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Satirical social criticism in the novels of John Dos Passos

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Satirical social criticism in the novels of John Dos Passos

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Content Thla dluerUtton has been
microfilmed exactly as received
66-8774
BELKIND, Allen Joyland, 1927-
SATIRICAL SOCIAL CRITICISM IN THE NOVELS OF
JOHN DOS PASSOS.
University of Southern California, Ph.D.
#
1966
Language and Literature, modern
University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan
© Copyright'by
Allen Joyland Belkind
1966
SATIRICAL SOCIAL CRITICISM
IN THE NOVELS OP
JOHN DOS PASSOS
by
Allen Joyland Belkind
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(English)
January 1966
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA "
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 0OOO7
This dissertation, written by
Allen Joyland Belkind
under the direction of his Dissertation Com
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by the Graduate
School, in partial fulfillment of requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Dean
Date January*.. 1.9.6.6.
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
5? *
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. DOS PASSOS AS SATIRIST
1
The Confusion of the Critics
The Meaning of Dos Passos
1
Work
Critical Evidence of Satire
Naturalist or Satirist?
The Critics' Confusion about Naturalism
Dos Passos
1
Own Statements about Satire
II. THE WAR NOVELS 62
Early Disillusionment and Rebellion:
1916-1919
One Man's Initiation—1917
Three Soldiers
III. MANHATTAN TRANSFER ............ 133
From 1919 to 1925
Manhattan Transfar; Dos Passos as
Architect of History
IV. THE U.S.A. TRILOGY
213
A Portrait of Decline and Fall
A Satirist of Manners
U.S.A. as Documentary Satire
The Satiric Narrator
V. SUMMARY
311
BIBLIOGRAPHY
324
li
! CHAPTER I
DOS PASSOS AS SATIRIST
i
i
John Roderigo Dos Passos has achieved distinction in
American literary history as the only American novelist to
attempt to chronicle American cultural trends from the
beginning of the twentieth century to the present time.
However, in the future, when his contribution to American
letters has been thoroughly evaluated, it is possible that
Dos Passos will not be considered one of America's great
social historians or historical novelists, but one of its
most incisive satirists. Although no extensive study has
yet been made of Dos Passos as a satirist, many critics have
!
described his novels as satires or have pointed out particu
lar satiric qualities in them. In addition, Dos Passos, in
his articles, letters, reviews, prefaces, and speeches, has
revealed those personality traits and attitudes, such as.
social alienation and moral idealism, that usually motivate
satirical writing, and has described himself as a satirist.
Furthermore, an examination of Dos Passos' fictional chron-
! .
jicles from One Man's Initiation—1917 (1920) to U.S.A.
(1930-1936) indicates that Dos Passos, like traditional
isatirists before him, wished to shock his audience into
| |
moral awareness by mercilessly exposing corruption in his
i •
own society, that is, in American life.
The Confusion of the Critics
Since there are no definitive critical studies of Dos
Passos* fiction, a confusion exists about the J.iterary
value and literary classification of his work. For example,j
a number of critics who have labeled him a "realist" or
"naturalist""'" in so doing have tended to distort the mean-
2
inq of Dos Passos' novels either by assuming that he in
tended them to be "objective" or "deterministic" or by
attacking or neglecting important aspects of his tone and
style that have diverged from realism. But this study will
^•See pages 33 to 55 of this study.
7
2I use the term to refer to the four categories of
meaning defined by I. A. Richards: sense, feeling, tone,
and intention. See Richards, Practical Criticism (New York,
1929, 1960), pp. 174-175. See pages 7 to 14 of this study.
show that such general terms as realism and naturalism,,
although useful for relating a writer to a literary move
ment, do not satisfactorily explain the main intent of Dos
Passos' novels.
! . -
The contention of this study is that Dos Passos is
primarily a satirist who writes novels in order to communi-
• ^
cate satirical social criticism. Approaching Dos Passos
1
fiction as satire rather than, for example, as historical -
or political commentary to be judged for its accuracy or
!
distortion, provides a means for studying his fiction as i
imaginative literature with its own intrinsic value above
and beyond its value as social or political documentary.
Although the satires of Juvenal, Swift, Pope, and Byron, and '
the satirical novels of Fielding and Thackeray may or may
not provide accurate factual information about ancient Rome
j
and eighteenth- or nineteenth-century England, we continue
to read them because of their literary merit as works of j
art that bring us pleasure and moral insights into humanity.
i
^To avoid excessive length and to devote more space to |
each novel, I shall limit this study to the novels that Dos !
Passos wrote during the first phase of his career (1920- |
1936), focusing primarily upon his two war novels, One Man's
Initiation—1917 and Three Soldiers, Manhattan Transfer, and
the U.S.A. trilogy.
It seems doubtful whether Ods Passos
1
novels can even be
given high merit as well-balanced, accurate accounts of
{social history, although they remain exciting personal com-
I
i
mentaries on the first half of this century. Too many
] I
critics, including Edmund Wilson, Maxwell Geismar, Malcolm !
I 4
Cowley, Bernard DeVoto, and Robert 6. Davis, have declared
Ithat Dos Passos has, in some manner, distorted history. It
happens that distortion is a trick of the satirist, whose
personal animus towards his subject matter overrides any
allegiance he may have toward criteria of realism or objec- !
tivity as an end in itself. As Wayne Booth has commented:
i
There is a radical difference between those who seek
some form of realism as an end in itself . . . and
those for whom realism is a means to other ends. ...
Satirists like Swift and Voltaire, though they may
indulge in some realistic effects for their own sake,
will clearly sacrifice realism whenever their satirical . j
ends require the sacrifice.5 j
I
6 i
These distortions, which Dos Passos himself has admitted,
4
Robert Gorham Davis, John Dos Passos (Minnesota, 1962);
pp. 44-45? Malcolm Cowley, "Washington Wasn't Like That," j
New Republic. CXX (January 17, 1949), 23-24; for references j
to Geismar, DeVoto, and Wilson, see footnotes 11, 30, and
41 in Chapter I of this study.
5The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 57.
6
"Looking Back on U.S.A.New York Times. Section 2,
p. 5, October 25, 1959.
r
5
iresulted first from his hostility toward modern industrial
society and his passionate involvement in radical politics
i
as a means of reforming society. Although never a Communist
jParty member, Dos Passos became known during the 1920*s and
7
11930's as "a radical historian of the class struggle," and
as an important leftist critic of American monopoly capital
ism. If he were just this, hotoever, his fiction would be
1
i
important only to students of American literary history or
8
of the proletarian movement during the depression era. |
But Dos Passos gained critical recognition not only because j
his work was tuned to the crucial social and political is
sues of the 1930"s, but because his novels contained origi- |
nal literary techniques that allowed Dos Passos to project
the whole complex movement and spirit of American life in
fictional form; a feat which astonished the literary world j
J
by its novelty and imaginative power. Manhattan Transfer j
i
• j
*7 •
'Malcolm Cowley, "John Dos Passos: The Poet and the |
World," in Literary Opinion in America. ed. M. D. Zabel j
(New York, 1951), p. 485. - j
' , j
®For an excellent study of the radical movement in j
America as it involved American writers, see Daniel Aaron,
Writers on the Left. New York, 1961. For specific material
on Dos Passos, see pp. 343-353. Aaron refers to Dos Passos
as "a fellow traveler" during the 1920's and early 1930's.
j
(1925), and The 42nd Parallel (1930) were widely read,
9
and
the publication of The Big Money, the last novel of the
U.S.A. trilogy, was a celebrated literary event.*
-0
Although
i
[several critics who reviewed the U.S.A. trilogy questioned
!
i
the accuracy of Dos Passos' drawing of American institutions
and character, his trilogy received their general praise for
its literary merits. For example, Bernard DeVoto objected
Sto "its distortion," but commended U.S.A. as a valuable
i - •
contribution to literature:
Literature [he said] is the richer for an interpreta
tion so sincere and eloquent as this one, [for] its
brilliance, its novelty, and the intensity of its
conviction. . . .
And T. K. Whipple, in his review of the collected edition j
of the trilogy in 1938, found the moral seriousness of the
novel more important than its partisan bias. Whipple j
j
wrote: I
Q '
'V. P. Calverton, the Marxist critic, noted that Dos
Passos was both a popular writer and a significant contem
porary "left-wing" writer. See The Liberation of American |
Literature (New York, 1932), p. 462. j
IQTime. August 10, 1936.
H-Bernard DeVoto, "John Dos Passos: Anatomist of Our
Times," Saturday Review of Literature. XIV (August 8, 1936),
13.
7
_ . . his [Dos Passos
1
] point of view is unmistakably
radical. The class struggle is present as a minor
; theme; the major theme is the vitiation and degrada
tion of character in such a civilization.
1
^
The Meaning of Dos Passos
1
Work
j Since this study concerns the meaning communicated by j
! i
the literary qualities of Dos Passos
1
fiction, it is neces-
jsary to comment further on a method for explicating this
meaning. As I. A. Richards has said: "The original diffi-
i
culty of all reading, the problem of making out the mean-
. 13
ing, is our obvious starting-point." Richards classifies
"meaning" into "Total Meaning" (p. 174), which is "a blend,
i
a combination of several contributory meanings of different
I
types" communicated in a work of art, and "four kinds of
meaning" which make up this blend: sense, feeling, tone,
14 !
and intention. Briefly, Richards defines "sense" as the
12
T. K. Whipple, "Dos Passos and the U.S.A.," Nation.
CXLVI (February 19, 1938), 212. i
|
13
Practical Criticism, p. 174.
^Pages 175-176. "Intention" cannot be separated from
the other three headings, but can be arrived at by examining
these other categories: sense, feeling, and tone. Although
Richards admits that intention is "not on all fours with the
others" and operates through the other functions, he says
that, at times, intention can be inferred from what is left
iinsaid. See pp. 176, 334-335.
i
j 8
I
I collection of "items" (the subject matter) which the writer
wishes to present to the reader for his consideration:
j
"feeling," the writer's "personal flavour or coloring" ex
pressed toward these "items," that is, his attitudes, di
rection, emotional bias, interest; "tone," the resulting
arrangement of words that reflect both the writer's "feel-
lings" toward his subject matter and the role he wishes to
assume in the eyes of his readers; and finally, "intention,"
the reader's appraisal of "what he [the writer] is trying to
i
do," his conscious or unconscious aim or purpose (pp. 175- j
176). |
Although these categories are artificially separated i
i
for purposes of analysis and, in reality, combine and over- |
lap, one might adopt them as a means of defining satire and ;
attempting to judge whether Dos Passos' fiction is satirical.
One might first ask, what is the aim or purpose of the sati-j
rist? Most definitions of satire refer to the satirist as j
some kind of moral idealist who uses language (or other |
_ "|
media) as a weapon to attack the vice and folly he observes '
'
in his society. His aims may be destructive or constructive
or both: he always attempts to criticize or ridicule social
manners or morals, and sometimes wishes to reform them.
Satire is thus distinguished by its moral and social
|criticism conveyed in an ironic manner which might range
|from the comic to the bitter or tragic. Northrop Frye de-
)
fines satire as:
militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, j
and it assumes standards against which the grotesque
and absurd are measured.*5
!
i
i • !
•F. R. Leavis has declared that satire is commonly discussed
|"as the criticism of vice, folly or other aberration, by
16
some kind of reference to positive standards." One stan-
i ...
dard handbook has stressed that satire blends its "critical
attitude with humor and wit to the end that human institu- |
i . i
17
1
tions or humanity may be improved." But another handbook |
:
|
states that satire need not be humorous or funny:
: j
; . . Satire is not necessarily "funny." It may be
bitter, as in Swift's A Modest Proposal. ... a grim
jest, but the fact that Swift can jest gives him a
certain superiority.1® j
i
i
i
15
Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), p. 223.
• . • j
16
"The Irony of Swift," in Discussions of Jonathan j
Swift, ed. John Traugott (Berkeley, 1962), p. 36. Hereafter
cited as Traugott.
17
William Thrall, Addison Hibbard, and C. Hugh Holman, i
A Handbook to Literature (New York, 1960), p. 436.
1®Lillian Hornstein, et ai., The Reader's Companion to
World Literature (New York, 1956), p. 403.
1 . • 10
i
! 19
| Gilbert Highet in The Anatomy of Satire says that
I
|the satirist is motivated by a hidden or disguised moral
|idealism. Highet declares that satire does not usually
| |
compare two real societies: "it compares a real and an |
ideal, or a noble dream with a debased reality" (pp. 159- |
i . (
160). He describes the satirist as being "outwardly dis
illusioned and secretly idealistic" (p. 244). Says Highet:
i •
; * i
Although some are too embittered, others too convulsed i
with laughter, to give voice to their positive beliefs,
all satirists are at heart idealists, (p. 243)
1
• i
According to Highet, the aim of the satirist is to shock hisj
audience out of complacency into protests ;
The satirical writer believes that most people are pur
blind, insensitive, perhaps anaesthetized by custom
and dullness and resignation. He wishes to make them
see the truth—at least that part of the truth which
they habitually ignore (p. 19)
To force men to view their own shortcomings, the satirist I
i
uses uncompromisingly clear language to describe un
pleasant facts and people. . . .He intends to shock
his readers. By compelling them to look at a sight j
they had missed or shunned, he first makes them realize |
the truth, and then moves them to feelings of protest,
(p. 20)
Further relating personality to aim, Highet describes two
19
Princeton, 1962.
11
types of satirists: the optimist and pessimist. The ppti-
j
mist, such as Horace, Highet says, "likes most people, but
i
thinks they are rather blind and foolish" (p. 235). This
: ' i
type wishes to cure people of their ignorance by telling I
i I
the truth with a smile. The pessimist, such as Swift or
Juvenal, "hates most people, or despises them. . . . His
|
laim therefore is not to cure, but to wound, to punish, to
i •
destroy" (p. 235). This "misanthropic satirist" finds life j
"ridiculously contemptible and nauseatingly hateful. His j
! • • !
vision makes his mission" (p. 236). j
According to Highet, "the subject matter and literary
forms of satire" can be infinitely variable. In a form
characterized by realism, such as the novel, Highet says,
the satirist pretends to mirror reality when actually he
distorts it, since he wants to show its ridiculous or re-
|
pellent qualities:
A satirical picture of our world, which shows only human !
beings as its inhabitants, must pretend to be a photo
graph, and in fact be a caricature. It must display j
their more ridiculous and repellent qualities in full
flower, minimize their ability for healthy normal living, !
mock their virtues and exaggerate their vices. ... j
And it must do all this while protesting that it is a
truthful, unbiased, as nearly as possible dispassionate
witness, (p. 190)
Since the role of the satirist is that of public moralist,
12
superior to the corrupt society he depicts, the tone of his
jwork, which Highet calls "the final test for satire," is a
"blend of amusement and contempt" (p. 21). j
In some satirists [says Highet], the amusement far out- |
weighs the contempt. In others it almost disappears; [
it changes into a sour sneer, or a grim smile, . . .
Even if the contempt which the satirist feels may grow
i into furious hatred, he will still express his hatred
in terms suitable ... to scorn, (p. 21)
!
The language used by the satirist to create this tone, says
Highet, might be composed of "cruel and dirty words," "tri
vial and comic words," or "colloquial and anti-literary
words." And if devices are present (which Highet calls
"weapons") such as irony, paradox, antithesis, parody, col- j
loguialism, anticlimax, topicality, obscenity, violence,
; ' i
vividness, and exaggeration, a literary work "is almost
certainly a satire" (p. 18).
^ j-
With this description of satire in mind, if one returnsj
to Richards' four classifications of meaning, one should
expect to find the following characteristics in Dos Passos
1
1
I
fiction. If Dos Passos is to be judged a satirist, one
should discover that the general "intention" of Dos Passos'
work is to attack, to expose, to criticize, to ridicule, to
condemn, and to reform some aspects of the manners and mor
als of the social milieu which is his chosen subject matter
13
or "sense." One should find that the motivation for his
satiric attacks is based upon a variety of negative atti-
Itudes toward his subject matter, "feelings" of hate, bitter-
: • !
ness, indignation, contempt, scorn, grim amusement, and so
Ion. If Dos Passos' subject matter is "realistic," that is,
jif he chooses to deal with the actual facts, manners, or
i
morals of his society, his negative feelings and biases
toward certain aspects of his society should cause him to
slant hi s material toward the unpleasant, the ugly, or the
sordid details of human behavior and to leave out or mini-
i
mize the more normal or healthy aspects. Thus, his depic- j
tion of reality tends to be one-sided. Even though he may ;
present a limited truth with power and conviction, he cannot;
tell the whole truth. Furthermore, one should expect the
satiric effect or style of Dos Passos' portraits to be the ;
result of the role (persona) he assumes in the eyes of his
I
audience. One should discover evidence of dissimulation in j
l
this role and expect Dos Passos to appear as a public moral-!
1
I
ist who is superior, aloof, and detached from his subject
matter and who pretends to portray the whole truth objec- j
i
tively when he is actually passionately involved in attempt
ing to expose the ugly and to shock his audience. Thus one
!
should expect to find that Dos Passos disguises his hatred
14
of his subject matter by pretending to document it in an
["impersonal" manner. But behind Dos Passos' fapade of ob
jectivity, the reader should discover the ironic "tone" of
I ;
the satirist, communicated through the satirist's selection,'
: , I
arrangement and description of his subject matter; his j
vocabulary; his devices; and his irony that reveals the
i '!
satirist's emotions of contempt, scorn, amusement, and in- j
dignation. j
i i
If one finds that Dos Passos' work is satirical, then
: . I
one should, I believe, expect his portrait of reality to be j
one-sided and one should not therefore deprecate his art on !
the basis of its deviation from objectivity or the whole
truth. Dos Passos' view might be distorted when one con
siders both the positive and negative qualities of human
nature or social institutions, and yet it might also present!
a convincing picture of the negative aspects of man and
society. One could ask, I suppose, whether the satirist's j
moral indictment can be justified as serious criticism that j
transcends propaganda; whether he accomplishes his intended |
effect of shocking people into moral awareness; and primari-!
!
! • !
ly, whether his portrait is interesting, original, and imagi
native. As George Orwell has pointed out, one need hot sub-
i
*
scribe to an author's moral and social beliefs to feel that
15
[his work of art is powerful. Citing Jonathan Swift's mor-
j I
jdant attacks on human depravity in Book IV of Gulliver's
i
'Travels. Orwell says:
| The aim, as usual, is to humiliate Man by reminding him j
that he is weak and ridiculous, and above all that he ;
| stinks.. . . . The political expression of such an out-
| look must be either reactionary or nihilistic, because
the person who holds it will want to prevent Society
from developing in some direction in which his pessi
mism may be cheated.
Although politically and morally aligned against Swift's
anti-Utopian and misanthropic ideas, Orwell declares that j
! ' I
i i
he admires the Dean "with least reserve" and says he can
never tire of Gulliver's Travels. The best books of any
one age, says Orweliy have always been written from several :
different viewpoints representing progressive and reaction- !
|
ary ideas, "some of them palpably more false than others" |
21 !
(p. 91). In so far as a "writer is a propagandist" says j
PO i
^""Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulli
ver 's Travels
T
" in Traugott, p. 89. For a contrary view
that attempts to prove that Swift was not a misanthropist,
see Samuel Monk, "The Pride of Lemuel Gulliver," Sewanee
Review. LXIII (1955), 48-71.
^iTraugott, p. 91. Granville Hicks says in "Literature
and Revolution," Cargill and Nelson, eds., Contemporary
Trends (New York, 1949): "... Any work of literature pre
sents some sort of world attitude and . . . must be judged
in terms of the author's world attitude and his success in
Communicating it" (p. 561).
16
Orwell, the most one can expect of him is conviction and
sanity. Swift, he says, possessed:
]
a terrible intensity of vision, capable of picking out
a single hidden truth and then magnifying it and dis
torting it. The durability of Gulliver's Travels goes
j to show that, if the force of belief is behind it, a
i world-view which only just passes the test of sanity is
sufficient to produce a great work of art. (Traugott,
p. 91) -
Critical Evidence of Satire
i
l
Before I examine Dos Passos' novels, I should first
i
like to survey a variety of critical opinion about his work
to show that many critics have called Dos Passos a satirist j
i
or have found satiric qualities in his work. I shall also '
review some evidence of tonal imperceptivity on the part of j
critics who have presupposed Dos Passos to be a naturalist. |
John Chamberlain, who has written a short biography of
22
Dos Passos and several reviews of his work, has described |
i
Dos Passos' novels as satires. In his review of The 42nd j
i
Parallel entitled "John Dos Passos Satirizes America 'on
9
\
: " ' 1
the Hake,"' Chamberlain says: j
22
"John Dos Passos," Saturday Review of Literature - XX
(June 3, 1939), 3-4, 15-16. This biography was later en
larged and published as a pamphlet entitled John Dos Passos:
A Biographical and Critical Study (New York, 1939), 20 pp.
17
This novel is a satire on the tremendous haphazardness
of life in the expansionist America we all have known,
The America which came into birth with the defeat of
Jefferson's dream of an agricultural democracy. . . .^
3
j
f
iChaniberlain declares that the novel satirizes:
i
! ... an America filled with people with vague hopes of
| success—no matter what success. ... Mr. Dos Passos
has "interpreted" his people in terms of irony to em
phasize aimlessness. . . . [the novel] remains in ex- i
tenuation, very effective social castigation.^ !
Horace Gregory, in his review of the U.S.A. trilogy entitled
i
|
"Dos Passos Completes His Modern Trilogy: Eloquent and
1
Incisive Satire Displayed in Scenario Style," says of Dos
i i
Passos:
| ' • ' j
. . .he, more than any other living American writer,
has exposed to public satire those peculiar contra- j
dictions of our poverty in the midst of plenty.
25
: !
In his review, Gregory briefly describes some of the satiri
cal qualities of the U.S.A. trilogy, such as its humor and
irony and its technique of understatement:
23
New York Times Book Review. March 2, 1930, p. 5.
24p
age
5, see also Chamberlain's review of 1919
T
the
Second novel of the U.S.A. trilogy, in the New York Times
Book Review. March 13, 1932, p. 2. Chamberlain refers to
1919 as "a news novel" and "a satire on expansionist . . .
raffish and vulgar America. ..."
25
New York Herald Tribune Bonks. August 9, 1936, pp.
1-2.
18
... only the most "unresponsive reader would fail to
appreciate the humor which is the force behind the
keen stroke of Mr. Dos Passos' irony. . . . [his char
acters] sure both comic and terrifying and . . . are
given the semblance of reality through understatement.
| (p. 1)
Daniel Aaron, who, in Writers on the Left, attempts to
jdisentangle Dos Passos
1
strange political career that has
i ' .
moved from radicalism to conservatism, speaks of Dos Passos
|as a satirist who was possibly indebted to the work of
I
George Grosz, the caricaturist:
i
Discovering the drawings of George Grosz at this time
[1918] seemed to Dos Passos like "finding a new weapon"
or "hearing a well-imagined string of cusswords." They
mirrored the corruption that Dos Passos was setting
down in words, and he may very well have patterned his
corrosive satire after Grosz's visual images.^ i
Max Lerner has called Dos Passos "The most considerable
and serious of our American writers," and has described the !
27
satiric effects of his work. Lerner characterizes Dos
2
(New York, 1961), p. 349. Aaron explains Dos Passos
1
involvement and later disillusionment with radicalism in
this manner: "... Dos Passos never found any form of
collectivism congenial. And when the [Communist] Party,
speaking for the oppressed, became itself in his eyes an
agency of the oppressor, he repudiated it" (p. 353). At
first, Big Business was the oppressor, then the communists,
later The New Deal, and finally, "universal Bureaucracy."
Dos Passos, says Aaron, has always fought for the underdog
against bigness.
27
"The America of John Dos Passos," Nation. CXLIII
19
•
Passos as a writer with "an acid intelligence" who had
attempted:
! to apply a novelist's scalpel to murder on an organized
scale in "Three Soldiers" and to the entire anatomy of
a diseased social system in the more firmly wrought
! novels that have followed.^8
Commenting on 1919
r
the second volume of the U.S.A. trilogy,!
I '
Lerner describes its ironic and moral qualities:
It is a study in individual rootlessness and group
! hysteria, and it is only at the end of the book that ...
the magnificent lyric on the Unknown Soldier hurtles
us back ironically into a consciousness of what price
we had paid as a culture for the dalliance of our
Eleanor Stoddards and our J. Ward Moorehouses and our
Eveline Hutchinses in Paris, (p. 187)
29 !
Lerner points out the emotional intensity (another quality
!
. ' i
! I
[found in satire) Of The Big Money a I
(August 15, 1936), 187-188.
28page 187. Dos Passos, in an article on George Grosz
published the next month after,Lerner's review, described
the aims of the satirist, and Grosz
1
s in particular, in
similar medical images. "The satirist in words or in visual
images," said Dos Passos, "is the doctor who comes with his
sharp and sterile instruments to lance the focuses of dead
matter that continually impede the growth of intelligence."
&ee Esquire. VI (September, 1936), 131.
29p
#
Leavis in "The Irony of Swift" has said of
Swift: "He is distinguished by the intensity of his feel
ings, not by insight into them, and he certainly does not
impress us as a mind in possession of its experience"
(Traugott, p. 43).
... in the last book Dos Passos has written with a *
! passion that welds his material together as never
before. The improved cunning of his hand is governed
I by a real heat of the brain, (p. 188)
|
Calling Dos Passos "one of the few novelists writing today
who are truly literate," Lerner describes Dos Passos as a
satirist:
I
! He is part of the America that he depicts, and he be
stows upon the portrait that desperate tenderness that
can only flow from love and solicitude turned into
satire. . . . he is the Veblen of American fiction.
| (p. 188)
!
J
Maxwell Geismar, who has referred several times to j
AM
satiric qualities in Dos Passos
1
novels, points out the j
: I
intellectual preconceptions and ideals that probably caused j
Dos Passos to diverge from realism, and cites the acerbity i
31
and distortion in his novels. Geismar seems to stumble
on the idea that Dos Passos might use realistic subject j
matter and yet not be a realist in the treatment of his j
subject matter. Calling Dos Passos "a writer obsessed by
demons in the shape of ideas" (p. 82), Geismar says:
In a sense, Dos Passos has never been a realist at all—
30
Writers in Crisis (New York, 1942), pp. 89-139.
3lAmeriean Moderns (New York, 1958), pp. 65-90.
21
in the sense of Dreiser, say. He has been a sort of
romantic visionary, and he has always to some degree
| lacked the real base of a novelist's craft: an inter-
! est in people as such, a knowledge of possible experi
ence, a curiosity about life simply as life. (p. 79)
Although the excitement of the U.S.A. trilogy was generated
!
H
by the brilliance of its creator's historical and philo
sophical world," says Geismar, no such gripping conflict as
the one between the worlds of illusion and reality: "the
Marxian dream" and "the dragon of capitalism" (p. 79) has
existed in Dos Passos
1
later novels which are "both dis- j
I !
torted as history and lacking in essential literary and
i i
32 . i
human values." In his backward glance at U.S.A.. Geismar j
| • i
declares that Dos Passos "showed his early gift. . . . as a |
: i
satirist of the upper classes" (p. 66), and that The Big
i I
Money, the last novel of the trilogy, is also "the most j
acerbic novel in twentieth-century American prose fiction"
j I
(p. 73). |
32p
a
ge 78. In this passage Geismar says of Dos Passos'
portrait of Washington during the New Deal: "If the Woodrow
Wilson of Dos Passos' 1919 was a warped and bitter Presi
dent, the F.D.R. of The Grand Design is merely a voice on
the telephone, a tilted chin, a smile. [Geismar does not
use the word "caricature."] In this sense the novel is
actually not a picture of the New Deal but of New Deal
Washington at its worst.
r
It shows us all the dreadful
machinery of official power but never the results. It is a
morality play without a moral."
22
John Wrenn in his recent book has defined Dos Passos'
I
jwork in general as "criticism," and has pointed out its
I
satiric qualities, implying that Dos Passos is a kind of
33
satirist manque. Manhattan Transfer. Wrenn says, is a
"tremendous satire of the small souls in an American metro
polis" (p. 94), and Dos Passos' method of satirically de
stroying stereotypes in U.S.A. produces a "grin of pain" in
the reader (p. 161). But in contrast to Horace Gregory's
remark that "only the most unresponsive reader would fail
to appreciate the humor which is the force behind the keen
34 «
stroke of Mr. Dos Passos' irony," Wrenn feels that Dos
Passos lacks the humor to qualify as a "true" satirist:
To some readers, doubtless, it is too bad that Dos
Passos is not more nearly the satirist that he is. •
Perhaps a leavening of humor that could change a
grimace to a grin would make him more palatable to
both readers and critics. . . .He has always been
too close to his materials, too involved personally,
to be able to attain the special kind of detachment
demanded of the satirist. Like Swift indeed, he
heartily loves John, Peter, Thomas, and so forth, but
he can by no means manage a principal hate and detesta
tion for that animal called man. (pp. 161-162)
It is not clear what "more nearly the satirist" means. In
33
John Dos Passos (New Haven, 1961), Twayne Paperback,
pp. 99-107, 161-166.
i
3
4see footnote 25.
Jhis belief that "humor" would improve Dos Passos' satire,
!
jWrenn perhaps confuses humor with wit, and comedy with
35
jsatire. Humor is more closely identified with comedy and
t
|
lis usually convivial and constructive with no taste of
jbitterness; wit is more closely associated with satire and
limplies an intellectual quickness of mind that is more like-
i ofi
ly to be hostile and destructive in its intent. As Gil-
|. •
bert Highet informs us, satire need not contain humor.
Also, the satirist ia "involved personally"; he may feign
detachment, but he is covertly indignant about the human
behavior he observes. Therefore, if there is "humor" in
his work, it is usually blended with bitterness and scorn.
37
Dos Passos is adept at both farcical humor and at "comic" i
satire that is grimly funny; that is, he might deflate a j
public figure into a caricature that blends the comic with j
35
Thrall, Hibbard, and Holman, A Handbook to Litera
ture, p. 510. Pages 509-510 deal with some differences
between "wit" and "humor."
36
The American College Dictionary (New York, 1961), p.
589.
^See the episode in which Doc Bingham seduces Mrs.
Kovack and is caught by her husband, the farmer. U.S.A.
(New York, 1937), I, 50-54. Modern Library edition.
24
38
the sinister or grotesque.
In his analysis of U.S.A.. Wrenn describes the "method"
jof the trilogy as tragedy that includes both naturalism and
j
satire:
i
I
Rather than satire—or rather including the satire and
| including his naturalism—Dos Passos' method in U.S.A.
is that of tragedy, a method based on an ironic atti-
i tude toward the past. U.S.A. is a great agglomerate
| tragic history, (p. 162)
i
Wrenn says that the "protagonist" of the tragedy is "the
real U.S.A. in the first third of the twentieth century,"
and that "its tragic characters are the real subjects of j
the biographies" (p. 162). The irony, Wrenn says, results
i i
from the comparison between our country's ideals of "demo- j
cratic individualism and reliance on the future" and its
"apparent downfall" brought on by its "tragic flaws" of "a
warped interpretation of [the pursuit of] happiness in
purely material terms" (p. 162). The tragic flaws of our ;
i
t
country are symbolized, Wrenn says, by its rejection of j
"its best men" (Bourne, Veblen, etc.) and by its failures j
"and the equivalent flaws" of "its worst men" such as
Bryan, Wilson, the Morgans, Insull, and others depicted in
i
38
See Dos Passos
1
caricature of J. Pierpont Morgan in
U.S.A.. II, 337-340.
25
the biographies (p. 162).
As Wrenn says, there exist tragic overtones in Dos
j
Passos' depiction of the failure of the U.S.A. to realize
its ideal democratic possibilities, but I believe Dos
i '
Passos' attitude toward the "real U.S.A." is basically
I
satirical, ranging from the comic to the bitterly pessimis-
i •
tic and tragic. Calling its basic method "tragedy" fails
to explain Dos Passos' hostility directed at the "real
'U.S.A.," which becomes an "antagonist" rather than a "pro-
; " -I
tagonist." Also, there exists a contradiction in Wrenn's
: . I
statement that the novel's "tragic characters are the real
i
i
subjects of the biographies" and Wrenn's statement that
Bryan, Wilson, Morgan, and Insull are this country's "worst i
; i
men." I do not believe that Dos Passos' capitalists and
ambitious politicians are depicted with any of the redeeming]
qualities found in tragic figures; from Dos Passos' point ofj
view their prominence is no guarantee of greatness. Rather j
than flawed tragic heroes, these men become satiric carica
tures, and their brief histories are narrated in a tone of
s
. i
39
1
disdainful superiority and ironic contempt. Although
3^Dos Passos uses various satiric methods to deflate
jbhe stature of these men, such as his reduction-compression
jbechnique that leaves out all but ludicrous traits which are
jBourne, Debs, Haywood, La Follette, Reed, Veblen, Wright,
i
land other radicals, idealists^ and individualists are tragi-
! •
cally depicted as martyred heroes, the prevalent tone o£
j
their biographies is satiric irony directed at the corrupt ;
i |
•"real U.S.A." that has frustrated the ideals of these men.
