Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos 9781472544100, 9781623564438, 9781623561185, 9781623564896

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Editorial Note and Acknowledgments
The Early 1920s: Constructing a Style
Introduction to Three Soldiers
Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination
John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The Development of a Modernist Style
Works cited
U.S.A.: The Style Perfected
U. S. A.
The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center
I
II
III
IV
The “only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money
The Sexual Geography of Expatriate Paris
The 1920s and Beyond: Friendships and Art
The Hemingway-Dos Passos Relationship
The Paintings of John Dos Passos*
Index
9781623564896_web_plates.pdf
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Illustrations
Preface
Editorial Note and Acknowledgments
The Early 1920s: Constructing a Style
Introduction to Three Soldiers
Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination
John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The Development of a Modernist Style
Works cited
U.S.A.: The Style Perfected
U. S. A.
The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center
I
II
III
IV
The “only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money
The Sexual Geography of Expatriate Paris
The 1920s and Beyond: Friendships and Art
The Hemingway-Dos Passos Relationship
The Paintings of John Dos Passos*
Index

Citation preview

Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos A Collection of Essays By Donald Pizer

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com First published 2013 © Donald Pizer, 2013 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Pizer, Donald. Toward a modernist style: John Dos Passos: a collection of essays/by Donald Pizer. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-118-5 (pbk.: alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-62356-443-8 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Dos Passos, John, 1896–1970–Criticism and interpretation. 2. Modernism (Literature)–United States. I. Title. PS3507.O743Z776 2013 813’.52–dc23 2013005997 ISBN: PB: 978-1-6235-6118-5 HB: 978-1-6235-6443-8 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6489-6 ePub: 978-1-6235-6598-5

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Editorial Note and Acknowledgments

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The Early 1920s: Constructing a Style

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Introduction to Three Soldiers Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The Development of a Modernist Style U.S.A.: The Style Perfected U. S. A. The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center The “only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money The Sexual Geography of Expatriate Paris The 1920s and Beyond: Friendships and Art The Hemingway-Dos Passos Relationship The Paintings of John Dos Passos Index

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26 41 43 67 82 89 103 105 122 137

List of Illustrations The “only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money Figure 1 Pages 524–5 of the first printing of The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936)

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Figure 2 Page of a draft of Camera Eye (51), The Big Money (John Dos Passos Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Accession 5950, Box 5)

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Figure 3 Page 618 of the setting copy of The Big Money (John Dos Passos Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Accession 5950, Box 5)

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The Paintings of John Dos Passos The figures below can be found in the colour plate section of this volume. Figure 1 [Arab Group, 1922.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 2 [Work Boat, 1923–24.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 3 Dust Jacket, The Garbage Man, 1926. Watercolor. Courtesy of Richard Layman Figure 4 [Urban Center, 1926–27.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 5 [Nude, mid-1920s.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 6 [Nude Sketch, mid-1920s.] Charcoal. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 7 [The Moon is a Gong 1,] 1925. Gouache. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin

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Figure 8 [The Moon is a Gong 2,] 1925. Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 9 [Fisherman, 1927.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin Figure 10 [Circus, mid or late 1920s.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin

Preface My interest in John Dos Passos’s work and career stemmed from and followed the same course as my earlier writing on Theodore Dreiser during the late 1960s and much of the 1970s. Although the two figures were separated by a generation (Dreiser was born in 1870, Dos Passos in 1896), by the 1930s they were often cited as two of the principal exponents of American literary naturalism—a designation that is still maintained. Dreiser of course expressed his themes within the traditional nineteenth-century form of the novel as mock biography, while Dos Passos deployed a number of modernistic experimental fictional techniques. But both writers in their most well-known works responded to the naturalistic impulse to represent in full detail the various ways in which the average American was circumscribed in his activities and beliefs by the circumstances of his life. My initial research on Dos Passos, beginning in the late 1970s, dealt with U.S.A., since it provided the best example of his unique combination of naturalistic themes, and experimental fictional devices. This effort produced a chapter on U.S.A. in my 1982 study Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation as well as an essay on the nature of the trilogy’s Camera Eye device. It also stimulated me to undertake research on the full range of Dos Passos’s work and career. I began by spending a summer at the University of Virginia Library examining its extensive Dos Passos collection. My intent was to gather material for a book about all his fiction, just as my research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Dreiser Collection had led to my The Novels of Theodore Dreiser (1976). I soon realized, however, that given both the extent of the collection, and the uneven nature of Dos Passos’s fiction over a long career, it was necessary for me to narrow my sights. Again U.S.A. provided the obvious means of doing so. Since it was at once his most experimental work and an acknowledged twentieth-century masterpiece, it therefore both required, and profited from having an entire book devoted to it. It was not until 1986, however, that I was able to find the time to write the book, which appeared in 1988 as Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.”: A Critical Study. By the mid-1980s, I was devoting more and more of my research and writing to various phases of American expression of the first half of the twentieth century. One of these phases was the vibrant 1920s expatriate movement; another was fictional modernism. Dos Passos played a striking role in both of these, and I was able to draw upon my knowledge of this participation for a number of essays over the following decades. The final

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two essays of this collection deal with important but either frequently misunderstood or neglected areas of Dos Passos’s career—his relationship with Ernest Hemingway and his lifelong commitment to painting. It is no accident that all my writing on Dos Passos has centered on his work of the 1920s—this despite the fact that he continued to publish prolifically until his death in 1970. Dos Passos was one of those fortunate artists whose background, temperament, and temper of the times were in productive relationship with each other during a specific era and thus coalesced into a powerful expressive tool. Rebelling against his upper-middle class upbringing and the reigning aestheticism of his Harvard years, he found himself, after a transforming participation in the War, in the midst of a decade in which other intellectuals and artists of all persuasions were also in revolt and were thus creating a milieu of ideas and artistic styles expressive of that frame of mind. If most Americans applauded America’s emergence as an industrial giant and its decisive role in the “War to Save Democracy,” Dos Passos and many of his generation’s artists and writers rejected these and similar positions. And if he and these other rebels found it impossible to live in a country which espoused a mechanical civilization and which also supported an art of platitudes expressed by means of outworn forms, they could find a freer and more congenial artistic climate abroad. Dos Passos’s life and work of the 1920s, from Three Soldiers to the climactic achievement of U.S.A., is thus a paradigm of the archetypal American artist of the decade. Rejecting his own class and its values, he was energized by this act of revolt to create out of the ferment of literary modernism a body of work that is both fully expressive of its moment and has stood the test of time. The essays that follow thus have a number of recurrent interwoven themes. They seek to chart the evolution of Dos Passos’s artistic sensibility from its largely conventional expression at the start of the decade to the radical formal experimentation of U.S.A. at its close. They also seek to place this development in the context of contemporary ideas about art and society that served as the matrix for this development. And, finally, they seek to describe the centers of artistic strength in his best work. During the 1920s and 1930s, Dos Passos was frequently considered one of the most important writers of his generation. On the completion of U.S.A. in 1936, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and in 1938 Jean-Paul Sartre named him “the greatest writer of our time.” But for several reasons his reputation declined over the remainder of his lengthy career and continued to do so for some decades afterwards. An initial cause of this decline was his increasing disenchantment, brought to a head by the Spanish Civil War, with leftist ideas, and activities and his concomitant outspoken support of rightwing positions from the late 1940s to his death. In addition, it was commonly

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held that his later novels lacked the freshness and edge of his earlier work— that they were largely tired reprises of older devices and strategies. These beliefs about his later career should not have affected estimates of his earlier work, but they did. In a period during which critical standards of value derived principally from the novels of Henry James and William Faulkner— that is, that significant fiction contained either psychological depth or a tragic vision—Dos Passos’s work as a whole was felt to be deficient in both. Townsend Ludington, in his The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos (1973) and John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey (1980), was one of the earliest scholars who sought to re-establish Dos Passos’s centrality in the great outburst that was early twentieth-century American literary modernism, an effort followed by my own John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose (1988) and Dos Passos’ U.S.A.: A Critical Study (1988), as well as that by other more recent scholars and critics. The present volume, with its emphasis on the sources and nature of Dos Passos’s modernism, is intended to be a further contribution to that effort.

Editorial Note and Acknowledgments All of the collected material in this volume is reprinted in the form in which it originally appeared except for the normalization of minor stylistic and documentation matters. Other than “The Paintings of John Dos Passos,” which has not been previously published, the list that follows cites each essay’s original appearance in the order of the essays as they appear in this book. I wish to thank the various publishers named for permission to republish. I also wish to thank Lucy Dos Passos Coggin for permission to reproduce the examples of Dos Passos’s work as a watercolorist contained in this volume. “Introduction” to John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers (New York: Dutton Signet, 1997). Reprinted by permission of Signet, an imprint of Penguin Group USA Inc. “John Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination,” Journal of Modern Literature, 21 (Fall 1997): 137–50. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press. “John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The Development of a Modernist Style,” Mosaic 45 (December 2012): 51–67. Reprinted by permission of Mosaic. “John Dos Passos: U.S.A.,” Twentieth-Century American Naturalism: An Interpretation (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982): 39–64. Reprinted by permission of Southern Illinois University Press. “The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center,” Modern Fiction Studies, 26 (Autumn 1980): 417–30. © 1980 Purdue Research Foundation. Reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. “The ‘only words against POWER SUPERPOWER’ Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 79 (1985): 427–34. Reprinted by permission of PBSA. “The Sexual Geography of Expatriate Paris,” Twentieth Century Literature, 36 (Summer 1990): 173–85. Reprinted by permission of Twentieth Century Literature. “The Hemingway-Dos Passos Relationship,” Journal of Modern Literature, 13 (March 1986): 111–28. Reprinted by permission of Indiana University Press.

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Introduction to Three Soldiers

John Dos Passos’s Three Soldiers was greeted by cries of outrage on its publication in 1921. The war to end all wars and to save the West from the Huns—a holy war—had ended with a glorious victory only three years earlier, and the United States was still basking in the euphoria generated by its late but decisive role in the conflict. But here was a novel that sought to destroy the principal myths on which support of the War rested. As depicted by Dos Passos through the lives of three American soldiers serving in France, the Army was a mechanism for turning men into mindless automatons, and battle  itself  unleashed all that was most vicious in man’s nature. The belief that the War was a triumph of the human spirit over the forces of evil was therefore a huge sham foisted on a public eager to accept a positive interpretation of the conflict. In expressing this subversive view, Three Soldiers heralded a number of later American war novels also seeking to demythicize the War, from e. e. cummings’ The Enormous Room (1922) and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) to William March’s Company K (1933). Three Soldiers also, along with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919), helped establish the distinctive angle of vision of the 1920s American writer. Much that Americans believed was false, and it was the writer’s function to demolish the myths and end the silences shielding Americans from the truths of their own lives. Dos Passos was not born into a social class ordinarily associated with rebellious spirits. True, his parents, because both were locked in failed marriages to others, were unable to marry until he was in his teens. But in almost all other circumstances Dos Passos was a child of affluence, and privilege. John R. Dos Passos, Sr, was a successful Wall Street lawyer and provided a conventional upper-class experience for young Dos Passos. There was much travel abroad and education in private schools followed by Choate, the exclusive Connecticut boarding school, almost a year of the “grand tour” of Europe, and four years at Harvard. Only 20 on his graduation from Harvard in  1916, Dos Passos was frustrated in his desire to observe the War in Europe, and was persuaded by his father to study architecture in Spain. Recalled by his father’s death in early 1917, he succeeded in joining the American-founded Norton-Harjes volunteer ambulance corps. He arrived in France in June 1917 and served initially at the horrendous battle of Verdun during the summer of 1917 and then—with a Red Cross unit—in northern

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Italy from late 1917 to June 1918. Forced to resign from the ambulance corps because of a “disloyal” letter sent to a friend, Dos Passos returned to America where, in October 1918, he enlisted in the Army Medical Corps. His unit was on its way overseas when the War ended in November. After five dreary months of duty in army camps south of Paris and in Alsace, he was permitted to transfer to a Paris student detachment in order to take classes at the Sorbonne. He was discharged from the Army, in France, in July 1919. He had already begun a novel based on his Army experiences, and he now settled in Spain to complete it. By April 1920, when he returned to France for several months, he had almost finished a draft of Three Soldiers. This brief and bald outline of Dos Passos’s early years fails to do justice to the rich nature of his inner life as he transformed himself from a Wall Street lawyer’s son into a radical writer. Basic to this change was Dos Passos’s youthful absorption of a stream of American romantic individualism that found any condition or force restricting personal freedom abhorrent. For many American artists and intellectuals since the United States had become an industrial society, the greatest threat to individual freedom was industrialism itself. Echoing the major American voices raised in protest against the oppression of the human spirit by the machine and by a machinebased civilization—Emerson, Thoreau, and Melville, for example—Dos Passos wrote in June 1916, as he was about to leave Harvard: Has not the world today somehow got itself enslaved by this immense machine, the industrial system. Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions, bound in the traces of mechanical industry, without ever a chance of self-expression. . . . They grind their lives away on the wheels, producing, producing, producing. And of all the results of this degrading, never-ending labor, how little is really necessary to anyone, how much is actually destructive of the capacity of men for living.

Industrialism to Dos Passos in this passage and elsewhere is not merely a technological process but a force in society comprising the mechanical, the materialistic, and the destructively competitive, and thus a force threatening and limiting freedom of action, thought, and feeling. Another major factor in Dos Passos’s emergence into the radical vision of Three Soldiers was his experience of war. His front line duty at Verdun and his service in northern Italy convinced him that the War was the fullest expression of the oppression of the individual by an industrial society. As has often been noted, World War I was the first great “mechanized” war. Immense casualties were inflicted anonymously and impersonally—that

Introduction to Three Soldiers

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is, from a distance—by weapons that were the product of a sophisticated industrial system— weapons such as the machine gun, the aerial bomb, heavy artillery, and poison gas. Men were slaughtered—over a million at Verdun— like animals in an abattoir by these weapons because warfare continued to be conducted as though mass infantry could accomplish victory. Yet despite this  reality, patriots remaining at home continued to proclaim the War a chivalric crusade in which young men gladly went to heroic deaths. As one American minister announced in 1917, “It is God who has summoned us to this war. It is His war we are fighting. The conflict is indeed a crusade. The greatest in history—the holiest. It is in the profoundest and truest sense a holy war.” At Verdun, however, Dos Passos saw a grotesque exercise in the distinction between myth and reality—not a crusade but mangled corpses and drunken French soldiers driven to the front. A few days after the onset of the battle, he wrote, “The war is utter damn nonsense, a vast cancer fed by lies and selfseeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.” And out of this realization that the war was a killing machine and that any other view of it was a lie came his belief, as expressed in a letter from the Italian front in 1918, that there existed a powerful web of connection between modern industrialism, the War, and the crushing of the individual spirit. “For all the things of the mind, for art, and for everything that is needed in the world,” he wrote, “war—I mean modern war—is death.” The war, he added a few months later, is “the machine that has been crushing us all.” Soon after the publication of Three Soldiers, Dos Passos commented that the novel “is not, as people have tried to make out, autobiography.” It is not autobiographical, of course, in that only John Andrews of the three soldiers resembles Dos Passos and in that Andrews himself differs from Dos Passos in being a musician, undergoing combat and getting wounded, and facing imprisonment for desertion. But in Andrews’ characteristics as a Harvardeducated artist serving in the Medical Corps in France, and in his expression of many of Dos Passos’s most strongly held beliefs about the War, he is autobiographical indeed. Moreover, Dos Passos’s experiences as an ambulance driver and enlisted man supplied him not only with a general sense of the relationship between modern warfare and an industrial society but also with a number of specific  moments of felt perception, of epiphanies, illustrating this relationship. These moments etched themselves so deeply into Dos Passos’s consciousness that they appear both in his early war fiction and in the war passages of such later novels and memoirs as Nineteen-Nineteen (1932) and The Best Times (1966). They include the drunken French soldiers at Verdun (used in his brief first novel, One Man’s Initiation [1920]), the letter protesting

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the war, which led to his dismissal from the Red Cross, and the exhilaration of his release from military duty to study in Paris. But perhaps the most significant such moment was Dos Passos’s initial experience of the Army, at Camp Crane, New Jersey, in October 1918, when he was assigned to a casual labor unit while awaiting reassignment to a permanent unit. Endlessly washing windows, picking up cigarette butts, and performing other tedious, meaningless tasks within an uncaring authoritarian system became for Dos Passos the defining image of the Army, and indeed of modern industrial society as a whole. “Organization is death. Organization is death,” he wrote to a friend from Camp Crane. John Andrews also washes windows during his training, and by the close of Three Soldiers, after experiencing almost every indignity that the military can inflict on the spirit, he sums up his and Dos Passos’s belief in the similarity between the Army and society as oppressive systems. “It seems to me,” Andrews says, “that human society has been always that, and perhaps will be always that: organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them.” After completing Three Soldiers in France, in June 1920, Dos Passos returned to New York to attempt to interest a publisher in the novel. He later recalled 13 rejections before George H. Doran & Co. accepted the book in early 1921. Doran, however, was dismayed by a good many passages in which Dos Passos rendered the actual speech of Army enlisted men and insisted that these be revised or cut. Dos Passos “employed the common language of the degenerate,” Doran later recalled. Dos Passos reluctantly agreed, and Three Soldiers was published in bowdlerized form in September 1921. (The original version of the novel is not among Dos Passos’s papers at the University of Virginia and is apparently lost.) The novel almost immediately stirred up a hornet’s net of controversy. While such figures as John Peale Bishop, a poet, and Princeton graduate who had also served in France, and H. L. Mencken, who had a dim view of Wilson’s War aims, applauded Dos Passos’s honesty, other reviewers who had served in the War (principally as officers) attacked the novel both as untrue and as an insult to the Army and the nation. Coningsby Dawson wrote in the New York Times that the book “is a dastardly denial of the splendid chivalry which carried many a youth to a soldier’s death with the sure knowledge in his soul that he was a liberator,” and the work was reviewed in the Chicago Tribune under the headline “Three Soldiers Branded as Textbook and Bible for Slackers and Cowards.” The novel sold extremely well for a work by a young unknown author, and Dos Passos was well launched on a career that was to include such masterworks of twentieth-century American fiction as Manhattan Transfer (1925) and U.S.A. (1938). And over the years, as Dos Passos’s depiction of life

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in the Army for the common soldier was confirmed both by other authors writing about World War I and by the further experience of modern war in World War II, Three Soldiers assumed its permanent place as a major and groundbreaking work of American fiction. Dos Passos’s portrayal of the Army as an industrial system—a theme hammered in by the titles to the parts of the book—reduces the individual enlisted man to the condition of a product of that system. He becomes an animal or an automaton motivated entirely by fear or hate—an end achieved by the ruthless authoritarianism inherent in an absolute hierarchical social organization. As one of Andrews’ fellow soldiers comes to realize, “In the tyranny of the army a man becomes a brute, a piece of machinery.” Throughout the novel, the “Y Man”—the representative of the YMCA, which played a quasi official role as moral guide to the troops—serves as a spokesman for the denial of this truth and for the alternative lies that made such a system acceptable. The military itself, however, is depicted, in direct contrast to these lies, as an organization that dehumanizes those who serve within it. This portrayal reaches a climax in Dos Passos’s account of the battle of the Argonne Forest in October 1918, one of the last major battles of the War, in which over a million American troops participated. In one of the most devastating depictions of the Army in action before the Vietnam conflict, American soldiers rob the dead, kill prisoners, and shoot their own officers, while both enlisted men and officers wander aimlessly in and out of battle. Using a technique that has roots in the Victorian novel of multiple plots and also looks forward to the fragmented, discontinuous, modernistic fiction of William Faulkner, Dos Passos divided his narrative into three separately told but often interwoven stories. His purpose was undoubtedly—as it was in the even more radically discontinuous narratives of Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.—to use range and repetition to confirm a theme. It is not only Andrews, an artist, who is beaten down by the system but also two more commonplace types—Fuselli, a city-bred clerk, and Chrisfield, an Indiana farm boy. Each of these three figures enters the Army as a kind of innocent believing in a specific American faith. Andrews thinks that he can discover through communion with the mass of men a relief from his directionless freedom; Fuselli hopes to pursue the dream of success in the Army—to rise to corporal and make a good career for himself; and Chrisfield believes in the integrity of his own personality and will. And each finds that the Army not only fails to fulfill his faith—in the group, in success, and in self-hood—but uses it as a weapon to destroy him. In a bitterly ironical series of reversals, the Army as mass belief crucifies Andrews, the Army as a system based on deception rather than effort defeats Fuselli, and the Army as institutionalized hierarchical power turns Chrisfield into a psychopath.

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Much of the criticism of Three Soldiers has centered on John Andrews because he is the most fully portrayed and complex of the three soldiers. It  is  generally accepted that his characterization suffers from its source in Dos Passos’s own recent Army experiences. There is too much in Andrews of the sensitive young man who is facing for the first time a crass and unsympathetic world and is therefore prone to self-pity. But Dos Passos is also expressing in his account of Andrews an additional theme—one which he perhaps only partially succeeds in making apparent. The man of insight and feeling—the artist—Dos Passos wished to say, must express his beliefs in action as well as in his art, even if action leads to martyrdom. When, at the close of the novel, Andrews turns from the lush sensuousness of his Queen of Sheba suite to the march rhythms of “John Brown’s Body” and when he refuses to compromise any further his faith in freedom, he is not expressing a quixotic idealism but rather his belief in the need for the artist to take his stand, in his art and in his life, at whatever personal cost.

Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination

There is perhaps an initial need to justify a full discussion of John Dos Passos’s 1922 interpretation of Spanish life, Rosinante to the Road Again. Rosinante, though often mentioned in accounts of Dos Passos’s early career, is scarcely of the stature of Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A., the works on which his reputation rests. Nevertheless, I will argue that Rosinante to the Road Again is of great interest in its special character as a significant expression of what can be called the modernistic expatriate imagination.1 Like many of the most engaged and lively writers of his generation, Dos Passos sought in his depiction of a foreign culture to explore in striking new forms the meaning of his own. To examine Rosinante at some length, therefore, is not to overextend the interest one might bring to a minor work. It is rather to seek to recognize that its themes and form are closely related to those of one of the major moments in early twentieth-century American writing. Although Rosinante to the Road Again consists for the most part of essays and narrative segments that Dos Passos wrote and published from mid-1920 to early 1922,2 the origins of the work lie in the turbulent years between his departure from Harvard in the spring of 1916 and the conclusion of his second visit to Spain in early 1920.3 Dos Passos graduated from Harvard in 1916 with few plans other than a desire to see the European war and to write. But since he was still dependent on his family, he readily assented to his father’s idea that he visit Spain in order to prepare for a possible career 1

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3

Early twentieth-century American expatriate writing has always attracted a good deal of critical attention, almost all of it limited to writers based in Paris. Among these studies, J. Gerald Kennedy’s Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993) has been most useful in aiding my thinking about the American expatriate state of mind. See also my own American Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996). The full prebook publication history of the various parts of Rosinante can be found in David Sanders, John Dos Passos: A Comprehensive Bibliography (New York: Garland, 1987), 6–7. I rely for biographical information about Dos Passos on Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980).

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in architecture. These five months of his initial visit, from October 1916 to February 1917, before he was recalled by his father’s death, came at a vital moment in Dos Passos’s intellectual and personal development. Two essays of the period just before his departure for Spain reveal his state of mind. In the first, “A Humble Protest,” Dos Passos stridently restates the long-standing indictment by American intellectuals and artists of an industrial society. Has not the world today somehow got itself enslaved by this immense machine, the industrial system, [he inquires.] Millions of men perform labor narrowing and stultifying even under the best conditions, bound in the traces of mechanical industry, without ever a chance of selfexpression.  .  .  .  They grind their lives away on the wheels, producing, producing, producing. And of all the results of this degrading, neverending labor, how little is really necessary to anyone; how much is actually destructive of the capacity of men for living.4

Dos Passos concludes by making the association, inevitable for many of his generation, between the nature of the European war and the consequences of an industrial civilization—“In the light of the flames of burning Belgian towns civilized men look at each other with a strange new horror. Is this what men have been striving for through the ages?”5 Dos Passos’s second major essay of this period, “Against American Literature,” which appeared as he was leaving for Spain, pursues the attack on the mechanization of American culture from another direction. Contemporary American writing, Dos Passos states, is often clever and amusing but is essentially superficial because it fails to tap into the deep roots of the natural in man’s basic character and experience. He goes on to compare this inadequacy with the primitivistic currents still present, he believes, in the literature of older European cultures. In other countries literature is the result of long evolution, based on primitive folklore, on the first joy and terror of man in the presence of the trees and scented meadowlands and dimpled whirling rivers, interwoven with the moulding fabric of old dead civilizations, and with threads of fiery new gold from incoming races. The result is glamour, depth, real pertinence to the highest and lowest in man. . . . This artistic stimulus, fervid with primitive savageries, redolent with old cult of earth 4

5

“A Humble Protest,” Harvard Monthly, 62 (June 1916): 115–20; quoted from John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 34. John Dos Passos, ed. Pizer, 34.

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11

and harvest, smoked and mellowed by time, is the main inheritance of the civilization, the woof upon which individual artists may work the warp of their own thoughts.6

But, Dos Passos ends, it has become “harder every day for any race to gain the lesson of the soil” because an “all-enveloping industrialism, a new mode of life preparing, has broken down the old bridges leading to the past, has cut off the possibility of retreat.”7 Much of the exalted rhetoric of Dos Passos’s essays of 1916 condemning the industrial present and yearning for a primitive past can, of course, be attributed to the circumstances of his age and class. Just 20 at the time, reared in considerable affluence by a Wall Street-lawyer father, and educated at Choate and Harvard, Dos Passos not unsurprisingly fashioned a code of revolt based on a rejection of the economic foundation of his own class and called for a return to the natural. He was also aided in his effort by his distaste for the effete aestheticism that flourished at Harvard during his years there, a cult that he later satirized in his early novel Streets of Night and in U.S.A. What is significant, therefore, in Dos Passos’s state of mind as he boarded ship for Spain in October 1916 is less the originality of his beliefs at this moment than the conviction with which he held them and thus his desire to search out further concrete manifestations of their truth. Put another way, Dos Passos found in Spain what he was prepared to find in an older and mainly unindustrialized culture, just as a few years afterwards, many American artists would find in Paris the freedom they believed lacking in America. And since Dos Passos indeed did conceive of the Spain he encountered in 1916 as metaphor or trope, his depiction of it was to trans­ cend, because of its rich mix of idea and symbol, both his original conception and his specific experience. The Spain that Dos Passos visited during the winter of 1916–l7— ­principally Madrid, but also various provinces—was in the midst of a wartime prosperity derived from its neutrality and the demand elsewhere in Europe for its goods and raw materials.8 Dos Passos saw and recorded in his diaries and letters, however, not the thriving mills and mines of the north or the rejuventated agriculture centers of the south, but the continuing presence in Spain of its rich cultural past. Soon after arriving, he noted of Madrid 6

7 8

“Against American Literature,” New Republic, 8 (14 October 1916): 269–71; quoted from John Dos Passos, ed. Pizer, 36–7. John Dos Passos, ed. Pizer, 38. For Spanish economic and social conditions of the 1910s and 1920s, I have relied principally on Adrian Shubert, A Social History of Modern Spain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1990) and Joseph Harrison, The Spanish Economy in the Twentieth Century (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985).

12

Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

that “there are lots of Goya’s little ragamuffins about, and people actually use ­pottery water bottles of the most divine shape.”9 He summed up this basic direction in his impressions when he commented in December that “the wonderful thing about Spain . . . is that it is a sort of temple of anachronisms. I’ve never been anywhere you so felt the strata of civilization.”10 In the summer of 1917, some months after leaving Spain, Dos Passos sought to codify his thoughts about the country in an essay he called “Young Spain.” Dos Passos based his portrayal of Spain in this essay on the historical irony that the vitality of contemporary Spanish life stemmed less from its adoption of the ideas and methods of modern Western societies than from the continuing powerful presence within Spanish culture of older beliefs and ways of life. He therefore began with a lengthy evocation of a Spanish village and its baker, a community and a figure not trapped in the past, as a modern European might indeed believe, but rather deriving strength from the permanence and continuity that the past constitutes. As the baker of Almorox attempts to tell something about his village, “there began to grow in [Dos Passos’s] mind a picture of his view of the world”: First came his family, the wife whose body lay beside his at night, who bore him children, the old withered parents who sat in the sun at his door.  .  .  .  Then his work, the heat of his ovens, the smell of bread cooking, the faces of neighbors who came to buy. . . . In him I seemed to see generations wax and wane, like the years, strung on the thread of labor, of unending sweat and strain of muscles against the earth. It was all so mellow, so strangely aloof from the modern world of feverish change, this life of the peasants of Almorox. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite past. . . . [And] always [there] remained the love for the place, the strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man, the walking consciously or not, of the way beaten by generations of men who had tilled and loved and lain in the cherishing sun with no feeling of a reality outside of themselves, outside of the bare encompassing hills of their commune, except of God which was the synthesis of their souls and of their lives.11

Dos Passos uses the village of Almorox as a vehicle for the expression of his central beliefs. He begins with the premise that man best expresses his capacity to exist fully and productively, in freedom and happiness, within   9

10 11

The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 50. Fourteenth Chronicle, 56. “Young Spain,” Seven Arts, 2 (1917): 473–88; quoted from John Dos Passos, ed. Pizer, 40–1.

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the continuity provided by the institutions of a specific place. And the place best able to provide the spirit-sustaining activities of family, work, and belief is one, like Almorox, above all simple in its needs and way of life. The basic emotional and ideological cast of this celebration of Almorox is, I would suggest, Arcadian. The world outside is feverish and directionless and is also destructive of the self. But there exists a refuge of the simple and natural—an Arcadia—in which men can both meet their basic needs and live in harmony with natural processes and therefore can live contentedly, fulfilled in body and soul. Thus, as Dos Passos goes on to discuss at some length in his essay, the most significant intellectual movement in contemporary Spain is that of the Generation of ’98, “Young Spain,” because of the efforts of its writers and thinkers both to describe the often baleful effects of Spain’s attempt to recreate itself into a modern industrial state and to proclaim the need to preserve what is vital in its past. Dos Passos’s experiences between leaving Spain in early 1917 and his return in mid-1919 served to intensify this Arcadian image of Spanish life. His diaries and letters, which deal with his years as an ambulance driver and then enlisted man in France and Italy, testify eloquently to his continuing belief that the roots of the inhumane butchery and blatant lies of the War lay in modern industrialism and mechanization. Spain thus became even more resonant as a refuge, as a place almost out of time. In late 1917, writing from the front in Italy to his friend Arthur McComb, he pleads, with comic exaggeration, “Oh Arthur—let’s all find a retreat in the heart of Spanish mountains somewhere, in sight of the sea, among vineyards and there all go and solemnly renounce the world and make cordials and engraved bookplates through all futurity . . . .”12 In another letter to McComb, in October 1918, written while undergoing army training, he asks for “a letter full of Spain. Go into some corner centuries deep in Spain—into a tavern on the edge of some small white town in Castile, at the door of which one can stand and look long at russet hills . . . .”13 As yet another letter to McComb makes clear, Dos Passos connected this escape into the Arcadian purity of Spain with a renewal of artistic fecundity and thus anticipates the full expression of this element of the expatriate myth in Rosinante and similar expatriate works, in which self-exile into a world more amenable to artistic production constitutes a birth of artistic strength. “On your wanderings through Spain,” he only half-facetiously reminds McComb, “take note of any small cheap cottages you see that might at some future not very remote be inhabited by a band of outcasts, fugitives from injustice, pariahs, a cottage where one could 12

13

John Dos Passos’s Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb  .  .  . ed. Melvin Landsberg (Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1991), 82. John Dos Passos’s Correspondence, 109.

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

live on olla & huevos revueltos and follow one’s natural avocations of making an ass of oneself on paper and on canvas  .  .  .—and let the bally world go hang . . . .”14 Dos Passos’s second stay in Spain, after this lengthy period of anticipation, was from August 1919 to April 1920. His cheap cottage turned out to be a boarding house in Granada, but he also undertook several extensive journeys, wandering as far afield as Portugal and Majorca. His two principal writing activities during this period were to complete Three Soldiers and to supply sporadic news dispatches on Spanish affairs to a British socialist newspaper, the London Herald. Both kinds of writing confirmed his Arcadian vision of Spain. Three Soldiers was a bitter depiction of America’s participation in the War as a betrayal of fundamental American ideals, especially that of freedom of belief, by an industrialized society translated into an inhumane war machine. And his dispatches centered on the social unrest and economic decline in Spain following the War.15 To Dos Passos, soldiers dying in the trenches of France and unemployed Spanish workers and peasants were all victims of a dysfunctional modern society. They were all on the wheel. It is no wonder, then, that after leaving Spain, Dos Passos decided to expand the thesis of his “Young Spain” essay of 1917 into a series of essays and eventually, in late 1921, into a book. He had during his second visit revitalized his Arcadian image of Spain both by his re-immersion in the life of the country and by the devotion of much of his intellectual energy to dramatizing—in his novel and dispatches—the unacceptable alternatives to the Spain of his imaginative construct. It was thus, one might say, timely and appropriate for him to complete the equation—to offer Rosinante to the Road Again as a counter image to Three Soldiers. The novel had depicted a world destroyed by its devotion to the false gods of modernity; the study of Spanish life would celebrate the true gods of the past still potent in Spain. Rosinante to the Road Again contains sixteen chapters, of which eight, including the first and last, tell of the journey from Madrid to Toledo by two young men named Telemachus and Lyaeus.16 The other eight, which 14 15

16

Ibid., 91. As Dos Passos recalled, however, in The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (New York: New American Library, 1966), 81, he did not write many dispatches. Among those I have located in the files of the London Herald are “Unrest in Spain Protests Against Tyranny,” 18 August 1919, 2, and “Amnesty in Spain/Tension Relaxed—For How Long,” 10 September 1919, 3. These are signed “From Our Special Correspondent” and are undoubtedly by Dos Passos. The best discussions of Rosinante remain David Sanders, “The ‘Anarchism’ of John Dos Passos,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 60 (1961): 44–55, and John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos (New York: Twayne, 1961), passim. See also my brief discussion of the work in relation to U.S.A. in Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.”: A Critical Study (Charlottesville: University Press of Charlottesville, Virginia, 1988), 5–10.

