Dalton Trumbo: Blacklisted Hollywood Radical by Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo (review)

Donald Trumbo contains 582 pages of text; 81 pages of notes; an appendix listing Trumbo’s black market work, original treatments, and unsold scripts; and a chronology of the highlights of his life and the historical events that shaped it. Whether one believes that Trumbo merits such a weighty (literally) biography depends upon one’s interest in, arguably, the most colorful and complex screenwriter of Golden Age Hollywood. Historians of the blacklist will not be disappointed, nor will anyone eager to understand how a man from Grand Junction, Colorado came to embody the unresolved tensions that characterized the period from the Great Depression to the beginning of the Cold War. Trumbo was antiwar but also anti-pacifism; he was a Communist from 1943 to 1948, and again briefly in 1956, but was bored by Party meetings and contemptuous of ideologues; he became a Communist not out of sympathy for the oppressed masses but because he considered Communism the only viable alternative to Fascism, which, as the world moved closer to war, was becoming an ever growing threat. In 1939, he opposed America’s entry into World War II but changed his mind two years later after Pearl Harbor. Although he believed that Americans had every right to challenge government decisions, he remained silent about the internment of West Coast Japanese Americans in early 1942. Like humankind in general, Trumbo was “a mingled yarn,” to quote the First Lord in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well (4,3), the main difference being that he wove his own strands, leaving behind a tapestry of words made up of magazine articles, short stories, novels published and unpublished, screen stories, treatments, screenplays filmed and unfilmed, letters sent and unsent, movie reviews, pamphlets, speeches, poems, and plays. Some are born writers; Dalton Trumbo was born to write.

Trumbo’s son, Christopher, would have been the sole author of his father’s biography had he lived to complete it. His death of cancer in 2011 required a coauthor, and who better than Larry Ceplair? Ceplair and Steven Englund, wrote one of the most comprehensive books on the blacklist, The Inquisition in Hollyiwood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Doubleday, 1980). Trumbo termed that period “the time of the toad” in his 1972 eponymous pamphlet; it was a time when those who subscribed to the wrong magazines, marched in the wrong parades, or supported the wrong causes had to atone for the error of their ways before the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) that made informants of the weak. It was also a time when one’s response to the overwhelming question, “Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?” determined whether or not you worked, and in some cases, whether or not you went to jail.

Although Dalton Trumbo covers much that is already known, it does so in an engaging way, more like a memoir than a biography. At last we have an answer, or as close as we will ever get to one, as to why the nineteen unfriendly witnesses--of whom ten (now known as the Hollywood Ten) were called to testify before HUAC--formed a united front, asserting not their Fifth, but their First, Amendment rights. Presumably, it was Trumbo who asked Larry Parks to propose a First Amendment stand, knowing that the actor’s unquestioned sincerity would convince even the most skeptical. In no way, Ceplair insists, was their stand dictated by the Communist Party, despite its party line similarities. As history has shown, their stand did not work. It could not have worked under any circumstances. Even if they admitted that they were or had been Communists, they would then be asked to name other Party members. If they refused, they could be cited for contempt. As it happened, the ten were cited for contempt for refusing to answer the question and given one-year prison terms, although the most any of them served was...