Writing for his agendas

NOVELS 1920-25: ONE MAN’S INITIATION: 1917, THREE SOLDIERS, MANHATTAN

TRANSFER

By John Dos Passos

The Library of America, $35, 885 pages.

TRAVEL BOOKS AND OTHER WRITINGS 1916-1941 by John Dos Passos. The Library of America, $40, 871 pages.

REVIEWED BY VINCENT D. BALITAS

Fame is, of course, fleeting. History oppresses with examples. Andy Worhol pricked vanity with his sarcastic though perceptive “fifteen minutes” quip. The peaks and valleys associated with being in the public spotlight are well-known to those who have done anything more imaginative than “stay the course.” Nowhere is enduring fame more elusive, more transitory than in the arts. As Charles Simic, one of our best poets, has recently written, “Time is cruel to all living things, but what it does to literary reputations is downright mean. Sometimes it takes no more than twenty years for someone thought of as great by his or her contemporaries to be completely forgotten.”

Although John Dos Passos is by no means “completely forgotten,” his literary reputation has stagnated and shows few signs of a vigorous recovery. There was a flurry of renewed interest in 1996, the centennial of his birth, when the always reliable Library of America published “U.S.A.,” his masterpiece. As Norman Mailer, who over the years has kept a close eye on the rankings of his fellow writers, has said, “Dos Passos came nearer than any of us to writing the Great American Novel, and it’s entirely possible he succeeded.”

The three novels — “The 42nd Parallel” (1930), “1919” (1932), and “The Big Money” (1936) — that Dos Passos republished in 1938 as “U.S.A.,” remain his true legacy. Stylistically innovative, historically acute, the trilogy is a wonderfully developed look at our country through the eyes of a keen and compassionate observer of American life. Because he tried to combine the literary naturalism of a Theodore Dreiser with the modernist impulse and experimentation of a Joyce, he should be seen as a major figure in the literary landscape of the last century. As bold as he was technically, however, it is all too apparent that he lacked the genius needed to create memorable characters and scenes.

The three novels included in one of these volumes are within the anti-war tradition — Dos Passos served in the ambulance corps during World War I, as did his contemporaries Ernest Hemingway and e.e. cummings, whose “The Enormous Room,” along with Robert Graves’ “Goodbye to All That” are two of the best non-fiction books written by non-historians about “the war to end all wars” — and are of varying degrees of interest. “Three Soldiers” (1921) continues the concerns Dos Passos had in “One Man’s Initiation: 1917” (1920). The waste land, literally and symbolically created by the oxymoronic “Great War,” and the disillusionment and displacements it caused are brought into focus by the skill Dos Passos used to shape fiction.

“Manhattan Transfer” (1925) is interesting not only for its bleak evocation of New York City, but also because Dos Passos was able to show how modes of transportation could be matched with characters to reveal class as well as psychology, something that John O’Hara did also. That Jimmy, a central player, walks off on foot at the novel’s end is both a Luddite act and a powerful indictment of capitalism.

All the narrative “tricks” Dos Passos used, ranging from vernacular speech to newspaper headlines, from popular songs and cultural references to appearances by historical figures to a jazz-like style should make his work attractive to students of narrative form and to readers interested in historical fiction. However, it is difficult to recall any character, any scene. We should applaud his innovations; we should empathize with his historical conscience, but once we are finished reading, what remains?

John Dos Passos was a very intelligent writer whose talent often seems to have been subservient to his political and social agendas. He witnessed firsthand the violence and sheer brutality of war. He saw the corruption of corporate and industrial capitalism, and the lack of justice among the have-nots. Dehumanization, engendered by greed and by immoral business practices, might well be his central theme. (Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?) Attracted to Marxismand the revolution in Russia, his fiction sometimes borders on being a manifesto. The surface of events is explored and offered as proof of the curse of capitalism.

If Dos Passos was a writer driven by his libertarian awareness of the collapse of pre-war notions of human progress, and even though his politics changed from being a “fellow-traveler,” who once wrote a friend that “Every day I become more red,” to a supporter of Barry Goldwater, still his fiction, if not to the taste of the majority of current readers, is an important part in the development of American literature.

Dos Passos was not only a fine shaper of fictions, he was also a poet, a painter of impressive skill, a playwright, an author of a solid body of travel writings. Born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago, John Roderigo Madison — he took his father’s name in 1911 — lived a peripatetic life, the kind that is more difficult, if not impossible, in this age of terrorism. Indeed, French was his “first spoken language,” as Townsend Ludington, the editor of these two volumes, tells us in his extensive “Chronology.”

Throughout his life, Dos Passos traveled widely, often recording what he saw and heard. He was not your average tourist, this man who seems to have felt and understood so much of the waste land. Just read “Rosinante to the Road Again” (1922), his meditation on Spain. Unlike Hemingway’s non-fictional pieces about Spain, Dos Passos gives us he people he met and what they said about their country. There is little Dos Passos, which cannot be said of the Hemingway we get in his work. I was particularly taken with a section on Toledo, recalling my own brief visit to that magnificent city and El Greco. Indeed, even though “Rosinante …” is over eighty years old, it still resonates with essential truths about Spain and its people.

If “Rosinante …” is one type of travel writing - don’t expect the kind associated with, say, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, as good as they are - then “Orient Express” is another. Published in 1927, it takes us from a Russia, still in the infancy of its on-going post-Revolution consolidation of power, to Iraq as it was being created by the then empire-minded British. Now that the Soviet Union has been re-configured, and that different nation-builders seek to reinvent Iraq, the observations Dos Passos made can teach us how little has changed except the deadly toys we use. He learned from the people, not from guide books and cultural attaches. For all of us armchair travelers, his books are a boon.

“In All Countries” (1934) and “Journeys Between Wars” (1938) are interesting in their own right, but are not up to his earlier books. If you can read only one of the travel books, then “Orient Express” is the best bet. And if you take poetry seriously, as everyone should, then you might want just to scan “A Pushcart at the Curb” (1922), his only published collection of poems.

Dos Passos is not a bad poet, but we could question their inclusion here. The same could be said of “Uncollected Essays 1916-1941” and “Letters and Diaries 1916-1920.” Perhaps, a bit of padding was needed to fill out the page count to Library of America length.

These volumes conclude with the expected “Chronology,” a mini-biography of sorts that should send interested readers to Mr. Ludington’s “John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey” (E.P. Dutton, 1980). “Notes on the Texts” and “Notes,” regular features of Library of America publications, supply us with necessary information, especially the latter which saves us from going on-line to find out who, for example, Tartain of Tarason and Francisco Ferrer were.

There can be little doubt, based on these two volumes and “U.S.A.,” that John Dos Passos has a place, shaky as it may be, in the literary pantheon. He is one of those writers, Jack London and Upton Sinclair come to mind, as do others, who lacked the genius to be placed among the immortals, but who deserve a wider audience. Perhaps now, thanks to Mr. Ludington and the Library of America, John Dos Passos will receive one.

Vincent D. Balitas is a poet, teacher and critic in Pottsville, Pa.