. Rae instructed “make sure you see the docter immediately.”
When Rae came down to Los Angeles in May, Tillie turned Karla over, with hardly a word. Such rudeness to Rae paled, though, in comparison to Tillie’s neglect of the almost emaciated Karla. Rae took Karla to say goodbye to Abe and cursed him for not seeing to her welfare. Then Rae took her undernourished niece to see Sue and Nahman Goldfarb in San Francisco. Since 1933, Sue had been a surrogate mother for Karla; since 1934, Karla was a surrogate for her lost child so Sue spent every day for a week taking Karla to the zoo, to merry-go-rounds, and to parks, feeding her treats all the while. When Rae and Karla arrived in Omaha on 7 June, the Lerners were shocked that Karla weighed little more than she had the year before. Rae wrote Tillie that Karla was delighted to see her grandparents, her Uncle Harry, her Aunt Vicki, and her Aunt Lillian, whose husband, medical student Joseph Davis, seemed to Rae “a very nice sort.”15 When Karla asked why they left her mother, Rae offered the hollow answer that Tillie had to be alone to write.
Despite saying that it was “DONE,” Tillie produced no novel on the first of June. That month, at the second American Writers’ Congress, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr accused Communists of fanaticism in their “mighty excommunication” of Trotsky. Ernest Hemingway was more appealing to the leftist writers as he declared himself “actively in the fight against fascism.”16 Tillie was not invited to this Congress; her reputation had vanished. She wrote Cerf that she would finish “sometime, sometime.” She hoped sending Karla back to Omaha would “give me a little more, not only time but energy.” She also made a startling confession: “will it please you to know that when I think of the time that I dribbled away that year I had nothing to do but write I go slightly crazy?” That year was 1935 after her flashy appearance at the Writers’ Congress in New York when she was living on Random House’s money and Marian Ainslee’s support. Though she had had “nothing to do but write,” Tillie instead had dribbled her time away proselytizing for the Hollywood Communist Party. Cerf replied that he and Klopfer were not “surprised to hear that your book wasn’t finished yet. You have disappointed us so often that we have come to take it as a matter of course.” Perhaps her book would “be so good that it will wipe away a great many unpleasant memories.”
Tillie had confessed honestly to Cerf, but her ability to go beyond confession to introspection was limited. Rather than the “movement work” that had kept her from writing, she now blamed “that ruinous first taste of fame.” She so twisted logic that the opposite of fame was selflessness. In another epiphany like her late 1935 one, she decided to “kill my ego. Then I can build one.”17 She sold subscriptions for the Western Worker, organized men and women in shipping and the automotive industries, and wrote the mimeographed Mariner for the San Pedro Branch of the YCL.18 On 24 June, the Western Worker printed a letter from Paul Cline, “L. A. Communist County Organizer,” praising these activities, without naming Tillie. She seemed indeed a dead one, having practically killed her identity, as well as her ego, as the party required.
Among the important accomplishments of the Works Progress Administration were programs making art, music, theatre, and writing accessible all over America. The Federal Writers’ Project boosted the writing careers of Jack Conroy, John Cheever, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and Eudora Welty (as a photographer), among many others. Tillie does not seem to have been among them, though she would say that she collected stories of Hispanic immigrants in Los Angeles for the historical records project.19 With America’s economic recovery in jeopardy, however, by August 1937, FDR cut WPA funds in half and virtually shut down the CWA. The Federal Reserve tightened credit. Unemployment rose. The stock market almost collapsed. The CP-USA offered no viable solution to the looming crisis. The common worker was again a forgotten man or woman.
After a week in Omaha, Rae took Karla to Faribault, where she “didn’t seem to mind” being away from her mother. Tillie was too frazzled to send, as promised, a box of Karla’s belongings and, Rae suspected, even to “keep up the house.” In July, Harry Lerner penned a letter for Ida asking Rae about Karla’s weight. Rae said the little girl was better, thanks to cod liver oil in her juice and milk and egg yolks in homemade ice cream. Rae wrote to Tillie a stream-of-consciousness letter about bathing Karla “about 6 times a day the little black monkie she is cute but oh how she can talk and if my voice gets stern she whimpers and says you are not getting angry, then of course I have to laugh and say oh no.” About Tillie’s inability to write, Rae wondered: “Who did it this time?”
