TRUMBO Page 17

  He had begun the project in 1937 after carrying the idea with him for a number of years. Early in the thirties he had seen an item in the newspaper telling of an incident that had occurred during an official visit to Canada by the Prince of Wales. In the course of a tour of a Canadian veterans hospital, the prince was seen by reporters to emerge weeping from a closed room. Inquiries disclosed that behind the door lay a World War I soldier who had lost not only his limbs, but all his senses except touch as well. According to the newspaper account, the only way that the prince could communicate with the soldier was to kiss him on the forehead—and that he had done.

  Well, Trumbo thought, why not a novel from the point of view of such a man? The basket case, war’s most extreme victim, could surely make the most eloquent and persuasive statement against it, if only a novel could actually be written under such difficult restrictions. And so very early, the composition of Johnny Got His Gun presented itself to Dalton Trumbo as a series of technical problems to be dealt with and solved. And perhaps that was just as well, for if he had allowed himself to become totally immersed in the dramatic reality of this emotionally loaded subject, then he might have been tempted to raw excesses of passion—to bathos or to rage—and the book that was Johnny might never have been written as it was written. He managed to solve those technical problems by the intelligent use of a number of devices. Since the action of the book was to take place totally within the brain of his young soldier—“a dead man with a mind that could still think,” Joe Bonham calls himself—Trumbo quite properly employed a modified stream of consciousness technique and deviated from it only toward the very end of the novel (doing some slight damage in the process to Johnny’s integrity of tone).

  Trumbo also uses film techniques to good advantage. Flashbacks, in such a context as this one, seem so inevitable that if the technique were not then available, it would have had to be invented. The success of the flashbacks in Johnny is due partly to the skill with which they are handled: each of Joe Bonham’s memories is sharp and incisive, introduced logically, and each is essential to the structure of the novel. But partly, too, the success here is due to its naturalness in the context of the novel’s situation. You would almost expect the entire novel to be done in alternating flashbacks and soliloquies. What is perhaps more remarkable, given the fact that his protagonist has lost all senses but touch, is that Trumbo is able to extend his narrative through present time in the latter half of the book, putting Joe in contact with the outside world, and ultimately in conflict with it.

  Trumbo also employs the movie technique of montage, covering space with sound brilliantly in the scene of Joe’s departure for war. Bits of talk between him and his girl Kareen are jumbled with an orator’s highfalutin rhetoric, shouts from the crowd, and lines from “Over There,” the George M. Cohan war anthem that gave the novel its title—all of it sketching in the scene and evoking the period with a shorthand that is essentially cinematic.

  And finally, though this may seem a bit vague, his treatment of time in Johnny Got His Gun is not novelistic in the usual sense, but more in the nature of what you experience seeing a film. There is little of the density of detail and incident that you usually get in a novel: it is actually a rather short book. Yet time passes. This in itself is surprising in a narrative that is so nearly static, the only real action coming in the second part with Joe’s breakthrough to the outside world. But what is especially impressive is that although the period of time that passes is an unspecified one, Trumbo manages to create the impression that it is of rather considerable duration, several years certainly. He uses fade-outs suggesting loss of consciousness. He fixes our attention firmly on Joe so that Joe’s subjective experience of the passage of time, whether faulty or not, is totally believable to us. It is like movie time, an emotional dimension, an empathetic reality.

  The first of Johnny’s two “Books” begins with Joe Bonham’s numbed and agonized wish that the phone would stop ringing. It is an auditory hallucination, and in with it rushes the memory of his father’s death: The phone rings at the bakery where Joe works, and he is summoned home by his mother, telling him that his father has just died. Joe’s reaction, as he views his father’s corpse (quoted earlier in Chapter Two), leads him to the realization that something is wrong, that he is sick, that there really is no telephone ringing, and that he is stone deaf. He drifts in and out of consciousness, and it is not until toward the end of the chapter that any memory or mention of the war comes, and then only fleetingly, for he is quickly back with his parents in Colorado—living, as he then must, in the past, existing only in his memories.

