Dear Arthur,

I am told you take it badly that I have not yet answered your note, and
that you consider my original letter to you insulting.

I am astonished to find you still so sensitive: for I have grown quite

accustomed to abuse lately—not only the quietly slanderous kind which
impels you to raise political bars against me in my trade un-ion, but also
that which comes from your less genteel colleagues and obliges me to
hide my mail lest the children see letters ad-dressed quite openly to
"Jew-lover Trumbo," "Bolshevik Dalt t.," "Red Rat Trumbo" and other
epithets of like nature. No criminal, no murderer nor rapist can safely be
called the names which with impunity are now applied to me. There
lives no man so foul or so low that he may not elevate himself a little in
the esteem of society by spitting upon my name and proscribing my
work.

I say this to you because for long years you have been a political
hermaphrodite, lifting your voice in the defense of no man, espousing no
principle which smells of danger. But now you are a politico. You have
found a faith to fight for. You have embarked upon a crusade—not for
something, to be sure, but at least against something. Hence you must
prepare yourself for a certain amount of recrimination. You must callous
yourself and harden your heart a little, for there is much work to be done
before your objective is fully achieved.

Your crusade isn't a very new one. Its first disciples felt the call in
Hitler's Germany immediately after the Reichstag fire, when hundreds of
thousands rushed forth to sanctify political discrimination a good four
years before it blossomed at Nuremberg into racial and religious
discrimination. You belong to the legion of men who traditionally
sacrifice their brothers to gain a little more time for them-selves—the
shuddering, exquisite, sensitive men who quietly deplore injustice while
dining upon its victim. This is your right, Arthur, and your choice and
your destiny.
But you should not, in your letter to me, assume a whore's virtue at
confession by using the word "affection." My affection caused me to
assert your ability to producers when you were out of favor; yours
impelled you to cry out against me in the most fatal hour of my career.
Mine persuaded me to spend long hours in discussion of your story
problems when you sought to re-establish yourself; yours led you to
organizational meetings calculated to deprive me of my rights within the
Guild, to destroy my good name and to make it impossible for me to
work in my profession. Give me no more such affection, I stagger
beneath that already conferred. Give me rather your hatred and let me
console myself by the exchange of a weak friend for a strong enemy.

And do not attribute, as you did in your letter, the destruction of our
friendship to political differences. Political opposition I have freely
given and taken both in victory and in defeat. But I have never
advocated the savagery of second-class citizenship for any-body, nor
sought to impose it, nor tolerated its suggestion. There can be no real
political differences between you and me because you have no politics
but expediency, no standard of conduct but deceit, no principle but self-
love.

I did not wish to write this letter, and would not have done so but for
your characteristically widespread complaints. With it—and with your
last kiss still hot upon my cheek— I bid you farewell.
Dear Harry,

I have received your letter, presumably from you as treasurer of the

Guild, warning that 1 am now in jeopardy of being placed in bad
standing for non-payment of dues. I thought it rather loud and more than
ordinarily witless, but to deny you those qualities would be to silence
you altogether; and that, for constitutional reasons alone, I should not
like to see happen. I can't clearly make out whether your main quarrel is
with me or the Mother Tongue, you have damaged us both almost
beyond repair.

Please be informed that my contract with MGM has been abrogated, my

work has been proscribed and that I myself have been banned from
employment in my profession until such time as I per-form an act of
political purification hitherto characteristic of fascist states. In
consequence, my income has ceased and I have no money with which to
pay dues. I am therefore obliged to go into bad standing.
Attached herewith my card.
Dear burglars,

Our baby sleeps in one bedroom and we sleep in another. When she
yelps at night we cannot hear her. A man said you were the people to
gee about such things.

Can you install a speaker in her room and one in ours so we can gossip
back and forth with her during the wee small hours? Not one of your
solid gold outfits. Something sensible and serviceable. I am-not a rich
man any more.

Now let’s all get together and see if we can arrange a decent, modest
little outfit for an old customer without screwing him to death in the
process.

Irritably yours,
DT
My dear Mr. Fourness,

Your Letter has arrived and been put to the only sensible use I could
think of. When we Reds come into power we are going to shoot
merchants in the following order: (1) those who are greedy, and (2)
those who are witty. Since you fall into both categories it will be a sad
story when we finally lay hands on you.

I had hoped time might have improved your character, but the prices you
quote convince me otherwise. You still cannot imagine a happy moment
which does not find your fist in somebody else's pocket. Since I have
very little choice in the matter, I must yield.

Send the set described and with it a man for installation. I have no
intention of creeping about the house on all fours with a wire in one
hand, a hammer in the other and my larynx clogged with tacks. Be-sides
I want the wire to go through the ceiling, and unlike your associates I am
no second-story man. Also, let's arrange for a week-day job. There is no
urgency about the matter, and I have little taste for that weekend
overtime racket.

The bill should be sent to my new business manager; whose name is Rex
Cole. 1 have employed him because he hates creditors and does not pay
them too promptly. You will feel better over Thanks-giving and
Christmas if you have something to look forward to during the hangover
period which follows: and I tell you quite frankly that it will probably be
sixty days before you get your money.