The irony in U.S.A.
T
as I will show, results from the dis
crepancy between the satirist's idealistic vision of the
j
possible and his slanted depiction of the actual; and the
f
v
irony is sometimes comic and sometimes bitter and tragic. j
More useful, from our point of view, are the qualities that
' . I
Wrenn finds in Dos Passos' novels identifiable with satire: I
i
• t
the "grin of pain" experienced by the reader (p. 161); the j
attack on "complacency" (p. 163); "scorn" (p. 164); "hatred"!
i
(p. 163); and the serious educative purpose of Dos Passos'
t
fiction (p. 162). i
I
!
Other critical comments on Dos Passos by Bernard
DeVoto, Edmund Wilson, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Lionel Trilling!
exaggerated by repetition and colloquialism. J. P. Morgan
becomes "the boss croupier of Wall Street" who "was famous
for his few words, Yes and No, and for . . . that special
gesture of the arm that meant, What do I get out -of it?"
Andrew Carnegie, ironically labeled "prince of Peace," is
depicted as a complete materialist and pragmatist who "be
lieved in steel" and Who, while donating money to promote
peace, made millions in profits from war. See pp. 263-292
of this study.
27
I lend further support to the idea that Dos Passos is a
satirist. These critics find an abundance of distortion,
i ""
hatred, contempt, and moral indignation in Dos Passos
1
fic-
!
i
tion. DeVoto cites the distortion and moral indignation
j
found in U.S.A.1
I
i
i
!
And that map-survey [of the United States]—how accurate
is it? . . . Well not very. It is a mature interpreta
tion of our times. . . . marshalling its themes to an
indictment, a judgment, and even an obsequy. And yet
... life in the United States . . . has not been so
i dreary as all that.
40
\ • I
Edmund Wilson, like DeVoto, finds Dos Passos
1
portrait j
j
of American life one-sidedly ugly, but thinks Dos Passos' j
:
' i
idealism and bitterness about the state of the country dur- i
ing the boom period of the 1920's has made his work signifi-l
!
' j
cant. In his review of Manhattan Transfer. Wilson says:
Now the life of middle-class America, even under capi- j
talism and even in a city like New York, is not so un- j
attractive as Dos Pas&os makes it—no human life under !
any conditions can ever have been so unattractive.
41
i
40,1
John Dos Passos: Anatomist of Our Times," Saturday j
Review of Literature. XIV (August 8, 1936), 13. DeVoto also
alludes to Dos Passos
1
use of caricature: "There are also a
number of genre pieces, such as Margolies, the movie direc
tor, who gives the author a field day of caricature ..."
(p. 13).
41
Shores of Light (New York, 1952), p. 432. This is a
collection of Wilson's reviews in The New Republic during
the 1920*s and 1930'.s.
28
Wilson attributes Dos Passos
1
"repulsive" portrait of the
city to the author's "infatuation with the social revolu
tion," but asks:
i
}
Might it not ... be possible . . . for a writer to
j hold Dos Passos' political opinions and yet not depict
i our middle-class republic as a place where no birds
sing, no flowers bloom and where the very air is almost
unbreathable? (p. 433)
Wilson stresses that when an intelligent man and good artist
isuch as Dos Passos:
i
I r—
allows his bias so to falsify his picture of life . . .
we begin to guess some stubborn sentimentalism at the
bottom of the whole thing, some deeply buried streak
of hysteria of which is misapplied resentments repre
sent the aggressive side. (p. 433)
I
One might suggest, at this point, that these emotional |
! i
qualities that Wilson cites, such as "stubborn sentimental- j
ism" and "deeply buried streak of hysteria," are the intense,
: j
destructive emotions of the satirist. Wilson, however, j
admires the moral idealism in Dos Passos' work, and says
that it is
his [Dos Passos*] relentless reiteration of his convic
tion that there is something lacking, something wrong,
in America—as well as his insistence on the importance
of America'—that gives his work its validity and power,
(p. 434)
|
I Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher and novelist,
29
also interprets Dos Passos' fictional world as a distorted
42
image of reality. According to Sartre, who has regarded
I
Dos Passos "as the greatest writer of our time" (p. 96),
Dos Passos deliberately created his frozen, determined
.
world of past history filled with futile, empty lives in
order to arouse the reader's awareness of his freedom and
his moral responsibility to protest against his own slug-
i •
gish complacency. Mentioning Dos Passos
1
trick of "dis- j
| 43
torting mirrors," Sartre says that Dos Passos has "done
j
everything possible to make his novel seem a mere reflec-
i j
Ition" of reality, but that "his art is not gratuitous; he
; i
i • • I
wants to prove something" (p. 88). Dos Passos, he says, j
very consciously uses his "absurd and insistent illusion to j
l
44 !
impel us to revolt." Dos Passos
1
work, says Sartre, re
awakens the reader who is usually emotionally sluggish and
indifferent to life:
4
2
"John jjog passos and '1919,"' in. Literary Essavs (New
{
York, 1957), trans. Annette Michelson^ pp. 88-96.
43page gg
#
Gilbert Highet has said of Gulliver's Trav
els; "Yet it is quite clear to most readers that Gulliver
is not really voyaging to different countries, but looking
at his own society through distorting lenses." Anatomy of
Satire, p. 159.
44pag
e
89. Highet has said that the satirist wishes to
j"shock his readers" into "feelings of protest" (p. 20).
30
He arouses indignation in people who never get indig
nant, he frightens people who fear nothing. . . . Dos
| Passos' hate, despair, and lofty contempt are real.
But that is precisely why his world is not real? it is
| a created object, (p. 89)
|
| ( . j
Through his "behaviorist style" (p. 93), his "journalistic
technique" (p. 95), and his "statistical determinism" (p.
95), Sartre says, Dos Passos forces the reader to compare
the moral choices still available to him with the petrified
jdestinies of fictional characters on the other side of the
i
mirror:
With the opening lines of his book, Dos Passos settles
down into death. The lives he tells about are all
closed in on themselves. ... We constantly have the
feeling that these vague, human lives are destinies. >
Our own past is hot at all like this. There is not
one of our acts whose meaning and value we cannot still
transform even now. (p. 92) j
Sartre implies that Dos Passos is both a moralist and propa-j
; I
gandist, who wishes the reader to rebel not only against his
own complacency but against society's complacency:
i
It is this unrelieved stifling that Dos Passos wanted
to express. In capitalist society, men do not have
lives, they have only destinies. He never says this,
but he makes it felt throughout. He expresses it dis
creetly, cautiously, until we feel like smashing our
destinies. We have become rebels; he has achieved his
purpose.45
^
5
Page 92. These implications of radical social reform
31
Sartre implies that Dos Passos is a determinist in
i 46
{method, not in philosophy, because Dos Passos uses the
j
methodof "statistical determinism" to express his hatred
i
of the system and to induce moral and social reform. Lionel
j
Trilling has also described Dos Passos
1
method as determin
istic, but doubts whether Dos Passos
1
fiction up to U.S.A.
reflects an attitude of philosophical determinism. Trilling
that Sartre discovered in Dos Passos
1
fiction were antic
ipated by Granville Hicks, who appraised Dos Passos* work up
jto 1932 from a Marxist point of view. Hicks said that Dos
Passos "has confronted every aspect, no matter how hideous, !
of contemporary life. . . .he has cast his lot with those i
who stay and fight, not with those who run away. His books j
show that as early as 1920 ... he was contemplating the
possibility of changing the social order." See "Dos Passos'!
Gifts." New Republic. LXVII (June 24, 1931), 157-158. V. F.
Calverton in his Marxian interpretation of American letters,
The Liberation of American Literature (New York. 1932), said
Of Dos Passos: "Convinced that American society cannot con
tinue in its present capitalistic form, Dos Passos believes
that the only way out is through a social revolution which
will emancipate the workers from their present state of sub-j
jection to the industrialists" (p. 462). Dos Passos, he i
said, "stirred the American reading public as well as the j
critics from a state of moral lethargy into one of new real
ization" (p. 463). However, Edmund Wilson, in his essay,
"Marxism and Literature," said that Marxist critics such as
Hicks built up "the myth" of "Dos Passos the Communist," al
though Dos Passos had publicly announced in the New Republic
1(1930) that he was a "middle-class liberal." The Marxists
were "finally compelled to repudiate" this myth because of
Dos Passos
1
later negative "attitude toward events in Rus
sia," says Wilson. See Zabel, Literary Opinion in America,
p. 701.
! 46j
0
hn Wrenn has referred to Manhattan Transfer as
"deterministic only in method." John Dos Passos—p—123-—_
32
says:
!
i It has always seemed to me that only a misreading of
| Dos Passos' previous work could allow the notion . . .
that Dos Passos was committed to the assumptions of
a simple and rather mechanical determinism.
47
i •
t
{And in an essay on U.S.A.
T
Trilling characterizes Dos Passos
48
as a moralist rather than a determihist. Calling U.S.A.
"The most important American novel of the decade" (p. 26),
Trilling says that Dos Passos is not just a social histor-
j
ian, but a moral chronicler of American life who has regis
tered its moral disintegration. If Dos Passos is a social
j j
•historian, Trilling declares, "he is that in order to be a j
! I
more complete moralist" (p. 29); and that there is no doubt j
'about Dos Passos
1
"attitude toward the dominant forces of j
i i
!our times he hates them" (p. 27). Reflecting Dos Passos
1
I
concern with "personal morality," his characters, says
Trilling, choose to "sin against themselves" and thereby
reap the "wages of sin" (p. 31) in the death of the spirit.
The social breakdown depicted in U.S.A.
T
he says, is the
i
47i«Determinist and Mystic." Kenyon Review. II (Winter .
1940), 94-97.
48
"The America of John Dos Passos," Partisan Review.
IV (April 1938), 26-32.
33
49
result of "moral degeneration through moral choice."
Naturalist or Satirist?
These statements by Sartre and Trilling about Dos
Passos' deterministic method pose the question whether Dos
Passos can justifiably be labeled a naturalist. For, along
with this critical testimony about Dos Passos' hatred for
icontemporary American culture during.the post-war boom of
! . .
the 1920's, Dos Passos
1
association with the radical move-
1 .«-•
ment, his vision of ideal democracy, his aims of moral and
i
'social reform, and his irony and satire, many critics have
called Dos Passos a naturalist or determinist. There is
justification for this label only if one defines naturalism
jbroadly enough to include it within the framework of Dos
jPassos' critical attitude toward society and his implied aim!
49page 29. Charles C. Walcutt in his book American
Literary Naturalisms A Divided Stream (Minneapolis, 1956)
has said of Dos Passos
1
"chaotic" picture of American life
in U.S.A.: "... it is, finally a moral deterioration that
Dos Passos depicts" (p. 287). And Malcolm Cowley has said
Of Dos Passos
1
View of society: ". . .we get the impres
sion that society is stupid and all-powerful and fundamen
tally evil. Individuals ought to oppose it, but if they do
so they are doomed." Says Cowley: "To Dos Passos the world
seems so vicious that any compromise with its standards
turns a hero into a villain." See "Poet and the World,"
in Zabel, pp. 491-492.
I '
!
34
of reforming it. But if the term naturalist indicates a
writer who believes wholly in philosophic determinism, that
!
|is, who believes man lacks freedom of moral choice and is
!
simply a product of biological and environmental forces, a
j
writer who depicts society from the detached and amoral
viewpoint of a scientist, without motives of reform, then
!
iDos Passos cannot be defined as a naturalist. Critics have
frequently called Dos Passos a naturalist on the basis of
jgeneralities, such as his concern with chronicling social
ihistory, his "type" characters, his "realistic" subject
matter, his apparent philosophy of pessimistic determinism, j
| j
and his supposedly "clinically detached" depiction of his j
characters. Surprisingly, they overlook specific details j
!
i
j • i
iof "tone" that I have mentioned and that other critics have j
pointed out. j
i i
Naturalism is a useful term to historically differen- |
tiate one group of writers such as Crane, Norris, Dreiser, !
<• i
London, Sinclair, and others, who revolted against the re- j
strictions of "the genteel tradition," who were influenced j
i
by the discoveries in the biological and social sciences
and the pronouncements of Zola, and who wished their novels
to expose, critically and candidly, the aspects of American
jlife not previously permitted in fiction—the sordid rather
. . , 35
50
than the "smiling aspects." But the term is a hindrance
rather than a help in explaining individual differences be
tween authors of one "school" and particularly the stylistic
i
i
individuality of Dos Passos. It explains general similari
ties, but not specific differences of intention, sense,
feeling, and tone--to use.I. A. Richards' categories.
5
* For
example, Henry Steele Commager cites the difference between
ithe characterization of Dreiser and Dos Passos:
i ... it is no less than startling to contrast Van
Harrington, Hugh Paret, and Frank Cowperwood with Dos
| Passos* representatives of Big Business, J. Ward Moore-
house and Charley Anderson. For those earlier titans
of finance and of industry are amoral and ruthless, !
but they are never contemptible or obscene. . . . and I
as for the fabulous Cowperwood, Dreiser can scarcely ;
conceal his admiration for the man who was, after all, i
merely obeying those laws of nature which Darwin and j
Nietzsche had deciphered. But Anderson and Moorehouse |
have no redeeming qualities, nor is their creator
troubled for a moment by any twinges of sympathy for
them. They inspire disgust and justify it. They are
Ring Lardner characters who, according to their ruined
SOwilliam Dean Howells in his essay "Criticism and
Fiction" (1891) attacked those novelists who dealt with the
jsensational, sordid, or sensual aspects of life, because he
believed that this subject matter did not faithfully reflect
the wholesome average American life. Howells stated that
. . . the more smiling aspects of life . . . are the more
American." See Bradley, Beatty, and Long, The American
Tradition in Literature (New York, 1962), rev. ed., p. 1037.
5
*See pp. 7 and 8 of this study.
36
standards, make good, and their success is the blighted
success of Lardner's dopes.52
j
One observes in this passage the different attitudes of two
i
so-called naturalists toward "realistic" subject matter.
| Both writers present an environment in which values are
j
amoral and relativistic; but Dreiser is content to describe
the amorality, whereas Dos Passos satirically attacks it.
The Critics' Confusion about flatUEalifim
.
To cite the inadequacy of the term naturalism in ex
plaining the particular "meaning" of Dos Passos' fiction, I
shall examine the statements of some critics who have
labeled him a naturalist. Not only do their definitions of
naturalism vary, but their preconception of Dos Passos as a
naturalist seems to make them imperceptive of the non-
naturalistic qualities of Dos Passos' work.
* |
j
I
52
The American Mind (New Haven, 1950, 1959), pp. 270- j
271. It is interesting, I think, that Dos Passos, although j
acknowledging a debt to Dreiser, called Dreiser a proletar
ian writer, not a naturalist. In a questionnaire published
in Modern Quarterly,. VI (Summer 1932), 12, Dos Passos said:
"Theodore Dreiser is, and has been for years a great Ameri
can proletarian writer." He also included Jack London,
Sherwood Anderson, and Walt Whitman ("a hell of a lot more
revolutionary than any Russian poet I've heard of") under
that category. See also Wrenn, John Dos Passos
T
p. 106.
37
Malcolm Cowley's essay on naturalism is ^n interesting
example of an attempt to apply a definition both to a theory
[
and to deviations from that theory. Cowley, in his essay
i
! 53
"The Natural History of Naturalism," defines the philo
sophic attitudes, methods, and subject matter of the natur-
jalist school of writers, and calls Dos Passos' novels Man-
I • '
jhattan Transfer and U.S.A. "predominantly naturalistic" (p.
i • • . .
384), although he does not apply his generalizations to
these novels.
Naturalism [says Cowley] has been defined in two words
as pessimistic determinism and the definition is true |
~ so far as it goes. The naturalistic writers were all j
determinists in that they believed in the omnipotence
of abstract forces. They were pessimists so far as |
they believed that men and women were absolutely in- j
capable of shaping their own destinies, (p. 370)
After explaining the theoretical formulations of the natur- j
alists, Cowley points out that their objective point of viewj
toward their material "was sometimes a pretense that de
ceived themselves before it deceived others" (p. 380). For
example, Frank Norris, in his literary theory, echoed Zola,
who had "defined the novel as a scientific experiment; its
purpose [being] ... to demonstrate the behavior of given
53
in John w. Aidridge, Critiques and Essays on Modern
Fiction 1920-1951 (New York, 1952), pp. 370-387.
38
characters in a given situation" (p. 380). Norris advanced
a similar doctrine:
that no one could be a vnriter until he could regard life
and people . . . from the objective point of view—
until he could remain detached, outside, maintain the
unswerving attitude of the observer, (p. 380)
But Norris, Crane, Dreiser, Sinclair, London, and others,
Cowley says, wrote their own personal conflicts and obses
sions into their works, and it was this individual involve-
i
ment that made their novels interesting: j
Indeed, there is personal grief and fury and bewilder
ment in all the most impressive naturalistic novels. j
They are at their best, not when they are scientific
or objective, in accordance with their own theories,
but when they are least naturalistic, most personal
and lyrical, (p. 381)
Other divergencies from scientific detachment, Cowley
states, were the result of the romantic temperaments of
l
!
these writers and their sense of morality:
. . . most of the naturalists are tender-minded. The
sense of moral fitness is strong in them; they believe
in their hearts that nature should be kind, that virtue
should be rewarded on earth, that men should control
their own destinies. More than other writers, they are
wounded by ugliness and injustice, but they will not
close their eyes to either; indeed, they often give the
impression of seeking out ugliness and injustice in
order to be wounded again and again.
The weakness of Cowley's analysis of naturalism is that
i
i
t
39
it fails to characterize the resulting tone and style of
these naturalistic novels that diverged from objectivity as
ja result of each writer's personal attitudes toward his
subject matter. One example of this weakness is Cowley's
|
description of the shocking and hostile effects of Sinclair
{Lewis's Babbitt as naturalistic:
j
i
| Literary naturalism. . . . depends for too many of its
| effects on shocking the sensibilities of its readers
and smashing their illusions. It always becomes a
| threat to the self-esteem of the propertied classes.
Babbittj for example, is naturalistic in its hostile
treatment of American businessmen, (p. 381)
: I
: i
Cowley here confuses subject matter with tone. The subject j
I
matter of *-+• may be realistic or naturalistic, but
i
Lewis's attitude toward the American businessman is satiri- j
|
cal. Cowley and other critics using the term naturalism in !
this way tend to deny themselves further investigation of j
particular styles and effects by including these as part of j
i
i
the naturalistic method. These critics fail to examine, forj
;
example, the
:
rhetorical techniques used by Lewis and other
satirists: caricature, burlesque, parody, irony, exaggera
tion, distortion, and so on.
Charles C. Walcutt testifies that the term naturalism
can be misleading when used indiscriminately:
40
The word naturalistic labels a philosophy fairly ade
quately, but by the time we have passed through the
varieties of social and ethical application that have
been drawn from it and listed the forms, styles, and
I motifs that it has evoked, we dare speak of the "natur-
; alistic" novel only with the reservations implied by
j quotation marks. The significant form of a novel can-
j not be deduced from the fact that its writer is a
| philosophical naturalist, for naturalism does not ac
count for spirit, imagination, and personality. A
work that was perfectly controlled by the theory of
materialistic determinism would not be a novel but a
report.54
Thus, there "cannot be a naturalistic style," says Walcutt;
writers oriented toward naturalism produce various styles:
Naturalistic styles cannot be defined in any exclusive
sense. They can be listed, perhaps, as documentary,
satiric, impressionistic. and sensational; but these
are not very accurate terms for describihg styles, and
they are certainly not exclusive.55 j
The limitation of Cowley's essay is that it is committed to
grouping particular differences under the same general cate-j
gory of naturalism. Although Cowley distinguishes between
54
Amsrigfln Literacy Naturalism; A Divided Stream
(Minneapolis, 1956), p. 23.
55j would tend to disagree with Walcutt*s use of these
;
terms to describe styles. I would call "documentary" and
"impressionistic" methods or techniques, and "satiric" and
"sensational" as effects produced on the reader. One, for
example, can produce a satiric effect "impressionistically,"
depending on the writer's attitude toward and selection of
Isubject matter.
41
naturalism as theory and so-called naturalistic novelists
whose novels diverge from this theory, he still labels their
|individually different novels that have various styles,
j _
effects, and aims as "the most impressive naturalistic
!
novels." The non-naturalistic qualities of these novels
sure neglected. Cowley himself admits that literary natural
ism
| has always shown a tendency to dissolve into something
| else. On the record, literary naturalism does not seem
| to be a doctrine or attitude to which men are likely to
j cling through their whole lives. It is always being
transformed into satire raid symbolism, lyrical auto-
biography, Utopian socialism, Communism, Catholicism,
Buddhism, Freudian psychology, hack journalism or the
mere assembling of facts, (p. 383)
The words "dissolve" and "transformed" are misleading be
cause they imply that these qualities were not present in
the novels from the beginning. Since the novels produced
by literary naturalists diverged from "pure" naturalism in
their particular style and themes, one wonders if naturalism
is a useful term or whether it disguises more than it re
veals . |
In his essay on naturalism, written in 1947, Cowley
identifies Dos Passos
1
trilogy, U.S.A.. as "predominantly
naturalistic" (p. 384). But in his 1936 review of the
! .•
trilogy, Cowley describes his impressions of the trilogy in
42
56
a manner which seems to characterize it as satire. The
tone of U.S.A., says Cowley, "is less argumentative than
iemotional"; it is "a furious and somber poem written in a
i
!
mood of revulsion more powerful than . • . The Waste Land"
i .
!
(p. 24). Although Dos Passos "loves old America," he
j
"loathes the frozen country that the capitalists have been
creating" (p. 23). Dos Passos, says Cowley, makes contem
porary America seem like "an inferno in which Americans true
(to the older spirit are crushed and broken" (p. 23). As
i
for the characters, "the hired soldiers of the conquering
jnation," (p. 23) identified with capitalism, Dos Passos
: i
"reserves sharper torture for th^m" (p. 23); they become
i
"hollow and enameled insects with the pulp of life sucked
out of them. . . . Rich, empty, frantic, they preside over
an icy hell from which Dos Passos sees no hope of our ever
..57
escaping.
r
Philip Rahv, in an essay which attempts to define
literary naturalism, lists French and American naturalists
56"The End of a Trilogy," New Republic. LXXXVIII (Au
gust 12, 1936), 23-24.
57page 23. Edmund Wilson describes these characters as
ibeing more lifelike than the puppets of Manhattan Transfer,
but, in part, "two-dimensional caricatures of qualities or
{forces he [Dos Passos] hates." Shores of Light, p. 447.
|and includes Dos Passos among them. He classifies as natu
ralistic:
|
| that type of realism in which the individual is por
trayed not merely as subordinate to his background but
as wholly determined by it—that type of realism in
which the environment displaces its inhabitants in the
role of the hero.^®
i ...
i
|
After citing additional devices of the "theoretical" natu-
i
I
ralistic novel, such as its reduction of characters to
i
i
types, its construction by accretion and enumeration rather
i
than by analysis or storytelling, its method of massing
documentary details, and its neutral attitude in the sphere j
i .
of values, Rahv says:
' •!
! But in the main it is the pure naturalist—that mon- j
strous offspring of the logic of a method—that I have j
been describing here. Actually no such literary ani- !
mal exists. Life always triumphs over methods, over
formulas and theories, (p. 419)
Rahv then proceeds to show where French and American natu- j
ralists have diverged from this "fundamental conception"
!(p. 420). Rahv, like Cowley, first cites the details of
the theory and then points out the individual writers who
have deviated from this theory. He lists naturalistic
5
®"Notes on the Decline of Naturalism," in Aldridge,
Critiques, p. 418.
I •
!
44
writers who have been "saved" from "that monstrous . . .
logic of a method" by their particular artistic originality.
i
He says that "the naturalism of Dos Passos is most com-
l
!
Ipletely manifested in U.S.A./' but distinguishes Dos Passos
from "other writers of the same political animus (apparently
I 59.
equating naturalism with proletarian writing) by "a sense
of justice," "a deeply elegiac feeling for. the intimate
features of American life," and by his "controlled use of
language" (p. 421).
Thus, Rahv lists the details of naturalist theory and
1 !
places Dos Passos within that theory without citing specific
; • • I
evidence. He then presents vague generalizations to show
, j
that Dos Passos' stylistic merits raise him above the level j
59
Alfred Kazin in his book, On Native Grounds (New
York, 1942, 1956), also makes the term, as he applies it to
iwriters of the 1930's, synonymous with social protest. "The
naturalists, . . . were the writers in whom the literal sig
nificance of the crisis had aroused a literature of literal
realism, mechanical prophecy, and disgust. . . . they were
obeying a common impulse . . . the heed to shock" (p. 290).
He excludes Faulkner from this group because he used "natu
ralism toward quasi-philosophical ends" (p. 290), and de
scribes Erskine Caldwell and James T. Farre11 as "left-wing
naturalists" (p. 296). Dos Passos, he says, is "perhaps the
last naturalist in American prose who had a conscious con
ception of naturalism as a philosophy of life . . ." (p.
291). Kazin does not list Dos Passos' specifically "natu
ralistic" qualities, however. See On Native Grounds, pp.
1283-310; 266-282.
45
and limits of this theory. But Rahv does not describe the
tone and style of U.S.A.
T
and his generalities still leave
!
;
•the cloud of naturalism blanketing out important differences
i
j
between theory and actuality.
Another example of tonal imperceptivity of a critic
who adopts the term naturalism as the basis for his analysis
[of Dos Passos
1
novels is the much-anthologized essay of
60
Delmore Schwartz. Schwartz's thesis is simply that Dos
Passos in his trilogy U.S.A. wanted to mirror the literal
truth about life in the United States as experienced by the
average man, and that by adhering in his narratives to the
I
naturalistic method, Dos Passos succeeded admirably in !
capturing this literal truth. But, according to Schwartz, !
! ' i
Dos Passos realized that something more than literal truth |
was necessary to make his trilogy transcend the level of
i - j
mere journalism or history; so Dos Passos sought "the whole j
= i
i
truth," that is, the imaginative awareness of more complex i
reality from "the standpoint ... of the greatest intelli- !
gence and sensibility" (p. 186), in the "full sensibility
of the camera eye and the heroic character in the
60"John Dos Passos and the Whole Truth
r
" The Southern
lReview
T
IV (Autumn 1938), 351-367.. Reprinted in Aldridge,
Critiques, PP. 176-189.
46
biographies" (p. 187). Because Dos Passos was forced by
the limitations of his naturalistic method to adopt these
jother narrative devices, his trilogy, says Schwartz, breaks
|
i"into four 'eyes' or uncoordinated vision" (p. 187). Dos
Passos, he says:
i
attempts to achieve the whole truth by going rapidly in
two opposite directions—the direction of the known ex
perience of his characters, in all their blindness and
limitation, and on the other hand, the direction of the
transcendent knowledge of experience, the full truth
about it. And thus the formal breakdown was scarcely
avoidable, (p. 187)
I
Schwartz is saying, in effect, that the "biographies"
and "camera eyes" contain a narrator with superior vision,
i i
t
whereas the pictorial narratives have no such narrator. j
; i
i !
What is weak about Schwartz's analysis is that nowhere does j
i I
Schwartz find the tone of irony, bitterness, hatred, and j
i !
I
revulsion that imply some attitude toward,, or judgment I
; |
about, American society that almost all other critics have
found. There is, in effect, a lack of tonal perception in
his essay. Schwartz examines the juxtapositions of the
61
"Newsreels" and finds them "amusing" (p. 179); he finds
^Blanche Gelfant, for example, in The American City
Novel (Norman, Oklahoma, 1954), says: "The Newsreels record
jsuch inanities, falsehoods, and ironic perversities that by
jcontrast the inanities and ironies that are fictional begin
47
the biographies "heroic" and "representative" (p. 180), and
the narratives "true" (p. 182). These adjectives indicate
only Schwartz's critical agreement with Dos Passos
1
treat-
I
; 'I
ment of his subject, not a critical evaluation of this
|
treatment.
i
Schwartz's essay breaks into two parts: his factual
jdescription of the novel and his thesis about the discrep-
|ancy between "the literal truth" and "the whole truth" (he
is vague about these expressions). Though he believes Dos
: i
I
Passos to be "the victim" (p. 189) of an adherence to natu- i
I
ralism, Schwartz appears to be the victim of his indiscrimi-j
i
)
nate application of the term naturalism (naturalism is
synonymous in his mind with literal truth: "a method of |
i
I
strict recording" or "an accurate report of that which
62 I
is") to the refracted reality of the U.S.A. trilogy.
This theoretical preconception, added to the fact that
Schwartz completely agrees with Dos Passos' portrait of
American life, lessens the critical distance between the
: ' i
' ~ ' i
i
to seem more true to life" (p. 172). "The biographical
sketches," she says, "contain Dos Passos' most trenchant
writing; ... we can see why he was moved to the intense-
ness that makes his irony so brutally effective" (p. 171).
6
^Schwartz, p. 185.
novel's and his own world view to zero. Consequently,
i •
!Schwartz is unable to detect the irony and satire.
|
Charles C. Walcutt, whose book on naturalism was
!
briefly mentioned earlier, attempts to place Dos Passos
within the confines of his particular definition of natu-
jralism which he has stretched to include not only pessimis-
i
tic determinism, but apparent non-naturalistic character-
I '
jistics such as moral idealism and optimistic faith in re
form. According to Walcutt, American literary naturalists
inherited a "divided stream" of materialistic determinism
and moral idealism from post-Darwinian science and the
i
transcendental tradition in American thought. Therefore, j
i
says Walcutt, "all 'naturalistic' novels exist in a tension j
|
between determinism and its antithesis" (p. 29). The natu- j
ralists, he says, believed not only in the powerful deter
mining conditions of heredity and environment upon man but
I
also in the beneficial results of changing these conditions;
hence they wrote "pessimistic" novels with an implied
"optimistic" purpose: social reform (pp. 24-25). Walcutt's
63
American Literary Naturalism; A Divided Stream, pp.
3-29.
49
64
inclusive description of the intention of these literary
naturalists resembles Sartre's description of Dos Passos'
i
intention of utilizing deterministic fiction to induce re-
jform, and would seem to provide a valid explanation of the
.
65
tension between determinism and satire in Dos Passos'
I
I
®^Walcutt states that "a work that was.perfectly con
trolled by the theory of materialistic determinism would
not be a novel but a report" (p. 23). He "groups" together
Zola, Frederic, Garland, Crane, London, Norris, Churchill,
Dreiser, Anderson, Farrell, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Dos
Passos on the basis of two traits that he interprets their
novels to have in common: determinism and idealism. Wal-
cutt finds that all these writers diverge from "pure" natu- j
ralism.
65
Malcolm Cowley and Alfred Kazin point out paradoxical
qualities in Dos Passos
1
novels. Cowley says: "John Dos
Passos is in reality two novelists. One of them is a late-
Romantic, an individualist, an esthete moving about the
World in a portable ivory tower; the other is a collecti-
jvist, a radical historian of the class struggle. These two
authors have collaborated in all his books. . . ." See
"Poet and the World," in New Republic. LXX (April 27, 1932),
303; reprinted in Aldridge, Critiques. p. 485. Kazin in On
Native Grounds calls Dos Passos a naturalist (p. 291), but
in his analysis of Dos Passos, stresses his individualism
and other "non-naturalistic" qualities. He says: "It is in
this concern with the primacy of the individual, with his
need to save the individual from society rather than to
establish him in or over it, that one can trace the conflict
that runs all through Dos Passos' work—between his estheti-
cism and strong social interests; his profound absorption in
the total operations of modern society and his over-scrupu-
lous withdrawal from all of them; the iron, satirical prose
he hammered out in U.S.A. (a machine prose for a machine
world) and the youthful, stammering lyricism that pulses
utiider it" (p. 268).