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15

are interspersed among the narrative chapters, consist of independent inter­ pretive essays on contemporary Spanish life and culture which expand on the section in “Young Spain” devoted to the Generation of ’98. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are evoked in both the narrative and discursive portions of the book, in the first by manifestations of the figures who join Telemachus and Lyaeus on their journey, and in the second by the narrator’s constant introduction of them into his ruminations on Spanish culture. This bald summary of the contents of Rosinante no doubt succeeds in obscuring the rich and suggestive participation of the work in the birth of High Modernism as a literary and cultural ethos. For, when we enter the world of Rosinante, we can, by an effort of the historical imagination, recover something of the excitement and freshness of this moment in cultural history, when such major voices as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound began to speak in similar ways about early twentieth-century civilization. Perhaps foremost in this state of mind was a contempt—heightened by the despair and outrage occasioned by the War— for the deceptions and superficialities of middle class life, and thus a turn to a mythic past in order to render the vast distance between the living presence of essential values in older cultures and their neglect in the present. In addition, these writers shared a desire to represent the inadequacies of contemporary life not in conventional literary forms, which they indeed associated with a catering to mass values, but by means of challenging and compelling new techniques that sought to stimulate the perceptive reader into an awareness of the limitations of his civilization. And lastly, they believed that given the failure of Western belief represented by the War, the artistic sensibility was a more reliable index of value and truth than the bourgeois mind. They were, therefore, often attracted to depicting in their work the experiences of an artist or artist manqué, a figure whose literal or symbolic withdrawal from the norms of his culture signifies his estimation of its worth. Rosinante to the Road Again shares in each of these characteristics of High Modernism, perhaps most obviously so in that Dos Passos structures his interpretation of contemporary Spain on the parallel mythic pairs of Telemachus and Lyaeus and of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. His principal intent in introducing these figures drawn from the high points of classic and Spanish civilization was to represent an essential and permanent duality in man which modern man neglects at his hazard. Telemachus and Quixote constitute the life of the intellect and spirit, Lyaeus (an alternative name for Dionysius) and Panza that of the body and the senses. Past civilizations recognized the need to accept and cultivate these seemingly opposed but basically complementary aspects of human nature. In the modern world, too often intellect and spirit are translated into a confining moralism and

16

Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

bodily pleasure into a gross materialism. Spain, however, as Dos Passos will dramatize in his narrative segments and explain in his discursive essays, still offers an opportunity to pursue the life-enhancing paradox epitomized in these pairings. An instructive example of Dos Passos’s fusing of Quixote and Panza and of modern Spain into a central ideology occurs at the close of the essay on “The Baker of Almorox,” when the narrator visits a village fete on the outskirts of Madrid: All were dancing in and out among the slim tree-trunks, and the air was noisy with laughter and little cries of childlike unfeigned enjoyment. Here was the gospel of Sancho Panza, I thought, the easy acceptance of life, the unashamed joy in food and color and the softness of women’s hair. But as I walked out of the village across the harsh plain of Castile, grey-green and violet under the deepening night, the memory came to me of the knight of the sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blunderingly trying to remould the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal. And in these two Spain seemed to be manifest.17

The journey of Telemachus and Lyaeus from Madrid to Toledo—a journey from the contemporary commercial capital of Spain to its ancient spiritual center—is thus above all a quest for confirmation of the possibility that what was true in the past might be true in the present. Relying on the tension of ideas inherent in the introduction of a mythic construct into the present, Dos Passos appears to be asking whether the ideal embodied in the dualities represented by Telemachus and Lyaeus and by Quixote and Panza is recoverable in modern life, and if so, how and where it may be. In posing this question, Dos Passos appears to be allying himself with what might be called the positive camp among his fellow modernists who were also attracted by the relationship between the mythic and the contemporary. For an Eliot or a Pound, the mythic past is not recuperable and therefore serves principally as a reservoir of images to dramatize the inadequacies of the present. The Thames may have sung sweetly for Edmund Spenser, but for Eliot it is a foul stream, while for Pound “the pianola replaces/Sappho’s barbitos.” For a Joyce or Hemingway, however, Ulysses and Telemachus still roam contemporary Dublin, and the sun still rises in the Pyrenees, if not in bohemian Paris. For these writers, among the debris of modern civilization one can still find evidence, in the continuity of mythic realities, of the possibility of renewal. 17

Rosinante to the Road Again (New York: Doran, 1922), 70. Citations from this edition will hereafter appear parenthetically in the text.

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17

In addition to this evocative use of the mythic, Dos Passos and others of his generation believed in the need to break away from conventional narrative and poetry into new ways of rendering experience—a shift in the conception of literary form, it has often been noted, similar to that which had occurred in painting a decade earlier in the move from representationalism to cubist abstraction. Spain, as an answer to the where and how of Telemachus’ quest, can thus be construed as a space to be filled in by its various parts, with meaning derived from the relationship of part to part, and of part to the whole, rather than from the sequential cause–effect movement of a conventional narrative or prose exposition. So, in Rosinante, as in Hemingway’s In Our Time or Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” one’s initial impression of the work is of a series of discontinuous fragments. Interspersed among brief narrative segments loosely describing a journey to Toledo are unrelated discursive essays about various phases of contemporary Spanish life. But as we have learned over several generations from the close reading of modernistic works of this kind—works in which different subjects, modes, and moments in time seem to float free of any central theme or overarching direction—there is meaning if one is willing to look for new ways of expressing meaning. The subject of Rosinante is the meaning of Spain in relation to the meaning of modern civilization, and in connection with this subject Dos Passos presents two major themes that he wishes to communicate—that Spain is a country defined not by a single culture and a dominant central government but rather by both the distinctive cultures of its provinces and a powerful anarchistic impulse, and that it is a country which has succeeded in preserving from its past a body of vital beliefs and modes of life. These are, on the one hand, abstract ideas capable of general discussion, and Dos Passos devotes several essays to describing and analyzing phases of Spanish life in which they are evident. On the other hand, they are also felt beliefs, ideas that one accepts in part because of their emotional valence, and here Dos Passos creates a group of symbolic constructs to persuade us that they are true because we are made to feel that they must be true—such constructs as a journey to the spiritual heart of Spain, the reappearance in different guises of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, and landscapes and folk rites of a natural richness and purity. Dos Passos, in brief, is asking us to comprehend a complex intellectual and emotional reality that has both spatial and temporal dimensions. The method that he chooses to accomplish this goal is not to engage us wholly either in analytical history or in symbolic representation but rather in a mix of the two—a mix in which the discontinuous fragments of the two modes constitute, in a kind of imitative form, the mosaic of space and time and of idea and feeling which is contemporary Spain.

18

Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

A final element of High Modernism in Rosinante is that of the centrality of the artist figure. Although Telemachus is not as clearly defined or promi­ nent in this role as are Daedalus, Nick Adams, or Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, he nevertheless is in their mold. Tel, as he is characterized in the opening narrative segments, is a wanderer in search of a father; he also has a moralistic mother and a pagan companion. He is, in broad terms, an archetypical American of this historical moment in that he is seeking understanding of himself through self-exile but is hindered in this pursuit by the presence of both a puritan conscience and the opportunity for excess. It is useful, in connection with Tel’s role in Rosinante, to return once more to “The Baker of Almorox,” this time to the close of the essay, at which point the narrative voice has discovered that Sancho Panza and Don Quixote live on in the village fete. After noting that “in these two Spain seems to be manifest,” the narrator continues: Far indeed were they from the restless industrial world of joyless enforced labor and incessant goading war. And I wondered to what purpose it would be, should Don Quixote again saddle Rosinante, and what the good baker of Almorox would say to his wife when he looked up from his kneading trough, holding out hands white with dough, to see the knight errant ride by on his lean steed upon a new quest. (70)

The references to a world of “enforced labor” and “goading war”—in contrast to the Spain evoked by the fete—and the central interpretive role claimed by the narrative voice, who has himself escaped from the destructive outside world to the richness of the village scene, reveal the underlying transactional ethic of the discursive chapters. There are two cultures, and the narrative voice is a refugee from the one and is drawn to and seeking to understand the other. And since the narrative voice will, in other chapters, frequently comment on the vitality of contemporary Spanish art and writing in comparison with the thinness of American expression, he is, in effect, a counterpart to Tel as an artist manqué. Both he and Tel are seeking to understand what it is that underlies the artistic strength of the culture to which they have exiled themselves in order to stimulate and redirect their own capacity for artistic expression. The initial four chapters of Rosinante to the Road Again introduce us to Dos Passos’s basic concerns and techniques in the work as a whole. The section opens with the first Telemachus–Lyaeus narrative segment, proceeds to two chapters devoted to the visits of an American to rural Andalusia and ­Castile, and closes with another Tel–Lyaeus segment. In the first chapter,  entitled

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19

“A Gesture and a Quest,” Tel and Lyaeus are determined to pursue the meaning of Spain as a civilization, a meaning, Tel believes, which may be encapsulated in the flamenco dancing of Pastora Imperio. Pastora’s flamenco, because of its proud and fiery affirmation of movement, of life itself—within a culture which also affirms everywhere the supremacy of death—may constitute what Tel calls the “gesture” of Spain. He and Lyaeus decide to seek out a confirmation of this meaning by undertaking a journey on foot to Toledo. The next two chapters also engage the reader in journeys—now accom­ panying a visiting American as he travels to remote areas of Andalusia and Castile. In these accounts, the meaning of Spain assumes its full Arcadian dimension. The various settings of the two chapters—a mountain pass, a country tavern, a small Castilian village, and a rural fete—constitute a Spain in which body and soul live in harmony, a Spain in which it is still possible to live richly and honestly. In contrast to this world is the modern industrial civilization that the American visitor represents—a civilization given expression both by his thoughts and by the reactions that he stimulates among the Spaniards whom he meets. And running through the depiction of these two mythic conditions—an almost Falstaffian Spain of good-natured carousing and much attention to the needs of the belly, and an America in which, as the Donkey Boy explains, “no se divierte” (27)—there appear, in a kind of debate, both frequent references to the continuing presence of the spirits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in present-day Arcadian Spain and, in contrast, various modern-day Spaniards who urge that Spain emulate the commercial success and efficiency of contemporary Europe and America. So, for example, the American visitor meets in Andalusia Don Diego, an advocate of change: Don Diego and I walked a long while on the seashore talking of America and the Virgin and a certain soup called ajo blanco and Don Quixote and lo flamenco. We were trying to decide what was the peculiar quality of the life of the people in that rich plain (vega they call it) between the mountains of the sea. Walking about the country elevated on the small grass-grown levees of irrigation ditches, the owners of the fields we crossed used, simply because we were strangers, to offer us a glass of wine or a slice of water-melon. I had explained to my friend that in his modern world of America, these same people would come after us with shotguns loaded with rock salt. He answered that even so, the old order was changing, and that as there was nothing else but to follow the procession of industrialism it behooved Spaniards to see that their country forged ahead instead of being, as heretofore, dragged at the tail of the parade. (42–3)

20

Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

Here, in this passage, are Dos Passos’s central theme and method in compressed but compelling form. In an Arcadian setting of a bountiful countryside and personal warmth, and in an allusive context in which flamenco, a good soup, Don Quixote, and the Virgin, all freely intermingle, the American and the Spaniard paradoxically reverse roles, the one pleading for Spain to preserve its past, the other demanding its acceptance of the present. This theme and method are confirmed in the next chapter, “The Baker of Almorox,” in which the baker and his village are apostrophized by the visiting American for the continuity of the full life of the body and spirit which they represent. At the close of the passage, the American identifies this continuity with the ideal of individuality inherent in the complementary figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza: Don Quixote, the individualist who believed in the power of man’s soul over all things, whose desire included the whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world was food for his belly. On the one hand we have the ecstatic figures for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits . . . . These are the Loyolas, the Philip Seconds.  .  .  .  On the other hand are the jovial materialists like the Archpriest of Hita. . . . Through all Spanish history and art the threads of these two complementary characters can be traced, changing, combining, branching out, but ever in substance the same. Of this warp and woof have all the strange patterns of Spanish life been woven. (54–5)

In addition to ruminations of this kind, Dos Passos devotes a considerable portion of this key chapter to the widespread debate among Spanish intel­ lectuals and artists on the future of Spain. “The problem,” he melodra­ matically summarizes, is whether Spaniards “will work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which there was hope for the future” (65). The chapter ends, however, not on this note of dark foreboding but rather—in tune with the tone of the book as a whole—on the positive note of the village fete, in which the spirit of Quixote and Panza provides the strength to keep at bay the general European conditions of “enforced labor” and “goading war.” The fourth and final chapter of this opening section returns us to Tel and Lyaeus, now pursuing their night journey to Toledo. They encounter, as dawn approaches, a short fat man on a donkey and a tall gray bearded man on a horse. The tall man explains that he had earlier sought to right wrong with his lance but that he now usually carries a fishing pole. Nevertheless, he also

Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again

21

announces that though “it is a little ridiculous to say so, . . . we have set out once more with lance and helmet of knight-errantry to free the enslaved, to right the wrongs of the oppressed” (78). The tall gentleman, Tel learns, is named Don Alonso, but his horse responds to the name Rosinante. In brief, when two young men who themselves represent the permanent duality of human nature seek to discover the meaning of Spain by undertaking a journey to its center of belief, they will—in response to this quest—meet Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the road. The remainder of Rosinante pursues and fills in the mythic constructs introduced in these early chapters. In the discursive chapters, moments of Arcadian richness reappear, interspersed with Don Diego-like figures who bemoan the slow pace of modernization in Spain. And the frequent evocation of the spirit of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the discursive chapters is matched by the several reappearances of Don Alonso in the narrative segments as Tel and Lyaeus make their way to Toledo. The bulk of the discursive chapters, however, is devoted to the theme introduced by the brief section in “The Baker of Almorox” on the intellectual, artistic, and social trends of contemporary Spain, which make up the conflict between the poles of value represented by a mythic Spain and a mythic America. With the exception of Blasco Ibáñez, most of the figures examined by Dos Passos in these chapters are either critical of Spain’s efforts to industrialize or render lyrically an Arcadian Spain. So Pio Baroja is praised for portraying “the streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any in Europe” (85), while the poets Antonio Machado and Juan Maragall are discussed as literary counterparts of the baker of Almorox, the first celebrating the role of the family in Spanish life, the second the continuity provided to Spanish life by its villages. So, too, the dramatist Benavente is lauded for preserving in his plays about Madrid the more leisurely and relaxed urban pace of the past. And so, too, even such seemingly unrelated figures as the educational reformer Francisco Giner and the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno are united by Dos Passos in their common distaste for “those who clamor for [the] modernization, Europeanization of Spanish life and Spanish thought” (226). Blasco Ibáñez is introduced as a foil to these figures. Dos Passos relates Ibáñez’ facility and popularity to the distinctive American characteristics of ease of literary production and an ability to cater to popular taste, and thus he finds especially appropriate lbáñez’ great success in America. He ruefully concludes, “It is unfortunate  .  .  .  that Blasco Ibáñez and the United States should have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no good” (131). Dos Passos reminds us in this comment, as he does frequently throughout his discursive chapters, that his subject in Rosinante is not only

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

the meaning of Spain but the implications of this meaning for America. So, in a further example, his chapter on Maragall concludes with an explicit comparison between the “thin soil” of American culture that prevents real poetry from bursting “sappy and green through the steel and cement and inhibitions of our lives” and Maragall’s Catalonia, where “the Langue d’Oc is as terse and salty as it was in the days of Pierre Vidal, whose rhythms of life, intrinsically Mediterranean, are finding new permanence: poetry richly ordered and lucid” (175). The narrative voice in the discursive chapters of Rosinante thus implies that there is a lesson to be learned by the American writer from the artistic life of Spain. He is to reject Ibáñez’ conception of literature as a form of production, but he is to follow Baroja’s lead in using his art “to put the acid test to existing institutions” (93), and he is to render, as do Machado, Maragall, and Benavente, the continuing presence of the potential for a full life in the past of his culture. The narrative portion of Rosinante, however—in which Telemachus is a more direct representation of the expatriate artist seeking to translate understanding into performance—offers a more problematic account of the lessons present for the American writer in Spanish life and art. Although Tel begins his quest for the gesture of Spain with an implicit acceptance of the sensuality and sexuality associated with the fiery flamenco of Pastora Imperio, he also, as a son of Penelope, views Lyaeus’ physical excesses with grave suspicion. And although Tel, for most of the narrative portion of Rosinante, seeks to overcome this distrust, he remains—as Lyaeus tells him—“under the law. [And] under the law there can be no gestures, only machine movements” (139). Dos Passos is here rendering, I believe, both his own personal conflict as an American expatriate and that of many of his generation of self-exiled artists. Europe—whether Spain for Dos Passos or France and Paris for others—may offer the possibility of achieving an integrated personality in which the alert and stimulated spirit and the fulfilled body provide the necessary matrix for artistic fecundity. But the law—the body of mosaic prohibitions and inhibitions inherent in the American psyche and experience—remains a barrier to the successful achievement of this integration. Dos Passos does, in one of the final narrative segments, suggest a resolution of this conflict for Tel. A young woman pacing the floor in a country inn while nursing her infant child has for Tel the same mix of physicality and rarefied beauty that is present in Pastora’s dancing. He is moved sufficiently to suspend his suspicion of his pleasure in the moment, despite its sexuality, and to accept its full impact, “waiting for the unbearable delight of the swing

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of the girl’s body as she turned to pace back towards him across the room” (181). Once in Toledo, therefore, the quest appears to have been successfully completed. Because Tel has now absorbed and accepted through his journey the “gesture” of Spain, he discovers that the city, which he is experiencing for the first time, is somehow “familiar, . . . as if it were a part of me, as if I had soaked up some essence out of it” (242–3). Dos Passos could indeed have ended Rosinante at this point, since thematic and narrative closure appear to have been achieved with both the physical and spiritual journeys successfully accomplished. But he was too honest a writer to do so. In the final narrative chapter, Lyaeus gets drunk and seeks to interest a girl in his attentions. She, in response, throws a bucket of cold water, which drenches not Lyaeus but Tel. “Speaking of gestures” (245), Lyaeus says, and the book then ends. The implications of this final passage are clear. European civilization, as expressed in a Toledo or Paris or in its best minds and spirits, may be present as a model for the American artist, but he cannot as readily translate his perception of the model into belief and expression as he can undertake, by steamer to Paris or on foot to Toledo, the act of expatriation. A puritan conscience, which can act as a bucket of cold water on the inquiring spirit, must be overcome. And an even greater barrier is present in the very kind of wisdom discovered by Tel and by the discursive narrator as they make their way to the Toledo of the full representation of this wisdom. The meaning of Spanish life for the artist, they have found, lies in the continuing presence in this life of an Arcadian past—of settings and of modes of life in which the spirits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are still manifest, and of a largely unindustrialized society in which an almost anarchistic individualism is still possible. The American who is offered this model, however, is in a quandary. He may be drawn to Arcadian and anarchistic visions of life, but as he views his own almost entirely mechanized world and its subjugation to mass values, he can find little outlet for his beliefs and feelings, except for the blind alleys of bitter condemnation, pure escape, or mindless nostalgia. There are no mythic constructs current in American life similar in strength to that of Quixote and Panza, and for an American writer of the early 1920s, idyllic villages, mountain paths, and country inns are the materials of an adult’s memory of a boy’s world—longed for but firmly in the past. The shock of the bucket of cold water for Tel is, therefore, also a shock of recognition by the American expatriate writer that although he may find in Europe a means for understanding and judging his own country, his discovery does not in itself produce a body of American experience that he can profitably explore. He is hard put to find American equivalents of the positive touchstones offered by the beauty and freedom of Paris or by the

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full acceptance of mind and body imaged by Quixote and Panza. Instead, his depiction of America itself consists largely of negative portraits, of Hemingway’s Krebs (in “Soldier’s Home”) or Stein’s Miss Mathilda (in “The Good Anna”) or Dos Passos’s own Jimmy Herf (in Manhattan Transfer)— figures who are forced into forms of self-exile by the materialism and moral narrowness of American life. Indeed, as far as Dos Passos himself is concerned, it was only at a much later stage of his career that he discovered, in the experientially-based idealism of the founding fathers of the republic, an Arcadian myth equal in potency to the one he had found in Spain. But in the early 1920s, the posture of many American expatriate writers, as in Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again, was to localize the triumphant discovery of a positive value system in European culture and to portray America principally by the absence of a body of affirmative value. Which brings us, almost inevitably, and in conclusion, to the relationship between Dos Passos’s vision of Spain and that of Ernest Hemingway in the early 1920s. Both writers began with the premise that modern life, as epitomized by American civilization, was largely devoid of the meaning necessary for the full life of the spirit. And although one writer stressed, within this premise, the baleful effects of an industrialized and mechanized society, and the other the inadequacy of conventional beliefs in a world of this kind, both subscribed to the idea that the War was the fullest expression of the destructive emptiness of early twentieth-century life. And both, therefore, found in Spain—a Spain that was no doubt indeed culturally isolated but a Spain that was also imaginatively constructed to play the role of cultural foil—a means for affirming the kinds of belief which had once existed in the past but are absent in the present. Whatever Spain was in the 1910s and the 1920s, it was to Dos Passos and Hemingway principally a mythic creation in which the natural, the honest, and the good still existed. Dos Passos found these qualities in the Arcadian tropes in Rosinante, Hemingway in such moments as the Burguete fishing scenes in The Sun Also Rises and the union of a potent sexuality and artistry in the bullfight passages of both In Our Time and The Sun Also Rises. But it should be clear that for both writers the use of Spain as an evocative foil embodied a central irony. The models that Spain offered of a powerful art emerging out of a full integration of spirit and body—the models of a Machado or Baroja or of a Pedro Romero—can be observed and understood by a Tel or Jake Barnes but not emulated. The America of the Nick Adams persona of In Our Time or of the narrator of Rosinante does not offer a matrix for an expression of this kind. This is not to say, however, that the writer thus stands mute. For in the great paradox of the expatriate state of mind—a paradox evident not only in Dos Passos and Hemingway but in many of the

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major figures of their generation—the moment of insight into that which should produce silence can itself be the source of a voice and can result in a Sun Also Rises and a Rosinante to the Road Again. And although, indeed, Rosinante may not be fully equal in stature to a Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or a Sun Also Rises, it shares in the modernistic and expatriate capacity to translate the nature of self-exile, and thus the consequent search for an affirmative model of belief, into works of art.

John Dos Passos in the 1920s: The Development of a Modernist Style

Although John Dos Passos’s career spans half a century, the bulk of his significant work was written during the 1920s. During this phase of his career, his writing, as it developed from the relatively traditional fictional form of Three Soldiers (1921) to the radically innovative The 42nd Parallel (1930), reveals in sharp focus many of the artistic impulses that constitute fictional modernism. By looking closely at Dos Passos’s move during the 1920s toward the extraordinary exercise in experimental fiction that is U.S.A., it is possible to come to a better understanding of what was occurring in more fragmentary and less integral form in fictional modernism as a whole during this decade. Dos Passos’s modernism has received consideration over the years, with particular attention given to its relationship to early twentiethcentury painting and film and, more occasionally and recently, to his own secondary career as a watercolorist.1 Much of this criticism, though valuable, is limited in focus in that it usually concentrates on a single modernistic strain or a single work. Another of its limitations is that the critic frequently fails to distinguish between a specific influence on Dos Passos’s shaping of a modernistic technique and a comparative relationship between Dos Passos’s technique and a modernist art form. It is often not clear, in other words, whether the critic is writing a source study or a species of literary criticism or a mix of the two. I will be attempting to grasp the larger picture—to describe the logic, so to speak, of the evolution of Dos Passos’s modernism during the decade in response to specific art beliefs and movements of the period—the why and how he made his way from Three Soldiers to U.S.A. Dos Passos himself in his later years, especially in the 1960s, often commented in essays and interviews on his response to the artistic ferment

1

For Dos Passos and painting, see Nanney and Spindler; for film, see Foster, Lowry, “Lively Art,” Seed, Shloss, and Spiegel; for his own watercolors, see Nanney. For significant recent theoretical-based criticism on the relationship between modern visual culture and fiction, see Jacobs and North. Major retrospective exhibitions of Dos Passos’s watercolors were held at Richmond in 1980 and Columbia, SC, in 1999.

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of the postWorld War I period and of his own participation in its various phases. Here is a typical example from 1968: Some of the poets who went along with the cubism of the painters of the School of Paris had talked about simultaneity. There was something about Rimbaud’s poetry that tended to stand up off the page. Direct snapshots of life. Reportage was a great slogan. The artist must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it. By contrast, juxtaposition, montage, he could build drama into his narrative. Somewhere along the way I had been impressed by Eisenstein’s motion pictures, by his version of old D. W. Griffith’s technique. Montage was his key word. (“What Makes a Novelist” 272)

This is an important recollection since it mentions, in evocative terms, a number of the key influences on Dos Passos’s engagement with modernism. But the passage also reveals the difficulty of depending on a writer’s memory of events that occurred over 40 years earlier. The passage ranges in chronological allusion from the 1890s to the late 1920s and in subject matter over poetry, painting, and film. There are almost no signposts as to what happened when and in what sequence or to which of his own works he is referring. These monumental shifts in Dos Passos’s artistic intent and method seem to have happened simultaneously in time and to have affected all of his work in a similar fashion. Just the opposite in fact occurred—as I hope to show. Because Three Soldiers (1921), as its title suggests, tells three distinct stories, with only sporadic plot interaction among them, the novel is often misleadingly viewed as an important precursor to Dos Passos’s more pronounced fragmented and discontinuous narrative style in his later works of the decade. This is an especially attractive idea because he began writing Three Soldiers in the spring of 1919, during a period when he was immersed (as a special student at the Sorbonne) in the Pars art scene (Ludington 180). Paris was then the center of innovation in the various arts. Cubistic styles dominated painting; music was striding away from its traditional sounds and forms; symbolism was a significant strain in poetry; and James Joyce was beginning to write Ulysses. Dos Passos, however, while he may have begun storing away for later use the modernist ideas he was encountering during this period, was largely impervious to their relationship to the novel he was writing or indeed to the pictures he was painting shortly afterwards. (His watercolors of 1919–20, done during visits to Spain, are for the most part conventional impressionist landscapes.) He was consumed above all by bitterness and anger—by the

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need to express as directly and powerfully as he could the crushing effect of modern industrialism, especially in its manifestation as war, upon individual destinies, and he thus chose a fictional method that most directly rendered this condition. He would tell how three very different American soldiers were destroyed by a military system that closely mimicked the core values and methods of a modern industrial society. Three Soldiers, despite Dos Passos’s use of an expressionist mechanist symbolism throughout the novel, took shape under the impulse of this theme as a traditional multiplot Victorian novel similar to that of Thackeray, Dickens, or Eliot at their most expansive. It begins, in Part One, by presenting the three central figures interacting in the common setting and experience of their American training camp. After this statement of theme and method (three interwoven stories with a single dominant theme), each of the other four parts of the novel concentrates on a single character while occasionally introducing the two other major characters as they interact with this focus of interest. Apart from this slightly more formalized separation of narratives, Dos Passos’s fictional style is conventional. The stories are all forward moving, and the point of view is traditional third person limited omniscient. The theme of Three Soldiers strongly echoes the modernist concern, brought into sharp relief by the carnage of the War, over the loss of individual identity in modern society, but Dos Passos delivers this theme in an unchallenging conventional form. Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) is, in a sense, a logical follow-up to the issues raised in Three Soldiers. If the first work is a diagnosis of the ills of modern society, the second is an analysis of how these may be both successfully resisted and replaced by more beneficial values and practices. But rather than dramatizing this theme by means of the methods of conventional fiction, Dos Passos now opts for strategies that were soon to become established as central characteristics of modernism (Pizer, “John Dos Passos’s Rosinante”). The causes of this shift were in part fortuitous. After his extended stay in Spain from mid-1919 to April 1920, Dos wrote during late 1920 and 1921 a number of unconnected essays about those aspects of Spanish life, principally its literature and its village culture, that deeply interested him. What attracted him above all in Spanish culture, these essays reveal, was that it provided an antidote to the strangling beliefs and institutions of modern European and American society. It was still possible to find in modern Spain, he claimed, constant manifestations of both a primitivist reliance on the underlying rhythms of life and an almost anarchistic faith in the need to maintain the integrity of the individual person. Desiring to collect these miscellaneous essays in book form and recognizing their lack of overall coherence, Dos Passos seems to have decided that he could make lemonade out of lemons

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by creating a structure that would both maintain their distinctiveness and provide a clarification of their underlying common themes. It is in this effort that a modernistic frame of mind enters the picture. Dos Passos (probably in the spring of 1921, while in Paris for a brief visit) wrote for inclusion in Rosinante a consciously symbolic narrative involving two youths (Telemachus and Lyaeus, one representing the spiritual, the other the bodily aspect of human nature) who are making an overnight pilgrimage on foot from Madrid to Toledo (the modern and religious capitals of Spain) to find the meaning of Spain. He then broke this narrative into segments which he interspersed between the essays. (The volume consists of eight essays and nine narrative segments.) The impulse behind this innovative form appears to have arisen from a heady mix of ideas derived from cubism in art and Joyce’s Ulysses. Joyce’s novel, though not published until shortly after Rosinante appeared, had been serialized in The Little Review from 1918 to 1920 and was widely known and discussed in that form. And of course the cubism of Picasso and Braque had emerged during 1910–14 and by the early 1920s was in its various forms the principal avant-garde movement in painting throughout Europe. Of the two streams of influence, the Joycean is the most clearly apparent, since is involves relationships between two verbal forms rather than between a verbal and a graphic. Like Joyce (and several other major modernists), Dos Passos introduces explicit comparisons between older cultures and contemporary life in order to make powerfully felt the failure of modern life to maintain the spirit sustaining values of the past. Like Stephen Dedalus, Telemachus is an artist manqué on a journey in search of a symbolic father who will answer his need for meaning in a chaotic and spiritually empty present-day world. And in another layer of cultural resonance, he is like Cervantes’ Don Quixote— perhaps searching for a chimera but exalted in the quest nevertheless. If Rosinante can take to the road again, all is not lost. As for Rosinante and cubism, it might be best to start by looking again at Dos Passos’s 1968 statement about the relationship of his work to the artistic ferment of the early 1920s. Two of the terms he uses in this passage— simultaneity and juxtaposition—occur again and again in his remarks on this subject (for example, in his 1961 “Contemporary Chronicles”), and can be firmly linked both to Picasso and Braque’s analytical cubism of 1910–12 and to the form of Rosinante. (A third term present in the passage—montage—is equally important for Dos Passos’s writing as a whole, but more so for his later work of the 1920s.) Both terms are inseparable from the underlying premise of a cubist aesthetic. A painting, it was held, is not a representation of what an artist sees but rather of his understanding of what he has seen. And since this understanding includes the realization that all existence

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

functions in time, a painting could also attempt to represent that reality. In execution, these beliefs resulted in paintings that combined an emphasis on the geometric base of all existence—that physical shape could be reduced to geometric forms—and an effort to communicate the notion that the subject of the painting was being observed from various angles simultaneously on the single canvas even though these angles could only have been gained by shifts in perception occurring in time. Simultaneity and fragmentation are thus perhaps the key ideas—a reality is stripped to its basic fragmentary components as these exist in space and time and these parts are then rearranged on the canvas to represent the whole as a simultaneity. The viewer is no doubt initially confused and dismayed because he is conditioned to think of art in relation to its representational conventions, but he is to realize that if he wishes to gain anything worthwhile from his experience of a cubist art work, he must enter into a quest for its meaning. It is he who must think through the fragments he is observing for their potential relationship to the work as a whole. The artist juxtaposes fragments to create a painting that communicates, in its reference to an underlying complex whole, a vision of experience that reflects man’s ability both to perceive and render the simultaneous existence of all objects both in space and time. It is impossible to determine whether Dos Passos derived these ideas about cubism principally from viewing cubist paintings or from encounter­ ing the ideas in the plentiful discussion of the movement in the criticism of the time. Judging from his own watercolors of the period, which contain few cubist elements, he seems to have found the ideas more attractive than their physical manifestation on canvas. In any case, given the inherent difficulty of the writer in transferring painterly method to prose form and style, it is probable that Dos Passos was drawn to a cubist aesthetic less for its achievements in painting itself than for the challenge it offered the writer as a means for achieving fresh and bold new forms in prose. As well as in its Joycean mythic component, Rosinante is therefore also a modernistic work in its rudimentary but clear application of the cubistic concepts of fragmentation, juxtaposition, and simultaneity to prose dis­ course. Dos Passos’s subject is Spain, that is, the question of its essential nature and how this quality might serve various needs in contemporary man. The question has its large-scale discursive side, and this is represented by discrete chapters exploring various manifestations of the Spanish character as found in present-day Spanish life. But it also has its more specific human side—that of an individual’s search for an answer to the question as an aid to the conduct of his own life. The first is handled by essays on contemporary Spanish culture, the second by a quest narrative. The inseparability of the two—the fact that they constitute one reality—is manifest by the device of

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constantly juxtaposing fragments of the first against fragments of the second, with the answer to the overall question of what is the essential Spain generated by this juxtaposition. Or, put another way, the answer lies in the simultaneity of the work’s discrete and fragmented parts. Broadly speaking, Manhattan Transfer (written 1923–25, published 1925) represents Dos Passos’s turn to the specifics of his own culture for a satiric dissection of the failings of contemporary civilization as well as his further pursuit of the possible application of visual forms to fictional method. An additional modernistic source for the work, one fully explored by E. D. Lowry some years ago, is T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” Eliot’s poem, which, like Joyce’s Ulysses, appeared in 1922, had an immediate and far-flung impact on almost all writers of Eliot’s generation. Indeed, “The Waste Land,” in its jaundiced reading of the spiritual sterility of modern life and its heavy reliance on juxtaposed fragments drawn from many ranges of experience, appeared to most writers to epitomize the major themes and styles of an emergent modernist aesthetic. Lowry perhaps over-emphasizes the centrality of “The Waste Land” in Dos Passos’s mind as he wrote Manhattan Transfer, since Dos Passos had already begun to reach toward the themes and method of the novel before Eliot’s poem appeared. But there is no doubt that there are powerful echoes between the two works in Dos Passos’s theme of the city as the fullest representation of the emptiness of modern life and in many of the specific devices he deploys to render this theme. One thinks especially of his frequent mixing of modes and tones (the alternating narrative, lyric, dramatic, satiric, popular culture, and documentary passages) and his reliance on recurrent striking symbols, such as fire—reminiscent of Eliot’s use of water as a key symbol. In conventional literary terms, Manhattan Transfer is a historical pano­ ramic novel. It covers some 25 years, from roughly the late 1890s to the mid1920s, and it seeks to render not an individual life story but the complex whole of New York life during this period. This goal is achieved by two modernistic devices that dominate the novel. First, as I have already noted, there is a large-scale inclusion of nonnarrative modes in order to present aspects of an urban civilization—principally its popular culture—more fully and directly than can be accomplished by means of a traditional narrative form. Second, the “plot” consists of approximately 20 narrative lines, some of which are interwoven, some not, and all of which are broken into discontinuous fragments. It has become conventional to describe the form of Manhattan Transfer as “cinematic” in the sense that Dos Passos’s use of a radical cutting or editing technique resembles the film technique of montage. This almost inevitable comparison thus also frequently leads to the more specific effort

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

to describe Dos Passos’s fictional montage form in Manhattan Transfer in relation to the montage technique of the most famous film innovator of the 1920s, Sergei Eisenstein, and thereby to attribute, as does Gretchen Foster, Dos Passos’s form to the impact of Eisenstein’s films (Foster). The difficulty with this line of thinking is that Dos Passos worked on and completed Manhattan Transfer before ever seeing any Eisenstein film. He completed the novel in May 1925, but Eisenstein’s films were not shown outside the Soviet Union until the following year, after the great success of Battleship Potemkin in Germany in the spring of 1926 (Thompson). By the time Dos Passos visited Russia in late 1928, he had seen several of Eisenstein’s films and was able to discuss their montage technique with Eisenstein himself in  Moscow, including perhaps the relationship of the technique to what he was attempting in The 42nd Parallel, which he had recently begun. But obviously he did not have available to him any first-hand experience of Eisenstein’s montage practice while writing Manhattan Transfer, and thus discussion of it in connection with Dos Passos’s modernism is best left to its possible presence in U.S.A. The modernism of Manhattan Transfer, however, is related significantly both to an earlier form of montage, that of D. W. Griffith, and to the second stage of cubism, the synthetic cubism developed by Picasso and Braque during 1912–14. Griffith, in two great movies, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), responded to the challenge presented by his desire to deal with extremely large historical themes—the impact of the Civil War upon the nation in the first, the history of human intolerance in the second—by creating the technique of montage. He would encompass and make felt these large-scale subjects by telling a series of stories to reveal their full dimensions, and he would present these stories in interwoven fragments to imply their interconnectedness and therefore their relationship to a common theme. Each of the films thus consists of a number of more or less independent plot lines presented in discontinuous segments over the course of the movie. Dos Passos, as he acknowledged on several occasions, found the tech­ nique admirably adaptable to his own desire to render the immense variety yet essentially similar nature of life in a twentieth-century American metropolis, though he extended and reworked it to his own purposes as well. Whereas Griffith limits himself to a few plot lines, Dos Passos creates over 20, and whereas Griffith’s segments are usually extended episodes occupying considerable film time, Dos Passos’s are more often true fragments—that is, brief episodes concisely told. Although the novel contains a number of isolated fragments—that is, of episodes involving characters who do not reappear—it also relies heavily on figures who have both their own plot lines

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and who reappear in that of other characters. George Baldwin, for example, plays such a role. A corrupt lawyer, his rise to success is told in a number of segments devoted principally to him as well as through his appearance in segments devoted largely to others. This technique, one Dos Passos would return to in the narrative portions of U.S.A., serves both to reinforce theme and to mitigate the initial impression of meaninglessness inherent in a narrative consisting of totally disconnected fragments. Put another way, Dos Passos, by this modification of Griffith’s montage form indicated that though he wished to adopt a cubistic method in his fiction, he did not wish to disconcert and alienate his readers to the degree present in viewing a work of analytical cubism. It should be noted, however, that Dos Passos does not in Manhattan Transfer avail himself of yet another radical narrative technique inherent in montage and present to a degree in Griffith’s cinematography. That is, the director can not only edit continuous sequences of action into discontinuous fragments but can also edit a specific scene to reflect how different camera angles portray a similar action in somewhat different ways. This more complex way of perceiving reality—that is, that much of what is seen and understood depends on the angle of vision (or the point of view in fictional terms)—was still to come for Dos Passos in his deployment of the four modes of U.S.A.2 The synthetic cubism developed by Picasso and Braque just prior to the outbreak of World War I was noteworthy for introducing into cubist technique the principle of collage. As cubists either painted in or pasted on to their canvasses scraps of everyday Parisian life—a menu or a bit of newspaper or an announcement of an entertainment—the cubist work in a sense became less cerebral and more populist. In viewing a Picasso or Braque of this period, the viewer’s task became less that of solving a kind of geometric puzzle than in identifying the relationship of the debris of common life to such objects as a guitar or a café table. The painting was still built on the cubist method of multiple angles of vision juxtaposed on a single canvas, but for the viewer, the painting had the effect of being both livelier, and more immediately pleasurable, than the earlier more austere analytical phase of the movement. Dos Passos himself in his recollections does not distinguish between cubism’s analytical and synthetic phases, but there is evidence to suggest that he was more drawn to the later phase. His favorite cubist was Ferdinand Léger, whose early cubist work is of this kind, and he himself in 2

Yet another kind of montage using varied angles of vision is that of Faulkner’s alternating stream-of-consciousness point of view figures in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and As I Lay Dying (1930).