Considering what you've done to me, I ought to make you wait the full
nine months.

Naturally, I hope this will be the last time I shall be obliged to do

business with you, although I daresay the junk you've pushed off on me
will soon begin to wear out and we shall have to start the whole weary
routine over again.
Please extend my good wishes for the holiday season to everyone in the
thuggery.

Cordially,
DT
George—

Enclosed with this letter is an original. It is not as well done as it might

be, for 1 was able to allow myself only four days on it. I will not go into
my finances with you, for I am the only one in the world who can do
anything about them. But I can tell you that the urgency is so great that I
have worked day and night to get this finished, and I am now, like a
fiendish machine, starting on another one. Let me know what you think
of it as soon as you can. If God is good and time lasts for me, I shall
have three in your hands before I leave for Washington.

A thousand apologies, ten thousand banzais, and a little affection to

boot!
For Christopher Trumbo— Ten Years Old

About ten years ago today

(Or rather, in the night)
Your mother turned to me to say
A thing that gave me fright.

She whispered with surpassing joy,

"My darling husband dear,
We're going to have a little boy
In fact, he's almost here!"
I leaped at once onto the floor,
Fell flat upon my face,
Jumped up and ran against a door,
Fell down again —same place.

1 scrambled into suit and hat,

Fell down the stairs, slid through the hall,
Did handsprings like an acrobat
To where the car stood in its stall.

I packed your mother into it

And started through the night,
To-whoop, to-whee, to-lickety-split,
To whiddle-de-wham, what a sight!
Then half-way to the hospital
The engine's feeble pop
Brought mother and me and unborn you
To an absolute dead stop.

Oh dear, Oh me, Oh double-alas

And mercy, cried my heart,
The car has just run out of gas,
And having stopped, won't start!
I raced away to a Standard sign
For a bucket full of gas,
Filled up the tank with an old hose line,
Which I threw away on the grass.

Then off again with the speed of light

(The tires and mother whining)
Like a startled baboon through the dark of night,
My eyes all wild and shining.

We got to the place in a mile-long slide,

And seven minutes later
You arrived with a mouth as wide
As a full-grown alligator.
Your mother looked at me,
and I looked grimly back at her.
"What'll we name it?" I said with a sigh,
And she said, “Christopher.”

And that's how it happened, my little son,

My grim and glare and starey,
My gloom and glum and fearsome one, My beautiful and scarey!

Happy Birthday from Daddy

DALTON TRUMBO—Prisoner #7551
My darling—

Two days hence will be our thirteenth wedding anniversary. I have been lying
here on my bunk thinking about it. The thirteen years seem so short a time
because it has been so happy a time for me. All that is any good in my life
has grown out of it. I think back on each year of it with pride. I think our
children take pride in it, and will take more pride as they grow older.

The date for my release is not far off. I am, as we say, "getting short." The
disease of short-time-itis develops its own peculiar symptoms — nervous
rash, inflammation of the taste buds, and general debility. The traditional cure
for the ailment, given by men who have served more time than I, is simple:
"Take it easy, play it cool, drink lots of water and walk slow." So that is what
I am doing. I came into this place to the strains of "Mona Lisa," and it
appears I shall leave it to the nauseatingly repetitious melody of "The
Tennessee Waltz." I think the three things I want most when get out of here
are (1) a good drink, (2) a rare steak, and (3) a symphony.

More and more I realize that when I emerge from here I must make the
choice of what kind of writer I truly want to be. I think it would be better for
all of us if I returned to writing novels, with the occasional foray into the
theater, although it would entail certain sacrifices, including (unless we won a
whopping law suit) the ranch. It seems pretty clear that with the kids growing
into high school age as they are, we can't live at the ranch more than a year
longer any-how. Selling it, we could live practically anywhere in the world
we wished for a year or two or three, during which I could accomplish the
rather difficult but pleasurable task of shifting literary gears.

All in all, from October in 1947, it will probably take seven years to recover
from the blow dealt by the blacklist. But the discovery of friends who would
rally round with such incredible generosity perhaps makes the whole
experience worthwhile.
Much, much love—
DALTON TRUMBO—Prisoner #7551
Old boy—

My limited view of the economy of Hollywood indicates it's not too

good. Employment extremely low, and many deserving hacks starving. I
find enough to do, but don't enjoy doing it, and stall a great deal of the
time. I remember how I started stalling and ate my way through the
Beverly Hills house pillar by pillar. I have the ugly feeling I am now
eating my way through this one tile by tile. I don't seem to worry much,
which is worrisome in itself. I just slunge around and bipper at people,
and dream of the time I'll be shet of everything

I am impatient for something to happen to us, good, bad, or indifferent. 1

want to move somewhere, and I think we might live handsomely and
grow rich in Mexico. Don't you?

