Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos

Donald Pizer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781623565985
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria norteamericana

A new appraisal of Dos Passos's work and life, Toward a Modernist Style describes both the central currents in his early work, and his full participation in literary modernism, culminating in his U.S.A. trilogy, as well as the relationship of these currents to those of an especially vibrant period in American expression. Donald Pizer charts the evolution of Dos Passos's artistic sensibility from its largely conventional expression at the start of the 1920s to the radical formal experimentation of U.S.A. at its close. He places this development in Dos Passos's writing in the context of contemporary ideas about art and society. Pizer also looks at the important roles that Dos Passos's expatriation and his relationship with Ernest Hemingway played in his work as well as his efforts as a painter and their relationship to his literary art. Toward a Modernist Style is both an incisive guide to a major American modernist as well as an exploration of the wider currents that created literary modernism in the early twentieth century.

U.S.A.: The Style Perfected

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, 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 miscellaneousness. 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 small-town 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 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 “cross-stitching”).

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 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 IWW-led 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 Nineteen-Nineteen 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.

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 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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Editorial Note and Acknowledgments
• The Early 1920s: Constructing a Style
• U.S.A.: Th e Style Perfected
• The 1920s and Beyond: Friendships and Art
• Plates
• eCopyright