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Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

his watercolors of the late 1920s (as I will later discuss) tends in his occasional adoption of cubist techniques toward a collage cubism. It is thus appealing to think of the modernism of Manhattan Transfer as owing much to the example provided to Dos Passos by synthetic cubism. Rosinante to the Road Again, it should be noted, though cubistically con­ structed, does not contain a collage element. Manhattan Transfer, how­ever, would be a very different and less successful experimental novel without it. Popular songs, advertisements, public announcements, and newspaper frag­ments litter the text, usually serving to “document” the validity of Dos Passos’s satiric representation of a specific fatuous phase of contemporary urban life. So, for example, in the novel’s opening chapter, an observant Jew, who has been tempted to shave his beard in response to the American dream of success, encounters a razor ad depicting a clean-shaven and obviously successful King C. Gillette that precipitates his decision. It serves little purpose, I think, to attempt to distinguish between the role of synthetic cubism and that of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in encouraging Dos Passos to incorporate this kind of material into his novel. Dos Passos’s frequently satiric use of popular culture and his delight in its absurdities suggest Eliot, but his close attention to the original print form of the collage object suggests cubism. It is nevertheless probably more fruitful to think of the two sources as operating in common to encourage Dos Passos toward his own adaptation of the technique. It is usual in accounts of Dos Passos’s overall work and career to proceed directly from a discussion of Manhattan Transfer to that of U.S.A. Since Dos Passos completed the first novel in early 1925 and began writing The 42nd Parallel roughly two years later, since he produced no major work in the intervening period, and since the U.S.A. trilogy appears to be a clear extension and development of the themes and techniques of Manhattan Transfer, this indeed does seem to be an acceptable procedure. In fact, however, he did prepare in early 1927 the 127-page polemic pamphlet Facing the Chair, a task that permitted him to explore further a specific modernistic technique present in Manhattan Transfer, which he was then to make a cornerstone of the form of U.S.A. Facing the Chair arose out of his intense engagement in the closing phases of the Sacco-Vanzetti case from the spring of 1926 to their execution in August 1927. Like most writers and intellectuals of the period, Dos Passos was outraged at what he perceived to be a gross miscarriage of justice in the conduct of their trial for robbery and murder in that he believed that they were convicted more for their anarchist beliefs and activities than for proven criminal actions. Dos Passos wrote articles on their behalf, visited them in prison, and was later to be arrested in Boston for illegally picketing in protest at their imminent executions.

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But his most significant contribution to their defense was the compilation of Facing the Chair. I say “compilation” because Facing the Chair is more an edited than a composed work. In loosely chronological order, with much backtracking, the book takes us through the history of the case, from the arrival of two Italian immigrants in America through their purported crimes and their trial and conviction to their present status as prisoners on death row awaiting the result of their final appeal for a new trial. The authorial voice provides passages of narrative summary and transition, but the bulk of the work consists of documents that have been edited and arranged to demonstrate the thesis of a frame-up of two innocent men because of their beliefs. The documents themselves are of immense variety, consisting of letters, affidavits, extensive passages from trial transcripts and court hearings, passages from Vanzetti’s book about his imprisonment, Department of Justice manuals, and so on. It is Dos Passos’s inclusion and manipulation of this material as blocks of reportage that has considerable bearing on his technique in U.S.A. Dos Passos’s mix of cubistic collage and montage fragmentation in Manhattan Transfer occurred within the convention of prose fiction that does not arbitrarily separate out passages in modes other than narrative but rather incorporates all expression within the single mode of a prose narrative. That is, whatever the dramatic, lyrical, or documentary passage we are encountering, we do so within the prose narrative which constitutes that novel. Compiling Facing the Chair provided Dos Passos the opport­ unity to discover the advantages of formally distinguishing between kinds of modal communication in order to benefit from the effects of authenticity and juxtapositional irony that this method allowed. In Facing the Chair, the bias or inaccuracy reflected, for example, in one body of clearly labeled documentary material is dramatically revealed by its contradiction in an abutting documentary passage. The device communicates the specific but often flawed point of view embodied in a distinctive verbal “package.” For U.S.A., Dos Passos reaches beyond what appears to have been this perhaps fortuitously derived method to the conscious and radical operative methodology of the trilogy’s form. There are now four distinct modes (biographies, camera eyes, newsreels, and narratives), each differing from the other in title, substance, and style, and distinguished as well by being printed as separate units. Often, however, a group of different modal segments will deal either directly or indirectly with the same public event (the onset of World War I, for example) and do so in sharply different ways arising from the different perspectives on the event provided by the conventions of each mode. In short, preparing Facing the Chair just months before he began U.S.A. gave Dos Passos the chance to sense the advantages

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in a break away from the convention of a single all-inclusive prose narrative containing collage elements toward the radical restructuring of the novel form in U.S.A. into a gathering of thematically integrated but strikingly distinctive modal segments. Dos Passos’s primary aim in writing U.S.A., as he explained on several occasions in later years, was to chronicle his age—that is, to render the nature of twentieth-century American civilization in  all its outer multiplicity yet with an underlying body of core values. As he also realized and frequently noted (Pizer, Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.” 35–40), he was thus engaged in a Whitmanesque endeavor; he would depict in full detail the rich variety that was the American experience from roughly 1900 to the present, using, of course, the overwhelmingly dark palette required to truthfully depict it, but he would also affirm by this representation the essential worth of the American experiment in freedom and equality despite its failings. He was thus returning to the problem presented by Rosinante—how best to capture the ethos of a culture. In that work, he chose a simplified cubism of rendering Spain through the multiple perspectives provided by alternating discursive essays and the chapters of a symbolic narrative. Some six years later, however, when Dos Passos in late 1927 created the form for The 42nd Parallel that would function in all three novels of U.S.A., he had come some distance from that beginning while still guided by its root principle that truth lay in the synthesis provided by multiple perspectives. Thus, Dos Passos’s great breakthrough to a fully modernistic fictional form in U.S.A. lay in extending the cubistic, collage, and montage devices he had explored in his earlier work of the 1920s into the modal form of the trilogy. In one sense, he was not doing anything different in U.S.A. than he had done before; he was still writing, as he had done earlier both in his fiction and nonfiction, in response to the modernistic impulses of his time. But in U.S.A. he had the brilliance and skill to bring these to their logical conclusion. The trilogy is therefore a compendium or vade mecum of fictional modernism in that its form as a whole rests on a mix of cubistic and montage premises while each of its modes further reflects a specific tendency in experimental modernist form. The overall plan of the trilogy’s form undoubtedly arose from Dos Passos’s realization that a cubistic multiple perspective method was ideally suited to achieve his Whitmanesque purpose. If the country as a whole was to be captured, it was necessary to render not only the immense variety of the national experience but also the equally wide range of vision necessary to understand this experience in all its dimensions. Thus, the four modes, as has frequently been noted, vary from the intensely personal inner life of the author in the modified stream of consciousness style of the camera eye to the almost always superficial and clichéd expression of the popular press and

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music in the newsreels, and from the commonplace lives at the center of the narratives to the great public figures of the biographies. There is little that is new to Dos Passos in each of these modes, except perhaps the biographical. He had experimented with stream of consciousness in Manhattan Transfer in several passages involving its semiautobiographical character Jimmie Herf, and that novel also contains many instances both of the ironic use of newspaper headlines and stories found in the newsreels of U.S.A. and of his ironic distance from his narrative figures characteristic of the trilogy’s narratives. What is strikingly different in U.S.A., as I have noted, is Dos Passos’s creation of clearly distinct modal forms for the depiction of these varied ways of representing a historical moment—an important innovation that can be attributed to the impact on him of Eisenstein’s theory and practice of film montage. In the 1968 passage from Dos Passos’s recollection that I cited at the outset, he wrote of the influence of montage, “By contrast, juxtaposition, montage, [the writer] could build drama into his narrative.” Juxtaposition is of course central to any concept of montage since the concept is based on rearranging segments of a sequence into new relationships. But “contrast” and “drama” speak more directly to Eisenstein’s contribution to the theory. Eisenstein’s forte was not only a frequent and rapid cutting from scene to scene or from one angle of vision of a scene to another, but also the introduction of a completely distinctive visual image into the sequence of shots—a device that he called “dissonance” (Eisenstein  78). His argument was that this kind of image required the viewer’s attention and thought, since its striking difference from previous images (a bird in the sky during a sequence involving armed combat, for example) demanded to be interpreted rather than merely experienced. Its dissonance or contrast helped create the intellectual drama of the new cinema, just as a dissonant symbol in a Rimbaud poem, as Dos Passos also noted at the opening of his 1968 recollection, “[stood] up off the page” and thus helped create a new poetry. This, too, was Dos Passos’s intent when deploying in U.S.A. the contrast and drama inherent in the device of sharply distinctive modes which by their dissonance require the reader’s engagement in the meaning inherent in their juxtapositional relationships. There has been a good deal of valuable commentary on the specific modernistic devices employed by Dos Passos in the styles of the individual modes, and I need here only summarize their major characteristics as they relate to the cubistic and montage sources and design of the entire work. The camera eye as a whole renders the growth of Dos Passos’s understanding of himself and the world through the course of his life from childhood to the point of writing the trilogy. Individual segments consist of discrete moments in this development presented by means of Joyce’s method of the impact of a concrete event or scene upon a consciousness. The narratives, however, rather than committed to depicting the seemingly chaotic inner life of a specific artist, appear initially to

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be flat and unchallenging accounts of the external lives of commonplace figures drawn from the full range of American social life. In fact, however, Dos Passos employs the narrative device of free indirect discourse to introduce a controlling ironic dimension to these accounts. The third-person prose style describing the actions of each narrative figure is in the language and sentence structure of that character’s otherwise unexpressed vacuous and clichéd thoughts and feelings and thus provides an ironic insight into the unfulfilled lives of these characters. This device can be found in older fiction, but its full adoption by novelists such as Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner for the rendering of the inner life of otherwise inarticulate characters made it a staple of twentieth-century modernist fiction. The biographies and newsreels are devoted to depicting the nation’s public life and do so in striking modernist forms. The newsreels employ cubistic and collage techniques in a kind of suspension. Each segment renders a specific moment in time by the multiple vision offered by headlines, bits of newspaper stories, and popular song lyrics, with the whole also simultaneously forming a gathering of collage fragments. In a sense, this technique mirrors in narrower focus the montage structure of the trilogy as a whole, in that the newreels’ device of multiple fragments connected to a specific historical event mimics the device in U.S.A. of a group of seemingly unrelated modal segments reflecting, each in its way, an important moment in early twentieth-century American history or culture. Finally, the biographies adopt the style of such 1920s biographers as Lytton Strachey and Thomas Beer whose ironic distance from their subjects is expressed by grouping selective and often seemingly minor details from a life into less-than-flattering accounts of that life—a kind of collage in its practice and effect of creating meaning through an accretion of the apparently minor fragments of a life rather than through a formal portrait. Perhaps I can best conclude this account of Dos Passos’s development of a modernist aesthetic and practice during the 1920s by commenting briefly on the relationship between its final stage in U.S.A. and some of the controlling tendencies in two of his watercolors of the late 1920s. Both paintings I have selected are portraits—one of a clown (fig. 1), the other of a fisherman (fig. 2).* The clown or circus painting owes much to Matisse’s fauve reliance on composition through vibrant color juxtapositions, while the fisherman is indebted, especially in portraying the figure’s face, to a cubist stress on the ­distortions inherent in using mixed planes of vision for portraiture. Common to both paintings is not only their use of distinctive modernist devices to render a figure but also their emphasis on the occupational context of these figures.

* All paintings by Dos Passos referred to in this essay can be found in the Plate section of this book.

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The face of the clown, dominating the painting by its startling whiteness, is surrounded by seals juggling balloons, cavorting elephants, dancing bears, and other clowns and acrobats—all woven into a colorful and vibrant tapestry to render the activities and tone of a specific kind of existence. Dos Passos’s eye and mind, in short, are held captive less by a single figure than by the entire world that figure functions in, and he has relied on the modernist technique of collage composition to help him achieve what he wishes to portray. The same effort is apparent in the portrait of the fisherman. Here, the figure himself is more prominently depicted, but present as well is the occupational context of his life in a cubistically constructed background of the prow of his boat, dominated by a large fish, and geometrically shaped conceptualizations of water and the sky. The mood of the whole composition, centered as it is on the broken and sour countenance of the fisherman, is far more dour than that of the clown portrait. It is of course extremely difficult to draw parallels between the form and style of a painting and those of a novel. Nevertheless, in this instance it is not pushing beyond credibility or usefulness to claim a relationship between the method of these two paintings and that of U.S.A. By the late 1920s, Dos Passos’s conception of the nature and purpose of modernism as an expressive tool had evolved to the point where it constituted an intrinsic frame of mind whether he was writing fiction or painting a watercolor. His function as an artist, he believed, was to render the relationships between the parts and the whole of the reality he was attempting to depict. Large-scale realities, such as a nation, of course required large-scale efforts in breaking a whole into its components, while a specific activity, or occupation, such as the circus or fishing for a livelihood, permitted a narrower focus. But in either case, the whole had to be reconceived into its parts in order for its nature to be properly grasped. Modernism for Dos Passos was therefore not a stylistic convention to be exploited because it was in vogue but was rather pursued primarily for its ability to help him convey his maturing notion of the purpose of art. From Three Soldiers onward, he had sought to render extremely large themes, and his efforts from that work to and including U.S.A. reveal his gradually refined use of such selected modernist devices as cubistic collage and film montage in order to express these themes.

Works cited Dos Passos, John. “Contemporary Chronicles.” In Pizer, ed. John Dos Passos, 238–40. —. “What Makes a Novelist.” In Pizer, ed. John Dos Passos, 268–75.

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Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form, ed. and trans. Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1949. Foster, Gretchen. “John Dos Passos’s Use of Film Technique in Manhattan Transfer and The Forty-Second Parallel.” Literature/Film Quarterly, 14 (1986): 186–94. Jacobs, Karen. The Eye’s Mind: Literary Modernism and Visual Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Lowry, E. D. “The Lively Art of Manhattan Transfer.” PMLA, 84 (October 1969): 1628–38. —. “Manhattan Transfer: Dos Passos’s Wasteland.” University Review, 30 (October 1963): 47–52. Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. New York: Dutton, 1980. Nanney, Lisa. John Dos Passos. New York: Twayne, 1998. North, Michael. Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pizer, Donald. Dos Passos’s “U.S.A.”: A Critical Study. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1988. —. ed. John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988. —. “John Dos Passos’s Rosinante to the Road Again and the Modernist Expatriate Imagination.” Journal of Modern Literature, 21 (Summer 1997): 136–60. Seed, David. “John Dos Passos and the Art of Montage.” Cinematic Fictions: The Impact of the Camera on the American Novel up to World War II. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009, 128–50. Shloss, Carol. In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer: 1840–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, 143–75. Spiegel, Alan. Film and the Camera Eye: Visual Consciousness in Film and the Modern Novel. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970, 176–8. Spindler, Michael. “John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts.” Journal of American Studies, 15 (December 1981): 391–405. Thompson, Kristin. “Eisenstein’s Early Films Abroad.” In Ian Christie and Richard Taylor (eds), Eisenstein Rediscovered. New York: Routledge, 1993, 53–63.

U.S.A.: The Style Perfected

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U. S. A.

Criticism of Dos Passos’s fiction is often colored by the naive transparency of the Dos Passos we know through his essays, reminiscences, and letters.1 Here is a man, it seems, who came to writing in the years after World War I armed with a few conventional ideas of his day, who during the 1920s gathered up and used, like a literary magpie, the principal avant garde techniques of the period, and who produced a series of historically significant but imaginatively deficient works culminating in U.S.A., after which his work settled into the permanent dullness that best reflects his fundamental mediocrity. There is some truth to this estimate of Dos Passos and his work. From his early Harvard essays to his late fiction he was preoccupied with the theme of the conflict between the Sensitive Young Man and a mechanistic world and with the related subject of the dangers to individual freedom posed by modern political and social institutions.2 He seems never, in other words, to have advanced in ideas beyond his early absorption in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (which he read twice before the end of the war)3 and his acceptance of his father’s late nineteenth-century Spencerian version of Jeffersonian individualism.4 In both frames of reference, the person seeking to preserve the freedom of feeling and action is good; the world outside is crass and restrictive and thus ultimately destructive and evil. By the late 1920s, after a decade of interest and experimentation in avant garde fiction, 1

2

3 4

The principal works by Dos Passos that provide information about his life and ideas are The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (New York: New American Library, 1966); Occasions and Protests (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964), a collection of essays; and The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973). Some influential early studies that stress these themes in Dos Passos’s work are: Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis: The American Novel, 1925–1940 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942), 87–139; Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1942), 341–59; and Malcolm Cowley, “The Poet and the World,” New Republic, 70 (27 April 1932): 303–5. (The essays by Kazin and Cowley are reprinted in Dos Passos, the Critics, and the Writer’s Intention, ed. Allen Belkind [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971]). The themes appear in Dos Passos’s essays as early as “A Humble Protest,” Harvard Monthly, 62 (June 1916): 115–20, and “America and the Pursuit of Happiness,” Nation, 160 (29 December 1920): 777–8. The Fourteenth Chronicle, 193. The fullest study of Dos Passos’s debt to his father’s ideas occurs in Melvin Landsberg’s Dos Passos’ Path to “U.S.A.”: A Political Biography, 1912–1936 (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1972), 1–19. See also Dos Passos’s own account in The Best Times, 1–40.

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drama, poetry, and film, Dos Passos found a suitable form for the expression of these conventional ideas. Joycean stream-of-consciousness and narrative discontinuity, German expressionistic drama and film, impressionistic biography, experimental free verse—these and still other 1920s enthusiasms helped chart his development from the comparatively conventional form of Three Soldiers in 1921 to the experimental techniques of U.S.A. in the early 1930s. U.S.A. is thus assumed to be a novel in which a 1930s naturalistic intensification of a traditional romantic theme—the oppressive nature of the world—is communicated in several fashionable experimental modes. Our interest in the novel is therefore in its form as a panoramic social novel. Otherwise, we are led to believe, the narrative portions are flat and dull, the newsreels obvious, and the camera eye obscure; only the biographies, because of their mordant satire, are of permanent interest. This is, I think, a fair account of the conventional estimate of Dos Passos’s work and of U.S.A. in particular. Yet many readers have found that U.S.A. has a holding power—the power to drive one to the conclusion of an extremely long book—which they associate with the greatest fiction. They are absorbed in its characters and events because these seem to communicate something moving about human nature and experience, not because the trilogy documents easily grasped ideas in fashionably experimental forms. Their response to U.S.A. as a work of fullness and depth suggests that the trilogy is not a collection of fragments but rather a powerful and complex unity—a unity which I propose to describe as that of a naturalistic tragedy. The surface impression of U.S.A., however, is indeed of miscellaneous­ ness. The three novels—The 42nd Parallel (1930), Nineteen-Nineteen (1934), and The Big Money (1936)—contain  12 discontinuous fictional narratives (in effect 12 different plots), 27 brief biographies of famous late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Americans, 68 newsreels consisting of snippets from popular songs and newspaper headlines and stories, and 51 camera eye passages which use modified stream-of-consciousness material to render specific moments in the inner life of the author from his youth to the early 1930s. In addition, each of the novels has a distinctive subject matter. Mac dominates The 42nd Parallel, Joe Williams and Richard Savage Nineteen-Nineteen, and Charley Anderson and Margo Williams The Big Money, while the setting shifts in emphasis from smalltown America in the first volume to Paris and Rome in Nineteen-Nineteen to New York in the final novel. Of course, there is a correspondingly superficial unity to this diversity of subject matter and form in that the trilogy (as most critics have observed) is a parody epic. The histories of 12 Americans of various backgrounds

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and occupations but of similarly unsatisfactory lives is a 1930s version of the 12 books or cantos devoted to the career of an epic hero. Epics demand the inclusion of much material involving the heroic past of the nation or race, and U.S.A. is therefore also a historical novel. The major political and cultural figures of the age are the subject of the biographies and several also appear in the narratives (Wilson, Bryan, and Big Bill Haywood, for example). A number of fictional figures are based on recognizable historical personages (the publicist Ivy Lee served as a model for J. Ward Moorehouse, as did Bernarr Macfadden for Doc Bingham).5 The principal events of American life from approximately 1900 to 1931 figure prominently in all of U.S.A. and not merely in the newsreels. By “events” I mean not only such specific historical occasions as the outbreak of war or the Sacco and Vanzetti executions but such phenomena as Prohibition, political and labor radicalism, the Florida land boom, the rise of the aircraft industry and of Hollywood, and so on. We come to know, too, a great deal about such American cities as Chicago, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles. The career of each fictional character therefore renders not only a representative type of modern American (the public relations man, the inventor-entrepreneur, the IWW radical) but a representative range of historical and social life. U.S.A. thus appears to be largely an obvious exercise in imitative form, in which the theme of the discontinuity, fragmentation, and miscellaneousness of American life is both epic theme and form. Yet there is much in U.S.A. which conflicts with this seemingly inevitable conclusion and which suggests that we must look further and deeper for a full understanding of the relation of theme to form in the trilogy. For example, fictional characters frequently appear in narratives other than their own (a device I shall call “interlacing”), and specific historical events frequently control an entire group of narratives, biographies, newsreels, and camera eye segments in a particular portion of the novel (a device I shall call “crossstitching”). Interlacing occurs in a number of ways in U.S.A. Minor figures, for example, reappear in the narratives of several different major characters. (By “major character,” I mean one of the 12 figures who have narratives devoted to them.) Doc Bingham in a sense frames the trilogy by his appearance in the opening narrative devoted to Mac and his reappearance at the close of The Big Money as a client of Moorehouse’s advertising firm, while the labor faker George W. Barrow and the newspapermen Jerry Burnham and Don Stevens reappear frequently throughout the trilogy. Love affairs occur 5

See Landsberg, Dos Passos’ Path to “U.S.A.,” for a number of other such borrowings by Dos Passos.

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between a number of major figures and thus create a frequent interlacing effect. Among the most prominent of such relationships are Daughter and Dick Savage, Dick and Eveline, Moorehouse and Eveline, Moorehouse and Eleanor, Charley and Eveline, and Mary French and Ben Compton. J. Ward Moorehouse in particular pervades the trilogy in an interlacing role. He is an important figure in the narratives of Eleanor, Janey, Eveline, and Dick Savage, and he appears occasionally, or is mentioned in those of Mac, Joe Williams, and Daughter. On two notable occasions (an evening in a Paris nightclub during the War and a New York party in the late 1920s), four or five of the major characters are briefly interlaced. Occasionally there is a sense of forcing when two characters are interlaced under unlikely circumstances, as when Dick and Joe meet briefly in Genoa or when Mac learns of Moorehouse’s presence in Mexico City. But in general the effect is curiously appropriate—curious because of the range of life surveyed in the trilogy, appropriate because the intertwining of the lives of so many diverse figures seems to confirm the feeling that there is a rich substrata of relatedness to their experience. Cross-stitching occurs most obviously when a new major character and thus a new area of experience is introduced. So, the initial appearance of Margo, who is to become a Hollywood star, is accompanied by biographies of Isadora Duncan and Valentino, much newsreel reporting of Hollywood high jinks, and the presence of the camera eye in New York art life. The inventor Charley Anderson and the radical Ben Compton have similar cross-stitched introductions. A second kind of cross-stitching consists of the frequent reappearance of a major social phenomenon in a number of narratives as well as in various biographies, newsreels, and camera eye segments. The IWWled strike, the stock market boom, and Greenwich Village art life are a few examples. The War, above all, is present in the trilogy as an event touching almost everyone. Of all the major figures, only Mac (who retreats to Mexico before it begins) and Mary French and Margo (who are too young) are not in some significant way involved in the War. And the War dominates the newsreels, many of the biographies, and much of the camera eye of NineteenNineteen as well as major portions of the other two novels. Through the interlacing of characters and cross-stitching of events Dos Passos appears to be saying that though we seem to be a nation of separate strands, we are in fact intertwined in a fabric of relatedness. Dos Passos was seeking, in short, to create a symbolic form to express the theme that though we lead many different lives in a multiplicity of experience, these lives are part of our shared national life; thus, our meaning as individuals and as a nation lies in the meaning that arises out of the inseparable unity of individual lives and national character.

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Dos Passos provides an introduc­tion to this meaning in his comment that the basic theme of all his work is “man’s struggle for life against the strangling institutions he himself creates.”6 What lends distinction and vitality to his fictional rendering of this conventional Jeffersonian concept is his ability to dramatize our life-denying institutions as the ideas, beliefs, and values that we unconsciously and habitually express in our thoughts and feelings, and thus in our language. His method is both verbal (in the sense of the language people use) and ironic. Dos Passos has claimed that the novelist is “the historian of the age he lives in”7 but he has also noted that “the mind of a generation is its speech,”8 and he concluded the opening sketch of his trilogy, the sketch itself entitled “U.S.A.,” with the comment that “mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”9 When Carl Sandburg, in  1936, sought in his book-length poem The People, Yes to express the same belief, he celebrated the innate wisdom and courage of the folk which are embodied in their language. Dos Passos, however, suggested by the powerful ironic current in his dramatization of “the voice of the people” that the language of democratic idealism in America, because it disguises various suspect values, subverts the very ideals this language purports to express and reflects instead a deep malaise at the heart of American life. As several of Dos Passos’s best critics have sensed, U.S.A. is a novel in which most of the conventional attributes of fiction—plot, character, setting, and symbol—are subordinated to a vast and complex exercise in verbal irony.10 The narratives in U.S.A., both because of their relative length within the trilogy as a whole and because of the inherent nature of narrative, are the fullest expression of Dos Passos’s ironic method. His technique is to use a version of indirect discourse to reveal the underlying nature of his narrative figures and thus to reveal as well the important similarities among these figures. In response to a question asked in 1965 about the source of his technique of indirect discourse, Dos Passos replied that he was uncertain

  6   7   8   9

10

“Looking Back on U.S.A.,” New York Times (25 October 1959), sec. 2, p. 5. “Statement of Belief,” Bookman, 68 (September 1928): 26. Introduction, Three Soldiers (New York: Modern Library, 1932), vii. U.S.A. (New York: Modern Library, 1937), vii. Citations will hereafter appear in the text. Since the three novels of U.S.A are paginated separately in this edition, I will cite both the novel and the page numbers, using the following abbreviations: FP-The 42nd Parallel; NN-Nineteen-Nineteen; and BM-The Big Money. Joseph Warren Beach offers some shrewd early comments on Dos Passos’s verbal irony in his American Fiction, 1920–1940 (New York: Macmillan, 1941), 66. A more recent discussion is by David L. Vanderwerken, “U.S.A.: Dos Passos and the ‘Old Words,’ ” Twentieth Century Literature, 23 (May 1977): 195–228.

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but that he believed he may have derived it from Zola and Joyce.11 If so, he modified his own practice greatly, since his indirect discourse lacks both the slangy raciness of Zola (or James T. Farrell) and the disconnected flux of Joyce. Instead, Dos Passos suggests by a number of devices that it is the very texture of his narrative prose—its vocabulary and syntax as a whole—which reflects a character’s habitual modes of thought and expression. The narratives in U.S.A. contain remarkably little dialogue or dramatic scene because the author’s narrative voice is itself essentially a dramatic rendering of character. Dos Passos supplies several verbal keys to remind us occasionally that we are reading the author’s rhetorical reshaping of a character’s habitual voice. One is to place eye-catching colloquialisms in his third-person prose (“ud” for “would,” for example), another is to run together as single words phrases that are spoken as single words (“officeboy,” for example). A third is to open a narrative that depicts the childhood of a character in a prose style which is obviously childlike. Here, for example, is most of the first paragraph of Eveline Hutchins’ narrative: Little Eveline and Arget and Lade and Gogo lived on the top floor of a yellowbrick house on the North Shore Drive. Arget and Lade were little Eveline’s sisters. Gogo was her little brother littler than Eveline; he had such nice blue eyes but Miss Mathilda had horrid blue eyes. On the floor below was Dr. Hutchins’ study where Yourfather mustn’t be disturbed, and Dearmother’s room where she stayed all morning painting dressed in a lavender smock. On the groundfloor was the drawingroom and the diningroom, where parishioners came and little children must be seen and not heard, and at dinnertime you could smell good things to eat and hear knives and forks and tinkly companyvoices and Yourfather’s booming scary voice. . . . (NN, 107)

The irony in this passage is readily apparent but gentle. Far more character­ istic of Dos Passos’s use of indirect discourse for ironic effect are the many 11

Landsberg, Dos Passos’ Path to “U.S.A.,” 254 n41. A number of critics have commented in passing on the relationship between Dos Passos’s narrative prose style in U.S.A. and Joycean stream of consciousness. These include John Lydenberg, “Dos Passos’s U.S.A.: The Words of the Hollow Men.” In Sydney J. Krause, ed. Essays on Determinism in American Literature. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1964), 97–107; Herbert M. McLuhan, “John Dos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility.” In Andrew Hook, ed. Dos Passos: A Collection of Critical Essays. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ.: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 148–61; George J. Becker, John Dos Passos (New York: Ungar, 1974), 48. One of the earliest comments about stream of consciousness in Dos Passos’s fiction occurs in JeanPaul Sartre’s “John Dos Passos and 1919.” In Hook, ed. Dos Passos, 1947, 61–9.

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occasions in the narrative when a character’s thoughts are rendered in a blatantly clichéd verbal style, which clearly reflects the painful inadequacy of his stereotyped beliefs. So, for example, when Joe Williams is arrested in wartime Liverpool for drunkenness, Dos Passos’ account of the magistrate’s lecture to him and his comrades captures both Joe’s colloquial idiom and the magistrate’s hackneyed jingoism. And the magistrate in the little wig gave ’em a hell of a talking to about how this was wartime and they had no right being drunk and disorderly on British soil but had ought to be fighting shoulder to shoulder with their brothers, Englishmen of their own blood and to whom the Americans owed everything, even their existence as a great nation, to defend civilization and free institutions and plucky little Belgium against the invading huns who were raping women and sinking peaceful merchantmen. (NN, 45)

Somewhat different in technique, but similar in effect in reminding us that Dos Passos is engaging us in the minds of his characters through their ­verbal formulas, is the passage reporting J. Ward Moorehouse’s thoughts when he discovers that the rich man’s daughter he had hoped to marry has been sleepng with a Frenchman. Here it is the last phrase which brings us up short. He walked down the street without seeing anything. For a while he thought he’d go down to the station and take the first train out and throw the whole business to ballyhack, but there was the booklet to get out, and there was a chance that if the boom did come he might get in on the ground floor, and this connection with money and the Strangs; opportunity knocks but once at a young man’s door. (FP, 193)

In fact, however, the narrative prose style in U.S.A. is generally far less blatant than these examples in its indirect discourse rendering of the platitudes and clichés which guide the lives of the characters. Rather, Dos Passos’s more common method is to suggest by the jaded, worn, and often superficially flat language of the narratives the underlying failure of understanding of those who approach life without independent vision and who are therefore “strangled” by the hold of the conventional upon their minds. And yet—and this is the source of the strength of the narratives as satiric fiction—this pervasive flatness is subtly and often powerfully ironic, since it always points to some specific limitation in the character depicted. Here, for example, is a typical passage of narrative prose, one in which without any bold ironic

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touches Dos Passos describes Janey Williams’ new position as secretary in a Washington law office just before America’s entry into the War. Working at Dreyfus and Carroll’s was quite different from working at Mrs. Robinson’s. There were mostly men in the office. Mr. Dreyfus was a small thinfaced man with a small black moustache and small black twinkly eyes and a touch of accent that gave him a distinguished foreign diplomat manner. He carried yellow wash gloves and a yellow cane and had a great variety of very much tailored overcoats. He was the brains of the firm, Jerry Burnham said. Mr. Carroll was a stout redfaced man who smoked many cigars and cleared his throat a great deal and had a very oldtimey Southern Godblessmysoul way of talking. Jerry Burnham said he was the firm’s bay window. Jerry Burnham was a wrinklefaced young man with dissipated eyes who was the firm’s adviser in technical and engineering matters. He laughed a great deal, always got into the office late, and for some reason took a fancy to Janey and used to joke about things to her while he was dictating. She liked him, though the dissipated look under his eyes scared her off a little. She’d have liked to have talked to him like a sister, and gotten him to stop burning the candle at both ends. (FP, 152)

On the one hand, the passage merely records Janey’s impressions of the various members of the firm and thus renders in a mildly ironic manner several of her received opinions—that fine clothes represent distinction, that speech mannerisms signify character, and that there are clear physical stigmata of moral decay—in short, that life is as superficially apparent as she finds it. On the other hand, the passage also records, with a far deeper and more significant irony, Janey’s unconscious absorption in Jerry Burnham and her fear of that absorption, a conflict which she seeks to resolve by her adoption of the role of “sister” toward him. Janey thus reveals in the seemingly bland prose of this passage her fear of her own emotions and desires, a fear that leads her to erect barriers of conventional and life-denying attitudes and roles between herself and the world. Each of the narratives in U.S.A. demonstrates that its major character is locked in an analogous prison of stereotyped thought and action that is reflected in his language. Although indirect discourse with an ironic thrust is the pervasive mode of the narratives, Dos Passos combines with this technique the equally ironic devices of the verbal motif and the paradigmatic action—devices which also enforce the theme that most Americans live unexamined lives within closed systems of belief. The verbal motif is a word or phrase habitual to a character’s thought or speech which defines

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the character’s response to experience, and the paradigmatic action occurs early in a character’s life and then reappears again and again in various guises. Both the motif and the action are unconscious and repetitious; they create a safe and comforting enclosure of feeling and thought from which a character can maneuver without undertaking disturbing explorations of himself or of experience. In U.S.A., characters do not develop or change in relation to experience, as in a conventional novel of character and plot. Rather, characters remain static and what changes in the course of time and the occurrence of major events are the patterns of failure within the American system. It is not our understanding of the characters that is filled out but our understanding of the nature of the nation as a whole. Dos Passos substitutes a number of developing thematic similarities among the narrative characters for the more conventional device of individual character development. It is therefore necessary to say something initially about each of the major characters, emphasizing the verbal motif or paradigmatic action that helps define his static nature, before going on to the patterns that emerge out of the narratives as a whole. Mac’s character is defined in his adolescence when he takes a job with the book salesman Doc Bingham. He soon realizes that Bingham is a charlatan but decides to remain with him. “Anyway, it was a job” (FP, 38), he says resignedly. Although Mac acquires radical ideas from his reading and experience, he is constantly betrayed in the expression of these ideas by his weakness of will. He is betrayed above all, in a kind of Marxist allegory, by the bourgeois comforts of a wife, a home, and a business. In the last segment devoted to him, we leave him worrying about his property during the furor of the Mexican revolution. Janey is born into the genteel restrictions of a Southern lower middle class world. Early in life, in the incident of her friendship with a black girl, she learns that she is expected to suppress natural feeling for the sake of propriety. She eventually attaches herself, a washed-out spinster, to Moorehouse, who represents to her both a paternal wisdom and authority and a safe masculinity. Moorehouse reveals his unchanging basic character when as a youth he unconsciously exploits his 35-year-old piano teacher and then departs without a word. Throughout his life Moorehouse will use to good advantage his ingratiating openness and seeming idealism. He will in particular rely on the term “cooperation” to represent his belief that men of opposing views—industry and labor, for example—can work together if they come to understand each other better under his guidance. But in fact Moorehouse never examines either his own motives or his verbiage and thus blandly and profitably exploits the gullible throughout his life.