I'm perfectly willing to go anywhere that I can live not, perhaps, in

peace, but certainly in luxury. If I could spend the next five or ten years
in Mexico City or its environs and earn say forty or fifty thou-sand a
year, which isn't at all improbable, and pay Mexican income taxes, and
stash enormous sums of cash away— hell, I'd go for it instantly. We
could establish headquarters near to each other in some aristocratic
section of Mexico City or its suburbs, either in separate quarters or a real
palazzo shared together.

Cleo and I intend to swoop into Cuernavaca and quiz Gordon Kahn
about living costs, schools, rent, mordito, imigrantes and the Virgin of
Guadelupe— all of which he is said to know more about than any other
living person. Naturally, we shall share our findings with you.

Hasta luego or some such thing. Wish you could be with us this
summer—the fish in the lake are all about ten inches long, and so fresh
that the little devils are still snapping when they hit the skillet. We all
send you felicitaciones, y misereres, y fraternidades y commiserereres.
Dear Ring

The book has arrived and a preliminary report will go forward to you in
about a week. I am going to violate your injunction in a small way and
ask Cleo to read it too. The reason for this I shah try to make clear.

Recently Albert Maltz finished a re-write of his book and sent it to us. I
read it and found two or three major things I didn't like. Cleo read it and
found two or three other major things that she didn't like. I was so
chagrined at having overlooked her points (with which I at once agreed)
that I went back to the book and read it most thoroughly again, taking
many notes. The result was that our combined efforts found absolutely
nothing in the book, aside from a couple of minor speeches, that we did
like. Having gone out of our way for Albert, we certainly wish to do no
less for you.

There are several ways and approaches for critical help such as you
desire:

1.) Discover the main weakness in the book—every book has one.
GO back over the book a second time with ideology in mind, making
exhaustive notes which will support your judgment and emphasize the
weakness. It is at this point that your passions should become inflamed.
Passion is essential. With passion you can approach the author in cold
hatred, reject his every defense, accuse him, by implication, of a good
many things he hadn't ever thought of or wished for and defeat him
utterly. This method results in a complete re-write.

2.) Instead of concentrating on the main weakness in the book as a

whole, search for the main weakness in every character and in every
scene (these also exist in every book). This more comprehensive
approach takes a good deal more time and is reserved, there-fore; for one
to whom one owes a great deal in terms of help and advice. By the time
all of the weaknesses are assembled you have a document almost as long
as the book itself. 'Il-re nice thing about method two is that when you
finally confront the author you don't need to be passionately involved
yourself. The evidence itself is so voluminous and so absolutely
damning that it need not be fortified with venom. One pities rather than
hates. One speaks gently, softly, as if in the presence of the dead.
Method two has a further advantage over method one in that the author
does not re-write; he throws the whole thing away. Quite often his folly
is so clear to him that he goes out and seeks honest work and never
writes again.

3.) This involves a study of the author as exhaustive as that of the book.
It can only be successfully done if you know and love the author and are
privy to many of his secrets. Naturally one reads the book, but one reads
it always with the character of the author in mind. Thus the weakness of
the book becomes his personal character weakness. The weakness of
each character illustrates still an-other facet of his own depravity. The
method must be employed on several levels—political, ethical, sexual
and economic. The instant he seeks to defend himself on any score, the
critic dredges up from his memory some folly or vice or worse in the
author's life which is clearly reflected in the matter at hand.

Method three has the following advantage over methods one and two:
whereas method one merely sends the author off to work for another
year without committing the critic in any way to the final product, and
whereas method two destroys the book completely but leaves the author
a clear alternative, method three destroys both the book and the man. It
produces a real qualitative change, and this is criticism on the highest
level.

Because Cleo and I are so fond of you we feel a deeper obligation to this
book than we have ever felt before to such a project. Therefore, we are
going into it thoroughly; and instead of applying only one method of
criticism, we shall apply all three. We think the result will give you a
pretty rounded picture.
Dear Mrs. Murphy,

I have received permission from your son Ray's executor to write to you
directly, which 1 hasten to do. want to tell you about your son and my
relationship with him, and of my wife's sorrow and my own that he is no
longer living.

As you have no doubt been told I am a writer named Dalton Trumbo and
also the mysterious Dr. John Abbott with whom Ray has been in
correspondence for the past eight or nine months. It has been my
privilege, since 1945, to be Ray’s friend. It came about in the following
manner:

In June of 1945 a party of six or seven war correspondents embarked

from San Francisco by air on a three-month tour of Pacific battle areas.
Among the correspondents were Ray and I. He was by far the youngest
of our group, certainly no more than twenty-two. His background had
given him a method of speech and a pattern of polite conduct which
differed from the others. These qualities were seized upon by certain of
our party as an excuse to make jokes at his expense. Because I admire
intelligence and understand how pain-fully youth can suffer even from
inconsequential affronts, I came to his defense, and together we made
common cause which resulted in a more comfortable situation. It was
this he later told me, which made him like me.

