TRUMBO Read online

  Catherine sighs and again wearily shakes her head, remembering. “I think back on that now, and I ask myself how I could have been so brutal?”

  Trumbo knew his share of frustrations. At that point in his life, at the age of twenty-eight and in the midst of the Depression, he was once more casting about for a job. It must have seemed to him then that he really had very little to show for the ambitions that had kept him going so long. After all those years of writing—six novels finished, unpublished, lying in the bureau drawer!—the only substantial piece of work of his which was to see print was the biography of Metternich he had just finished for the Baron. And that, of course, would appear under von Reichenberg’s name. Trumbo was by then positively starving for recognition.

  And he had begun to suspect, more than just hope, that it might finally be coming his way. He was at that time finishing up what would be his first published novel, Eclipse. He believed in it as he had not in the others he had written before. He had been working steadily at the manuscript, watching it grow, since just after he had left the bakery. For the first time in writing fiction he felt completely in control of his material. This was to be a long novel, one that would focus on a single key figure in the town of Grand Junction, a character through whom it would be possible to view the entire town, examining its social structure at a number of different levels. He had to get a job so he could finish the book.

  Help came from a man named Frank Daugherty whom he had met while with the Hollywood Spectator. Daugherty had written for the magazine himself but worked in the Warner Bros. story department. During a chance meeting Trumbo mentioned to him that he was looking for work, and Daugherty, who knew and liked his writing on the Spectator, urged him to come up to the studio. He would, he promised, put in a word for him where he worked. Daugherty did just that. Trumbo was hired in the summer of 1934 as a reader in the story department at a good, steady thirty-five dollars a week. It wasn’t much. On good weeks at the Spectator even Welford Beaton had paid him better. Still, it was a way to get on with the work he considered most important. Not for a moment did he suspect—or even wish—that he was beginning a career in films.

  Alice Hunter remembers him from those early days in the Warners story department. Then Alice Goldberg, she is now Mrs. Ian McLellan Hunter, the wife of a close friend of Trumbo’s, herself a friend and the one person in the industry who has known him longest: “He was the kind of person you noticed immediately. The first day Trumbo came in it turned out he didn’t even have money for lunch. He had been working at the bakery, I remember. He talked about that then, talked about it a lot. Even in the story department he was different from everybody else. There was a quickness and a drive to him, and he had such an original turn of mind. He was the most industrious person I ever knew. He was a writer—he talked about that, too—and he knew he would be successful.”

  A reader in the story department of a major studio may only have had his foot on the bottom rung of the ladder, but he was nevertheless in an important position. The job took some writing ability, but still more literary judgment. Novels, plays, literary properties of all kinds were submitted to the motion picture company’s story department to be considered for purchase as the basis of film adaptation. The reader in the story department went through the material, judging it for literary quality and its movie potential, and then he wrote his report, a synopsis, and a comment. If he liked the material and recommended that it be considered further, his report might go three or four pages—otherwise, only a page was needed. One of the first books Trumbo remembers reading and reporting on there in Warner Bros. story department was F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night. “I wrote a glowing recommendation for it,” he says, “but of course they didn’t buy it.”

  It was in the early fall of 1934, while he was working in the Warners story department, writing early mornings and the evenings, that he completed Eclipse. He sent it out once on his own to Dodd, Mead, and had it rejected; then, thinking he might do better with help, he wrote to O. O. McIntyre, a syndicated newspaper columnist with the New York Evening Mail, who was a remote cousin of his. Trumbo pointed out the relationship and quickly made it clear he was only writing for advice. He asked if McIntyre could suggest an agent who might be suitable to handle a novel he had just completed. McIntyre wrote back promptly suggesting Curtis Brown, Ltd. Trumbo wrote to George Bye of that agency, who declined but in turn recommended that he try Elsie McKeogh. She had recently formed her own agency, Bye explained, and might be on the lookout for clients. It turned out that she would be pleased to take a look at Eclipse, and subsequently, that she would be delighted to take him on as a client. Thus began a very congenial author-agent relationship that lasted twenty-one years and ended only with the death of Mrs. McKeogh in 1955.

  She offered the novel to a couple of American publishers, then heard that Lovat Dickson in England was beginning operations as a book publisher and was looking for manuscripts there. Dickson, born Australian and raised Canadian, had emigrated to London and had made quite a splash there as the editor of the Fortnightly Review. She sent him the manuscript, reasoning (erroneously) that it would be easier to sell Eclipse to an American publisher if it had already been accepted by an English one. Since Dickson was more or less a Canadian, it seemed likely to her that he would be receptive to young American authors. And so he was.

