When It Was Fun to Be Red : UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES: A Memoir of the Fifties, <i> By Sally Belfrage (HarperCollins: $22.50; 264 pp.)</i>

Sally Belfrage was born in Hollywood in 1936. Myrna Loy was her godmother; and she attended a birthday party for Shirley Temple where the cake, for age-image reasons, was one or two candles short. Her English father and mother were stars in the Beaverbrook newspaper galaxy: Cedric Belfrage, a film and theater critic whom Noel Coward once denounced as a cad for attending an opening in a soft collar, and Molly Castle, a chatty columnist billed as “The Girl Everyone Reads.” They were a golden couple; a visit to the Soviet Union led them to join the Communist Party briefly and then to go on, with fewer constraints, as fellow travelers. It was a time when, in Hollywood at least, it was fun to be Red; much better than boring, or out of touch or--of course--dead.

The war came, and for Cedric it went on being fun; much less so for Molly and their two children. They moved to New York, where he worked for British Intelligence and later traveled to Occupied Germany to pick anti-fascist editors for the denazified newspapers in the British sector. Anti-fascist, in those first postwar months, tended to mean communist or socialist. For Cedric, a blithe spirit oddly harnessed to an unchanging political loyalty, that was all to the good.

For the changing political climate in the United States, it was all to the bad. His Hollywood politics, his role in Germany and above all his founding of the intransigently leftist National Guardian--it backed the candidacy of Henry Wallace; mostly supported the Soviet Union, though not its feud with Tito, and was anti-anti-Communist all through the Cold War--earned him the steady attention of the FBI. Soon it would earn him the wrath of the House Un-American Activities Comittee and, in the mid-’50s, arrest and deportation.

Still, Sally Belfrage’s partly comic, highly painful and ultimately unreconciled memoir portrays him by and large as a happy warrior. The victim of his war, though, was not the object of its attack--the Cold War did just fine and so did domestic anti-communism. It was the bystanders: his family. “The phone was tapped from the moment I could talk on it,” Sally writes. Nick, her younger brother, was stood up in his classroom at age 12 by a teacher who demanded: “Who you going to kill today, Belfrage?” Molly, whose interest in politics had long since expired, was fired from her job at McCall’s, called up before the HUAC and, refusing to denounce Cedric, was deported even before he was.

It was the best thing that he had done for her since the golden Hollywood days. Sally’s memoir is about something deeper and more destructive than the troubles of a family singled out by McCarthyist oppression. The awfulness was internal. From the time they moved to New York, Cedric rarely came home. He fathered a child by a Frenchwoman, set up housekeeping with another woman and eventually divorced Molly. The children were left with a mother who went about for years in a state of weeping, self-absorbed depression. From a glamorous life and an admired profession, she found herself in a cramped New York apartment, coping with short funds and a deep loathing of domesticity, and cut off from her country, her work, her outings and her friends. Deportation to England paradoxically restored her to many of these things, to something like the life she had been exiled from.

Sally Belfrage, who died a few months ago, grapples with the lost glamour, the misery, the traces of sophisticated blitheness that flickered in the misery and two other things. One is the grievous pain of a child who would have been quite willing to share the struggle of a father she worshiped but whom, for most purposes, he abandoned. The other is her confused adolescent identity, torn between the painful eccentricity of her family’s public and private life and a need to become a normal American teen-ager: curlers, pleated skirts, etiquette (entering a room, make sure you sit in a chair that matches your dress), sexual etiquette (third-date kiss and cautious gradations well this side of going all the way) and the ultimate triumph of getting pinned to a West Point cadet. “When I was a child I wanted to be famous; by adolescence I yearned to be invisible,” she writes.

It is a lot to put together, and Belfrage’s memoir is something of a hybrid; often ragged, and in some ways emotionally and intellectually quite unresolved. It runs until she is 18 and is off to visit her newly deported mother; it picks up in an epilogue when she is in her 50s, and her mother and her father are dying in their comfortable homes in Bermuda and Mexico, respectively. There are only sketchy references to the years between: her private life and her career as a writer and journalist largely engaged on the left. Many of the contradictions of her adolescence reappear in the epilogue’s last year; in one instance, astonishingly.

The raggedness and the contradictions make for uneven writing. “One thing I get from my father is that I am an Unamerican,” she writes, “though what a terrible long time it took me to be glad of it.” This is an unstable rock on which to build a memoir; especially since so much of the book details her efforts to fit in with her high school friends and the 1950’s notion of the good life. It disengages her from her adolescent self--often crudely and in an almost cartoon-like fashion--without managing quite to attach to anything else, except in the form of a highly abstract sketch of her later radicalism. Certainly, although she has taken on a part of her father’s political heritage, her portrait of him, though sometimes engaging, is essentially distasteful.

All this is uneasy going, and yet it gives “Un-American Activities” something different and sometimes more striking than emotional honesty: the search for it. Often she misses; but when she succeeds, she can write with a fine and startling emotional clarity. She starts off, for example, in something of the Mitford tone of privileged disaster, where horrors are presented comically with an air of aristocratic insouciance. Suddenly she pivots and writes of her childhood, when her parents were coming apart without talking about it: “A profound despair covered up by a fraudulent happy-go-luckiness whose manufacture was the last, worst torture.”

The story of her high school affair with a West Point cadet--it was not meant to be an affair but in the course of a heavy session, she writes “it just leaked in”--is astonishing. He was straightforward, ambitious, tender, moral and devoid of moral imagination. She goes through a terrible abortion alone and breaks with him; 30 years later he turns up, a major general whose specialty is missile warfare. Instantly, despite their totally divergent views and his marriage, they launch a prolonged, passionate affair under the eyes of Army intelligence.

This is comet-like; it fits in with nothing else, except with the unresting, unappeased vision that Belfrage has of herself, her life and above all, of her father. Cedric’s gaiety, charm, affection and public passions imprinted her; his intimate aloofness and material abandonment made the imprint a palimpsest--of which this memoir is an uneasy image.

BOOK MARK: For an excerpt from “Un-American Activities,” see the Opinion section.