After Ethel returned to Faribault in the last stages of pregnancy, she assumed Rae’s role of scolding Tillie for her “out of sight out of mind” approach to Karla. Ethel instructed “BE A MOTHER FOR GODS SAKE.” Karla was talking about a baby brother, so Ethel wondered, “did you or didn’t you tell her there was a baby in your stomach?” When Ethel’s baby Benita was born on 9 August, Rae was shocked that Karla already knew “all the details” about babies and sex. When she took her niece to see Edgar Bergen, in a Minnesota appearance, Karla astounded her aunt by understanding that the unruly Charlie McCarthy was really a dummy whose voice was Bergen’s. Karla gravitated to the “Pied Piper” story about the messianic leader who “got the rats out then took the children in the mountain you should hear her tell it when she looks at the pictures.” Though she understood something of sex, ventriloquism, and mesmerizing power, little Karla still refused to eat. A visiting nurse found Ethel’s baby healthy but Karla, at four-and-a-half, fifteen pounds underweight. Ethel exclaimed that her family would have done “better by Karla than” Tillie and that Karla could sue her mother “for breach of promise.” Tillie responded with a card to Karla, saying that the San Pedro sailors “all ask me—where is KARLA—is she being good—is she happy—is she acting like a big girl and your MAMMA says yes and hugshugsloveskisses.”20
Desperate for attention, Karla used her pitiful looks to finagle toys, trips to shows and movies, and ice cream treats. Her ability to wheedle costly favors made Ethel charge that “Karla sure doesn’t show any PROLETARIAN upbringing.” She was “a little conniving queen,” who lies and “looks you straight in the eyes while doing it.” Karla certainly lied about eating, as Rae later discovered when she cleaned her silver tea set and found the sugar bowl, creamer, and cups each “half full with food which Karla put in when I went out from the dining room and she used to tell me she ate it all up the rascal it was moldy and there was [everything] from buttered bread to egg yolk cheese potatoes and what not.” In another run-on phrase, Rae told Tillie about getting a literary “key” to James Joyce’s Ulysses because “Good God what a book I thought I’d never finish much less understand.” The “key” made sense of Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novel, even as it vindicated Rae’s peculiar writing style.
Worried about Karla’s health, Ida came to Faribault to take, with Rae, the little girl to a doctor. He advised that Karla’s tonsils should be removed, as Tillie had failed to do, and that they should keep the truss over her navel so her hernia would not rupture. After getting more scolding, Tillie promised that she and Jack would take better care of Karla. Ethel set out terms: “If things pan out the way you want them to about Jack and jobs, Karla is yours. If not, not. But ferhevvenssake [for heaven’s sake] don’t keep changing her from east to west to this and that home [and] relative and so on.” Rae sent Tillie a similar ultimatum: either become a good mother or lose Karla. Awaiting Tillie’s commitment, Ida took Karla to Omaha.
During these hassles over Karla’s future, Tillie continued giving emotionally charged speeches about German and Italian attacks on villages like Catalonia and Guernica. She sang songs like “Abraham Lincoln Walks Again.” She connected American “traditions of liberty” with “the Party of Lenin [which] is leading the way!”21 She could so fire up a crowd that many sailor friends, including Georgie Kaye and Jack Eggan, volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. She led them to believe, as Eggan wrote, that the Brigade would restore the duly-elected Republic of Spain. At home, the criminal syndicalist detainees achieved a long-delayed release.22 In Los Angeles though, that victory for union organizers was undermined by escalating class rivalry between AFL and CIO unions. The president of the Theatrical Stage Employees, an AFL affiliate, reportedly appointed Chicago hoodlums to intimidate studio workers to join, while CIO unions fought to keep them.
A week or two after Ida returned to Omaha with Karla, the Lerners sent her back to Tillie in Los Angeles. On 13 October, they telegraphed “Mrs Jack Olsen,” at the Winter Street address, all that they had: “KARLA LEFT ON CHALLENGER WEDNESDAY TEN FORTY AM SHE WAS HAPPY AND LIKED STEWARDESS WHO WAS EXPECTING HER PLEASE WRITE IMMEDATELY ABOUT HER ARRIVAL LOVE. LERNERS.” After four and a half months away, Karla must have been happy to be met by “hugshugsloveskisses” but terrified when her mother collapsed in pain. Soon Tillie was admitted to the Los Angeles General Hospital for an appendectomy.23 Comrade Lou Rosser wrote, “how does it feel to be minus that great contraption which god gave you your appendix.” He was planning a cocktail party at the state convention for “free loaders” or “youth leaders” like Tillie. He suggested that she “hurry up and get well Jack is worrying his head off. It shows he loves you—so do I when my wife is not looking.”24
Rae wrote Tillie that Abe’s Los Angeles friends Jerry and Sylvia reported that he was “not sorry for the years spent” with Tillie, though she had “taken advantage” of his devotion.25 In mid-November, Tillie began a 1,200-word reply, mentioning a short story that had given her “enough strength to break with Abe.”26 She listed paralyzing health troubles, including a “zipper” or incision that drained and would not heal.27 Karla tried extortion on her incapacitated mother by saying Rae had taken her “to the movies three times a day, supplied her with an endless stream of ice cream and kept her happy with every toy the kids ever heard of.” Though they could not afford such treats, Tillie assured Rae that she and Jack were being responsible parents, establishing discipline, and even converting Karla into “a voracious eater.” They were “leaving for Frisco this Sat. morning.” Testifying “Rae, one of the richest things in my life has been knowing you,” Tillie begged “don’t curse me any more.” At the end of this letter, she noted that she was not leaving with Jack but “staying on another week” in Los Angeles, while he took care of “getting settled” in San Francisco. She ended disconnectedly, “I have a fever.”