During the invasion of Borneo, Ray and I went ashore in a landing craft
between the first and second waves, dodging mortar fire as we sprinted
across the sand. Two hours later our troops had advanced only six
hundred yards inland against determined Japanese resistance. From a slit
trench outside the Governor’s Palace Ray and I spotted a hilltop which
we believed would give us a better view of what was going on, and
decided to climb it. The officer assigned to guide us refused to go along
on the perfectly legitimate ground that it was a needless risk. Ray and I
started out alone.
When we finally reached the top of the hill we found an abandoned
AA gun that had been knocked out by naval fire, and no sign of a human
being. We took what cover we could when we heard sounds of
approaching troops thinking the Japanese were returning. Moments later
a grim-looking Australian assault group with fixed bayonets appeared,
expecting to meet the enemy. Well in advance of our armed forces, as it
turned out, Ray and 1 had accidentally captured the hill.

The next morning, after boiling tea from a five-gallon can, Ray and I and
two Australian correspondents, joined up with a patrol of the Australian
Seventh Division, crossing the mountain chain between the point of
invasion and the city of Balikpapan. We entered the city and penetrated
half-way down its main waterfront street when enemy cross-fire sent us
diving for cover. The two Australian correspondents were killed on the
spot.

We slowly worked our way back to our lines, and it required three more
days for the occupying forces to fight their way to the point where he
had been, and two more before the city was secured. On the fourth day
of the campaign, the outcome being beyond doubt, our group decided to
return to Tawi Tawi. The only way we could go was by an Australian
mail courier, a small Catalina flying boat. It was a nasty day with a fairly
heavy sea, and two Catalinas had already cracked up trying to get off the
water. The third one, on which we were going, was the last available for
courier duty. There were eleven of us. For the takeoff we were all
jammed into the tiny navigator’s cabin to give more weight for the nose
against the hammering waves that had smashed our two predecessors.
Once off we retired to the main cabin.

Somewhere off Japanese-occupied Celebes, the alarm signifying an air

attack went of in the cabin. It could only mean that a Zero had risen
from Celebes and was attacking. The gunners rushed from the forward
cabin to the two rear blisters and tore the covers from their weapons. We
in the cabin put on our helmets and lay down wherever we were. Our
two gunners opened fire.

I was on the top bunk. I looked down. Ray was lying full length on the
floor between two other men, his helmet on. He looked up at me, and
although his face was, I daresay, as pale as my own, he smiled. Then he
said: “Goodbye, Trumbo."

I cannot quite describe my emotions at that moment. Perhaps I thought

of my own son, then only four; perhaps I thought of my father, long
dead; certainly I felt that a son not my son had chosen me from among
that company as the one he wished to say goodbye to; and that a father
not his father had responded. The fact, as it later turned out, that there
was no Zero within a hundred miles and no danger, that the whole
incident was a ludicrous mistake of nerves on the part of the crew, in no
way diminishes my memory of that moment, nor the surge of love I felt
for your son.

We managed to correspond intermittently ever since. Ray went to

India, and later published his first book; I went before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities and later served my first term in
the penitentiary. In the summer of 1951 we saw a great deal Of each
other, both at our ranch and in Hollywood. I was at that time, as I am
now, blacklisted by motion pictures, publishers and magazines. Ray was
indignant at what had happened to me, not because he agreed in any way
I ever discovered with my political views, but because he was morally
opposed to sending people to jail for opinion, and outraged that the slow
starvation, via the blacklist, should be visited upon men after they
presumably have paid for their misdeeds. It was typical of his generous
nature that he offered to collaborate with me for motion pictures, and to
put his name alone to the product of our mutual endeavors. It was typical
of my need that I accepted.

In mid-January we met in Hollywood, and for ten days we worked

closely together finding a proper agent and making certain the story
would at least be seen by the studios. On January 26th, our work being
completed, I saw him last. We had drinks and dinner in my hotel room.
We were extremely pleased with ourselves and with the world, Ray
recited limericks; I told him stories about Holly-wood and its
extraordinary mores. We parted expecting to see each other very soon.
Ray was returning in two days to New York. I left the next afternoon for
Mexico City. It was almost two months later that I learned of his death.
Because with a person like Ray it is almost intolerable to think what he
might have been had he lived, I have chosen in this letter to write about
what he was. 1 have lost members of my own family. I well know what
chill comfort a letter of sympathy can be, and so I have not written you
one. During our last visits, in a moment of temporary depression
common to young men who are both sensitive and intelligent beyond
their years, Ray told me that he thought he believed in nothing; that he
felt himself a complete cynic. It was, of course, not true. A day or two
later when he brought a copy of my novel "Johnny Got His Gun" for me
to inscribe, I wrote in it what I really felt about him and his future. He
telephoned me the next day to thank me. He said: "I hope r can live up to
it." I should have told him then, and now have only you to tell, that he
already had.
Dear Dorothy and Seniel:

To start in, I was a fool for moving south of the border. The line of
supply to my living source was so tenuous that when I did work the
people who owed me for it mistook my absence for my death, and
simply did not pay without the strongest kind of pressure being exerted.
We lived out an old truism: "The first time you see Mexico you are
struck by the horrible poverty: within a year you discover it’s
infectious." I am as broke as a bankrupt's bastard.

