John Dos Passos

Barry Maine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134723201
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This set comprises 40 volumes covering 19th and 20th century European and American authors. These volumes will be available as a complete set, mini boxed sets (by theme) or as individual volumes.
This second set complements the first 68 volume set of Critical Heritage published by Routledge in October 1995.

THE BIG MONEY

August 1936

32.
Bernard De Voto, ‘John Dos Passos: Anatomist of Our Time,’ Saturday Review
August 1936, 3–4, 12–13

De Voto (1897–1955), the American critic and historian, was editor of Saturday Review from 1936 to 1938 (succeeding Henry Seidel Canby) and wrote the ‘Easy Chair’ column for Harper’s Magazine from 1935 until his death. Author of a trilogy of histories covering the westward expansion across the frontier (including Across the Wide Missouri (1947)), he is best known for his studies of Mark Twain, such as Mark Twain’s America, which stressed Twain’s frontier background. In this review De Voto examines Dos Passos’s development as a writer and questions the accuracy of his social history. He also notes Dos Passos’s failure to invent memorable characters.

John Dos Passos has developed more consistently than any other American novelist of his time. With the exception of Streets of Night, which fell far below Three Soldiers and is surely one of the worst novels of the generation, every book he has written has been distinctly better than its predecessors. The Big Money is better than 1919, which came out four years ago and was then easily his best novel. Whether it is the end of a trilogy, or whether it will be succeeded by a volume carrying the anatomy of our times still closer to today’s headlines, cannot be made out—the method of discontinuity does not permit endings but only terminations, and there is no reason why the surviving Richard Savage, Margo Dowling, and Mary French should not move on into the depression years. But at any rate the enterprise, the most ambitious one that American fiction has embarked on since Frank Norris’s unfinished trilogy of the wheat, has gone far enough to justify a few conclusions.

The habit of criticism, following the lead of Mr. Cowley’s essay,1 has been to divide Mr. Dos Passos’s career into two parts, the unconverted years when he wrote his first three novels, and the years following the journey to Damascus when, tenderly loving those whom he had previously resented as vulgarians, he turned from an unmanly and individual estheticism to the social sternness of which The Big Money is the latest issue. The division is useful but deals only with accessory qualities of his work. For the faults of The Big Money are the faults of Three Soldiers, and its virtues are those of Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer. In the trilogy we have the mature expression of a mind that has worked toward an interpretation of American life. But the qualities of that mind were established in 1921, when Three Soldiers appeared, and the interpretation has developed in the channels then laid down without breaking through them.

Three Soldiers was a very courageous book, the more so in that America, having suffered least from the war, most strongly tabooed discussion of it. Barbusse and Latzko, who wrote while the war was actually going on, had preceded Mr. Dos Passos, but he was a good many years in advance of the reaction that gave us The Revolt of Sergeant Grischa, All Quiet on the Western Front, and a succession of novels akin to them. It had conspicuous faults and obvious merits. Of the latter, the most striking was the author’s burning vision of his characters as mere atoms of personality buffeted by the tremendous forces in which they were caught. Most of its demerits were due to insufficient apprenticeship. The dialects, for instance, were almost indecently bad. Except for Chris, who spoke a combination of Georgia cracker and Minnesota squarehead, everyone, including Private Mandlebaum, expressed himself in a vaudeville Irish brogue as vile as any that has been called poetic in the plays of Eugene O’Neill.

But there were aspects of Three Soldiers which, if not defects, signalized biases or limitations of the author’s mind which he has never since transcended. The novel, in so far as it was a representation of the A.E.F. and not a biography of three wind-tossed atoms—and it sometimes had to be such a representation—failed almost grotesquely to convey any feeling of experience. The choice of two deserters and a venereal victim loaded the dice to begin with. But what was much worse, the book nowhere suggested any of the fascination, the delight, or the consummation that made army service a fulfilment for many hundreds of thousands—and are, it may be, the most terrible attribute of war. There was none of the gusto, the male fellowship, the day by day satisfaction, the adventurousness, the honed senses, the awareness of common living splendidly stepped up which made the war a climactic experience—as anyone may verify by listening to two veterans over their beer. There was no pleasure in this most terrible, most deadly of pleasures—even the boys on pass going down to get drunk and find a mamselle seemed to be doing so drearily, lethargically, in a conviction of logical necessity rather than anticipation. There was not, even, any humor—the book contains no wisecracks, no jokes, none of the camaraderie of men at ease with one another. The result was, certainly, a memorable record of horror and brutality, but it left out many things that exist on the record, things that, rounding out the picture, might well have increased its horror. It narrowed the war to its impact on one mind, it was one man’s initiation as Mr. Dos Passos put it in another title. It thus lost its representative purpose in a marked individualism—and came close to trivializing its subject by suggesting that the tragedy of war chiefly consisted of its preventing a sensitive man from composing a tone poem.