In San Francisco, Jack found joblessness at its highest point “since the termination of the 1934 strike,” according to the Western Worker, which soon printed Dorothea Lange’s photo of a migrant worker with her baby (later known as “Depression Madonna”) with the headline: “SPECTRE OF RENEWED DEPRESSION HAUNTS AMERICA.”28 With unions unable to staunch the reopened wound of unemployment, tensions deepened between the AFL and the CIO. In Hollywood, the battle for control of workers escalated. Abe Goldfarb had had Hollywood in mind when he wrote Rae about hoping “to earn enough” to provide a haven for her, as she had for him over the years. He may have fought the AFL, which had its own paper, the Los Angeles Citizen, to combat the CIO’s Western Worker, which called AFL unions dues-collecting rackets that used the tactics of Al Capone and Hitler.29
At the very time Tillie justified to Rae her decision “to break with Abe,” he was found dead. On 17 November 1937, just after six in the morning, two police officers noticed a light in a culvert under a bridge just north of San Fernando, California. They found Abe Goldfarb “crushed under an overturned light sedan.” One paper said, “Goldfarb was en route to Hollywood after visiting his wife and baby in San Francisco.” He carried letters, a key, and a billfold with his social security card and $37.50 in cash. He listed himself as a salesman and as “sec. music corp.”30 The Los Angeles County Coroner reported that he had a “crushing injury of thorax” and a “probable basal fracture of skull. Auto ran off a bridge—accidental.” In a one-car crash, a “basal fracture” at the back of the skull seems at odds with a crushed chest. The coroner was too busy or corrupt to make a more careful investigation, but the injuries may suggest foul play.31 Perhaps Abe was a victim of the AFL/CIO rivalry for Hollywood union members. Or perhaps he had simply driven off the road in the middle of the night, catapulting himself and his car into the culvert below. Rumors circulated that he had committed suicide, had been eliminated in some union or CP squabble, and even had been set up by Tillie. She was in Los Angeles without Jack and remained there into December.32 She had believed that the good of the party justified any misdeed, when capitalists like Leopold and Loeb could get away with murder. Her diaries now expressed crippling guilt. She wondered why she could not “pour it out—tell the truth. And I know all this I deserve—for the falseness that was in me.” Then she inked out lines that might have explained that falseness. She did leave legible a question: “why A. hit so hard?” And she promised someday to answer that question.33
She also typed up a bizarre page labeled “This that has happened in your lifetime Karla.” She imagined painting on a room-size canvas “so the eye could see it all at once.” Rather than paint, she wrote a surrealistic word-picture of elegant figures in tuxedos and evening dresses eating, drinking, and dancing on a platform, with one “couple making love on a couch” and a girl leaning over “despairing, every line of her fingertips of the one fallen hand in the blood.” The platform is “sustained by a fountain spray of blood.”34 Clearly, this picture was an allegory for Tillie’s, not Karla’s, life. It is consistent with revulsion at her pampered Hollywood existence and her “ruinous first taste of fame.” Still, the “spray of blood” remains a mystery, unless it refers to Abe’s death.
About six years later, Tillie told her family only “he died.”35 She later insisted that she had been a single mother, sometimes saying that Karla was the child of a passing fling with a drifter. Before she deposited her papers at Stanford, she tried to scratch out Goldfarb’s name wherever it appeared. She did not keep the letter from “AF of L Sam.” In a 1937 notebook, she asked, “How much does the comrade’s personal life have to do with his movement work. . . . Death—puts people in their proper places.” She even wrote that “torture is just, because a poor man’s life is one long torture. And all who teach poor men to bear it—all the Christian priests & everyone else ought to be punished. They don’t know.”36 Such rationalizations help clarify Communist disregard for the personal but do not solve the riddle of why Tillie tried to erase Abe Goldfarb from her life.
Seeing Lillian Hellman’s film adaptation of Dead End, Tillie felt less like the good working girl, played by Sylvia Sidney, than the unscrupulous gangster, played by Humphrey Bogart, who is denounced by his mother in words that Hellman could have stolen from Rae Schochet. In poor health, desperate for stability, paralyzed by guilt, Tillie fled Los Angeles with Karla that December for San Francisco and Jack. In lodgings near Telegraph Hill and then the rough western addition, the threesome clung together. Tillie was often in tears, virtually incapacitated by awareness of the “falseness that was in me.”
The Western Worker’s success enabled its transformation into a paper called the Daily People’s World. Determined to overcome tears and guilt, to revitalize herself, and reclaim her writing identity, Tillie asked Al Richmond, managing editor, for a job. He offered a theater-reviewing post, giving her a free ticket to San Francisco Opera Guild’s rendition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. She could both mingle with San Francisco’s elite theatergoers and judge them in the review she wrote near year’s end.