  In a letter dated December 12, 1934, Elsie McKeogh communicated Lovat Dickson’s offer to publish Eclipse to Trumbo, suggesting that if he accepted she thought she could swing a sale to Macmillan in the United States. Dalton Trumbo never thought twice about it. He wired his acceptance, then followed that up with this letter to her on Warner Bros. stationery, dated December 15, 1934:

  My Dear Miss McKeogh:

  I am, of course, awfully pleased that Mr. Dickson is such a courageous gambler; and needless to say I hope his example will inspire Macmillans to similar daring. As I stated in my wire, I am willing to abide by any decision you make in marketing Eclipse, and you may govern yourself accordingly.…

  Because my grandfather took a vigorous part in the building of the portion of Colorado which the story deals with, I should like to add a dedication to the book. He is a grand old man who cleared the land, fought in the cattle-sheep wars, put in twelve years as a sheriff when fast shooting and hard riding were essential, and is still hale enough to enjoy any slight triumph his grandson might render him. Hence I should like the dedication to read:

  To

  My Pioneer Grandparents

  Millard and Hulda Tillery

  Will you please notify Mr. Dickson of this alteration, and also any subsequent publisher?…

  Cordially,

  Dalton Trumbo

  Eclipse is a first novel any writer could take pride in. It tells the story of John Abbott, who is, when we meet him in 1926, the most successful businessman in the town of Shale City, Colorado. His department store, the Emporium, the largest between Denver and Salt Lake City, is doing a thriving business. His bank is prospering. He is the most respected and admired man in town. However, Abbott is not without problems: he wants desperately to be free of his wife so that he may marry Donna Long, an intelligent, hardworking woman who is his second in command at the Emporium. The two have carried on an affair for years, and his wife has just discovered the fact; she makes it clear to them she will not step aside. Donna Long dies suddenly, mysteriously. Although the cause of death is given as “acute indigestion,” the implication is clear that she may have committed suicide.

  At first Abbott seems to rebound admirably. He comes back from a trip east, which he has taken to get over the shock of Donna Long’s death, bursting with ambition and ideas, plans to make the town better. Among them is the new public swimming pool, which he donates when a town boy drowns in the river. The pool is dedicated on the eve of the 1929 stock market crash, and at just about that same time Abbott receives word that his wife, who has now left him, has died.

  He faces the Depression alone. One
by one, those who had admired him and sought his favor reject him as his enterprise declines. His bank fails. His department store goes into receivership, and he is kept on as an employee. Physically disabled by a stroke, Abbott has sustained even greater damage to his psyche. Disoriented, bewildered, he is partly to blame for the fire that sweeps the Emporium, the one in which he himself perishes.

  Thus Eclipse is a kind of Babbitt-in-reverse. Where George Babbitt loses his identity and is all but swallowed up by his own success, John Abbott is made unique by his failure. Among Sinclair Lewis’s cast of Zenith businessmen, Abbott is personally much more like Sam Dodsworth. He is a personable, honest, intelligent man, one who has good impulses. In fact, Abbott is the very model of the enlightened capitalist: a philanthropist, a man who accepts the responsibilities of his wealth. And it is in this that Trumbo succeeds most impressively in Eclipse: he successfully attacks the business ethos at its strongest point, presenting Abbott as simultaneously the champion and the victim of small-town capitalism. John Abbott is no caricature. He is a man of dimension and depth, a man worthy of admiration, yet even he is crushed by the system he serves and the town in which he believes.

  This makes Eclipse sound more tendentious than it really is. It is no tract, after all, but a novel and a rather good one: one of Trumbo’s purposes in writing it was to present a picture of life in Grand Junction—the ebb and flow of events, the frustrations and choked passions—and he does this well. But if anyone should doubt that his primary purpose was something more than offering a slice of small-city life, he need only consider a few of Abbott’s conversations with Hermann Vogel. Vogel is something of an amateur scholar and philosopher; he is inclined to take a coldly intellectual view of things. Of his friend, John Abbott, for instance: “I think you’re going to die of pedestalization, old friend, just as your archetype did.” And his archetype, Vogel tells him, is Napoleon, who made the condition clear when he declared, “‘Your legitimate kings can be beaten twenty times and still return to their thrones. But I am a soldier parvenu… and my throne rests upon my successes in the battlefields.’” And so we are invited to see John Abbott as a businessman parvenu, one whom society and the system say must continually earn and re-earn his place on the pedestal with new triumphs in the field of business, ever grander gestures of philanthropy. Let him falter, let him fail to produce, and he will be tumbled down, never to be granted even the grace of the hundred days that fate extended to Napoleon.

  The great law of what-have-you-done-for-me-lately prevails, and when Abbott fails to satisfy the insatiable Shale City Moloch, few show him much pity. Not even his friend Vogel, the immigrant intellectual:

  “I love America,” murmured Hermann Vogel. “And I’m not going back [to Europe]. Not now, at least. I wouldn’t miss the glory of these times for anything on earth. It’s like—taking a clean bath. It’s like seeing a dog deloused, with millions of filthy little insects dropping dead after having made him miserable for God knows how long. That’s what is happening to America, my friend. The lice are being driven from the body politic. If an occasional ant like you, or a spider such as I, is killed in the process—well, it’s a regrettable affair, but a sacrifice we can cheerfully make. I, for one, am almost exhilarated at the thought.”

  An old revolutionary image—parasites dropping from the body politic, leaving it healthy at least. In hints and suggestions such as this, and in one overtly radical scene in which a young Red harangues a street-corner crowd and sings the “Internationale” as he is hauled off by the cops, Eclipse turns out to be a far more radical novel than we might have expected Dalton Trumbo to write at this time in his life. We see that in 1934, at the age of twenty-nine, he was well on his way leftward.