  As Book I, entitled “The Dead,” moves on, we follow the pattern established in the first chapter. Joe Bonham continues to remember, and his memories center, for the most part, on his early life in Shale City, Colorado. These individual scenes are brilliantly realized; the past is evoked with the economy and vividness of film. A paragraph, or sometimes just a sentence, will call forth the precise image, the remembered detail that makes it all real to us: the smell of a hamburger stand down on Main Street, and the warmth of the hamburgers inside his jacket as he ran them home to his family; the old men of the town sitting around the cigar store, discussing the progress of the war in Europe, with America still neutral. And the longer sections—the story of his last fishing trip with his father and the lost fishrod, and the hellish couple of days spent working out on the railroad in the Utah desert with a Mexican section gang—these, among others, tell not only what it was like growing up in Shale City, but also what it was like to be Joe Bonham. This last is, I think, quite important, for considering his condition and all he stood for in the novel, there must have been some temptation to generalize Joe’s character, to make him the pacifist’s Everyman, the universal victim. This, however, Trumbo wisely refused to do and instead made Joe Bonham into a person, a very specific person—himself. For clearly Joe’s Shale City is Grand Junction, his parents Orus and Maud Trumbo, his eagerness to succeed and be somebody, to be admired—this, as we know, was certainly also Dalton Trumbo.

  By contrast to the sections of Book I dealing with Colorado, some of those set in Los Angeles seem a bit weak. Could it be that the alterations Trumbo made in chronology offered some fundamental difficulty? The problem was this: because he wished to combine the bakery material with his Colorado boyhood, he was obliged to shift the locale. But he did so in the most arbitrary sort of way: “Then his father decided to leave Shale City. They moved to Los Angeles.” Only that. It is one of the few instances when the bones of the book show through its flesh. Why was this necessary? It may be that Trumbo’s sense of identification with Joe was so keen that he felt he had to share whatever he could of his own life with him, even though it meant bending years to fit.

  In the course of Book I, Joe Bonham has learned, little by little and sense by sense, that he is not only deaf but also blind and dumb, and that all four of his limbs have been amputated or blown off. Each separate discovery stirs a memory within him that makes the loss just that much more painful to him. The only sense left him is the sense of touch; at one point he has a tactile hallucination and believes that a rat has come to nibble at him, just as the rats chewed at the corpses in the trenches. But later he realizes that real as it was to him at the time, “the rat was a dream.” He knows then that he must regain control of his mind, or these hallucinations will continue and he might go mad. He must learn to keep track of time passing. He does so, finally, through the warmth of the rising sun in the morning and the nurse’s hands on his body beginning him on what he comes to recognize as his daily routine. And once he has mastered that: “He had a mind left by god and that was all. It was the only thing he could use so he must use it every minute he was awake. He must think till he was tired tireder than he had ever been before. He must think all the time and then he must sleep.”

  And if thought is to provide his salvation—as, in a sense, it does—Book II of Johnny, entitled “The Living,” details the
working of that salvation. Put briefly, it is brought about through Morse code. Joe had learned it as a kid. It occurs to him that since he does have control of his neck muscles, he can use them to beat his head against his pillow. And so he begins, hoping he can get through to someone, sending out the SOS signal over and over again. It is remarkable, but Trumbo manages to pump a great deal of excitement, even suspense, into these efforts by Joe Bonham to get through to the nurse, or to a doctor, or to anyone out there he can communicate with. Finally, he does, and the reply to his SOS comes back to him from the outside world, tapped by a finger on his forehead: “What do you want?”