In San Francisco, the Daily People’s World debuted on 1 January 1938. More artful and inclusive than the Western Worker, the DPW covered the arts, sports, and local, national, and international politics. It featured poems, stories, historical essays, comic strips like “Little Lefty,” and columns like “Seeing Red” (by Tillie’s friend Mike Quin), “Women’s Slant,” and “Behind the Screen,” an insider’s view of Hollywood. Its first issue included Tillie’s review.37 She noted that the targets of Gilbert’s wit, “pompous and corrupt officials . . . exist today as they did fifty years ago.” She regretted that Sullivan “was heaped with honors,” while Gilbert was “despised” by queen and establishment. Still, Gilbert’s satire had “reached the ears of the masses” and ripped open the “veil of holiness and wisdom” from the ruling class. Tillie’s class-conscious exposé echoed Marxist Abe’s literary analysis and her early distinction between Longfellow and Spartacus. At long last, it recaptured something of the pizzazz of her youthful “Squeaks” column.
When party operatives on Winter Street in Los Angeles forwarded a letter from Random House, Tillie trembled lest Cerf might want his money back. Instead of recriminations, though, he assured her, “you need fear no terrible reproaches from me because we have long since despaired of ever getting a novel from you.” Tillie replied that, if he came to San Francisco, she could always be found through People’s World.38
Now twenty-six, Tillie found reviewing self-affirming. On 3 and 11 February, she accused actress Pauline Frederick of “melodraming” and praised Clare Boothe’s The Women for blasting “Feminine Leisure Class” and proving that only “working girls” are honest. She labeled The Wave, a film about Mexican fishermen, with subtitles by Dos Passos, “one of the greatest motion pictures of all times, of all countries” because it showed the “thrilling power” organizing brings to oppressed people. When Richmond assigned her an article on Benjamin Franklin, though, she filled a bag with notes but could not meld them together, until she tried projection. Appearing on 17 February 1938, her much-revised article depicts Franklin as a man who rejected Britain’s “glory and prestige” to choose rebellion. Her Franklin was not a wealthy entrepreneur and investor; he could well have been a Communist.
Back in Hollywood, Cerf’s diary was a “Who’s Who” of film and literary stars, including Dorothy Parker, John Steinbeck, Robinson Jeffers, Budd Schulberg, and Charlie Chaplin. Later in San Francisco, he met Tillie Lerner at the Palace Hotel on 22 February. Cerf was so genial she went along when he was driven over the Bay Bridge to visit Eugene O’Neill. Over a free lunch, she argued that Tom Mooney could write an even more sensational book than Angelo Herndon, who had visited Mooney in 1934.
On returning home, Tillie dashed off an article titled “Noted Publisher Here: To Visit Tom Mooney,” in which she gave Cerf a makeover. Her Cerf claimed that Mooney, now appealing his 1916 conviction, was his personal hero. Her Cerf admired books published cheaply for the Russian masses. Her Cerf found Harry Bridges, the “most exciting and colorful person in the West,” an opinion, she remarked, that “kind of puts Hollywood and his two western authors, Nobel Prize winner Eugene O’Neill and Carmel poet Robinson Jeffers, in their place.” She had made her father a spokesman for meat packers and Ben Franklin for egalitarianism; now her ventriloquism made Bennett Cerf the voice of communism. He and Klopfer, signing radical writers like Lerner, Malraux, and Herndon, had hoped to democratize and invigorate their publishing list. But by 1938, it seems unlikely that Cerf would be saying, as Tillie claimed, “the Left is where the great literature of tomorrow is coming from.”39 He did arrange, on 25 February, to be driven over the “new Golden Gate Bridge to San Quentin where [he] had a one hour talk with Tom Mooney,” who was uninterested in writing his story for Random House.40
Remaking others in her own image was, for Tillie, an enabling psychic strategy, but remaking Josef Stalin was a more daunting task. He used intimidation, vindictive arrests, and brutal sentences against traitors, defined as anyone who criticized him. Despite evidence that the Moscow Trials were atrocities and Stalin a despot, Tillie tried to reconstruct him as chiefly a foe of counterrevolutionaries.41 Rumors that Stalin and Hitler might collude undermined such rationalizations, so Tillie cheered when the Daily Worker blasted the “filthy falsehood that the Soviet Union was considering an agreement with the bestial Nazi regime.”42 Hitler proved his bestiality by invading Austria. Former president Herbert Hoover proved his by visiting Hitler in March, an act showing Tillie that capitalism was indeed in cahoots with fascism.43
By writing reviews and living a more ordered life, Tillie was recovering from the guilt that had incapacitated her in late 1937, but world events still threatened her emotional stability. She could not recapture the mood of a “rainy spring here in S. F. in that pre-Spain world.” The fascists bombed Barcelona on 24 March, and the “magic” of spring was “emptied” by news of another “vast exodus of women and children” from bombed-out Spanish villages. After another stock market dive, Roosevelt began reviving the WPA, the PWA, and other federal agencies, increasing employment and putting dollars back into circulation. He instructed Congress “BOOST PEOPLE’S INCOME.”44 By June, he signed fair labor legislation that outlawed child labor and established a minimum wage of 25¢ an hour (Tillie’s CWA wage in 1933–1934), to rise to 40¢ in two years. FDR had preempted what was left of the Communist Party’s altruistic agenda.
