Arts and Letters

I like to remember Dos Passos as I saw him from time to time in the middle 1920s. Though still in his own twenties, just four years older than the century, he had already published half a dozen books, including Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer, both of which novels were being widely read and hotly argued about. People gathered round him at parties, as if hoping that his talent would rub off on them, but he seemed to prefer standing in the background to watch and listen. He was a little above the average height and was usually dressed in a nondescript gray suit that might be worn at the seams. He had straight black hair, a wide forehead growing a little higher each year, and a wide mouth curving upward at the corners into apologetic grins. His most noticeable feature was a pair of spectacles with thick lenses, for he suffered from extreme short-sightedness until he was cured of it by a combination of middle-aged presbyopia and Dr. Bates's famous exercises. In his twenties he had to peer at people and carried his head forward like that of a shy, inquisitive, easily frightened bird.

Sometimes he offered opinions in a shyly tentative fashion: "W-well, don't you think that perhaps…" he would say; but the opinion that followed would be his own and nobody else could change it. Sometimes, with a timid but mischievous smile, he stuttered out a devastating remark. "Intellectual w-workers of the w-world, unite!" he would say to a group of radical friends. "You have nothing to lose but your brains."

I heard him make that remark, afterward widely repeated, at John Squarcialupi's restaurant, where he had come with Joe Freeman and Mike Gold to discuss plans for bringing out a revolutionary magazine; it was to be called The New Masses. But were Joe and Mike and other radical journalists really his friends at the time, or were they merely allies in his crusade against a businessman's culture? They were all Marxists of a sort, close to the Communist Party, whereas Dos Passos was a libertarian with a touch of anarchism. His real friends were Cummings, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wilson, and other rising writers of the new generation, though even with these he was a little out of tempo. He was less interested than the friends in problems of aesthetic form, less interested in achieving psychological depth, and vastly more interested in the social panorama. He looked back more than they did to the Yellow Nineties and, at a time when the friends were completely unpolitical, his work looked forward to what was afterward called the Red Decade.

Moreover, he had no sympathy with an element of showmanship that he detected in some of the friends. Speaking of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, he was later to say, "…the idea of being that kind of celebrity set my teeth on edge." Dos Passos didn't want to be any kind of celebrity or project a public image of any sort. He wanted to remain an independent observer, free to listen to all sorts of people, and, as regards his private life, he wanted to keep it to himself. Very few of his friends knew where he was living in any given week. He never seemed to have a nest, but only to be perching on a branch, as if he were a migrating bird. At parties he left his hat near the door, "so as to be ready to bolt at a moment's notice," or so he tells us in his informal book of memoirs, The Best Times. There he also says:

At the slightest excuse, and particularly upon the occasion of the publication of a book, I bolted for foreign parts…. Young women I met at cocktail parties liked to tell me I was running away from myself.

That was partly true. Maybe I was running away from them. I never got around to explaining that I was running toward something too. It was the whole wide world…. I wanted to see country, landscape and plants and animals and people: men, women and children in city, town and hamlet. I had to hurry. There would never be time to satisfy such multifarious curiosity.

The same note of eagerness and multifarious curiosity is sounded in a sort of preface to his most ambitious work, a trilogy of novels first published separately. When the novels reappeared in 1938 as one huge volume entitled U.S.A., he added three pages by way of a prologue that offers a portrait of the author as he was in his twenties.

The young man walks by himself [Dos Passos says], fast but not fast enough, far but not far enough (faces slide out of sight, talk trails into tattered scraps, footsteps tap fainter in alleys); he must catch the last subway, the streetcar, the bus, run up the gangplanks of all the steamboats, register at all the hotels, work in the cities, answer the wantads, learn the trades, take up the jobs, live in all the boardinghouses, sleep in all the beds. One bed is not enough, one job is not enough, one life is not enough. At night, head swimming with wants, he walks by himself alone.

No job, no woman, no house, no city.