50
novels.
i
But Walcutt interprets Dos Passos as a bitter pessimist
jwith little hope for reform. Dos Passos' place in the
i
naturalist group, says Walcutt, is at the extreme "end point
in the evolution of naturalistic forms" (p. 280), because
ihis fiction illustrates the fact that environmental forces
have grown too complex to cope with. Thus, according to
Walcutt, the earlier naturalists' optimistic faith in sci-
jence as a remedy for human ills appears in Dos Passos
1
novels as dark pessimism and uncontrolled indignation at
: • i
the helplessness of the individual at the mercy of environ- j
' I
mental forces (p. 280). Walcutt's thesis is interesting, i
but, upon closer examination, his interpretation of Dos j
Passos seems too neat and simple and does not adequately
account for the tone of irony and indignation in Dos Passos'j
; • I
:
• |
novels. Instead of a thorough analysis of the formal com- j
.?i
plexxty of Dos Passos' novels, Walcutt simply equates this |
. . I
: • - i
complexity with chaos. The kaleidoscopic form of Manhattan !
:
j
Transfer, he says, is a perfect stylistic embodiment of
materialistic determinism because it illustrates "a picture
of chaos, a blind, formless struggling, frantic world" out
pf control (p. 280). Walcutt fails to find the moral per
spective thrown upon this chaotic world that other critics
51
66
have observed in the symbolic structure of the novel.
Having concluded, perhaps too hastily, that Dos Passos
accepts determinism, although bitter about it, Walcutt says
ithat the excessively grim and sensational tone of his novels!
is due to Dos Passos' helpless indignation:
. . . the tone [says Walcutt] is as grim as it is sen-
| sational. The idealism of the American Dream is pre-
J sent as indignation and bitterness at the conditions
I which have thwarted that Dream, but this is so only if
I the reader deduces it from the ironic juxtapositions
I and from the overtones of Dos Passos' language, which
| shows the city always incredibly bright and polished,
while its lives are dull and morally sterile. Tradi
tional values may be scorned, both by the characters
and their author, but there is no feeling here that |
science has the answer. ... !
j
|
Walcutt has said earlier that a "purely" naturalistic pic- j
ture would not be a novel but a report (p. 23). If this is |
true, then it seems clear that in the first place, this j
- ' I
novel with its ironic and bitter picture of "morally ster- |
i
ile" lives diverges far from "pure" naturalism. Secondly, j
viewing Dos Passos as a determinist, Walcutt plays down Dos
56see Blanche Gelfant's analysis of the urban symbolism
and unified aesthetic design of Manhattan Transfer in Ihfi.
American Citv Novel, pp. 133-166. And R. 6. Davis, in his
'John Dos Passos. says about U.S.A.i "And though the four
(Separate modes of presentation might seem a confession of
{disunity, they are skillfully employed to bring diverse
materials together according to certain dominant themes"
j(p. 24).
52
Passos
1
moral concern with his characters by saying only
that:
Dos Passos is more sentimentally aware of his people
than Joyce is: he shows their agonies and fears and
defeats in passages of considerable force, (p. 282)
As an example of this "sentimental awareness," Walcutt
quotes a passage in which Ellen Thatcher prepares to marry
George Baldwin, whom she abhors, for money and for status.
Yet Walcutt makes no further comment on this passage in
which Ellen has made a conscious moral decision and Dos
Passos has commented on it by means of imagery that suggests
spiritual death:
She had made up her mind. . . . Ellen felt herself sit-
| ting with her ankles crossed, rigid as a porcelain fig
ure under her clothes, everything about her seemed to
j be growing hard and enameled, the air blue-streaked
with cigarette smoke fsicl. was turning to glass. . . .
(p. 282)
A closer examination of this kind of so-called "impersonal"
|comment reveals not mere determinism but Dos Passos' impli-
67
icit criticism of-his characters' moral weakness.
| ®^See Lionel Trilling's comments on pp. 32-33 of this
jstudy. H. H. McLuhan has said of Dos Passos* technique:
i"Even satire is managed by Dos Passos in a direct, lyric
jmode, though the technique seems to be impersonal. . . ."
|See Harold C. Gardiner, ed., Fifty Years of the American
1Novel (New York, 1952), p. 155.
53
Walcutt also interprets U.S.A. as being "divided" into
|the determinism suggested by, on one hand, its fragmentary
!
form and clinically detached narratives (p. 285), and, on
the other, the idealism of the Camera Eye which expresses,
in "uncontrolled protest" (p. 287) and "unreliable indigna
tion" (p. 289), the fact that America is "being corrupted,
debauched, and enslaved by the forces of commercial rapa
city" (p. 287). But the question exists as to how Dos
Passos
1
narrative can be clinically detached (detachment as
a method need not imply lack of bias) and yet present the
|"facts" as "grim, dark, and uncontrollable" (indicating
Idistortion of reality). Walcutt's acknowledgment of dis-
I
tortion, together with his opinion that the biographies
!
"are set forth ironically and bitterly" (p. 286), and that,
;in effect, "it is, finally a moral deterioration that Dos
Passos depicts" (p. 287), suggests that an interpretation
of the trilogy as being satirical can bring unity, whereas
Walcutt's interpretation leaves U.S.A. artificially split
i
into a "divided stream."
Richard Horchler, in his appraisal of Dos Passos
1
work
i • .
|from 1920 to 1961, has described Dos Passos' technique as
j"naturalistic" on the basis of the recurrent theme of the
i
i
| corruption or victimization of the individual by society or
68
social institutions But according to Horchler it is not
primarily Dos Passos
1
acceptance of "philosophic determin
ism" (p. 15) that motivates his pessimism, but his persis
tent hostility toward industrial society:
Actually, if Three Soldiers be considered Dos Passos'
first social novel,
6
® we see in each succeeding work
68,1
Prophet Without Hope," The Commonweal. LXXV (Sep
tember 29, 1961), 13-16.
69
Pred B. Millett in his book, Contemporary American
Authors (New York, 1922, 1940), has classified Dos Passos as
a social novelist, rather than as a naturalist or satirist.
l"The social novel, the novel of purpose, or the thesis
novel," he says, "is related at once to realism and natural
ism, and is at times almost indistinguishable from one or '
the other of these literary modes. The social novel, there-!
jfore, is not easy of definition> but it is differentiated j
from the purely realistic or naturalistic novel by its em- j
phasis on some problem of social, economic, political, or
religious significance, a problem which the specific persons
and plot-devices may be taken to illustrate and illuminate"
j(p. 74). Millett includes the "proletarian novel" as a
class of the social novel and Dos Passos
1
novels among this
class. Millett describes the method of Manhattan Transfer
as "almost purely naturalistic," and U.S.A.. he says, fuses
"naturalistic technique" with "expressionistic devices" (p.
83). Millett's unclear definition of naturalism seems as
sociated with violent and coarse subject matter. Dos Passos,,
he says, "shows urban America at its most violent and re- j
pellent, as a harsh, cynical, brutal composite of individ
uals aggressively on the make, corruption in private and
public life, raucous speech, and animalistic behavior" (p.
03). Dos Passos* view, he says, is "limited by the omission
of common decency, honesty, integrity, and simple and un-
corrupted pleasures . . ." (p. 83). Although Millett recog-
nizes that Dos Passos does not present "the whole truth,"
Millett, too, disregards the tone of Dos Passos' novels.
55
a clearer rejection of our Whole industrial civiliza
tion, an increasing belief in the futility of substi
tuting one collectivity for another, reiterated warn
ings of the dangers to individual integrity in a cen
trally controlled society, (p. 15)
I
The extent of Dos Passos
1
acceptance of philosophic deter-
I
jminism, says Horchler, "is difficult to judge, and certainly
i •
he has not held that principle with consistency . . (p.
115) . Horchler then points out that Dos Passos "has pub-
j
lished many apparent affirmations in his non-fiction works"
jsuch as his "historical studies of American heroes like the
Founding Fathers" but, paradoxically, his "excursions back
into the years of faith are always followed by novelistic
< I
statements of contemporary hopelessness" (p. 16). Since j
' i
Horchler's analysis is brief and thematic, he does not deal
i
With the tone of Dos Passos' work; but he does cite Dos
! ' i
j
Passos' misanthropy, idealism and intense anger, traits j
: ' "l
characteristic of the satirist:
Dos Passos [says Horchler] is le misanthrope, the soured
idealist. The discrepancy between the real and the
ideal is not to him a challenge to be faced or a mystery
to be celebrated; it is a frustration, a bafflement, to
which he responds with annoyance and anger. It was
i. never ideas which gave his writings their power, but
the depths of his emotions and the imaginative energies
they enkindled. ... (p. 16)
56
Doa Pasaos' Own Statements about Satire
Although Dos Passos has not, to my knowledge, described
himself as a naturalist, he has, in some of his articles
!'
and speeches, spoken both explicitly and implicitly about
i
the satirical aims of his work. In his acceptance speech,
when awarded the,"Gold Medal for Fiction" by the American
70
Academy of Arts and Letters xn 1957, Dos Passos implied
i
that he was a satirist who criticized men as he observed
I
them in particular moments because they did not measure up
;to his idealistic expectations of human nature in general.
jlntroduced by William Faulkner, who declared that Dos Pas-
i
isos' work had been "recognized and honored" by his fellow j
, • !
jcraftsmen, Dos Passos said: j
; !
I wonder if any of you have ever noticed that it is
sometimes those who find most pleasure and amusement j
! in their fellow men, and have most hope in his good- i
ness, who get the reputation of being his most carping j
critics. Maybe it is that the satirist is so full of
the possibilities of human kind in general, that he
tends to draw a dark and garish picture when he tries
to depict people as they are at any particular moment.
The satirist is usually a pretty unpopular fellow. The
only ;time he attains even fleeting popularity is when
70
American Academy Of Arts and Letters and National
Institute of Arts and Lettersr Proceedingsr Second Series
No. 8 (New York, 1958), pp. 192-193. Dos Passos* address
was given on May 22, 1957.
57
his works can be used by some political faction as a
stick to beat out the brains of their opponents.
| Satirical writing is by definition unpopular writing.
Its aim is to prod people into thinking. Thinking
; hurts. ... (p. 193)
I
In this sketch of his own personality and aims, Dos Passos
!seems to fit the pattern suggested by Gilbert Highet, who
stressed that the satirist is motivated by his hatred of
I the moral imperfections of men in his society, by his secret:
idealistic notions of man's nobility and the good society,
and by his need to shock people out of moral complacency
into protest, that is, "to prod people into thinking." j
j
In an earlier article on the satirical caricaturist, j
! '
!
George Grosz, Dos Passos further elaborates upon the per-
; ' i
jsonality and aims of a satirist, and, in his speculations
71
about Grosz, reveals much about himself. Dos Passos says !
i
; ]
in the article that when he first saw Grosz's drawings in j
Paris during the Peace Conference of 1919, he recognized
;
!
them as important cultural documents that symbolized the i
; " j
collapse of the orderly nineteenth-century civilization at
the onset of World War I. "Finding Grosz's drawing," says
Dos Passos:
7
•'•"Grosz Comes to America," Esquire. VI (September
11936), 105, 128, 131.
58
was finding a brilliant new weapon. . . . Looking at
his work was a release from hatred, like hearing well-
imagined and properly balanced strings of cusswords.
(p. 128)
i '
For Grosz, says Dos Passes, had been brought up in the ear-
i
jlier age's climate of order, rationality, and progress, and
I
Grosz's drawings of man's inhumanity to man provided a
cathartic release for Dos Passos' own indignation about the
!
butchery of the war and the moral chaos that the war had
t
1 •
brought upon the contemporary world. Grosz, says Dos Pas-
sos,
... was a satirist and a moralist. Like Swift in
another age and working in another medium, Grosz was
full of the horror of life. A satirist is a man whose
flesh creeps so at the ugly and the savage and the |
incongruous aspects of society that he has to express |
them as brutally and nakedly as possible to get relief. !
| (P. 131) |
The satirist, Dos Passos implies, not only gains psychic
relief by bitterly portraying "the ugly and the savage and
the incongruous aspects of society ... as brutally and
nakedly as possible," but must force his horrible vision of
man's irrationality upon his audience in order to cut
i
through its moral complacency that allows violence and in
justice to exist. Through "the invention of new ways of
Seeing things," says Dos Passos, the satirist breaks up "old
59
processes and patterns" in "the apparatus that makes up the
mind" and "make[s] it possible to perceive the new aspects
and arrangements of evolving consciousness" (p. 131).
iProbably referring to himself as well as to Grosz, Dos
j
Passos then says:
!
t
i The great enemy of intelligence is complacency. The
j satirist in words or in visual images is the doctor
who comes with his sharp and sterile instruments to
lance the focusses of dead matter that continually
impede the growth of intelligence. Without intelli
gence it is impossible to cope with the intricacy of
nature or with the madhouse every man carries within
him. No one with any sensitiveness to words who has
read Swift can ever be so complacent again about his
position as a human being. Grosz's work combines
visual freshness with a bitter satirical intensity
that few complacencies can survive. When complacency !
goes young""Intelligence begins, (p. 131)
Finally, in a recent review of his career, Dos Passos re- j
fers to himself as a satirical chronicler of contemporary |
society who was moved to write his chronicles of protest by
the social injustices he had observed since his experience
in World War I. Dos Passos says:
The generation I got my education from, the generation
that cut its eyeteeth on the deceptions and massacres
of the First World War, had a fervent sense of right
and wrong. We thought civilization was going to hell
in a hack, and in some ways we were right. But we did
believe too that if people used their brains the modern
world could produce a marvelous society. There was a
germ of truth in both conceptions.
We suggested some radical remedies. The trouble was
that when the remedies were tried in most cases the cure
I . 60
i
i
i proved worse than the disease.
| It was in the cards that the writing of a would-be
chronicler like myself should become more and more
! satirical as the years went by. Satire is not the
only way, of course, but it is one way of looking at
the world.
In summary, the approach of this study is that a pri
mary aim of Dos Passos
1
fiction is to communicate satirical
'criticism, and that by focusing upon Dos Passos as a sati
rist, one can unify much of the complexity and better under
stand the specific literary qualities of his work. The
characteristics of satire and the satirist have been out
lined, and critical evidence and Dos Passos
1
own statements j
have been cited to indicate that these characteristics are j
present in Dos Passos
1
fiction. From additional critical
j
statements of those who have called Dos Passos a naturalist,j
one finds that while the term naturalism can be used to
describe a group of writers whose work apparently illus-
i
!
trates their beliefs in philosophic determinism, the term j
cannot accurately characterize the style of one specific !
; j
writer, and, its indiscriminate use can cloud instead of
clarify the "meaning" of an individual writer's work. While
72Joseph Hearned and Neil Goodwin, eds., Art and the
Craftsmani The Best of the Yale Literary Magazine 1836-
1961 (New Haven, 1961), p. 207.
61
naturalism generally implies a writer
1
s use of biological
or environmental determinism, it is variously defined by
critics and seems applicable to Dos Passes' fiction only if
jits meaning is broadened to include the deterministic meth
od within Dos Passos' general aim of satiric social criti
cism.
| CHAPTER II
i
! THE WAR NOVELS
I
j
!
j Earlv Disillusionment and Rebellion; 1916-13.19
i " . '
! It has been stated that the satirist gains relief from
j - .
his sense of alienation and his frustrated idealism by his
destructive attacks upon society and by shocking his audi
ence into moral awareness in order to bring about social |
l
changes that conform to the satirist's idealistic visions.
Since Dos Passos
1
career seems to follow this pattern of
disillusioned idealist turned satirist, one can better j
understand the motives behind his attacks upon war,"the
army, and modern society from a brief review of his life up
to the time of his participation in the First World War.
The origins of Dos Passos' social rebellion can probab-j
ly be traced to his birth in 1896. He was born an outsider,
the illegitimate son of a wealthy and famous corporation
lawyer of Portuguese descent, John Randolph Dos Passos, who
provided his son with all the advantages except the Dos
62
63
Passos name, which was not acquired until John Roderigo was
sixteen years old. Dos Passos
1
mother, Lucy Addison Sprigg,
an aristocratic Virginian of Quaker stock, was, at first,
jthe elder Dos Passos' mistress until she later became his
wife. Since John Randolph Dos Passos was married and a
well-known public figure at the time of his son's birth, he
declined to publicly recognize John Roderigo until his first
i
i
i
wife died and he married Miss Sprigg about 1912—the date
remains uncertain. Therefore, the younger Dos Passos first
took the name, John Roderigo Madison*until the time he en
tered Harvard College in 1912. John spent much of his
i
!
early life up to his entrance at Harvard traveling in Europe
1
i
and Mexico with his mother, and received his early education'
I
from private tutors and from private schools for wealthy
children.^
^or more biographical information, see Charles W. j
Bernardin, "The Development of John Dos Passos," unpub. j
diss. (University of Wisconsin, 1949); also John H. Wrenn, j
John Dos Passos
T
New Haven, 1961. Much autobiographical
material can be found in the "Camera Eye" sections of U.S.A.
and in Dos Passos' autobiographical novel, Chosen Country
r
1951. For more information about Dos Passos' personal prob
lems, see Martin Kallich, "John Dos Passos: Liberty and the
Father Image," Antioch Review. X (March 1950), 100-105.
64
His college writing; early
social criticism
As a student at Harvard College during the period of
t
the Harvard esthetes, Dos Passos was doing more than com-
iposing imagistic verse and indulging his senses in observing
i
precious art objects. He was already conscious of crucial
I
social issues and was attempting in his essays for the
i 2 3
Harvard Monthly to "prod people into thinking." During
i • '
|1916, when the cultural climate in the United States changed
ifrom an era of progressive social reforms to war spirit,
Dos Passos, in his articles for the Monthly, was already
I * i
angrily attacking the complacent attitudes of those who |
' * !
believed that science had solved man's problems and who
:
!
consequently were overlooking the harmful effects of the j
: 'i
industrial revolution.
' i
4
One of his essays for the Monthly provides a good
index to his social attitudes at that time by revealing Dos
Passos' disillusion with the doctrine of progress and his
; ' i
!
i
^Charles Bernardin, "Dos Passos' Harvard Years," New
England Quarterly, XXVII (March 1954), 3-26.
3See footnote 70, Chapter I of this study.
4
"A Humble Protest," Harvard Monthly, LXII (June 1916),
115-120.
i • . • .
65
belief that traditional humanistic ideals were missing from
contemporary industrial society. Aware that the advent of
i
iwar had shattered "the stodgy complacency" of the first
i •
i
decade of this century, Dos Passos questions the existing
!
|tendency to glorify the current age and "the wonders of
•
science which have brought it about" (p. 115). Science,
Dos Passos argues, has neither liberated man, as had the
Italian Renaissance and the French Revolution, nor produced
!
a greater age than the Elizabethan period; instead it has
jcreated "that bastard of Science, the Industrial Revolu
tion" and the "ponderous suicidal machine civilization" that;
I
was "demoralizing to body and soul/
1
and antagonistic toward
i
"the twin guideposts for humanity . . . thought and art" j
' i
i
(p. 117), which are the real ends of life. "Why," he asks,
"the unreasoning acceptance of this new superstition Sci-
' ' I
ence? Haven't we forgotten the Know Thyself of the Greeks?
I
Alluding to the satirists, Butler and Swift,. Dos Passos I
finds "a flash of profound thought" in their ideas that
machinery would eventually enslave mankind. He cites a
chapter from Samuel Butler's Erewhon. called "The Book of
the Machines," that had related, fantastically, in the
manner of Swifts
i
| ... how all complicated machinery was abolis hed in
66
this country . . . because the inhabitants feared lest
it should eventually find itself conscious and enslave
|. the race of men. (p. 119)
1
j
| During 1916, as the tide of public opinion shifted
!from progressive reform to war sentiment, Dos Passos became
j
deeply disturbed by Wilson's foreign policy which had begun
to mobilize public opinion toward the acceptance of American
participation in the European conflict. He attacked Wil
son's policies in his article "A Conference on Foreign Re
lations," advocating "constructive pacifism," and expressing
i
his own need as a writer "to mould opinion in America, and
to stir it into active life."^ Dos Passos' identification
with political radicalism at this time apparently developed
out of his strong convictions that American democratic j
i i
i
ideals were being undermined by the war hysteria. For dur- j
ing this period of rising-war hysteria, the academic and
political freedom of those who dissented from the war senti
ment was stifled. For example, Professors J. M. Cattell and
Henry L. Dana were dismissed from Columbia college for
5
Harvard Monthly. LXII (June 1916), 126-127. Also
quoted in John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos. p. 100. Charles
Bernardin in "Dos Passos
1
Harvard Years" says of Dos Passos:
"Like some quakers fsicl he was then squarely opposed to war
as a means of settling disputes" (p. 24).
67
6
expressing pacifist opinions) socialist leaders Eugene Debs
and Big Bill Haywood were soon to be sent to prison; meet
ings of radicals and pacifists were raided by police; and
radical periodicals such as The Masses and the writings of
• 7
iyoung idealists such as John Reed and Randolph Bourne were
I .
i Although Dos Passos was an excellent student and
t
I •
i
i
i '*
i
| ^Daniel Aaron, p. 70. Walter Rideout also relates Dos
jPassos' pacifism to his subsequent radicalism. See The
'Radical Novel in America 1900-1954 (Cambridge, 1956), p.
156.
7
See Dos Passos
1
biographies of Debs, Haywood, Bourne,
land Reed in U.S.A.. I, 26, 93; II, 15, 103. Quoting Floyd
jDell, Aaron says that Reed "stepped into the shoes of Jack I
London," when London died, as a "modern Rover boy of social-'
jism," because he shared London's "gusto for life and his i
romantic-rebellious attitude toward revolution ..." |
(Aaron, p. 37). Reed, like Dos Passos, came from an upper-
iclass family and developed revolutionary sympathies while a
student at Harvard. Between 1913 and 1917 he became famous
for his on-the-spot reporting of the Paterson, New Jersey
textile strike, his travels with Pancho Villa during the
Mexican Revolution, and his experiences as a foreign corres
pondent covering the War. Because he "attacked conscription
and lashed out . . .at the superpatriots and profiteers"
(Aaron, p. 40), no newspaper would handle him in 1917, so he
journeyed to Russia and described the Bolshevik seizure of
power at St. Petersburg, editing his experiences into his
book, Ten Davs That Shook the World (1919). Reed later died
of typhus while in Russia, was made a Marxian hero, and
buried under the Kremlin walls. Dos Passos depicts Reed as
a romantic hero and calls him "the best American writer of
his time" in the biography "Playboy" (U.S.A., II, 15).
68
graduated cum laude from Harvard in 1916, he began to rebel
against its genteel atmosphere and class snobbery. Later
i -
the autobiographical narrator in the Camera Eye passages of
U.S.A. sarcastically recalls his early Harvard experiences:
i
... haven't got the nerve to break out of the bell-
I glass four years under the ethercone breathe deep
i gently now that's the way be a good boy one two three
; four five six get A's in some courses but don't be a
grind be interested in literature but remain a gentle
man don't be seen with Jews or socialists. . . .®
i
As George Snell has said about Dos Passos' Harvard years:
There was, probably, a warring dichotomy within Dos
Passos' own personality. . . . even as a Harvard youth
. he must have been uneasy in the knowledge that he was,
to some degree, set apart—the son of a Portuguese
father, with ties of blood to the great immigrant hordes
that made up America's polyglot people. He was an out
sider, in a way, and he could look at the sons of the
rich with an objective eye, in the times when he did
not imagine himself to be one with them. He was differ
ent from them; and those differences came to the top
when he finally broke with tradition. . . .
9
In his rebellion against the upper classes, Dos Passos
might have emulated John Reed, for both Daniel Aaron and
John Wrenn have commented on the probable influence of John
Reed upon young Dos Passos' radicalism and his early
8
U.S.A. (New York, 1938), I, 301-302, Modern Library
edition.
! Qshaoers of American Fiction (New York, 1947), p. 250.
69
reportorial writing. Aaron says that Dos Passos' "radical
adventures" began in 1916 when:
i he was conscientiously rejecting all the "truths" he
1 had previously taken for granted. . . . symptoms of
incipient rebellion crept into the favorable reviews
of John Reed's Insurgent Mexico (1914) and War in
Western Europe (1916) that he wrote for the Harvard
Monthly. (p. 345)
i
I 1Q
;Dos Passos' romantic acceptance of the Marxian myth as
|
|the solution for the world's evils and his own personal
jalienation probably resembled the radicalism of John Reed,
|
as Walter Lippmann had characterized Reed:
He [Reed] assumed that all capitalists were fat, bald,
and unctuous, that reformers were cowardly or scheming,
that all newspapers are corrupt.. . . that the working
class is not composed of miners, plumbers and working
men generally, but is a fine, statuesque giant who
stands on a high hill facing the sun. ... He talked
with intelligent tolerance about dynamite, and thought
he saw the intimate connection between the cubists and
10
Robert Tucker in Philosophy and Mvth in Karl Marx
(Cambridge, 1961), speaks of Marx's theory of the final
conflict between the "Collective Worker" and "My Lord Capi
tal" as the product of Marx's personal alienation projected
upon outer reality. A characteristic of "true mythic
thinking," says Tucker, "is that the thinker is not aware
of it as mythical. For him it is a revelation of what em
pirically is.. The inner process that the myth represents as
outer is actually perceived to be taking place in the outer
world" (p. 224). Dos Passos seems to have been a captive of
ithe Marxian myth at this time, interpreting reality in terms
jof the class struggle, final conflict, and resulting mil-*
ilennium.
! *
70
the I.W.W. He even read a few pages of Bergson.
(Quoted in Aaron, p. 38)
Aaron suggests that not only Reed's radicalism but
I
also Reed's impressionistic reporting was influential on
t
young Dos Passos
1
early writing style:
1
He [Dos Passos] particularly liked Reed's impression
istic style, the happy combination of the factual and
the personal, which Dos Passos later incorporated into
his own pungent brand of "reportage." (p. 345)
|And John Wrenn mentions that Dos Passos
1
"first critical
commitment on the subject of form" was his description of
Reed's journalistic style as "half newspaper report and
half personal narrative" (p. 101). Says Wrenn:
We feel that if Dos Passos had been deliberately
searching for a book form in which he could best
exercise the critical principles he had been outlin
ing in his writing, he would have chosen one very
close to that described here. (p. 101)
Dos Passos' letterss
explosive rebellion
i
Although Dos Passos thought the European War was mor
ally wrong, he wished to observe it at first hand by at
tempting to join the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Service after
his graduation in 1916. Since his father would not allow
this, Dos Passos compromised by going to Spain to study
71
architecture, but returned home a few months later, when
11
his father died, and again volunteered. Aaron notes that
iDos Passos
1
letters to his friend Arthur McComb "on the eve
|
of his embarkation for France" in 1917 "exploded with re-
J
bellion" against the upper classes and the general cultural
12
climate in America at that time. It is important that the
contents of these letters be quoted to show the connection
between Dos Passos
1
violent alienation and the indignant
satire of his war novels. Dos Passos first reveals to
McComb his pacifist and radical sentiments:
I have been spending my time of late going to pacifist
meetings and being dispersed by the police. I am get
ting quite experienced in the cossack tactics of the
New York police force. I've been in a mysterious police
raid, too; nearly piled into a black maria—Every day
I become more red—My one ambition is to be able to sing
the international—. . . . (p. 345)
i r-~
He then comments disparagingly on the lack of spirit in
himself and other Harvard students from the upper classes:
I think we are all of us a pretty milky lot,—don't you?-
with our tea-table convictions and our radicalism that
keeps so consistently within the bounds of decorum—
Damn it, why couldn't one of us have refused to register
^Wrenn, p. 38.
^Daniel Aaron, p. 345. These letters appeared in
jarint for the first time in Aaron's book.
72
and gone to jail and made a general ass of himself? I
should have had more hope for Harvard, (p. 346)
.....
!
jln the following three paragraphs, Dos Passos reveals the
I • .
violent destructiveness of his passionate rebellion and his
admiration for those outside the restrictions of the genteel
class:
All the thrust and advance and courage in the country
now lies in the East Side Jews and in a few of the
isolated "foreigners" whose opinions so shock the New
York Times.. They're so much more real and alive than
we are anyway—I'd like to annihilate these stupid
colleges of ours, and all the nice young men, therein,
instillers of stodginess—every form of bastard culture,
middle class Tsicl snobism f sicl.
And what are we fit for when they turn us out of Har-
j vard? We're too intelligent to be successful business
| men and we haven't the sand or the energy to be anything
else. Until Widener is blown up and A. Lawrence Lowell
assassinated and the Business School destroyed and its
site sowed with salt—no good will come out of Cam
bridge .
I've decided my only hope is in revolution—in wholesale
assassination of all statesmen, capitalists, war-mongers,
jingoists, inventors, scientists—in the destruction of
all the' machinery of the industrial world, equally barren
in destruction and construction.
s
The only alternative to his rebellious fantasies, Dos Pas-
sos' letters indicate, was a feeling of profound frustration
I ..
land neurotic depression:
i '
j .
1 My only refuge from the deepest depression is in dreams
of vengeful guillotines, (p. 346)
However, Dos Passos' first reactions on board the ship to
I •
73
I
France, says Aaron, were comically satiric. The satiric
impulse, it seems, served as an emotional antidote for Dos
Passos' frustration:
!"
i
... he professed huge delight at the presence of five
| Socialists and poked fun at "Archie" Roosevelt and other
patrician officers, bloody imperialists to a man. Were
he back at Harvard, he wrote to Arthur HcConib, he would
be attacking conscription, the daily press, and "the
intellectual classes." (p. 346)
' j
i • •
If the war could not be stopped, Dos Passos thought:
j
|
| One might still "heave 'arf a brick into the Temple of
Moloch if nothing else" and "disturb with laughter the
religious halo of the holocaust." He still saw the
ridiculousness of Richard Norton, surrounded by fat
officers,I-
3
addressing the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Unit:
"and as gentlemen volunteers you enlisted in this ser
vice, as gentlemen volunteers I bid you farewell."
(p. 347)
However, further experience in a French training camp made
Dos Passos embittered and pessimistic because of his power-
lessness to change world events. He wrote to McComb:
Politically, I've given up hope entirely—the capital
ists have the world so in their clutches—I mean the
elderly swag bellied gentlemen who control all destin
ies—that I don't see how it can ever escape. There
Passos said of George Grosz, the satirist: "He
knew how the old men, the fat men looked. He drew them as
they grewsomely were. Looking at his work was a release
from hatred. . . ." "Grosz Comes to America," Esquire. VI
(September 1936), 128.
i 74
i
| are too many who go singing to the sacrifice—who throw
themselves gladly fsicl abjectly beneath the Juggernaut.
It's rather a comfort to have given up hope entirely.
! (p. 346)
From August 1917 to the summer of 1918, Dos Passos
"lived the life of a vagabond ambulance driver, first in
jFrance, then in Italy" (Aaron, p. 347), until he was sent
i
I *
back to the States for writing letters, such as, those to
14
McComb, expressing anti-military views. Again eligible
i '
i . ,
for military service, Dos Passos enlisted in the medical
corps despite his acute myopia and, after a period of basic
training, found himself aboard another ship bound for
France. As an army private, Dos Passos probably thought he
could gain close contact with "proletarians," with whom he
now spiritually identified himself. He wrote to McComb:
. . . even if I seem to grumble. I've always wanted to
divest myself of class and the monied background—the
army seemed the best way—From the bottom--thought I,
one can see cleat—So, though I might have escaped
behind my sacred eyes, I walked with the other cattle
into the branding pen—. . . . (Aaron, p. 348)
l^Wrenn, p. 42. See also Dos Passos
1
own fictional
review of his experience with army censorship in U.S.A.
(New York, 1938), II, 200, 207-210. While Dos Passos was
sent home from Italy, E. E. Cummings was held captive in a
French prison for similar candid letters condemning the war,
Out of his experience, Cummings produced The Enormous Room
(1922).
75
From his attack upon capitalists and his apparent
identification,with the political left, it appears that Dos
Passos was already influenced by Marxian ideas of the class
struggle between the so-called industrial proletariat and
the so-called exploiting capitalists, a conflict that Dos
Passos believed would inevitably lead to social revolution
and the emergence of a new cooperative commonwealth run by
jthe workers. For, in the preface to a later edition of One
! 15' i
Man's Initiation, Dos Passos recalled that to the ideal
ists of his generation, confident about human progress and
! . i
i
i
sheltered from man's inhumanity, the shock of war and their ;
lack of historical perspective made them fall easy "prey to !
the notion that by a series of revolutions like the Russian j
Tsicl the working people of the world could invent ... a
reign of peace and justice" (p. iii).
j
During his army esqperience, Dos Passos retained his j
romantic faith in the basic goodness of the common man, j
•
v
i
while directing his indignation at the supposedly corrupt |
I
IS
bosses who had perpetuated the world's wars and injustices.. j
|
15
First Encounter (New York, 1945), pp. ii-iv. j
16
Leonard Feiriberg in The Satirist (Ames, Iowa, 1963),
Isays: "Satirists are clever men, but few of them are bril
liant men. They are agile in using logic, and they are
76
For he recalls, in a later article, how in 1919.'lie had
eagerly awaited the Paris strike, which he had hoped would
i.
start a socialist revolution, and how he had cynically ob
served the Peace Conference in the Spring of that year:
j
It's hard [he said] to reimagine rsicl the feelings of
savage joy and bitter hatred we felt during that spring.