The Left wing turned its attention to Republican Spain’s battle against fascism. Clifford Odets and Sylvia Sidney donated ambulances. The League of American Writers auctioned manuscripts, including one of Hemingway’s, also to buy ambulances, but the New York Times refused to publish a writers’ petition opposing the U.S. embargo on Republican Spain.45 The House of Representatives created a Committee on Un-American Activities to uncover fascism in the United States, but Chairman Martin Dies of Texas, under pressure from the Hearst papers, reinterpreted his mission as ferreting out Communists. In California, HUAC, as it came to be known, became a fascist force, as it listed, for example, all Peoples’ World writers, including Tillie Lerner, as subversives. It scoffed at censure from the League of American Writers.
After making the capitalist Cerf a Communist, Tillie made Clifford Odets seem a capitalist, perhaps because he had left the Communist Party. She dismissed his Golden Boy for lacking a “feeling of bitter economic necessity.” She wrote no more reviews for People’s World. She would say that she worked thirty hours a week “for Western, a temp agency, to manage hours for Karla. Desperate about writing time.” She took odd jobs: “hotel maid and linen checker, a waitress, solderer of battery wires, and jar capper.” She attempted to order her life: “3 nights YCL, 2 nights soc. [socializing] and Jack. Leaves 2 nights for me.” The most they could afford for rent was: “$20 unfurnished, 24 furnished.”46 Sometimes they camped out in someone’s spare room, entwined together on an army cot. With little privacy or time together, as Tillie gained strength, she and Jack resumed a passionate sex life. They intended to avoid pregnancy, but she sometimes forgot to use her pessary and that spring became pregnant again.47 She felt guilty over losing other babies and neglecting Karla, but she believed herself too ill to bear a child so she scheduled another abortion. Then, at the end of May, Tillie’s chest x-ray reported that she was free of TB.48 The next week, People’s World reprinted Käthe Kollwitz’s lithograph “The Mothers,” with commentary about her understanding the “sufferings of motherhood and childhood under capitalism.” Tillie proceeded to the abortionist’s office, but with Kollwitz’s “The Mothers” searing her eyes and memories of Ida, Rae, and Karla searing her heart, she ran out of the office, still pregnant. She consoled herself that Jack could care for them and that motherhood could be redemptive.49
In Munich, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ceded Czechoslovakia to Hitler.50 Daily People’s World on 1 October saw “a permanent alliance of Great Britain with Nazi Germany.” On 10 October, the paper warned “HITLER THREATENS FRANCE.” Japan had invaded China and remained in occupancy. Britain seemed “ready to Cede Europe to Nazi Grip.” Americans were becoming so frightened that radio audiences panicked on 30 October 1938, as Orson Welles’s Mercury Theatre aired its adaptation of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, about an invasion from Mars.51
Four and a half years after Tillie had ridiculed “Franklin Dealout Richvelth,” the DPW put faith in him, insisting that FDR “Won’t Yield on New Deal.” Communist candidates did not dare attack him but lost elections anyway.52 Democrats made a “Clean Sweep” in California, electing liberal Culbert Olson governor. Nationally, conservatives made gains by arguing that reform had gone far enough and that inflation was now the threat to recovery. Congress cut the New Deal social programs FDR had refortified. Just when DPW announced that Pearl Buck was “1st U. S. Woman to Capture Nobel Prize,” it described “Nazi Fury,” destroying synagogues and Jewish shops. With broken glass reflecting rampant fires, 9–10 November became known as “kristallnacht,” crystal night. Pogroms against Jews spread. Hitler threatened France. Loyalist lines along the Ebro River were faltering, but the United States did not lift its embargo on Spain, much less oppose Germany. HUAC considered artists like Orson Welles and Communists like Tillie and Jack more a threat than Hitler.
Tillie tried to turn her fervent speeches about Spain into articles. In letters to the Olsens, Georgie Kaye had proclaimed that the Spanish Republicans were about to “wipe fascism off the face of Spain.” Jack Eggan had killed “ignorant peasants misled by the phony capitalists.” Now he wished he could kill the fascist dictators, “men who cause war and who get fat from it and not their puppets.”53 Despite her private informants, public articles, and pages of notes and outlines, Tillie could not convert her speeches into publishable articles. Also, the heaviness of late pregnancy sapped her energies, even while the baby within promised a new beginning.
