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ever actually became a card-carrying member of the American Communist Party. She immediately bore him their first child, Hill, in 1948.
    In 1950, when the House Un-American Activities Committee anti-Communist hunt got going full blast in all its glory, and the Hollywood Ten had finally been jailed, Harry (often jokingly called Number Eleven of the Hollywood Ten—although a number of others claimed that title, too, I gather) was investigated. Somebody had given in his name, obviously. Rather than talk to the Committee and give the names of friends as most of his friends did, Harry chose to skip out to Canada and make his way to France, later sending for Louisa and Hill when he got settled, I do not choose to comment on what will be history’s verdict on these ignorant, primitive, self-seeking American politicians who could tolerate and even defend a Rankin and a Joe McCarthy, though they will probably be slightly less badly thought of than the Catholic Inquisition.
    Even had he stayed and not gone to jail, he could not have gotten a job anywhere in the American film industry without talking for the Committee because of the secret blacklist—the blacklist which the industry denied existed but which in fact did exist. We tend to prefer not to remember all this today whenever we righteously criticize the Russians for putting their outspoken writers to jail.
    Harry’s first two years in France were very hard indeed, because of the language problem. But without help from his family (his parents disapproved of him and had not quite died yet to leave him his inheritance), Harry started over. He played bit parts as Americans in French films, became adept at the new industry of dubbing American films into French for the French market, and finally was writing screenplays in French—now for the young French Nouvelle Vague film makers. And as the years passed and the McCarthy Era blew finally away back home, more and more American producers were coming to him for screenplays of productions to be done in Europe, and finally for screenplays to be done at home. It had been discovered Harry had a natural talent for American love stories, and for America’s morality play, the Western. Success followed success.
    So it is true that on that night of April 27th, when young Hill threw his first young monkey wrench into the machinery, Harry Gallagher was an unqualified, even a disgusting success.
    But Harry had paid pretty dearly for never compromising his principles. It was, Harry felt, something to be proud of. And it was that that stunned him so about Hill’s accusation. It was as if everything he had done and stood for had gone by the board, been thrown out, negated, denied existence by his son in a wild youthful jettison, as if in his housecleaning young Hill, was throwing out the furniture and rugs and even the wall fixtures, along with the dirt.
    And yet they were not all that far apart. Hill with his anti-Capitalist, anti-Communist Nouvel Anarchisme and the black flag of Dany Cohn-Bendit was not all that far from Harry’s viewpoint. Because Harry had given up on Communism. After watching the developments in Russia, China and elsewhere during the ’40s and ’50s and the ’60s, Harry had become convinced that while these societies might be—probably were—helping the lowest common denominator of humanity, their demand, their drive to compel rigid inflexibility of belief from every citizen (as the Church had also done in its day of power) was diminishing, impeding the movement upward of the highest common denominator of the race: its growth, which was where the true creativity, the talent for innovation, and genius for change and spiritual growth were situated. And for him, however reluctantly, that meant a return to enlightened Capitalism as the lesser evil of the two. But he didn’t like that Capitalism, either. Or what it stood for. Spiritually, that made him an Anarchist too.
    But try and tell that to Hill. Certainly I