Lear on the highway: Albert Maltz’s ‘The Journey of Simon McKeever’

Hitting the road looking for work in the midst of the Depression.

The scriptwriter, novelist, and blacklisted member of the Hollywood Ten Albert Maltz was around 40 himself when he wrote his novel on aging, The Journey of Simon McKeever, first published in 1949. He had many more productive years ahead but because of the blacklist this novel was the last one that would appear under the imprint of a major American publisher and it would be another twenty years before he would sell another script. Maltz was not old himself but, because of the repression of the House Un-American Activities Committee just starting to have an impact, and later of the McCarthy era, he must have felt some of the uselessness of the lead character in his novel which has now appeared in a new edition by a British publisher.

Simon, a 73-year-old ex-oil pipeline fitter, lives in an old-age home in “Frisco” and undertakes a for him monumental journey to Glendale in Los Angeles County to find a doctor to cure his “arthuritis,” which has hobbled him to the point that he can no longer work.

The novel is, as it must be in documenting the life of an old man, a series of small moments. Simon’s first of these begins with “the monumental journey across the street” where he finds a quarter which takes him to a pharmacy to buy some half-decent tobacco to substitute for the rot gut passed out by the owner of the home in his penny-pinching the boarders. Here he meets a woman who tells him of a miracle cure of a doctor 400 miles south, and thus begins his next “monumental journey,” where he takes to the open road as a hitchhiker in search of his lost vitality.

The novel’s great subjects are the aging process itself which is universal, how that process is worsened under capitalism, and how it is made tenable because of the comradely modes and customs of him and his fellow workers.

In another time, rather than the paranoid one of the late 1940s and early ’50s, the novel, purchased by the Fox producer Daryl Zanuck, might have been the vehicle for an Academy Award-winning performance. Both Walter Huston and Spencer Tracey showed interest in playing the part. But the Fox board ruled down Zanuck, and the film was never made, though years later it was offered by Jane Fonda to her father Henry, who had never won the award, as almost a sequel to his Academy-nominated role as the working-class everyman in Grapes of Wrath. Fonda signed on, but the film still was not made.

The novel stands as perhaps the last great monument and elegy to the American proletarian fiction of the 1930s. As a road story for the ages—and of the aged—it recalls a series of works in film and literature. Most prominent among these is how in its minute documenting of the challenges of the everyday the novel anticipates Vittorio De Sica’s Umberto D, that director’s monument to a then-faded Italian Neorealism about the struggle of a pensioner to meet his rent. McKeever forecasts as well Clint Eastwood’s paean to aging, The Mule, about a lonely old man who finds worth as a drug runner and helps restore a town devastated by capital flight.

Along the way, Simon quotes Shakespeare’s King Lear, and like Lear he is cast out into the wilderness. But unlike Lear he finds redemption and purpose not in the way he had planned or wanted but in working on what he claims is his great dream, to write a book. Simon reads Jack London, another self-taught writer, and performs his own working-class criticism of The Dance of Life, a pop philosophy treatise of the 1920s where he complains that though the book has chapters on “The Art of Dancing,” of “Writing” and of “Thinking,” there is no chapter on “The Art of Working” or “The Art of Earning a Living.” He then composes his own poem based on his difficulty in affording a fare titled, “Litany to a Bus Ticket.”

Simon is that much maligned figure of the New Deal era of the 1930s and ’40s, the Common Man, heralded in 1948 in the last great alternative presidential campaign in U.S. history, Henry Wallace’s, and in music by Aaron Copland’s arguably best-known composition, Fanfare for the Common Man. The proletarian icon was lampooned by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce, who replaced the term with his own empire phrase, “The American Century.” And it was canceled by studio magnate Jack Warner, who is said to have declared on the roof of his studio in 1945, as he urged on his goons to throw bolts down on his striking workers below, “ I will never again make a film about the Common Man.”