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Eleanor, whose father is a clerk in the Chicago stockyards, has learned to take refuge in art from the “animal” in life. “Art was something ivory white and very pure and noble and distant and sad” (FP, 211). “Refined” is her verbal motif, and she uses its suggestion of an aesthetic sensibility to conceal both her emotional sterility and her calculating use of others. Charley Anderson is “only a mechanic,” as he says repeatedly when he wishes to identify something worthy and productive in his nature despite his pursuit of the big money. His childhood poverty has led him to identify the good life and freedom with wealth. But, in truth, he remains “only a mechanic” in that his underlying naiveté and openness make him an easy target in worlds where shrewdness and deception are required to survive. His essential weakness is revealed in early manhood when a friend gets Charley’s girlfriend pregnant while he is in the hospital, and it is later revealed again and again in business deals and love relationships in which friends, associates, fiancées, and wives deceive him. Eveline is an upper middle class girl (her father is a successful clergyman) who is over-protected from experience. She therefore craves it but despite her open emotional nature cannot understand what she wants. She cultivates a manner of aloofness—life is “interesting” or “tiresome” but in fact is desperately seeking an emotional center. So her life is a series of disastrous love affairs culminating in a “rebound” marriage and suicide. Joe Williams, Janey’s brother, rebels against the restrictive roles she accepts and runs away to become a seaman. We first encounter him when he has just deserted from the navy and is being cheated in the purchase of forged ablebodied seaman papers. In incident after incident which follows, officials and women take advantage of him wherever he travels. He is forever the goodnatured but dull-minded butt of the shrewd and unscrupulous, and he dies in an inconsequential bar brawl in St Nazaire. Richard Ellsworth Savage learns early in life that “gentlemanly manners,” family connections, and good looks can carry him far. But he also learns from his early affair with a minister’s sexually repressed wife that his upper middle class world requires the disguise or suppression of his deepest feelings. Although he thinks of himself at Harvard and during the War as an artist and a rebel, he is in fact striving to make himself acceptable and pleasing. His rebelliousness fails the test offered by the War, and he drifts into the role of Moorehouse’s subordinate and eventual successor. Daughter (perhaps the least satisfactorily characterized major figure in U.S.A.) has grown up in a male-dominated Texas world and views herself as a creature to be admired and petted. Her entire life is focused on her need to be loved, and when she is rejected (when pregnant) by Dick Savage, she reaches out for and finds death in an airplane accident.

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Ben Compton, a Brooklyn Jew, laces his speech with the catch phrases of the radical left. He has an almost religious faith in Marxist ideology—a faith that lends him dignity and courage (as well as an occasional ludicrousness) but which also results in his dismissal from the Communist Party because of his refusal to follow the party line. As a child Mary French resented her ambitious and genteel mother and identified with her father, an over-worked and self-sacrificing physician. After a few years at college, she drifts into social work and then radical activities, but her commitment to the left has the nonideological, personal character of her earlier family relationships. Because she is loyal to friends and true to what she knows at first hand, she constantly suffers in a movement characterized by personal betrayal and ideological conformity. Margo is a pretty child who is raped by her step-father. She makes her way through life viewing men as untrustworthy but exploitable. Toughened by experience, her rise to stardom in Hollywood also reveals her picaresque qualities of piquant good humor, sympathy for the down and out, and genial amorality. The 12 narratives of U.S.A. communicate in various interlocking patterns far more subtly and powerfully than any one narrative the theme of the failure of American life. One such pattern arises out of the use of a reappearing minor character whose manifest hypocrisy finds an almost universal echo in the major figures and who thus suggests an underlying similarity in their lives. George Barrow, who appears initially in Mac’s narrative in The 42nd Parallel and whom we last encounter in The Big Money as a passive observer of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, is the principal figure of this kind. Throughout the trilogy he is a symbol of the insipid betrayal of liberal and progressive ideals by a presumed defender of those ideals. In his professional career he is an agent of organized labor, and in his personal affairs an advocate of “the art of life” (his own verbal motif). But in truth he is less interested in social and personal freedom than in maintaining an even keel in rough waters. He is the minor functionary whose bland thinness of commitment to the principles he is identified with actually subverts these principles. His appearance in a narrative usually signals a turn to the easy way out by the major character in that narrative. Doc Bingham is an even more striking barometer of falseness. He appears only twice—early in Mac’s narrative in The 42nd Parallel as an itinerant book salesman and late in The Big Money as the owner of a large patent medicine company. On both occasions he is the master of the art of perverting a large truth for a small purpose. As a book salesman, he claims, while selling pornography to country boys, that “My God is the truth, that rising ever higher in the hands of honest men will dispel the mists of ignorance and

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greed, and bring freedom and knowledge to mankind” (FP, 32). At the close of the trilogy, he encourages Moorehouse and Savage to promote his worthless patent medicines by linking their consumption to the American ideals of “selfservice, independence, individualism” (BM, 494). The difference between the two occasions is of degree rather than kind. Bingham in 1900 is just another dishonest peddler in rural America; in  1929 the huge growth in the national ability to disseminate and reward falseness has made him wealthy and powerful. The most important way in which the narratives as a group represent theme is through what I shall call narrative clusters. Some of these clusters parallel Dos Passos’s interlacing device. That is, a number of major figures not only appear in each other’s narratives but also have a basic similarity of character and fate. Other clusters evolve out of discrete narratives in which the major characters never mix but nevertheless share a common destiny. An example of the first kind of cluster is the group of major figures who revolve around J. Ward Moorehouse as patron or employer—Janey, Eleanor, and Dick Savage. All three are from white-collar backgrounds of minor clerks or officials and all three are intent on solidifying their position in settings of greater gentility, power, and wealth. To do so, however, requires a repression of those emotions or drives, particularly the sexual, which might jeopardize their advance. All three, at the close of the trilogy, are both successful and desperately unhappy, with the “unnaturalness” of their lives represented most of all by their sexual failures. Eleanor is frigid, Janey has channeled her sexuality into a fierce and paranoic protectiveness toward Moorehouse, and Dick refuses to acknowledge his homosexuality. Unlike the group of figures revolving around Moorehouse, Eveline, Joe Williams, and Daughter constitute a cluster in which the characters do not interlace. (Dick Savage, however, knows or meets all three.) Eveline, Joe, and Daughter share a tragic innocence. They are “open” characters in the sense that they acknowledge their emotional (and sexual) natures and seek personal fulfillment as much as their circumstances allow. Eveline and Daughter want love, Joe freedom. But they are without strength or shrewdness, and thus for them something ventured is all lost. Daughter’s openhearted love for Dick and his desertion of her despite her pregnancy suggests the similar victimization of all three figures by the more ruthless and circumspect. So all three go to bitter and meaningless deaths—victims of a naively innocent failure to realize that to desire is to make one’s self vulnerable. Mac and Joe also never interlace but have basically similar characters and fates, even though Mac’s fate is bourgeois respectability and Joe’s is death. Both represent the life of the working man at its most empty and futile. Until Mac

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moves into the middle class at the close of his narrative, their lives are of constant movement—Mac throughout America as a laborer, Joe throughout the world as a seaman. They are archetypically rootless American working men, in permanent transit not because they wish to be but because their marginal lives prevent them from putting down roots. And because they are marginal and thus weak, Mac and Joe are beaten up and robbed and cheated and deceived wherever they go. Both are also victimized (in a Marxist sense) by sex. They marry because girls whom they desire withhold sex as leverage to gain a husband. After marriage, their wives struggle for the possessions that signify a rise in status. So both take the road again, with their ultimate destinies—Mac sinking into a mindless desire for security, Joe dying in a bar—representing the two extremes of defeat for the workingman. Mac is occasionally active in the IWW, and Joe, while not politically conscious, resents America’s participation in the War. Both figures belong to an early phase of American radicalism. Ben Compton and Mary French, however, play active roles in the more theoretically based and institutio­ nally structured radicalism of the 1920s. Yet, both share with Mac and Joe an essential naiveté, which for Dos Passos is the tragic center of modern American radicalism. Ben is a textbook Marxist and Mary is responsive to the misery she sees around her in city slums and in factory and mine towns. Both therefore lack an appreciation of the maneuvering, compromise, and betrayal, which are central to left-wing radicalism after the war. So, Ben is dismissed from the party as a deviationist because he fails to accept that party discipline supersedes Marxist truth, and Mary labors fruitlessly in the trenches of the movement because her political innocence is suspect. The most significant cluster of narratives in U.S.A. is that of Moorehouse, Charley Anderson, and Margo Dowling as inversions of the American myth of success. Moorehouse’s life is an ironic fulfillment of an Alger-like rise. Born on the Fourth of July, a reader of Success magazine in his youth, he works hard and “didn’t drink or smoke and was keeping himself clean for the lovely girl he was going to marry, a girl in pink organdy with golden curls and a sunshade” (FP, 177). But Moorehouse’s good luck in twice marrying the boss’ daughter (in his two marriages) also includes having to accept sexually soiled and neurotic women who make his life a misery. And his upwardmoving career—from selling real estate to public relations work for steel and oil corporations to pushing the war effort and fighting the “radical element” and finally to Madison Avenue advertising—touches upon the major areas of American life in which a false rhetoric of Americanism can be used by the wealthy and powerful to exploit the poor and weak. Moorehouse has risen by pluck and luck to eminence because he has been able to manipulate

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the naive faiths by which most Americans live, including their faith in the Alger myth. Charley Anderson represents a different kind of inversion of the American success myth. He aspires to be a Henry Ford or Thomas Edison, a tinkerer of genius. A country boy come to the city, he will work hard to build a better mousetrap (an airplane engine for him) and thus rise to fame and fortune while aiding mankind through his ingenuity. But Charley soon discovers that hard work and mechanical inventiveness alone do not bring the rewards promised by the myth. In an almost allegorically precise demonstration of one of Thorstein Veblen’s principal theses, he learns that ruthlessness and deception are also required. Although Charley tries to ape these qualities, his essentially trusting and open nature makes him an easy mark for more skilled corporation in-fighters. Seeking the big money, he is almost casually devoured by more rapacious birds of prey, while he himself helps destroy those who are even more naively honest and faithful than he himself—notably his old mechanic friend Bill Cermak. So Charley becomes a garrulous and drunken hulk, a corrupted Honest Workman. Like Charley, Margo Dowling is poor and likeable, and she too discovers that success requires the perversion of one’s most saleable commodity— mechanical skill for Charley, sex for Margo. Her rise to stardom is a parody of the Hollywood version of the rags-to-riches career of the movie star. As in a film, poverty and hardship in youth are followed by work as a Ziegfeld girl, pursuit by a wealthy Yale halfback, obscurity in Hollywood, and at last discovery by a famous European director and marriage to her handsome leading man. In Margo’s case, however, this rise is achieved not by hard work and good luck but rather by the open exploitation of her sexuality and by her ability at every stage of her rise to achieve an effective level of phoniness. In Hollywood, for example, a rented Rolls-Royce, relatives who pose as servants, and a false foreign background win her the entry into films that her talent could not. And once in the door, it is only her willingness to play the sexual games demanded by her kinky director (himself a Margo kind of phony) and by a sexual-athlete male star that assures her rise. Margo ends as a Jean Harlow figure—blonde, hard, shrewd, someone who has what she wants and who accepts what she had to do to get it. The ironic inversion of the myth of success in the Moorehouse, Anderson, and Margo narratives occurs as well in two other major strands of the complex fabric that is U.S.A. The first is found in the anonymous biographies at the opening, approximate middle, and close of the trilogy—“U.S.A.,” “The Body of an American,” and “Vag.” The three figures recapitulate the failure of the American dream. The “young man” of the opening sketch seeks a Whitmanesque community of shared labor and finds only loneliness and

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“words telling about longago.”12 The Unknown Soldier has spilled his blood to save the Morgan loans. And the hungry hobo who walks the dusty road (while planes overhead carry the rich) recalls that “books said opportunity, ads promised speed, own your home, shine bigger than your neighbor” (BM, 561). A second major analog to Dos Passos’s ironic portrayal of the myth of success in the narratives occurs in his full-scale attention in the trilogy to two of the major moments in the history of the American consciousness in the twentieth century—the war and the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Both events have the same configuration—vested authority believes that it is pursuing a course of action that is necessary to preserve American ideals, and particularly the ideal of freedom, but in fact is aiding in the corruption and destruction of these ideals. In both instances, the failure of the American dream is so massively evident that this failure takes on mythic resonance. It is not merely the super-patriots and the Massachusetts establishment who falsify the great words—democracy, freedom, happiness—but the nation as a whole. The end of the war in Nineteen-Nineteen and the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti at the close of The Big Money are thus the historical equivalents of the narratives of Moorehouse, Anderson, and Margo. In both the historical event and the fictional life, the American dream, including the dream of success, is not only false but is itself corrupting. Although the biographies in U.S.A. appear to be radically different in theme and form from the narratives, they are in fact essentially similar. Of course, the biographies substitute a stylized impressionistic selectivity for fully extended narration. But in the biographies, as in the narratives, the principal mode is irony. Often the very title of the biography is ironic (“Meester Veelson” or—for Carnegie—“Prince of Peace”); or, as in the narratives, a key word is used to reflect an obsession (“righteousness” for Roosevelt, “ideas” for Ford). Most of all, irony oozes out of every phrase in the biographies because they are studies in reversal of received opinion. In them, the presumed greats of American life are revealed to be betrayers of American values and the conventionally vilified to be heroic and noble. I will, at this point, discuss Dos Passos’s ironic portrayal of the just and successful, reserving my discussion of the other biographies until later in this essay. Dos Passos’s biographies of the presumed great divide into clusters of analogous “life stories,” clusters which offer a massive confirmation in public lives of the dramatization in the fictional narratives of the perversion of the American myth of success. There are three clusters of bitterly ironic biographies of the great in U.S.A.—the robber barons (Minor Keith, 12

U.S.A., vii.

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J. P. Morgan, and Samuel Insull); the misguided or hypocritical do-gooders (W. J. Bryan, Roosevelt, Carnegie, Wilson, and Hearst); and the callous industrialists (Frederick Taylor and Ford). Considerably less biting in tone are the biographies of a cluster of inventors and artists (Burbank, Edison, the Wright brothers, Steinmetz, Isadora Duncan, and Valentino) who, while themselves not directly culpable, have nevertheless permitted themselves or their work to be controlled by the powerful and wealthy of America. The robber barons and assembly-line industrialists—the open manipulators of the system for their own profit—are easy game for Dos Passos’s irony, particularly when they display an interest in art or politics, and he dispatches them effectively. His deepest anger and longest biographies are reserved for those who have used the rhetoric of American idealism but who, in his view, have betrayed that idealism because of their class or religious bias (Roosevelt and Wilson) or ambition (Hearst). In contrast to the caustic tone of these biographies, Dos Passos’s tone in his portraits of duped men and women of creative genius is more ambivalent, and occasionally even sympathetic. Here the fault, as with Edison, is often of preoccupation, or, as with Valentino, of naiveté. Nevertheless, though used by the system, all—whether consciously or not—have also used the system to gain success. All are therefore portrayed ironically in that their fame as artists or inventors echoes the falseness and hollowness of the society that has rewarded them. Since all four of these clusters of biographies are ironic success stories, they are evocatively related to the ironic success narratives of Moorehouse, Anderson, and Margo. The sanctimoniously self-righteous rhetoric of Wilson and the hypocritical “public interest” journalism of Hearst are powerful public parallels to the methods and career of J. Ward Moorehouse. Charley Anderson’s life as a tinkerer is closely related to the lives of Ford, Taylor, and Edison. Like Taylor, he believes that his “responsibility to the shareholders” requires him to impose dehumanizing conditions upon his workforce. But more significantly he differs from Edison and Ford (and thus gains a tragic dimension) in that he can neither retreat into his work room nor push single-mindedly toward the big money he craves. And Margo, who has been transformed into a star by the image-making capacity of Hollywood, has her analogues in Isadora Duncan and Valentino—two figures whose artificially enlarged public personalities tragically outrun their ability to fulfill them. The newsreels in U.S.A. maintain the ironic technique of the trilogy as a whole. They consist of authentic snippets from contemporary headlines, news stories, speeches, and songs—contemporary in the sense that they roughly parallel the forward-moving chronology of the narratives and camera eye from approximately the turn of the century to the early 1930s. Their authenticity produces an immediate ironic effect, since the “real” world they

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depict is one of trivia and hysteria, of the significant reduced to the superficial by simplistic loading, and of the superficial bloated into importance because of its “human interest.” The newsreels create an impression not of life but, as in the indirect discourse of the narratives, of life seen through a distorting lens that has failed to recognize the gap between events and the falsified language used to report them. Like the other modes in U.S.A., the newsreels contain much ironic interlacing and cross-stitching. As always, the War offers the most obvious illustrations. Newsreel XIX in The 42nd Parallel, for example, contains a number of items dealing with America’s entry into the War. Run between verses from the patriotic “Over There” are news items noting huge profits for the Colt Firearms Company, legislation to restrict blacks from white areas, and pleas for the punishment of “abusers” of the flag. So the inspiring lyrics about America’s role in Europe are juxtaposed against the War profits, racial prejudice, and intolerant super-patriotism that the War has permitted at home. The newsreels frequently cross-stitch with the other modes, most often, of course with the narratives, since many of the narrative figures are engaged in activities—strikes, the War, the stock market boom, etc.—which are also public news. More suggestive, however, is the cross-stitching between the newsreels and the camera eye, a device that reflects both the ironic disparity between public reporting and private vision and the involvement of the camera eye in the events and issues of his day. For example, Newsreel XXI of Nineteen-Nineteen is largely war news, including the arrival of American troops in Europe and military successes of the Allies. It also contains passages from several jolly and humorous war songs, the most lengthy of which is “Mr. Zip,” whose “hair [is] cut just as short as mine” (NN, 70). This newsreel is followed by Camera Eye 29, in which the consciousness depicted is at the front, fingering his close cropped head. He hears artillery to the north “pounding the thought of death into our ears” and thinks of “the limits of the hard immortal skull under the flesh” and of “a deathshead and skeleton” which sits “wearing glasses in the arbor . . . inside the new khaki uniform inside my twenty one year old body” (NN, 71–2). So the superficialities of reportage and of popular song are transformed into the poetic images of personal truth. The character of U.S.A. as a naturalistic tragedy derives not only from the “stranglehold” of falsified American ideals on American life and belief. It also arises from the presence in the trilogy of those who struggle through to an understanding of the corruption of the American dream and who seek to express this understanding in word and deed. This theme in U.S.A. appears most clearly and powerfully in the biographies and the camera eye, though it is also obliquely present in the narratives.

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Several biography clusters are devoted to the possibility of the heroic life in America—to the life dedicated to the pursuit of truth in words and action by those willing to be ignored or vilified or martyred because they run against the grain of American life established by the powerful and corrupt. One such cluster is of fallen leaders—Big Bill Haywood, Robert La Follette, and Eugene Debs. These three preWar leaders sought to express through a radical ideal—the IWW, progressivism, and socialism—a vision of a better life for all Americans. Each, in the more innocent days before the War, met with some success. But the career of each was destroyed as old enemies exploited the super-patriotism of War hysteria to crush all forms of liberalism. Another cluster consists of the martyred radicals, Jack Reed, Joe Hill, and Wesley Everett. Here, as in the narratives, Dos Passos depicts preWar radicalism more affirmatively than its postWar communist version. Reed, Hill, and Everett are native Americans (westerners all—Reed’s motif is that he is “a westerner and words meant what they said”) (NN, 14) who seek to translate the old words into acts and who are killed or die in the effort. And finally there is the cluster of the vilified truthsayers, writers and thinkers and artists such as Randolph Bourne, Thorstein Veblen, Paxton Hibben, and Frank Lloyd Wright. These are men who struggle to say something true about the War or economics or diplomacy or architecture. Each, like Veblen, finds that so much falsehood is accepted as truth that he “couldn’t get his mouth around the essential yes” (BM, 98) and thus each, like Wright, is “not without honor except in his own country” (BM, 433). There are several minor figures in the narratives who play a similar role— men whose careers as truthsayers result in their being labeled as cynics or disruptive forces. Mr Robbins, who works many years for Moorehouse, is such a character, but Jerry Burnham, the radical newspaperman who appears in the narratives of Janey, Eveline, and Mary French, is the more developed figure. Because Robbins and Burnham know the truth but lack the heroic strength of the biography figures, they sink into moroseness and drunken self-contempt. Yet they too reveal that some men can see and speak honestly, as Jerry does about the War, the peace conference, and the communist involvement in the left-wing movement. Far more significant among the narrative figures similar to the truth­ sayers of the biographies are the major characters who have the ability to see the truth but who betray their vision because of their commitment to the big money. Blanche Gelfant has written perceptively about the failures in identity among the characters of U.S.A., that “their flatness and helplessly drifting quality is largely a result of their inability to find inner reality.”13 Several of 13

“The Search for Identity in the Novels of John Dos Passos,” PMLA, 76 (March 1961): 133–49; quoted from Dos Passos, ed. Belkind, 187.

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the major characters in U.S.A., however, do not so much fail to find their identity as suppress an identity that threatens their success. We sense in the early lives of Charley Anderson, Dick Savage, and Margo Dowling qualities of character and temperament which are their essential natures. Charley’s love of engines, Dick’s aesthetic sensibility, and Margo’s responsiveness to others reveal sparks of life in their early careers which, if properly nurtured, might have grown into sustaining identities. But each lacks the courage to sacrifice and fight for what he is, and thus each, despite his ostensible success, lives an artificial and unhappy life. Our last glimpse of Margo is of a doll-like figure created to fulfill a public role. But it is the fates of Charley and Dick that most fully enforce the implicit theme of the truthsayer biographies—that it is better to be martyred or misunderstood than to suppress a truthful vision of oneself for the success that this suppression might bring. The drunken and whoring Anderson, prone to prolonged binges and self-destructive accidents, and the deceitful, treacherous, self-hating Dick Savage are biting studies in the spiritual malaise that a knowledge of self-betrayal can bring. Their narratives are intended to move us not so much to moral condemnation (though there is some of this) as to a sense of the tragic waste of a potential for vision and honesty. Perhaps the fullest expression of the tragic theme in the narratives is contained in the character and life of Mary French. Mary’s career is that of an average but enlightened American. A sensitive and insightful young woman (a key is that she reads and admires Veblen while at college), Mary sees at first hand in the Chicago slums and Pennsylvania mine and mill towns the degradation of working class American life. Her radicalism arises less from a political ideology than from a responsiveness to misery and pain. Yet Mary’s ability to help the working class is constantly compromised by her disastrous love affairs with various left-wing leaders—affairs that allegorize the ways in which an aroused social conscience can be weakened and limited in America. Her first relationship is with Gus, an uneducated young Pittsburgh radical with whom she unconsciously falls in love. Then she meets George Barrow and lives with him for some time in Washington while serving as his secretary. In New York she takes in and nurses Ben Compton; they fall in love and live together while he continues his union organizing. And finally, she lives with Don Stevens, a newspaperman-turned-communist leader. Each of the affairs ends poorly. Gus is beaten and sent to jail for his activities; Barrow, Mary realizes, is selling out the labor movement, and she leaves him; Ben decides that a family will handicap his work in the party and drifts away; and Stevens leaves her at party orders in order to marry a foreign comrade. In each instance, Mary’s capacity to give of herself is cast aside or betrayed for reasons that constitute the fate of the informed sensibility that seeks to respond to the needs and conditions of most Americans. Her potential for

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truthsaying is not so much suppressed as prevented from full beneficial expression, and we leave her not guilt-ridden but worn and wasted by her constantly thwarted efforts to fulfill her love for man and mankind. The most cogent depiction in U.S.A. of man’s ability to see and act despite the stranglehold of institutions and institutionalized language in America occurs in the career of the authorial persona portrayed in the camera eye. With some recent exceptions, this portion of the novel has long been misunderstood. Adopting the position expressed by Dos Passos himself in a late interview,14 many readers have considered the camera eye merely a device to “drain off ” the subjective from the creative process and thus somehow ensure the greater objectivity of the remainder of the novel. Or it has been taken to be a device that seeks to demonstrate the ability of the private consciousness to survive in the modern world. Both of these views of the nature and function of the camera eye tend to ignore two of its principal qualities. First, the substance of the camera eye stream of consciousness is less similar to Molly’s reverie at the close of Ulysses than to Bloom’s thoughts as he wanders during the day. The stream-of-consciousness material is not “pure” interior monologue but consists of the constant intertwining of exterior event and interior reflection, in which the “world outside” plays an important role in the world of consciousness. Second, the consciousness depicted in the camera eye is not static. The 51 episodes form a kind of novel of development, in which the protagonist, after a number of false starts and difficulties, comes to see his proper role in life and begins to undertake it.15 The notion that Dos Passos intended the camera eye to dramatize his own intellectual and emotional development is supported by the presence in other portions of the novel of similar reflections of his changing attitudes and values. During the seven or eight years of the genesis and composition of U.S.A., from approximately 1927 to 1935, Dos Passos’s commitment to the radical left underwent considerable change. As Daniel Aaron has noted, Dos Passos’s radicalism “simmered in the early twenties, boiled furiously between 1927 and 1932 [the period during which he wrote the first two novels of the trilogy], and began to cool thereafter.”16 This shift in Dos 14

15

16

Frank Gado, “An Interview with John Dos Passos,” Idol: The Literary Quarterly of Union College, 45 (1969): 23. A brief discussion of this aspect of the camera eye occurs in Townsend Ludington’s “The Ordering of the Camera Eye in U.S.A.,” American Literature, 49 (November 1977): 443–6. Writers on the Left (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961), 348. Landsberg, in his Dos Passos’ Path to “U.S.A.,” has a full account of Dos Passos’s political ideas of the 1920s and 1930s. He and others have noted the important role that Dos Passos’s dismay over the communist involvement in the Harlan mine workers’ strike played in his growing antagonism to the party.

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Passos’s degree of endorsement of the Left can be seen most clearly in his treatment of the radical newspaperman Don Stevens. Throughout the trilogy Stevens and George Barrow frequently appear together in complementary roles. Whether in Washington and New York before the War or Paris during and after it, Barrow is always the soft-centered and self-serving labor leader while Stevens is a sympathetically portrayed radical and, later, enthusiast of the Russian Revolution. When we encounter them in The Big Money, however, Barrow is unchanged but Stevens has become a coldly calculating and deceptive party functionary. The depiction of Marxism itself undergoes a similar change. In Mac’s narrative in The 42nd Parallel—and particularly in the portrayal of Mac’s radical printer uncle—Marxism is endorsed as offering an apt description of the nature of class warfare in America. But in his dramatization of the role of Marxism in Ben Compton’s life at the close of Nineteen-Nineteen and throughout The Big Money, Dos Passos suggests the baneful personal and social consequences of a programmatic and religiously held economic theory. Dos Passos also incorporated into his portrayal of several of the biography and narrative figures themes which suggest his absorption in the possibility of growth in vision by someone of his own class. Among the biographies, Jack Reed and Paxton Hibben are depicted as figures who despite “four years under the ethercone” (FP, 301) at Harvard and Princeton awake to an understanding of the world as it is rather than as the conventional lies of their class would have it be. Dick Savage’s career as a Harvard aesthete and as an ambulance driver in France and Italy closely parallels Dos Passos’s as caught in the camera eye. But Dick, though he does develop in insight, lacks the moral courage to fight the system and thus descends into self-hate and spiritual death. The camera eye persona develops despite two related handicaps. He must escape the narrow vision both of his class and of a self-imposed aestheticism if he is to grow in an understanding of the world as it is and thereby assume his proper role in life. His “education” begins as a child when he skates on a pond near the mills. He is warned of the “mockers . . . bohunk and polack kids” and contrasts them with “we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights in the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon” (FP, 81). The imagery here and frequently elsewhere in the camera eye portions of the trilogy expresses a condition that the camera eye persona finally openly acknowledges in one of his last segments when he cries, “all right we are two nations” (BM, 462). It is an imagery of two classes divided not only by wealth and power but by the language of degradation on the one hand and of mythic prowess and nobility on the other. By the time the camera eye persona has reached Harvard, he

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has begun to awaken to social awareness but feels himself bound by the code of the gentleman aesthete—“don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or Socialists” (FP, 302). His participation in the War, because European conditions vividly reveal the disparity between the strong and the weak and between language and reality, moves him toward involvement as well as insight. His war responses contain a biting edge of anger, which presages action, as in the comment that “Up north they were dying in the mud and the trenches but business was good in Bordeaux” (FP, 364), or in the front-line vision of “the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead” (NN, 101). After the War, however, the camera eye persona is attracted by the excitement of traveling and by Greenwich Village bohemianism. Not until the late 1920s does the “two nations” theme again move him deeply. At this point, he faces a conflict between his newly activated social conscience and his personal doubts about his ability to play a role in the struggle. He is also troubled by the conflict between the high idealism of his thoughts about “the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy” (BM, 150) and the pull of more personal desires and needs, as is suggested by the images of “dollars are silky in her hair soft in her dress sprout in the elaborately contrived rosepetals that you kiss become pungent and crunchy in the speakeasy dinner” (BM, 151). So he “peel[s] the speculative onion of doubt” (BM, 151) until the crisis of the SaccoVanzetti case persuades him that personal and literary activism must be his course. Standing in Plymouth, where Vanzetti lived and the pilgrims landed, he thinks: how can 1 make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppres­sion came to this coast how say Don’t let them scare you how make them feel who are your oppressors America rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America. (BM, 437)

To “rebuild the old words,” he now realizes, is his function and commitment— to speak truly and movingly about the misuse of the great and noble terms— liberty, freedom, democracy—and so to help recreate their meaning and potency.

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The deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti lead to anger but also to a hardening of this commitment: America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our  language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul. . . .  all right we are two nations. . . .  but do they know that the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight in the mouth of an old woman from Pittsburgh of a husky boilermaker from Frisco . . . the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight. (BM, 462–3)

“We stand defeated America,” the camera eye persona cries out at the close of this segment, but he himself stands confirmed in his role. At Harlan County, in the last camera eye of the trilogy, he recounts the betrayal of the miners by owners, government, and conservative labor and concludes with a statement that announces both temporary defeat and continuing effort—“we have only words against” (BM, 525). In effect, the camera eye persona has brought us to the point in the late 1920s when he committed himself to write U.S.A. He has accepted the premise that “two nations” exist in America in part because of the betrayal of the language of freedom and democracy and that he, as a writer, can help restore the “ruined words” through his art. The camera eye in U.S.A. is thus not only a typical nineteenth-century development story in which understanding is gained through experience. Like such nineteenth-century poems as Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” it also embodies in its story of growth a preoccupation with the growth of an artist’s imaginative power and poetic role, a preoccupation that has fulfilled itself in the work we are reading. U.S.A. thus combines two nineteenth-century forms—the romantic poem of the development of an imaginative sensibility and the Victorian novel of plot. Dos Passos’s pervasive interlacing and cross-stitching of character, event, and place in an extremely long work produce the equivalent of the Victorian novel’s effect of the presence of an organic authorial voice, of a voice in this instance that shapes through ironic analogues or clusters, a coherent and powerful vision of life. The camera eye is not an anomaly within this organic voice but is rather a means toward confirming in the drama of an expanding consciousness the validity of the depiction of experience in the other modes.

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Dos Passos’s brilliant control of his technique and materials persuades us to accept the tragic view of American life portrayed in U.S.A. We are persuaded that America has been false to its traditional ideals, that these ideals are manipulated by the wealthy and powerful in order to maintain their status, but that there remains the possibility of struggle and even of renewal. It is true that at the close of the trilogy, the “ruined words” appear to be irrecoverable. The advertising man Dick Savage is playing court to Myra Bingham, one of the heirs to Doc Bingham’s patent-medicine empire, and is thereby uniting the false word and the false thing. The party apparatus is in control of the radical Left. And Sacco and Vanzetti are dead and the Harlan miners are crushed. “We stand defeated America” is an apt response to these conditions. Nevertheless, Wesley Everett and Joe Hill were willing to die for truth in the past, and Veblen and Frank Lloyd Wright erected monuments of truth for the future. “We have only words against,” but words can be as potent a weapon for truth as for falsehood. Out of the conscious ambivalence of this vision Dos Passos has created the vast tragic structure which is U.S.A.

The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center

Most general readers of John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. have been troubled by the camera eye portion of the trilogy. The subject matter of these brief stream of consciousness fragments from Dos Passos’s life is of course necessarily obscure. Even for close readers of the trilogy the events of the camera eye were difficult to identify until the appearance of Dos Passos’s autobiography The Best Times in 1966 and Townsend Ludington’s edition of The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos in 1973.1 In addition. the comparative brevity of each of the often widely dispersed 51 camera eye passages in an extremely long work (almost 1500 pages in the Modern Library edition) makes it difficult to maintain a sense of thematic continuity from one camera eye to the next. Thus, the camera eye in U.S.A. has usually either been read casually—almost as an awkward interruption—or for its occasional reference to events present as well in other portions of the trilogy. Recently, however, a number of critics of Dos Passos’s work have begun to examine the camera eye more closely. In particular, it has become not uncommon to discuss the entire camera eye sequence in U.S.A. as a kind of development novel in which Dos Passos presents the reader with a valuable and suggestive account of his maturation as an artist.2 This critical effort runs counter to the thrust of Dos Passos’s own late and repeated comment that his principal intent in the camera eye was to “drain off the subjective.”3 By this 1

2

3

(New York: New American Library, 1966) and (Boston: Gambit, 1973). Melvin Landsberg also contributes to an understanding of the autobiographical foundation of the camera eye in his Dos Passos’ Path to “U.S.A.”: A Political Biography 1912-1936  (Boulder: Colorado Associated University Press, 1972), as does James N. Westerhoven in his “Autobiographical Elements in the Camera Eye,” American Literature, 48 (November 1976): 340–64. The best and fullest of these discussions occurs in David L. Vanderwerken’s “U.S.A.: Dos Passos and the ‘Old Words,’ ” Twentieth Century Literature, 2 (February 1977): 195–228; see especially 206–15. See also Townsend Ludington, “The Ordering of the Camera Eye in U.S.A.,” American Literature, 49 (November 1977): 443–6, and Iain Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 66–119 passim. See the interviews by David Sanders, Writers at Work: The “Paris Review” Interviews, Fourth Series, ed. George Plimpton (New York: Viking, 1976), 81 and Frank Gado, First Person: Conversations on Writers and Writing, ed. Frank Gado (Schenectady, NY: Union College Press, 1975), 52. Both interviews occurred in 1968.