  Then follows a very moving chapter in which Joe must deal with that staggering question. His mind races. He remembers that once he saw an exhibition of a man turning to stone: “You could tap a coin against his arm and it sounded as if you were tapping it against marble it would ring so.” If that was bad, thinks Joe, then he is worse. They could put him out on exhibit in the same way:

  He would be doing good in a roundabout way. He would be an educational exhibit. People wouldn’t learn much about anatomy from him but they would learn all there was to know about war. That would be a great thing to concentrate war in one stump of a body and to show it to people so they could see the difference between a war that’s in the newspaper headlines and liberty loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud somewhere between a man and a high explosive shell. Suddenly he took fire with the idea he got so excited over it he forgot about his longing for air and people this new idea was so wonderful. He would make an exhibit of himself to show to the little guys and to their mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and wives and sweethearts and grandmothers and grandfathers and he would have a sign over himself and the sign would say here is war and he would concentrate the whole war into such a small piece of meat and bone and hair that they would never forget as long as they lived.

  And so he taps out his request, asking that he be let out, that he be put on exhibit at beaches, county fairs, church bazaars, circuses, and traveling carnivals. The answer: “What you ask is against regulations.” His response—and we are now in the last chapter, so it is meant as Trumbo’s final statement—seems uncharacteristic of Joe, perhaps even a false note here. Denied his request, he suddenly has “a vision of himself as a new kind of Christ” and begins preaching a new kind of gospel, one of threat and what-will-happen-if: “If you make a war if there are guns to be aimed if there are bullets to be fired if there are men to be killed they will not be us.” Who then?

  It will be you—you who urge us on to battle you who incite us against ourselves you who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler you who would have one man who works kill another man who works you who would have one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live. Remember this. Remember this well you people who plan for war. Remember this you patriots you fierce ones you spawners of hate you inventors of slogans. Remember this as you have never remembered anything in your lives.

  By rhetoric—and certainly it is impressive rhetoric—Trumbo tries to elevate Joe from a figure of pathos to one of heroic dimensions. It does not really work. Joe Bonham cannot but be a victim, a living reproach to the world that makes war and leaves its surviving victims tucked away neatly behind locked doors in hospitals.

  To say this is simply to concede that Johnny Got His Gun has its faults. What is remarkable is that it hasn’t many more of them, considering that Trumbo’s overriding purpose in writing it was to get his antiwar message across to a world hurtling toward war. That he did, certainly, but in so doing he also created a profoundly moving novel.

  Few have found it less than that. When, at the end of August 1938, he sent the first half of Johnny off to Elsie McKeogh, she responded immediately and enthusiastically: “I am tremendously interested in your new book and I am very curious to see what you are going to do with the other half of it. It is an amazingly vivid and touching job, and I haven’t been able to get Joe out of my head since I read it.” She believed in the book and was sure that any publisher she showed it to would feel just as she did.

  That, however, was something of a problem. Trumbo had resented the treatment given Washington Jitters by Alfred Knopf and was not especially anxious to turn over the new novel to him. Mrs. McKeogh urged him to reconsider: “If you were in my position you would realize that every publisher has certain authors who are dissatisfied with his labors in their behalf, and even the ones that you are particularly eager for are not exceptions.” The question of the publisher hung fire. When he had completed Johnny Got His Gun, he wrote to her on February 20, 1939:

  One of the things that disturbs me is the fact that there is growing up in this country among liberals and intellectuals a strong pro-war sentiment. They appear to view war as the only salvation for democracy, whereas I see it as a sure destruction for the kind of democracy we know at present. These perfectly sincere war mongers are becoming louder, more influential and even more dangerous. If Knopf were in sympathy with them—and I suspect that he might be—he would certainly be out of sympathy with “Johnny Got His Gun.” In such an event he might deliberately delay a decision, and if he decided to publish it he might further delay its ultimate appearance. If the book is any good at all it is good as an argument against war; and it will be utterly valueless if the country is either in war or in favor of war by the time it is published.

  Note the press of time felt by Trumbo, the need to get the book out before the world—and America with it—was plunged into war. The immediate problem of the publisher was dealt with directly and, as it turned out, was solved easily when Mrs. McKeogh went to Alfred Knopf himself and explained that her client was dead-set against publishing his new novel with Knopf. Nothing could be simpler. Trumbo was released from his contract. Johnny Got His Gun was offered to J. B. Lippincott and was snapped up immediately.

