This year not only marks the centennial of the outbreak of World War
I, it is also the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of one
of the most powerful novels written about the Great War, Dalton
Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun. Trumbo wrote in 1939, on the eve
of an even greater conflagration, and with none of the dewy-eyed
romanticism of the previous generation.
During the period he was writing Johnny in the late-thirties,
Trumbo established himself as one of the most successful
screenwriters in Hollywood. At the same time he became deeply
involved in labor activity as a member of the Screen Writers Guild,
serving as editor of the union’s official publication, The
Screen Writer. Trumbo’s formal politics were close to the
Communist Party, though he would not formally join the CP until 1943,
dropping out in 1948 (Trumbo would then briefly rejoin the party in
1954 in solidarity with fourteen party leaders convicted under the
Smith Act).
Though standard histories of the CP, largely written by defenders of,
or apostates from, the party, often make such decisions
transformative events, Trumbo’s experience probably was much more
typical. Like thousands of other fellow travelers, Trumbo drifted
into and out of the party without bitterness, supporting it on some
issues but not others. Trumbo’s decision to enter, or leave, the
party did not represent any fundamental break in his politics. As he
would comment on joining, “Some of my best friends were Communists.
And no one pressed me to join. There was really no reason to. To me,
it was not a matter of great consequence. It represented no
significant change in my thought or in my life.” Similarly, he
would say that his decision to quit the party was motivated by the
fact that he was tired of driving the eighty-five miles from his
ranch in Ventura County to Los Angeles for the meetings.
In late-thirties Hollywood, Trumbo worked primarily in minor,
undistinguished films, though even in this work he evinced an
independent leftist politics often at odds with CP doctrine. In Five
Came Back (1939), co-written by Trumbo, Nathanael West and Jerry
Cady, an American plane with twelve passengers (one of whom is played
by a young Lucille Ball) crashes in a South American jungle. One of
the passengers, an anarchist being deported to his home country to
stand trial for political crimes, assumes the role of leader and
moral spokesperson for the survivors as they create a collectivist
society and try to decide which five will be able to return to
civilization in the badly-damaged plane. In the words of Paul Buhle
and Dave Wagner, the movie is “a wrongfully neglected small-budget
exotic drama.” It also serves as a fascinating political statement
from Trumbo, featuring, as it does, a Spanish-speaking anarchist as
the hero at a time when the Spanish Civil War—which was marked by
bitter, internecine struggles between Communists and anarchists—was
ongoing.
Johnny Got His Gun was published on September 3, 1939, a week
and a half after the Nazi-Soviet pact, two days after the beginning
of World War II, giving it, as Trumbo would write in a new
introduction to the 1959 edition of the book, “a weird political
history,” and one that further establishes Trumbo’s distance from
CP ideology. Throughout the late 1930s, during the period Trumbo
worked on the novel, the Soviet Union was advocating a united front
against fascism, making the book’s anti-war message unpalatable to
much of the American left. The coincidental timing of the book’s
release fit with the 180-degree turn in Soviet policy, and the book
was serialized in the Daily Worker. But after the German
invasion of the USSR in the summer of 1941 and the American entry
into the war in December, the book’s theme was once again anathema
to the CP and to Trumbo himself. As he would remember, though the
book was never banned—despite some reports to the contrary—“If,
however, it had been banned and I had known about it, I doubt that I
should have protested very loudly. There are times when it may be
needful for certain private rights to give way to the requirements of
a larger public good. I know that’s a dangerous thought, and I
shouldn’t wish to carry it too far, but World War II was not
a romantic war.” Throughout the war, Trumbo received letters from
right-wing sympathizers—“a number of whom used elegant stationery
and sported tidewater addresses”—urging him to keep the book in
print. “Nothing,” he commented in 1959, “could have convinced
me so quickly that Johnny was exactly the sort of book that
shouldn’t be reprinted until the war was at an end. The publishers
agreed. At the insistence of friends who felt my correspondents’
efforts could adversely affect the war effort, I foolishly reported
their activities to the F.B.I. But when a beautifully matched pair of
investigators arrived at my house, their interest lay not in the
letters but in me. I have the feeling it still does, and it serves me
right.”
At the same time Johnny was becoming both a commercial and
critical success—winning a National Book Award for Most Original
Book—Trumbo’s Hollywood career was taking off, and he soon would
be the highest-paid screenwriter in the business, with his screenplay
for Kitty Foyle (1940) providing an Academy Award-winning role
for Ginger Rogers. His wartime work showed how quickly he could turn
away from the anti-war message of Johnny, as he produced
scripts for such movies as A Guy Named Joe (1943)—with
Spencer Tracy as a dead pilot who is sent back to earth to serve as a
guardian angel for a novice pilot—and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
(1944)—about the first American bombing raid on Japan. He also
wrote the home-front soap opera Tender Comrades (1943), also
starring Ginger Rogers, in which a group of women left temporarily
single by the war move in together, forming a household collective.
This movie would come under attack as communist propaganda in
hearings before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee (HUAC) in
the late-forties, especially for Rogers’ line, “Share and share
alike—that’s the American way.”
All of which raises questions both about Trumbo’s commitment to the
pacifist message of Johnny as well as his fealty to the CP
political line, though that independent streak would be too subtle
for the members of HUAC, which would hold Trumbo and nine other
screenwriters and directors in contempt of Congress in 1947, leading
to Trumbo’s blacklisting for the next thirteen years. None of
Trumbo’s political contradictions and changes of heart, though,
diminishes the novel’s power.