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remark Dos Passos meant that he included the camera eye largely for the negative purpose of restricting his subjective experience to that portion of U.S.A., and thereby supposedly increasing the objectivity of the remainder of the trilogy. Most critics of U.S.A., however, now believe that the camera eye not only dramatizes the development of an artist’s credo but also is intimately related in its themes to those of the trilogy as a whole. I would like to contribute to this growing sense of the significance and centrality of the camera eye in U.S.A. by offering an interpretation of this stream of consciousness novel within a novel that stresses the importance of the sexual motif both in it and in the entire trilogy. It is of value in this regard to recall that U.S.A. is a work both of the 1920s and the 1930s—that, though begun in  1927, it was largely written in the postcrash years. The camera eye is indebted in its themes and techniques to some of the principal literary preoccupations conventionally attributed to these decades. The camera eye is Joycean both in its specific kind of stream of consciousness—that in which the consciousness moves freely through time, yet is also responsive to a particular social and physical “present”— and in its motifs of the search by an artist for a home and a father.4 As a work of the 1930s, the camera eye presents the successful completion of this search as an acceptance by the artist of his committed role within the class struggle. As a work of the 1920s, the camera eye, now more covertly and often principally through image and symbol, identifies specific social values, attitudes, and activities with specific sexual values, attitudes, and activities. While Dos Passos was not seeking to render his inner life in Freudian terms, he nevertheless does so in the sense that his recollection of his life through stream of consciousness is closely related to psychoanalytic self-revelation in which there is a constant intertwining of the sexual and almost every other phase of one’s experience. Thus, in the camera eye Dos Passos depicts his maturation into literary radicalism both as a sexual development into a proper masculinity and as a discovery of a literary creed that is symbolically a father and a home. This is not to say that each of the 51 segments of the camera eye contributes equally and clearly to this theme. There is perhaps more variation in content and tone in the camera eye than in any other portion of the trilogy. Nevertheless, the camera eye as a whole has a pervasive and discernible direction—a direction that also has a distinctive cast in each of the three novels of the trilogy. The camera eye in The 42nd Parallel deals with Dos Passos’s life from his early childhood to his departure for Europe 4

See John Wrenn, John Dos Passos (New York: Twayne, 1961) for frequent allusions to this theme in Dos Passos’s work from Rosinante to the Road Again (1922) to U.S.A.

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in  1917 and dramatizes principally his gradual recognition that there are “two nations,” those of “topdog” and “underdog,” and that these have sexual significance for him. In Nineteen-Nineteen, the camera eye depicts Dos Passos’s experiences in Europe between 1917 and 1919 and both his discovery of a need and desire to play an active, masculine role in literary and social affairs and his failure to find a proper means for doing so. And, finally, the camera eye in The Big Money describes Dos Passos’s ineffectual search during the 1920s for a fully masculine literary identity and his discovery at last of that identity through his participation in the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Harlan County miners’ strike. At the close of the camera eye, Dos Passos stands revealed as a modern approximation of Walt Whitman.5 He is ready to tell the truth about American life with his father’s masculine honesty and vigor and will thereby aid in the restoration of the underlying purpose and ideals of America.

I The general texture of Dos Passos’s early life as depicted by the camera eye in The 42nd Parallel is of constant physical movement within the social world of the upper middle class. In carriages and on trains and boats, in Holland and England and in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Virginia, we encounter Dos Passos in a world of servants, boarding schools and Harvard, luxurious travel, country estates, yachting, and edifying visits. Within this world, Dos Passos’s mother and father (the “He” and “She” of the camera eye consciousness) play conventional parental roles. The mother is a figure who initially expresses accepted class attitudes (“Workingmen and people like that laborers travailleurs greasers”)6 and a feminine aversion to violence and conflict (as in the first camera eye, when she and Dos Passos take refuge under a shop counter) and who later fades into a debilitating illness (“He was very gay and She was feeling well for once”) (42P, 173). The father, the “strong athletic man  .  .  .  immensely energetic,” described by Ludington,7 is powerfully masculine in thought and action. Willing to state and act on unpopular opinions (“What would you do Lucy if 5

6

7

See in this connection Lois Hughson, “In Search of the True America: Dos Passos’ Debt to Whitman in U.S.A.,” Modern Fiction Studies, 19 (Summer 1973): 179–92, and Robert Weeks, “The Novel as Poem” in the same issue of MFS. U.S.A.: The 42nd Parallel (New York: Modern Library, 1938), 25: Citations will hereafter appear in the text. Since the three novels of U.S.A. are paginated separately in this edition, I will cite both the novel and the page number, using the following abbreviations: 42PThe 42nd Parallel; NN-Nineteen-Nineteen; and BM-The Big Money. Ludington, The Fourteenth Chronicle, 3.

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I were to invite one of them [a Negro] to my table?” and “Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day”) (42P, 13), he is also a man who carries his flask wherever he goes, recites Othello in cabs, and enjoys swimming and yachting. Early in the camera eye, Dos Passos begins to associate his upper-class experience with his mother’s feminine conventionality and lack of strength and the lower-class world, which he occasionally encounters, with his father’s masculinity, both because of the greater vigor of this world and because of its more openly expressed sexuality. This pattern of association is probably indebted to Dos Passos’s awareness of his father’s Portuguese immigrant background and his mother’s roots in a socially prominent Maryland family. But it is also, and more fully, a product of the sexual conventions of Dos Passos’s youth, in which a Victorian gentility still masked the expression of sex in upper middle-class life, while working-class experience was assumed to be more openly and aggressively sexual. Initially, this association is communicated largely by images and brief incidents in which the boyish Dos Passos is fearful during moments when a masculine sexuality is linked to his father or to the working class. Traveling by train at night with his mother through an industrial landscape, he peeks “out of the window into the black rumbling dark suddenly ranked with squat chimneys and you’re scared of the black smoke and the puffs of flame that flare and fade out of the squat chimneys” (42P, 25). And when challenged at school about his political opinions (opinions which are also his father’s), he can only reply “all trembly” (42P, 58). Camera Eye (7), which describes Dos Passos on an ice skating pond during the period he was attending Choate, brings to the surface his permanent association of class and sexual roles. The section is important and brief enough to quote in its entirety: skating on the pond next the silver company’s mill where there was a funny fuzzy smell from the dump whaleoil soap somebody said it was that they used in cleaning the silver knives and spoons and forks putting shine on them for sale there was shine on the ice early black ice that rang like a sawblade just scratched white by the first skaters I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down look out for the muckers everybody said bohunk and polack kids put stones in their snowballs write dirty words up on walls do dirty things up alleys their folks work in the mills we clean young American Rover Boys handy with tools Deerslayers played hockey Boy Scouts and cut figure eights on the ice Achilles Ajax Agamemnon I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down. (42P, 81)

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The immigrant background “muckers” play roughly and unfairly and revel in an unclean sexuality; the Rover Boys lead clean American lives of ritualized activities, codes, and roles. Dos Passos at this point identifies with and aspires to the Rover Boys (“we clean young American Rover Boys”), a group which includes hockey and figure skating among its activities. But “I couldn’t learn to skate and kept falling down.” His ineptness signifies that he is between two worlds. As his father’s son his true identity is with the outsider “muckers,” but as his mother’s son he condemns their overt sexuality and endorses the conventional and derivative upper-class roles of the Rover Boys. Dos Passos’s illegitimacy probably strengthened his sense of not belonging to the world he aspired to and thus his ineptness in its skills. (Metaphorically speaking, his father and mother had also done “dirty things up alleys.”) He therefore carries with him throughout his upper middle-class boyhood and early youth a sense of displacement. He responds deeply to the story of the man without a country (42P, 147–8) and considers himself without either a home (“I wished I was home but I hadn’t any home” [42P, 224]) or a religion (42P, 206–7). But as a “displaced person,” Dos Passos’s life also increasingly takes on the shape of a search for a home and a father—that is, for a creed and a course of action which will embody in compelling symbolic form the values he attributes to his father. In other camera eye passages in The 42nd Parallel, Dos Passos’s overt condemnation of yet underlying desire for the greater sexual vitality and experience of lower-class life emerges clearly. Near his parents’ Virginia farm he meets at a freight crossing a youth who “couldn’t have been much older ’n me . . . he had curly hair and wisps of hay in it and through his open shirt you could see his body was burned brown to the waist I guess he wasn’t much account” (42P, 92–3). Dos Passos’s early encounters with girls also bring into the open his association of a desirable sexual freedom with lower-class life and of a cold formality with upper-class experience. In juxtaposed camera eye sequences, he sits in a well-to-do suburban Pennsylvania church listening to girls singing “chilly shrill soprano” in the choir and watching them in their “best hats and pretty pink green blue yellow dresses” (42P, 108). Then, in the camera eye which follows, he has his first sexual experience, as Jeanne, the young family maid from the Jura, takes him into her bed one night, “and afterwards you knew what girls were made like” (42P, 130). As Dos Passos moves into adolescence, he discovers in specific single instances confirmation of his linking of sexual attitudes and values with class. At a summer resort, he meets a Methodist minister’s wife, a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who’d heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables

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With this woman, with her thin aestheticism and suppressed sexuality, Dos Passos “felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn’t want to” (42P, 238). Rather, you “wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian.” And though he does not have the nerve, “but Oh God not lilies” (42P, 239). Parallel to this scene is Dos Passos’s visit to “historic Quebec” with a group of students in the care of several older men. One of these guides, a singer, takes a homosexual interest in Dos Passos: it’s raining in historic Quebec and walking down the street alone with the baritone he kept saying about how there were bad girls in a town like this and boys shouldn’t go with bad girls and the Acropolis and the bel canto and the Parthenon and voice culture and the beautiful statues of Greek boys and the Winged Victory and the beautiful statues in St Anne de Beaupré but I finally shook him and went out on the cars to see the falls of Montmorency famous in song and story and a church full of crutches left by the sick in St. Anne de Beaupré and the gray rainy streets full of girls.8 (42P, 284–5)

Dos Passos’s identification of effeminacy and homosexuality with the upper class and of masculine sexuality with the lower continues in the Harvard portions of the camera eye in The 42nd Parallel. As in his Quebec visit, experience now presents Dos Passos with clear choices. There is the world of Jeanne, the colored servant, and the Quebec girls, and there is the world of shrill sopranos, the minister’s wife, and the baritone. But the Harvard camera eye passages add an important new element to this distinction. Now the upper class becomes associated in Dos Passos’s mind not only with sexual inadequacy but with a destructive social blindness. In a bitterly ironic camera eye section dealing with the Lawrence strikes of 1912, the Rover Boys

8

It is perhaps worth noting that whereas in the ice skating scene Greek masculine role models are an accepted staple of upper middle class education (“Achilles Ajax Agamemnon”), they are here found suspect because of their implied homosexuality.

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of Choate reappear as young Harvard men who become scabs on a street car line: what the hell they were a lot of wops anyway bohunks hunkies that didn’t wash their necks ate garlic with squalling brats and fat oily wives the damn dagoes they put up a notice for volunteers good clean young to man the streetcars and show the foreign agitators this was still a white man’s. (42P, 245)

Two men from “Matthews” answer the call, and while they are horseplaying on a car, one accidentally kills the other, and “now the fellow’s got to face his roommate’s folks” (42P, 246). Yet, despite Dos Passos’s restlessness (“can’t sleep”) because of his realiza­ tion of the social blindness of his world, he doesn’t have the nerve to break out of the bellglass four years under the ethercone breathe deep gently now that’s the way be a good boy one two three four five six get As in some courses but don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or socialists. (42P, 301–2)

The Harvard bellglass is that of a sexless or effeminate aestheticism—“grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall” (42P, 302). Opposed to it is an “outside” of raucous activity and striving in the “real” world of industrial America—“the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round Harvard Square and the trains crying across the saltmarshes and the rumbling siren of a steamboat leaving dock and the blue peter flying and millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts” (42P, 302). But, Dos Passos concludes, “I hadn’t the nerve” (42P, p. 302). Dos Passos’s occasional efforts to break out of the bellglass end not in action or commitment but in a seemingly inevitable return to his class. He and a friend attend some radical meetings in New York, and afterwards “we had several drinks and welsh rabbits and paid our bill and went home and opened the door with a latchkey and put on pajamas and went to bed and it was comfortable in bed” (42P, 350), The concluding camera eye of The 42nd Parallel finds Dos Passos on his way to Europe during wartime. Perhaps, it is implied, he will discover in the upheaval of war an answer to his dilemma of how to identify and commit himself to the home and father that he senses are somewhere in the world of radical struggle.

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II The initial camera eye in Nineteen-Nineteen sets the tone for all the passages in this portion of the trilogy. It begins with a coalescing of the news of the deaths of Dos Passos’s parents—his mother in May 1915, his father in January 1917. With their deaths, the “bellglass” is “shattered” (NN, 11). Gone is the protective shield they provided (a shield which included Choate and Harvard), and gone, too, therefore, is the barrier between himself and experience that their protectiveness included. Both they and Dos Passos’s earlier life are now dead: we

who had heard Copey’s beautiful reading voice and read the hand­ somely bound books and breathed deep . . . of the waxwork lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ethercone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius were now dead at the cableoffice. (NN, 11)

The camera eye continues by juxtaposing this rejected effete world (“I’m so tired of violets/Take them all away”) (NN, 10) and the experience of men at war—an experience ranging from ordinary tasks (“washing those windows/ K.P./cleaning the sparkplugs with a pocketknife”) to whores, bombardment, and death (NN, 11–12). Now that the barriers are down, the War can provide Dos Passos with the kind of experience that might lead to the full discovery of his true identity and role. The initial camera eye in Nineteen-Nineteen thus ends—“tomorrow I hoped would be the first day of the first month of the first year” (NN, 12). In the camera eye sections that follow, the experience which represents to Dos Passos a powerfully attractive combination of masculinity and of integrity of feeling and expression has a distinctively Hemingway cast. It is while threatened by death or when engaged in drinking, eating, whoring, and adventure with his comrades that Dos Passos communicates a sense of a new life. Under bombardment at the Marne, with the shells “pounding the thought of death into our ears” (NN, 71), his response to the stimulation of that thought is both sexual and intoxicating—“the winey thought of death stings in the spring blood that throbs in the sunburned neck up and down the belly under the tight belt hurries like cognac in the tips of my toes and the lobes of my ears” (NN, 71–2). And the camera eye that describes Dos Passos’s trip to Italy with his ambulance section—a passage which begins and ends with the refrain “11,000 registered harlots said the Red Cross Publicity Man infest the streets of Marseilles” (NN, 148) —combines the lush richness

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of the French landscape with the camaraderie of men eating and drinking while on the loose. War as a “real” masculine experience—the experience of both death and life—supplies the matrix for the emergence of the motif that is to dominate the camera eye from this point on—the motif of the distinction between life as Dos Passos now understands it and the language conventionally used to disguise the true nature of experience.9 Thus, in a camera eye passage filled with the horrors of war— remembering the grey crooked fingers the thick drip of blood off the canvas the bubbling when the lungcases try to breathe the muddy scraps of flesh you put in the ambulance alive and haul out dead. (NN, 101)—

the physical images of man’s destructiveness are combined with the heroic language of patriotism and, in particular, with Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” (NN, 102–3). Such language is corrupt, it is implied, both because it drives men into the horror of war and because it then disguises that horror. During their trip to Italy, the ambulance section is accompanied by a living example of a failure in truth-telling about this horror, a “Successful Story Writer [who] it turned out he was not writing what he felt he wanted to be writing What can you tell them at home about the war?” (NN, 150) Dos Passos has now reached a felt though still not clearly articulated understanding of the basic relationship between art and life. Life is experience in its masculine cast of the complete range of human feelings and activities, and art is the effort to render this kind of experience with virile honesty and full attention to the frequent ugliness and injustice of experience. Apparently believing, however, that he is still deficient in experience, Dos Passos enters the Army as an enlisted man and is exposed to the drudgery, squalor, mindlessness, and destructiveness of life on its lowest level. But the Army, though it contributes to Dos Passos’s “education,” is itself a prison of the spirit. Dos Passos’s discharge at Tours in the spring of 1919 is thus like a second rebirth as he once again escapes a repressive world for one of a new freedom. In Paris after his discharge, he feels the richness of life with a masculine sexual energy and excitement and with an imagery

  9

The theme of the “old words” in U.S.A. is best discussed by Vanderwerken, “U.S.A.: Dos Passes and the ‘Old Words,’ ” and by John Lydenberg, “Dos Passes’ U.S.A.: The Words of the Hollow Men.” In Sidney J. Krause, ed. Essays on Determinism in American Literature. (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1964), 97–107, reprinted in Dos Passos, the Critics, and the Writers Intention, ed. Allen Belkind (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), 93–105.

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of rebirth which echoes almost precisely the imagery of his earlier escape from the bellglass: Paris comes into the room in the servantgirl’s eyes the warm bulge of her breasts under the grey smock the smell of chicory in coffee scalded milk and the shine that crunches on the crescent roles stuck with little dabs of very sweet unsalted butter . . . . Today is the sunny morning of the first day of spring We gulp our coffee splash water on us jump into our clothes run downstairs step out wideawake into the first morning of the first day of the first year. (NN, 343, 344)

But France offers no means for the expression of Dos Passos’s emerging sense of his identity as an artist. In the 1919 May Day riots, he is the outsider who takes refuge in the back room of a café where he drinks “grog americain” (NN, 401). And the French radical movement itself lacks energy and direction, as is suggested by its degeneration into an anarchist picnic where Dos Passos meets a girl who “wanted liberty fraternity equality and a young man to take her out” (NN, 420). Like the girl in a New York taxicab in an important Big Money camera eye passage, the French girl does not provide Dos Passos a means for the expression of a radical masculinity despite the sexuality of their encounter. Beneath her revolutionary activities, she is really a girl in search of a good time—“she wanted l’Amérique la vie le theatre le feev o’clock le smoking le foxtrot” (NN, 420) —and thus offers the radical artist principally an opportunity for the betrayal of his goals. The final camera eye in Nineteen-Nineteen is chronologically out of order in that it returns Dos Passos to his period as an enlisted man in France. Nevertheless, it sums up his development by the close of the second novel of the trilogy. He is an Army casual, loading scrap iron on to railcars in the morning and unloading it in the afternoon while his discharge is delayed because his service record—that is, his identity—has been lost. Thus, the two “rebirths” of Nineteen-Nineteen are in truth false dawns. Although Dos Passos has escaped from the prison of both Harvard and the Army, neither his full identity nor his role as an artist has been fully discovered, and he is still engaged in the meaningless tasks that life presents him.

III In The Big Money, the camera eye passages are dominated by the related motifs of traveling and of trying on literary roles—of search as both physical and artistic restlessness. The theme of search begins with the initial camera

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eye of The Big Money with Dos Passos’s reaction to postwar America on his return from France. The harbor scenes evoke memories of place and season, but once he is fully in touch with America the images shift to those of a 1920s world of crushing normalcy on the one hand and social oppression on the other: the crunch of whitecorn muffins and coffee with cream gulped in a hurry before traintime and apartmenthouse mornings stifling with newspapers and the smooth powdery feel of new greenbacks and the whack of a cop’s billy cracking a citizen’s skull and the faces blurred with newsprint of men in jail. (BM, 27)

Escape into art appears to be the only response to these conditions, but escape into the roles either of “artist as world traveler” or of “artist as successful novelist” brings no relief. In each instance, Dos Passos must adopt a false identity appropriate to the role, as is suggested by the dress suit he is forced to wear both in Beirut and New York. In Beirut, after crossing the desert by camel, “scarcelybathed he finds him self cast for a role provided with a white tie carefully tied by the viceconsul stuffed into a boiled shirt a tailcoat too small a pair of dresstrousers too large.” (BM, 30). And on his return to New York—after the great success of Three Soldiers—he “finds waiting again the for somebodyelsetailored dress suit” (BM, 31) of a literary personage expected to read poetry to attentive audiences. These, Dos Passos concludes, are not “any of the positions for which he made application at the employmentagency” (BM, 31). The 1920s Greenwich Village cocktail party world also does not provide a context for self-discovery. In the camera eye passage devoted to such a party, the imagery of effeminate artiness and of role-playing clearly relates the falsity of this world to that of Eliot’s Prufrock setting. At the party, “the narrow yellow room teems with talk” (BM, 125), and the hostess finds every man his pigeonhole the personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face to facilitate recognition she pins on each of us a badge (BM, 125)

To escape being pinned, Dos Passos must walk the streets and walk the streets inquiring of Coca Cola signs Lucky  Strike ads pricetags in storewindows scraps of overheard conversations stray tatters of newsprint yesterday’s headlines sticking out of ashcans for a set of figures a formula of action an address you don’t quite know. (BM, 149)

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In this search, “a formula for action” now has special appeal—“to do to make there are more lives than walking desperate the streets hurry underdog do make” (BM, 149)—and he briefly adopts the role of social agitator, of “a speech urging action in the crowded hall” (BM, 149). But he finds himself merely sloganizing in his reaching out for approval, and disappointedly returns home after a drink and a hot meal and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial and ponder the course of history and what leverage might pry the owners loose from power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our storybook democracy. (BM, 150)

New York in the early 1920s thus provides Dos Passos with the opportunity to choose between two opposing literary roles—neither of which is satisfactory. He can be the class conscious radical who is ineffectually seeking a way to contribute to the restoration of “our storybook democracy.” Or he can be the successful artist who finds excitement in the intimate connection between sex and money: money in New York (lipstick kissed off the lips of a girl fashionably dressed fragrant at five o’clock in a taxicab careening down Park Avenue when at the end of each crosstown street the west is flaming with gold and white smoke billows from the smokestacks of steamboats leaving port and the sky is lined with greenbacks. . . . dollars are silky in her hair soft in her dress sprout in the elaborately contrived rosepetals that you kiss become pungent and crunchy in the speakeasy dinner sting shrill in the drinks. (BM, 150–1)

But this kind of sexual excitement is not an adequate conclusion to his search. “If not why not?” he asks; and from “somebody in [his] head” comes the answer, “liar” (BM, 151). The sexuality of the Big Money—as Charley Anderson and Richard Savage are discovering in the narratives of this portion of U.S.A.—betrays rather than affirms and supports a masculinity of strength and purpose. So Dos Passos must still search while “peeling the speculative onion of doubt” (BM, 151)—doubt imaged in the following camera eye section as a harbor fog that hinders his efforts to begin his true journey: tonight start out ship somewhere join up sign on the dotted line enlist become one of hock the old raincoat of uncertitude . . . to rebuild yesterday. (BM, 196)

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But he again wanders the streets in “aimless walks,” an unidentified stranger destination unknown hat pulled down over the has he any? face (BM, 197)

Dos Passos’s search for a fully expressive masculine literary identity and role ends in the related settings of the Plymouth of the Sacco-Vanzetti case and the Harlan County of the miners’ strike. In these examples of the organized oppression of freedom and democracy by the very institutions established to safeguard them, Dos Passos discovers his theme and his function as a writer. He is to tell the truth about America, and particularly about the corruption and subversion of the “old words” of freedom and justice by those in power, and thus play an active part in the struggle to return us to “our storybook democracy.” As he walks through Plymouth, pencil scrawls in my notebook the scraps of recollection the broken halfphrases the effort to intersect word with word to dovetail clause with clause to rebuild out of mangled memories unshakably (Oh Pontius Pilate) the truth (BM, 436)

Returning to Boston, he asks, how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast how say  Don’t let them scare you  how make them feel who are your oppressors America rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America (BM, 437)

With the deaths of Sacco and Vanzetti, the struggle appears to be lost— “there is nothing to do we are beaten . . . our work is over” (BM, 462). But, in fact, the old words of the immigrants are being renewed in blood and agony tonight do they know that the old American speech of the haters of oppression is new tonight . . . the language of the beaten nation is not forgotten in our ears tonight the men in the deathhouse made the old words new before they died. (BM, 463)

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“We stand defeated America,” this camera eye ends. “We stand defeated,” however, only in the sense of the failure to save Sacco and Vanzetti. The “old words” were made new again in the strength and courage of Sacco and Vanzetti and in the beauty and power of Vanzetti’s language of freedom and hope in his letters. And in this lesson the writer can find his true task. So, in Harlan County, which in the crushing of the striking miners by corporate and state power represents in microcosm the betrayal of American ideals, Dos Passos can end the camera eye in U.S.A. with the defiant and challenging charge to himself, “we have only words against” (BM, 525).

IV The camera eye in U.S.A. is a story of maturation. The young Dos Passos who falsely identified himself with the “topdog” (“we  .  .  .  Rover Boys”) at last realizes that he too is oppressed within the American system (“we stand defeated”). The writer who sought in travel, success, bohemianism, and “greenback” sex an identity for himself as an artist at last finds it in his role as one who can help revive the “old words” through his art. And the boy who hid under the counter with his mother during a moment of social upheaval is capable at last of his father’s aggressive expression in both word and action of rebellious values. When we read U.S.A., we are encountering, somewhat as in a familiar kind of romantic poem (“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” for example), both an account of the growth of an artist’s imagination and the product of that growth, that is, the poem itself. U.S.A., of course, differs from this kind of romantic poem in that it sharply bifurcates the history of artistic development and the product of that development. The camera eye presents us with a stream of consciousness account of the growth of the artist’s imagination up to the point of the composition of the work we are reading. The remainder of the trilogy presents us with an interpretation of American social life which is the  result of the act of composition by the mature artist. Yet this bifurcation should not disguise the intimate connection between the camera eye and the rest of the trilogy. When Dos Passos reveals to us in the camera eye that he has made his literary sensibility whole and insightful by maturing into the identity of his father and that this identity involves above all a masculine honesty and vigor of thought and expression, he is also revealing to us one of the principal reasons for the failure of American life as depicted elsewhere in the trilogy. For in each of the other modes of U.S.A.—in its newsreels, biographies, and above all in its major narratives from Mac and Moorehouse to Charley Anderson and Richard

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Savage—a femininization or inadequacy of male sexuality is closely related to a failure in intellectual honesty and strength, and thus a failure to contribute to the preservation of the “old words.”10 Although Dos Passos felt that he himself had struggled through to a return to his home and father, America as a whole had failed to do so. And he made this theme one of the principal themes of his trilogy. Dos Passos does not “drain off ” his subjective experience in the camera eye and thereby assures a greater objectivity in the remainder of the trilogy. He rather depicts openly in the camera eye deeply personal preoccupations which underlie many of the central themes of U.S.A. as a whole. The belief that U.S.A. is principally a novel of social documentation arises out of its cultural role in the 1930s and the fictional mode of its narratives. It is, in fact, a work in which Dos Passos’s sense of himself is a major contribution to the thematic complexity and energy which, we are increasingly realizing, are the sources of its permanence.

10

A parallel theme—one which I cannot explore here—exists in Dos Passos’s treatment of female sexuality in U.S.A. Most of the major women figures in the trilogy either exploit their sex or are exploited sexually—in both instances, principally because they have accepted conventional sexual identities and roles in ways that contribute to the decay of the “old words.”

The “only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” Passage in John Dos Passos’ The Big Money

John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. has usually been considered both a documentation of the failure of the American capitalistic ethic and a demonstration of the naturalistic thesis that individual destinies are controlled by the conditions of social life. In this traditional view, Dos Passos’s various experimental techniques in the trilogy—and especially his stream of consciousness camera eye sections—are seen more as gestures toward a voguish modernism than as integral to the work. In recent years, however, there has arisen an increasing awareness of the depth and complexity of Dos Passos’s vision of twentiethcentury American life and of his means of expressing this vision. Central to this new approach to U.S.A. is the realization that Dos Passos attributes the failure of American life principally to our failure to maintain the strength and integrity of American ideals as they are expressed in the “old words” of the American Dream—justice, equality, democracy, and freedom.1 The major drift of American life, as depicted in the trilogy, has been toward the perversion of these words, toward the use of them to disguise acts which in fact suppress freedom and democracy (as during World War I) and justice and equality (as during the Sacco-Vanzetti case). The principal overt falsifiers of the old words are of course those who manipulate them in their public roles—such statesmen, newspaper publishers, and public relations men as Wilson, Hearst, and J. Ward Moorehouse. But this corrupt warping of language and thus of all feeling and expression affects every range of experience and creates, especially in such deeply personal areas of life as love, sex, and marriage, a pervasive texture of the shallow, inconsequential, and false. Some few in America, however, have continued to feel and live the old words—have continued to express in their lives the central values of American idealism. And though these figures—a Frank Lloyd Wright, a Joe Hill, or a Thorstein Veblen—often lead tragic lives, they continue to serve as symbols of the hope that a full national commitment to traditional American ideals can 1

See John Lydenberg, “Dos Passos’s U.S.A.: The Words of the Hollow Men.” In Sydney J. Krause, ed. Essays on Determinism in American Literature. (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1964), 97–107, and David L. Vanderwerken, “U.S.A.: Dos Passos and the ‘Old Words,’ ” Twentieth Century Literature, 23 (1977): 195–228.

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yet be reborn. The hope that the old words can be revived and made whole again is expressed most of all in the novel-within-a-novel bildungsroman of the camera eye.2 From sissified upper class youth to bohemian artist to confused would-be radical in The 42nd Parallel and Nineteen-Nineteen, the camera eye persona comes, at last, in the final Sacco-Vanzetti and Harlan miners’ strike segments of The Big Money, to a mature artistic consciousness. Experiencing the anguish and frustration of the persecution of Sacco and Vanzetti, he asks, How can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression came to this coast   how say   Don’t let them scare you   how make then feel who are your oppressors America rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to America how can you know who are your betrayers America.3

Although the camera eye persona now accepts that we are two nations, the rich and powerful and the poor and weak, he also realizes that the informed understanding can, through art, reveal the injustice of this condition and thereby seek to regenerate and make operative the ideals of America enshrined in the old words. This reading of U.S.A., in its several variations, has led a number of recent critics to pay special attention to a specific key passage in The Big Money because of its suggestive implications both for the old words theme and for the note of combined bitterness and hope inherent in that theme and in the trilogy as a whole.4 The passage occurs at the close of Camera 2

3

4

I discuss this aspect of the camera eye fully in my “The Camera Eye in U.S.A.,” Modern Fiction Studies, 26 (1980): 417–30. But see also Ian Colley, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978), 66–119 passim; Townsend Ludington, “The Ordering of the Camera Eye in U.S.A.,” American Literature, 49 (1977): 443–6; and Vanderwerken, 195–228. The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936), 437. Most readers know U.S.A. in the form of its Modern Library edition of 1939. This edition was printed from the same plates as the Harcourt, Brace edition of 1938. The Harcourt, Brace edition was itself printed from the plates of Dos Passos’s revision of the 1930 Harper The 42nd Parallel for the 1937 Modern Library edition of the novel and from the plates of the 1932 and 1936 Harcourt, Brace editions of 1919 and The Big Money. See Jack Potter, A Bibliography of John Dos Passos (Chicago: Normandie House, 1950), 46. See Barbara Foley, “The Treatment of Time in The Big Money,” Modern Fiction Studies, 26 (1980): 463; Jonathan Morse, “Dos Passos’ U.S.A. and the Illusions of Memory,” Modern Fiction Studies, 23 (1977–78): 554; and Vanderwerken, 228.

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Eye (51), which is itself the final camera eye section in the trilogy. Camera Eye (51) stems from Dos Passos’s participation in the visit of a committee of left-wing writers, led by Theodore Dreiser, to Harlan County, Kentucky, to investigate conditions arising out of a miners’ strike. The miners epitomize working class life in early 1930s America in that they are poor, exploited, and oppressed. They are kept in that state not only by the mine owners but by the manipulators of language—the law and the press—who are in the pay of the owners. The committee, including Dos Passos, visits a group of jailed strikers and encounters the red-faced, armed sheriff sitting at his desk—the sheriff, who in the final words of this final camera eye, feels behind him the prosecutingattorney the judge an owner himself the political boss the minesuperintendent the board of directors   the president of the utility the manipulator of the holdingcompany he lifts his hand towards the telephone the deputies crowd in the door we have only words against5

In both the initial publication of The Big Money as a separate novel in 1936 and its re-publication as the third volume of U.S.A. in the initial publication of the full trilogy in 1938, “we have only words against” is followed, without punctuation but after three quarters of an inch of white space, by “POWER SUPERPOWER,” the title of the biography of Samuel Insull (fig. 1). This juxtaposition of the final words of the camera eye persona and the title of the biography of a utility-holding magnate crystallizes the underlying theme and form of the work as a whole. The startling thrust of meaning across the modal barrier between the final camera eye and the final biography raises and extends the level of abstraction of the entire moment. Words may be all we have against the power of the Harlan County sheriff, but all power is vulnerable to attack through the words of literary art, and in that uneven conflict lie both our despair and our hope. Given the importance of this moment of insight into the heart of the work, it is of more than usual interest to trace the process by which Dos Passos reached this remarkable juxtaposition of concluding phrase and opening title. It is necessary to begin with Dos Passos’s general method of composition in U.S.A. This account is based primarily on the almost complete genetic history of The Big Money in the John Dos Passos Collection of the University of Virginia Library, which includes early notes and drafts to final typescript 5

The Big Money, 524–5.

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Figure 1 Pages 524–5 of the first printing of The Big Money (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1936).

setting copy (the only significant gap in this history is proof). I shall also draw on various miscellaneous manuscripts bearing on the writing of the trilogy as a whole.6 From the first, Dos Passos conceived of the four modes of U.S.A.—the narratives, biographies, newsreels, and camera eyes—as distinctive writing activities. His method was to begin with a loose and approximate sense of the material he wished to include in a volume of the trilogy—the fictional characters, biographical figures, newsreel chronological range and emphasis, and camera eye moments—and to compose each modal unit separately without much thought about the final arrangements of this material in the work. For example, though he indicated breaks in the Charley Anderson narrative for The Big Money, he wrote it as one continuous story without a firm sense of what other material—that is, camera eyes, biographies, newsreels, and narrative segments of other fictional characters—would come 6

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For permission to consult this material and to publish portions of it in this study, I wish to thank the Manuscripts Division of the Alderman Library, University of Virginia, and Mrs Elizabeth Dos Passos.

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between the various segments of the Anderson narrative. The other modes were similarly prepared before their incorporation into the structure of the volume. Somewhere well into the composition of the various parts of a volume, Dos Passos began a threefold process of revision and of organizational shaping, which would eventually result in the finished book. Each of these three steps was more or less concurrent with each of the others as well as with the completion of the initial drafts of the narratives, biographies, etc. that were to be included in the volume. One step was to revise already drafted material before its incorporation into the volume as a whole. Another was to struggle toward a sense of the desired order of the material in the work. Here Dos Passos’s method appears to have been to initially sketch out the order and relationship of the narrative segments and biographies and then to splice in the newsreels and camera eyes. The third step was an often radical revision both of the substantive nature of the volume (cutting and adding blocks of material as well as extensively revising already included material) and of its order. For example, the surviving manuscripts and the draft tables of contents of The Big Money reveal that as that work progressed Dos Passos: 1. Cut an entire fictional narrative—that of Ike Hall (an automobile worker)—for which he had written several segments; changed the J. Ward Moorehouse segment to that of Richard Savage; and shifted the order of narratives to achieve an early emphasis on Charley Anderson and a later one on Margo Dowling and Mary French. 2. Cut a number of biographies (some written, some projected), including those of George W. Norris (“Norris of Nebraska”), John D. Rockefeller (“Oil King”), and Huey Long (“Kingfish the First”), and added that of Samuel Insull (“POWER SUPERPOWER”). 3. Reshaped the conclusion of the volume at a late stage of revision by the addition of the Insull biography (to replace that of Long) and the Vag epilogue and by the omission of the Ike Hall narrative. To turn more fully and closely to the “we have only words against POWER SUPERPOWER” passage, Camera Eye (51) is extant both in an early draft and in the setting copy. The final page of the early draft (fig. 2) reveals Dos Passos’s extensive revision of the segment. What is significant for our purpose is the narrow relevance of the conclusion at this stage of composition. In this revised version of the conclusion of Camera Eye (51), “we have only words against” is an afterthought with a specific limited object—“their guns”—which is itself followed by two additional lines dealing with the Harlan moment.

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Figure 2 Page of a draft of Camera Eye (51), The Big Money (John Dos Passos Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Accession 5950, Box 5).

The setting copy of the conclusion of Camera Eye (51) (fig. 3) is, before Dos Passos’s further revision, an exact transcript of the revised draft. In revising the setting copy, Dos Passos trimmed the conclusion but preserved “their guns” as the object of “words against.” Because Dos Passos’s method of composition had been to think and write in independent modal units, the setting copy maintained the separate physical identities of these units. So Camera Eye (51), though now paginated as part of the setting copy (616–18), has a body of white space at its conclusion, and the following biography of Insull begins at the top of a fresh page with its title. There is still no immediate visual connection between the concluding line of Camera Eye (51) and the title of the Insull biography. Galley proof would, for the first time, have brought the conclusion of the camera eye and the title of the biography into inescapable visual juxtaposition. The presence of galley mark 162 on p. 616 and of 163 on p. 620 indicates that the boundary between the segments would have fallen on galley 162. It was thus

Towards.indb 87

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Figure 3 Page 618 of the setting copy of The Big Money (John Dos Passos Collection, Alderman Library, University of Virginia, Accession 5950, Box 5).

while reading galleys7 that Dos Passos must have seen for the first time the possible relationship between the close of Camera Eye (51) and the title of the Insull biography, realized that this relationship could be preserved in the printed book, and, by cutting “their guns,” took the imaginative leap into the crystallization of theme and form represented by the flow across the modal boundary of “we have only words against POWER SUPERPOWER.”