  The protagonist of Eclipse was drawn directly from life. W. J. Moyer was a Grand Junction businessman, a merchant who, in nearly all particulars, resembled precisely Trumbo’s John Abbott. Moyer’s department store, The Fair, closed during the Depression, and his bank failed to open following the 1933 bank holiday. His character, too, was very much like Abbott’s—open-handed and generous, he was also given to philanthropy. In fact, he donated a swimming pool to the city of Grand Junction, which was called the Moyer Natatorium, and at the dedication none other than Elizabeth Trumbo, then six years of age, was the first to jump in. In other details, too—Moyer’s rocky marriage, rumors of an affair of long duration between him and one of his employees—there are marked similarities. Those in Grand Junction who knew him well maintained that, item for item, detail for detail, John Abbott quite simply was W. J. Moyer. And many resented this, for after all, in one important particular Moyer differed from Abbott: he was still alive when the novel was published (he died in 1943 at the age of eighty-three). He could still be hurt.

  So some there in Grand Junction counted Trumbo’s portrayal of John Abbott as an unkindness to W. J. Moyer. Among them, as it turned out, was his old boss at the Grand Junction Sentinel, Walter Walker. Trumbo sent the editor an inscribed copy of Eclipse shortly after its publication in England. In the letter which he enclosed, he remarked of the novel:

  As for “Eclipse,” I hope you will not be angry if you find characters whom you recognize in it. I am convinced that all novels are based in fact, and distorted for fiction purposes to suit the author’s particular talent. I do not pretend that any of the portraits in “Eclipse” are real, yet you will, I am sure, see at least some characteristics of their counterparts in real life. I have no apologies although I do confess to some qualms. But the job is done, and it took a long time in the doing, and since I understand that one or two copies have already hit Grand Junction, there is no use trying to keep the book a secret. I am enclosing a copy of the review which appeared in the very snooty London Times Literary Supplement*—a review which, as you can easily guess, made me extremely happy.

  The letter, which he ended, “Sincerely, Dalton,” might more frankly have been signed, “Anxiously, Dalton,” for Trumbo was clearly uneasy about the reaction of some back in his hometown—and of Walter Walker, in particular.

  His old editor, the man who had given him his start as a writer and at the same time encouraged him to consider a career in politics, replied to Trumbo after a month. Writing more in sorrow than in anger, he said:

  My dear Dalton:

  … It goes without saying that “Eclipse” has caused a great deal of local comment. While in your letter you say you do not pretend that any of the portraits in “Eclipse” are real, nevertheless people in a town that is used as the locale for a story or a novel are prone to accept as real any characters which they think they recognize.

  Naturally, I have no feeling of anger toward you concerning the book. After all, it was your privilege to utilize your old home town in demonstrating your talents as a writer if you wanted to do so. Furthermore, I might say, in looking at it from a selfish standpoint, that I have no cause to complain because you treat me very decently in the book. Frankly, however, with the personal regard and affection I have for you and the admiration I hold for your talent, I do regret that you saw fit to release this story at this time. The only personality involved in the book that actuates me in saying this is that of W. J. Moyer. Had not misfortunes piled up on him quite so heavily and so frequently, and if he were not alive, this regret of mine would be considerably reduced in volume.

  I cannot help but believe that your book was inspired by some real idea or fancied that you or your family had received a great injury from this community and perhaps from the man you call John Abbott, and in which case I certainly do not attempt to condemn your action.…

  Sincerely,

  W. W.

  The feeling was widespread in Grand Junction that Trumbo wrote his book out of resentment—and in a general way, it is probably true he did. Walter Walker was correct, in other words, in assuming that Eclipse was inspired by a feeling that Dalton Trumbo and his family “had received a great injury from this community.” But specifically from the man he called John Abbott? This
interpretation—still a popular one in Grand Junction—does not hold up. It urges that Trumbo’s portrait of Moyer as John Abbott is unsympathetic, which it certainly is not. Trumbo presents him as the most decent man in the town, one blessedly free of the hypocrisy that rules there. Eclipse is an honest effort to understand one man and his relationship to the town he lived in.

  Why then were the people of Grand Junction so angry at the book and at Dalton Trumbo for writing it? “Really, what they hate about the book is that it’s an attack on them,” said Trumbo, “on a faithless town. They could take so much from a man, kiss his ass so soundly, and then just turn their backs on him. And that’s what they don’t like.”

  But how did Trumbo settle on W. J. Moyer? Why did he choose to tell his story, and what did he hope to say through it? “Mr. Moyer, I think, served to a degree in the novel as a substitute for my father and the treatment he received in Grand Junction. Being fired, as he was, from Benge’s Shoe Store after working there for so many years, well, it came to him like a bolt out of the blue—this was the end! Now I perhaps reacted to this more unfairly than I should have. But as I pondered the fate that befell Mr. Moyer after the Depression—I kept up with it all in the Grand Junction paper—I could realize it was in essence the same thing, a man destroyed. And that possibly accounted for some of my passion against the town itself, which actually had been quite good to me.”