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Conclusion 263 By 1977 the once-energetic Lawson had slowed down considerably. Now well into his eighties, he had failing eyesight and was experiencing the onset of Parkinson’s disease, a motor system disorder often characterized by tremors, stiffness of limbs, slowness of movement, and impaired balance and coordination. The cruelest aspect for Lawson, perhaps, was how this hindered his ability to write, to read, and to visit theaters to watch movies. This in itself was a death sentence. His body, in short, had been “savagely attacked” by the ravages of time, which left him in ill humor. As early as January 1956, he had to spend two months in New York enduring “two operations for cataracts, which had rendered him partially blind”—a cruel penalty for an “omnivorous” reader.1 “I had an exceptionally bad time,” he acknowledged agonizingly “because the first operation (on one eye) seemed all right and then a film formed over it again.”Then he “had a great deal of further trouble, because the attempt to cut through to open up the eye was bungled, and the eye was in danger.” This led to the second operation, and “for a few days after,” there was “bad pain and one must rest and be very careful of any strain for five or six weeks.” After recovering, his eyesight was “perfect with glasses—indeed, it [is] actually twenty-twenty,” he declared. But surgery is rarely cost-free, not least in the psychic realm.2 It was not long before he was making a discreet “inquiry concerning” the “procedure necessary” for “an individual to will his body, following death.”3 Soon he was putting his house on the market and moving north to San Francisco to be closer to his daughter.4 “A buyer suddenly appeared,” said a marveling Lawson, “and was crazy about the house—so crazy that he has agreed to take the dog as part of the deal.”5 Living among fellow senior citizens proved to be trying, however. It was a “curious experience” and “proved that we are not the types for Old People, gathered in homes and pretending that we are pleased.” “We learned a lot and met some nice people,” though the “communal meals” proved trying, and the “people (mostly women who dress carefully and want to pretend that they are busy and pleased with everything)” also tested his patience.6 But age meant Lawson had fewer choices. He now walked with difficulty and was “considering getting small crutches, which only go to one’s middle and are attached to the elbows.”7 He was suffering various illnesses. “The sturm und drang of moving was too much,” he told Bessie, “for both Sue and me, and we have been on the edge of half or three-quarter sickness ever since.”8 Lawson came to realize that his Parkinson’s disease was not abating.9 By August 1977, John Howard Lawson was dead, the commitment he had forged decades earlier was now interred. Appropriately, though, even in death he was stirring controversy. Setting the tone for future constructions of Lawson, his obituary in the New York Times repeated the canard that he “‘used to give his colleagues tips on how to get the Party viewpoint across in their dialogue,’” and this supposedly contributed to his downfall. Ring Lardner Jr. quickly took up the cudgels for his erstwhile comrade.“Actually ,” he instructed the newspaper correctly, “he regarded anything of that sort as a puerile approach to the politicalization of screenwriting. More revolutionary movies, he said, would come from the interdependence of form and content and the deeper penetration of human character, especially in neglected sections of the population. To his younger, less philosophic disciples, his counseling sometimes seemed remote from the immediate struggle.”10 Nor had other controversies that had touched him disappeared. In 1994 a hullabaloo erupted once more when a popular monthly magazine wondered if there were too many Jewish Americans in Hollywood.11 The posthumous assault on Lawson was of a piece with the continuing assault on writers—notably screenwriters—a process he had contributed exceedingly to combating. Just before the 1947 siege of Lawson, Sheridan Gibney, who wrote the screenplay for Anthony Adverse, among other movies,groused that“after fifty years of motion pictures,the words‘screenwriter ’ and ‘screenwriting’ do not appear in current dictionaries,”12 and this kind of symbolic annihilation had not dissipated as a new century dawned. In this regard, Britain in 2003 seemed similar to...

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