7

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It is clear from Townsend Ludington’s account in his John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980), 351, and from Dos Passos’s letter to Hemingway of 31 May 1936 (in Ludington’s The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos [Boston: Gambit, 1973], 484) that Dos Passos read galley proof in Havana and Miami in late April and early May 1936 and page proof in Provincetown in late May and early June. Although I am assuming that “their guns” was cut in galley proof, it would not affect the argument of this paper if it were in fact cut in page proof.

5/9/2013 10:44:56 AM

The Sexual Geography of Expatriate Paris

The American expatriate movement of the 1920s and 1930s attracted much attention almost from its moment of origin, and books of every kind dealing with the phenomenon, from memoirs to anecdotal history to coffee-table art and photograph collections, continue to appear regularly.1 The movement, however, has received surprisingly little attention as a body of literary expression with its own significant shape.2 I would like therefore to offer an account of what I believe is one of the more compelling characteristics of this shape—the common positioning in the work of the best expatriate authors of the union of creativity and sexuality in a distinctive Paris locale. I will discuss principally autobiographical accounts by Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin, and novels by Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Let me begin with a suggestive precursor of this tendency toward the identification of Paris with a fusing of sexual and artistic expression. In a much remarked scene in The Ambassadors, Lambert Strether, who has led a gray personal and artistic life in Woollett, lectures the youthful Little Bilham in Gloriani’s garden on the need to “Live all you can.” For Strether, Paris, with its open cultivation of and respect for art and with its undercurrent of sexuality, is the life he has not had, and the garden of the artist Gloriani is an apt setting for his recognition of the absence of beauty and fulfillment in his experience and of his desire to turn this recognition into admonitory use. Of course, for James the sexual element in the moment is far from explicit. It lies in Strether’s growing awareness that “life” for Chad Newsome is at least, in part, his affair with Madame de Vionnet and in the suggestiveness of the garden setting. For the next generation of American expatriate writers, the sexuality of this kind of moment becomes more pronounced, until we will eventually find ourselves sharing one of Henry Miller’s whorehouse epiphanies. 1

2

Perhaps the most useful of the many general accounts of the movement are those by Humphrey Carpenter, Geniuses Together: American Writers in Paris in the 1920s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1987), and George Wickes, Americans in Paris (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969). A standard collection of biographical sketches can be found in Karen L. Rood, ed. American Writers in Paris, 1920–1939, Vol. 4 in the Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale, 1980). A notable exception is Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986). Benstock’s study, however, includes British authors and is limited to women.

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This transition into clarity and emphasis is apparent in Hemingway’s A  Moveable Feast, a work which, though written in the late 1950s, fully expresses Hemingway’s lifelong attitudes toward the Paris scene of his early career. In the opening chapter of A Moveable Feast, a chapter that seeks to epitomize the meaning of Paris for a young American writer of the early 1920s, Hemingway makes his way from his apartment in the inhospitable Place Contrescarpe quartier to a “good” café on the Place St Michel. There, as he begins to write one of the stories of In Our Time, an attractive girl enters the cafe: I looked at her and she disturbed me and made me very excited. I wished I could put her in the story, or anywhere, but she had placed herself so she could watch the street and the entry and I knew she was waiting for someone. So I went on writing. The story was writing itself and I was having a hard time keeping up with it. I ordered another rum St. James and I watched the girl whenever I looked up, or when I sharpened the pencil with a pencil sharpener. . . . I’ve seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil. Then I went back to writing and I entered far into the story and was lost in it. . . . Then the story was finished and I was very tired. . . . I closed up the story in the notebook and put it in my inside pocket and I asked the waiter for a dozen portugaises and a half-carafe of the dry white wine they had there. After writing a story I was always empty and both sad and happy, as though I had made love. . . .3

The incident is beautifully transparent. The act of writing well, with one’s sharpened pencil, is like the act of making love to an attractive girl. Both, in this instance, are acts of the imagination, and thus both maintain their purity. Indeed, because the act of writing is also the only physical act of the moment, the single act of placing pencil to paper constitutes a powerful and productive union of the forces present in sexual desire and in creative energy, or, in other terms, in body and spirit. And “a warm and clean and friendly”4 Paris café is the site of this joining of sexuality and creativity in artistic expression. Hemingway’s emphasis on the role of masculine sexual hunger in the fecund artistic matrix of the “good” café is comically endorsed by a later 3 4

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1987), 5–6. Ibid., 5.

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scene in A Moveable Feast. He has moved to Montparnasse and is preparing for a writing session at his favorite café, the Closerie des Lilas, when he is joined by a homosexual acquaintance whose mindless chatter destroys the possibility of work. For Hemingway, in short, creativity is a heterosexual force. It is no wonder that in his irritation he advises the acquaintance, who has aspirations to be a writer, that his true métier is undoubtedly literary criticism. At first glance, a very different union of sexuality and creativity is at the center of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude Stein’s account of her complementary heroic roles as discoverer and champion of pictorial modernism and as practitioner and aesthetician of literary modernism is also a kind of sentimental domestic novel. She and Alice Toklas meet, decide to join their lives, and then live together happily ever after in their charming house on Rue de Fleurus, where they entertain many interesting artists and writers. The frontispiece photograph of the anonymously issued first edition of the Autobiography renders this domestic image.5 The photograph, by Man Ray, depicts Stein writing at her desk in the large single-room atelier that adjoins their living quarters while Alice Toklas is entering at the door. The artist is at work (work which also includes the writing of the Autobiography), the artist’s companion and aid temporarily joins her, no doubt on some domestic errand. The underlying but never openly expressed theme of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in brief, is that it is largely the happy and successful “marriage” of Gertrude and Alice which has permitted Stein to pursue her triumphant career. The Autobiography, indeed, has often been misinterpreted by casual readers as excessively egotistical because of Stein’s frequent comments on her own importance. It has not always been realized that these remarks are a form of love letter to Toklas, whose domestic skills, companionship, and love have made possible the full flowering of Stein’s creative powers. Man Ray’s photograph is also significant because it stresses that the center of the Stein–Toklas union at 27 Rue de Fleurus is the salon or atelier. It is here, at countless dinners and soirees, in a room whose walls are lined with the masterpieces of the new art, that the course of modernism is determined and charted. Here, too, as in Hemingway’s good café, sexuality and creativity join in a distinctive Paris setting in which the trope of this union relies heavily on the sexual but nevertheless subsumes the sexual under the artistic expression that is the permanent and significant product of the moment. Despite an appearance to the contrary, this same stress on the “spiritual” consequences of the sexuality inherent in artistic expression is also present 5

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt, 1933).

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in Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. In a characteristic incident of Tropic of Cancer, Miller is asked to aid a young Indian disciple of Gandhi who has been sent to Europe to spread the gospel of his master. More specifically, he is asked to guide the disciple, who has been wearied by his efforts, on a whorehouse visit. There then follows the initially farcical incident of the Indian using a bidet for a toilet and producing two large turds, much to the dismay of the prostitute and madam. The next night, Miller again accompanies the young disciple in his pursuit of “the fucking business.” Once in a low dive of a brothel, Miller begins to meditate on the previous night’s events. Gradually, he pushes toward an insight. Man, he realizes, has devoted his energy throughout time in pursuit of miracles to confirm impossible beliefs: And out of the endless torment and misery no miracle comes forth, no microscopic vestige even of relief. Only ideas, pale, attenuated ideas which have to be fattened [for] slaughter; ideas which come forth like bile, like the guts of a pig when the carcass is ripped open. And so I think what a miracle it would be if this miracle which man attends eternally should turn out to be nothing more than these two enormous turds which the faithful disciple dropped in the bidet. What if at the last moment, when the banquet table is set and the cymbals clash, there should appear suddenly, and wholly without warning, a silver platter on which even the blind could see that there is nothing more, and nothing less, than two enormous lumps of shit. . . . Somehow the realization that nothing was to be hoped for had a salutary effect upon me. For weeks and months, for years, in fact, all my life I had been looking forward to something happening, some extrinsic event that would alter my life, and now suddenly, inspired by the absolute hopelessness of everything, I felt relieved, felt as though a great burden had been lifted from my shoulders. . . . Walking toward Montparnasse I decided to let myself drift with the tide, to make not the least resistance to fate, no matter in what form it presented itself. Nothing that had happened to me thus far had been sufficient to destroy me; nothing had been destroyed except my illusions. I myself was intact. . . . I made up my mind that I would hold on to nothing, that I would expect nothing, that henceforth I would live as an animal, a beast of prey, a rover, a plunderer.  .  .  .  One must burrow into life again to put on flesh. The word must become flesh; the soul thirsts. On whatever crumb my eye fastens, I will pounce and devour. If to live is the paramount thing, then I will live, even if I must become a cannibal. Heretofore I have been trying to save my precious hide, trying to preserve the few pieces of meat that hid my bones. I am done

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with that. I have reached the limits of endurance. My back is to the wall. I can retreat no further. As far as history goes I am dead. If there is something beyond I shall have to bounce back. I have found God, but he is insufficient. I am only spiritually dead. Physically I am alive. Morally I am free. The world which I have departed is a menagerie. The dawn is breaking on a new world, a jungle world in which the lean spirits roam with sharp claws. If I am a hyena I am a lean and hungry one; I go forth to fatten myself.6

Miller has in this passage crystallized, within a context and in a form that parodies the traditional language and motifs of religious mysticism, the essence of his creative rebirth in Paris. Throughout history, he now understands at last, the search for meaning in life by the faithful has produced merde. Recognition of this truth can lead only to an acceptance of life and man as they are—free of cant and convention—and in this acceptance of life, this burrowing into what is real, the thirst of the soul for spiritual meaning in life will paradoxically be met. Miller has dramatized a moment of mystical insight that begins with two turds in a Paris whorehouse and ends with a new birth of creative freedom and power arising out of an acceptance of the elemental union of body and soul. A striking sexual radicalism thus appears to underlie these various Paris scenes in which American expatriate writers of the 1920s and 1930s explore the rise and nature of their creativity. Hemingway’s fantasies of sex with an unknown girl while the faithful Hadley prepares lunch at home, Stein’s lesbian establishment at the Rue de Fleurus, and Miller’s whorehouse all seem to represent a sharp break with the conventionally acceptable in belief and behavior—a break that appears to be attributable principally to the Paris scenes in which they are set. But before accepting this notion at face value, it might be well to consider Miller’s comment in Tropic of Cancer—“Of itself Paris initiates no dramas. They are begun elsewhere. Paris is simply an obstetrical instrument that tears the living embryo from the womb and puts it in the incubator. Paris is the cradle of artificial births. Rocking here in the cradle each one slips back into his soil. . . .”7 Seen in this light, the scenes and settings I have been describing may owe their surface sexual sensationalism to their distinctively Parisian settings, but the core values of the moments are indeed often closely related to traditional and frequently conservative American faiths. Thus, Hemingway’s joining of sexual fantasy and artistic creation is at heart (as seen particularly when related to the parallel café scene 6 7

Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1960), 97–9. Ibid., 29.

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at the Closerie des Lilas) a celebration of masculine heterosexuality of an almost undergraduate conventionality, while the home at 27 Rue de Fleurus is above all just that—a home where traditional middle-class male and female roles within a nineteenth-century model of marital domesticity are played out. And Miller’s whorehouse is primarily a striking and provocative extension into modern Paris of Whitman’s and Thoreau’s man in the open air freeing himself from worn-out creeds and embracing as a new faith both his own energizing spirit and all that grows and lives in nature. Most American writers in Paris, in short, were still principally American writers. Paris encouraged not so much the expression of new and radical faiths as the restatement of traditional beliefs in the new and radical forms of an open sexuality and an evocative Paris locale. It is, indeed, only in the diary of Anaïs Nin that a full-blown radical belief— one that anticipates a major characteristic of postmodern thought—begins to emerge. Nin, of course, offers special problems in any effort to discuss her work in the context of the American expatriate movement. Born in France of a Spanish father and a Cuban mother, fluent in several languages, and resident in America for only a decade before her move to Paris in 1925 at the age of 22,8 she can perhaps be considered as much a twentieth-century cosmopolitan as an American. In addition, the volume of her diary for which she is best known, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934, first published in 1966, is, we now realize from the recently published Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1986), a heavily revised work, with significant omissions and changes. Nevertheless, because of Nin’s emphasis on the relationship of sexuality to creativity in a Paris setting, and because of her close association with Henry Miller and other American expatriates of the 1930s, it is both possible and useful to consider her writing as within the American expatriate movement. To do so adequately, however, it is necessary to conflate the two versions of her diary of the early 1930s—to see them not as irreconcilable in their often variant accounts but rather as representing, in their totality, the full dimensions of her interpretation of a specific moment in her life. The event that I will discuss is that of a visit to a whorehouse in March 1932. At this time, Nin was living in the Paris suburb of Louveciennes with her husband Hugh (usually called Hugo) Guiler, a banker. Nin’s years in Paris, and especially her attempt to write a study of D. H. Lawrence, had led her to believe that she was engaged in a process of self-discovery. This awareness intensified greatly in December 1931, when she met Henry Miller and his 8

Authoritative biographical information about Nin is still difficult to acquire. Probably the best brief account can be found in Gunther Stuhlmann’s introduction to A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, 1932–1953 (New York: Harcourt, 1987).

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wife June. Quickly, Nin fell in love with both Miller and June, while still continuing to live with and often to feel deeply in touch with her husband. The visit to the whorehouse occurs at this profoundly complex moment in Nin’s emotional life. In the 1966 Diary version of the incident, it is Henry who suggests that he and Nin visit a whorehouse at 32 Rue Blondel. They are entertained by two whores performing various sex acts. One, a dark woman, plays the masculine role, the other—younger, smaller, and blonde—the feminine. All is on a bantering level both for the whore and for Henry and Anaïs until. . . . The small woman had been lying on her back with her legs open. The big woman removed the penis and kissed the small woman’s clitoris. She flicked her tongue over it, caressed it, kissed. The small woman’s eyes closed and we could see she was enjoying it. She began to moan and tremble with pleasure. She offered to our eyes her quivering body and raised herself a little to meet the voracious mouth of the bigger woman. And then came the climax for her and she let out a cry of joy. Then she lay absolutely still. Breathing fast. A moment later they both stood up, joking, and the mood passed.9

In Henry and June, it is Hugo and Anaïs who visit the whorehouse on Rue Blondel, and now it is at Anaïs’ suggestion. Again Anaïs and her companion observe the prostitutes: Hugo and I look on, laughing a little at their sallies. We learn nothing new. It is all unreal, until I ask for the lesbian poses. The little woman loves it, loves it better than the man’s approach. The big woman reveals to me a secret place in the woman’s body, a source of a new joy, which I had sometimes sensed but never definitely—that small core at the opening of the woman’s lips, just what the man passes by. There, the big woman works with the flicking of her tongue. The little woman closes her eyes, moans and trembles in ecstasy. Hugo and I lean over them, taken by that moment of loveliness in the little woman, who offers to our eyes her conquered, quivering body. Hugo is in a turmoil. I am no longer woman; I am man. I am touching the core of June’s being. . . . And when we returned home, he adored my body because it was lovelier than what he had seen and we sank into sensuality together with new realization. We were killing phantoms.10   9

10

Anaïs Nin, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann (New York: Swallow Press, 1966), 60. Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, ed. Rupert Pole (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 71–2.

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Hugo Guiler and Henry Miller were still alive in  1966, and it was for this reason that Nin omitted from her Diary both any mention of her husband and all explicit sexuality in her accounts of her relationship to Miller and June. But that Nin could in good conscience replace Hugo with Henry in the 1966 version, and that she had in her original version also linked her sexual excitement to June, reveal the essential truth encapsulated in both versions of the event—a truth which also draws upon the fact that it was Nin who prompted the visit to the whorehouse. For the moment dramatizes the possibility of a sexual awakening independent of a distinctive partner or agent in the awakening—a sexual awakening, in other words, in which the principal emphasis is on the meaning of the awakening for selfhood rather than for a specific personal relationship. The heavy whore is male and female interchangeably, but in the end she is primarily an activating force—a tongue playing a role in the fulfillment of a pleasure that is confined to the clitoris of the smaller whore. And so for Anaïs, for whom this scene comes at a crucial moment in her self-discovery, there is a realization—first felt and later more fully understood—that Henry, Hugo, and June are in a sense interchangeable activating principles in bringing her to self-awareness. What is significant is that it is she who has been brought to life, that it is she who in the discovery of the intensity of her sensual nature has entered deeply into the process of self-identification and thus ultimately of self-expression. No wonder, then, that Nin during this scene makes love to June in her imagination and that she and Hugo make love that night and that she and Henry make love for the first time a few days afterward. Nin’s point is not the celebration of a female Don Juanism, of a liberated sexuality in which sex is an aim in itself, but rather in the announcement of a sexuality that is so powerfully oriented toward self-discovery that it reaches, in its final joining of body and soul, a form of epiphany. So, shortly after the scene in the whorehouse, Nin writes (in Henry and June) of her lovemaking with Henry—“That last afternoon in Henry’s hotel room was for me like a whitehot furnace. Before, I had only white heat of the mind and of the imagination; now it is of the blood. Sacred completeness.”11 Nin’s “sacred completeness” is both similar to and different from the union of creative energy and sexual expression that I have described in the work of Hemingway and Stein and even of Miller. There is in these writers a discovery in Paris of a sexuality that is also a liberation of the imagination. But for Nin, this discovery is so profoundly solipsistic that it results in the creation of a new thing, though it was to be some time before Nin herself knew  what it was she had created. For in Nin’s diary, the discovery of sex 11

Nin, Henry and June, 77.

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is itself a liberation from the bonds of sexuality insofar as the fulfillment of sexual need implied—as it did for Hemingway, Stein, and Miller—the acceptance of a body of traditional belief. For Nin, experience was now a blank page to be written on by her capacity to feel. As she wrote shortly after recording her sense of “sacred completeness,” “The important thing is the response to life.”12 This may also have been Miller’s creed. But for Nin, one senses, far less intellectual baggage accompanied the declaration, and there was also for her a far greater acceptance of the autocracy of the feeling self. I have so far confined myself to autobiographies, considering for purposes of this discussion Tropic of Cancer as a form of spiritual autobiography. In this kind of writing, the obstetrical function of Paris is of course portrayed in a positive light. The birth is successfully accomplished; indeed, the principal intent of each work is to depict the emergence and triumph of the creative imagination within a Paris context. But it should be clear as well that each of the scenes or moments I have discussed contains a darker potential—the frustration of the girl longed for but not in fact had, the complex emotions locked within the walls of the unmentioned bedroom of the Rue de Fleurus, the degradation of the spirit inherent in the act of prostitution. It is in the fiction of the American expatriates of this period that this tragic potential in the effort to achieve a wholeness and intensity of creative expression in a Paris setting is explored and dramatized. In such scenes as that of the impotent Jake at the bal musette in The Sun Also Rises, or Dick Diver caught between the competing claims of Nicole and Rosemary in Tender Is the Night, or Richard Savage seeking to resolve the problem of Daughter’s pregnancy in Nineteen-Nineteen—in these scenes the sexuality of Paris becomes the symbolic analogue not of creative energy and freedom but of a bitterly ironic failure to achieve what is so urgently desired. The artist manqué figures of Jake and Dick and Savage, like the self-portraits of Hemingway, Stein, Miller, and Nin, also seek some vital expression of self, but now the open sexuality of their worlds mocks rather than aids in its fulfillment. This in-part comic and in-part pathetic use of Parisian sexuality in the depiction of artistic impotence is nowhere clearer than in the bal musette scene early in The Sun Also Rises. Every sexual thread in this richly textured moment contributes to the theme of spiritual failure and frustration in the novel as a whole. The larger dimension of the scene is that of a parody of the romantic tragedy foreshadowed by the Capulet ball in Romeo and Juliet. In both scenes, two lovers meet accidentally at a dance. But now, instead of the mix of youthful sexual eagerness and innocence that pervades the moment in 12

Ibid., 89.

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Shakespeare, all is sexual falseness and incompleteness in which the various sexual roles displayed approach the level of a Hogarth caricature. There is physical impotency (Jake), homosexuality (the young men accompanying Brett and the writer Prentiss), nymphomania with perhaps a lesbian base (Brett), prostitution (Georgette), and simple lust (Cohn). Hemingway has saturated the scene with sexual behavior and attitudes which to his mind lack both honesty and completeness. There will be neither triumphant fulfillment nor tragic grandeur in these lives but rather the pathos of a vast impotence of the spirit—an impotence which for Hemingway is of course also that of the creative imagination. Toward the conclusion of Nineteen-Nineteen, Dick Savage has reached a crucial stage in his career. The earlier powerful repugnance of his artistic temperament toward the slaughter and lies of the War has given way to an accommodation to the power of the established social and political forces responsible for the War. We thus find him in early 1919 an Army officer at the Paris Peace Conference. He has also begun to associate with the entourage of J. Ward Moorehouse with an eye toward a position in Moorehouse’s public relations firm at the end of the conference. It is at this point that Dick meets Ann Elizabeth (Daughter) in Rome. In her youthful vitality and honesty, she constitutes a counterforce to Eleanor Stoddard, Moorehouse’s companion, who speaks for the prostitution of Dick’s talent. On the night they make love for the first time, Daughter tells him, “You’re an artist, Dick, and I love you very much . . . you’re my poet, Dick.”13 Dick’s dilemma, as is often true of Dos Passos’s characters, has an allegorical cast, with sexual symbolism playing a major role in the allegory. Daughter’s giving of herself (she had been a virgin) was an act of love expressed toward the best side of his character, that of Dick as artist. Eleanor, on the other hand, is sexually frigid. Her life is played out in relationships in which social power—here as an agent for Moorehouse—substitutes for personal emotional fulfillment. She wishes to lure Dick out of the sexually complete and potentially artistically fruitful relationship with Daughter and into the sexually and artistically impotent world of Moorehouse. The final act in this ethical melodrama is played out in Dick’s Paris hotel room. Daughter has become pregnant, and after several vain efforts to involve Dick in her predicament, she has come to Paris to state her need. Dick, in the meantime, has fully accepted a future posited on Eleanor’s values. She has cautioned him that “an unsuitable marriage has been the ruination of 13

John Dos Passos, Nineteen-Nineteen (1932; rpt. in U.S.A., New York: Modern Library, 1938), 375.

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many a promising young fellow,”14 and Moorehouse has promised him a job in New York. With Daughter now four months pregnant, Dick—as they talk in his room—tries to cajole and then pressure her out of a belief that he has any commitment toward her. He initially pleads the needs of his career, then suggests that she might consider marrying somebody else, and finally spits out, “if you’d taken proper precautions.”15 Daughter at last realizes and accepts Dick’s essential weakness and meanness of spirit and leaves. Dick, as he later lies in his cold bed, is at first troubled by thoughts of Daughter, but “gradually he got warmer” as he thinks of the pleasures of the day and the life to come—“twilight tea at Eleanor’s, make her talk to Moorehouse to clinch job after the signing of the peace.”16 Dick has, by his dismissal of the pregnant Daughter, sealed his own fate in life. Our final glimpse of him, in The Big Money, is as Moorehouse’s heir apparent in a powerful New York advertising firm. The cost of this success is revealed by his prostitution of his artistry in advertising slogans and by the emergence in him of a latent and self-destructive homosexuality. In the Paris portion of Tender Is the Night, we shift from Rosemary’s earlier ingenuous vision of Dick and Nicole as charming and gracious prince and princess of a sunlit kingdom by the sea to a full revelation of the malaise at the center of their lives, with Parisian sexuality serving as the symbolic reflection of this condition. The climax of this revelation— both for Rosemary and for us—is preceded by a series of instances in the Paris setting of false or failed sexuality. We learn of Abe North’s unrequited sexual longing for Nicole and of Rosemary’s deep necking with a Yale undergraduate in a railway compartment in the context of a visit by Dick and Rosemary to a lesbian cocktail party, of an American woman shooting her English lover at the Gare St Lazare, and of Dick and Rosemary’s furtive kissing in taxicabs. These half-sinister, half-comic revelations and incidents come to a head in Rosemary’s discovery in her hotel bed of a recently murdered black man. Dick and Rosemary had been sitting on her bed kissing when they had been interrupted by Abe North and the black man Peterson. They then all went across the hall to the Divers’ suite, and later Peterson had gone into the hall. When Rosemary returns to her room she finds the dead Peterson on her bed. Fitzgerald’s intent in the elaborate setting up and choreographing of this scene is to dramatize a powerful sexual symbolism. As Rosemary and Dick 14 15 16

Ibid., 393. Ibid., 396. Ibid., 397.

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sit kissing on her bed, with Nicole in her room across the hall, the deception and falseness of their situation have begun to be apparent to them both. Rosemary has become increasingly aware of Nicole’s neurotic possessiveness and of Dick’s roles of poise and control, and Dick has realized the nature of Rosemary’s essentially adolescent infatuation with him. “Oh, we’re such actors,”17 Rosemary tells Dick. Peterson’s blood had soiled Rosemary’s coverlet and blanket. Dick replaces them with those from his and Nicole’s bed and then moves the body into the corridor. At this point, Nicole retreats into the bathroom and collapses, as she had on the Riviera when she had begun to sense Dick’s interest in Rosemary. Dick’s exchange of their bedclothes for Rosemary’s bloody bedclothes had for her signified Dick’s further betrayal, and her collapse is her means of asserting her prior and greater need—an appeal that she knows will be honored by Dick now, as it had been in the past. All, in other words, is clashing sexual need—the unfulfilled demands of Rosemary and Dick, she for a father figure, he for an adoring and ego-flattering love, and the powerful sexual possessiveness and manipulation of Nicole. The bloodied bedclothes are thus an apt symbol of the sexual warfare of the moment, a warfare in which the ostensible hero of the moment, Dick, is rather its principal victim both in the failure of his desperate reaching out to Rosemary and in his submitting once again to Nicole’s emotional blackmail. Despite his having kissed a beautiful young movie star in her hotel room not long after having had sex with his wife, it is he who is being emasculated in body and spirit and who will eventually be discarded by both Rosemary and Nicole as a wornout hulk, his creative energy as a research scientist (read artist) rendered permanently impotent. American expatriate writers of the postwar period thus had no single attitude toward the sexuality that they viewed as inseparable from life in Paris. For some, sexual openness and freedom served to confirm traditional beliefs, while for others it led either to a deeply iconoclastic stance or to the dramatization of modern versions of man’s tragic limitations. It is not entirely clear, however, why the more affirmative portrayals of Paris sexuality occur in autobiographies and the more tragic in novels, though undoubtedly the very nature of these forms plays a significant role in the difference. The autobiographical writer is of course seeking to identify those characteristics of his experience that constitute the source of his distinctiveness and worth, as in Hemingway’s account of the impact of Paris upon him in A Moveable Feast, while the writer of fiction, as in the same author’s The Sun Also Rises, is usually attempting to render a more general theme—Jake Barnes, 17

F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1987), 105.

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for example, as a reflection of the loss of value in his generation. Tropic of Cancer, because of its mixed autobiographical and fictional modes, offers up both tendencies. Miller sharply distinguishes between his own growth in the Paris milieu and the destructive effect of the city on his fellow expatriates. But whether the sexual geography of Paris was that of the flourishing and fecund garden found in many autobiographical accounts, or that of the wasteland of much fictional representation, there can be little doubt of the power and attractiveness to the American expatriate imagination of the 1920s and 1930s of the trope that united sexuality and creativity in the city of light.

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The 1920s and Beyond: Friendships and Art

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The Hemingway-Dos Passos Relationship

The Hemingway-Dos Passos relationship was a long and complex one.1 The two met briefly in  1918, were friends during the most productive periods of their careers from the early 1920s to the late 1930s quarreled bitterly in  1937 over the communist role in Spain, and brooded spasmodically about each other for the remainder of their lives. It is this brooding, in the form of autobiographical portraiture and fictional caricature, that I wish to concentrate on. For the preoccupation of each writer in rendering in literary form his erstwhile friend is more than an exercise in revenge and self-justification. It is also—and this is its principal interest and value—a largely unconscious attempt by each writer to project into the other some of the tormenting anxieties of his own psychic life and thus of his work as a whole. There is some question, given the precise dating of their activities as volunteer ambulance drivers on the Italian front in the spring of 1918, whether Hemingway and Dos Passos did in fact spend a few hours in casual conversation near Schio in late May, as both of them in later years dimly recalled.2 But whether they met in Italy is less significant than their discovery, on encountering each other in Paris in  1922 and on cementing their friendship there in 1924, of a number of remarkable parallels in their lives and interests. Both were young men (Hemingway was 19 in 1918, Dos Passos 22) who had been desperately anxious to see the War (whatever their dismay at what they did see) as a necessary involvement of the aspiring writer in the major cataclysmic event of his time. Both then went on to portray 1

2

The essential facts of the relationship can be found in the following documentary and biographical sources. I do not cite these sources in my notes except for quotations, for matters in dispute, and for especially significant details: Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner’s, 1969); Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker (New York: Scribner’s, 1981); The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973); Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980); and Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). See Ludington, Odyssey, 159n, for a discussion of the problem. Ludington, Baker, and Giovanni Cecchin—the last in his Con Hemingway e Dos Passos: Sui Campi di Battaglia Italiani della Grande Guerra (Milan: Mursia, 1980), 42–3—assume that a meeting took place despite the fact that Hemingway arrived in northern Italy several days after Dos Passos appears to have left the front for Rome.

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the event—Dos Passos in Three Soldiers (1921) and Hemingway in In Our Time (1925)—with a characteristic early 1920s blend of debunking theme and experimental form. Both found life in Europe freer and more congenial (to say nothing of cheaper) than the 1920s America of Harding and Coolidge, and in particular, both were deeply engaged by Spanish life. Most of all, both writers saw themselves as truthsayers—as artists seeking to cut through the lies which obscured men’s ability to see clearly and truly. During the mid-1920s, when the two writers saw each other frequently in Paris, Spain, and Austria, Dos Passos was the more established and successful figure. Three Soldiers had brought him both notoriety and income, and Manhattan Transfer (1925) received much attention. He was thus in a position to help Hemingway and attempted to do so. He sought to advise Hemingway about the dangers of publishing The Torrents of Spring, and he played an instrumental role in finding a publisher for In Our Time. But by the late 1920s the balance of strength in the relationship—measured in terms of popular success—had begun to shift. The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) brought Hemingway fame, and by the early 1930s he was receiving very high sums for his shorter work. Dos Passos, on the other hand, was preoccupied from the late 1920s to the late 1930s with the slow and unprofitable production of the novels of U.S.A. After the breakup in  1926 of his first marriage to Hadley Richardson, Hemingway had moved—with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer—to Key West, where Dos Passos was to visit him frequently. (Until he himself married in 1929 and acquired a house in Provincetown, the peripatetic Dos Passos was always a visitor, never a host.) It was at Key West in the spring of 1928 that Dos Passos met Katy Smith, an old friend of Hemingway. She and her brothers Bill and Y. K. had been close to Hemingway during his “up in Michigan” summer vacations of 1916 and 1917 and during his period as a Chicago reporter in 1921. Dos Passos and Katy were married in August of 1929. As is not infrequent in such instances, Dos Passos’s marriage to a woman who had been an early interest of Hemingway’s placed a strain on the relationship, and indeed eventually provided a focus for the accusatory portrait which each writer created of the other. Katy, a vivacious, engaging woman, was seven years older than Hemingway.3 When they first met, at 3

The birthdays are–Katy, 26 October 1891; Dos Passos, 4 January 1896; Hemingway, 21 July 1899. In Odyssey, 265, Ludington dates Katy’s birthday as 26 October 1894, apparently on the basis of the date on her grave headstone, although he cites 26 October 1891 in Fourteenth, 375. I lean toward the earlier date, as does Baker, who in A Life Story 25, remarks that Katy was nearing 25 in the summer of 1916. Carr, 572n, who consulted Katy’s St Louis birth certificate, cites 24 October 1891.

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Horton Bay in Michigan in the summer of 1916, she was 24 and was soon to be courted by a man in his mid-thirties while Hemingway was just 17. Later in Chicago during 1921, when Hemingway was working as a reporter and was attempting to write stories, it was through Katy—a native of St Louis— that he met Hadley Richardson, who also was from that city. A number of deep veins thus run through Hemingway’s relationship with Katy and were eventually to be associated with Dos Passos through his marriage to her. First, Katy was one of a series of clever, older women—Agnes von Kurowsky (the Catherine Barkley of Farewell) and Hadley (who was eight years older than Hemingway) are others—to whom he was deeply attracted during his early life. When he could make love to such women, he did; when he could not, he later possessed them vicariously in his fiction, as he did with Agnes in Farewell and with Katy in the story “Summer People,” which he wrote during the early 1920s as the first of his Nick Adams stories. (“Summer People” remained unpublished during Hemingway’s lifetime; it appeared in  1972—in a mangled text—in Philip Young’s edition of The Nick Adams Stories.)4 In “Summer People,” the young Nick Adams, up in Michigan after his War experience, has sex with an eagerly acquiescent Katy. (In the story, Nick is Wemedge [Hemingway’s nickname among the Michigan crowd], while Katy is Kate and also Katy’s local nicknames of Butstein and Stut.) But the “real” Katy of the late 1920s and early 1930s was not only an unfulfilled adolescent sexual fantasy (all commentators on the story agree that its events are imagined),5 but also the woman who was indirectly responsible for the mingled joy and pain which Hadley represented in Hemingway’s life. In brief, she was intimately connected in Hemingway’s feelings with failure—first, with his failure to possess her outside of fantasy, and then, as the years went on, with his increasingly powerful and nagging realization of the failure in his life represented by his break with Hadley. There is of course another angle as well to the Hemingway-Katy-Dos Passos “triangle.” Whatever Katy had told Dos Passos about her relationship with Hemingway and whatever Dos Passos surmised about the relationship from Hemingway’s behavior toward her, the verifiable fact is that in his 1951 novel Chosen Country (a novel I will return to fully later) Dos Passos portrays Hemingway as an adolescent suitor of Katy in Michigan. Dos Passos, in other words, did not have to read “Summer People” (it of course appeared after 4

5

The Nick Adams Stories, with a Preface by Philip Young (New York: Scribner’s, 1972). Peter M. Griffin, in “A Substantive Error in the Text of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Summer People,’ ” American Literature, 50 (November 1978): 471–3, notes the importance of the editor’s misreading of “Slut” for “Stut” in the 1972 Scribner’s text. See particularly Ludington, Odyssey, 265n, and Bernice Kert, The Hemingway Women (New York: Norton, 1983), 46.

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his death) to know of Hemingway’s earlier feelings toward Katy. And so the presence of Katy introduced as powerful a tension into his attitude toward Hemingway as it did into Hemingway’s attitude toward him. Katy and Dos Passos saw a great deal of Hemingway and Pauline during the early 1930s—sometimes in Europe, but mostly at Key West. Ostensibly all was well. Katy and Pauline were friends, and the two writers contributed useful critiques of each other’s work in progress. But there was also mounting irritation. Hemingway had always sought to draw the largely unathletic Dos Passos into an active interest in the robust sports which absorbed him throughout his life.6 (Aside from hiking, the extremely nearsighted Dos Passos was out of his element in almost all athletic activities.) From observing boxing and bike and horse racing in Paris and bullfighting in Pamplona, this pressing of the active life on Dos Passos’s attention extended to participation in skiing in Austria, hunting in Montana, and deep-sea fishing in the Gulf. Hemingway’s aggressive athleticism was a form of domination and control, as Dos Passos must have instinctively realized. Even more obvious was the manipulative effect of Hemingway’s many illnesses and accidents and moods. To these Dos Passos and Katy responded with efforts at good-natured deflation—efforts which tended to annoy Hemingway. Money was also now a source of irritation. Hemingway, who had married into a rich family and who could expect high prices for his magazine writing, was relatively well-off during this period. Katy and Dos Passos, however, were often in difficulty.7 While Katy had a house in Provincetown, Dos Passos made little with his writing, and his and Katy’s penchant for travel and their frequent illnesses left them permanently in debt. There were numerous small loans from Hemingway, and when Dos Passos was hospitalized in Baltimore with a severe attack of rheumatic fever in May 1933, Hemingway sent 1,000 dollars. And yet when Dos Passos went to Hollywood briefly in 1934 both to recoup his fortunes and to gather material for the Margo Dowling portion of The Big Money, Hemingway confided to friends that Dos Passos had sold out.8 A further cause of tension between Hemingway and Dos Passos in the early 1930s was their respective roles in the radicalization of American writing during the decade. Dos Passos, with his position on the editorial board of the New Masses, with his increasingly outspoken radical journalism, and with the publication of The 42nd Parallel in 1930 and Nineteen-Nineteen 6

7

8

See especially Dos Passos’s account in The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (New York: New American Library, 1966), 142–5. Ludington summarizes Dos Passos’s financial problems during the 1930s in Fourteenth, 417. Baker, A Life Story, 266.