That young man once published a book called, without much exaggeration, In All Countries. As early as 1927, however, his itinerary had changed. He had become deeply involved in the struggle to save Sacco and Vanzetti, and the execution of "those anarchist bastards," as Judge Thayer called them, made Dos Passos feel that his own country had lost compassion under the rule of faceless corporations. He determined to write a series of novels that would chronicle the moral decay of the country since the Spanish-American War. To carry out the project he would need more knowledge about many sections of the United States, and the search for that knowledge was to guide most of his activities for the next ten years. Instead of running up the gangplank of steamers bound for it didn't matter what foreign port, he hurried to catch trains to the Middle West, the South, or the Pacific Coast. He attended mass meetings and Congressional hearings, he reported strikes for the labor press, once he worked in Hollywood, and always he listened and observed.

The trilogy of novels that resulted from his travels embodied a curious paradox. Dos Passos was primarily interested in gathering and presenting his material, that is, in offering an accurate panorama of American life over a period of thirty years. But no one had found a method for presenting such a panorama, and the result was that Dos Passos had to invent a number of technical devices, including "newsreels," as he called them, portraits of American worthies, the Camera Eye, in which he gave his own reaction to the scenes described, and finally the life stories of twelve more or less typical characters hopelessly involved in great events. In other words, the intensely curious reporter immersed in his material had to become a master technician. The paradox is that the technique, more than the material it was designed to present, has had an effect on history. Dos Passos's picture of America succumbing to moral decay is powerful but subjective; we are not obliged to accept it; but we have to acknowledge that the methods he invented have been adopted by novelists here and in many other countries. Jean-Paul Sartre says, in an article written for The Atlantic Monthly,

Dos Passos has revealed the falseness of unity of action. He has shown that one might describe a collective event by juxtaposing twenty individual and unrelated stories. These revelations permitted us to conceive and to write novels which are to the classic works of Flaubert and Zola what non-Euclidean geometry is to the old geometry of Euclid.

Nothing Dos Passos wrote afterward had the international impact of U.S. A., but he was busy at his desk, and several of his later works are of lasting interest. Among the most ambitious is District of Columbia, another trilogy, with the first volume devoted to American communism, the second to Huey Long's brand of fascism, and the third to the New Deal in wartime. Another ambitious work, Chosen Country, is Dos Passos's closest approach to an autobiographical novel. Midcentury, published in 1961, proved to be more popular; it is a long novel devoted to the misdeeds of the labor bosses. All these are honest books, but they lack the zest of his early work and a young man's fascinated interest in all sorts of people, including grotesques and villains and likable buffoons.

While writing the long novels and a number of shorter books, Dos Passos had completely changed his political position. From standing on the extreme left, even beyond the Communists, he had moved close to the extreme right, or its equivalent in American politics. Instead of writing for The New Masses, he published articles in The National Review. But the change, however dramatic, was perhaps not so fundamental as it appeared to be. Dos Passos from the beginning had been an individualist who distrusted bureaucracies of all sorts. The bigger they were, the more he distrusted them, whether they represented big capital, as in the beginning, or big labor and the welfare state. "Organization is death," he had once repeated to himself in French, Latin, Greek, and Italian; that was when he was washing barracks windows as a private in the American Army. Organized communism was death, he later came to believe, and the New Deal was death because its "grand design," as he called it, was to introduce a type of communism.

Nobody doubted that he was acting with complete integrity in adopting those new beliefs. Nobody thought that he was hoping to profit by them. The fact was that they involved a financial sacrifice, since they deprived him of his former audience and plunged him into a period of partial neglect. As always he was following his sense of duty. But why—some of us wondered plaintively—did this one-time pacifist let his name appear on public statements among the names of drop-the-big-bombers and Washington warhawks? That was a question to which I have never found the answer.

I reflected, though, that all the writers deeply involved in the political struggles of the 1930s paid a heavy price for the illusions they held for a time. When they lost the illusions, they became embittered or discouraged. In some ways Dos Passos paid less than Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others, since he found new illusions to take the place of those he had abandoned. He continued doing honest work to the end. The final record is impressive: thirty-nine books in all, including essays, poems, travel books, reporting, three plays, a book of memoirs, several historical studies—perhaps the best of his later work—and finally twelve novels, among them a trilogy that has won and deserves to hold a place in the literature of the world.