Time passed; Mr Dos Passos published his second and bad novel; he read Joyce, and in 1925 Manhattan Transfer appeared. Here, too, he saw his characters as mere filings in great fields of force but he had considerably matured his conception of those fields. His apprenticeship was over; he was now not only an expert technician but an experimenter as well. He had arrived at the novel of masses, which he had tried but failed to reach in Three Soldiers. It was the form which all his succeeding novels have taken: little groups of associates whose lives are carried forward discontinuously, whose planes only partly and infrequently intersect those of the other groups, who exist like the brush work of an impressionist painter less for themselves than for the canvas as a whole. He had worked out a swift narrative method, behavioristic and marvellously condensed, which gave the book a higher specific gravity than anything he had written before. It was an instrument excellently fitted to achieve the effects his new objectives called for.

He had also begun a revolt against the conventions of typography which, as he has gone on with it, has become increasingly annoying. It is at once pedantic, inconsistent, and absurd. He trips over his own principles, he is sometimes an enemy and sometimes an ally of the comma, he fiercely rejects the hyphen but crooks the pregnant hinges of the knee to the apostrophe. What is more to the point, he distracts the reader’s attention from the matter at hand, to facilitate which is the sole purpose of typography, and so endangers the effect he sets out to produce. And he has begotten dozens of imitators who think that you can become a significant novelist by writing ‘towhair,’ ‘legalaid,’ ‘toothick,’ ‘antisepticlooking,’ and ‘carvedivory.’ …Whereas ‘uneeda’ and ‘drivurself’ are bourgeois Philistinism and, it may be, the rot of democracy.

Manhattan Transfer is a surface novel. A brilliant evocation of the metropolis, full of color and sound and movement, its patterns shift expertly between chaos and implied design. With every device that can serve versatility it assails the reader’s imagination, hurrying him on with the breathlessness and rhythm of the crowds it symbolizes. But, though the surface is hard and jeweled, the book lacks depth. Mr. Cowley says that its lack of significance proceeds from the failure to establish a scale of social values, that like Three Soldiers it comes down to a basic assertion that life is is painful for sensitive people. But its true weakness is much simpler: the characters are not sufficiently alive to engage one’s sympathies.

Mr. Dos Passos was interested in depicting mass man, the mass experience obliterating the individual. The war carried the theme in Three Soldiers, the metropolis in Manhattan Transfer. In the trilogy it is identified with the mighty currents of American life during the pre-war years, the war, and boom. He set an ambitious goal: to convey the movement of continental United States during more than a quarter of a century. In the maturity of his powers he has splendidly succeeded. In scope and in multiplicity no comparable achievement exists in our fiction. The Big Money, for instance, gives us not only New York but Detroit, Miami, and Hollywood as well; not only a Minnesota rural community but a Colorado mining town; not only brokers, promoters, publicity men, engineers, movie directors, inventors, senators, and salesmen, but labor leaders, social workers, literary socialists, communist orga nizers, and a counter-revolutionary; not only the insipid daughters of millionaires, hostesses of salons, wealthy widows, and suburban wives, but cabaret entertainers and a movie queen. This scale is maintained throughout the trilogy, and it is supported by a truly amazing fecundity of incident, and by a rushing narrative that is one of the finest technical accomplishments of our time. Mr. Dos Passos does indeed cover the continent from ocean to ocean, from farm to factory, from mine to mill, from proletariat to the master class. And he has mastered his details. He knows the provinces and geographies of America, the rituals and etiquettes, the creeds and superstitions, the avenues of tradition, the lines of force, the flowing shape of things. He has got a greater variety of them into fiction than any other novelist of his time.

1919 was a better novel than The 42nd Parallel, and The Big Money is better still, more in the round, more nearly three-dimensional, more mature and finished. It carries J. Ward Moorehouse, the Ivy Lee image, up to collapse and invalidism; and Richard Savage, his faintly poetic, faintly homosexual understudy, up to a partnership in his firm. Eveline Hutchins works through a series of adulteries to suicide. Ben Compton gets out of Atlanta and is excommunicated from the Party, in whose councils Don Stevens has risen so high that he makes a secret trip to Moscow. G.H. Barrow makes a good thing out of the trades unions. But the main burden of the book is carried by Mary French, a Vassar girl from Colorado who sleeps and weeps her way into the Party and finally into dedication to its purposes; by Margo Dowling, whose career takes her from a vaudeville act to Hollywood by way of a Cuban marriage and the most extensive whoring anyone has yet done in the series; and especially by Charley Anderson, who makes his first appearance since the end of The 42nd Parallel. Charley, whom we had seen as a farmer, garage mechanic, and hobo, has meanwhile been, it now appears, a member of the LaFayette Escadrille and something of an inventor. He patents improvements in airplane design, falls in with promoters and makes several killings on the stock market, boozes his way through his first partnership, through his marriage, and through a number of affairs, ending with Margo Dowling, and finally, bankrupt and burnt out, drives his car in front of an express train while drunk.

