To Be Frank

 

My widower’s walk for the day was a pilgrimage to the former home of writer Bruno Frank at 513 North Camden Drive, Beverly Hills.

Homes on the street boast the scale and dimensions of the Italian palazzo. The location is a block away from the city’s commercial center. Sweet.

Frank was born in Stuttgart, Germany and worked as a dramatist-novelist until the Reichstag fire, after which he thought it best to get he and his wife, Liesl, to the far edge of the Western world. As he was Jewish, that turned out to be the right call.

He worked productively in the L.A. film world during its Golden Age, most notably penning the script for RKO Radio Pictures', “The Hunchback of Notre Dame,” starring Charles Laughton.

I am reading Frank’s “A Man Named Cervantes” about the writer of “Don Quixote,” Miguel de... My edition is in Spanish as I am prepping for the court interpreter’s oral exam and because Cervantes was, you know, Spanish.

I learned about the book while reading Georg Lukács’ “The Historical Novel,” which has maintained a long ascendance over my writing philosophy. Lukács was a Marxist literary theorist who asserted that, “what matters in the historical novel is not the retelling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who figured in those events.”

He urged the novelist to engage with “popular life,” with the thoughts and desires and sufferings of those whom the grand historical narrative necessarily overlooks.

In discussing my novel, “Vedette,” the literary review “Margin” observed, “most impressive was the way in which Siciliano drew for his readers the portrait of revolution through the lives and experiences of the villagers. There is something of a grassroots nature to his worldview…”

In “The Goodfather,” the events of Congressman Marcantonio’s career reported by the “New York Times” are refracted through the experiences of his humble neighbors on 112th Street, la famiglia Fortunato.

Lukács singled out Frank’s book as a work that achieves this granular approach to historical science.

Frank knew something about persecution from on-high and, in the book, depicted that of Roman courtesans by Pope Pius V during young Cervantes’ Vatican residency. In 1967, it became a feature film, “Cervantes,” directed by Vincent Sherman.

He was one among other German writers who made the trek to the Left Coast. Here, he joined his friends Heinrich Mann and Thomas Mann. Playwright Bertolt Brecht had a similar set-up in nearby Santa Monica.

In 1989, I attended the Writers Guild awards dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel with actress Monique Salcido. As part of the event, the Guild screened updated credit sequences to films scripted on the sly by blacklisted writers - with their actual names - remedying an injustice of McCarthy-era Hollywood.

Still living and present was Ring Lardner Jr., a member of the Hollywood Ten, who recalled Los Angeles of the ‘30s and ‘40s as a place not yet overrun by cars, where writing work was plentiful and well-remunerated, the air redolent with jasmine during a good portion of the year.

One draws a blank trying to imagine the German literary titans in sunny, palm-leafy surroundings but, however removed from the gritty urban/industrial environments in which they had formed, the Warm Orange must have represented a welcoming safe harbor from Nazi terror.

What would they make of this current Southern California in which masked and armed jackals cruise about in unmarked vans kidnapping people off the street? We can be pretty sure of what they would call them.

Frank died in June 1945, just after the official surrender of the Third Reich to Allied commanders and just before Hollywood scribes would suffer their own witch hunt. We can only speculate on how persecution, forced displacement, and homesickness contributed to his untimely passing at 58.

Bruno Frank is interred at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Glendale, California, far away from Stuttgart.

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