Farewell to a dear friend

This evening I spoke with Mitzi Trumbo, the younger sister of my friend Christopher Trumbo. Chris and I first met sometime in the summer of 1952, shortly after I arrived at the American School in Mexico City.

I learned only on New Year's Day that Chris was dying of renal cancer, at the very young age of 70 (I am, for a few more weeks, a boyish 69). And tonight Mitzi told me that he had died on Saturday night. 

We hadn't seen each other in five years, and rarely even swapped email. But a friendship six decades old doesn't need constant attention, and we respected one another's privacy. So while I was shocked to learn of his illness, I wasn't surprised that he hadn't told me. 

Chris's father Dalton was one of my mentors. When I was 12 or so, he read a painfully typed, 88-page SF story I'd written, and set my course in life: "Well, you're a writer," he said. And that was that.

Chris was a writer too, of TV and film scripts. He also wrote a stage play based on his father's astonishing letters, which was a great success and eventually formed the basis of a documentary, Trumbo, which I highly recommend. 

Dalton Trumbo taught me not that writing was a way to make a living, but that it was a way to take a stand: to portray the world as you see it, whether that portrait will make you rich or put you in jail. (Trumbo's vision of the world did both for him.)

And in 2009, Chris published an article in The Huffington Post that expressed how he had taken that same lesson: War And Peace (A Sequel). Here is an excerpt:

Once upon a time during the last century I was in Paris and it was the fourteenth of July, Bastille Day, the Fete Nationale, a party that France throws for itself to remember the day that the gates of the Bastille were forced open and the prisoners streamed out from that place of gloom and pain and death and into the sunlight and they were free. 

Every year the French do this, and that night when I was in Paris I went to a party and Simone Signoret and Yves Montand were there and around midnight we all tumbled onto the streets and people were laughing and dancing and some of us got lost but later we made it back to the party and it went on until morning. 

And after we got back James Jones - who wrote the book From Here to Eternity about men and women and soldiers and love and the way they live and what happens to them and the Second World War - began to talk with Dalton Trumbo - who wrote the book Johnny Got His Gun about all the things that Jones had written about except Trumbo was writing about the First World War which had been fought so the Second World War wouldn't happen, about what was called the War to End All Wars. Neither man was sober and when they finished a drink another always appeared and their talk was punctuated with "You're full of shit, Dalton" and "You're full of shit, Jim" and later "You're so full of shit, Dalton" and "You're so full of shit, Jim" as I remember it. 

They were talking about what a person could do that would change things and, maybe because it was Bastille Day, Jones was glum about the progress of freedom and the prospect of peace in the world and that night he didn't think that one man could make a difference in the way things were going. Another night I think he would have argued differently but that night such was his take on the world, because it's so damned hard to stand up to unjust authority again and again and never see anything happen except maybe see things get worse. Trumbo didn't agree with him. He thought that one man could make a difference and he and Jones went round and round with neither one convincing the other. 

Trumbo was blacklisted in Hollywood when James Jones and he talked that Bastille Day, and his name hadn't appeared on a film he'd written in almost 13 years because he refused to comply with the standards of political behavior Hollywood came up with in 1947, and his name wasn't on any films not because he'd stopped writing them but because his work appeared under the names of other men, or under pseudonyms, and among the films he wrote during that time were two that brought Oscars to writers who would not normally have received them because it was Trumbo who had written those scripts, not themselves.

Yes, one man (or woman) can make a difference. Dalton made a difference, and so did Chris. I hope I have too.