... We knew that the world was a lousy pesthouse of
idiocy and corruption but it was spring. We knew that
in all the ornate buildings . . . the politicians and
diplomats were brewing poison, fuddled old men fester-
i ing like tent-caterpillars in a huddle of red tape and
gold braid. But we had hope. What they were doing was
too obvious and clear. It was spring. The first-of
j May was coming. We'd burn out the tent-caterpillars.
|With these corrupt bosses out of the way, the underdogs of
the world would create a sane and peaceful world, because
the underdog, thoifght Dos Passos, possessed a natural good
ness:
... we knew [said Cos Passos] that plain men, the
underdogs we rubbed shoulders with, didn't go out of
their way to harm: each other as often as you might
expect,- that they had a passive courage the topdogs
skillful in manipulating and distorting what seems to be
evidence, but this agility and skill do not necessarily
denote an intellectual capacity of the highest order. In
general, satirists tend to use logic which supports their
own position, and to ignore logic which refutes that posi
tion" (p. 186).
i
17
"Grosz Comes to America," Esquire. VI (September
1936), 128.
77
had never heard about and certain ingrained impulses
towards social cohesiveness, the common good. (Grosz,
| p. 128)
'Observing that "unorganized industrial life was becoming a
chamber of horrors" (p. 128), Dos Passos "thrilled to the
18
jword 'cooperative,"' believing that a society of workers
j : • .
would control the machine for the good of all. With Revo-
|
lution in the air, the promise of a workers' Utopia assuaged
i '
his pent-up resentments against the army. Dos Passos re
called:
i
I
... those of us who served as enlisted men could
hardly be expected to take kindly to soldiering, to
the caste system which made officers a superior breed
or to the stagnation and opportunism of military bur
eaucracy .... We came home with the horrors. We had
to blame somebody. . . . Capitalism was the bogey that
was destroying civilization. . . . Capitalism was the
sin that had caused the war; only the working class
was free from crime.
In this brief review of some important events in Dos
Passos
1
life up to 1919, it appears that Dos Passos
1
psycho
logical reactions to his own age conform to the pattern of
18
John Dos Passos, The Theme is Freedom (New York,
1956), p. 2. See also Dos Passos
1
biographies of Debs and
Haywood for his sympathetic attitudes toward the I.W.W. and
anarcho-syndicalism. U.S.A. (New York, 1938), I, 26, 93..
Modern Library edition.
19
The Theme is Freedom, p. 2.
78
the disillusioned idealist turned satirist. As has been
{pointed out, Dos Passos
1
confidence in traditional nine-
I
jteenth-century ideas pf progress was shaken first by the
advent of World War I and later by the change in American
political climate from idealistic reform to war sentiment.
The subsequent decline in civil liberties in the United
States at the time of American entrance into the War pre
cipitated Dos Passos
1
hostility towards his own social class
and modern industrial society in general. Dos Passos* al
ternating defiance and depression produced by his sense of
helplessness iii the face of world events, his disgust with
!
iwar and army^bureaucracy, and his youthful hope for revolu-
I
jtion as a panacea for universal corruption and injustice,
i " '
finally resulted in two satirical war novels: One Man's
Initiation—1917 and Three Soldiers, if Dos Passos was not
at this time a doctrinaire Marxist, but merely a "fellow-
20
traveler," his radicalism, as he said of Pxo Baroja's,
^Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left (New York, 1961),
|p. 48. Aaron says: "A very small fraction of the Left Wing
Iwriters were once members of the Communist Party. A consid
erably larger number might better be designated 'Fellow trav
elers.' I apply this slippery and inexact phrase to those
iwho were in the 'movement,' who sympathized with the objec
tives of the party, wrote for the party press, or knowingly
affiliated with associations sponsored by the party. With
out including the fellow travelers or liberals or non-party
79
became "an immensely valuable mental position. ... to put
the acid test to existing institutions, and to strip the
veils off them."^
| One Man's Initiation—1917
i
The novel as critieism
Dos Passos based his first novel, One Man's Initiation
22
—1917 on his impressions of the War as an ambulance
I
driver with the Norton-Harjes unit in France during 1917.
Although the novel is not esthetically important as a self-
|
contained work of art, it is historically important because
jit displays Dos Passos' early search for a formal framework
|in which to express his particular kind of satiric social
jcriticism. As the title suggests, the book seems modeled
jupon a novel of education which depicts a young man's ini
tiation into the way of the world (in this case, war) and
radicals, the story of literary communism would be very
thin indeed, for the Communist Party had far less influence
on writers than the idea of communism or the image of Soviet
Russia" (p. ix).
21john dq
S
Passos, "A Novelist of Revolution," in Rosi-
nante to the Road Again (New York
r
1922), p. 93.
22tf
ew
York, 1922. The novel was written in 1918 and
| first published in England in 1920.
|the maturation that occurs from his experiences. In One
iMan's Initiation, the experiences of Martin Howe, the young
jambulance driver, change him from a self-involved esthete
iinto a socially-conscious radical. His perceptions also
serve to refute the myths and deflate the illusions about
|the war being a heroic or holy crusade for freedom. At
i
first excited about seeing battle, Martin is horrified and
i '
disgusted with its depravity and absurdity and, at last,
becomes convinced that a social revolution is necessary to
. 23
reform society and to abolish future wars.
i ' J
At first reading, the book seems more like a diary than
,a novel. Instead of the usual logically coherent plot, !
I
authorial comment, and transitional summary, the novel pre- !
, . ' i
, j
sents a jumble of disconnected, imagistic impressions and j
brief dramatic scenes that seem sketched by a painter or i
24 i
recorded by a camera. Some unity is maintained by the
devices of first-person point of view and interior mono
logue, which convey the illusion that the reader is inside
23pages 114-115. Hereafter, I shall cite page referen
ces of this novel in parentheses after the quotation.
^Dos Passos was possibly striving for the qualities he
had found in Grosz's drawings, a "visual freshness with a
bitter satirical intensity that few complacencies can sur
vive." "Grosz Comes to America," p. 131.
81
Martin's mind viewing events from his perspective. During
the novel's many brief scenes, Martin boards the ship on his
I '
way to France; overhears the excited speculations of the men
about war and French women; listens to their patriotic and
anti-German songs; arrives at Bordeaux; experiences the
moving images of the countryside on the speeding train to
i
Paris; indulges in Parisian night life; studies the youth-
|
ful faces of soldiers at the front en route to.their deaths;
hears the screaming bombs overhead near the battles; smells
the nauseous odors of stench and formaldehyde of makeshift
hospitals; observes the mangled bodies of the battle casual-
i
ties; escapes from horror by imagining he lives in the
peaceful culture of the Middle Ages, symbolized by the
! ' i
i !
Gothic cathedrals; and exchanges revolutionary ideas with j
young French Poilus who are thereafter killed before their
dreams of a better society can be realized.
i
In these apparently disconnected impressions, there is
25
evidence of. an underlying satiric strategy. Dos Passos
1
apparent objective was to shock his audience out of its
chauvinistic and romantic ideas about the War by portraying
25
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (New
York, 1957), p. 3.
82
its depravity in a series of sharp, disconnected images.
His approach was to be perceptual rather than conceptual;
i
!
| the interpretation of the images is left to the reader
I
rather than given by an omniscient author. Dos Passos said
i
Ilater that he wished to appeal to an "eye-minded" not
j
26
"word-minded" audience. Although the novel's brief scenes
are realistically convincing, they are selected and satiri
cally slanted to emphasize the horrible and to leave out
the heroic aspects of military life. Those who condone war
|or believe only "the Huns" are barbaric are ridiculed in
tones of ironic amusement or contempt.
Methods of criticism; ironic
contrast
To shock, surprise, and startle the reader out of moral
I
complacency, Dos Passos adopts a pattern of juxtaposing
!
!
contrasting images and ideas. Throughout the novel, one
discovers images of, for example, a beautiful sunrise or
26^08 p
assos
said in 1936: "In the last twenty-five
years a change has come over the visual habits of Americans.
... From being a word-minded people we are becoming an
eye-minded people." Esquire
T
VI (September 1936), 125. He
said of Grosz's drawings: "Their impression is not verbal;
(you don't look at the picture and have it suggest a title
land then have the title give you the feeling) but through
jthe eye direct, by the invention of ways of seeing" (p.
128).
83
lovely flowers contrasted with ravaged forests and bloody
corpses, an idyllic vision of the Middle Ages contrasted
with the violence of the present, ideas of humaneness with
hatred, life with death. In this manner, Dos Passos builds
ia cumulative vision of horror and depravity, while contin-
! •• '
uing to suggest that common men should unite and rebel
against the established system, controlled by corrupt
rulers (these are not made specific) who perpetuate war for
their own selfish greed.
The first of Dos Passos
1
ironic contrasts occurs early
;in the novel when Martin, aboard ship
>
encounters supposedly
humane people who have been made morally insensitive by hate
: ' i
propaganda. Martin, like Dos Passos, is a pacifist who has '
1 I
• i
rebelled against his genteel background, nationalistic
: j
identities, and modern industrial civilization. Since he
;is detached from, but critical of, conventional attitudes of
others, he becomes a satiric commentator on "hate the Hun"
attitudes conditioned by propagandistic accounts of German
atrocities. Aboard ship he briefly encounters a zealously
patriotic young English woman off to "do her bit" in France
against the Germans. She praises Martin on his volunteering
for ambulance duty, the result, she presumes, of his "having
i
Understood the issues" (p. 13), and says if she were a man
84
she would have shouldered a gun the first day of the war.
When Martin ventures that "the issues were hardly . . .
defined then," she says:
1 "They didn't need to be. I hate those brutes. I've
| always hated the Germans, their language, their country,
1 everything about them. And now that they've done such
frightful things. ..." (p. 13)
The "frightful things," reports that invading German sol-
idiers had raped some Belgian nuns in a convent, are "abso-
i
jlutely authentic" because she heard them from a girl friend
in New York who "got [them] from a friend of hers" who
claimed to have spoken to a "little Belgian girl ... in
the convent at the time. . . . Oh [she says] I don't see
why they take any prisoners 1 I'd kill them all like mad
dogs" (p. 14). Martin, who has not yet seen Allied atroci-
i
ties committed upon German prisoners, is amused by the
girl's contrasting illusions of humaneness and actual
statements of murderous hatred:
"If there are any left alive after the war [she says]
they ought to be chloroformed. . . . And I really don't
think it's patriotic or humane to take the atrocities
so lightly." (p. 13)
In this scene Dos Passos, in the role of the satirical
reporter, cuts through illusions to real behavior, a
!
|technique he continues in his later novels.
85
Dos Passos also comments satirically on the war by
juxtaposing images in a manner analogous to the techniques
used in modern poems such as Eliot's The Waste Land or
27
iPound's Cantos
T
and xn novels such as Joyce's Ulysses.
j
By this method, Dos Passos suggests value judgments by his
i ,
selection of images and close-up descriptions rather than
I ' •
|by overt, extended verbal comments. They are strikingly
jeffective because they appeal directly to the reader's
jvisual imagination and memory and allow him the illusion of
jhaving judged the events for himself.
An example of this kind of satiric contrast occurs
when Martin receives his first glimpse of a physically dis
figured soldier in a Paris restaurant. Sitting at a side
walk table, Martin is in a state of romantic ecstasy as he
views:
the last topaz-clear rays of the sun, the foliage of
the Jardin du Luxembourg bright green above deep alleys
of bluish shadow . . . breathing deep . . . the musty
scent of Paris, that mingled with the melting freshness
of the wild strav&erries on the plate before him. (p. 19)
^Dos Passos had admired and closely studied the tech
niques of Eliot and Joyce before he wrote One Man's Initia
tion . He had read the early work of Joyce and Eliot while
•at Harvard. See Georges Albert Astre, themes et Structures
dans L'oeuvre de John Dos Paaaoa fParia. 1956), pp. 39-41.
1
i
1
86
Suddenly two figures cross his field of vision: "a woman
swathed in black crepe veils was helping a soldier to a
iseat at the next table" (p. 20). In startling contrast to
the sensuous beauties surrounding him is the soldier's face,
I
i
"a face that still had some of the chubbiness of boyhood,"
shattered by shrapnel:
Between the pale-brown frightened eyes, where the nose
should have been, was a triangular black patch that
ended in some mechanical contrivance with shiny little
metal rods that took the place of the jaw. (p. 20)
i
Then, thrust before Martin's eyes are some red roses, sold
by an old woman who offers, in a commercial manner, to
teach him "the language of flowers, the language of love"
(p. 20). When Martin leaves the cafe, deeply disturbed by
his first vision of horror, he attempts once more to con
template the changing colors of the foliage. But now he
only sees "the brown hurt eyes of the soldier, and the
triangular black patch where the nose should have been"
(p/ 21).
Besides contrasting the ugliness and destruction of
war with the enduring beauty of nature, Dos Passos contrasts
a vision of the heroic past with the beurbaric and trivial
87
28
present to ridicule illusions of man's moral progress.
While on ambulance duty in the Argonne Forest, Martin dis
covers an ancient Gothic abbey which "towered in ghostly
{perfection" above "the dirty smell of huddled soldiers" (p.
|
42). Its
!
great traceried windows and . . . buttresses and the
high-pitched roof seemed as gorgeously untroubled by
decay as if the carvings on the cusps and arches had
just come from under the careful chisels of the Gothic
workmen, (p. 42)
i '
When there is no call for the ambulance, Martin spends long
summer afternoons at the abbey dreaming "of the quiet lives
the monks must have passed" (p. 43) planting flowers in the
garden and reading and writing in the library. Overcome by
romantic nostalgia, Martin imagines himself living in the
Middle Ages or the Renaissance j
working in the fields, copying parchments . . . drows
ing his feverish desires to calm in the deep-throated
passionate changing of the endless offices of the
Church, (p. 43)
These thoughts lead Martin to voice his disgust with his own
^®Martin's idyllic vision of the past reminds one that
the satirist, as Gilbert Highet mentioned in The Anatomy of
Satire. "does not compare two real societies"; he compares
!"a noble dream with a debased reality" (pp. 159-160) .
88
. tfge:
GodI [he says] if there were somewhere nowadays where
you could flee from all this stupidity, from all this
cant of governments, and this hideous reiteration of
hatred, this strangling hatred. . . . (p. 44)
•j.
To his army buddy, Tom Randolph, Martin bitterly complains:
"and'you say we've progressed" (p. 42). Ironically, the
abbey, used by the Allies for an ammunition dump, is later
shelled and destroyed by the Germans—a symbolic act of a
degenerate age that indifferently destroys the cultural
i
achievements of the past.
The satiric sketch
Another method Dos Passos adopts to satirize the bar-
I * i
barity of war is to select only those atrocities committed I
by the Allies, showing -that bestiality is a common part of
i
i
war and not limited to "the Huns." His brief shocking
sketches depicting man's inhumanity to man might be consid
ered the literary equivalent of Goya's or Grosz's visual
29
sketches of war. Goya and Grosz, in their depiction of
! 29por perceptive comments on Goya's method, see Kenneth
Clark, looking at Pictures (New York, 1960), pp. 123-130.
;To view reproductions of Goya's eighty-five etchings on war,
jsee Goya, The Disasters of War (New York, 1956). Grosz's
{drawings on war can be found in collections such as Inter
regnum. ed. Caresse Crosby (New York, 1937), which contains
89
atrocities, captured the naked, brutal details of man's
depravity by distorting outlines and heightening effects,.
often with macabre humor. Dos Passes, who was familiar with
the works of these visual satirists, catches the sardonic
and sadistic qualities of their work in his own war sketch
es. An example of this kind of literary sketch is a battle-
weary Englishman's sardonic comment on the murder of a Ger
man prisoner. The Englishman, noting that Martin and Tom,
his buddy, are "new at the game" of war, says to them:
You're lucky. . . . Before I left the front I saw a man
tuck a hand-grenade under the pillow of a poor devil of
| a German prisoner. The prisoner said "Thank you." The
i grenade blew him to helli (p. 54)
i
In this sketch, Dos Passos projects his indignation into a
concrete image that ironically contrasts a man's pretense
jof humaneness with his sadistic act, thus heightening his
jan introduction by Dos Passos. Dos Passos viewed the Goyas
|in 1916 at the Prado Museum, Madrid. That Goya's paintings
jaffected his imagination is evidenced by Dos Passos' comment
jabout the Spanish Civil War in 1937: "Whenever you walked
out on the street you tended to come on little scenes of
blood and agony which Goya had already etched in the cold
light and black shadow of the Castilian plateau, a century
and a quarter before." The Theme is Freedom, p. 136. Dos
Passos said of these artists: "George Grosz's drawings will
show the future how Europeans felt while their culture died
of gas gangrene, just as Goya's drawings show us the agony
of Europe a century before." Esquire. VI (September 1936),
128.
90
barbarity.
In another scene, Dos Passos comments sardonically on
|the inverted values of weir which identify sadism with hero-
|
ism. Martin confronts two French soldiers drinking
:
wine in
| '
the doorway of a deserted house near the front. Although
j
jboth have bayoneted German soldiers they could have taken
jprisoner, their attitudes toward these killings are con
trasted. The first soldier describes how he bayoneted a
I
German who "threw his arms up just in front of [him] saying
i'Mon ami, mon ami,' in French" (p. 96). Afterwards, this
! |
Frenchman, shocked by his act, had examined the dead man's
i • • • 5
iwallet and found a photograph of the German's wife and two i
! ' j
children, reminding him that the corpse was a human being j
like himself with loved ones waiting for him at home. In j
contrast to the guilt and human feeling of this first sol
dier, the other, an Alsatian, hates "the dirty Boches" and
wishes to "put them [all] to the bayonet" (p. 97). For
killing three Germans he had been awarded the Croix de
Guerre for heroism.
„ln an amusingly contemptuous description of how some
officers had won the Croix de Guerre, Dos Passos ridicules
those seeking heroic symbols—and the accompanying prestige
j:—through political bribery and pretense of heroism;
91
Martin
1
s friend, Will, a fellow Harvard alumnus in the
30
ambulance corps, relates how Lieutenant Duval, the head
i
of his group, had won his medal in a manner which Will feels
jwould make a fitting chapter in a "book called Heroisms of
the Great War
;
(p. 86). Duval, says Will, had wanted
the Croix de Guerre because others in his section had won
i
ithe medal:
i
!
1
| He tried giving dinners to the General Staff . . . but
| that didn't work. So there was nothing to it faicl but
| "to get wounded." . . .He tried going to the front
posts but "the trouble was that it was a hell of a quiet
sector and no shells ever came within a mile of it."
i (P. 86)
1
Fortunately, a shell finally landed about fifty yards from j
j
his staff car and the lieutenant, showing "the most marve-
i |
lous presence of mind. . . . clapped his hand over his eye [
- ! ' !
and sank back in the seat with a groan" (p. 86). Avoiding
the doctor, "he rode round all day with a handkerchief over
one eye and a look of heroism in the other . . ." (p. 86).
With a bandage around his head "as big as a sheik's turban,"
Duval later lunchied with the staff-officers and won his
30j
n
this "joke," Dos Passos distorts and over-simpli
fies reality for satiric emphasis. Lt. Duval, a satiric
Caricature, seems to have been a figment of Dos Passos'
imagination.
92
medal "for assuring the evacuation of the wounded under
fire and all the rest of it" (p. 87).
In another scene Dos Passos comments pictorially upon
the helpless fate of the individual soldier caught in the
military machine by contrasting the dead mechanical quality
of an army company with the animated faces of several sol-
31
jdiers in the company. In these descriptions of groups of
marching men, trains of artillery, and caissons of ammuni-
jtion, Dos Passos* early Whitmanesque tendency is to portray
collective images by cataloguing lists of plural nouns, an
! • • • ' ' i
epical technique used to capture a vast sweep of space. He j
first focuses upon the thing-like, inorganic quality of the
group: "infantry tramped by, the rain spattering with a j
cold glitter on grey helmets, on gunbarrels, on the straps
pf equipment" (p. 26). He then focuses upon the wa±m, pul
sating life of the men's faces: <-
... rows and patches of faces were the only warmth in
the desolation of putty-coloured mud and bowed mud-
coloured bodies and dripping mud-coloured sky, [faces]
soft and warm amid all this dead mud, amid all this
hard mudcovered steel, (p. 26)
31i
ma
gistic sketches of this kind foreshadow Dos Pas
sos' later deliberate use of mechanistic determinism to in
dict the organized system which he portrays as being hostile
to the individual.
93
Again, when military camions roll by, filled with soldiers
on the way to the front, Martin stares at them "noting
jintelligent faces, beautiful faces, faces brutally gay,
jmiserable faces, like those of sobbing drunkards" (p. 29).
i
i
Svmbolism
Besides the use of ironic contrasts, and satiric
sketches, Dos. Passos comments ironically on man's illusions
.i
of moral progress by means of symbolism. In one scene, he
adopts the traditional religious symbol, the Crucifixion,
jto compare the fate of Christ with that of the common sol
dier and to indicate that in the modern age of war Christian
I
principles no longer apply. As Martin's car passes "the
32
cross-roads where the calvary fsicl was," he observes that
jsomeone "had propped up the fallen crucifix so that it
tilted dark despairing arms against the sunset sky ..."
(p. 71). The slant of the crucifix and the declining sun |
symbolically connote that Christ's ideals of love and hu- j
maneness and his martyrdom to save man were futile. Staring
at the "gaunt, scarred figure" of "the old wooden Christ,"
whose "fallen jowl and ... cavernous eyes . . . had meant
32The Crucifix.
94
for some country sculptor ages ago the utterest agony of
pain" (p. 71), Martin suddenly notices that the crown of
| thorns about the forehead of Christ had been replaced by
I ' • '
barbed wire. A moment later "through the clean rain came
ithe smell of filth and sweat and misery of troops marching"
(p. 71). The faces of the men
I strained and colourless and cadaverous from the weight
; of the equipment . . . drooped under the helmets, tilt
ed to one side or the other, distorted and wooden like
the face of the figure that dangled from the cross.
(p. 72)
The barbed wire, the agonized faces, the tilting heads, the
theavy burdens, all symbolically identify each soldier with
Christ and the war with a re-enactment of the Crucifixion. j
1
I
Finally, in a bit of forced symbolism, a straggler kicks at
;the prop of the cross which "fell forward with a dull j
splintering splash into the mud of the road" (p. 72), pos
sibly suggesting the coming total eclipse of civilization.
Expositions direct criticism
Besides satirizing war and its causes by devices of
contrast, sketches, and symbolism, Dos Passos includes
direct social criticism by having various minor characters
95
33
express brief anti-war and radical sentiments. These
characters usually enter a scene quickly and speak without
adequate preliminary motivation, indicating that Dos Passos
|either was not interested in or did not know how to develop
a convincingly dramatic scene. In one brief episode, Mar
tin's escapist reflections are interrupted by a man with
"sand-coloured hair," an ambulance driver from another
i
sector. After a brief introduction to Martin, a complete
stranger, the man proceeds to comment without restraint on
i
the absurdity of war and the victimization of helpless
people by warmongers who control the organs of propaganda:
Think, man, think of all the oceans of lies through all
the ages that must have been necessary to make this
possible'. Think of this new particular vintage of lies
that has been so industriously pumped out of the press
and the pulpit. Doesn't it stagger you? (p. 25)
To another minor character, Tom Randolph, an earthy, care
free type, war is "an arrangement for mutual suicide" (p.
36). And to Merrier, the French Poilu and anarchist, both
^Blanche Gelfant, in The American citv Novel (Norman,
Oklahoma, 1954), says that in this early novel, Dos Passos
adopts "the device of the apprentice, exposition" to esqpress
his "social theme." The views of his characters, she says,
;are not "dramatized—they are all flatly stated" (p. 140).
Mrs. Gelfant tends to disregard the "pictorial" comment of
Jthis novel.
96
armies are the dupes of political rulers, cattle driven to
the slaughter. Merrier comments cynically:
l
Have you ever seen a herd of cattle being driven to an
abattoir on a fine May morning. . . . the herd can be
driven by a boy of six . . . or a prime minister.34
j
Most of the direct social and moral comment is ex
pressed in Chapter IX when Martin and Tom exchange views
with four French Poilus in a farmhouse kitchen. The func
tion of the scene is apparently to indicate Martin's new
i
allegiance to radicalism and to persuade the reader that
revolution is the only means to crush the old order and to
bring in the new. This radical political discussion appar
ently actually occurred; for in the preface to the 1945
edition of the novel, Dos Passos said:
In reporting a conversation we had with a congenial
bunch of Frenchmen one night in a little town where
the division was en repoa T
I tried to get some of this
down on paper. ... I remember being amazed and de
lighted to meet men who could formulate their moral
attitudes, Catholic, Anarchist, Communist, so elegant-
: ly. . . . (First Encounter, P. ii)
Although the men disagree ideologically about the kind
pf new society necessary to insure peace, equality, and
34p
a
g
e
69. See Dos Passos' letter to Arthur McComb
earlier in this chapter (p. 74) for a similar comment.
97
freedom for the common man, all agree that the present worlc
society is controlled by greedy capitalists and warmongers,
that the press is now an organ of propaganda which feeds
lies to the masses in order to justify war, and that the
masses, including most of the soldiers, have become; slaves
of this propaganda. Their attitudes, of course, are not
jbased upon the cool analysis of facts but upon the emotional
jfervor of young idealists committed to action. Dubois, the
i
t
jindividualist and activist, advocates no constructive pro
gram apart from the courage to act; but his enthusiastic
rhetorical manifesto arouses the emotional pitch of the
group: j
I
j
First we must burst our bonds, open our eyes, clear our j
ears. We are slaves. No we know nothing but what we j
are told by the rulers, (p. 20) ^ I
; • '|
Chenier, the Catholic, believes that a Theocracy is the only
solution for a corrupt and depraved world; that people are
too weak and need to be governed by spiritual, not physical,
force (p. 114). To Merrier, a doctrinaire Marxist, the real
war is the "war between the classes: those that exploit and
those that are exploited. ... a gigantic battle fought
over the plunder of the world by the pirates who have grown
i ' • . • •
fat to the point of madness on the work of their own
98 1
people . (p. 117). Adopting a fallacious syllogism
for purposes of persuasion, Merrier declares he is a commu
nist because he lacks the faith in human nature that an
anarchist must have, because men are weak like sheep: "We
are too like sheep; we must go in flocks, and a flock to
live must organize" (p. 117). Merrier's solution is "so
cialism of the masses that shall spring from the natural
need of men to help one another. . . . the rich [he argues]
must be extinguished; with them wars will die" (p. 118).
Lully, the anarchist, counters Merrier's argument by saying
that men are not sheep, but are "capable of standing alone"
i(p. 118) without the unnecessary evil of government which in
|the past has done more harm than good. The one excuse for
igovernment, he says, "is the protection of property . . .
1
ithe central evil of the world" (p. 119). His solution is
for people to "trust their own fundamental kindliness," and
I to abolish property,
i :
j
I the desire to grasp and have, and you'll need no govern
ment to protect you. . . . Over-organization is death.
It is disorganization, not organization, that is the
aim of life.35
35
Page 120. Lully's view seems to be the one closest
to Dos Passos' early anarchistic individualism. The view
that "over-organization is death," central to Dos Passos'
99
Within this atmosphere of heated emotional rebellion,
Martin suddenly finds himself "filled with a desire to
talk" (p. 114), to express his own pent-up desires to free
a
himself from "all the conventional ties, the worship of
jsuccess and the respectabilities . . . drummed into you
when you
J
re young" (p. 114). Carried away by his emotions,
he,too, in the enthusiasm of the moment, vents his disillu
sionment with America's entrance into the war: "Now we're
a military nation, an organised fsicl pirate like France
|and England and Germany" (p. 113). Americans, he says, "cure
like children. They believe everything they are told
i. . ." (p. 113). Through the propaganda of the press,
I
| • 'I
Americans have become "slaves to bought intellect, willing I
slaves."
What terrifies me [he says] is their power to enslave
our minds. ... I shall never forget the menacing,
exultant flags along all the streets before we went
to war, the gradual unbaring of teeth, gradual lulling
to sleep of people's humanity. . . . America, as you
know, is ruled by the press. And the press is ruled
by whom? Who shall ever know what dark forces bought
and bought until we should be ready to go blinded and
artistic imagination, is found in all his early work, and
even the work of his later so-called "conservative" period.
See Dos Passos' letter to Arthur McComb in Aaron, p. 347:
j"The organization of army life appalled him [Dos Passos].
;'Organization,' he declared, 'is death."'
100
gagged to war? (p. 114)
Although this scene, according to Dos Passos, was
supposed to express "in the language of the time, some of
|
the enthusiasms and hopes of young men already marked for
36
slaughter," its intent and,indeed, that of the book, seems
to be to arouse in the reader the revolutionary enthusiasm
felt by the young men, and "to result in an experience,
37
which in turn induces a mode of action."
I *
j ,
i Although the scene ends with a toast "to Revolution,
I
to Anarchy, to the Socialist state" (p. 123), the fervent
I
idealism of these young men is soon cut short by their
deaths, ending the novel on a note of irony and pessimism.
By depicting his characters as helpless victims of "the
system," Dos Passos established, for the first time, the
pattern of pessimistic determinism he repeats in his later
novels. As was suggested earlier in this study, Dos Passos
adopts this "naturalistic" device to indict the corrupt
mechanistic system and to persuade the reader that it needs
to be reformed. Determinism is thus included within Dos
36
Preface, First Encounter (1945).
j 37(3
ranv
in
e
Hicks and others, eds., Proletarian Litera
ture in the United States (New York, 1935), p. 211.
101
Passos' primary aim of satiric social criticism.
Three Soldiers. Dos Passos' second anti-war novel, was
the result of his stored-up indignation deriving from appar
ent outrages he experienced as a private in the medical
corps during 1918-1919. He later recalled that this novel
"attempted to chronicle the resentments and frustrations of
38
the natural-born civilian drafted into the army." Like
One Man's Initiation, Three Soldiers attacked war, the
!causes behind war, and the propaganda slogans and national
istic hatreds that perpetuate war. But in this second
I ' j
novel, Dos Passos concentrated upon documenting the injus
tices of the army camp and the inefficiencies of army bur
eaucracy. By eliminating many of the disconnected impres
sions of his first novel and relating in a more coherent
manner the experiences of his three soldiers in the training
camps, on troop ships, and in convalescent hospitals, Dos
Passos successfully punctured the illusions of his readers
that the War had been a "crusade for democracy" or that life
for the enlisted man had been heroic or ennobling.
j
38,1
The Desperate Experiment," Book Week. I (September
15, 1963), 3.
102
Therefore, when it was published in 1921, Three Soldiers
shocked its audience and helped precipitate America's anti
war disillusionment characteristic of the 1920's. Because
i
I
of its controversial nature, the novel attracted wide criti
cal attention and a large reading audience, and made Dos
Passos an important young writer almost immediately after
the book was published.
Critical opinion indicates
satire
I A sampling of the many controversial reviews of Three
!
Soldiers indicates that critics reacted strongly to certain
j
qualities in the novel that one associates with satire.
H. S. Canby praised the novel but declared that it would j
shock many readers:
| It [the novel] is an intense, a skillful, and utterly
sincere expression of throbbing human nature and there
fore real literature. ... He [Dos Passos] calls a
spade a spade . . . dainty readers will now and then
be shocked.
H. Beston called the novel "a work of marked distinction,"
and "aesthetically honest and quite fearless," but also
labeled it propagandists:
39
Literary Review of New York Evening Post. October 8,
jl921, p. 67.
103
It is a great pity that the propaganda and the pages of
barrack pettinesses which Mr. Dos Passos puts in to
prove his case should be allowed to make the book curi
ously topheavy. . .
i
E. L. Pearson implied that Dos Passos deliberately used
i
extreme situations to distort and exaggerate the brutalities
of army life:
'
| ... The exactions and annoyances of military discip
line which undoubtedly grind upon the sensitive spirit,
but which are accepted . . . by 95 per cent of the men,
are represented by Mr. Dos Passos as intolerable and
j fiendish insults-treasonable cause for desertion or for
| murder.
i
i
! .