When I arrived from Mexico I pulled into town with a wife, three
children, a dog, a cat, one mortgaged Jeep, and $400 in my pocket.

There were other problems. I had lost all of my life insurance during that
disastrous Mexican holiday. I lived on borrowed money for the last nine
months of the visit. I couldn't even get my furniture out of storage
because of a $1,200 storage bill I couldn't pay. I sat down in a motel in
Pasadena with the dog, cat and one child, while Cleo and the two girls
moved in with my sister. I had kept my electric typewriter, and by the
second day of residence, I was operating it as fast as the Lord gave me
the strength to do.

Most of my black market connections had dissolved during my absence,

and it was like trying to find work at midnight in a thick fog among
strangers. Also, with no credits for the past seven years, it was wondered
whether I still had whatever touch they had thought me to have in the
past. Hence I started at the bottom, like any new-comer, for as little as
$1,000 a script. In the first 18 months 1 wrote 12 scripts—which
normally would take between 4 and 6 years to do. The necessity of
keeping the money grinding in made it impossible for me to take as
much as a month off and gamble on an original which might sell for
enough to give me more gambling room.

Also, I am overly timid and evasive when I owe money and can't see just
how I'm going to pay it back. This letter, then, is an apology which I
hope you will be generous enough to accept. I have been rude and
discourteous to almost everybody, because I was seized with a kind of
desperation, and knew the only solution lay in privacy and very long and
arduous spells of uninterrupted work. I've been a monk—a surly and
ungrateful one, perhaps, on the surface, but not really so at all. I enclose
a check for $50, which I shall now be able to repeat every month until
the money you so very graciously lent me is paid off in full.
To Mrs. Eleanor Barr Wheeler, Principal
Annandale Elementary School

My dear Mrs. Wheeler:

At the beginning of the 1955-56 school term we entrusted to your care a

happy, healthy, comparatively well-adjusted and demonstrably
intelligent child who loved school, adored her teachers and enjoyed the
friendship of her small circle of contemporaries. Eight months later you
have returned to us a spiritually devastated human being who begs us
not to send her to school. I am informed that within the VLA and the
Bluebirds there have been a series of small secret meetings devoted to a
discussion of Mrs. Trumbo's character, and of mine, and what to do
about us. Since no one has come to our home to discuss at first hand the
problems which so deeply trouble them, we have obviously been tried
and condemned in absentia, and the verdict has filtered down from
parent to child. Mitzi, who started out the school year with many friends,
has found herself in the past three months the object of the scorn and
ridicule and hatred of those whom she liked most. Small childish
conspiracies are directed against her — patterned in secret after the
conspiracies of the parents—and she is quietly and incessantly
persecuted and boycotted and shunned as long as the school day lasts.

This slow murder of the mind and heart and spirit of a young child is the
proud outcome of those patriotic meetings held by a few par-ents, under
the sponsorship of the PTA and the Bluebirds. It is a living test of the
high principles of both organizations—principles noble in word, ignoble
and savage in application. The principles are what they say: Mitzi is
what they do. I should like you to watch how decently and bravely our
daughter tries to suppress her bewilderment at her first encounter with
barbarism parading as American virtue. Barbarism which began at your
school among adult persons.

Now that we have discovered the source of Mitzi's agony we shall

naturally secure competent treatment to rid her of the scars already
inflicted. We may therefore employ private tutors, or, as seems more
likely, send her to a private school which has as its objective the
encouragement of honor, of friendship and of learning rather than their
destruction.

If it then seems advisable we shall employ competent counsel to

seek a court test of the responsibilities of the school and of school
organizations for the mental health of the children entrusted to them. For
it is within these school organizations that Mitzi has suffered an assault.
That the assault has been upon her personality and that the injury she has
sustained is psychic makes it no less real than if, in a physical sense, the
men and women of the PTA and the officials of the Bluebirds had
incited their children to trample her senseless on the blacktop of the
playground.
Dear Guy,

I have had several days to ponder our discussion of the Saturday

before Christmas. Although I have not yet had the opportunity to
talk it over with the others, I have had second thoughts of my own,
and a strong impression I didn't make myself clear as to my real
That day, a prominent and liberal producer (whose motives 1 do not
at all doubt) was quoted as saying to one of us: "Look, you people
are simply stubborn and foolish. Regardless of what you think of
informing it has become a part of the law. The Committee and its
requirements are a part of our time, they are the law; they are the
country; they are the flag. That's the way it is, and those who refuse
to recognize this no longer arouse sympathy; they only isolate
themselves and prevent their voices from being heard.

The more 1 think of that the more 1 disagree with it, and the more
puzzled 1 become about the workings of the mind that produced it.

I know and can read the First Amendment as well as anyone else. 1
know it is the basic law of this country. 1 know that if it goes all will
go. The Warren court has carefully and specifically outlined the ex-
act method by which persons can refuse to inform. It is almost as if
the court had decided to provide citizens with a text book on how
Thus, the court has presented us with a dilemma that lies at the
heart of all philosophies and religions, the dilemma best symbolized in
the Faustian legend: yield up your principles and you shall
be rich; cling to them and you shall be less prosperous than you
presently.