Simon McKeever, which describes the dignity of the aged under stress in a system that has discarded them, is especially relevant today. One of the “inmates” in Simon’s boarding house is 63 and must count his pennies until he reaches 65 and can draw on a state pension. Everywhere there is an attack on this vulnerable population. No more starkly than in France, where the right-wing banker president Emmanuel Macron, after pushing the retirement age from 62 to 64 in a country where corporations are laying people off earlier and earlier, then spits in the face of those trying to hang on for two more years, like the boarder in Simon’s home, by championing their “right to die.”

The novel brilliantly describes the angst of the aging process for someone who wants to continue to be a productive member of society (“I was always a working man”) but who is instead cast aside on the scrapheap of a broken-down boarding house, surrounded by men like him who help him with his journey, but also by the desperation of another resident in the house who says they don’t need a clock because “there is nothing to keep time about.” Concludes Simon, “There’s an awful lot of dying in most people’s living.”

In his dream on the road, he struggles with being labeled, because he is unproductive, “an old cockroach…No good for anything. A parasite. Garbage!” His dead wife appears to him in the dream, though, and validates his usefulness. He also fights against using his age as a crutch to make him bitter. He lets a vibrant young man who he is hitching with go along ahead of him so he will not slow him down and wishes him well because “he doesn’t want to turn into one of those cranks who resents everyone younger.”

But this is also about a life lived under the strain of vicious periods of capitalism, which have caused him to at first abandon then recalibrate his dreams. In the present he is exploited by the owner of the old age home (which Simon describes as “a prison”), who skimps on food staples while claiming his work is “a labour of Christian love in which profit and loss played no part.” On the road, in the presence of an alcoholic salesman bent on keeping up appearances at all costs, he complains about “the dollar bill,” as “a rope around your neck,” “the way it can twist a man out of shape, it’s the shame of our civilization.”

Simon was forced to leave Ireland because of penury due to the exploitation by the English and talks about his dream of going to school to be an engineer collapsing during a depression in 1914 and then stunted again as part of the lost years of the great Depression from 1930 to 1938, because of the collapse of Wall Street, spent riding the rails looking for work that was difficult to find. One of the few memories that stand out for him in this period of so many wasted lives is of a mother carrying her baby—dead because of lack of nourishment—home to show her mother. In a bus station, where he seeks shelter for the night, he outwits a rule-bound ticket taker, playing on the way he was “bent to his superiors” by making him think he might be sent by the company to monitor the attendant’s work.

Finally, the novel is a validation of the culture and modes of thought of a working class which despite being stunted under capital exhibits strong notions of solidarity. His trip begins on what he calls “a hunch,” where a woman in a drug store tells him casually that there is a doctor who can save him. “Some of the best jobs in my life came from a tip from some oil man I passed on the street,” he says in relating the way that knowledge is passed from one working man and woman to the other. He believes strongly that the world is made up “mostly of good people. Some punks, some mean ones, some crooks, but most were a pleasure to recall,” all of whom he meets on his trip.

He has as well an innate distrust of authority, scolding a cop who orders him to move on from a park bench he has camped out on in the middle of the night: With “women being raped…children dying of consumption, politicians grafting, racketeers and labour spies getting paid off—and all you got to do is arrest old men for sleeping in the park. What a profession.” Equally, as a worker, he questions capitalist communications, in particular an advertisement from Standard Oil—since he was a pipefitter and knew the truth—claiming that John D. Rockefeller alone built the oil fields.

In the end his new dream is realized by resorting to that staple of all unions, the contract, as he negotiates to facilitate his being able to write his book for the purpose of moving “the world one inch forward.” In its validation of the value and worth of the common man and woman Maltz’ novel equally “moves the world one inch forward,” not only in his own time but now in ours.

Albert Maltz
The Journey of Simon McKeever
Calder Publications, 2024

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CONTRIBUTOR

Dennis Broe

Dennis Broe, a film, television and art critic, is also the author of the Harry Palmer LA Mysteries. His latest novel, The Dark Ages, focuses on McCarthyite repression in Los Angeles in the 1950s.