H. N. Fairchild identified Dos Passos
1
technique with that
j ~ '
jof Sinclair Lewis:
I Three Soldiers must be set down as a rather brilliantly
j written piece of sordid, narrow-minded realism—the
' techniques and spirit of "Main Street" applied to the
I war. . . .
2
An anonymous reviewer said that the novel was "not a readily
classified book. . . . The propagandist in him [Dos Passos]
40Atlantic Booklist. XVIII (December 21, 1921), 83.
•
4Independent and the Weekly Review. CVII (October 1,
|1921), 16.
42
Indeoendent and the Weekly Review. CVII (October 29,
1921), 97.
104
43
is apt to mar a clear case by extremism. ..." Another
reviewer, Coningsby Dawson, was disturbed by Dos Passos*
one-sidedly sordid view which, according to Dawson, was a
deliberate insult to the army:
The story is told brutally, with calculated sordidness
and a blind whirlwind of rage which respects neither
the reticences of sort nor the restraints of decency.44
Still another reviewer attacked the novel for its unfair
ipresentation:
j
I The book is surely a protest against war. ... It
| fails . . .in that it is written with a too restricted
view. ... It is not fair.45
43
Nation and Atheneum. XXX (October 22, 1921), 148.
|
44,1
Insulting the Army," New York Times Book Review.
October 2, 1921, p. 1.
45
A. E. F., Springfield Republican. January 8, 1922, p.j
13a. Leonard Feinberg in The Satirist (Ames, Iowa, 1963) I
says: "The truth that he is trying to show, the satirist }
assumes, justifies the unfair means that he uses to show it.
;. . . Furthermore, to be 'fair' in the conventional sense
is impossible for a satirist. A complete investigation of
any human action would eventually lead to some measure of
vindication for everybody; The satirist cannot afford to
make that kind of tolerant, judicial examination of all
possible mitigating circumstances. Once having decided
jwhat he is for and what he is against, in view of his aes
thetic purpose, he tends to paint his adversaries black and
his friends white. He has to distort. All of the basic
techniques of satire—exaggeration, understatement, inver
sion of values, pretense, misrepresentation, vehemence, and
indirection—are unfair. But these unfair techniques con
stitute the satiric method. Without unfairness there can be
105
Determinism as a satirical
weapon
Although the novel's subject matter, its detailed
scrutiny of the degrading aspects of military life, is
46
naturalistic, the novel's aim, as the reviews mentioned
above indicate, seems to be satiric social criticism. By
depicting the extreme helplessness of the three soldiers
under the control of the mechanized system, Dos Passos uses
the method of determinism, foreshadowed in One Man's Initia
tion. as a weapon of satire to more effectively expose and
j
indict the injustices of the system. As aforementioned
critics have noted, Dos Passos was not a detached, scien
tific observer, but a mordant critic of the army. Although
he presents his facts in an "impersonal" documentary manner,
i
eschewing overt comment, he slants his documentary to por-
l
tray only the negative and destructive aspects of army life.
no satire" (p. 184).
[
46vernon Parrington said that Three Soldiers was "a
naturalistic handling Of war." Main Currents of American
Thought (New York,- 1930), III, 384. Calling the novel "the
most notable American work on the theme since Stephen
brane's The Red Badge of Courage" and comparing it with
Henri Barbusse's Under Fire and Andreas Latzko's Men in War.
Parrington found it naturalistic in its attempt to document
|in detail the life of "the barracks and the drill field" and
iin its depiction of "low-grade" characters defeated by their
jirrational drives and the pressures of army regimentation.
Main Currents. III. 385. .
106
47
He displays "the ridiculous and repellent qualities" and
leaves out any redeeming aspects of human nature under "the
system." For example, Dos Passos presents his officers as
brutes or snobs, his "y" men and clergymen as hypocrites
who spread hate, his German soldiers as victims of American
atrocities, and his enlisted men, generally, as ignorant,
animal-like slaves of the army caste-system and hate propar
ganda. Frederick Hoffman has noted that Dos Passos was
iobsessively concerned with army mechanization because he
wanted to show
I
... that the war was . . . brutal, vulgar, cruel, but
inevitable; that the brutality was part of a world-wide
plan to discredit every decent human virtue; and that
the world was becoming—had become, in fact—a machine !
for which traditional values no longer had a meaning.|
Reportagea the armv as
mechanism
Though Dos Passos
1
presentation includes naturalistic
^Gilbert Highet, The Anatomy of Satire (Princeton,
]1962), pp. 190-191. .
48
The Twenties, rev.,ed. (New York, 1962), p. 80.
Hoffinan says of Dos Passes' depiction of war and the army:
j"[his] occasional demonstrations of a very real talent of a
literary sense of the proper and the useful, are inhibited
jby his obsessive and driving need to show the monster [the
imachinel'at work wrecking the world" (p. 81).
107
subject matter, one could more accurately describe his
method as reportage, a method of directly and dramatically
recording historical events and giving these events esthet
ic form and personal coloration for purposes of effective
social criticism. Granville Hicks and Joseph Freeman, who
called John Reed and Dos Passos great writers of report-
49
age, have said about this method:
The writer not only condenses reality, he must get his
' reader to see and feel the facts. The best writers of
reportage do their editorializing via their artistry.
They do not themselves tell you why these men acted
thus and so; the characters they describe do that job
for them. ... In brief, reportage is the presentation j
of a particular fact, a specific event, in a setting
that aids the reader to experience the fact, the event, !
This is the best reporting.50
Dos Passos not only "editorializes" but esthetically
unifies his documentary by means of symbolism. Since his
narrative method of focusing upon the diverse aspects of
I
the army is basically panoramic and episodic, Dos Passos !
I ' t
^Proletarian Literature (New York, 1935), pp. 211-212.|
In a recent review of his writing Dos Passos said: "Report-!
agjs was a great slogan. The artist must record the fleetingj
world as sharply as the motion picture film recorded it. By
contrast and juxtaposition he could build his own vision
into reality: montage." See "The Desperate Experiment,"
Bookweek. I (September 15, 1963), 3.
i
| SOproietarian Literature, pp. 211-212.
108
compensates for his lack of logical progression by employinc-
a central symbol, the machine, to suggest an over-all
theme. To indicate that the mechanized system of the army
i
is the main antagonist that shapes the lives of his sol
diers, Dos Passos divides the novel structurally into six
main section or chapter headings entitled: "Making the
Mould," "The Metal Cools," "Machines," "Rust," "The World
Outside," and "Under the Wheels." In the recurrent symbols
and images that suggest the theme of mechanization, one
observes Dos Passos* movement toward the thematic unity he
achieves in his later work.
To make his documentary seem more objective, Dos Passos
• i
; • I
also adopts a more impersonal narrative technique, first |
; |
used by James Joyce and Gustave Flaubert, that French crit- j
51 I
ics have called stvle indirect libre. Dos Passos narrates
in third person, yet limits the point of view to the per
ceptions of the character under observation, revealing the
character
1
s consciousness by means o£ interior monologue and
indirect discourse. By this method Dos Passos naturalisti-
CI
JX
Astre, pp. 88-89. The influence of Flaubert is sug
gested by the many allusions to Flaubert's Tj Tftnfcation de
Saint Antoine in Three Soldiers. Wayne Booth has referred
ito this type of narration as "third-person center of con-
isciousness " See The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961),
pp.. 152-153 -----
/ 109
cally records a character's motives, desires, dreams, and
perceptions of outer reality. It is a useful technique to
feign detachment, while satirically ridiculing a character's
illusions, such as Fuselli's success-dreams, or attacking
the system through Andrews' perceptions of the horrors,
injustices, and absurdities in the barracks or on the bat
tlefield.
The individual vs. the system
52 * *
Section I of Three Soldiers. called "Making the
Mould," concerns the initiation of the three soldiers,
Fuselli, ChrisfieId, and Andrews, into army regimentation.
|The scenes in this section are slanted to emphasize the
ioppressive dehumanizing effects of the training camp: the
:
I
I f
endless drills, rigid inspections, wearying physical exami
nations, monotonous window washing and cleaning details,
;the brutal arrogance of the officers, the hard labor which
ileaves the men too tired to think, and the stream of hate
propaganda directed at the men during the day and even dur
ing their recreation periods. Under these oppressive con
ditions, Dos Passos' three recruits from different
j
| 52
A
h p
a
ge references cited are to the Modern Library
jedition, New York, 1932.
110
educational and economic backgrounds are all eventually
humiliated, frustrated, demoralized, and defeated by the
army. When the training period ends and the three soldiers
separate, Dos Passos documents the varied aspects of army
life by relating each soldier's experiences in a different
location. Host of sections I and II deal with Fuselli's
early naive optimism and later disillusionment about the
army as a means to success; section III relates Chrisfield's
moral degeneration; and sections IV through VI focus pri
marily upon Andrews' rebellion and defeat.
Dos Passos satirically portrays Dan Fuselli as a vulgar
Opportunist, a product of the American success myth, whose
illusions about the heroism and glory of army life are de
flated by the degrading experiences he is forced to undergo.
An uneducated, lower-middle class American of Italian de
scent, whose views have been conditioned by romantic film
stories, Fuselli has joined the army because he imagines
jthat military life will be an exciting contrast to his drab
Occupation of clerk in a San Francisco optical store. He
believes that in the army he can become a battle hero and
i "•
gain promotion and leadership over other men.
! Although the training camp contrasts sharply with
j
Fuselli's expectations, he anxiously submits to its
P " 4 """ " • Ill
|
brutalities, its boredom, and its rigid demands for con
formity, and dreams of his forthcoming heroism and promo-
jtion:
Oh, he wanted so hard to be promoted. It'd be so swell
if he could write back to Habe and tell her to address
her letters Corporal Dan Fuse Hi. He must be more care-
! ful not to do anything that would get him in wrong with
anybody. . . . "Oh, when we're ordered overseas, I'll
show them," he thought ardently, and picturing to him
self long movie reels of heroism he went off to sleep.
! (P. 11)
i
Thoroughly indoctrinated by the army propaganda films which
depict allied soldiers in "jolly pursuit of 'the Huns,'"
(pp. 35, 37), Fuselli is proud to be a soldier and is im
pressed with military jargons "These phrases, 'entrain-
ment,' 'order of march,' had a businesslike sound" (p. 32).
After training ends and Fuselli is on the ship for France,
i .
life for him and other enlisted men becomes even worse than
that in the barracks. They sleep in stinking lower holds
in constant fear of torpedoes, drowning, and disease.
Given K. P. duty, Fuselli stifles his dissatisfactions by
dreaming that his girl, Mabe, is waiting faithfully for him
to return as a hero, but he feels "bewildered and humilia
ted" by being treated like "a bale of hay to be bundled
about as anybody liked" (p. 42). Yet when dissenters such
as Meadville and Eisenstein criticize the army and speak of
112
the frightened enlistees as "meat for the guns" (p. 42),
Fuselli is angered by their unorthodox attitudes and warns
them "to be careful how you go talkin' around the way you
do" (p. 44).
When he arrives in France and is stationed in a con
valescent camp, Fuselli*s romantic illusions about his
heroism and promotion to corporal begin to crumble as he
views the grim war casualties and is forced to perform de
grading servant work for the officers. Filled with boredom
and despair, with no letters from his girl, who has appar
ently deserted him, Fuselli feels "lost in the vast [army]
'machine ..." (p. 64). j
> Fuselli's alternating hopes and disappointments finally
crush his spirit. At first his loneliness is assuaged by
Yvonne, a lovely French girl, whom he meets in a small gro
cery store; but Yvonne, having amused herself with him,
soon drops Fuselli and takes up Fuselli's sergeant as an
other temporary lover (p. 115). A second blow to Fuselli's
lagging spirits is the return to duty of the sick corporal
whom Fuselli had hoped to replace (p. 115). With his hopes
for promotion shattered and his dreams of heroism changed
jto cowardice, Fuselli finally volunteers for a clerical job
i . •.
to avoid combat. At this point the narrative shifts to the
113
story of Chrisfield, and we lose sight of Fuselli until
Andrews meets him later in Paris in the last section of the
novel. He then tells Andrews that he has been degraded to
permanent K. P. duty in Paris for having caught venereal
i . • i
i
jdisease from a prostitute. His spirit has now been com
pletely broken by the army machine (p. 327).
The making of a robot
Section III, "Machines," switches back to the other
two soldiers, Chrisfield and Andrews, who are nearing the
!
| front and preparing for battle at about the time Fuselli
i
jvolunteers for his office 30b. The title of this section
; " !
jrefers to the fully-molded fighting men reduced by continu-
l
ing propaganda and regimentation to savage hatred for the
1
L
| - !
Germans and to apathetic unconcern about their own lives. j
This section, which focuses primarily upon Chrisfield's
moral degeneration, is Dos Passos
1
ironic comment on the
dehumanizing effect of the military machine. A primitive
farm boy from Indiana, Chrisfield is molded into an appar
ently ideal fighting machine, a man with reckless courage
; I
land no moral compunctions about killing. But ironically,
his indiscriminate desire to kill leads him to commit atro-
jcities not only upon the enemy but also upon a lieutenant
114
in his own company.
When Andrews first meets him, Chrisfield is a kind of
noble savage, usually gentle, but sometimes violent. But
after being exposed to rigid army discipline and atrocity
films, Chrisfield*s irrationality becomes intensified. Like
Fuselli and other enlistees, he responds emotionally to the
films, saying: "Ah'd lahk te cepture a German officer an'
make him shine ma boots an
1
then shoot him dead . . ." (p.
24). Unable to control his resentment of officers or to
I
jwork off his hostility toward the humiliation of army rou-
j
|tine, Chrisfield pathologically centers his hatred for
'authority upon one man, a Corporal Anderson who he feels
has been persecuting him. One day when Anderson imperson-
I
ally reprimands him for not being with his company, Chris-
field loses control: "If ever Ah gits out o' the army Ah'm
goin' to shoot you." (p. 169).
Before battle, Chrisfield and others are blatantly
encouraged by the Colonel of their regiment to commit atro
cities. An enlisted man, Judkins, mimics the Colonel's
Voice:
! On the subject of prisoners, well, I'll leave that to
j you, but juss remember . . . juss remember what the Huns
did to Belgium, an' I might add that we have barely
enough emergency rations as it is, and the more prisoners
115
you have the less you fellers'11 git to eat.
5
^
Judkins then says to Chrisfield, "Rip up their guts, that's
all, like they was dummies" (p. 180).
I This kind of indoctrination results not only in Chris-
field's brutal killing of a young German but also in his
murder of Anderson. Finding himself separated from his
y
company, he stumbles inside a small house occupied by a
young German soldier "sitting at a table, his head resting
ion his hands" (p. 196). Instead of questioning the defense-
f
less man, Chrisfield "automatically" throws a grenade at hiir
j
and backs away from the explosion, seeing that the young man
jhas made no attempt to avoid death: "The light-haired man j
hadnot moved; his blue eyes still stared straight before
j
him" (p. 196). Dos Passos abruptly ends the scene at this !
I , i
point, on a note of controlled and tense understatement, so j
the vision of the inhuman act remains with the reader. Fi
nally, like a mad animal "numb with cold and hunger, lonely
^Following the pattern of One Man's Initiation
T
Dos
Passos attacks the prevalent opinion of German barbarism by
depicting short scenes in which Americans commit atrocities
jupon Germans. These scenes, although within the bounds of
jcredibility, cure calculated to shock the reader into an in-
dignant awareness of war's depravity. One notices that Dos
Passos' war novels do not contain any scenes in which Ger
mans commit atrocities; they are generally portrayed sympa-
thetically as victims.
116
and lost away from his outfit" (p. 197), Chrisfield comes
upon Anderson, wounded and defenseless j.n a forest clearing,
and again reacts automatically, pressing the spring of
'another grenade and throwing it at Anderson (p. 200). After
i '
I
I •
the murder, Chrisfield sadistically kicks a ragged German
soldier whose hands are up in surrender,
1 feeling the point of the {German's] spine and the soft
| flesh of his rump against his toes with each kick,
laughing so hard all the while that he could hardly
j see where he was going, (p. 200)
After handing the man to another soldier, who bayonets the
German instead of taking him prisoner, Chrisfield at last
| .
arrives back at camp, feeling "warm and important" and no
! • i
longer "lonely any more now that he was marching in ranks j
again" (p. 200). Without being aware of it, Chrisfield has
j
now become a machine that cannot exist apart from the group:
i
I
j His feet beat the ground in time with other feet. He
would not have to think whether to go to the right or
to the left. He would do as the others did. (p. 200)
i
' ' * ' ^
When last seen by Andrews in Section VI, Chrisfield has
'deserted the army because he fears another sergeant has
'discovered his murder of Anderson and is going to have him
i
arrested.
j •
i ..
117
Rebellion and defeat
Sections IV through VI, entitled "Rust," "The World
I Outside," and "Under the Wheels," focus upon the third sol-
i
dier, John Andrews, as he stagnates with other Wounded men
in a convalescent hospital, succumbs to the glittering world
jof Paris, outside the power of army restraints, and falls
jin defeat, after a defiant but futile revolt, under the
wheels of the military machine. Andrews not only symbolizes
54
the artist crushed by a hostile society but serves as Dos
Passos' ironic commentator on the mechanized system.
Like Dos Passos, Andrews is a Harvard-educated artist
and intellectual with an aristocratic Virginia background, j
He has joined the army in the mistaken belief that he can j
| j
escape personal problems and can confront a more realistic j
i j
world which he feels will, make his art (he is a musician)
5
^Malcolm Cowley mentions that the defeat of the artist
by a hostile society was a constant theme of the "art novel"
and constituted both the author's revenge upon a philistine
Isociety and his affirmative gesture of triumph over it
through art. All Dos Passos' novels up to 1936, says Cow
ley, were, in part, art novels. Cowley's thesis lends support
to a view that Dos Passos' use of "pessimistic determinism"
was related to his estrangement from contemporary society,
his condemnation of it, and his defiant gesture of creation
;in the face of the destructive power of "the system." See
j"John Dos Passos: Poet and the World," in Zabel; Literary
Opinion in America, pp. 485-492.
118
more vital and meaningful. He wishes to escape from the
responsibility of individual decision into the security of
the group mind. But once in the army, his delusions that
humility will produce self-discipline and that contact with
others will generate genuine social impulses are destroyed
by the brutal arrogance of the officers and the stupid
herd-like minds of enlistees willingly vulnerable to the
55
brain-washing effects of army propaganda. Unlike the
others. Andrews remains at first determined to resist the
i •
deadening routine, but he gradually loses his will and be-
comes apathetic. But after he is wounded in battle and is
convalescing in a military hospital, Andrews realizes that
he "had let himself be trampled down unresistingly into the
i
pud of slavery" (p. 212) and decides that "as soon as he j
got out of the hospital he would desert. . . . This was his
last run with the pack" (p. 226).
!
However, while Andrews is recuperating, the war ends .
and he loses his will to desert. Instead, he compromises
jhis integrity by using a "Y" man's connections with a
i
^
5
Pages 21-23. The profusion of animal images in this
scene, which depicts the hatred aroused in the men by German
atrocity films, is characteristic of "naturalist" novels.
Cf. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895).
119
highrranking officer to get placed on an academic list to
study music at the Sorbonne. Free now from the world of
"wooden automatons knowing only the motions of the drill
manual" (p. 313), he starts to write music again. But his
failure of courage and the "slave psychology" (p. 290) of
the army continue to haunt him. <
Rushing to Chartres to meet Genevieve Rod, a beautiful
French dilettante, Andrews forgets his pass and is arrested
jby the military police who—typical of army disorganization
j—have never heard of the Paris-school detachment and think
j I
Andrews is a deserter. In a brutally Kafkaesque scene which
depicts the complete helplessness of the individual before
l
; )
brutal authority, Andrews, for failing to salute an officer,!
j ' |
lis savagely beaten into unconsciousness by drunken M.P.'s •
i |
and thrown into a labor camp. Hysterically obsessed by
visions of army brutality and an oppressive machine world,
Andrews decides to martyr himself in the cause of individual
liberty. He deserts the army upon sudden impulse by diving
into the Seine River. Back in Paris, he is urged by friends
at the school detachment to consider the consequences of
his act and the easy possibilities of resuming his life as
a student without having been missed. But he refuses be
cause he considers his act a symbol of defiance against the
120
system in the name of the individual. He then registers in
a boarding house under the name John Brown, the anarchist-
martyr, and changes the title of his projected musical work
from the escapist theme of Flaubert's "The Queen of Sheba"
56
to the social protest theme: "The Body and Soul of John
Brown" (p. 451). Finally alone, without funds, and para
lyzed by emotional conflict, Andrews realizes he cannot be
both deserter and composer because the system will destroy
I
him before he can create anything meaningful. At last,
|Andrews surrenders to the military police that have been
called by his landlady. The defeat of this "poet against
the world" is symbolized by "the brisk wind" (p. 471) that
blows his unfinished manuscript off the writing table onto
; I
: "
1
the floor of his room.
Andrews as moral commentator
Since Andrews is the only one of the three soldiers
who is morally perceptive, Dos Passos uses Andrews' observa-
-!
tions to document the injustices of the army and to comment
upon the loss of human values in the modern mechanized
world.
56
From Flaubert's La Tentation da St. Antoine (1849).
121
First of all, Andrews' experiences within the training
camp dramatize the fact that each soldier is a cog in the
I army machine and must conform to the behavior consistent
jwith his particular social role in its rigid hierarchy,
that each must act properly regarding those above and below
him in status. For example, when Andrews and ChrisfieId
are taMng on a clean-up detail, the corporal, their im~
'mediate superior, shouts:
11
'All right, what you fellers
|
|stand here for? Go an' dump them garbage cans. Lively1
1
i
. . . waddling about importantly on his bandy legs" (p. 20).
But, seeing a group of officers, the corporal automatically
i
shouts "Attention1" and changes his behavior to fit his new
; i
inferior relation to those above him: "His face froze sud-j
j j
denly into obsequious immobility. He brought his hand up j
; |
jto the brim of his hat" (p. 20). The inspecting lieutenantj
sadistically reprimands Andrews for his unkempt appearance, |
but then becomes aware that he, too, is being observed by
his own superior officer who, apparently, disapproves of !
his action. The lieutenant says to Andrews:
"To teach you not to answer back when an officer ad
dresses you. . . ." The officer . . . glanced out of
the corner of his eye at his superior and noticed the
major was frowning. His tone changed ever so slightly.
I "If this ever occurs again you may be sure that discip-
| linary action will be taken." (p. 21)
122
r
Through Andrews' observations, Dos Passos also visually
comments on the rigid mechanization of the camp by use of
the figurative device synecdoche—that is, a form of meta
phor which in mentioning a part signifies the whole. Dos
Passos details significant "parts" of the army camp, such
as identical rows of soldiers or cots, that metaphorically
convey the deadening effects of army monotony and standard
ization upon the soldiers. Andrews and Fuselli, on the
drill field, stand "stiffly at attention in a khaki row that
i
i
jwas one of hundreds of other' khaki rows, identical, that
i ;
filled all sides of the parade ground . . ." (p. 5). And
Andrews, cleaning rows of endless windows, looks down into |
' ' I
the barracks on "rows of cots where the blankets were folded
i
the same way . . ." (p. 16). Other images that symbolically;
: i
echo the ever-present army machine are the "treadmill" to
indicate the tedious boredom and monotony of army life, the
"steamroller" to indicate the army's brutal inexorable de-
structiveness, and "revolving doors" to indicate the de
personalization of army bureaucracy. For example, -when
Andrews is alone in his room after deserting, he wonders if
his life had "led in any particular direction, since he had
been caught haphazard in the treadmill, or was it all
jchance. A toad hopping across a road in front of a
123
steamroller" (p. 451).
Through the use of mirror images, Dos Passos visually
captures the reduction of individuals into endless rows of
names inside army headquarters. For example, when Andrews
enters the major's office to file for discharge, he sees
himself through the mirrors on all four walls: "a skinny
figure in olive-drab, repeated endlessly, stepped up to
endless mahogany desks, which faded into each other in an
endless dusty perspective" (p. 369). When he salutes, he
sees "the figures in the mirror, saluting down an endless
corridor," summing up in him "a morose feeling of helpless
ness" (p. 369).
Dos Passos' satiric reportage includes the comments of
many common soldiers who reveal their bitterness about the
war to Andrews. Eisenstein, a radical from New York, whose
cynicism about war contrasts with Fuselli's naivete, is
sardonic and skeptical about slogans because he believes
the enlistees are being conditioned for slaughter: "...
It's part of the system. You've got to turn men into beasts
before ye can get 'em to act that way. Ever read Tolstoi?"
:(p. 44). ". . . In the tyranny of the Army [says Eisen-
jstein] a man becomes a brute, a piece of machinery" (p. 96).
| '
jln the hospital, the two patients, an ex-taxi driver named
124
Applebaum and the ex-undertaker, lying next to Andrews, are
both bitter about the army. Applebaum, who has lost an arm
in battle, thinks he was "a sucker" to have enlisted: "Next
i • _
time, [he says] we'll know better. . . . Local Board Chair
man's going to be my job" (p. 218). The former undertaker,
dying of tuberculosis, says, he enlisted because he was de
ceived by patriotic slogans and coerced by public opinion:
I thought we was goin' to put things to rights by comin
1
over here. . . . But hell, everybody was saying that we
. was going to fight to make the world safe for democracy,
and that if a feller didn't go, no one'Id trade with him
any more, (p* 219)
i
i
i
I
Isatiric caricature
|
Some of the most corrosive satire in Three Soldiers is
|
^directed at the "Y" men and the clergy, evidently objects of
!
|
Dos Passos
1
contempt because he believed them to be agents
of propaganda who sought to justify the war as a great
Christian undertaking. Frederick Hoffman points out that
most of the "esthete" volunteers were decisive about "their
disapproval of American Propaganda":
For every one of the American volunteers who later wrote
j in terms of his experience a sharp distinction was drawn,
whether explicitly or implicitly, between words used
vaguely to inspire or coerce and words used to designate
; objects, persons, and acts. Never before in American
history was there such a sharp "nominalistic" examina-
| tion of the reasons for using words and phrases, or of
125
the kinds of persons who used them. . . . Consider the
literary consequences. . . . Certain words were avoided,
because they had too often been used by men who turned
out to be either stupid or brutal, in speeches, direc
tives, and the prose defenses of "ideals." This public
personality, because he was public and spoke in plati-
| tudes, became ridiculous; and, along with him, the
i sponsors of "ideals" and "vailues"—the orator, the
priest, the head of the YMCA and his assistants—were
thrown into the discard.
5
^
In his descriptions of the "Y" men, Dos Passos exag
gerates or caricatures their objectionable qualities, such
as their facial expressions, gestures, and cliches, which
reflect their self-conscious role playing, their hypocrisy,
jtheir sense of superiority over the enlisted men, and their
j
!self-righteous hatred of Germans. For example, Andrews ob-
! i
serves one -'Y" man in the camp directing the community sing-
i
jing of "Haii, hail, the gang's all here; We're going to get
i
the Kaiser." The man "twisted his lean face into a face-
i
jtious expression" stressing the hate lyrics: "and lots of
guts in the get and lots of kill in the Kaiser" (p. 22).
Another "Y" man is described in a canteen standing "with a
i " '
i
set smile doling out chocolate to a line of men that filed
past. . . . his well-fed voice full of amiable c6ndescen-
! 57
3
'Frederick Hoffman, The Twenties
r
rev. ed. (New York,
1962), pp. 74-75.
126
sion" (p. 55). Later, still another "Y" man with a "sallow
face . . . pinched nose and chin" counters Andrews' com
plaint about the "filth and slavery" of the army with the
warning: "You'll get into trouble, my boy, if you talk that
I
l
way" and "You must remember that you are a voluntary worker
in the cause of democracy" (p. 165). When Andrews asks him
if he had ever shot a man, the "Y" man answers, "No. . . .
No, of course not, but I'd have enlisted, really I would.
Only my eyes are weak" (p. 165). Andrews then responds
sarcastically under his breath with "I guess so," to indi
cate the man's more than purely visual weakness,
i ' !
! ' i
In the hospital, Andrews is awakened by another "Y"
; • !
man who is confident of his mission and his right to disturb
{every enlisted man. Thinking Andrews is an average soldier ;
! •
1
who hates Germans, the "Y" man proudly brags of the Allied
i
bombing of Germany: "They've bombarded Frankfort; now if
they could only wipe Berlin off the map" (p. 224). Wishing
1
j
to shock the man, Andrews ironically suggests to him that |
if he really hates Germans, he could "borrow a revolver from
one of [his] officer friends and shoot up a convoy of pris
oners" (p. 224). Startled by Andrews' apparent barbarity,
the dull-witted man says, "Don't you know prisoners are
•
sacred?" Dos Passos here attacks the moral complacency of
127
those who can thoughtlessly condone a mass bombing of Ger
man civilians because "they are barbarians, enemies of
civilization" and. at the same time, believe themselves to
I . ' • ' . .
l
be humane; those who direct their hatreds along acceptable
and conventional channels.
There is an equally caustic portrait of Reverend Dr.
I
Skinner who, after having spent Christmas in Germany, ar
rives at the hospital where Andrews is convalescing to
i • -
combine "a little bit of prayer" (p. 232) with a "hate-the-
Hun" sermon. Dr. Skinner is caricatured as:
| a little man with chubby cheeks and steel-grey hair
| very neatly flattened against his skull . . . rubbing
his fat little white hands together and making a faint
unctuous puffing with each breath, (p. 231)
[Dos Passos parodies the tone of Skinner's sermon: "his
i
! ?
voice rose and fell in the suave chant of one accustomed to
i
going through the episcopal liturgy ^for the edification of
well-dressed and well-fed congregations" (p. 232). To an
[audience of wounded men, many permanently disabled by the
war, Dr. Skinner pompously speaks as if he were the only
one inconvenienced by the war: "I ate my Christmas dinner
!
jin Coblenz. What do you think of that?" (p. 233). Skinner
i
then complains that "the Germans have not undergone the
I +
change of heart for which we had hoped" and should be made
128
to "understand the horror that they alone have brought de
liberately upon the world" (p. 233). Skinner's attitude
reflects the feeling of revenge toward the Germans that
resulted in what Dos Passos considered the harsh terms of
|the Versailles Treaty: "I very much fear [he says] that we
i
stopped too soon in our victorious advance; that Germany
should have been utterly crushed" (p. 234).
i '
1Idyllic past vs. sordid
'present
1 *•
In the last section of the novel, Dos Passos fore
shadows his later attacks on American culture by extending
jhis indignation to the general corruption of contemporary |
i ~ i
isociety that stifles the potential greatness of the indi- j
i i
ividual. Andrews, Dos Passos* moral spokesman, is shocked |
by the sadism of the battlefield and appalled by the hatred
|
jof so-called "civilized" people who claim to represent man-
jkind's Christian principles of love and charity. Bitterly i
disillusioned with man's pretense of humaneness, Andrews
y
rejects the values of human civilization as unrealized
ideals that disguise the actual savagery of men. To An-
drews, an anarchist, the great figures of the past, sketched
on the walls of this converted Renaissance hall where he
! •
jlies wounded, were martyrs, "touched by the unutterable
129
futility of the lives of men" (p. 225), idealists whose
"phrases had risen [like] glittering soap bubbles to dazzle
men for a moment, and had shattered" (p. 225). Human civi
lization, underneath these phrases, was actually corrupt
jand depraved, filled with "greed and hatred and cruelty"
i
|(p. 225). As Andrews says to Genevieve Rod, human society
is controlled by those who use words, "pompous, efficient
words" (p. 458) to enslave men. Society, he says, will
{
;always be "organizations growing and stifling individuals,
i
i
and individuals revolting hopelessly against them ..."
|(p. 458). As an outlet for his frustrated idealism, An-
58
jdrews muses upon the vivid life of the Renaissance, which
jsymbolizes to him an age of strong individualists like
!"Michael Angelo, da Vinci, Aretino, Cellini," figures
i
"before which dogmas and slaveries had crumbled to dust"
I (p. 373). In contrast to their greatness, "the world today
seemed pitifully arid."
S^For other references to the Renaissance as an age of
greatness, see "A Humble Protest," Harvard Monthly. UXII
(June 1916), 115-120; also Dos Passos
1
introduction to
fthrae Soldiers (1932); see also Fanshaw's remarks in Streets
of Niaht (1923). Dos Passos
1
idealized view of the past
again reminds us that, as Gilbert Highet suggests in The
Anatomy of Satire, one device of a satirist is to compare
I"a noble dream with a debased reality" (pp. 159-160)
130
Men seemed to have shrunk before the vastness of the
mechanical contrivances they had invented. . . . Men
had become ant-like. . . .There could be no more
individuals, (p. 373)
I
| In this chapter it has been suggested that Dos Passos
fits the pattern of disillusioned idealist turned satirist.