That’s the problem: choice. Not compulsion: choice. Committee or

no committee, law or no law, capitalism or no capitalism, movies or
no movies, it is the constant necessity to choose that dogs every action
of our lives every minute of our existences, who is it then who compels
us to inform? The committee does not come to us even now and ask us
to change our minds and give them names and re-instate ourselves. Who
is it that asks us to do this? Who is it that denies us work until we seek
out the committee and abase ourselves before it?

Since it is neither the Court nor the law nor the committee, the man who
compels informing can only be the employer himself. He is the one who
urges us to inform, and he is the one who withholds work from us until
we do. He is, in fact, that same liberal producer who was quoted at our
Saturday discussion. It is he, and not the committee, who applies the
only lash that really stings —economic reprisal: he is the enforcer who
gives the committee its only strength and all its victories.

Now mind you, from what I have heard of him he is a nice man, and I
think consultation with him as to tactics of clearance might be helpful.
But when he says that the committee's requirements to in-form are a part
of our time, that they are the law and the country and "the flag," I think I
have spotted the core of what he really said.

Disliking the nasty business of blacklisting but nonetheless practicing it

every day of his life, he places upon his country and his flag the blame
for moral atrocities that otherwise would be charged directly to himself.
And thus, since informing has nothing to do with the law and the
country and the flag, and since the necessities of his life as he sees them
oblige him to enforce what the committee can never compel, and since
without his enforcement the committee would have no power at all—
what he actually said is that he is the law and the country and the flag.

Thinking back to our producer and his concept of country and flag,
I am more than ever bewildered. I wonder if he has really seen this
country, if he has really seen these American people, if he has really
seen that flag. If he has, and his conclusions are honest, he has seen
something I never imagined and don't believe exists.

I've delivered newspapers, peddled vegetables, clerked in stores, waited

on tables, washed automobiles, picked fruit, hosed down infected
cadavers, shoveled sugar beets, iced refrigerator cars; laid rails with a
section gang, reported for newspapers, served an eight-year hitch on the
night shift of a large industrial plant.

I've looked at many American faces: I've seen them as flak burst around
them nine thousand feet over Japan; in a slit trench on Okinawa
watching the night sky to see where the next bomb would fall; in an
assault boat as they moved toward a beach that tossed more violently
than the surf through which they rode.

I've counseled with a paroled prostitute on how she might escape the
clutches of a policeman who had caught her and was stealing half her
earnings and sending his friends to her with courtesy cards that entitled
them to take her without pay. I've also counseled with Secretary of the
Air Force, Tom Finletter, on how the Secretary of State might better
explain his policies to a perplexed people. I've talked with General
MacArthur in Manila and dismissed as fantasy his warning that an
atomic bomb might be developed. I've been asked by Louis B. Mayer
why I had no religion, and by a ranking member of the State Department
how I could bring myself to work with "all those Hollywood Jews."

I've seen American faces in a Congregational Church in New

Hampshire, where a colleague and traveled with a bodyguard of
students. I've seen their faces in a miners' union hall in Duhlth on a night
when the wind off the lake blew the snow so killingly and so deep that
cars couldn't be used and everybody walked to the meeting. I've seen
their faces in the banquet room of a New York hotel when the American
Booksellers' Association gave me a National Book Award; and I've seen
them again in a jury box as each of them twice said "Guilty as charged,"
while one of them wept as she said it.

I've been stripped by Americans and paraded naked with them and
before them and obediently bent over on command to present my anus
for contraband clearance. I've lived with and trusted and been trusted by
car thieves and abortionists and moonshiners and embezzlers and
burglars and Jehovah's Witnesses and Quakers.
I've stood on a gray day in the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo
Jima, and looked off at the graves of 2,198 Americans. — In the center
of all those graves on a slim white pole on a concrete pedestal flew the
American flag. And I swear it was not the flag of in-formers. And if I
could take a census of all the American faces I have seen and of all the
dead whose graves I have looked on—if I could ask them one simple
question: "Would you like a man who told on his friend?" —there would
not be one among them who would answer "Yes."

But, show me the man who informs on friends who have harmed no one,
and who thereafter earns money he could not have earned before, and
will show you not a decent citizen, not a patriot, but a miserable
scoundrel who will, if new pressures arise and the price is right, betray
not just his friends but his country itself. I do not know of one
Hollywood informer who acted except under duress and for money; such
men are to be watched.

I have been noticing lately that I sneak small naps in the afternoon.
It's just a little more difficult to summon the energy to write this letter
than it was five years ago. Wine goes to my head more quickly than it
used to. 1 walk forward instead of running, and al-though there is much
life in me, much has also gone. To sum up, I evaluate, I calculate my
course more thoughtfully.

There are certain men of my time who have waged great battles and now
100k out upon the world from hilltops or from peaks where the horizon
must be immensely wider and more revealing. But I, who have only
skirmished, stand on a ridge, lower than I had hoped for and yet perhaps
higher than I deserve. The horizons I had thought to see will probably be
denied.