During the holidays, Tillie and Jack sent Karla to his parents in Venice. For the first time in a year, Tillie wrote Ethel, inviting her to San Francisco. Ethel replied that she would bring little Benita, join the Writers’ Project, and leave Tillie home with “Karla, Bonny and Whatsisname,” not the arrangement Tillie had in mind. Ethel admitted she would “never be the genius, the something T. Lerner was acclaimed,” but she refused to be Tillie’s maid.54 Tillie was upset by Ethel’s past-tense reference to her genius. News that her brother Gene Lerner won third prize in a nationwide drama-writing contest, played one of the “Dead End Kids,” and had gotten Eleanor Roosevelt to address a forum at George Washington University, where he was on scholarship, did not improve Tillie’s self-esteem.55 Then she heard that Jack Eggan was killed near the banks of the Ebro.
Tillie had seen Eggan, an orphan who had become a boxer and a poet, as proof of human potential, but fascist forces had turned potential into dust. Tillie wrote of “the sterile wind” which “layed him down.” She made a more defiant note: “We fight again. Hunted. You drive our seed deeper.”56 She meant that the seeds of reform and rebirth would grow to fight again. She planned to name the baby “Jack” after his father and Jack Eggan. But after a difficult labor, a daughter was born to Jack and Tillie on 27 December 1938. They named her Julie. A sailor friend teased them about having “only a girl,” who would still show “revolutionary tendencies.”57 Dubbed “Gazoonie” by her parents, a word that soon produced gurgling happiness, baby Julie showed no rebellious tendencies. After assaults to her lungs, digestive track, and reproductive system, childbirth had jeopardized Tillie’s health again. Still, she felt a blissful flood of contentment with this baby. Soon she began, as with Karla six years before, trying to be scientific about motherhood. She recorded when Julie “tried to suck thumb. Partially supports head.”
At year’s end, the Daily People’s World celebrated a “Leftward Trend” in the “Best Books Written in ’38”: Hemingway’s The Fifth Column, André Malraux’s Man’s Fate, and Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In bed with her baby, Tillie felt little connection with the masculine experiences of those “best” writers. She imagined a book about immigrant women, like Ida and Rae, as a universal democratic mother: “in the most elementary sense no USA would be here without her, she gave life to the life of the continent.” Her story could “break our heart.”58 Her own heart near breaking over such unnamed women, Tillie vowed to be a better mother to Karla and to baby Julie.
By early 1939, the CP-USA was in disarray. It had led the way in opposing racism and fascism and defending Republican Spain. It had helped to improve workers’ lives and to convince most citizens that the government bore responsibility for the well-being of its people. It had, however, become a bureaucracy.59 It refused to credit Democrats, socialists, liberals, religious people, charitable institutions, or ordinary caring citizens for improving the lot of Americans. Two 1939 DPW headlines suggest its tactics: “Hitler Lies and So Does Dies” and “Hitler Hoover Trotsky Join Hands.”60 Equating Martin Dies with Hitler and Hoover with Trotsky and Hitler was illogical, but logic was already absent from attempts to deny Stalin’s brutal purges and collective farms’ failures. Tillie was so overwhelmed by postpartum depression that, as she later told Rae Schochet, she was “too sick to know what was going on.”
Early in the year, Rae came to see Nahman and Sue Goldfarb and check on Karla. When Rae heard that her youngest sister was seriously ill, however, she left abruptly; once again Karla to felt abandoned. A new house to live in, rather than rooms to camp in, made her a bit more secure. At 61 Alpine Terrace, up a heart-stopping incline and steps, Jack installed Tillie, Karla, and the baby; friends helped move their modest accumulations, including boxes and bags of Tillie’s books and papers. Money was so scarce that they often held parties to solicit contributions toward the rent. As Tillie recovered from childbirth, friends from L.A., including Lou Rosser, joined them for a “tribute to Union Labor,” as People’s World put it, on Treasure Island, in San Francisco Bay.
As she emerged from the fog of depression and ill health to learn “what was going on,” Tillie was horrified by a DPW headline: “World’s Best Singer Jim-Crowed.” Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let “Marian Anderson, Negro contralto” sing in Constitution Hall. Resigning her membership, Eleanor Roosevelt arranged for Anderson to sing at the Lincoln Memorial. Advertised “For All the People,” the Easter concert attracted an integrated audience of 75,000 .61 In Harlem, Billie Holiday soon recorded “Strange Fruit,” an eloquent protest against lynching in the American South. Tillie had challenged audiences not to “stay home, as if nothing is happening in Spain.” But she was staying home while others fought racism in America.