It was pointed out that Dos Passos first exhibited his moral,
idealism in his college essays, when he compared the
achievements of the heroic past with the degrading effects
iof machinery upon modern man, and expressed skepticism re-
Igarding ideas that scientific and industrial progress would
.lead to man's moral perfection. It was then mentioned that
Dos Passos
1
pessimism concerning the direction of modern i
!
civilization was intensified by the war hysteria which end
ed the progressive era and trampled upon democratic rights
jof free speech and assembly, and that Dos Passos
1
anger andj
! .•' I
frustration finally led him into political radicalism as an
outlet for his naive beliefs that modern society was con
trolled by entrenched capitalists, warmongers, and jingo-
lists, and could only be saved by the Revolution which would
abolish war and produce a new cooperative commonwealth.
Dos Passos
1
awareness of social injustice, his hatred
j of his own social^class, his bitter disgust with the war
were the strong driving forces behind these bitterly ironic
131
war novels. Following the typical strategy of the satirist;
Dos Passos
1
intention in these novels was to portray the
war as brutally as possible not only to release his own
anger but to shock his audience out of its prevalent be
liefs that the War had been, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase,
"a crusade for democracy," and that only the Allies had been
humane and heroic, while the Germans had been barbarians
iwho wished to destroy civilization. Using an impersonal
I
i
jand documentary style of narration to feign objectivity,
|Dos Passos purposely slanted his portrait of War to elimi
nate or to ridicule the heroic and to expose the irrational
and depraved actions of human beings in the army training
camps and on the ^battlefield. Adopting a deterministic
i
method for purposes of satiric social criticism, Dos Passos
{depicted the typical enlistee as an ant-like victim of the
^gigantic army machine, and made the War a symbol of the
i
mechanized destruction of traditional human values. Repre-
4'
sentative of the "lost generation" idealists alienated from
their supposedly corrupt elders, Dos Passos satirized the
self-deception and hypocrisy of those public figures who
pretended to represent humane and civilized values but who,
as agents of "the system," had actually spread hatred that
131
war novels. Following the typical strategy of the satirist;
Dos Passos' intention in these novels was to portray the
war as brutally as possible not only to release his own
anger but to shock his audience out of its prevalent be
liefs that the War had been, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase,
"a crusade for democracy," and that only the Allies had been
humane and heroic, while the Germans had been barbarians
1
jwho wished to destroy civilization. Using an impersonal
[and documentary style of narration to feign objectivity,
jDos Passos purposely slanted his portrait of War to elimi-
j . '
inate or to ridicule the heroic and to expose the irrational
and depraved actions of human beings in the army training ;
; • i
camps and on the battlefield. Adopting a deterministic
method for purposes of satiric social criticism, Dos Passos
depicted the typical enlistee as an ant-like victim of the
igigantic army machine, and made the War a symbol of the
'mechanized destruction of traditional human values. Repre
sentative oi; the "lost generation" idealists alienated from
their supposedly corrupt elders, Dos Passos satirized the
self-deception and hypocrisy of those public figures who
pretended to represent humane and civilized values but who,
jas agents of "the system," had actually spread hatred that
132
had brought social conflict and moral degeneration upon
contemporary society.
CHAPTER III
MANHATTAN TRANSFER
From 1919 to 1925
Dos Passos' next important novel, Manhattan Transfer,
called by Sinclair Lewis "a novel of the very first impor
tance" and "the foundation of a whole new school of novel-
writing"'
1
' was shaped by the same critical attitudes toward
imodern industrial society that had motivated Dos Passos
1
iwar novels: the shocked disillusionment that the war had
produced upon his idealistic sensibilities, his pessimism
i
;about the decline of democratic ideals in postwar America,
and his hatred of the growing mechanization and materialism
of his age that he believed was a threat to the individual.
The new and daring experimental form of Manhattan Transfer.
i '*>
which was to characterize Dos Passos
1
style through the
i
i
^-Saturday Review of Literature. VI (December 5, 1925),
; 361.
I
133
134
years of his U.S.A. trilogy, resulted from Dos Passos'
growing interest in cultural history and his belief that the
novelist with a new technique that could both recreate and
I judge the events of contemporary history could reach a wide
audience and exert influence toward creating a better world.
To better understand the social criticism and complex lit
erary techniques that Dos Passos successfully integrated in
Manhattan Transfer, it is necessary to review briefly some
j
pertinent facts of his career between the years 1919 and
! 1925, including his response to the cultural trends of the
i
postwar period, his literary works that preceded Manhattan
Transfer, and the influence of the avant-garde movement in
I I
the arts upon his later fictional experiments.
i
iSpain and self-diseoverv
After his army discharge in 19i9 Dos Passos, a politi
cal radical and social agrarian, chose to escape from the
morally chaotic postwar world by returning to Spain.
Agrarian Iberia, the land of his father's heritage where he
had spent a peaceful interlude in 1916, offered Dos Passos
I
2
•rest for his disturbed mental state and a chance to
^John Dos Passos, "Grosz Comes to America," Esquire.
VI (September 1936), 128.
135
discover spiritual roots that he was unable to find in the
3
United States. In Spain during 1919 and 1920 he worked
out his pent-up hostilities and recovered his mental equi
librium by writing his war novels, a volume of imagist
poetry, Pushcart at the Curb (1922). and an impressionistic
cultural study of the Spanish people and institutions,
4
Roslnanfce to the Road Again (1922). While in Spain, DOS
Passos discovered that his own anarchistic idealism was an
ingrained character trait of the highly individualistic
Spaniards. As Dos Passos said later, he began "to feel
t
enormous sympathy" for the Spanish people, "so various and
so much themselves, so unaffected by the standardization of
'5
the life of our day." Spain became linked in Dos Passos
1
mind with the ideals of the American Dream that he observed
t
crumbling in the wake of the War. The Spanish professional
classes, he observed:
I 3
; John Dos Passos, "Against American Literature," New
Republic. VIII (October 14, 1916), 269-271.
4Jack Potter, A Bibliography of John Dos Passos (Chi-
jcago, 1950), pp. 69-71. Several short pieces first pub
lished in American periodicals were later collected in Rosi-
nante.
5
John Dos Passos, The Theme is Freedom (New York,
1956), p. 105.
•
136
felt an immense desire to further the good of mankind
the way the men who launched our own American republic
had furthered the good of mankind. Progress was their
faith, (p. 106)
6 7
An "independent radical seeker" and revolutionary, Dos
Passos sympathized mainly with the working classes, especi
ally the "numerous syndicalists and anarchists [who] saw no
need for the machinery of the state" to create a "republic
8
of well-intentioned men," and "-the socialists" who "be
lieved a revolution . . . would put the people who did the
work in charge of the mechanism of the state. . . . There
after men would treat each other as brothers according to
;the principles of mutual aid" (p. 106).
Searching for his identity in "the scattered pictures
i • . '
9 10
of Spain," Dos Passos, in the role of Telemachus,
^Daniel Aaron, Writers on the Left, p. 348.
?Aaron, pp. 346-347; The Theme is Freedom, pp. 2-4.
8The Theme is Freedom, p. 106.
9
John Dos Passos, Roainante to the Road Again (New
York, 1922), p. 55. Hereafter, page references to this work
jshall be included after the quote in the text.
| l^This picturesque travelogue of Spain contains brief
fictional episodes involving Telemachus, the idealist, and
jLyaeus, the sensualist, who travel, in a picaresque manner,
jthrough Spain and meet interesting Spanish types. Inter
spersed with these episodes cure cultural studies of Spanish
{artists, writers, and intellectuals.
137
discovered in the Spanish character an extreme individual
ism, that was "born of a history whose fundamentals lie in
isolated village communities" (p. 53) with their "roots
i
striking into the infinite past" (p. 52); an individualism
I-
that had extended from the classical Spanish painters down
to contemporary Spanish writers, and had resolved itself
into the extreme idealism of Don Quixote, "who believed in
jthe power of man's soul over all things," and the extreme
sensuality of Sancho Panza, "to whom all the world was food
I
jfor his belly" (p. 54). The extreme individuality of the
'Spanish artists and writers, Dos Passos found, had caused
j
their art to deviate from realism into satire and social |
criticism, a trait which was to characterize Dos Passos
1
own
1
!••••'" I
work. The realistic portraits of El Greco and Goya, he j
! . |
discovered, tended to become caricatures: j
: ' j
Spanish art [said Dos Passos] is constantly on the edge !
of caricature. Given the ebullient fertility of the
Spanish mind and its intense individualism, a constant
slipping over into the grotesque is inevitable. ...
Their image of reality is sharp and clear, but distort
ed. Burlesque and satire are never far away in their
most serious moments, (p. 58)
In contemporary Spain, Dos Passos.located this extreme in
dividualism in Pio Baroja, whose anarchism Dos Passos found
j
to be "an immensely valuable mental position" (p. 93) for a
138
young writer like himself.
1
* Baroja had followed "in the
footprints of Balzac" (p. 94) as a "historian of morals"
(p. 96) and had written novels of Spanish life that were
"etched with vitriol" (p. 99). His work contained a message
about "the profound sense of the evil of existing institu
tions" (p. 93) to which Dos Passos' own anarchistic tempera
ment could respond. Baroja, recalled Dos Passos, had said:
. . . the only part a man of the middle classes can
1 play in the reorganization of society is destructive.
| ... His great mission is to put the acid test to
| existing institutions, and to strip the veils off
| them. ... (p. 93)
It is possible that Dos Passos, at this time, discov-
| •
jered in Baroja's work his own future role as a moral his-
torian and critic of American society; for in a later review
of a Baroja novel, when he again discussed the Spaniard's
writing, Dos Passos seemed to reveal his own attitudes
toward industrial capitalism and the role of the radical
writer. Baroja, said Dos Passos:
|
13
iJohn Wrenn, in John Dos Passos (New Haven, 1961),
has remarked: "What Dos Passos has to say about Baroja is
sometimes so close to what might later have been written of
Dos Passos . . . that it is.difficult to know just what
significance to give his statements as they might relate to
his own art" (p. 91).
139
felt intensely the restlessness and disruption of the
world about him in which the middle classes dazed and
bloated by the tremendous power and riches a century's
industrial growth had brought them, were already losing
control. An era was speeding to a climax. The early
twentieth century was to bring decisive and sublime
events. In all this there was no i.time for urbanity or
literary punctilio. Writing should be colloquial,
sarcastic, acid. A novelist was an advance agent of
revolution who measured out and described what was to
be destroyed
Critic of the American scene
Spain was not only a refuge from the "chaos that
13
followed the Versailles peace," but a base away from the
i
'United States from which Dos Passos could fulfil the decla-
i
ration he had made to Arthur McComb to attack the reaction
ary trends in American culture that had started with the
' 14 15
|advent of the War. Frederick Hoffman in The Twenties
jcites Harold Stearns' published symposium, Civilization in
i
the United States
r
as an accurate index of these postwar
trends that Dos Passos was to criticize in his articles,
plays, and novels when he returned to the States. Stearns'
^"Baroja Muzzled," Dial, LXXIV (February 1923), 199-
200.
l^John Qos Passos, "The Desperate Experiment," Book-
week . I (September 15, 1963), 3.
!
14
Aaron, pp. 346-347.
15
Revised edition (New York, 1962), pp. 21-22.
140
book, days Hoffman, was a "curious document of disaffection"
by thirty-three intellectuals who exposed America's cultural,
failure during those years and encouraged the younger Amer
ican generation "to reject its heritage and to look to other
| ' .
lands and other cultures" (The Twenties, p. 22). Among the
contributors to the symposium, Lewis Mumford stressed that
"the [American] city is an index of our material success
i
and our spiritual failure" (p. 22); H. L. Mencken cited "the
incurable cowardice and venality of the normal American
politician" (p. 22); John Macy pointed out that "the press
|is corrupt and controlled by advertisers, and the public
i
accepts uncritically what the newspaper provides" (p. 22);
Caret Garrett concluded that "in our business life we no !
I' . I
longer have an ethic" (p. 22); Alfred Kuttner cited the I
i ' j
!"neurotic breakdown" (p. 22) of marriage and family life; ;
Van Wyck Brooks declared that artists "will scarcely find ;
'i • !
nourishment in such a soil" (p. 22); and Stearns himself
commented that "the only hopeful sign in 'The intellectual
Life' [of America] is the disrespect the younger people have
for their elders" (p. 22). "Before 1915," says Hoffinan,
"the liberal, the dissident, the progressive member of
society hoped for a moral, intellectual, and aesthetic re
surgence" (p. 24), but to "those who contributed to
Ml
Civilization in the United States there was no longer any
basis of a reasonable hope . . (p. 25).
As Merle Curti, the cultural historian, has pointed
out, from the Populist uprising to Wilson's second election
I
I in 1916, political, economic, and social reform had been an
.
impressive element in American thought, but that in the
postwar years through the 1920's the prevailing public
jopinion was symbolized by President Coolidge's slogan, "The
i ig
business of America is business." Says Curti: "The new
i
acceptance of the philosophy of mass consumption and mass
prosperity had overshadowed the older reform ideology" (p.
693). Big business was made acceptable to the public by
'advertisers, public relations experts, economists, story j
writers, and columnists; President Harding's slogan, "Back
I
i
jto normalcy," stressed bland optimism, prosperity, and con-
i
formity, rather than self-criticism, moral idealism and
reform. In this atmosphere of a "prosperity [that] cures
all evils," super-patriotism, and anti-internationalism,
|says Curti, "the effort was made ... to conceal divisions
within American life and to maintain the social and economic
16
The Growth of American Thought (New York and London,
1943), pp. 686-696.
142
status quo" (p. 690). Economic inequalities and hardships
of low income groups were concealed; war hysteria and
Ihatred of dissenters, aliens, and minority groups continued,
i . '
and many so-called "undesirables" were deported; the League
|of Nations was rejected; American superiority over Europeans
and the doctrine of the superiority of "Nordic" stock became
accepted notions; hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan were
;tolerated and condoned; foreign immigration was restricted;
j
|"New York teachers" were required "to take oaths of loyal
ty"; controversial text books were attacked as "subversive";
and "black lists" were circulated; hate propaganda directed
i ' I
; • |
at labor unions was disseminated through the press; the j
i i
I.W.W. was suppressed; Socialism "was now reduced to a
feeble fragment" of its previous influence; and "Communism
|was virtually driven underground" (pp. 690, 692-693).
Following Baroja's example, Dos Passos proceeded to
become a destructive critic of these trends and began send-
i
ing articles to such liberal and radical periodicals as the
Liberator, Dial, Freeman, and Nation in which he attacked
"the anti-Bolshevik hue and cry" and "the fanatical worship
i
of things" existing in America that had caused Europe to
JL43
17
turn away from the "false dawn" of Wilsonian idealism.
Reminding his readers of the revolutionary heritage of
America, Dos Passos called for a rebellion, in the tradition
I
of "the swaggering independence of our pioneers" (p. 777)
against existing standards of conformity:
We have heard [said Dos Passos] a great deal in these
last years of the duty of the individual to his govern-
| ment; it is time something were said of the duty of the
individual to his own integrity, to his conscience in
the good round eighteenth century term. (p. 777)
i
' After a year in Spain and further visits to Portugal
i
18
and the Near East, Dos Passos returned to the United
States in 1922 and lived chiefly in New York City during
the 1920's. Settling in Greenwich Village, Dos Passos be-
came a free-lance reporter and continued to write articles,
*
novels, and plays critical of American culture. He later
Irecalled the ideological beliefs that had motivated his
I
criticism during this period:
^"America and the Pursuit of Happiness," Nation. CXI
(December 29, 1920), 777-778.
l®Out of these travels as a correspondent for the Near
East Relief during 1921, Dos Passos wrote articles later
collected in another impressionistic travelogue, Orient
Express (New York, 1927). He also included in this book
some impressionistic water colors painted during the trip.
144
In Europe [said Dos Passos] we had picked up some of the
slogans o£ Marxists and syndicalists. We agreed with
them that democratic self-government had sold out to
capital. Capitalism was the sin that had caused the
wary only the working class was free from crime.^
I
j
Opposed to the ingrained "system" Dos Passos supported the
working class:
. . . War was ruining civilization. Everywhere the
plain people wanted peace. Only the bankers and busi
nessmen had profited by the war. Merchants of death.
Down with the bankers and businessmen. With the work
ing class in power, peace would be assured, (p. 4)
Joining other liberals and radicals engaged in fighting "the
class war," Dos Passos in 1926 became a contributing editor
20
to The New Masses
T
a radical periodical that succeeded thej
defunct Masses. and a director and set designer of The New
Playwrights Theater, an avant-garde group whose plays were
revolutionary in both their social ideas and experimental
i 21
techniques.
|
19
The Theme is Freedom, p. 2.
|
20
Wrenn, pp. 189-190.
2
^Wrenn, p. 132. See also Dos Passos' articles on the
theater; especially, "Propaganda in the Theatre," Daily
Worker j. April 4, 1927, pp. 7-8; "Towards a Revolutionary
Theatre," New Masses
T
III (December 1927), 20; "Did the New
Playwrights Theatre Pail," New Masses
T
IV (August 1929), 13;
and "Why Write for the Theatre Anyway," in John Dos Passps,
Three Plays (New York, 1934), pp. ii-xxii.
145
Early criticism: Streets Of
niabt.
While in New York, Dos Passos wrote two minor works
that preceded Manhattan Transfer and foreshadowed the themes
I
land techniques of his "collective" novels. Representing
Dos Passos' first criticism of the American scene in fiction
and drama, both works satirize the stifling effects of
American culture upon young people who are anxious to ex
perience life fully and freely. The novel, Streets of
Niaht
T
published in 1923 but probably written while Dos
I 22
Passos was a student at Harvard, exposes the inhibitions
I
and restrictions of Harvard academic life and puritanical
New England culture. In a Boston setting around 1910,
|
ithree youths, Nancibel Taylor, an aspiring violinist, Pan-
; i
; i
shaw MacDougan, a college instructor, and David'Wendell
i
i(Wenny), a graduate student, are "thrown together in an
I 22"The Desperate Experiment," Bookweek
T
I (September
15, 1963), 3, Dos Passos comments that while he was at Har
vard, he had written "various novels on the hackneyed old
before-the-war theme of the revolt of precious youth . . .
against the conventions and constraints of the successfully
mature," the main theme of Strseets of Niaht. Joseph Warren
Beach, in American Fiction 1920-134.0 (New York, 1941, 1960),
calls the novel "a vague and ineffectual composition" and
jsuggests that it "must have been written earlier and dragged
out of the author's barrel after the success of Three Sol
diers in 1921" (pp. 26-27).
L
146
oppressive environment which frustrates or perverts their
23
energies, their loves, and their hopes." In this one-
sidedly "unpleasant portrayal of his collegiate contempor-
! 24
aries," Dos Passos again adopts a deterministic method to
indict the outworn New England traditions as a form of
death-in-life to the human spirit and to depict his three
jcharacters as.victims of "the system" that prevents them
{from attaining a rich authentic existence. Portrayed iron-
[ •
ically as the products of the genteel class snobbism and
j
puritanical guilt they have inherited from their parents,,
all three characters are unable to break the mold of their
sexual inhibitions, rigid class consciousness, and emotional
i
paralysis. Nancibel, a talented musician, is inwardly drawn
: '
to Wenny's intense vitality, but her emotional fears cause j
her to reject his love, ruining both his life and her own.
Refusing a chance for the fulfillment of marriage and chil
dren, she escapes from life by sublimating sexual longings i
•into her music. After Wenny's death, she becomes a prema-
i
turely old maid who seeks to contact him spiritually through
23Wrenn, p. 116. Wrenn has pointed out similarities
between this novel and Nathaniel Hawthorne's Fanshawe (1828),
;See pp. 116-121.
|
| 24yjrenn, P • 117.
147
the medium of the ouija board. Fanshaw, a Prufrock type,
escapes direct contact with life by burying himself in the
historical past, finding his bookishly refined conception
jof the Italian Renaissance preferable to the drabness and
i •
sterility of his own age. Identified with the intellectual
prestige of Harvard College and the social prestige of the
bourgeois class, Fanshaw reaches a degree of self-awareness,
but is unable to break the shell of his introversion. In-
stead, he resigns himself to his static existence, consoling
!
himself that he is perfectly fit for it. He thinks his mind
is like the "little Mid-Victorian knickknacks" in his cabi
net at home: "It opens. You can put things in and they
: ' ' i
stay there, but nothing moves. That's why I am so appropri -j
25 '
ate to the groves of Academe." As Fanshaw says: "I feel j
'futile . . . but pleasantly futile, artistically futile."
Wenny, portrayed more sympathetically, possesses an inner
1
vitality that Nan and Fanshaw both lack and that draws them
! ^streets of Night (New York, 1923), p. 45.
i
26
Streets of Nicrht. p. 46. Maxwell Geismar in Writers
in Crisis (New York, 1942) has called Dos Passos
1
treatment
of Fanshaw "definitely satirical" (p. 101). "Confessing
himself a disciple of Pater," Fanshaw, says Geismar, "is
really a parody of Pater
1
s disciples from the mid-American
belt" (p. 101).
148
ito him. Although Wenny consciously rejects the shallowness
i *
|of his own class and dreams of escaping Boston, where he
i
27
|feels "caged by dead customs," he cannot break from the
|
Ipast because he is too much the product of it. Constantly
'haunted by the puritanical voice of his clergyman father,
jWenny cannot obey his true desires to become a seaman or a
"mucker" like Whitey, the proletarian vagabond, whom he
jmeets and whose mobility represents freedom and fertility
i
ito him. Instead, Wenny can only summon enough courage to
jprotest his heritage by committing suicide, his only pos-
sible act of self-assertion.
Drama as criticism; The
gjffraqf Map
j
The theme of youthful guest for experience and self-
identity, and the resistance to the mechanized forces of
culture that threaten one's identity is continued in Dos
Passos
1
expressionistic Plav r The Garbage Man, written about
28
1923. Produced by the Harvard Dramatic Club in 1925 with
27streets of Niaht. p. 70.
28
John Wrenn says: "The date 1923 is conjectural. The
Garbage Man was first written as the composition of a fic-
jtional character in an early unpublished novel" (p. 196).
This is confirmed by Dos Passos in "Looking Back on
I U.S.A.,
1
" New York Times, October 25, 1959, section 2, p. 5
149
29
the title
r
The Moon is a Gona. and again in New York in
1926, The Garbage Man warrantsmore attention because it is
an important illustration of Dos Passos
1
developing satiri
cal style, his first sociological diagnosis of New York
City, and the expressionistic techniques which influenced
30
his stylistic conception of Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.
The garbage Man is a transitional work between Streets
Of Might and Manhattan Transfer in that it satirizes both
29
Three Plays, p. 75.
i
• 3°In "Looking Back on 'U.S.A.,'" Dos Passos declared:
j". . . it seems fairly obvious that my excitement over the
I'expressionist' theatre of the Nineteen-twenties had a good
deal to do with shaping their [the U.S.A. novels] style."
|And as Dos Passos stated in his articles on theater in the
New Masses,, he wished to write plays not for a select group
|of intellectuals, but for a large working-class audience
jthat enjoyed musicals, prize fights, and the circus; and
jthat he wished to'communicate both serious ideas and show
manship through the use of experimental staging, farce and
melodrama, music,and dance, which he hoped would give seri-
ous drama a wider appeal and greater emotional impact. In
-his "Production Note" at the end of the published version of
The Garbage Man. Dos Passos stated that he had wished, in
ithis play, "to fuse the two halves of the New York theatre:
ithe 'serious' half that strives for content and that at
present attains mostly a lot of empty seats, and the box-
office half that has, for musical shows, farces and melo-
jdramas at least, the technique of showmanship." See Three
iPlays. p. 75. Dos Passos also experimented with new tech
niques while he was a director of the New Playwrights Thea-
jtre between 1926 and 1928; but the plays of the group, al
though interesting experiments, failed both critically and
commercially. See "Did the New Playwrights Theatre Fail,"
New Masses. IV (August 1929), 13.
150
the genteel snobbishness of the small town and the commer
cial! ty and corruption of the big city. Called by John
Wrenn "the first expressionistic pre-telling of the story
31
of Jimmy Herf and Ellen Thatcher," the play focuses upon
the desperate need of two youths to seek a fulfilled ex
istence within the deadening confines of contemporary Amer
ican society. Tom and Jane, two childhood sweethearts,
I
feel stifled in a small town somewhere in the U.S.A. and
wish to run away and get married; but because Tom is the
son of a plumber, Jane's socially prominent family look
jupon him as an unfit suitor. Tom, a journalist, is sick of
his job and would like to run away and see the world. Jane,!
i |
who also wants to escape the town, is attracted to the big ;
; • i
city and the idea of becoming a successful actress. After |
i
the death of her mother (I. ii.) and her first confronta-
• !
tion with The Family Practitioner (Death personified) who j
comes to collect her mother's remains, Jane is reminded j
I
that she is not really living and that death might appear j
at any moment. She therefore decides to flee the town and
go to Chicago with Tom. Later (I. iv.), at a railroad
; crossing where the train in front of theirs has been
i
i
!
I 31fjrenn, p. 132.
151
i
|wrecked, Jane again confronts Death, this time as The Man
j
i
I in Black Overalls as he collects the bodies of those who
!
had planned to go to Chicago to make money or find love.
Disturbed by the possibility of sudden death before she can
attain freedom and fulfillment, Jane chooses fame and a
career rather than love, and deserts Tom, who lacks the
1
direction and aggressiveness needed for success in the big
city. Tom, embittered by Jane's rejection of him, now feels
free to become a tramp and to travel around the world on a
'quest for experience. Jane wishes to go up the social lad
der and Tom wishes to go down.
The four disconnected scenes of Act II deal with life
in New York City five years later. Tom reappears as a rag-
j
ged and impoverished bum in search of Jane, who has now
• J
become Janet Gwendolen, the stage star, and has lost her
identity in the process. While Jane has achieved success—
has struck the moon like a gong and made it ring—Tom, like
Wenny, has become emotionally paralyzed in a society that
permits no outlet for his dreams. Nearly starved, he be
comes involved in a robbery under the leadership of The Han
in the Stovepipe Hat (Death in another dress) who; promises
Tom and other bums easy money and success; but the robbery
!fails and all the others except Tom sure caught or shot by
152
police. With the police in hot pursuit, Tom searches for
Jane, hoping that she will recognize him and hide him from
jthe law. While Tom finds temporary refuge with Mrs. Hal-
I
loran in a rooming house near Jane's residence, the action
i
i
centers upon Jane's party, and the meaningless chatter of
i
her vapid guests, who illustrate the emptiness and futility
|of her career. When Jane finally recognizes Tom, she admits
ishe hates her artificial existence, but is too enmeshed in
jthe complexities of her career to give it up for genuine
{life and love.
j I
| The climax of Act II comes with The Prosperity Day j
Parade, called by the governor and mayor to avert financial j
\ 1
panic. While Tom begs Jane to flee the success drive and . |
: I
live before they are swept away by The Garbage Man (Death
in another disguise), who again-appears to collect the j
wasted lives of the city, the parade approaches them, high
lighted by the Voice of the Radio, which shouts, in a tra
vesty of a political speech, all the cliches of the day in
exaggerated form. The Voice calls for prosperity, patriot
ism, and conformity, and attacks all dissenters. Tom, !
choosing to live rather than to be ground under by the
. machine, defies the loudspeaker and the police and runs
along the rooftops of the skyscrapers. Jane, after being
153
temporarily carried away by The Garbage Man, is miraculously
{reunited with Tom as they break away from the city and
itranscend time and space in a mystical manner, finally at-
i
itaming freedom.
!
I
iExpresaionisfcic satire
!
| Like other expressionistic plays and much modern poet
ry, The Garbage Man substitutes a symbolic structure for its
jlack of a tightly-knit plot. Recurring images and key words
that refer to machinery and death suggest the theme that
! • • •
modern mechanized society threatens the life of the individ
ual. The actions and dialogue of the characters, the set
ting, and the use of music and dance, all support this
i
theme. |
| At the beginning of the play, as Tom and Jane come on
I
jstage, a factory is seen in the background, and the orches-
I •
tral accompaniment beats out the monotonous rhythms of its
machinery. As in much expressionistic drama, the dialogue
i
is disconnected and symbolic in nature, such as the sudden
i . •
outbursts of Jane's verbalized thoughts about her death-in-
; - /
life existence: "Oh it's terribly cold this morning. Some
154
32
body's walking over my grave." Another of her statements
links machinery with death:
i
| They'd make us work till our hands couldn't feel and
our faces were gray and our eyes were blank. . . . Tom
listen Fsicl to the engine in the powerplant. That's
all people. The engines are made out of people pound-
i ed into steel, (p. 8)
I
!
At the end of the first scene, music is again heard which
connects machinery with death. The stage directions read:
The rhythm of the powerplant rises triumphant, goes off
as the curtains come together into a song like "Massa's
in de Cold Cold Ground" played on the full orchestra,
(p. 8)
Scenes ii and iii satirize the spiritual deadness.of
the small-town genteel society with its snobbishness, its
sentimentality, its hypocrisy and greed, and its moribund
i
customs and language. Burlesquing the funeral ceremony of
bane's mother, Dos Passos communicates much of his satire
musically through the use of derisive renditions of senti
mental popular tunes or harsh jazz music which jars with
the expected solemnity of the funeral rites. When Jane's
mother dies, the music fades out sourly on a few bars of
"My Old Kentucky Home," after which The Family Practitioner
! John Dos Passos. The Garbage Man (New York and Lon
don, 1926), p. 7.
155
(Death personified) enters with a sardonic comment:
i
Oh I tend the very best people. I dress specially when
I come to a refined family like this. How do you like
my hat; very genteel, don't you think so? . . . Taste I
Discretion! Tact I (pp. 16-17 )
i
i
Her mother's death makes Jane aware of her own spiritually
dead existence. She says to Tom: "If there were a garbage
man in the world who carried off all the dead-alive don't
I . .
you know we would go too?" (p. 13). During the funeral
i
ceremony, travestied by jazz music (p. 36), the relatives
dance into the room, pretending to be in mourning but really
• • i
concerned about "the will" Jane's mother has left. They are
1
: ' i
presented as satiric caricatures which exaggerate their |
class snobbery and dead cliches. Aunt Georgiana Riverson
! ' «
is less concerned about her sister's death than Jane's
deviations from genteel respectability and association with |
Tom, the son of a working man. She tells Jane: "You know
< i
Jane I never felt you kept up your position enough socially"!
j
(p. 21). Jane's Uncle William, Aunt Marianna, and their two
sons with "Arrow Collar faces" all spout empty cliches:
"Everything's for the best in this world dear" (p. 31).
Cousin Frank Wilmot speaks in the rhetorical flourishes of
|an opportunist politician: "You should not neglect your
|
Ifamily history. . . . After his flag a gentleman's greatest
156
pride is in his family" (pp. 28-29).
The scene is climaxed when John, the colored servant
i
|and "a seeker," upsets the ceremony by rushing up the stairs
i
I
and preaching to all present that no one there is alive:
In dis world dey's many folks thinks dey's alive as
| ain't alive. . . .It's dem dey ought to cart away
j in hearses, bretheren1 . . . (p. 47)
i
!
Expressing a constant theme in Dos Passos' work, the ser
vant's message is that one can only find salvation by an
i
individual route: "When a man's found his road to foiler
ain't no way for him 'xepen he follers it" (p. 43). His j
i
sermon frightens away the guests and reminds Tom and Jane j
that they too must find their own way to salvation while
!
there is still time. j
: ' !
Act II of The Garbage Man has an important bearing
: • I
upon Manhattan Transfer because the play's action centers
I
in New York, and its themes and techniques, used to charac- |
terize life in the big city, foreshadow those of the novel, j
In his expressionistic vision of New York City, Dos Passos
satirically distorts external reality and magnifies particu
lar social and political trends he believed to represent the
essence of city life. In general, he. characterizes life in
Manhattan as a wasteland where precious time is lost seeking
such illusions as success while The Garbage Man (Death)
i
'continually enters to collect the waste. Technically, Dos
Passos wishes to communicate the exciting panorama of the
city, the surface glitter of success that had attracted
!countless numbers of people from all parts of the country.
jThus, his cast of characters includes a wide assortment of
types: old bums, gorilla-faced policemen, robbers, actors,
press agents, speculators, real-estate men, politicians,
landlords, government agents, dancers, and newsboys (p. 74).