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in 1932, had become the darling of the far Left. Hemingway, however, was living in some style in Key West, wrote for the popular magazines, and produced as his major works during the first half of the decade a book on bullfighting and another on big game hunting in Africa. One writer appeared to be fully committed to the fulfillment of his social responsibilities, the other to be ignoring them. The increasing distance between Dos Passos and Hemingway widened to a chasm during the Spanish Civil War. The war should have drawn them together, since both loved Spain and were staunchly Loyalist in their sympathies. But the event itself proved otherwise. The two had agreed to aid in the production of a documentary film about the Spanish resistance to Fascism and were in Madrid in the spring of 1937 in connection with the project. While there, Dos Passos learned that his old friend José Robles had been executed for treason by a Loyalist firing squad. Dos Passos was convinced that Robles was killed by the communists as they reached for absolute control of the army and country. When Hemingway at first downplayed Robles’ disappearance and then defended his execution (he would not have been executed if he had not done anything, Hemingway told Dos Passos), Dos Passos was incensed. The two quarreled in Madrid and again shortly afterwards in Paris and the friendship was over. Of course, the Robles incident itself merely crystallized a widening political gulf between the two writers. Despite his having been taken up by the Left, Dos Passos had become increasingly suspicious, as the 1930s progressed, of communist methods and goals. In The Big Money of 1936 he had brought these suspicions into the open in his depiction of the betrayal of radical causes by a Soviet-dominated American Communist Party. Hemingway, however, argued that the communists in Spain were playing an important and necessary role in the life-or-death struggle against Fascism and that one could not, in these circumstances, be too fussy about one’s allies. To Dos Passos, the communist presence in Spain and on the Left was worse than the disease being fought; for Hemingway, it was necessary for the cure. Nothing could bridge this gap in belief between the two men. The works which best reveal the underlying attitude of each writer toward the other are Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not (1937) and A Moveable Feast (1964, written 1957–60) and Dos Passos’s Chosen Country (1951) and Century’s Ebb (1975, written 1960–70). These are of course not the only published comments on each other by the two figures. Each had some unflattering remarks on the other’s work—Dos Passos on the thinness of the expatriate subject matter of The Sun Also Rises in a 1926 New Masses review,9 9

“A Lost Generation,” New Masses, 2 (December 1926): 26.

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and Hemingway on the unrealistic battle scenes and dialog of Three Soldiers in the Introduction to his 1942 anthology Men at War.10 In the period following their break in Spain, each indulged in a number of covert allusions to the other’s position in essays and reportage about the war.11 And there is an extended account of their friendship during the 1920s in Dos Passos’s autobiography The Best Times (1966). But these occasional critical and political comments are thin and transparent, while Dos Passos’s recollections of Hemingway in his autobiography are remarkably sweet-tempered. The difference between the depiction of Hemingway in Dos Passos’s autobiography and in his fiction is readily explainable both by the conscious nostalgic tone of The Best Times and by the distinction Dos Passos maintained for most of his career (one often noted by friends)12 between the bitter satiric edge of his fictional voice and the mild-tempered personal manner he presented to the world. The Dos Passos of The Best Times is the “personal” rather than the “fictional” persona. Given the dates of each writer’s major portraits of the other, there is a temptation to think of the four accounts as having a punch-counter punch sequence—To Have and Have Not followed by Chosen Country, followed by A Moveable Feast followed by Century’s Ebb. There is probably something of the “counterpunch” in Hemingway’s portrait of Dos Passos in A Moveable Feast, for he was deeply offended by the depiction of himself in Chosen Country.13 But it more meaningful and useful, I believe, to consider each writer’s sense of the other as all of a piece from the beginning—from the beginning, that is, of the various major strains on the relationship in the early 1930s. From this perspective, as I noted earlier, the coherent view that each writer had of the other is above all a suggestive self-revelation. Since To Have and Have Not was not published until mid-October 1937—some four to five months after Hemingway and Dos Passos quarreled in Madrid and Paris—and since Hemingway worked on the novel during the summer of 1937 after his return to America, it might seem that the 10 11

12

13

Men at War: The Best War Stories of All Time (New York: Crown, 1955 [1942]), xv. See Dos Passos’s “Farewell to Europe,” Common Sense, 6 (July 1937): 9–11, and Hemingway’s “The Writer and War.” In Henry Hart, ed. The Writer in a Changing World. (New York: Equinox, 1937), 69–73, “Treachery in Aragon, Ken, 1(30 June 1938): 26, and “Fresh Air on an Inside Story,” Ken, 1 (22 September 1938): 28. For a characteristic comment, see Edmund Wilson’s 1939 letter to Dos Passos in his Letters on Literature and Politics, 1912–1972, ed. Elena Wilson (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 319. See Selected Letters, 775–6. It was in reaction to Chosen Country that Hemingway (as reported by Baker in A Life Story, 495) wrote a friend that his house “supported a pack of fierce dogs and cats trained to attack one-eyed Portuguese bastards who write lies about their friends.”

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portrait of Dos Passos as Richard Gordon in the novel could be attributed to the break between the two writers. In fact, however, Hemingway completed the final chapters of To Have and Have Not, in which Gordon appears, in the fall of 1936.14 When he showed this material to Arnold Gingrich in December of that year, Gingrich immediately recognized Dos Passos in Gordon and advised Hemingway that he might be subject to a libel action.15 The roots of this devastating portrait of Dos Passos—a portrait which differs little in its essential nature from that in A Moveable Feast—are therefore not in the quarrel of 1937, but rather in Hemingway’s deep-seated anxieties about himself—anxieties that he had projected onto other figures from the beginning of his career and for which Dos Passos— as their friendship began to unravel in the early 1930s—now provided a major new target. Richard Gordon resembles Dos Passos in a number of easily recognizable characteristics. Gordon has made his reputation as the author of proletarian fiction, and he is currently writing a novel about a strike in a textile factory. He and his wife Helen have no children and travel a great deal, including regular visits to Cap d’Antibes (where Dos Passos frequently visited the wealthy Sara and Gerald Murphy) and Key West. Hemingway’s rendering of these two central characteristics of Dos Passos’s work and life—his radical fiction and his peripatetic existence with Katy—is bitingly vicious. Gordon catches a glimpse of Henry Morgan’s wife and immediately believes he has seen, “in a flash of perception, the whole inner life of that type of woman.”16 Gordon, however, completely misreads the character of Morgan’s wife because of his preconceived notions about the working-class type he is seeking to portray. In short, Dos Passos has been writing out of abstract ideas rather than from an open response to specific concrete experience. Hemingway’s reading of Dos Passos’s personal life is even more destructive. Because of Gordon’s desire to be free to travel, his wife has had a series of abortions. (Katy, in fact, had had a number of miscarriages,17 about which Hemingway almost certainly knew.) And during a bitter quarrel, she accuses Gordon both of being an inept lover and of “changing your politics to suit the fashion, sucking up to people’s faces and talking about them behind 14 15

16 17

Baker, A Life Story, 296–7. Baker, A Life Story, 298. It was no doubt in response to Gingrich’s comment that Hemingway included a prefatory note to the novel, stating that “In view of a recent tendency to identify characters in fiction with real people, it seems proper to state that there are no real people in this volume: both the characters and their names are fictitious.” To Have and Have Not (New York: Scribner’s, 1953 [1937]), 177. See Carr, Dos Passos, 334–5.

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their  backs.”18 That Dos Passos had been changing his politics during the 1930s was of course true. He had become increasingly disillusioned with the extreme Left, whatever his sympathies for the Loyalist cause once the war broke out in 1936. But Hemingway’s charge of conscious hypocrisy and duplicity—of the betrayal of one’s friends and commitments—introduces a note which goes far beyond what could be legitimately attributed to Dos ­Passos’s scrupulous searching out during the 1930s of his deepest values. Hemingway’s charge thus begins to shift the axis of his portrait from Dos Passos to Hemingway himself. This shift in focus is strikingly evident in the major incident of the Gordon portion of To Have and Have Not, an incident which has little applicability to Dos Passos but a great deal of relevance to Hemingway. Gordon is drawn to Helene Bradley, a wealthy married woman who “collected writers as well as their books.”19 They attempt to make love but are interrupted by Helene’s husband. Gordon returns home, quarrels with his wife (including slapping her), and goes on a drunk. Hemingway has thus coalesced the themes of political and personal betrayal. It is not only a cause that Gordon has betrayed but a wife. The true and loyal Helen has been betrayed for the false and wealthy Helene. Dos Passos, of course, was not a womanizer. There is no record in his two recent exhaustive biographies of an affair during either of his two marriages. But Hemingway was throughout his life caught in situations in which it appeared to him that he was betraying one love for another—situations in which there were again and again Helens and Helenes.20 The theme of betrayal in Hemingway’s life and imagination thus has an archetypal configuration which is worth exploring in detail both for its own sake and as an explanation of his portrait of Dos Passos. An early but revealing example of this archetype occurs in a quarrel between Hemingway and Bill and Y.  K. Smith (Katy’s brothers) in Chicago during 1921. (This quarrel also finds its way into Chosen Country, as I will note later.) Y.  K. had been having trouble with his wife, Doodles. Doodles had told Hemingway about her marital problems, and Hemingway had repeated her story to another member of the group. All this got back to Y. K., who broke off the friendship (a serious blow to Hemingway, since he and Hadley were about to marry and had planned on renting a room from Y.  K.). Bill Smith supported his brother in the controversy, and later also temporarily ended his friendship with Hemingway. What is significant 18 19 20

To Have and Have Not, 186. For Gordon as a poor lover, see 185–6. To Have and Have Not, 150. Kert, of course, gives special attention to this aspect of Hemingway’s life in The Hemingway Women.

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in this tempest in a teapot is some doggerel verse which Hemingway sent to Bill Smith in early 1922: “Blood is thicker than water,” The young man said As he knifed his friend For a drooling old bitch And a house full of lies.21

Bill Smith, Hemingway is saying, has sided with his brother in the quarrel and has thus betrayed Hemingway for a bitchy woman and the lies surrounding her way of life.22 In its essence, this is the charge Hemingway was to make against Dos Passos on a number of occasions, including one that contains a notable repetition of the knife image. Dos Passos had betrayed his friends (and their worthy cause) for lies and a woman, with the woman chiefly responsible for this betrayal. Somewhere in the center of Hemingway’s being, in short, was the belief that man will betray what he holds most dear for a woman. What was to appear more clearly and fully as Hemingway’s career progressed was his association of the woman with money. It is difficult to have an intimate sense of the Hemingway of 1921, since letters, writings, and first-hand recollections are less plentiful than they were later to become. He had earlier felt himself betrayed by Agnes von Kurowsky who had apparently failed to view him with full seriousness as a lover and had soon after his departure from Italy become engaged to someone else. But he had felt deeply about her and had tended to idealize her (she was his first love); yet now—only a year or so after their breakup—he was marrying an older woman who was bringing a small inheritance to the marriage which would permit them to go abroad so that he could give more time to his writing. The outlines of a mind set are thus present in 1921–22, though they are neither fully confirmable nor heavily drawn. For a woman, often an older woman with money, one betrayed a faith or loyalty or love, and one exorcized the guilt occasioned by this sense of betrayal by attributing the same motives and actions to others. Hemingway would continue in later life to interpret the motives of others in this fashion, particularly as experience confirmed the strength of  the 21 22

Baker, A Life Story, 88. Baker, A Life Story, 88, implies (he is not entirely clear on this point) that “the old bitch” of the verse is Mrs Joseph Charles, Bill’s aunt, who—Hemingway believed—“had been poisoning Bill’s mind against him.” But whether the term refers to Doodles Smith or Mrs Charles, the theme of betrayal of a friend for a woman remains.

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attraction he felt for well-to-do women. So, of course, he was to leave Hadley and their son Bumby (a child he loved dearly) for Pauline, who had a great deal of money at her disposal. And so during the early 1930s he had an extended affair, while married to Pauline, with Jane Mason, another wealthy woman—indeed, the woman who was believed by Gingrich to have supplied the model for Helene Bradley in To Have and Have Not.23 It was also during this period that Hemingway’s preoccupation with the bitchy, destructive wealthy woman who causes men to betray the best in themselves entered powerfully into such 1936 stories as “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.” It was out of the paradox, therefore, that Hemingway during the 1930s was  conducting various affairs while living in some splendor in Key West with a wife whose family could sponsor his African safari, whereas the faithful Dos Passos was limping through the decade, financially speaking, because of his and Katy’s illnesses—it was out of Hemingway’s need, in short, despite the inapplicability of Dos Passos for the part, that Dos Passos began to play during the decade the role of sacrificial offering who was to bring relief. As early as 1929, on the occasion of Dos Passos’s marriage to Katy, ­Hemingway introduced (albeit facetiously), in his congratulatory letter to Dos ­Passos, the motif of betrayal through a woman of wealth. He noted that Donald Ogden Stewart had been “ruined” by coming into money and by meeting wealthy people. He went on, “[John Peale) Bishop was ruined by Mrs Bishop’s income. Keep money away from Katey.”24 After their break in 1937, ­Hemingway’s facetiousness and the indirect expression of To Have and Have Not gave way to direct accusation. In a letter to Dos Passos early in 1938—a letter, which like the one to Bill Smith some 16 years earlier, was intended to end their friendship—Hemingway defended his position regarding communist involvement in the Loyalist cause. Then, in a reference to Dos Passos having written a number of articles about Spain since his return, Hemingway accused him of betraying his old friends and the cause for money: Good old friends you know. Knife you in the back for a quarter. Anybody else charge fifty cents. So long, Dos. Hope you’re always happy. Imagine you always will be. Must be a dandy life. Used to be happy myself. Will be again. Good old friends. Always happy with the good old friends. Got them that will knife you in the back for a dime. Regular price two for a quarter. Two for a quarter, hell. Honest Jack Passos’ll knife you three times in the back for 23 24

Baker, A Life Story, 298. Selected Letters, ed. Baker, 303.

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fifteen cents and sing Giovanezza free. Thanks pal. Gee that feels good. Any more old friends? Take him away, Doc he’s all cut. Tell the editor’s secretary to make Mr. Passos out a check for $250. Thank you Mr. Passos that was very neat. Come around any time. There’s always work here for anyone who thinks as you do.25

Although Hemingway did not mention Katy in this extraordinary diatribe, he did so in letters to others. So when writing to Maxwell Perkins in 1944, he compared Edmund Wilson’s decline as a critic with Dos Passos’s as a novelist. “You can trace the moral decay of [Wilson’s] criticism,” Hemingway wrote, “on a parallel line with the decline in Dos Passos’ writing through their increasing dishonesty about money and other things, mostly their being dominated by women.”26 We should now, I believe, return briefly to the portrait of Dos Passos as Richard Gordon in To Have and Have Not. Dos Passos could certainly be viewed, as Hemingway viewed him in the novel, as living two irreconcilable lives. He had received favors over the years from the wealthy Murphys while writing radical novels. But whatever betrayal of his beliefs there might be in his relationship with the Murphys, there was not in that, or in any other relationship, a sexual betrayal of a loyal and forbearing wife for another love, as there was with Gordon and his two Helens. That—in current parlance— was Hemingway’s hang-up. It was he—not Dos Passos—who was throughout his life to find a dismaying appeal in the combination of wealth and attractive women, an appeal which caused him much anguish because of the sense of guilty betrayal that it evoked. One way to relieve this guilt, it seems, was to find a similar betrayal in others, and Dos Passos was the man on the scene. By the time Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast during 1957–60, his need for an exculpatory betrayer was so great that Dos Passos was elevated into the arch-villain of Hemingway’s early life. Between writing To Have and Have Not and A Moveable Feast Hemingway had left Pauline and their two children for Martha Gellhorn and then Martha Gellhorn for Mary Welsh and had been tempted to leave Mary Welsh for Adriana Ivancich. The pattern that began when he had left Hadley for Pauline, in short, had become the pattern of his life—a constant betrayal of the “loyal” wife for a more exciting, often more aristocratic (if not richer) new attraction. And of course he had also broken openly with Dos Passos and had been offended by the portrait of himself in Chosen Country. We now know, through the recent research of Gerry Brenner, that Mary Hemingway severely edited the manuscript of A Moveable Feast and that 25 26

Ibid., 464–5. Ibid., 557.

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the well-known closing passage on Dos Passos as the “pilot fish” was not Hemingway’s only version of the role played by Dos Passos in his breakup with Hadley and that in other drafts Hemingway does assume greater blame for the event.27 Nevertheless, he did write the version which is in the published form of A Moveable Feast, and this version is not only part of the indelible record of the relationship, but also a further revelation of its essential character. In Hemingway’s account of the “nightmare winter” of 1926, the Austrian mountain area of the Vorarlberg and the town of Schruns, where he and Hadley and Bumby were living, is initially one of his archetypal “high places.” It is clean and cold, there is good food and drink, and he works and skis and plays poker. Into this Edenic refuge come the evil rich, led by their pilot fish, Dos Passos: The rich have a sort of pilot fish who goes ahead of them, sometimes a little deaf, sometimes a little blind, but always smelling affable and hesitant ahead of them. . . . Then you have the rich and nothing is ever as it was again. The pilot fish leaves of course. He is always going somewhere, or coming from somewhere, and he is never around for very long. He enters and leaves politics or the theatre in the same way he enters and leaves countries and people’s lives in his early days. He is never caught and he is not caught by the rich. Nothing ever catches him and it is only those who trust him who are caught and killed. He has the irreplaceable early training of the bastard and a latent and long denied love of money.28

He and Hadley trusted the pilot fish in those days, Hemingway notes, because he was their friend and because they were innocent. It was their innocence, too, he concluded, which led them even earlier to welcome another “infiltrator,” a rich woman whom he had fallen in love with, and so brought to an end the happy idyll in the high place.29 Hemingway’s concentration on Dos Passos’s role in the collapse of his personal life in 1926 of course contains a large logical gap. Hemingway had met Pauline (the rich “infiltrator”) in Paris in early 1925 through Harold Loeb and Loeb’s girlfriend, Kitty Cannell. He met the Murphys (the “rich” of the Vorarlberg visit) in Paris in late 1925 through Dos Passos and Fitzgerald, and it was Dos Passos and the Murphys who visited the Hemingways at Schruns 27

28 29

Gerry Brenner, “Are We Going to Hemingway’s Feast?” American Literature, 54 (December 1982): 528–44. A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), 207–8. A Moveable Feast, 109–10.

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in mid-March 1926. Pauline had visited the Hemingways at Schruns—in late December 1925—but her visit was independent of that of the Murphys and Dos Passos. The facts of chronology and relationship are that Hemingway fell in love with Pauline during 1925 (they probably became lovers in early March 1926, when Hemingway passed through Paris on his return from a trip to New York) and that he also came to know the Murphys (through Dos Passos) that year. But it is impossible to draw a line between Dos Passos as pilot fish for the Murphys (who, indeed, were to have little impact on Hemingway’s life) and Pauline (who was to cause the breakup of his family). In A Moveable Feast, however, though Hemingway does in passing distinguish between the rich brought to the Vorarlberg by Dos Passos and the rich woman who is the specific cause of the breakup, the large burden and effect of his account of the winter of 1926 is to attribute to Dos Passos the loss of Eden. It is the pilot fish who receives the fullest attention in the passage and it is he who is responsible for the presence of the rich and therefore presumably of the rich woman in Hemingway’s life. This failure in logic was, of course, not apparent to Hemingway since his account had a far deeper emotional logic deriving from the need to relieve his own sense of guilt by casting Dos Passos in the role of betrayer. So here is Dos Passos as serpent bringing evil, in the fatal combination of wealth and a woman, into an innocent paradise. Here, in other words, is Hemingway again being knifed in the back by his “friend.” Whereas Dos Passos served Hemingway as a scapegoat projection of his fears about himself, Hemingway served Dos Passos as a means of diminishing the value of personal qualities which Dos Passos lacked but which, for a portion of his career, he had covertly desired. During his early life, the mildmannered, nearsighted, balding, physically inept Dos Passos had before him as a model for emulation his fighting cock of a father—a man of great personal force and charm as well as an athlete and a successful lawyer and lover. As is revealed most of all by the stream-of-consciousness camera eye passages of U.S.A, to be his own man and yet to achieve the masculine strength represented by his father was the principal psychic tension of Dos Passos’s inner life through the 1920s and early 1930s.30 His relationship with Hemingway was to provide him this tension in externalized form in that he was to realize that despite its attractiveness Hemingway’s kind of masculinity was not for him. Initially, however, it was. The unathletic Dos Passos who during the 1920s and early 1930s skied, hunted, and fished with Hemingway and the sexually shy and elusive Dos Passos (as caught by Edmund Wilson in his 30

See Donald Pizer, “The Camera Eye in U.S.A.: The Sexual Center,” Modern Fiction Studies, 26 (Autumn 1980): 417–30.

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1929 novel I  Thought of Daisy) who brought along a girl when he joined Hemingway and Hadley at Pamplona during the fiesta of 1924—this Dos Passos was seeking to project himself into a Hemingwayesque masculine role. Perhaps this effort by Dos Passos to model his lifestyle on Hemingway’s is most clearly apparent not in action itself, but rather in the cast of mind revealed by his letters to Hemingway during the 1920s and 1930s before their quarrel. In Dos Passos’s other correspondence of the period, there is scarcely a profanity or obscenity. But in his letters to Hemingway Dos Passos adopts the abrupt tough guy lingo of Hemingway and the “hells,” “damns,” and “shits” flow freely.31 Among the other effects of their falling out, however, Dos Passos—as is revealed in Chosen Country—consciously condemned a Hemingway-like masculinity and thus sought to dramatize his exorcism of its earlier hold on him. The novel is in part a tribute to Katy, who had died in an automobile accident in  1947. Fully half of Chosen Country deals with Katy’s early life in Upper Michigan and Chicago just before and after the War. The central figures in this portion of the novel are Lulie Harrington (Katy) and George Elbert Warner (Hemingway), with Jay Pignatelli (Dos Passos) appearing only briefly. In the Michigan summer resort section, Lulie is a tomboyish girl just out of high school and George Elbert (usually called Georgie) is a loutish selfcentered boy interested almost entirely in hunting and fishing. In two crucial changes from actuality, Dos Passos makes Lulie and George Elbert the same age and also brings Jay on the scene. (In fact, of course, Dos Passos did not meet Katy until 1928.) Thus, George Elbert and Jay are rivals for Lulie. Or, to put it another way, the contest between Dos Passos and Hemingway for Katy will reveal which is the superior personal code—Hemingway’s aggressive and competitive masculinity or Dos Passos’s humane unwillingness to sacrifice others to achieve a goal. The key early scene in this “contest” occurs during a dance at the Michigan resort. Lulie and Jay (who is pie-faced, wears glasses, and has a slight stammer) are on their way from the dance when they meet Georgie carrying a shotgun. Georgie, who has a crush on Lulie and is thus jealous of Jay, pretends to be a member of an Indian tribe and attempts to embarrass Jay by forcing him to perform a dance. “ ‘The Tribe,’ Georgie says, ‘doesn’t allow its women to consort with foreigners.’ ”32 Jay remains cool and polite, Lulie is furious, and the thwarted Georgie becomes belligerently destructive 31

32

See Fourteenth, ed. Ludington, 401–3, 409–10, 426–7, 430–1, and (in particular) 485–6 for characteristic Dos Passos to Hemingway letters of the 1930s. For the 1920s, see the letters quoted by Carr, Dos Passos, 223–4. Chosen Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962 [1951]), 82.

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and shoots out a streetlight. The sexual symbolism of the scene is so explicit as to be painful. Georgie, with his big shotgun, wants to control Jay, to have him dance to his tune in order to impress and win Lulie. But Lulie is drawn instead to Jay’s inner strength and control, while Georgie fumes and rages. Or at least this was Dos Passos’s reading, in 1951, of the sexual tension of the 1930s represented by his marriage to a woman Hemingway had desired but never possessed. The second major incident in Chosen Country that reflects Dos Passos’s effort to dismiss the ghost of his earlier infatuation with Hemingway occurs in the portion of Lulie’s narrative set in Chicago after the War. George Elbert, a marine lieutenant during the War, is now a Chicago newspaperman. Although he now appears to be a “new grownup authoritative Georgie,” his “old sullen injured look” still returns when he does not get his way.33 At this point, the old Michigan bunch is shaken by a sensational event. Lulie’s brother Zeke, who is married to a fatuous woman, has been having an affair. His wife attempts to shoot him and his mistress but instead wounds a handyman. George Elbert takes much interest in the event and is obviously preparing to write a story about it for his paper. When Lulie asks him how he can consider betraying his friends, he replies, “Lou we’re not playing for fun anymore. . . . We’re playing for keeps. This is a highly competitive game.”34 The story, when it appears, is a perverse misinterpretation of the event in order to cater to popular 1920s assumptions about sex crimes among the rich. The shooting is reported to have occurred in an “artistic circle,” and the Harringtons—the children of a poor college professor—are said to be “wealthy,” “exclusive,” “highbrow,” and proponents of “free love.” When Lulie reads the story, she cries out, “I could strangle Georgie with my bare hands. . . . He’s selling his own past history.”35 One of the reasons Hemingway was furious with this portion of Chosen Country was that he was not in fact involved in the shooting incident on which it was based. He and Hadley had left Chicago in  1921, and the incident—in which Y.  K. Smith’s mistress (not his wife) accidentally shot a gardener—occurred in  1923. But there had been an earlier betrayal of the group by Hemingway—at least in their eyes—when (as I noted earlier) he had gossiped about Y.  K.’s marriage, and Dos Passos probably felt justified in transferring the theme of Hemingway’s lack of loyalty to a more fictionally compelling event. But of course the significance of Dos Passos’s characterization of Hemingway in the Chicago section of Chosen Country is 33 34 35

Chosen Country, 250–1. Ibid., 304. Ibid., 309–10.

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not dependent on its literal accuracy, just as the significance of Hemingway’s portrait of Dos Passos in A Moveable Feast is not adversely affected by the misleading implication that Dos Passos was responsible for Pauline’s presence in the Hemingway Eden. Dos Passos freely recast Hemingway’s life in Chicago because he wished to create an event which would dramatize fully and powerfully his rejection of one of the principal elements in the Hemingway code—that life is a competitive game in which winning is all. Hemingway, Dos Passos is saying, not only began his career with this belief in place—when he “sold his history” in the sensationalistic expose of his friends in The Sun Also Rises (a novel Dos Passos had grave doubts about even in  1926)36—but had based his entire life upon the ethic. And Dos Passos himself—here in the person of Lulie/Katy—had been drawn to that code for a time until in a moment of insight he saw its true selfishness and destructiveness. For Dos Passos, that moment was undoubtedly in 1937 when in the instance of the fate of José Robles he spoke out for the transcending ideals of loyalty and justice while Hemingway adhered to the goal of winning the game (that is, defeating the Fascists) at all costs. It is this climactic moment in Spain in 1937 to which Dos Passos returns in the early portions of Century’s Ebb for the glimpses we get of George Elbert Warner in that novel.37 In this final account by either writer of the relationship, Dos Passos’s portraiture technique descends to literalism and caricature. Jay and Warner (now a world-famous author) are sponsoring a documentary film on behalf of Loyalist Spain. When we first encounter Warner, his New York hotel suite is cluttered with hunting equipment, galley proof, and empty bottles. He walks with a slight limp, shadowboxes continually, and complains of a sore throat. And he has just left his wife (Pauline) for a hard blonde with Leftish sympathies (Martha Gellhorn). Dos Passos’s account of Jay and Warner in Europe concentrates on their opposing positions toward communist control of the Loyalist cause and on the disappearance of Ramon Echevarria (Robles) and their final quarrel and breakup in Paris. One incident, however, does penetrate beneath this literalism to the deepest reaches of Dos Passos’s reading of Hemingway’s essential nature. Jay, in a letter to Lulie, tells of Warner’s behavior on the front lines. Warner and his companion (an English scientist) wish to survey the enemy’s gun 36

37

It might also be possible to interpret Dos Passos’s account of Warner’s story on the shooting as a parody of the origin and nature of The Sun Also Rises. There, too, in Dos Passos’s view, Hemingway had attempted to aggrandize the escapades of a group of bohemians he was associated with into a tragic love story about artists and aristocrats. Warner also appears on several minor occasions, thinly and predictably portrayed, in Dos Passos’s novel The Great Days (1958).

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emplacements from in front of the Loyalist position. A corporal informs them that this will draw enemy fire: “Who’s chickenshit?” cries Georgy. . . . The silly bastards walk arm and arm the length of the paseo. I took the corporal’s hint and followed along behind a line of busted-up private houses. . . . When I met the precious pair at the other end they were puffed up like turkey gobblers.

Shortly thereafter, Jay continues, “all hell broke loose. I hate to think how many good guys lost their lives through that piece of bravado.”38 The incident reflects both Dos Passos’s sense of the basic configuration of the Hemingway code and his own rejection of the code in  1937. There is no true bravery in Hemingway’s idea of masculine courage; there is only foolhardiness and a destructive disregard for others. The Dos Passos who walked behind the lines was not choosing the way of cowardice but of maturity and of consideration for others. As Dos Passos wrote in The Best Times in connection with his relationship with Hemingway, “The troubles that arise between a man and his friends are often purely and simply the result of growing up.”39 Or, translated into terms suggested by his admiration for Hemingway during the 1920s and his later break with him, he himself had grown up while Hemingway had remained Georgy the adolescent. Although Century’s Ebb appeared after Hemingway’s death (and indeed after Dos Passos’s as well), neither writer had the “final word.” For the notion of a “final word” is that of an argument in which the last statement (as in a formal debate) is of strategic importance. In this instance, however, I do not think that the portraits by each writer of the other can be considered as efforts to “talk” to each other. Each writer was rather talking principally to himself. Each one had a powerful ghost in his own psychic closet to exorcise—the one of guilt at the betrayal of a loved one, the other of a desired but later rejected code of masculinity. The opportunity to find in each other the means for this exorcism—that it was Dos Passos who had been the betrayer, that it was Hemingway who revealed the selfishness and destructiveness at the center of a competitive masculinity—this was a temptation that neither writer could resist. The truth at the heart of each writer’s portrayal of the other is thus the kind of truth that is revealed by the artistic imagination in one of its most inward explorations. It is the truth that emerges out of the effort of the artist to find symbolic constructs for the expression of the deepest center of his own being. 38 39

Century’s Ebb: The Thirteenth-Chronicle (Boston: Gambit, 1975), 90. The Best Times, 218.

The Paintings of John Dos Passos*

John Dos Passos (1896–1970) is known principally as a major twentiethcentury American writer. His long and prolific career began with One Man’s Initiation—1917 (1920), a novel based on his World War I experiences, reached an early peak with two of the most significant and widely discussed novels of American literary modernism—Manhattan Transfer (1925) and the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–36)—and continued unabated until his death. Less known, except to his biographers and a few critics, are the many watercolors that Dos Passos painted throughout his career. His life as an artist has received little attention for the obvious reason that Dos Passos himself called little attention to it. During his early twenties, he was torn between a career as a writer or painter, but when he soon afterwards determined to devote himself principally to writing, painting became an avocation rather than a profession. He continued to paint for the remainder of his career (his daughter Lucy recalls his lifelong habit of writing in the morning and painting in the afternoon), but his principal creative effort was directed toward achieving success as a purveyor of “used paper,” as he and Hemingway jokingly referred to their unsold manuscripts.1 Why, then, is there any need for any interest in Dos Passos’s work as a painter? The answer to this question lies in the quality and relevance of his paintings. Two major retrospective shows since his death—at Richmond in 1980 and Columbia, SC, in 1999—revealed for the first time the strength and richness of his paintings when viewed as a collected body of work.2 * All paintings by Dos Passos referred to in this essay can be found in the Plate section of this book. 1 I have relied throughout this essay on the two major biographies of Dos Passos: Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980) and Virginia Spencer Carr, Dos Passos: A Life (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984). See also Carr’s “Dos Passos, Painter and Playwright: New Possibilities in Research,” Resources for American Literary Study, 13 (Autumn 1983): 207–14. Lucy Dos Passos Coggin’s comment occurs in her introduction to “The Art of Dos Passos,” a brochure prepared in connection with a 2001 traveling exhibition (based on the 1999 South Carolina show) of Dos Passos’s paintings (see note 2 below). For Hemingway’s and Dos Passos’s remarks about “used paper,” see, for example, Dos Passos to Hemingway, 25 May 1933, in The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, ed. Townsend Ludington (Boston: Gambit, 1973), 432. 2 The two posthumous shows are Paintings and Drawings by John Dos Passos: An Exhibition Organized by the Virginia Museum, Richmond, 26 February–6 April 1980, and Colors that Will Not Fade: The Art of John Dos Passos (Curator, Richard Layman), McKissick Museum, University of South Carolina, Columbia, 14 March–4 April 1999. Portions of the 1999 show formed a traveling exhibition that appeared at various museums and

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The  shows  suggested that his painting deserve greater study both because of its intrinsic quality and because much of it, especially that produced during the 1920s, epitomizes many of the significant strains in the American response to early twentieth-century modernism. Of course, yet another reason for interest in Dos Passos’s paintings is that their subject matter and style may contribute to an understanding of important aspects of his fictional form. Although this subject requires a monograph to do it justice, I will nevertheless seek in the course of this essay to note a few of the most cogent connections between his painting and fiction. I should also note at this point that an additional reason for the general unawareness of Dos Passos’s paintings is their unavailability. Dos Passos often exhibited his work between 1920 and the mid-1930s, but few if any of these paintings sold and thus made their way eventually into permanent collections. At his death, therefore, almost all his art work (aside from a few paintings owned by private collectors) became the property of his estate— that is, initially his widow, Elizabeth Holdridge Dos Passos, and then their daughter, Lucy Dos Passos Coggin—where they still reside. It is hoped that his best and most interesting work will eventually be reproduced in a fullscale retrospective volume.3 As a young man, Dos Passos enjoyed and had a talent for sketching. On graduation from Harvard in  1916, he attempted to join the Belgian Relief Commission. When rejected as too young, he decided that he would instead go to Madrid to study architecture, and it was there that he had his first lessons in drawing and also made architectural sketches. At his father’s death in early 1917, Dos Passos returned to New York and enlisted in the volunteer ambulance corps. Over the next three years, while both in the corps and then in the U.S. Army, he spent considerable time in Paris, where he sporadically participated in drawing classes. His first extensive artistic efforts occurred during early 1918, while serving in the ambulance corps in Italy, when he frequently made pencil sketches and occasional watercolors in his notebooks. His initial major efforts to paint in watercolors in a larger format date from the fall of 1919, when he was living in Spain while writing his novel Three Soldiers.4 Dos Passos had become close friends with a fellow corps member,

3

4

universities over the next several years. Dos Passos also had a one-man show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York in early 1937. I wish to thank Lucy Dos Passos Coggin for her strong support of my interest in her father’s art work and for making available for reproduction the paintings in her possession used in this essay. I also wish to thank Richard Layman for providing his extensive file of photographs of Dos Passos’s paintings and for his encouragement and aid throughout the project. See Dos Passos to Germaine Lucas-Championniére, 19 November 1919; John Dos Passos: Lettres à Germain Lucas-Championniére, ed. Mathieu Gousse (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 60.

