Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Manufacturing Taste

The story of this story is probably its most interesting part. The idea for it started as a Canadian news article recounting a royal visit to a Canadian quadriplegic soldier who had been injured in World War I. Twenty years later Trumbo turned this idea into a book about an American soldier that included much autobiographical material. Seventy-five years after that, Larry Brown in his Dirty War of 2012 transformed it yet again into a hospital dialogue between two veterans of the war in Viet-Nam. The progression from fact to rapportage, to interpreted story, to re-interpreted story is fascinating.

Equally fascinating is the political fate of both the book and its author, one of the most highly paid screenwriters of the day. Both were attacked by the political Left in the United States in the late 1930’s for pacifist propaganda. The Far Right wrote fan mail. After World War II, book and author were again attacked as pacifist but then by the political Right. Trumbo was summoned by the House UnAmerican Acitivities Committee of Senator Joseph McCarthy but he refused to testify. He was consequently blacklisted in the Hollywood film industry but managed to write two Academy Award winning scripts under pseudonyms.

By the time of the Vietnamese war, Trumbo had been ‘rehabilitated’. In 1971 he wrote and directed a decidedly anti-war film version of the book. In 2003 Trumbo’s son, Christopher made a film, Red, White, and Blacklisted, about the book and its consequences for Dalton. A more comprehensive biographical film was released in 2015 which uses the book as its focal point. Certainly the whims and vagaries of official taste in the Stalinist Soviet Union were at least rivalled by the shifting mass opinion manufactured in the American political system.

There is no doubt about Trumbo’s talent as a writer. Johnny won a National Book Award as the ‘most original’ work of fiction in 1939. But without its political notoriety it most probably would have remained merely a good work of its day. Today it’s main value is as a sort of repository of American cultural themes of the inter-war period - optimistic youth, economic depression, exploitation of immigrants, West Coast cosmopolitanism, and a deep nostalgia for life before 1914.

Of course the book still serves as a warning to those who conceive of war as something that a country turns on and off as if it were a handy appliance, or those who believe that the real enemy of every infantry soldier is something other than the rats and his officers and, eventually, even his doctors. But so much more has been written since, with so much more graphic detail of the personal and national consequences of combat, that Johnny seems little more now than a tame historical relic which has more to teach about aesthetics in a democracy than pacifism.

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