And in order to combine his satire with the entertainment
of popular arts of musical comedy and melodrama, he injects [
!
the use of jazz music, operatic arias, popular songs, polit
ical slogans, newsboys shouting headlines, dancers, a radio
33 j
loudspeakers and a parade. |
The main theme, the waste of one's life chasing fame
and fortune, is reiterated by the Old Bum and the Telescope
Man who sells tickets to those who wish to see the moon.
Both men act as a kind of chorus. The message of the Old
Bum is that the romance of success lures many to Manhattan:
/
". . . folks is thinkin' of this town, packing and selling
33
The subtitle of The Garbage Man is A Parade with
Shouting.
158
out, leaving wives to come here" (p. 89). However, few
reach the top, he says, and poverty exists amidst plenty:
"It's a rare life for them guys on the inside track" (p.
89). According to the Telescope Man, even the lives of the
t
rich and successful are destroyed by the city; their natural
impulses are crushed by their mechanized routines:
| Every day [he says] they're tied tighter in ticker rib-
! bon an' typewriter ribbon till they can't move, till
they don't have time to look at the moon.... and
they've ground their lives little like sausage meat an'
crushed their lives in stone crushers an' clanked 'em
out into smudgy black picayune letters in printing
presses, (p. 91) j
:
j
In his satirical dissection of the social organism, |
: I
Dos Pas.sos shows that many American lives cure wrecked by
!
the success myth propagated by four centers of power. These
i I
are represented by four expressionistic types, who control
1
the city: The Fat Man, the capitalist speculator who owns j
i
the machinery of production; the Real-estate Men who controlj
the property; The Man in the Panama Hat who controls the j
press and police power; and The Voice of the Radiophone, j
the politicians who manipulate the machinery of the city
-r
for the good of the speculators and landlords and who pre
serve the illusion of prosperity to avoid financial panic.
phe Fat Man is depicted as a Marxian caricature of the cold,
i •
t
v
159
selfish manipulator of money. Less concerned about the
lives lost in the train wreck than the delay caused by the
[accident which could cost him a million dollars, his only
i
1
'comment is: "Love is cheap. You can buy it anywhere.
Lives are cheap. It's money that's dear" (p. 56). The
four Real-estate Men are heartless profit-takers who joy
ously celebrate the foreclosure of Jane's mortgage by danc-
jing an Indian war-dance around Tom and Jane to the clash of
'cymbals from the orchestra (p. 138). The Man in the Panama
i
j
Hat represents several predatory social types who endanger
the freedom of the individual. He appears simultaneously I
as a corrupt press agent and a snooping FBI officer who
sneaks into Jane's party carrying a dictograph machine to j
record her guests' conversations for evidence of subversion.;
He then threatens to blackmail Jane by releasing a story to
the papers about her "colored blood" (p. 119), thus possibly
i
ruining her career unless she cooperates with him in his
hunt for "aliens and bolsheviks" (p. 117). His view of a
good citizen is: "Every loyal American should be an agent
Of the Department of Justice" (p. 134). Finally, The Voice
of the Radiophone represents the propaganda generated by
the mass media that mold public opinion to believe in the
i
success myth and to think that all forms of dissent sure
160
subversive. It also seems, in montage distortion, to re
flect the mass-mind of the public during the 1920's, a
function later assumed by the Newsreels of U.S.A.
As the Prosperity Day Parade approaches closer to Tom
and Jane, The Voice increases in volume, and the people in
the parade (the American mass public), cowed into conform-
ity, appear as automatons marching with "their eyes straight
I
before them . . . their minds clicking like adding machines
34
. . shackled xn Arrow Collar shackles." In a distorted
montage of slogans that ironically convey the idea that
American democratic ideals have become corrupted by commer
cial goals, The Voice shouts that every American citizen is |
entitled to: "LEGALIZED PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS OR IN THE
JARGON OF OUR DAY SUCCESS WHICH IS PROSPERITY" (p. 146).
Satirically juxtaposed are patriotic songs about freedom
iand a speech emphasizing the hatred of non-conformity. A
voice from a phonograph sings "America," while the loud
speaker blasts that a list is being made of all those who
do not subscribe to the prosperity slogans:
34
Page 140. Elmer Rice's The Adding Machine (1923) is
another expressionistic play that jprotests against the mech
anization of modern man.
161
DISSENTERS KNOCKERS REDS CARPING CRITICS NON-CHURCH
GOERS WEARERS OF STRAW HATS OUT OF SEASON. . . .
LOAFERS . . . READERS OF FOREIGN LANGUAGES DIVORCEES
ADVOCATES OF FREE LOVE THE EIGHT HOUR DAY SUBVERSIVE
DOCTRINES. (p. 149)
i
The play ends when Tom, like other Dos Passos heroes,
I
I
Irevolts against the machine and asserts his individualism.
Tom, choosing to be alive rather than to fall into the
lockstep tempo of the crowd, shouts out: "Voice of the
jmachine ... I defy you" (p.. 151); and, after being pur-
!
Jsued by police, Tom and Jane temporarily escape the deadness
i
:Of the city by ascending into space where there is "nothing
I
but the whirl of space in our faces" (p. 158).
Dos Passos as Architect of History j
; I
Following the thematic pattern of The Garbage Man
T
i
Manhattan Transfer is a satirical dissection of American
i
society which Dos Passos believed had become corrupted by
monopoly capitalism and had lost contact with its original
goals of democracy, individuality, and liberty. As Blanche
Gelfant has said about Dos Passos
1
view of American urban
;life as it is presented in Manhattan Transfer!
. Twentieth-century Manhattan . . . embodies the trend
| away from formulated American ideals of a social system
| that would allow the individual fullest opportunity for
-
I 162
equality and personal self-fulfillment as a human being.
It symbolizes rather the trend towards a mechanized
kind of life that is expressed, in economic terms, in
monopoly capitalism and, in human terms, in the loss
of man's human capacities for love and self-realization.
The abstract qualities [of the novel] that cure presented
as urban scenes, characters, atmosphere, social patterns,
and historical tendencies are implicit commentaries upon
the moral significance of modern American city life.
Envisioning his role as a novelist to be that of moral his
torian and satirical chronicler of American society, Dos
Passos wished not only to expose the destructive effects of
monopoly capitalism upon postwar American society but to
j
extend his reportage of New York City back to the beginning
Of the twentieth century in order to trace the historical
trends that had led to the moral chaos and rampant material
ism of the 1920's. He also wished to apply a standard of
moral judgment to the existing amorality and corruption by
paralleling Manhattan's early promise and later moral de-
i
cline to the rise and fall of great cities of ancient his- j
tory that had perished from internal decay, implying that
American civilization, symbolized by New York, its largest
city, was also doomed to destruction.
35"John Dos Passos: The Synoptic Novel," The American
City Novel, p. 143.
163
Dos Passos' satirical depiction of New York in The
jGarbage Man was the first indication of his growing compul
sion to examine the sociological and historical trends of
i
American society and his search for experimental techniques
i
that would project on a large fictional canvas his personal
vision of American manners and morals. In a recent summary
of his writing career, Dos Passos recalls that after his
war experiences and his "first-hand glimpses in Europe and
the Near East of what the collapse of old servitudes and
jthe bloody building of new ones meant to human beings in
volved," he came home with the "compulsion to set down in
human terms the panorama of history that roared past my
36
ears." His interest in the contemporary avant-garde move-;
t
i ; '
!
ment in different art forms, he says, led to his "desper
ately experimental" method of recording the sweep of historyj
that eventually resulted in the "collective" forms of Man- j
hattan Transfer and his U.S.A. trilogy. Besides his inter
est in the expressionist drama, which he had earlier acknow-
37
ledged as having influenced the form of his novels, Dos
"The Desperate Experiment," Bookweek. I (September
15, 1963), 3.
I
I
37,1
Looking Back on 'U.S.A.,"' New York Times. October
125, 1959, section 2, p. 5.
164
Passos recalls that he drew upon the techniques of modern
painting, poetry, and cinema:
I had done a lot of reading [Dos Passos says] knocking
| about the war-wracked world. Some of the poets who went
along yiith the cubism of the painters of the School of
Paris talked about simultaneity. There was something
about Rimbaud's poetry that tended to stand up off the
page. Imagism. Direct snapshots of life. Reportage
was a great slogan. The artist must record the fleeting
world as sharply as the motion picture film recorded it.
By contrast and juxtaposition he could build his own
vision into reality: montage.3®
j
His early reading of historical novels and his interest in
the English satirists also influenced the kind of novels he
was to write. Dos Passos recalls that he was "very murfih
affected by" the "chronicle novels" he had read, such as
Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Stendhal's La Chartreuse de Parme.
land Tolstoy's War and Peace (p. 3). "In this sort of novel,'j
i ' ;
says Dos Passos,
the story is really the skeleton on which some slice
of history is brought back to life. Personal adventures
illustrate the development of a society. Historical
forces take the place of the Olympians of ancient Greek
drama, (p. 3)
In Spain, he says, he became interested in "Pio Baroja's
modern revival of the Spanish picaresque style," and that he
38
Bookweek. I (September 15, 1963), 3.
165
had just "read James Joyce's 'Ulysses' on my way home from
Europe" (p. 3). Ulysses
T
says Dos Passos, was "subjective":
I wanted to do just the opposite. I wanted to be objec
tive, satirically objective, like Swift and Fielding.
I had been pretty well steeped in the 18th century from
early youth. In college I had been taken with Defoe's
literalness and with Fielding's and Smollett's satire.
(P. 3)
Other statements made by Dos Passos in the 1920's and
1930's give further evidence that he had begun to think of
I
|
himself as a fictional chronicler of social history who
jmight influence public opinion through his criticism and
i
help to create a better world. In this "statement of be
lief" made in the 1920's Dos Passos says:
The only excuse for a novelist . . . is as a sort of
second-class historian of the age he lives in. The
"reality" he misses by writing about imaginary people,
he gains by being able to build a reality more nearly
out of his own factual experience than a plain histor
ian or biographer can. ... I think that any novelist
that is worth his salt is a sort of truffle dog digging
up raw materials which a scientist, an anthropologist -
or a historian can later use to permanent advantage.^
And in the preface to a re-issued version of Three Soldiers
in 1932, Dos Passos refers to himself as an "architect of
39
Bookman. IXVIII (September 1928), 26.
166
40
history." Asking himself why he had become a writer, he
answers: "to convince people of something. That
1
s preach
ing, and is part of the business of everybody who deals
with words" (p. vii). Since his era, he says, was "an
epoch of peculiar [moral] confusion" and his generation "the
first . . . not brought up on the Bible" (p. viii), it was
a writer's job to counter the destructive trends of his
time by using liis art to influence the future course of
i
i
social change. As he says:
The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes
aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in
print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today
and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's j
generation. That's history. A writer who writes
straight is the architect of history, (pp. vii-viii)
Dos Passos' faith in the power of the writer to influence
jsocial change is again reiterated in a later speech in which
i
he declares: I
i . I
The professional writer discovers some aspect of the
world and invents out of the speech of his time some
particularly apt and original way of putting it down
on paper. If the product is compelling and important
enough, it molds and influences ways of thinking to
the point of changing and rebuilding the language which
4°Modern Library edition (New York, 1932), p. viii.
167
41
is the mind of the group.
To do their best work, Dos Passos stresses, American writers
must try to "discover the deep currents of historical change
under the surface of opinions, orthodoxies, heresies, gossip
I
and the journalistic garbage of the day" (Hart, p. 79).
The "collective" novel
i
Out of his experiments in poetry, fiction, and drama,
i
and his growing interest in social history, Dos Passos pro-
i
duced Manhattan Transfer, an unusual and original work of
i
I
42
fiction which critics were to label as a "collective" or !
43 ' j
"synoptic" novel. Within the panoramic form of Manhattan ;
Transfer. Dos Passos attempted to convey, through a variety
i I
of experimental techniques and devices, a breadthwise or |
cross-sectional view of Manhattan's social structure; to
' - - !
capture—as he had in The Garbage Man—the general atmos- |
phere of the city. Adapting to fiction the method of using
a large cast of diverse character types, short, disconnected
The Writer as Technician," in Henry Hart, ed.,
American Writers' Congress (New York, 1935), p. 79.
42Beach, p. 41.
43
Gelfant, p. 14.
168
scenes, and songs, slogans, and news headlines like those
contained in his expressionistic play, and adding other
! • . . . • .
jdevices such as impressionistic prose-poems and urban images
land symbols, Dos Passos attempted to recreate, in breadth
i
and depth, a whole city in which innumerable, diverse lives
from different classes, nationalities, and occupations
existed simultaneously. In addition, by using biblical and
'i
f
mythical allusions juxtaposed against images of his own age,
i
Dos Passos wished to convey an implicit moral judgment upon
l
the panorama of moral and social disintegration he thought
epitomized contemporary American society.
; • i
The first collective novel in American fiction, Man-
: !
hattan Transfer differed from the conventional novel in that'
! |
it completely discarded the traditional narrative method of j
relating the continuous story of a few central characters.
!
Its focus was not upon any of its characters but upon the
. . 44 '
city itself. As Dos Passos later saxd: "... there was
more to the life of a great city than you could cram into
44
Beach, p. 41. And George Snell in Shapers of Ameri
can Fiction 1798-1947 (New York, 1947) says: "Dos Passos
'skyrocketed the literary world . . . with technical fire-
jworks. . . . The 'collective novel' had arrived with a fan
fare, and it was a success, though it puzzled many, and put
off others who looked for the old continuity, the recogniz
able story-line, the plot with its climax and denouement"
(p. 252) . . . - -
169
45
any one hero's career." The fictional narratives in his
"chronicle," he said, were to function only as a "skeleton
on which some slice of history is brought back to life" (p.
3). He therefore substituted a technique that had been
foreshadowed in his earlier work: an objective method,
analogous to the swiftly moving scenes of the cinema, which
vividly captured in sharp images a brief incident in the
life of one character and then suddenly switched abruptly,
I
without authorial comment or transition, to another scene in
the life of a different character. By this method, time and
i !
! : I
space were telescoped, and the numerous impressions that j
I
I
rapidly succeeded each other in a kaleidoscopic manner added
up to a general impression of the metropolis. As Dos Passosj
! ' I
; I
later recalled: "Direct snapshots of life. ... By con- j
trast and juxtaposition [the artist] could build his own
vision into reality: montage."^
45
Bookweek. I (September 15, 1963), 3.
46
Bookweek
T
I (September 15, 1963), 3. Many analogies
;can be made between this kind of "montage" writing and other
literary genres and art forms which stem from the gargantuan
'impulse of the artist to engulf a large mass of experience
in a short moment of time. One thinks of the efforts of
epic poets such as Homer, Virgil, and Milton to catalogue
vast numbers of troops and equipment in battle scenes; of
jWalt Whitman
1
s efforts to transcend space and time and to
catalogue diverse American types in different locations and
170
Manhattan Transfer as satire:
the critics
But the vision that Dos Passos created of Manhattan was
;the one-sidedly bleak picture of the satirist. Dos Passos
1
outraged idealism, his radical alienation from the puritan-
ism, mechanism, and materialism of American society, and his
frustrated hopes for a better world resulted.in a Juvenalian
jportrait of the city that is etched in the irony of bitter-
iness and disgust. It is possible to agree with Sinclair
| '
Lewis' judgment that Manhattan Transfer captures "the strong
iperiods in order to capture the essence of America; of ex- i
perimental modern poetry and novels, ironic epics such as I
Eliot's The Was-Hft T-anri and Joyce's Ulysses in which images
of the past are suddenly superimposed upon the present. In
painting there are first the frescoes
r
that so occupied Dos
Passos' attention while he served in the Red Cross in Italy.!
In these religious paintings, the many scenes of a biblical
story could be dramatized in a single mural. There cure also
the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque wherein subjects
from nature were broken up into small facets and superim
posed planes. Especially suggestive are the Cubist collage
jpaintings, a form of sophisticated artistic expression used
by Picasso, Braque, and others, to create new formal ar
rangements by juxtaposition of. newspaper cuttings, laundry
bills, stamps or bus tickets into a montage. This practice
deems analogous to Dos Passos
1
juxtaposition of not only
scenes, but songs, slogans, and headlines in his collective
novels. See John Dos Passos, "Satire as a Way of Seeing,"
George Grosz, interregnum (New York, 1937), ed. Caresse
Crosby. For Dos Passos' interest in the cinematic tech-
piques of D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, see The
Theme is Freedom, pp. 41-42.
|
171
47
savor of very life" without believing that Dos Passos
1
aiir
was to present a balanced portrait containing the whole
truth about the city. Instead, Dos Passos' panorama focuses
too corrosively on the degraded side of human nature within
jthe industrial city: the universal success disease, the
ruthless competition, the selfishness, self-deception, and
hypocrisy, the isolation, the lack of love or social respon-
sibility and other less redeemable traits that are observed
j • >.
jin modern urban society. Therefore, although the content of
i
Manhattan Transfer may be realistic or naturalistic, the
I /
stylistic effect produced by Dos Passos
1
ironic tone and
his selection of incidents and characters is that of satire.
i
As Wayne Booth has said:
* , •
Satirists . . . though they may indulge in some realistic j
effects for their own sake, will clearly sacrifice real- j
ism whenever their satirical ends require the sacrifice.
4
®
Like the portraits of El Greco and Goya that Dos Passos de-
49
scribes in Rosinante. the scenes of Manhattan Transfer
shift from realism into satire because Dos Passos was
47,1
Manhattan at Last'." Saturday Review of Literaturer
December 5, 1925, p. 361.
48
The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961), p. 57.
49
Page 58. See p. 137, this study.
172
compelled to stress the ugliness of the city, just as he
had focused upon the sordid aspects of army life in Three
Soldiers. As he later said of George Grosz:
' .
! A satirist is a man whose flesh creeps so at the ugly
| and the savage and the incongruous aspects of society
that he has to express them as brutally and nakedly as
possible to get relief.
50
Most critics of Manhattan Transfer have hftlH that the
novel's portrait, of American city life is distorted to em
phasize the seamy side. Blanche Gelfant declares that Dos
Passos' "realism involved a considerable distortion of ac-
i
jtuality, but it is a realism to which the imagination can
I 51
give assent." Believing that Dos Passos
1
portrait is at
least partly credible, Mrs. Gelfant says that he wished to
! • • !
re-create a historical trend, "the drift towards monopoly j
capitalism, and his intention committed him to exclusion as
52
much as to inclusion." Less enthusiastic about the credi
bility of Dos Passos' depiction of city life, Edmund Wilson
states that Dos Passos' "disapproval of capitalist society
50
"Grosz Comes to America," Esquire. VI (September
11936), 131.
51
The American City Novel, p. 142.
5
^Gelfant, p. 139.
173
seems to imply a distaste for all the beings who go to
53
compose it" and that "no human life under any conditions
can ever have been so unattractive" (p. 432) as Dos Passos
displayed it in Manhattan Transfer. Alfred Kazin comments
{that Dos Passos "had become fascinated with a kind of mass
t
land pictorial ugliness" and that "what one saw in Manhattan
[Transfer was not the broad city pattern at all, but a wist-
i 54
iful absorption in monstrousness." H. M. McLuhan mentions
' that Manhattan is "not envisaged as providing anything more
jthan a phantasmagoric backdrop for [the characters
1
] frus
trations and defeats. The city is felt as alien, meaning-
i
55
iless." Henry Longan Stuart declares that Dos Passos "has
i
an exasperated sense of the unpleasant" and that his study
I
"that seemed designed to convey the stir and movement of
multiple lives too often freezes into a set piece of hor-
56
ror." And George sneii calls Manhattan Transfer:
; . .
53
Shores of Light, p. 431.
54
On Native Grounds, p. 274.
55"John iDos Passos: Technique vs. Sensibility," in
Gardiner, Fifty Years of the American Novell 19QQ-195Q, P.
158.
J
56
"John Dos Passos Notes the Tragic Trivia of New
York," New York Times Book Review} November 29, 1925, p. 5.
174
. . . a depressing spectacle. ... it is a civilization
set in a mold as rigid as the militarism that confined
Fuselli, Chrisfield and Andrews, and that mold is the
mechanism of modern life which makes city-dwellers hard
ly more than robots going through automatic motions.
j Also typical of the satirist and the fact that Dos
i
|Passos' mirror of American society tends to become a carica
ture, is the flat and lifeless quality of his characters,
who are more often puppets reflecting his distorted and
I 58
oversimplified world than individuals in their own right.
!
Blanche Gelfant declares that a primary weakness of his
*
novel (and, one suspects, a weakness of the "collective"
!
form in general), is that Dos Passos' characters become
isymbols or human correlatives of the novel's abstract de- j
| . |
sign. Instead of being real people, she says, they tend to !
: i
! . I
59
become "discontinuous states of mind" that fit, like other
•
9
l
I !
: !
formal elements, into the over-all esthetic plan, one "that j
is in itself Dos Passos
1
moral condemnation of the social
57The Shartars of American Fiction, p. 253.
SSGilbert Highet, in The Anatomy of Satire, says:
"Genuine satiric fiction pretends to be true and real; but
lit is distorted through and through. . . . its characters,
although often described with every appearance of gravity,
sure misshapen, exaggerated, and caricatured" (p. 158).
|
j . p
>
152.
175
tendencies in twentieth-century America" (p. 159). As
• (
Edmund Wilson says, Dos Passos allows "his bias so to fal
sify his picture of life" that all his characters face
I
|either moral or economic defeat in the system:
i
; ... everybody loses out: if he i£ on the right side
I of the social question, he has to suffer, if he is not
i snuffed out; if he is on the oppressors' side, his
i pleasures are made repulsive.
j
The disconnected episodes of Manhattan Transfer concert;
primarily the race for success in the big city, and Dos
jPassos' characters illustrate the destructive effects of the
success myth. As Mrs. Gelfant suggests: "the struggle for
isuccess seems to be one organizing principle that can give
• 61 I
unity to an individual's actions." The characters' rela
tionships to the economic structure of the city divide them j
roughly into three groups: those, like Ellen Thatcher and
George Baldwin, who achieve success at the cost of moral j
compromise and psychic disintegration; those, like Jimmy
Herf and Stan Emery, who reject the success myth but who
become emotionally paralyzed by their inability to find any J
i
other meaningful existence in the city; and those, like Bud
Korpenning, Ed Thatcher, Anna Cohen, and Dutch Robertson,
i
j jj
I
60
Shores of Light, p. 433.
61
Gel^ant, p. 163.
176
who either fail to gain success or who become victims of
the economic injustices of the capitalist system.
i
i
h Juvenalian portrait of
the city
!
j The action, like that of the later U.S.A. trilogy, is
idivided into three historical periods represented by the
novel's three main sections: the period of progressivism
1 .
and economic expansion from the turn of the century to World
i
I
War I; the War years; and finally, the postwar period ex-
i
tending into the 1920's, an era of continuing war hysteria,
political reaction, increasing monopoly, labor troubles, |
depression, and attacks on minority groups. The quickly j
shifting scenes recapture significant historic incidents
i j
such as Governor Morton's Greater New York Bill (1895-1896)yj
|the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905)y the Sarajevo assassina
tion (1914) that precipitated Wbrld War Iy the deportation
|of "undesirable" aliens on the S. S. Buford (1919) during
the period of Red-hysteria that followed the war, and the
reform movement against Mayor Hylan during the early
il920's.
62
]
6
^Beach, p. 35. References to historical time are made
by the use of newspaper headlines and popular songs, which
{also help recapture the general mood and quality of the mass
177
The first section of Manhattan Transfer (1898-1914)
introduces a panorama of characters who are either born
jinto the city or have emigrated there. Ellen Thatcher is
Iborn into the middle-class home of Ed and Susy Thatcher,
i
|absorbs the materialistic values of her father, who is a
i
|lowly accountant and would-be business tycoon, and later
matures into a beautiful but emotionally-hardened careerist
I determined to be a Broadway star. Jimmy Herf arrives from
lEurope with his rich but sickly mother, lives a lonely life i
! !
in Manhattan hotels until his mother dies, and is then j
raised by his relatives, the wealthy Merivales, who wish to j
!
coerce him into following a lucrative business career. Herf
:
!
; j
eventually leaves the Merivales, rejects their success j
; i
values, lives a bohemian life in Greenwich Village;,' and be- j
I comes a cub reporter. George Baldwin is introduced as an j
aggressive young lawyer, ambitious to become a success in
; , |
the big city. Scanning the daily headlines, Baldwin noticesj
a story about Gus McNeil's accident, and takes Gus's case.
While Gus recuperates in the hospital, Baldwin has an affair
with Gus's wife, Nelli, whom he drops after he wins the
jmind during each era. The prose-poems sketch the back
ground locale: the city's various sights, sounds, and
ismells.
178
case. He then joins a socially prominent law firm and
•
starts his way to the top.
Several minor characters looking for opportunities in
;the big city are also introduced. Bud Korpenning, a farm
jlaborer from up-state New York, arrives on the ferry seeking
a job, and, since he has killed his brutal father, the pro
tective anonymity of New York. Never finding "the center of
things," in the lonely crowd, Bud lives either as a jobless
vagabond or as an esqploited worker until he finally commits
suicide by jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge. Gus McNeil,
the milkman whose real desires are to leave New York and j
start a farm out West, is inadvertently propelled toward |
success by winning his case against the railroad company j
held responsible for the collision with his milk wagon.
His newly acquired capital tempts him to enter into corrupt
New York politics. Congo and Emile, two French sailors with
naive notions about America being "the land of opportunity"
: • j
for immigrants, jump ship and assume menial jobs in New |
:
i
York. After being exploited by the upper class and treated
with disdain because they have no money or status in their
lowly jobs as janitor and waiter, both become disillusioned
with America. Congo goes back to sea, while Emile works as
! '
a cook, determined to work his way up the social ladder.
179
In Section II, Dos Passos demonstrates ironically that
material success, achieved at too high a price to one's
jintegrity, does not lead to happiness, but to self-aliena
tion and a form of emotional sterility resulting from the
ruthless competitiveness, selfishness, and moral compromis
ing needed to get to the top within "the system." Like
Jane of The Garbage Man. Ellen is caught in the trap of
success which devours her entire emotional life. Hardened
;by the relentless competition of show business personalis
l ' j
ties lusting for the center of the spotlight, she marries
Jojo Oglethorpe, a homosexual actor with stage connections, j
; S
to further her career, but divorces him when she achieves
some degree of artistic recognition. Finally, when she I
j • j
becomes a "nine day wonder," or overnight success, she be- |
•! ' . • i
comes bored, tense, and lonely even when surrounded by a j
s ' i
I • i I
crowd of admirers^ because she has no close friends. She is !
pursued by Baldwin, who handles her divorce, and by Harry |
Goldweiser, the theatrical producer who guides her career,
both of whom she rejects. She then has a casual affair
with Stan Emery, but, selfishly obsessed by the demands of
her career, she neglects Stan and becomes partly responsible
|for.his suicide. Made pregnant by Stan, Ellen tells Jimmy
i
Herf, Stan's friend, that she will give up her silly life
180
and have the baby, but a few scenes later she enters the
office of an abortionist.
Like Ellen, Baldwin illustrates the unhappy conse
quences of achieving material success gained at the cost of
i .
jhis stifled emotions, abnormal family life, and inner empti-
i
jness. Baldwin, having become a well-known attorney, neither
jenjoys his practice nor loves his wealthy socialite wife i
! I
whom he has married for convenience and prestige rather than!
I
for love. An outward success but inner failure, Baldwin
finds his only emotional outlet in his lust for Ellen, who
represents to him the last remains of the genuine emotions j
he has sacrificed to Mammon.
Besides tracing the moral deterioration of those who !
'I
succeed, Dos Passos illustrates the conflicts created in
pore sensitive individuals who reject the material values j
; •' i
of the city, but who cannot find any meaningful life outside
these values. This group, is representative of the "lost j
:
i
generation" of the Twenties, alienated from, and superflu
ous to, the culture and self-absorbed in discontent and
drink. Jimmy Herf, another "poet against the world" like
j
John Andrews, Wenny, and Tom, escapes from his unpleasant
.job as a hack reporter by dreaming of romantic adventures or
i • •
in drinking bouts with his friend Stan, and views New York
181
as a cemetery in which he has buried his youth. Lacking
jambition or direction, Herf declares that his "motion is
I 63
circular, helpless and confoundedly discouraging." Like
i
-
Herf, Stan Emery, the playboy son of a rich lawyer, also
remains aloof from a conventional career and discovers that
'
the only outlet for his undirected energies lies in succes-
jsive acts of dissipation that finally lead to his suicide.
jLacking ambition and hating his father's shady law practice,
Stan says to Herf: "Why the hell does everybody want to
succeed? I'd like to meet somebody who wanted to fail.
That's the only sublime thing" (p. 139). The events in
: !
Section III that occur after the War, five years later,
begin with another series of arrivals to Manhattan: the j
j
return of soldiers and Red Cross workers from Europe. Among;
]
the arrivals are Jimmy Herf and Ellen, former Red Cross j
i
workers who have been married overseas. Although they seem j
happily married, the commercial atmosphere of Manhattan soonj
separates them and kills their love. After becoming a
{successful columnist with a fashion magazine that carries
the latest gossip and informs people about "the center of
|
63
Manhattan Transfer (New York, 1925, 1959), p. 139.
The page numbers cited in the text are from the 1959 re
print of the novel.
182
things," Ellen leaves Jim, convinced that he will never
amount to much, gives up her old friends in the Village,
i
land consents to a loveless marriage with George Baldwin,
iselling her soul for the sake of her future material secur-
I j
ity. Another target of Dos Passos
1
irony is Baldwin, who
has risen to become district attorney through the efforts of
Gus McNeil, a oorrupt Tammany politician. Obsessed by his
drive for power, Baldwin runs for mayor of New York on the
j
reform ticket, which opposes the Tammany machine. Outwardly
^successful, Baldwin's haggard appearance reflects his con- \
|
stant anxiety about his financial position, the mental tor- j
ture of his moral compromises, and his awareness of his |
inner emptiness. He tells Ellen: "I've been like a tin
|
mechanical toy, all hollow inside" (p. 292). Anxious when
.
alone because he is forced to contemplate his barren life,
Baldwin thinks to himself:. "... good God, how am I going
to get my existence straightened out?" (p. 219).
Jimmy Herf, like the earlier Dos Passos heroes, finallyj
revolts against "the system" and leaves the city of destruc
tion. After Ellen deserts him, Herf resigns his reporter's
job, walks out of a Greenwich Village party one May evening,
and catches the same ferry boat that had brought Bud Kor-
ipenning to the city many years earlier. Looking back on
| 183
{the garbage dump near the city that represents the waste
jand futility of the success race, Herf, having re-estab-
j
jlished his independence, hitches a ride toward some unknown
!
destination, a further journey of self-exploration.
Dos Passos
1
ironic view of the success race in the city
is also illustrated by means of satiric sketches of minor
figures who identify with the system and by pathetic por
traits of lower-class types who are victimized by the sys-
!
!tem. For example, Blackhead, the millionaire importer who
goes bankrupt, recollects on his death bed that his life
chasing success has been a smutty joke; James Merivale,
Herf's dull-witted cousin, spouts the cliches of success
and dreams of financial security in banking; and Cunningham,
the polygamist, bluffs his way to success through his clever
opportunism and a handsome appearance. The helpless vic
tims of the economic system are melodramatically portrayed
in a tone"of ironic regret. Anna Cohen, the taxi-dancer,
garment worker, and union scab, is exploited and later
killed in a fire in Madame Soubrine's dress shop. And ex-
serviceman Dutch Robertson, who dreams of a good job and
marriage, is forced by unemployment into robbery for which
he receives a twenty-year prison term.
184
Documentary satire
! •
j Besides dramatizing the destructive effects of the
I success race upon his characters, Dos Passos, acting as a
i
!
satirical historian, wished to trace the source and gradual
jrise of commercial corruption that had, in his interpreta
tion, undermined the earlier democratic ideals of American
i -
iculture. He therefore includes many brief scenes in which
I '
the actions, thoughts, and speech of various minor charac
ters serve to recreate specific social and economic trends
i
of urban America during the first twenty years of the twen-
i
i • i
tieth century. Although Dos Passos
1
method of depicting
j ' i
these scenes is impersonal and objective—that is, he simu- !
lates the method of the camera and remains invisible behind |
:
i
the scenes that he creates—his satirical intention is re
vealed through the novel's ironic tone and its one-sided |
selection of incidents. Technical devices such as interior
monologue, close-up caricature, popular songs, parody, and
news headlines are also used to communicate irony without
authorial comment and to maintain the illusion of objectiv
ity and immediacy in each scene. These short, scenes drama
tize such trends as the rise of big business; the influence
;of the mass media and mass advertising upon human behavior;
;the real-estate boom and the rise of the leisure class
I 185
through ownership of private property; the economic injusti
ces and class discrimination that is brought about by un
equal distribution of income; the decreasing value of honest
work and the low status of the blue-collar worker; and, in |
!. i
;general, the growing mechanization, standardization, and
isuccess-seeking that dominates the atmosphere of the city.