I still hope (if I conserve energy and absorb the meaning of my

experiences) that I shall be able to ascend one of the middle hills—a
little hill, but still a hill and not a ridge. Be that as it will be, even from
my ridge I look back on two decades through which good friends stood
together, moved forward a little, dreamed that the world could be better
and tried to make it so, tasted the joy of small victories, wounded each
other, made mistakes, suffered much in-jury, and stood silent in the
chamber of liars.

For all of this I am grateful: that much I have: that much cannot be taken
from me. Barcelona fell, and you were not there, and I was not there,
and perhaps if we had been the city would have stood and the world
been changed and better. But we were here, and here together we
remain, and our city won't fall, and if it should, better that we lie buried
in its ruins than found absent a second time.
My dear son:

I am sending you two books I think appropriate for a young man spending
five-sevenths of his time in the monkish precincts of John Jay Hall. The first
is "Education of a Poker player," by Herbert O. Yardley. Read it in secret,
hide it whenever you leave quarters, and you'll be rewarded with many unfair
but legal advantages over friend and enemy alike.

The second book I think you should share with your young companions. It is
"Sex Without Guilt," by a man who will take his place in history as the
greatest humanitarian since Mahatma Gandhi— Albert Ellis, Ph.D. This good
man has written what might be called a manual for masturbators. That is to
say, in one slim volume he has clarified the basic theory of the thing, and in
simple layman's language, got right down to the rules and techniques. This in
itself is a grand accomplishment; but what most compels my admiration is
the zest, the sheer enthusiasm which Dr. Ellis has brought to his subject. The
result (mailed in Plain wrapper under separate cover) is one of those
fortuitous events in which the right man collides with the right idea at
precisely the right time.

This whole new approach—this fresh wind blowing under the sheets, so to
speak—this large-hearted appeal for cheerful self-pollution, invokes perhaps
a deeper response in my heart than in most. For I (sneaky, timorous,
incontinent little beast with my Paphian obsessions) was never wholesomely
at home with my penile problem, nor ever found real happiness in working it
out— all because of that maggoty, mountainous pustule of needless guilt that
throbbed like an abscess in my young boys heart.

On warm summer nights while exuberant girl-hunting contemporaries

scampered in and out of the brush beneath high western stars, I, dedicated
fool, lay swooning in my no companion save the lewd and smirking demons
of my bottomless guilt. Cowering there in seminal darkness, liquescent with
self-loathing, attentive only to the stealthy rise and Krafty-Ebbing of my dark
scrotumnal blood, fearful as a lechwe yet firmer of purpose than any rutting
buffalo, 1 celebrated the rites of Shuah's Son with sullen resignation. Poor
little chap on a summer's night, morosely masturbating…!
Even now, more than three decades later, even now when I forget a friend's
name, or mislay my spectacles, or pause in mid-sentence idiocy— even now
such lapses set a clammy chill upon my heart.

It’s then, while panic tightens my sagging throat, that I whisper to myself:
"It's true after all. It does make you crazy. It does cause the brain to soften.
Why, oh why did I like it so much? Why didn't I stop while I was still ahead
of the game? Was it only one time too many that caused this rush of
premature senility? Or a dozen times? Or a thousand? Ah well—little good to
know it now: the harm's done, the jig's up, you're thoroughly raddled, better
you'd been born with handless stumps.

An instant later I blessedly recall the name, I find the spectacles, I complete
the sentence—and the salacious ghoul of my sickened fantasies retreats once
more into the shadow, not banished to be sure, but held off at least for a few
more days or hours.
I recall a certain chill winter night on-which my father took me to one of
those Calvinist fertility rites disguised as a father-and-son banquet. Master of
the revels was an acrid old goat named Horace T. McGuiness, a man greatly
venerated in our town and much in demand for such festivities as that which I
describe.

He opened his discourse with' a series of blasphemous demands that the

Almighty agree with his ghastly notions and then got down to the meat of the
program Which, to no one's surprise, was girls. When you go out with a
young lady, he slavered, you go out with your own sister. As you treat her, so
will your sister be treated. It followed that you must not think of it in relation
to her, you must not suggest it to her, and certainly you must not do it to her.
If you did, you were a blackguard, a degenerate, a runnion, a cullion and a
diddle-cove — It seed plain to me that if one day I did burst upon the world
as the hymeneal Genghis Khan of my dreams, I'd be in for an extremely
incestuous time of it.

I can still hear that demented old reprobate howling his bill of particulars ag t
poor Onan, the Bible's first recorded masturbator, shaking his fist at us and
sweating like a diseased stoat. "He wasted his seed! Oh monstrous, shameful,
nameless act—he spilled it right out onto the ground! All of it! And this
displeased the Lord, and the Lord slew him!" He rushed on to a warning
against the most dangerous period of a boy's day, which he leeringly defined
as those last ten minutes before the coming of blessed sleep. This period, he
rasped, was Onan's hour, that dread time of temptation which separated the
men from boys. He commanded us, on pain of Onan's fate, as we loved God,
loathed sin, and cherished our immortal souls, thenceforth to sleep with our
hands outside the covers. Whereupon we were ordered to rise en masse, lift
high our swearing arms and take the pledge.