A line from a song for Jack’s twenty-eighth birthday, on 16 March 1939, applauds “our Franklin sneering loudly at Der Fuehrer and his boys.” Other spirited verses sung at the surprise party mention “your gorgeous Lerner, Till” and the “sixty thousand million steps which lead to Olsens on the hill.” People were poor but hopeful: “without benefit of money—let no bounds know our joys.”62 Such good cheer was soon demolished by the news that Republican Spain had fallen. Thanks to America’s nonintervention, the lives of many idealists had been lost, in vain. When a dispirited Georgie Kaye returned, Tillie and Jack made room for him on Alpine Terrace; he repaid such generosity by helping around the house, often changing Julie’s diapers while singing “I am too young to die.”63
Jack’s birthday also saw Daily People’s World publish Dorothy Parker’s “You’re Doing Fine Baby, But You’re Not doing Enough.” Tillie took those words seriously when, despite Kaye’s help, she spent her time “performing senseless & revolting work in order to continue to exist.”64 Needing help, she asked her youngest sister if she wanted to attend college in California, but Vicki wanted “down-to-earth information” about colleges, which Tillie failed to supply. Her parents scolded her for not sending news. Jack had no steady employment. They might lose their house. Ethel and Vicki had each refused to be her housekeeper. When Karla finally had her tonsils out, her tongue got infected. Tillie had bleeding ulcers or colitis, and a sulphur drug made her sicker. Finally, Jack’s teenage second cousin named Pauline moved in to help. The chaotic household then included three adults, a teenager, a six-year-old, and a baby. Jack landed a temporary job back on the waterfront.65 Still, the times were so “nightmarish” that by summer Jack “up and shipped us (Julie included) down to his folks,” the Olshanskys.66
Sun, sleep, and food, along with the Olshanskys’ nonjudgmental love, helped revive Tillie. She wrote Jack that she “started scribbling; I yam better guttily speaking; and oh its so heavenly not to be trembling with exhaustion by the time supper starts.” She was sleeping late “without even taking out 10 minutes to miss your arms & legs around me. I eat enough to make Georgie’s appetite look ‘delicate.’ So does Karla. So does Gazoonie.” Jack’s mother Bluma was so ill she ran from people on the beach who asked about her health, but she so adored her first grandchild “you’d a thought” Julie was “a second Lenin.” Tillie gushed: “(I love your mom & dad) (also their eldest son).”
As she recovered strength, Tillie wanted people to know that “we were the ones who fought Hitler . . . at every step fought against and warned . . . that there is a way to stop Hitler, our way, and it will be the only way.” She was right that communism had opposed Hitler from the beginning, but she was too partial to notice how the party had corrupted its cooperative values. It had, for example, condemned Budd Schulberg’s Liberty Magazine story “What Makes Sammy Run” as individualistic, not “proletarian.” Furious over its dictatorial tactics, Schulberg resigned before the party expelled him.67
The new Democratic governor of California pardoned Tom Mooney, appointed activist film star Melvyn Douglas to the Welfare Board, and made Carey McWilliams head of Immigration and Housing. At the close of Steinbeck’s novel Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad goes into hiding, promising to be “ever’where” fighting poverty, starvation, and injustice. This 1939 American epic about history and redemption reinforced Tillie’s awareness that other writers had “gone beyond me.” Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, with Jimmy Stewart playing the earnest hero, affirmed the three quintessential American documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The best of New Deal legislation together formed a fourth essential American document, a declaration of responsibility for public welfare. But the Dies committee’s investigations of Communists and even New Deal proponents undermined these documents with fascist tactics. Jack’s father started keeping all his “necessary” lists in one envelope that could be “destroyed in half a second.” Tillie advised Jack to “follow your pop’s example.”
From the Olshanskys, Tillie courted Rae’s goodwill with news that Karla was “all animation & movement & plumping out.” There were “several 1905’ers (real ones)” living near the beach, including two former “central committee members of the Bund till 1921.” One was Genya Gorelick, Al Richmond’s mother. Walking with Tillie, Genya told about being imprisoned by the czar in 1905 and by the Bolsheviks after 1917. Later, Tillie talked about Genya’s suffering under the czar, not under the Bolsheviks.
Jack worked only sporadically on the waterfront so Tillie sent advice about getting food stamps and a relief number, avoiding the landlord, renting out Karla’s room and a couch for twenty dollars, and confiscating Georgie’s paycheck to “throw it at the landlord.” She rationalized borrowing from Jack’s father: “we’ll pay it back someday.” For their sex life, not their pocketbook, she begged “Jackie darling, darling Jackie—say to hell with everything, & come down for 2 or 3 days—and sleep with me in the big bed of your father & mother in the sun.” She was “terribly drawn to you, same attraction as to Abe but this [is] a won-out passion.” Her desire did lure him to Venice. They posed on the beach, Tillie in a sexy two-piece bathing suit, arm-in-arm with Jack and his brother Leon. She looked happy, well-kept, and energized. Suddenly, the “old miracle” revived: “I started writing last night.” She tried painterly images: “the lemon and gold pier lights very clear in the twilight, the long slow line of the breakers from Ocean Park to Venice, and the ocean, swollen and rustling and glinting with green and crimson light.” She thought of writing an “ulcer story” about Genya with “the Venice pier” as background. If she had “managed that hour a day” writing her novel, she might now be able to write about women like Ida, Rae, and Genya, but she had not.