  He was right, of course, to feel a certain sense of urgency in getting Johnny out. Although Lippincott wasted no time in seeing it published and out into the bookstores, Trumbo and his novel were ultimately overtaken by events: Germany invaded Poland a week before the book came out. World War II was several days under way when the reviews began to appear. All were respectful, and Ben Ray Redman, in the Saturday Review of Literature, was quite bowled over. “This is one of the most horrifying books ever written,” he began, but manfully continued with a full and accurate synopsis of the novel, concluding his review with this paragraph:

  To say that this book is a terrific indictment of war is to employ a phrase that has been robbed of its proper weight of meaning by careless and promiscuous use. Yet the phrase must serve. To insist that this book should be required reading for all men big and little, for those who are capable of making wars and for those likely to be herded into them, is to betray an innocent and mistaken faith in the power of the printed word. Yet one must insist, even though one knows that there are some indictments that simply will not stick, and that war has survived them, and doubtless will survive them, beyond numbering. It is possible to insist conscientiously, too, on more grounds than one for “Johnny Got His Gun” is not merely a powerful anti-war document; it is also a powerful and brilliant work of the imagination. In giving voice to a human experience that has hitherto been voiceless, Mr. Trumbo has written a book that can never be forgotten by anyone who ever reads it.

  There has grown up a tradition among Trumbo’s liberal and right-wing detractors that Johnny Got His Gun was purely a product of the rather ignominious von Ribbentrop Pact period, during which world communism did an abrupt about-face the moment the Soviet Union signed its nonaggression treaty with Nazi Germany, suddenly beginning to talk pacifism and nonintervention, leaving Hitler free to range across Europe. None of that, however, had anything to do with how or why Johnny was written. Trumbo was not a member of the Communist Party during the time the book was in preparation, nor for years after it was published. When it was being written, its antiwar mes
sage was very much contrary to the Party line. It was simply an accident of history that the book was published when the Party line itself had been altered so that it suddenly and quite surprisingly conformed with what Trumbo had freely expressed in his novel. As a result of this accident of history and at J. B. Lippincott’s suggestion, Johnny Got His Gun was serialized in the Party organ, the Daily Worker, soon after publication—giving rise, I suppose, to the myth that it was written to order, a hack job.

  None of this concerned Trumbo much at the time, nor would it even bother him greatly in retrospect. Once he had written Johnny, and publication was assured, the matter was out of his hands. Now he would spend correspondingly less time up at the ranch in Ventura County and more with the new friends he had made about the time he began pursuing Cleo. There were three of them—Ring Lardner, Jr., the son of the short-story writer; Ian McLellan Hunter; and Hugo Butler—all junior writers at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer when Trumbo got to know them, all around Cleo’s age, about ten years younger than he. They remained good friends for life (Butler died in 1968). All four were blacklisted.

  Ring Lardner, Jr., and Ian McLellan Hunter live within a few blocks of one another on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It suits them. Having met these two New Yorkers in their native habitat, it is hard even to imagine them elsewhere. They started out as reporters together at the New York Daily Mirror and were on their way west to become screenwriters by the time they were twenty-one. Not much more than a decade later, however, they were back in New York, blacklisted, pariahs of the movie industry. During that period they eked out a living writing for television under pseudonyms (a lot of it for the old Robin Hood series which was filmed in England). With the blacklist ended, both resumed their rightful identities and continued to write for films and television. Lardner’s post-blacklist credits include The Cincinnati Kid and M*A*S*H. And although Ian McLellan Hunter (he used his middle name to distinguish himself from the English actor Ian Hunter) did some work on theatrical features after emerging into the sunlight, most of his writing was on television for such distinguished shows as Hallmark Hall of Fame and the PBS production of The Adams Chronicles. Neither Lardner nor Hunter felt it necessary or especially desirable to move back to Hollywood, and though they were at a continent’s remove from Trumbo, the three kept in close touch. They visited when trips took them to the other coast. They called at all hours of the day and night. After more than twenty years apart, they still spoke of one another as “best friends.”