Well. You can imagine how I felt, poor shuddering pertinacious masturbating
Little dolt! My young companions, their faces shining with devotion, rose
like eager chipmunks to recite that preposterous oath as solemnly as if it were
a prayer. I felt compelled to join them, my skin flushing beet-red beneath a
field of yellow pimples then riotously in bloom from the base of my throat to
the farthest border of my scaly scalp. When I went to bed that night the
thermometer shivered at twenty-three degrees below zero. I slept alone on an
open porch with only a dismal flap of canvas to separate my quarters from
those glacial winter winds that howled on the other side of it. Shuddering like
a greyhound bitch in heat, I burrowed beneath mounded covers. My
congealing breath formed a beard of frost on the quilt beneath my chin. My
pale hands, like twin sacrificial lambs, lay freezing outside the covers. It'
made no sense at all to me, yet I'd been gulled into taking their peccant oath,
and now in my own dim-witted fashion I proposed to keep it. It was Onan's
hour.
While I lay there pondering Onan's fate, nerves twitching, go-naducts aflame,
ten chilly digits convulsively plucking at my counterpane, I tried to divert my
tumescent thoughts from their obsession. i thought on heroes and their
heroism—on Perseus, Jason, Odysseus, Achilles—and I wondered if they too
had shared my feelings of inadequacy and shame. Thus musing, I fell asleep.

The next morning, I was rushed off whooping to the hospital, brought low
with quick pneumonia and seven frostbit claws.

There are still other stories I could tell you, but if my point isn't made by now
it never will be. Yet the more I think on it the more positive I become that
you will never truly be able to comprehend in all its horror that interminably
sustained convulsion which was your father's youth. It's only reasonable that
this should be so, since you had so many advantages that were denied to me.
To name but three of them—a private room, a masturbating father, and
Albert Ellis, Ph.D.

The debt I owe Dr. Ellis cannot be measured, for through him I have finally
found relief from my adolescent guilt and come to realize
that I was, in truth, an example and a martyr for all who'd gone before me and
for endless millions still to come. For that's what it amounts to, son. I carried
the ball for all of us, and carried it farther than anyone had a right to expect. I
was the Prometheus of my secret tribe—a penile virtuoso, a gonadic prodigy,
a spermatiferous thunderbolt; in fine, a masturbator's masturbator.

I am still, as you may suspect, somewhat distraught from reliving for your
instruction the calamitous tale of my youth. That it's been painful I can't
deny, but what is pain compared to the immeasurable satisfaction of being a
proper dad to you? I am also, perhaps still too deeply under and erotic spell
of "Lolita," which I've read four straight times in four straight days. If you
don't know the book, you must get it at once. This chap Nabokov, like Dr.
Ellis, is a way-shower, e of those spirits who understands that every-thing
under the un has its time and place and joy in an ordered world.

Yr. Obt. Sv .
Pop
To: A.C. Spectorsky
January 17, 1960

More god-damned problems: Got out of the hospital alive—which is

rare—then had to go back for a couple of days. Also, sick picture
problems. I'll have the piece, but please check all who-whoms, which-
that's, subjects without verbs, verbs without subjects, misspellings and
clichés.

From 1941 to 1952 1 was in Who's Who, and that material is correct.
They hurled me later, but they weren't the first. Johnny Got His Gun has
just been republished 20 years after it first appeared. It sells slowly, but
then it never did sell fast. The other novels were not much good.

I am, of course, the Robert Rich who wrote the original story and
screenplay of a simple—if not simple-minded —little film called "The
Brave One, for which young Rich was awarded an Oscar. He hasn't got
it yet, and neither have I. However, it's just as well, for although those
statues look like gold, I'm told they/re nothing but pot-metal inside.

I have two pleasant children in college—one at the University of

Colorado (does she have fun!) and the other at Columbia. He was
pensive on his return home for Christmas vacation. I think he misses
Charles Van Doren. I have a third child—a blonde who is urgently
beautiful — in high school, and the only woman I ever married is still at
my side. Neither Cleo nor I had the slightest idea of what we were in for,
and I must confess that if I have stood for anything of value or crafted
anything that will resonate beyond my lifetime, I owe the debt of its
accomplishment to her.

There's really nothing more. I think the average Hollywood screen-play

is better written, constructed, and conceived than most Broadway hits; 1
like my work here and do a lot of it; toward the latter part of 1960 my
name is going to appear, for the first time in 12 years, on a screenplay
I've written. This, in Hollywood, will be an almost unparalleled example
of freedom, truth, and virtue. Of course, the whole process might reverse
itself and 1 could find my-self once again blacklisted with as little notice
as I had the first time. Until that time, I am determined to respect every
institution in America —even those not yet established—and think that
all members of Congress are wise, witty, and noble.

I am, sir,
Suspiciously yours,
Dalton Trumbo