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the writer John Howard Lawson. When Lawson’s wife and sister, Adelaide Lawson, made a visit to Barcelona and then Majorca in April 1920, Dos Passos joined them and during this period painted a number of watercolors of local scenes and people. Adelaide, who was seven years older than Dos Passos and who was already an accomplished artist, occasionally painted in watercolor, and she perhaps also further instructed Dos Passos in the medium at this time. Dos Passos was seldom to use any other. He was highly peripatetic throughout his life, and unlike oils and canvas, the paints and pads for watercoloring could easily be carried in a suitcase while traveling. The early 1920s can be considered the watershed years in Dos Passos’s career. He was not only working toward the radical fictional form of Manhattan Transfer—the novel that established his centrality in 1920s avantgarde fiction—but also vigorously seeking out a style and subject matter as a painter. On his return to New York in mid-1920, he joined forces (so to speak) with Adelaide Lawson, who lived and studied in the city, and became fully engaged in the New York art scene. Together over the next several years they participated in art classes at the Art Students’ League and the Maine summer art colony run by the sculptor Robert Laurent, frequently attended shows, and then, in January 1923, had a joint exhibition of their work (with a few sculpture pieces by Reuben Nakian) at the Whitney Studio Club (the precursor of the Whitney Museum of American Art). During this same period Dos Passos continued to spend much time abroad.  He made an extended (and often hazardous) journey through the Caucasus and Middle East from July 1921 to February 1922, a journey that stimulated an interest in the exotic as a subject for art that remained throughout his life. And he had two significant Paris sojourns. From March to late August 1923 he immersed himself, with the aid of the American expatriate Gerald Murphy, in the thriving Paris art scene of the period. Through Murphy, he met Léger, Picasso, and Gris, and also through him, he participated in the construction of the modernistic sets for the Ballet Russe’s premiere of Stravinsky’s Noces. A second summer in France, during 1924, helped cement many of these friendships and interests.5 By 1925 Dos Passos had largely completed the shaping of his artistic sensibility. He had participated actively in the New York and Paris art worlds and was thoroughly familiar with the various strains of modernism then current. He had painted throughout the period—fully enough to show more than 50 pieces at the January 1923 Whitney show6—and (as I will discuss) 5

6

Dos Passos recalls these Paris activities and friendships in The Best Times: An Informal Memoir (New York: New American Library, 1966), 145–9. The informal catalogue of the show prepared by the Whitney Studio Club indicates that Dos Passos exhibited two gouaches and 50 watercolors.

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had experimented with several different styles. He was of course to move on to additional interests in his later career as a painter; two examples are his own efforts as a set designer in the late 1920s, and his constant discovery of new subjects for his work as he traveled the globe. But for the most part his basic art impulses and styles were established during this especially rich halfdecade of the early 1920s. Dos Passos saw the abbreviated traveling version of the Armory Show in Boston in the spring of 1913 toward the close of his freshman year at Harvard. He recalled in 1936 that its paintings—largely European postimpressionists with a smattering of cubists—gave him a “real jolt,”7 but he does not go on to explain the nature of that effect. Indeed, it was probably not until he found himself in Paris at various times between 1917 and 1920, and began painting in watercolor during this period, that he began to think seriously about the possibilities of expressive art in the early twentieth-century and thus also began the process of formulating where he wished to place himself within those possibilities. As I noted earlier, this process in self-definition was to continue over approximately the next five years. The Paris art scene of the late teens and early 1920s was in frenetic turmoil. It was a period during which a number of postimpressionist schools which had risen since the 1880s still held sway and in which several more recent “isms”—futurism and expressionism, for example—also attracted followers and critical partisans. Yet within this foment it is possible to identify two broad modernistic streams arising from the postimpressionist rejection of a Monet-derived emphasis on the immediate visual impact of a specific scene upon a particular observer. The first, stemming in part from Cezanne, moved in various ways from the figurative and representational toward abstraction. By 1920, this way of thinking about the art work was in a sense institutionalized by the international vogue of cubism and its various offshoots, with many contemporary artists—Léger, for example—alternating between a variant of cubism and complete abstraction. The second stream had its source in the postimpressionist desire to explore the possibilities of color and form beyond the demands of realistic representation but to maintain within the painting a fully recognizable subject. This stream reached expression in the Fauve explosion of the first decade of the century, and by the close of the second was still powerfully available in Matisse’s continuing experiments in color and form. The American art scene, on the contrary, was less vibrant during this period. Late nineteenth-century impressionism and Academy conventionality had 7

Dos Passos, “Grosz Comes to America,” Esquire, 6 (September 1936); rpt. John Dos Passos: The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), 174.

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given way to various movements emphasizing the depiction of distinctively American settings, but realistic representation was still the norm. The Eight, or Ashcan School, with its vivid but stylistically unexceptional depiction of contemporary New York life, had risen to prominence after its 1908 show. Although Stieglitz’s “Gallery 291” circle did attract artists of the avant garde, this group was decidedly on the fringe. Adelaide Lawson offers an example of a typical product of the art education of that period. Born in 1889, she attended classes for many years at the Art Students’ League, the principal founder of which was the American impressionist Robert Henri. Her teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller, was himself a student of Henri’s and painted realistically depicted American scenes. Given this training, it is little wonder that Lawson’s own work throughout her long career, though distinctive and innovative in its own way, seldom wandered into any of the more abstract tendencies sweeping European painting.8 In an interview of 1937, Dos Passos claimed that he was largely self-taught as an artist. His interviewer reported, “As no one taught him to paint, no artist has influenced his style. He said that some of his pictures would never have existed if he had not seen Matisse’s work. He admires Picasso and Miro, but makes no attempt to paint in their manner.”9 This statement, one of the few Dos Passos made on the sources of his style, is of course important for its acknowledgment of a debt to Matisse. But it also is suggestive in implying the possible important role of Adelaide Lawson as a significant conduit for Dos Passos’s engagement with aspects of Matisse’s style. Adelaide and Dos Passos were close friends during Dos Passos’s formative years as a painter. Athough Lawson reported many years later that they were never lovers, they apparently painted together whenever they could. Indeed (as I will later note), several of Dos Passos’s best nudes are probably of her. Dos Passos seldom wrote about her painting, except for one important document, an unpublished review of her 1925 one-person show in New York. Entitled “Pictures to Look At: A Manhattan Primitive,” the review celebrates her ability to render through “the direct impact at the tip of a fanciful sturdy brush  .  .  .  the most unsuspected combination of things, moods of color, aspects of human character. She puts such childlike faith in the direct impact that it is perfectly fair to call her a primitive.” Indeed, it was almost inevitable,

8

9

Other than brief entries in biographical dictionaries, little about Adelaide Lawson Gaylor (her married name) has been published. There are, however, some useful biographical accounts on various internet art sites, since her work is often for sale. See, for example, www.askart.com. “Side-Lines: Dos Passos and Broun Excel in Dual Expression on Canvas and Paper,” Literary Digest, 123 (6 February 1937): 27. The occasion of the interview was Dos Passos’s one-man show at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery.

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given Lawson’s style of a flat perspective, bold and unrealistic colors, and awkwardly formed human figures, that her work would be designated as primitive throughout her career.10 Dos Passos did not have to turn to Matisse, in short, when Adelaide Lawson was close to hand. If Matisse was a Paris primitive in much of his work—seemingly painting as though he had never had instruction in the basic techniques of achieving an illusion of reality—and Adelaide replicated in her own way several of his techniques and was thus a Manhattan primitive, Dos Passos could well have absorbed through her an emphasis upon several prominent aspects of an art resembling Matisse’s. Of course, I mean to suggest in this notion of influence and sources not direct borrowings but rather an acceptance of broad currents of emphasis. Adelaide, for example, is far more in the stick-figure school of simplistic primitivism than are either Matisse or Dos Passos, and her color technique, though strong, does not overwhelm a canvas, as in some of the most striking work of Matisse and Dos Passos. But it is nevertheless accurate to say that the work of the three artists is related in their common use of color far beyond the representational and their associated frequent willingness to shape an image in accord with a theme rather than to create an illusion of visual reality. There is, however, more to Dos Passos’s formation of a style during the early 1920s than the acceptance of several Fauve tendencies. For central to the visual knowledge of almost all artists of the period was the almost overpowering lens provided by the cubist insight into the essential nature of reality and the possibilities for rendering this insight on canvas. Nevertheless, as a number of historians of American art have noted, American artists of the period, though not immune to the radical appeal of cubism, tended not to succumb entirely to its principles, and especially not to the tendency toward abstraction among some European cubists by the late teens. As Barbara Rose remarks, American artists on the whole tended to respond to cubism as an art of “sharp lines and acute angles” rather than as a means of rejecting completely the conventions of centuries of visual representation.11 Their method of achieving modernist status was thus to introduce cubistic elements into clearly recognizable American scenes. Thus, both precisionism (as in Gerald Murphy’s well-known Watch) and orphism (as in Delaunay’s blend in his early work of cubistic shaping and exuberant coloration) are more characteristic 10

11

For Adelaide Lawson’s comment that she and Dos Passos were friends, not lovers, see Carr, Dos Passos, 192. Dos Passos’s unpublished review of Lawson’s 1925 show is in the Dos Passos Collection of the University of Virginia Library and is quoted with the permission of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin. Rose, American Art since 1900: A Critical History (New York: Praeger, 1967), 85. See also Erika Doss, Twentieth-Century American Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 61–2.

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of the underlying American art aesthetic of the period than the mainstream cubism represented by the foundation work of Picasso and Braque. Rose has indirectly well-described how Dos Passos himself absorbed and used cubistic elements in his painting. He never produced a fully cubistic work but he frequently relies on the selective use of such cubistic techniques as geometrically-rendered shapes and, in portraits, interlacing planes of vision (see figs. 1, 9). Indeed, it is the mix in his work of these two central streams of modern art that I have been discussing—the Matisse emphasis on color and the cubist on geometric essence—that constitutes his distinctive style as an early twentieth-century American artist. Rose implies that this unwillingness by American artists to plunge fully into the liberation that cubism confers constitutes a weakness in the American art of the period. That may be so in the larger view, but in Dos Passos’s case this unwillingness produced an artist who could successfully exploit powerful elements in both of these central tendencies and thus create, in his best work, an art which is at once both derivative and distinctive. Dos Passos only occasionally titled and rarely dated his art work, perhaps because he was seldom offering it for sale. Nevertheless, a rough chronological placing of almost all his painting can be achieved by its subject matter. Briefly, much of his work falls into the following subject groups and thus time periods—Spain and Majorca figures and landscapes (1919–20); the Middle East (1921–22); New York studio work (nudes) and cityscapes, including New York harbor (1922–25); Paris scenes (1923, 1924); backdrop, curtain, and poster designs for New York theatrical productions (1925–28); Morocco figures and scenes (winter 1925–26); and genre painting related to  his frequent trips to Havana, Key West, and Mexico after 1926. In addition, Dos Passos contributed dust jackets and other illustrations to many of his books throughout his career, beginning with A Pushcart at the Curb (1922). When Dos Passos painted in a studio, he occasionally used large sheets, but for the most part, his work is usually restricted to paper of various sizes ranging roughly from 9  14 to 12  20. I have noted earlier his preference for watercolor. He described his practice as a painter to an interviewer in 1937 (see note 8 above)—“For each finished picture he makes several painstaking preliminary sketches . . . . When a painting refuses to turn out the way he planned it, he puts it away for a while, rather than take a chance at spoiling it.” He also frequently sketched in pencil or charcoal, both in sketchbooks and on separate sheets, and would occasionally work in pastel or gouache for special projects, such as his set designs for The Moon Is a Gong in 1926. In all, Dos Passos’s work as an artist comprises approximately 300 separate paintings and 150 sketches in notebooks and small sketchpads.

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Dos Passos’s earliest full-scale paintings, his watercolors of Spain and Majorca scenes in the spring of 1920, reveal a not-surprising preference for conventional impressionistic landscapes—not surprising because he was at an early stage of exploring both his medium and his sensibility and an impressionistic style provided an established vehicle for doing so. It is not certain when Dos Passos painted his Middle East pictures. As I noted earlier, he was in the area for six months in late 1921, but was traveling light in difficult conditions (including a long desert leg by camel), and may have been unable to do more than sketch during this period. However, he exhibited at least a dozen Middle East watercolors at his January 1923 Whitney show, which means that they are probably the product of his immersion in the New York art world during 1922.12 Another issue in dating arises from Dos Passos’s Morocco journey of the winter of 1925–26, when he apparently did have art materials with him.13 Unless a painting portraying Arabs cites a Middle East locale or is included in either the Whitney Show or as an illustration in his book on his Middle East adventures, Orient Express (1927), it may derive from his Morocco trip. Dos Passos was fascinated both by Arab faces and by the characteristic Arab head dress, the keffiyeh, and did many paintings in which these feature. Figure 1 contains his version of the Arab face as it appears in all his Middle East and Morocco work—sharply pointed head covering, long face with prominent nose, pointed beard, and hard penetrating eyes. The remainder of the body, except occasionally for an exposed arm, is covered, which further accentuates the triangular shaping at the peak of the body. There is a desire to stylize, in other words, which brings these portraits to the edge of caricature. They escape this effect because of Dos Passos’s ability to render the gravity of his subjects; they are not objects of derision but are rather portrayed as men made hard and solemn by the nature of their lives. This intent is clearly present in figure 1. All of the men’s faces that are depicted in the painting— from the young boy on the left to the mounted old man—have a roughly similar grim visage. This common characteristic in Dos Passos’s Middle East and Morocco painting arises not from his inability to distinguish between human faces and thus human character but rather from his desire to reach toward the archetypal—that is, in this instance, the Arab face as an index of the Arab experience as a whole. Without adopting the nonrepresentational ethos of abstractionism, except perhaps in his cubistic penchant for geometric 12

13

This assumption is supported by Dos Passos’s comment in a letter to Germaine LucasChampionniére, 23 May 1922, several months after his return from Middle East, that he was working on a painting of an Arab; John Dos Passos, ed. Gousse, 157. See Dos Passos to Germaine Lucas-Championniére, 22 February 1926, writing from Tangiers; John Dos Passos, ed. Gousse, 216.

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shaping, Dos Passos is nevertheless in this instance reaching toward the expression of an abstraction, that is, the underlying truth of the lives of the common people of the area. Figure 1 thus reveals that Dos Passos has determined not long after the outset of his career as a painter to sacrifice realistic perspective and composition, the conventional tools for the creation of an illusion of actuality, for a postimpressionist (and especially Fauve) emphasis on effect through nonreferential arrangements of color and shape. Figure 1 is especially instructive in this regard. It contains some remnant of perspective, since the nearest Arab head in the procession is both the largest and the closest to the point of view, but five of the six figures also create, as a whole, a shape roughly approximating a diamond—a shape that receives further definition by being placed against a reddish background closely matching the color of the portrayed faces. This is a painting, in short, both immediately vibrant in its basic color juxtapositions, especially white against red, but also cerebral in its larger appeal. We are not viewing a specific Middle East scene, we realize, but rather a highly composed image of Arab life as a whole. The New York of 1920–25 that Dos Passos depicted in his painting and illustrations of that period resembles his Middle East watercolors in that what interested him in the phenomenon of a great city was its tout ensemble—the city as a whole rather than its specific neighborhoods, events, and people. In this regard, his most compelling New York paintings also resemble what he was trying to do in Manhattan Transfer, a novel in which the presence of a large number of discontinuous narratives shifts the emphasis from specific story lines to the nature of the city as a whole as expressed through the total effect of these fragmented narratives. A good many of his paintings of this kind (as in fig. 2) are related to his late 1923 move to Columbia Heights, the Brooklyn neighborhood overlooking New York harbor and the downtown Manhattan business district. Figure 2 is especially instructive of what can be called Dos Passos’s fully realized Fauve/cubist style. The foreground of the painting is dominated by a small boat unloading cargo, probably at the wharves beneath Brooklyn and Columbia Heights. The detail of its depiction perhaps disguises for a moment that its rendering is also highly stylized in coloration. Bright blues and yellows predominate—not the colors of a working vessel. And the interior composition of the boat and its crew is also somewhat stylized—two men are balanced in position on either side, while another is centered in the hold, and the mast neatly divides the forward deck structure. All, indeed, is rather jaunty in effect for a boat of this kind. In the far background is an entirely different image—lower Manhattan’s skyscrapers in the form of pointed elongated rectangles, rising as an indistinct yet clearly recognizable

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image of mystery and wonder—the city of one’s dreams, perhaps. The entire painting, we realize, has (like much of Dos Passos’s writing about New York) a satirical edge. Up close, New York comprises work—sometimes work of a vibrant character, but work nevertheless. In the distance—as a kind of aery dream—lies the city of wonder and beauty. The two exist simultaneously, but the first is the one in which we live, the other is in our imagination. Something of the same tongue-in-cheek rendering of the grandiose element in New York represented as a whole pervades Dos Passos’s cover and dust-jacket illustrations for three of his 1920s books, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), Manhattan Transfer (1925), and The Garbage Man (1926). The dustjacket (fig. 3) for The Garbage Man (the revised title of his play The Moon Is a Gong) is characteristic of the cartoon element found in much of Dos Passos’s illustration work—as if he were preparing the way for Reginald Marsh’s superb satiric illustrations for the 1946 edition of U.S.A. Manhattan in figure 3 is a kind of huge oval arising magically out of the sea and girded by puffy smoke stack emissions below and clouds above. Elements characteristic of Manhattan—the el and Brooklyn Bridge—are scattered here and there, but the work’s principal effect derives from its soaring center, a crescendo of structures, each taller than the one preceding it, with the whole suggestive of the towers of Camelot or some other such mythical center of ideal existence. Since The Garbage Man is itself an expressionistic and satirical dramatization of the American Dream of Success, Dos Passos no doubt wished in his illustration to render the compelling but illusionary nature of one of its major components—the great American city. Although figure 4 differs from the other New York works I have discussed, in that it takes us into the heart of the city rather than observing it from a distance, the painting nevertheless is characteristic of several significant elements in Dos Passos’s work as a whole in that it represents the centrality of the Fauve element in his painting. Broadly speaking, the work is composed of two colors, yellow and shades of red (there is some occasional green as well), with little that is realistic in their use. Except for the uniform red of the sky and the yellow of the cars below, colors alternate for effect and emphasis rather than for representational accuracy. The work is thus alive with color, as though the city is burning in various shades. In addition, though objects are crudely shaped, they nevertheless powerfully communicate the painting’s major theme—the center of a huge modern metropolis, its crowded buildings ablaze with light, with unending automobile traffic below, contains not a single visible person. A city of things and objects has absorbed the human. This was not an uncommon theme in expressionistic drama and film of the time, and it is thus appropriate that Dos Passos lends the painting as a whole an expressionistic cast. We appear

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to be in a careening, unstable urban site in which the structures on the left lean excessively in that direction, while the tall building on the center right is overdrawn into a triangle. Many of Dos Passos’s nudes are of the early and mid-1920s, when he lived in New York for several long periods. Without being fully recognizable portraits, several also seem to stem from a single model, who was probably Adelaide Lawson. Like the nudes in figures 5 and 6, Lawson was a large and generously proportioned woman. Another general characteristic of Dos Passos’s nudes is that they are the most derivative of his paintings in that they all share specific elements of the postimpressionist demythification of the nude, as, for example, in Matisse’s The Blue Nude (1907) and Rouault’s Before a Mirror (1906). The presence in these and other nudes of the period of nonrepresentational color and awkward poses by ungainly models is reflected in Dos Passos’s own nudes by the jutting belly of figure 6 and the tortured pose of the dozing woman in  5. Another equally apparent source for figure 5 is Fernand Léger, whose response to cubism during one phase of his career consisted of shaping human limbs as tubes. Indeed, in Dos Passos’s interpretation of the human body as tubular, as well as in the simplification of his palette, figure 5 is perhaps his most fully apparent cubist painting. It should also be said, however, that though Dos Passos’s nudes are obviously derivative, they are so on a high order of quality. The effect he wished to make—that there is nothing either inevitably beautiful or erotic about the female body—is powerfully achieved in a variety of compelling ways. Dos Passos was involved in the theater as writer, designer, and producer during much of the 1920s. While in New York in  1922, he renewed his friendship with the playwright John Howard Lawson (Adelaide’s brother), and influenced by him wrote the expressionistic play The Moon Is a Gong, completing it in early 1923. The play was initially staged by the Harvard Dramatic Club in May 1925 and then, the following spring, at Greenwich Village’s Cherry Lane Playhouse. From early 1926 to 1929 Dos Passos confirmed his commitment to avant garde drama by serving on the board of directors of the New Playwrights Theatre, a group devoted to producing experimental plays by its members. Out of these various activities came a distinctive phase of Dos Passos painting, his designs for the posters, sets, backdrops, and curtains of various productions he was connected with. For this work he frequently used pastel and gouache as well as watercolor, and also stiff board as well as paper. What has been preserved from this phase of Dos Passos’s career as an artist are the designs he prepared for various stage productions; it is not clear whether the sets, backdrops, and curtains they depict were in fact ever constructed and used.

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The distinctive shared element of figures 7 and 8 is their reflection of Dos Passos’s move away from the Fauve and cubistic characteristics of his earlier work into more expressionistic and futuristic styles. Of course, some earlier characteristics remain—the geometric patterning in figure 7, for example, or the tongue-in-cheek homage to Matisse’s The Dance in figure 8—but in the main, this body of work is committed to an expressionistic distortion of external reality in order to gain a heightened sense of an underlying, often ideologically based, Truth. However, because Dos Passos did not maintain this style once he ceased creating art for the theater, it is likely that his foray into it derives not from a radical rethinking of his art but rather from a temporary adaptation of his style to the expressionistic plays that he and other New Playwrights were writing. Figures 7 and 8 are backdrop designs for Dos Passos’s own expressionistic play, The Moon Is a Gong, probably for the 1926 New York production. In  figure 7, Dos Passos seeks to communicate the vacuous chaos of contem­ porary American life. At its center, trains, tracks, and roads go nowhere; to the right and left unidentifiable but presumably urban shapes are miscellaneously piled. Although we live in a crowded and mechanized world, the design says, it is a world which lacks coherence and meaning. Figure 8, an unusually mordant painting for Dos Passos, reverses the celebratory dance of life in contemporary America. The similarly costumed and postured Jazz Age dancers with their glassy stares and rictus smiles resemble corpses, as in fact is anyone who believes that the frenetic can substitute for the life of the mind and spirit.14 Though perhaps suffering from a too great explicitness, the design nevertheless works as satiric art. The stylized uniformity of the dancers’ coloration and movement, even the strictly patterned floor they are dancing on—all contribute to an effect of pictorial wit at its sharpest. Figures 9 and 10 date from the mid to late 1920s and reveal Dos Passos at the peak of his fully evolved style. Figure 9, the portrait of a Mexican fisherman, obviously owes much to cubist portraiture, of Gris especially, in its rendering of the subject’s head as a field of mixed planes of vision. The painting is also infused, however, with a Fauve-like strength of juxtaposed bold colors, made even more striking because of Dos Passos’s clear and strong draftsmanship in this particular instance. And, finally, Dos Passos successfully pushes the painting into the traditional realm of the portrait as iconic rendering of the subject’s world, here of fishing. A portion of a boat’s prow is to the left (with a caught fish clearly depicted), the sea and then sky 14

The design was for the backdrop for Part One, Scene Three, of The Garbage Man, a scene that contains, as Dos Passos notes in a stage direction, a “grand jazzed funeral march of relatives into the parlor where the drawn back curtains reveal the coffin.”

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and then sails are cubistically suggested in the painting’s upper portion, and the entire work perhaps attempts to capture a fishing boat at sea in that the sails appear to be unfurled and the fisherman is leaning to the left, as on a rocking boat. Figure 10, a circus kaleidoscope, reveals another side of Dos Passos’s mature style. Concentrically positioned around the head of a clown are some of the principal members of a circus—trained seals, bears, and elephants, as well as acrobats and other clowns. The exuberance of a circus—its frenetic activity as it seeks to amuse and entertain—is communicated by the painting’s organization and coloration. All the figures in the circle appear to be in movement, as though circling endlessly, while in its center, the face of a clown dominates the scene and implies its meaning. Indeed, the circle is the painting’s structural spine, running from the seal’s balanced ball just below the clown’s head to the head itself and then to the acrobat’s umbrella at top left. Dos Passos’s palette in the painting complements its theme in the sense of dramatizing the vividness and variety of the entertainment it depicts. Reds and yellows predominate, but darker shades are also present, and the whole creates an impact of color run riot except for the uniquely white and centered image of the clown’s face—an image that immediately draws the eye to signal its major role in the work’s composition and theme. Dos Passos’s late 1920s watercolors reveal the close relationship between his painting and fiction of this period as both evolved into his own significant variety of high modernism. His massive trilogy, U.S.A., with its intricate archetectonics, which he conceived in  1927, and the last two paintings discussed above share a desire to create complex forms that render distinctive social realities in intimate and dependent relationships with their social worlds. His work as a whole during this phase of his career, in brief, is guided by a wish to create innovative forms that simultaneously communicate both a vividly portrayed concrete particularity and a fully displayed general idea about the social reality in which it functions. Although Dos Passos continued to paint for another 40  years, his later paintings for the most part lack the interest of his 1920s work. For one thing, there were fewer of them. Dos Passos married in 1929, and the calls upon his time and energy now included that responsibility as well as the difficult task of making a living as writer during the Depression. After the death of his first wife in 1947, he remarried in 1949, and 1950 saw the birth of his daughter, Lucy. For another, though he continued to paint in a number of styles, these differ little from those he had evolved during the 1920s. Nevertheless, Dos Passos did produce during that decade a body of significant work. These paintings as a whole resemble in a limited sense those  of Stuart Davis over Davis’s extended career, in that like Davis he

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worked with distinction in a number of styles without achieving a major innovative style of his own. Nevertheless, as I have argued, Dos Passos was no mere skilled imitator of what was fashionable. He crafted out of various modernistic strains of his day—especially Fauvism and cubism, but futurism, orphism, and expressionism as well—a painterly eye and method that were capable of producing work that both offers insight into the creative ferment that was 1920s American art and is still a delight to view.

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Index Aaron, Daniel  62 Alger, Horatio  55 Anderson, Sherwood  3 Winesburg, Ohio  3 Armory Show  125 Art Students’ League  124, 127 Ashcan School  126 Baroja, Pio  21–2, 25 Beer, Thomas  38 Benavente, Jacinto  22 Bishop, John Peale  6, 114 Bourne, Randolph  60 Braque, Georges  29, 32–3 Brenner, Gerry  115 Bryan, William Jennings  45, 58 Burbank, Luther  58 Cannell, Kitty  116 Carnegie, Andrew  57–8 Cervantes, Miguel de  15–25 passim, 29 Chicago Tribune  6 Choate  3, 11, 70, 72, 74 Coggin, Lucy Dos Passos  123, 134 Colt Firearms Co.  21 communism  53, 105, 109, 114, 120 Copeland, Charles Townsend  76 Cummings, E. E.  3 The Enormous Room  3 Davis, Stuart  13 Dawson, Conningsby  6 Debs, Eugene  60 Delaunay, Robert  127 Dickens, Charles  28 Doran, George H., & Co.  6 Dos Passos, Elizabeth Holdridge  123

Dos Passos, John major themes and concerns American myth of success  55–8 cubism  17, 27–38 passim, 125–35 passim expatriation  viii, 9–25, 28–9, 89–101, 124 modernism  viii–x, 7, 9–40, 134–5 montage  26–38 passim naturalism  vi, 59, 82 “old words”  65, 79–80, 82–3 painting, Dos Passos’ own  ix, 27, 30, 38–40, 122–35 radicalism  4–5, 34, 62–3, 79, 83–4, 108–9 sexual themes  67–81 World War I  viii, 3–8, 13, 27–8, 64, 74–5, 105 writings “Against American Literature”  10–11 The Best Times  5, 67, 110, 123 The Big Money  44–5, 53, 63, 69, 76–88, 99, 108–9 Century’s Ebb  109–10, 120–1 Chosen Country  108–10, 112, 115, 118–20 “Contemporary Chronicles”  29 Facing the Chair  34–5 The 42nd Parallel  26, 32, 34, 44, 53, 59, 63, 68–73, 83, 108 The Garbage Man  132–3 “A Humble Protest”  10 Manhattan Transfer  6–7, 9, 24, 31–4, 39, 106, 122, 124, 131–2

138 The Moon Is a Gong  128, 132–3 Nineteen-Nineteen  5, 44, 46, 57, 59, 63, 68, 74–6, 83, 98–9, 108 One Man’s Initiation  5, 122 Orient Express  129 “Pictures to Look At”  126 A Pushcart at the Curb  128, 131 Rosinante to the Road Again  9–25, 28–31, 33–4 Streets of Night  11 Three Soldiers  ix, 3–8, 14, 26–8, 39, 44, 77, 105–6, 111, 123 U.S.A.  viii–ix, 6–7, 9, 11, 26, 33–4, 36–9, 43–88, 122, 131, 134 “Young Spain”  12–15 Dos Passos, John R. (father)  3, 9–11, 69–74 passim, 80, 117, 123 Dos Passos, Katy Smith  106–8, 113–15, 118–20 Dos Passos, Lucy Madison (mother)  69–74 passim Dreiser, Theodore  viii, 84 Duncan, Isadora  46, 58 Edison, Thomas  56, 58 Eisenstein, Sergei  26, 32, 37 Battleship Potemkin  32 Eliot, George  28 Eliot, T. S.  15–17, 31, 34, 77 “The Waste Land”  17, 31, 34 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  4 Everett, Wesley  59, 66 expressionism  125, 131, 133, 135 Farrell, James T.  48 fascism  109 Faulkner, William  x, 7, 38 fauvism  125, 127–9, 131, 133, 135

Index Fitzgerald, F. Scott  89, 99–101, 116 Tender Is the Night  97, 99–101 Ford, Henry  56–8 Foster, Gretchen  32 Freudianism  68 futurism  125, 133, 135 Gelfant, Blanche  59 Gelhorn, Martha  115, 120 Ghandi, Mahatma  92 Giner, Francisco  21 Gingrich, Arnold  111, 114 Goya, Francisco de  12 Griffith, D. W.  26, 32–3 The Birth of a Nation  32 Intolerance  32 Gris, Juan  121, 133 Guiler, Hugh  94–5 Harlow, Jean  56 Harvard Dramatic Club  132 Harvard University  ix, 3–5, 9, 11, 43, 52, 63, 69, 72–4, 125 Hayward, William (Big Bill)  45, 60 Hearst, Randolph  58, 82 Hemingway, Ernest  ix, 3, 15–17, 24–5, 74, 89–91 passim, 105–22 A Farewell to Arms  3, 106–7 In Our Time  17, 25, 89, 105–6 Men at War  110 A Moveable Feast  89–90, 100, 109–10, 112, 115–17, 119 The Nick Adams Stories  107 “The Short Happy Life”  114 “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”  114 “Soldier’s Home”  24 “Summer People”  107 The Sun Also Rises  3, 25–6, 97, 100, 106, 109, 120 To Have and Have Not  109–15 The Torrents of Spring  106

Index Hemingway, Hadley Richardson  93, 106–8, 112–14, 116–17, 120–1 Hemingway, Jack (Bumby)  114, 116 Hemingway, Mary Welsh  115 Hemingway, Pauline Pfeiffer  106, 109, 114–16, 120 Henri, Robert  126 Hibben, Paxton  60, 63 Hill, Joe  59, 66, 82 Hogarth, William  97 Ibáñez, Blasco  21–2 Insull, Samuel  58, 84, 86–7 Ivancich, Adriana  115 IWW (Industrial Workers of the World)  45–6, 55, 59 James, Henry  x, 89 The Ambassadors  89 Jefferson, Thomas  43, 47 Joyce, James  15–16, 27, 29, 31, 38, 43, 45, 48, 68 Portrait of the Artist  25, 43 Ulysses  27, 29, 31, 62 Keith, Minor  57 Kurowsky, Agnes von  107, 110 LaFollette, Robert  59 Laurent, Robert  12 Lawrence, D. H.  95 Lawson, Adelaide  124, 126–7, 132 Lawson, John Howard  123, 132 Lee, Ivy  47 Léger, Ferdinand  33, 124–5, 132 Little Review  29 Loeb, Harold  116 London Herald  14 Long, Huey  86 Lowry, E. D.  31 Ludington, Townsend  x, 67 The Fourteenth Chronicle  x, 67, 69 John Dos Passos  x

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Machado, Antonio  21–2, 25 McComb, Arthur  13–14 McFadden, Bernarr  45 Maragell, Juan  21–2 March, William  3 Company K  3 Marsh, Reginald  131 Marxism  53–5, 57, 65 Mason, Jane  114 Matisse, Henri  38, 126–7, 134, 136 The Blue Nude  134 The Dance  136 Melville, Herman  4 Mencken, H. L.  6 Miller, Henry  89, 91–6 passim, 100 Tropic of Cancer  91–3, 95, 97, 100 Miller, June  94–6 Miller, Kenneth Hayes  126 Miro, Joan  126 Monet, Claude  126 Morgan, J. P.  57–8 Murphy, Gerald  111, 115–16, 124, 127 Watch  127 Murphy, Sara  111, 115–16 Nakian, Reuben  126 New Masses  108–9 New Playwrights Theatre  132 New York Times  6 Nin, Anaïs  89, 94–7 The Diary of Anaïs Nin  94–7 Henry and June  94–7 Norris, George W.  88 orphism  127, 135 Pastora Imperio  19, 22 Perkins, Maxwell  115 Pfeiffer, Pauline see Hemingway, Pauline Pfeiffer Picasso, Pablo  29, 32–3, 124, 126

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Index

Pound, Ezra  15–16 precisionism  127 Princeton University  6, 63

Stravinsky, Igor  124 Noces  124 Success  55

Ray, Man  91 Reed, Jack  59, 63 Richardson, Hadley see Hemingway, Hadley Richardson Rimbaud, Arthur  26, 37 Robles, José  109, 120 Rockefeller, John D.  86 Roosevelt, Theodore  57–8 Rose, Barbara  127 Rouault, Georges  132 Before a Mirror  132

Taylor, Frederick  58 Thackeray, William M.  28 Thoreau, Henry David  4, 94 Time  ix Toklas, Alice B.  91

Sacco-Vanzetti case  34, 45, 53, 57, 64–5, 69, 79, 83 Sandburg, Carl  47 The People, Yes  47 Sartre, Jean-Paul  ix Shakespeare, William Othello  69 Romeo and Juliet  97 Smith, Bill  106, 112–14 Smith, Doodles  112 Smith, Katy see Dos Passos; Katy Smith Smith, Y. K.  106, 112, 119 Spencer, Herbert  43 Spenser, Edmund  16 Stein, Gertrude  24, 89, 91, 93, 96–7 Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas  91 “The Good Anna”  24 Steinmetz, Charles P.  58 Stewart, Donald Ogden  114 Stieglitz, Alfred  126 Strachey, Lytton  38

Unamuno, Miguel de  21 University of Pennsylvania Dreiser Collection  viii University of Virginia Dos Passos Collection  viii, 6, 84 Valentino, Rudolph  46, 58 Vanzetti, Bartolomeo  36 Veblen, Thorstein  38, 59–60, 66, 82 Vidal, Pierre  22 Welsh, Mary see Hemingway, Mary Welsh Whitman, Walt  36, 46, 64–5, 69, 78, 94 “Out of the Cradle”  65, 80 Whitney Studio Club  124, 129 Wilde, Oscar  74 Wilson, Edmund  115, 117 I Thought of Daisy  118 Wilson, Woodrow  6, 45, 57–8, 82 Woolf, Virginia  38 Wright, Frank Lloyd  59, 66, 82 Wright brothers  58 Yale University  56 Young, Philip  107 Ziegfield, Florenz  56 Zola, Emile  48

Figure 1  [Arab Group, 1922.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 2  [Work Boat, 1923–24.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 3  Dust Jacket, The Garbage Man, 1926. Watercolor. Courtesy of Richard Layman.

Figure 4  [Urban Center, 1926–27.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 5  [Nude, mid-1920s.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 6  [Nude Sketch, mid-1920s.] Charcoal. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 7  [The Moon is a Gong 1,] 1925. Gouache. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 8  [The Moon is a Gong 2,] 1925. Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 9  [Fisherman, 1927.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.

Figure 10  [Circus, mid or late 1920s.] Watercolor. Collection of Lucy Dos Passos Coggin.