Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, Eclipse is a novel about a town and its people in the style of the social realists. The social realist school was born out of a reaction to the excesses of romanticism and classicism and aimed to describe everyday life as realistically as possible without sentiment or flowery language. This approach included a frank look at people’s ethnicity, social class, the work they did, how they did it, their desires for power, sex, status and money.
Reading Eclipse, one gets a true sense of how life in a small American town in the West was lived in the 1920s. Men got up in the morning and walked to work, children went to school, mothers washed and cooked and cleaned, summers were hot and lazy, winters cold and deep with snow. A frequent tool of the social realists was satire, and in Eclipse it is harsh, particularly in the first third of the book. Perhaps Trumbo blamed the town for his family’s difficulties and for his father’s early death. In the biography Dalton Trumbo, the author, Bruce Cook, quotes Trumbo as saying of his father, “Being fired, as he was, from Benge’s Shoe Store after working there for so many years, well, it came to him like a bolt out of the blue—this was the end! Now I perhaps reacted to this more unfairly than I should have.” Trumbo goes on to explain that the John Abbott character is a substitute for his father. This character, who is based on the actual Grand Junction citizen W. J. Moyer, was also destroyed (as his father had been) by the depression. He says, “And that, possibly, accounted for some of my passion against the town itself, which actually had been quite good to me.”
The premature loss of his father froze their relationship in time, depriving my father of the deepening shared knowledge and understanding that growing older with a parent makes possible. My father loved his father and also was troubled that his father was a failure. In Johnny Got His Gun, Joe Bonham says, “His father couldn’t make any money. Sometimes his father and mother talked together in the evenings about it . . . It was hard to understand how his father could be such a big failure, when you stopped to think about the thing. He was a good man and an honest man . . . Even rich people in the cities couldn’t get vegetables as fresh or as crisp . . . Those things you had to raise for yourself . . . even the honey they used on the hot biscuits his mother made. His father had managed to produce all these things on two city lots and yet his father was a failure.”
The John Abbott character is sympathetically drawn. He is a thoughtful, generous, moral, kind man who dislikes public displays of appreciation. He extends credit in his store, he gives generously to various charities, he facilitates loans for townspeople who are short of ready cash, he quietly helps several boys with college tuition, and he is as helpful to Stumpy Telsa, the town Madam, as he is to Harry Twinge, his immediate competitor. His caring and concern for Shale City is almost fatherly. “When a business house failed, John Abbott felt that in some fashion he had been negligent.”
Abbott also has a mischievous sense of humor. When Stumpy Telsa asks him if he can help find a job for a girl who came to her for help, and who chased a patron with a hairbrush when he mistook her for one of Stumpy’s girls, Abbott suggests she work for Violet Budd, who is looking for a housekeeper. Mrs. Budd regularly launches morality campaigns to run Stumpy out of town, and the man the girl ran off turns out to be Mrs. Budd’s husband, so the girl will certainly be protected from discovery if she works there since Clem Budd won’t say a word for fear of disclosing his own patronage of Stumpy’s. So Violet employs, unbeknownst to her, an object of her unbridled scorn and her husband’s passion. Stumpy and Abbott share a spontaneous laugh as they think over this situation. This humor is distinctly Dalton Trumbo. He delighted in exposing hypocrisy and relished the opportunity whenever it presented itself.
Hermann Vogel, a teacher in the high school, is the antithesis of John Abbott. He has open love affairs, he terrorizes the faculty at the high school, he behaves as though he is John Abbott’s equal, he ridicules even John Abbott, and despite, or perhaps because of, their differences, the two are good friends. John Abbott vicariously enjoys Vogel’s exploits and irreverence, and through the friendship “escaped the shackles of respectability and became a creature of Mephisto.” Vogel’s moody lectures often leave John Abbott feeling strangely uncomfortable. On one occasion he tells Abbott, “They may turn against you some day, these organizers, these praters, these ex-Loyalty Leaguers. And when they do—God pity you.”
Vogel makes his last appearance in the book when the depression has taken hold. He has worked out a theory, which he tells Abbott. It is that the depression is a necessary cleansing. “I foresee an era of pleasant, graceful living ahead,” says Vogel. “It will endure only so long as we keep the moralists hungry . . . let them, therefore, labour fourteen hours a day at extremely low wages and they will have little urge to thrust their snouts beyond their own doorsteps. They will have no time to dictate what their neighbour may read, what he may see in the theatre, what he may wear, what he may think, what he may eat, what he may smoke, whom he may love.”
At my father’s memorial service in 1976, Ring Lardner, Jr., a long-time close friend, said of him: "At rare intervals, there appears among us a person whose virtues are so manifest to all, who has such a capacity for relating to every sort of human being, who so subordinates his own ego drive to the concerns of others, who lives his whole life in such harmony with the surrounding community that he is revered and loved by everyone with whom he comes in contact. Such a man Dalton Trumbo was not.” That might, however, be a description of John Abbott. My father was more clearly like a very successful Hermann Vogel—a brilliant, ambitious, contentious man who enjoyed exposing the hypocrisy and lies that he observed; a man whose drive, determination, humor and powerful personality generally got him what he wanted. He won a National Book Award for Johnny Got His Gun and two Oscars while blacklisted in Hollywood for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. He went on to break the blacklist with Spartacus and Exodus and wrote twelve more screenplays and one more novel before his death in 1976.
Yet John Abbott and Hermann Vogel both reside in my father. His written works are often stories of kindness and love (The Brave One), fairy tale romance, (Roman Holiday), of honesty and dreams (Our Vines have Tender Grapes). Others are stories of individuals acting on their ethical beliefs (Spartacus, Lonely are the Brave, The Fixer). His interpersonal relationships were almost always conflicted. Yet he loved animals without reservation, and it was in his relationships with the birds he owned or rescued in later life that I saw in him a tenderness and consuming love. He had a large screened-in area built for a fledgling mocking bird he had raised from babyhood so it could experience the outdoors in safety before it was freed. On another occasion I witnessed his anguish when a pet parakeet died in his cradled hands on a frantic trip to the vet. It was difficult for him to expose his vulnerability. Satire is self-protective. It serves to keep deeper, more tender feelings safely hidden. Trumbo satirized Grand Junction rather than expose the pain he felt upon the loss of his father and the love he felt for the town and the childhood he left there.
Nikola Trumbo 2005