The book opens with a soldier, Joe Bonham, slowly coming to
consciousness in a hospital. Gradually Bonham realizes he has lost
both of his arms and legs and that his face has been so badly damaged
that he has no eyes, nose or mouth, leaving him little more than a
slab of meat that can think. “You couldn’t lose that much of
yourself and still keep on living. Yet if you knew you had lost them
and were thinking about it then you must be alive because dead men
don’t think. Dead men aren’t curious and he was sick with
curiosity so he must not be dead yet.” With Bonham, Trumbo creates
a character similar to the modernist grotesques populating such
thirties works as Trumbo’s screenwriting partner on Five Came
Back, Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and Day
of the Locust (1939), or Tod Browning’s bizarre 1932 movie
Freaks. But Trumbo’s grotesquerie is the direct result of
the destructive capabilities of modern technology, politics, and the
clash of competing imperialisms.
Unable to communicate, or even distinguish whether he’s awake or
dreaming, Bonham inhabits a silent and solitary darkness, utterly
helpless, unable even to kill himself. The narrative takes place
entirely within Bonham’s thoughts. Often written in a
stream-of-consciousness style, the book differs from most other war
novels in that there are virtually no battle scenes. Much of the
story focuses on flashbacks from Bonham’s youth, events often drawn
from Trumbo’s own experiences growing up in western Colorado and
working in a Los Angeles bakery. In fact, when Trumbo directed the
1971 film version of the novel (the only movie he ever directed), the
scene in which Bonham’s father dies was filmed in the same house
where Trumbo’s own father had died.
As Bonham has nothing else to do than think, he spends a great deal
of time pondering the convictions that had sent him and millions of
other men to war. “They were always fighting for something the
bastards and if anyone dared say the hell with fighting it’s all
the same each war is like the other and nobody gets any good out of
it why they hollered coward. If they weren’t fighting for liberty
they were fighting for independence or democracy or freedom or
decency or honor or their native land or something else that didn’t
mean anything.”
What, he questions, if anything, did these words mean? “There was
this freedom the little guys were always getting killed for. Was it
freedom from another country? Freedom from work or disease or death?
Freedom from your mother-in-law? Please mister give us a bill of sale
on this freedom before we go out and get killed. Give us a bill of
sale drawn up plainly so we know in advance what we’re getting
killed for and give us also a first mortgage on something as security
so we can be sure after we’ve won your war that we’ve got the
same kind of freedom we bargained for. . . When armies begin to move
and flags wave and slogans pop up watch out little guy because it’s
somebody else’s chestnuts in the fire not yours. It’s words
you’re fighting for and you’re not making an honest deal your
life for something better.”
He wonders if in their dying moments soldiers think about the ideals
they had been told they were fighting to defend. No, he concludes.
“They died crying in their minds like little babies. They forgot
the thing they were fighting for the things they were dying for. They
thought about things a man can understand. They died yearning for the
face of a friend. They died whimpering for the voice of a mother a
father a wife a child. . . . He ought to know. He was the nearest
thing to a dead man on earth.”
Eventually Bonham attempts to make contact with the outside world by
tapping out Morse Code with his head on his pillow. Losing track of
time, Bonham doesn’t know if he’s tapping for months or years
before someone finally understands he’s trying to communicate and
responds, “What do you want?” Caught off-guard at first, Bonham
then asks to be taken on a tour as a kind of traveling freak show.
“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 newspaper headlines and liberty
loan drives and a war that is fought out lonesomely in the mud
somewhere a war between a man and a high explosive shell.”
Bonham goes on and on, excited that at last he has an opportunity to
communicate, desperate to escape his solitude, to escape his
confinement in the hospital, to feel fresh air. But after a long
pause, the answer, also tapped out in Morse Code, comes back, “What
you ask is against regulations. Who are you?” Stunned at first,
Bonham ponders the question—who am I? “And then suddenly he saw.
He had a vision of himself as a new kind of Christ as a man who
carries within himself all the seeds of a new order of things. He was
the new messiah of the battlefields saying to people as I am so shall
you be. For he had seen the future he had tasted it and now he was
living it. . . . He was the future he was a perfect picture of the
future and they were afraid to let anyone see what the future was
like. Already they were looking ahead they were figuring the future
and somewhere in the future they saw war. To fight that war they
would need men and if men saw the future they wouldn’t fight.”
Bonham’s thoughts then segue into a peroration foretelling a rising
international class consciousness. “We are men of peace we are men
who work and we want no quarrel. But if you destroy our peace if you
take away our work if you try to range us one against the other we
will know what to do. If you tell us to make the world safe for
democracy we will take you seriously and by God and by Christ we will
make it so. We will use the guns you force upon us we will use them
to defend our very lives and the menace to our lives does not lie on
the other side of nomansland that was set apart without our consent
it lies within our own boundaries here and now we have seen it and we
know it.”
The problem is, as historian Richard Pells says, “there is little
in the book which supports this kind of conclusion. . . . Given
[Trumbo’s] point of view, those who called for revolution were as
dangerous and dishonest as those who called for war; in both cases it
was the ‘little guys’ who would be maimed or slaughtered for
nothing.” Certainly one of the primary lessons of World War I was
that, in fact, workers did respond to the clarion call of nationalism
rather than the ideal of international class solidarity, that they
did view the primary menace as lying on the other side of no man’s
land.
The book’s message gives lie to all the abstract ideas that justify
war, forcing the reader to confront the human toll, to face the
realities of where our war-talk leads. As Trumbo wrote in an
introduction to a 1970 reprint, at the height of the Vietnam War, “We
turn away from them; we avert the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, face. ‘Why
should I look, it wasn’t my fault, was it?’ It was, of course,
but no matter.”
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