Accompanying all this are the rockets and pinwheels of Mr. Dos Passos’s fantasia on the boom years, with the fateful shadow of collapse moving close. There are also a number of genre pieces, such as Margolies, the movie director, who gives the author a field day of caricature: he is done to a turn and he will not be forgotten. And there are—innovations. When Charley Anderson, getting drunk, passes himself off as Charles Edward Holden, the writer, he precipitates the first joke in more than a thousand pages of fiction. Irony Mr. Dos Passos has plentifully provided before, suave or corrosive at need, and a fine sardonic quality runs through most of his work, but this is the first bit of fun. It seems lonely in all that expanse of mechanized behavior. But there is another novelty: in Mary French’s Daddy, in Charley Anderson’s partner Joe Askew, and in the treatment of the death of Charley’s mother one comes upon something recognizable as human emotion. It has not been perceptible in any of the death, violence, or torture that has gone before. Looking back over the trilogy, one can remember only one small incident when any of the characters seemed to be feeling anything at all, the passage in 1919 where the reluctant Sister, during a mountain rain-storm, was putting off Richard Savage to another time. She seemed to be feeling a genuine emotion at the time, which is more than she did when, pregnant and drunk, she started on the airplane ride that killed her. That incident in the rain stuck out as sharply as a metaphysician would in a novel by Ernest Hemingway.

With that realization we come to Mr. Dos Passos’s principal deficiency as a novelist. How far it is also a deficiency of the fiction of mass man is indeterminable. It may be that the rigorous behaviorism of his method is what deprives his characters of intellectual life. It may be that you cannot show the interests and passions of the mind, its reveries, its analyses, its preoccupations, its satisfactions and anxieties, when you limit yourself to exhibiting only motor and verbal behavior. Certainly, no character in the trilogy thinks at all, none of them follows an idea for none has an idea to follow, and no intellectual value affects any of them in the least. But if that complete atrophy of the cerebrum must be charged to technical rigorousness, surely something other than technique is responsible for the atrophy of the emotions. A technique of fiction is only a means of presenting human beings—and human beings feel. But the automatons of Mr. Dos Passos do not feel.

They have no emotions of any kind. It is not only that the more complex pleasures and pains pass them by, so that they are not stimulated by anything esthetic or depressed by anything spiritual—but that all pleasures and pains pass them by. They sleep with each other every page or two and they drink enough liquor to make this the most eloquent temperance tract since The Beautiful and Damned. But they seem to enjoy neither the flesh nor the devil; they invoke both in a nerveless and even bodiless lethargy that looks like an abstract concept being mathematically worked out. They feel no lust and no love, nor any other of the common experiences of mankind. From page 1 of The 42nd Parallel to page 561 of The Big Money there is neither anger nor hate, neither loyalty nor admiration, neither affection nor fellowship, neither jealousy nor envy. Violent stresses are laid on the characters, their ambitions are frustrated, their bodies are mangled, savage cruelties and repulsive deaths are inflicted on them—but though they grimace they do not suffer. Oppress them and they do not cry out, cut them and they do not bleed.

But that is to say that one essential of fiction is slighted, that the atoms blown about the universe by Mr. Dos Passos’s intergalactic winds remain atoms, remain symbols, and do not come alive. And so the reader does not much care what happens to them—interesting, spectacular, kaleidoscopic, pyrotechnic, expertly contrived, a fine movie, but you remain untouched. Compared to Mr. Dos Passos, Mr. Sinclair Lewis, for instance, is an unsophisticated technician—but his people have nervous systems. More life resides in even the minor characters of a Lewis novel than ever gets between the covers of this trilogy. You remember what Fran Dodsworth was doing in 1929—what was Eleanor Stoddard doing a year later? J. Ward Moorehouse is a stylized statement of a conception—George Babbitt is a living man. Or, for an exact parallel, consult the Benda mask of E.R.Bingham in The Big Money and reflect on the hideousness, but the living hideousness, of Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh…. Not Mr. Lewis alone need be invoked. In the six novels o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• THE CRITICAL HERITAGE SERIES
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Three Soldiers (September 1921)
• One Man’s Initiation—1917 (London, October 1920; New York, June 1922)
• Manhattan Transfer (November 1925)
• The 42nd Parallel (February 1930)
• 1919 (March 1932)
• The Big Money (August 1936)
• Adventures of a Young Man (June 1939)
• Number One (March 1943)
• The Grand Design (January 1949)
• Chosen Country (October 1951)
• Midcentury (January 1961)
• Century’s Ebb (August 1975)
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX