THE REMARKABLE ANDREW — Dalton Trumbo—Lipplncoff ($2.50).
AMERICA Is WORTH SAVING — Theodore Dreiser—Modern Age ($2.50).
Many books end up in Hollywood. Last week, for a change, two books came out of Hollywood. Both carry identical counsel for the U. S. citizen on identical subjects: Defense, Democracy and World War II. America Is Worth Saving is a spiteful, wretchedly written tract by great, aging Theodore Dreiser (The Titan, An American Tragedy), who lives in Hollywood, lectures to California's women's clubs. The Remarkable Andrew might well be Dreiser's tract scripted into a novel by its author, Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.
Dalton Trumbo is one of the leaders of Hollywood's socially-conscious set. His 1939 novel, Johnny Got His Gun, depicted the mind of a soldier who survived Flanders without legs, arms, sight, hearing, even without a face. It was as sharp as bloodied barbed wire, retchsome as the smell of gas gangrene, it was a gruesome refutation of Patrick Henry's naïve views:
". . . There's nothing worth dying for. ... I would trade democracy for life. I would trade independence and honor and freedom and decency for life. . . ." Unlike Survivors Hemingway, Cummings, Remarque, Graves, etc., anti-war Novelist Trumbo saw nothing of World War I. The Remarkable Andrew is a further effort to avoid seeing anything of World War II.
Its plot is about the return of the ghost of General Andrew Jackson to help an admirer. Trumbo's General Jackson agrees with Theodore Dreiser right down the line: 1) Europe's wars are no concern whatever of the U. S.; 2) the U. S. has little interest in the British Fleet; 3) Great Britain is not a democracy; 4) if Hitler can't even cross the English Channel, he can't cross the Atlantic; 5) U. S. concern with fifth columnists is hysteria; 6) Ger many is not "an international outlaw"; 7) the U. S. didn't help Loyalist Spain, therefore shouldn't help any other country; 8) the U. S. Government is deceiving the electorate, etc.
General Jackson's opinions need surprise no one who has observed George Washing ton and Abraham Lincoln zealously follow ing the Communist Party Line in recent years. Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, John Marshall and Jesse James are also cast for bit parts in Trumbo's production. If the devil can quote Scripture, surely an irritated screenwriter can dip into The Federalist. A chapter of The Remarkable Andrew is devoted to the remarkable Dalton's attempt to outwit charges of Communism and pacifism with tedious parodies of Red-baiting.
Dreiser's tract is largely an attack on this felonious isle, this seat of tyrants, this England. He is also so fearfully wrought up over the present state of the U. S. that America is Worth Saving reads like the definitive burlesque of Upton Sinclair. Like Trumbo, Dreiser is just a good guy trying to revive the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Last fall, during the Presidential campaign, he announced his support of Earl Browder and the Communist Party platform.