By summer’s end, Tillie returned with the girls to the house on Alpine Terrace.68 A letter from Rae awaited her with news that Rae’s sister, just three years older than Tillie, was dead. Tillie replied sympathetically and assured Rae that she and the girls were well, although their house was “too much for me right now. Any energies I have left I want (have) to give to writing.” She had begun a book after Julie’s birth, “before I got sick with the sulfanilimade” and was “working on it again. Just three hours a day.” Jack was “working at odd jobs since you left. Out of the warehouse and the culinary halls. He’s getting as muscled as a circus strong man.” Now he taught at the California Labor School and finally got a full-time job in Merchants Ice and Cold Storage warehouses.
Back in 1937, Tillie had been reassured by the Daily Worker’s attack on the “filthy falsehood” that Stalin might by aligned with “the bestial Nazi regime.” On 23 August 1939, however, that falsehood turned into truth, as the Soviets signed a nonaggression pact with the Nazis. Hitler ceded the Baltic States to the USSR, and Hitler and Stalin split Poland, then Germany invaded Poland. World War II began. Hitler’s villainy was beyond question. Of Stalin’s, Tillie still took no notice. Earl Browder rationalized that the Stalin-Hitler pact contributed to peace. When the League of American Writers refused to protest the Stalin/Hitler alliance, many writers, including Granville Hicks and Malcolm Cowley, resigned from the League. Many comrades resigned from the party. Neither Tillie Lerner nor Jack Olsen, however, resigned.69 Still obedient to the party, she followed its orders to return to Los Angeles during October and November. There, as Matilda Lerner, she checked out books from the public library, using the party’s Winter Street address.70
Tillie had sent spirited letters from Venice in the past summer mostly to Jack, without writing her parents at all. Angry and worried, Ida apparently boarded a train, sitting up all the way to California. She had not seen Karla since she and Sam put the tiny girl on a train to Los Angeles in October 1937, so she was relieved to find her granddaughter no longer emaciated and Jack earning a reliable income. Perplexed to find Tillie and the baby gone, Ida apparently did not complain about a pain in her stomach.
For at least five years, Tillie had used Karla’s “tummy” as an excuse for her own dereliction. Now Grandmother Ida insisted that Karla must have her long-postponed appendectomy and hernia operation. Perhaps this was when Ida wrote a grim poem in Yiddish, lamenting “I cry, ‘Come, Help Me,’/ But no reply to my cry.”71 Apparently, Jack did hear her cry and rushed Ida to Mount Zion Hospital, where she was operated on for gall stones, on probably 27 November. He got word to Tillie, and she sent a special delivery letter to Sam, who responded on 29 November 1939 to the “unexpected tragedy.” He and Ida had recently moved from the old Caldwell Street house to a larger house at 3419 Lafayette Avenue, a shaded street in a hilly, more affluent part of Omaha.72 He had “mortgaged everything I could” and now had “no work.” Still, “Mother should get the best treatment obtainable.” He sent fifty dollars and asked Tillie to postpone other bills “till Ill be able to pick up a little work. Mother must not know any financial burden.” His concern was that Ida “shall not worry.”73
Jack, who had recently become an official in the ILWU, wanted Tillie home. She faced another ultimatum: either remain in L.A. as a Communist operative or disobey party orders and return to her family. This time she followed her heart. Ida went back to Omaha, Julie turned one, and Karla turned seven, an event she celebrated wearing a Mexican dress from Rae. Tillie began following the “Women’s Slant” column in People’s World, tallying expenses, listing “cheap meat cuts,” and noting penny-pinching recipes mixing meats with cornmeal, cracked wheat, potatoes, or polenta. She joined a “Women’s Committee to Lower the High Cost of Living” and vowed to “scrub kitchen floor.” Her notebooks became a mish-mash of political and maternal issues. She mixed up “notes on history of Socialism in U.S.” with a “pattern for how to make panties.”74
Thanking “the old vigorous Rae” for Karla’s birthday dress, Tillie tried to allay worries: Karla had started the first half of the third grade and was making perfect grades in every subject except spelling. Tillie made a little socialist parable about Karla: though a boy friend in the third grade gave her presents, she fell for a first grader who gave her nothing. Karla added a note to her “Dear Auntte Rae”: “I wish I could see you and bonnie.” Signing “love Karla” and making Xs for kisses, she sounded lonely.
Believing that the party took precedence over personal loyalties, Tillie had neglected one child and aborted others, been unfaithful to her husband, hidden her marriage, invented another to the man she loved but left according to party dictates. She had skipped out on debts to doctors, hospitals, and landlords. She had taken Random House’s money but sacrificed her literary promise for party organizing. Near the end of 1937, she had not been able to “pour it out—tell the truth.” Since 1938, however, Tillie had tried to balance party loyalties and family responsibilities, but in November 1939 her absence at the party’s behest imperiled both her daughter’s and her mother’s health. In late 1939, an abashed Tillie realized that she must be more responsive and responsible to loved ones and to her own gifts. The question remained, however, whether she had frittered away not only her time but also her talents.