I The first chapter of Manhattan Transfer, called "Perry-
j ..
slip," documents the problems of newly arrived immigrants
j
attempting to adjust to urban American culture at the turn
of the century. Dos Passos juxtaposes four apparently un-
; I
related scenes, thematically linked by the idea of arrival
;into the city: the birth of Ellen Thatcher, the meeting at ;
the hospital between Mr. Thatcher and Mr. Zucher, a newly '
: • i
arrived German immigrant, who explore the possibilities of
understanding between men of different nationalities, the
arrival of Bud Korpenning on the ferryboat, and the reac- ;
tions of a newly arrived immigrant Jew to a billboard ad
vertisement. The scenes that include Bud and the Jew illus
trate negative trends already present in American culture:
status consciousness, class and racial discrimination, and
the pressures to conform induced by the mass media. Bud's
ragged clothing, a symbol of his low status, is observed by
i
a lunch-wagon counterman who warns Bud that in the city
186
jone'a appearance is more important than his potential abil-
!
jity as a good worker. The counterman says to Bud:
i . • • You go git a shave and a haircut and brush the
hayseeds out of yer suit a bit before you start lookin
[for a job]. . . . It's looks that count in the city."
|
"I kin work all right. I'm a good worker," growled Bud
with his mouth full, (p; 4)
I '
The next scene contains a close-up sketch of a bearded Jew
"gnawing his lips and clasping and unclasping his hands" as
i
he studies a billboard advertisement showing "the dollar-
proud eyes of King C. Gillette," the clean-cut face "of a
i
I
man who had money in the bank . . ." (p. 9). After strug-
gling with the problem of assimilating into a "success"
culture hostile to minority groups and non-conformists, the j
Jew determinedly clenches his fists, buys a razor, goes |
i i
home, and shaves off his beard.
; ' i
Dos Passos also includes a ironic documentary of New
: i
York's growing real estate boom. Chapter II, "Metropolis," |
illustrates the rising price of land exploited for profit
by real estate speculators, the identification of the middle
classes with leisure-class values such as "conspicuous con-
sumption," the hatred of minority groups and lower classes,
®
4
A term coined by Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of
the Leisure Class (1899) to characterize the wasteful
187
'
and the change in American ideals from moral progress to
material progress. In one scene, in the first decade of
l
the century, a real estate agent urges a Mr. Perry to buy
| a lot because New York is fast becoming the second largest
jcity and the land will soon double in value: "It's an
jopportunity not to be missed" (p. 12). The agent convinces
;
Mr. Perry, who wants an investment that is "dead safe," that
[property will mean "security . . . ease, comfort, [and]
i
! luxury" because "we are caught up on . . .a great wave of
expansion and progress" (p. 13). At this moment, Mr. Perry
looks down "amid the dry grass" and sees "a triangular
skull," the remains of what "must have been a fine ram" (p.
|
13). The skull symbolizes the replacement of the heroic |
values of the frontier by the new commercial values of the j
industrial wasteland. In another scene, Dos Passos presents
lan unflattering portrait of the rising, socially-conscious_ j
middle classes. William Olafson, a "sanitary engineer" !
' • !
(garbage man) and his wife are renting a new and fashionable
consumption of goods by members of the leisure class as a
demonstration of their status and economic wealth. Because
of his ironic dissections of society, Dos Passos has been
called by many critics "the Veblen of American fiction."
|See Max Lerner, "The America of John Dos Passos," Nation.
CXLIII (August 15, 1936), 187-188.
188
apartment in a middle-class district near the Hudson River,
a step upward on the social scale from their old rickety
|farmhouse in Brooklyn. Olafson, satirically caricatured as
"a big shambling man with eyes of a washed out blue deepset
i
in a white, infantile head," is forced by his wife to rent
jthe place because "we can afford it now. ... We must live
!
jup to our income. . . . Your position demands it" (p. 33).
{When the real estate agent asks them for references and a
i
present address, Mrs. Olaifson falsely declares they live at
i
the Hotel Astor, because, as she later tells her husband, if
she had told the agent they lived in the Bronx, '"he'd have
thought we were Jews arid wouldn't have rented us the apart
ment'" (p. 33). Dos Passos also catches the cliched speech j
• • I
patterns of the agent that reflect the materialistic values j
of the time. The agent tells the couple: "'You are very
wise . . . you won't be able to get anything out this way
for love or moneyI'" (p. 33).
In brief, fragmented case histories of his characters,
Dos Passos also documents the corrupting influence of New
York's materialistic values upon children. Although his
case histories lack the detail of those in U.S.A.
T
his brief
references to the childhood of Ellen Thatcher, Jimmy Herf,
and James Merivale, Herf's cousin, significantly reveal the
189
pressures placed upon the middle-class children to succeed.
Ed Thatcher, the struggling accountant, quickly teaches his
|little girl, Ellen, the importance of money. For example,
i
; ' *
when Ellen dances on the Sunday paper and tears the sheets, j
! !
Ed reprimands her: "... dear you shouldn't be destruc
tive. It costs money to make that paper and people worked
i
jon it" (p. 15). During Ellen's adolescence, Ed implants in
her mind his own frustrated ambitions to succeed and to make
I
money. When the two are sitting on a bench at the Battery
looking at an ocean liner sailing to Europe, Ellen asks her
father, "'Daddy, why don't we go?'" And Ed asnwers: "'Maybe {
!
we will some day if I can save up the money'" (p. 49).
Ellen, associating leisurely travel with money, asks her
: I
' v ' !
father: "'Daddy why aren't we rich?'" (p. 49). Young j
Jimmy Herf is also pressured to succeed. When Jimmy lives
with the Merivales, the children's games reflect an early j
I
indoctrination into money and success values. Although Jim j
I
wants to "go down an look at the trains," his cousin James
Merivale wants to: "'. . . play stock exchange. . . . I've
got a million dollars in bonds to sell and Maisie [Merivale],
can be the bulls an Jimmy can be the bears'" (p. 84). Herf
is soon coerced by his Uncle rfeff to "follow [his son]
! '
|James' example and work [his] way up through the firm,'"
190
and to have "'sufficient responsibility about money matters
. . . making good in a man's world'" (p. 94). Says Meri-
jvale: . .And don't forget this, if a man's a success
iin New York, he's a success'."
1
(p. 94). j
| i
Dos Passos also builds his case for the prevalence of
[
jthe success drive in American life by showing, through the
use of interior monologues, songs, prevalent cliches, and
news headlines, that the fantasy life of his characters is
j
dominated by unconscious desires for wealth and status. In
one scene Ed Thatcher dreams of success after viewing a
newspaper headline that concerns New York's growing finan- i
i
cial opportunites as the world's second largest city: "MOR
TON SIGNS THE GREATER NEW YORK BILL" (p. 10). After folding
the paper and laying it on the table, Ed imagines a rosy
: j
future for himself: j
"Gentlemen tonight that you do me the signal honor of j
offering me the junior partnership in your firm I want j
to present to you my little girl, my wife. I owe every- j
thing to her." (p. 10) !
'Sometimes a character's success fantasy includes a popular
song whose title is the central theme of the fantasy. For
example, James Merivale, while reading the papers about the
postwar business slump, feels elated with the thought that
bankers like himself handle money in times of both
191
prosperity and depression. In an effervescent mood he hums
a popular song associated with the theme of prosperity and
|security: "'O it's always fair weather . . . Even in a
i
Ideficit there's money to be handled, collateral . . (p.
i
1299). Merivale then dreams that he has become "president
iof the Bank & Trust Company" and is making a speech amidst
! •
:"thunderous applause" and "flash-light photographs." Dos
jPassos satirically ridicules his pompous rhetoric and banal
jcliches:
1
"Let me only add that in all trials and tribulations,
becalmed amid the dark waters of scorn or spurning the i
swift rapids of popular estimation ... my staff, my j
bread of life, my inspiration has been my triune loy-* !
alty to my wife, my mother, and my flag." (p. 300) j
i i
The success-drive dominates the fantasy life of those at j
the bottom of the economic scale as well as those at the
top. Before Bud Korpenning jumps to his death off the
Brooklyn Bridge, he daydreams that he was been made "Alder
man Bud" by the mayor and is "riding in a carriage to City
i
Hall with four white horses . . . through rows of men waving
cigars, bowing, doffing brown derbies . . ." (js. 98). And
Anna Cohen, the exploited garment worker, hums the song "Oh
I'm -iuss wild about Harrea" while she imagines that she is
jin the arms of her boyfriend, the proletarian radical,
192
Elmer Duskin, "loving as Valentino, crushing me to him with
Dougstrong arms" (p. 309). She envisions the aftermath of
|the Revolution in America in terms of an American success
i
dream, with Elmer and herself the romantic hero and heroine
of a D. W. Griffith Hollywood "spectacular": "Fifth Avenue
bleeding red flags, glittering with marching bands . . .
'Look Elmer darling* EIMER DUSKIN FOR MAYOR" (p. 309).
In other scenes, Dos Passos connects the drive for
I ' ' •'
success and money with the growing widespread corruption in
American institutions of business, the mass media, politics
and law. One example of the prevalent corruption in busi
ness is a scene in which Ed Thatcher examines the assets
and liabilities of the "FanTan Import and Export Company"
(p. 86), for whom he serves as an accountant: "'A bunch of
goddam crooks,' growled Thatcher out loud. 'Not an item on
the whole thing that aint faked'" (p. 87). Another scene
involving Jojo Oglethorpe and Jimmy Herf illustrates that
Dos Passos thought the New York press was controlled by big
business interests. Oglethorpe, after stumbling drunkenly
into Herf's apartment looking for his wife, Ellen, who is
having an adulterous affair with Stan Emery in a spare room,
truculently confronts Herf and calls him "the yellow jour-
| -
nalist" and "a paid prostitute of the public press" (p. 154).
Oglethorpe, a probable spokesman for Dos Passes, attacks
{the press as a source of national corruption:
"I read and keep silent. I am one of the silent watchers.
I know that every sentence, every word . . . that appears I
in the public press is perused and revised and deleted j
j in the interests of advertisers and bond-holders. The
! fountain of national life is poisoned at the source."
; (p. 154).
In several scenes involving Gus McNeil, former milkman,
now corrupt politician in the Tammany machine, Dos Passos
i
depicts the prevalence of dishonest politics in New York.
In one scene, Gus bribes Joe O'Keefe, the leader of an or-
I
i i
ganization of ex-servicemen, by promising Tammany support j
for the servicemen's lobby for a national bonus. Then, in |
» i
the following scene, Dos Passos ironically comments on the i
j
state of New York politics by use of a visual image, the j
statue that O'Keefe sees as he leaves Gus's office: j
: j
Opposite the old City Hall there was a scaffolding. !
Joe pointed at it with his cigar. "That there's the
new statue of Civic Virtue the mayor's havin set up."
(P. 247)
In another scene involving Gus McNeil, Densch, the
millionaire importer, and George Baldwin, Dos Passos links
the corruption of American institutions by big business
interests to the wave of political reaction that followed
l
the war.- Thinking Baldwin will support big business if he
194
is elected district attorney, Densch attempts to persuade
him, in a speech that rings false, that Baldwin's "'unblem
ished integrity'" is needed to carry the country "'through
ja dangerous period of reconstruction. . . .
1
" (p. 226). Dos
Passos satirically captures the hypocrisy and greed behind
Densch's hollow rhetoric as Densch identifies "'the great
principles of democracy'" with "'that commercial freedom
i
upon which our whole civilization depends . . .'" (p. 226).
1
A political reactionary, Densch is convinced that there is
a "'subversive plot among undesirable elements in this
country,'" but that "'the attitude of the press has been
gratifying'" (p. 226) in suppressing it. "'In fact,'" says j
Densch, "'we're approaching a national unity undreamed of
•r- !
before the war'" (p. 226), meaning governmental support of 1
:
. |
big business, racial and nationalist supremacy, and politi- j
! ' |
cal conformity. Juxtaposed in the following scene is the {
sight of the mass deportations of "undesirable aliens" on I
the S. S. Buford in 1919: "'They are sending the Reds back
to Russia. . . . Deportees. . . . Agitators. . . . Undesir
ables"' (p. 227).
195
The symbolic structure; the
city as destructive mechanism
Beneath the surface of its realistic documentary, Man-
! • •
!hattan Transfer satirizes modern urban life by means of an
*
underlying symbolic structure that conveys an expressionis-
tic vision of New York as both a gigantic destructive mech
anism and a-barren, rootless wasteland. As Blanche Gelfant.
suggests, Dos Passos had to find a means to capture the
total impact of city life and to integrate its "massive
65
material" into "a formal framework." Dos Passos
1
use of
j"urban symbolism," she says, was "one method of condensing
:
. I
statement, atmosphere, and judgment" (p. 14). j
In order to suggest an urban environment hostile to
human life, Dos Passos again chooses the device of using
symbolic chapter headings like those in Three Soldiers
which had characterized the army as a machine: "Making the
Mould," "The Metal Cools," and "Machines." In Manhattan
Transfer these direct references to machinery are replaced
by eighteen headings composed of urban images, contemporary
phrases, song lyrics, and historical and Biblical allusions,
suggesting that the human condition in the modern city is
65
The American Citv Novel. p. 14.
196
one of death-in-life. These chapter headings, when re
peated or linked with other images in their accompanying
iprose-poems or with the fictional narratives, form a com
plex symbolic pattern that suggests that the city dehuman-
t
jizes and destroys its inhabitants. For example, the first
jtitle, "Ferryslip," refers thematically to the various
I •
I ' •
! arrivals into the city that occur in the four scenes of
Chapter I. But the imagistic prose-poem that follows this
;title also links the arrival of the ferry-boat passengers
with annihilation:
... men and women press through the manuresmelling
wooden tunnel of the ferryhouse, crushed and jostling
like apples fed down a chute into a press, (p. 3)
This simile connotes the idea that the mass of individuals
entering the terminal are to be ground into anonymity by
the machinery of the city. The verbs "crushed" and "press"
provide kinetic images suggesting the coercive force of the
turban environment that is re-echoed in other chapter head
ings and images such as the title "Steamroller," which Dos
Passos had used earlier in Three Soldiers to suggest the
blind force of the army machine. Accompanying "Steamrol
ler," another prose-poem further conveys the crushing weight
|of the mechanized environment upon the human spirit:
197
. . . Dark presses tight the steaming asphalt city,
| crushes the fretwork of windows . . . and corrugations
! and eyes and hands and neckties into blue chunks, into
black enormous blocks. . . .Night crushes bright milk
| out of arclights, squeezes the sullen blocks. . . .
I All the asphalt oozes light. Light spurts from letter
ing on roofs . . . stains rolling tons of sky. (p. 88)
|
In the fictional narrative following the poem, a steamroller
is seen near the cemetery where Jimmy Herf's mother lies
dead, again bringing an urban image into association with
death. The city's deadening force is also re-echoed in
images of metals, especially "lead." One prose poem con
tains this passage: "The leaden twilight weighs on the dry
i
limbs of an old man walking towards Broadway" (p. 195).
The fictional narratives also contain this leaden symbol of j
the city's dehumanizing force. As Ellen walks through Man
hattan to meet Baldwin, whom she is about to marry for money
and social position, she is described as being in a state of
both tension and boredom: "The minutes hung about her neck
leaden as hours" (p. 290). And Herf, at a Greenwich Village
party, is told about the man who wore his straw hat out of
season (a symbol of non-conformity) when someone from behind
"brained him with a piece of lead pipe" (p. 312).
Other chapter titles are also symbolic of the city's
mechanized existence. "Dollars" refers to Manhattan's
198
materialism; "Nickelodeon" to its mechanical pleasures;
i
i
I . —
|"Animals' Pair" to its circus-like race for success; "Rol-
lercoaster" to its futile excitements needed to fend off
ideadening boredom; "Nine Days' Wonder" to its sudden irra-
tional pattern of success and failure; "Five Statutory
Questions" to its laick of love and its high divorce rate;
and "Revolving Doors" to its monotonous time-clock routine.
Many of these titles cure also incorporated into the narra-
i
i
tives. "Rollercoaster," for example, metaphorically sug
gests Ellen's fluctuating mood of manic-depression while
i
living a loveless life caught in the web of success: "She
|had started to drop with a lurching drop like a roller-
coaster's into shuddering pits of misery" (p. 121). "Re
volving Doors" appears in Jimmy's thoughts as he envisions
ithe monotonous life of business and the futile pursuit of
money: "Jimmy fed in a tape in and out the revolving doors
. . . grinding out his years like sausage meat" (p. 94).
The mythical pattern; a
modern wasteland
Further condemnation of modern society is suggested by
Dos Passos' use of biblical imagery and of symbolic "waste
land" motifs that parallel Manhattan with ancient civiliza-
|
jtions destroyed by internal corruption. The intricate
199
pattern of myth and symbolism in Manhattan Transfer, which
suggests the barrenness of modern life, probably derives
66
from Dos Passos
1
early reading of T. S. Eliot's poetry,
67
|James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, and his extensive reading
|of J. 6. Frazer's The Golden Bough, which Charles Bernardin
|
says Dos Passos had "explored from one end of the shelf to
68
the other." Dos Passos, like Eliot, Joyce, and other
writers who reached maturity during the first World War,
believed modern civilization, with its materialistic myths
'of success, its acquisitiveness, and its faith in machinery,
i
to be rootless because it was cut off from the spirituallly
^regenerating myths of past civilizations. As Elizabeth Drew
says about The Waste Land:
|
Eliot sees the contemporary world as deaf and blind to
the realities behind the old symbols and myths of its
literary tradition and therefore stunted and parched
in its whole emotional living. The central symbol of
the fragmentariness, the moral ugliness, and the bore
dom of the contemporary scene is the modern city. It
represents the lack of all fertility and communion
66
Astre, Themeg et Structures dan? L'oeuvre fle John
PQS Paggpg, PP. 39-41.
67,1
The Desperate Experiment," Bookweek. I (September
15, 1963), 3.
i
| 68-Dog Passos' Harvard Years," New England Quarterly.
jXXVII (March 1954), 3-26.
200
between man and God, between man and man, between man
and woman, and between man and his traditional cultural
heritage.®^
i
Dos Passos had first attacked the rootlessness of
i
modern American life and literature as early as 1916. In
|his Harvard Monthly essay, "A Humble Protest," he pointed
i
|out that we now lived in a "ponderous suicidal machine
{civilization" that has iost touch with "that humanism, that
i •
realization of the fullness of man, which was the heritage
70
of the Greeks, and, in another form, of Jesus." He asked:
"Are we immolating ourselves, after abandoning our old
benevolent gods, before the new moloch [industry] in futile
sacrifice?" (p. 118). And in another essay, "Against Ameri-
! ; 71
can Literature," published shortly after his graduation
jfrom Harvard, Dos Passos found that American literature,
like American culture, was "a rootless product, cut off
from England, nurtured in the arid soil of the New England
colonies," whereas European literature was "the result of
long evolution basied oh primitive folklore and myths of its
*G. B. Harrison, ed., Modern British Writers (New
York, 1954), II, 670.
70
LXII (June 1916), 115-120.
j
71
New Republio. VIII (Otitober 14, 1916), 269-271.
201
past. . .- (p. 270). America, he said, possessed "no
local saints—tamed pagan gods," but only a heritage o£
"Protestant Christianity ... a muddled abstract theism,"
and "an all-enveloping industrialism [that] . . . has
. •
broken down the old bridges leading to the past . . ." (p.
I
|270).
i
i
| The biblical allusions in the chapter titles of Man
hattan Transfer indicate that Dos Passos wished to super-
iimpose images of the historic past'upon contemporary life
r*
las "a way of controlling, or ordering, of giving a shape
and significance to the immense panorama of futility and
72
anarchy which xs contemporary history." Chapter titles
such as "Metropolis," "The Burthen of Nineveh," "Fire En
gine," "Skyscraper," "Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus," and
"One More River to Jordan" suggest a moral condemnation of
the modern city by paralleling Manhattan with the great
cities of biblical or ancient history. The prose-poem
following "Metropolis," for example, compares Manhattan to
72
T. S. Eliot, "'Ulysses,' Order, and Myth," Dial
r
LXXV (November 1923), 480-483. Reprinted in Mark Schorer,
et al., eds., Criticism; The Foundations of Modern Liter-
jafy. Judgment (New York, 1948), p. 270. Eliot makes this
I comment about Joyce's mythical method used in Ulysses.
202
Babylon and Nineveh, Athens, Rome, and Constantinople,
cities of great civilizations that became corrupt and per-
73
ished in the cycle of history. Another title, "Fire En
gine," becomes linked, through repetition, with "The Day of
iJudgment" and God's destruction of Sodom and other wicked
cities by fire. Throughout the novel there cure recurrent
references to fires^firetrucks, firebugs, firesales, and
j ...
so on, to suggest that the atmosphere of the city is hellish
i
i .
jaind sinful. The titles "Longlegged Jack of the Isthmus"
and "One More River to Jordan," that recur in the narratives
;
as lyrics in a song about the great biblical flood and
Noah's Ark, suggest impending doom by drowning and the need
for spiritual rebirth? and "Skyscraper" recurs in the narra
tives to link the tall buildings of Manhattan with the Tower
of Babel, built by another wicked civilization that placed
t,
its own pride ahead of man's humility before God. The theme
of social disintegration and approaching doom, suggested by
these biblical allusions, becomes overt in the last chapter
;of the novel when a crazy tramp (a moral commentator on the
city's corruption> shouts to other tramps cooking over a
73
Cf. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land. 11. 372-377.
203
campfire:
"Do you know how long God took to destroy the Tower of
Babel, folks? Seven minutes. Do you know how long the
Lord God took to destroy Babylon and Nineveh? ...
There's more wickedness in one block in New York City
than there was in a square mile in Nineveh, and how
long do you think the Lord God . . .will take to de
stroy New York City . . .? Seven Seconds. ..." (p.
| 296)
I To further suggest the barrenness and forthcoming doom
jof contemporary civilization, Dos Passos infuses into Man-
i
lhattan Transfer an elaborate pattern of wasteland imagery.
Like Eliot's The Waste Land, the novel contains an under
lying mythical pattern that conveys the general impression
of a dry and sterile land filled with walking dead, hollow
men, rats, inett metallic substances, and machines. Yet,
recurrent references to the biblical flood, to the charac
ters ' desperate longing for rain and for death by drowning', j
:
suggest, by their association with the symbolic baptismal
rites of ancient civilizations, the need for a spiritual
rebirth. As Elizabeth Drew says of The Was*** tanH.
. . . many of the death images in Eliot's poem, such as
rock, dust, bones, are also used to suggest the possi
bility of life, just as the water image contains also
the possibility of death. The central experience of
"rebirth" is one of the oldest symbolic patterns of the
human race, and Eliot suggests this by the number of
cultures and languages, and all the spreading and pro
liferating associations from other writings that he
204
plants in the poem. . . . The central symbol of the
possibility of generation is water. In the vegetation
ceremonies it was the coming of the spring rains that
restored the gods to life after their winter death.
; When these fertility myths developed into religions
j concerned with spiritual truths, their initiation cere-
| monies used water as the symbol of regeneration, just
as the Christian religion has adopted the sacrament
of baptism.
75
To suggest that the czty is a place of death-in-life,
Dos Passos first-of all injects the key word "dead" and
t
t
|other words associated with death into his characters'
|
[thoughts and conversations. For example, a man buying real
estate wants to be "dead sure" (p. 12) his purchase is se
cure. Herf says to Ellen as he takes her home: '"God I'm
glad I'm not dead, arent you Ellie?'" (p. 208). Baldwin, in
ja bid for Ellen's favor, says he is "dead serious" (p. Ill)
about needing her; Ellen, in a restaurant with Baldwin, asks
him to order a martini because "'I'm dead tonight, just
dead'" (p. 290); and "'Somebody walked over my grave I
guess
1
" (p. 292). Anna Cohen's mother, angry at her
7
^Modern British Writers, pp. 670-671.
75dos Passos, in his article "Grosz Comes to America,"
defines the satirist as: "the doctor who comes with his
sharp and sterile instruments to lance the focuses of dead
matter that continually impede the growth of intelligence"
(p. 131).
205
daughter for staying out late with a boy friend, says she
wishes that Anna had been "born dead" (p. 277).
There are also many recurring images of corpses, mari-
j
jonettes, dolls, mechanical toys, machines, and.hollow men.
iWhen the actress Ruth Prynne rides the subway, she views "a
jtrainload of jiggling corpses . . (p. 230). Ellen, after
jher abortion, awaits her Taxi to the Ritz, looking like "a
wooden Indian, painted, with a hand raised at the street-
i
corner" (p. 210). Herf, dancing with Ellen, senses she is
"an intricate machine of sawtoothed steel" (p. 180); and,
later, to Stan Emery, Herf describes himself as "an auto
matic writing machine" (p. 269). Ellen, looking at Baldwin!
across the table, sees "his wooden face of a marionette
[that] waggled senselessly in front of her" (p. 291). And
Baldwin, speaking of his empty life, says to Ellen: "'I've
been like a tin mechanical toy, all hollow inside"
1
(p.
292).
This death-in-life atmosphere is also suggested by
76
references to the disease and sterility of the city. Stan
76
Alvin Kernan, in The Cankered Muse (New Haven, 1959),
finds the disease imagery in the "tragical satire" (p. 192)
of the English Renaissance indicative of the satirist's dis
gust with a depraved world. In this "Juvenalian type of
satire," says Kernan, "the satirist seems always on the
206
Emery wonders why "'I go on dragging out a miserable exis
tence in this crazy epileptic town . . .(p. 153). Herf
|declares: "'I'm losing all the best part of my life rottinc-
jin New York'" (p. 140), suggesting that hack reporting has
I left him "pockmarked with print" (p. 276). The sterility
jof McUihattan is also reflected in its women. Host of the
l •
!
;women in the novel are either frigid or unloved; none Want
i ,
! •
children, and several have abortions. Cassie, the dancer,
i
a sexually frigid careerist, tells Ellen that her boyfriend
left her because: "'I said our love was so beautiful it
I
could go on for years and years. I could.love him for a
lifetime without even kissing him
1
" (p. 131). Later, Cassie
accidentally becomes pregnant and gets an abortion. Anna
Cohen tells Elmer, her boy friend: "'I aint never going to
have any children . . .'" (p. 279). When Ellen gets an
abortion, the atmosphere of death and sterility is communi
cated by images of rats, metals, and dolls. In a grisly
satiric caricature that reminds one of George Grosz's draw
ings, the abortionist is expressionistically portrayed as:.
... a short man with a face like a rat and sleek
black hair brushed straight back. . . .- Short dollhands
I verge of stepping over onto tragic ground" (p. 192).
207
the color of the flesh of a mushroom hang at his sides.
. . . [He] suddenly looks in her eyes with black steel
eyes like gimlets, (p. 209)
j
The women of the city express their barrenness and despair
i
by their frantic desire for rain. Ellen's frigidity is
|
jsuggested when, on her wedding night with Jojo Oglethorpe,
she leans out of the train window and feels the rain that
i ' '
"lashed in her face spitefully stinging her flesh, wetting
•her nightdress." The song on her mind, "Oh it gained forty
i
days
T
" (pp. 91-92) recalls the biblical flood and death by
drowning. And Cecily, Baldwin's wife, driven to hysteria
by his coldness, leans out of her Park Avenue apartment
window and prays for rain:
Oh if it would only rain. As the thought came to her
there was a low growl of thunder above the din of
building and of traffic. Oh if it would only rain,
(p, 147)
•• e
Dos Passos implies the need for the dead city's spiri
tual rebirth in the scenes of Stan Emery's suicide, Martin
Schiff's attempted suicide, and Jimmy Herf's departure from
the city of death at the beginning of spring. Stan, who
represents the youth and vitality destroyed by the city,
walks home in the rain after a night of heavy drinking and
has an attack of alcoholic hallucinations that results in
l
i . • .
i
208
his death by fire. During his walk, the motifs of the
prose-poems concerning the biblical fire and flood and the
destruction of ancient cities recur in his jumbled thoughts,
including the tune: "And it rained forty days and it
rained forty nights ... And the only man who survived the
flood was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus. . . ." (p. 198).
Viewing a fire from his apartment window, Stan envisions hint-
self setting fire to New York: "Skyscrapers go up like
flames, in flames, flames" (p. 198). The kerosene he pours
over himself and lights is associated with the water immer
sion ritual: "Kerosene whispered a greasyfaced can in the
corner of the kitchen. Pour on water" (p. 198). In a bi
zarre- scene depicting a gathering of bored bohemians of "the
lost generation" in a Greenwich Village cafe, Martin Schiff,
the radical, suddenly jumps up from the table in a drunken
stupor and runs toward the river to demonstrate his disgust
with the sham of contemporary life and to "prove his ata--
vistic sincerity" (p. 282) in death by drowning. Before
anyone can stop him, he peels off his clothes and shouts
dramatically: '
"I must run into the sincerity of black. ... I must
run to the end of the black wharf on the East River and
throw myself off." (p. 282)
209
And in the last scene of the novel, Jimmy Herf's decision
to leave the city suggests a symbolic baptismal rite; he
becomes the one wise man of Sodom, and "the only man who
survived the flood" (p. 198). The novel ends on the cycle
jof rebirth as Herf, by quitting his job and freeing himself
i • '
from deadening success values, "meets the demands of snrinq"
(p. 274) in his own individual way. Alone on the ferry boat
except for a "brokendown springwagon laded with flowers"
j
emitting "a rich smell of maytime earth" (p. 313), Herf
i
Hooks back on the wasteland of New York with its "dumping
I
grounds full of smoking rubbishpiles," and its "shapeless
masses of corroding metal" (p. 314).
In summary, the tone and intention of Dos Passos
1
lit
erary works that followed his war novels continued to illus
trate the bitter irony and disgust of a satirist who is "so
full of the possibilities of human kind in general, that he
77
tends to draw a dark and garish picture" of the imperfect
i
society he observes. Disillusioned by the War and the post
war reactionary trends in America, Dos Passos chose to
77
''John Dos Passos' acceptance of the "Gold Medal for
Fiction," in American Academy pf Arts and Letters and fla-
fcional Institute of Arts and Lettersr Proceedingsr Second
Series (New York, 1958), pp. 192-193.
210
return to Spain where he discovered his own anarchistic
individualism in the Spanish character and his future role
las a social historian and critic of American industrial
i
I •
culture. After returning to the United States in 1922 and
jbecoming involved in the class struggle, Dos Passos resolved
i
|to use his literary and journalistic talents to criticize
! '
and expose the existing social trends, to arouse public
i
opinion, and to influence social change. His growing in
terest in history and in avant-garde experiments in the arts
resulted in his first expressionistic^play, The Garbage Man,
and his first collective novel, Manhattan Transfer
T
both
jsatirical dissections of American urban culture.
Important as the first "collective" novel in American
literature, Manhattan Transfer was radically different from
i
[conventional novels that dealt with the limited story of a
few central characters. Instead, the novel focused upon
the city itself, attempting to characterize the whole at
mosphere and movement of New York and to chronicle the
social and economic trends of American life from the begin
ning of the twentieth century. But because of Dos Passos*
antipathy toward American society, Manhattan Transfer de-
picted the same one-sidedly ugly view of the city that
! -
r
"
Three Soldiers had presented of the army. His portrait of
211
New York became a distorted caricature rather than a real-
.
istic mirror of the city's complexity, and a caustic satire
jof the materialistic and mechanistic trends that Dos Passos
interpreted as having undermined American democratic ideals.
I
iBy emphasizing only the negative aspects of American life,
I ,-~
i
|Dos Passos depicted the city as a monstrous mechanism and a
i
sterile wasteland. Rather than living beings, his charac-
i •
iters tended to become astutely drawn caricatures: puppets
thrown about not only by historical forces but by their
author
1
s vindictiveness.
Manhattan Transfer is more successful as a technical
experiment and as incisive satire than as accurate history.
The novel's tightly controlled "collective" design presses
"naturalism far beyond itself into positively gothic dis-
78
itortions" and ends as a morality play (like The Garbage
Man) in which mechanistic determinism is used to damn those
characters identified with "the system" and to doom others
i
78jjark Schorer, "Technique as Discovery," in John W.
Aldridge, ed.. Critiques and Essavs on Modern Fiction (New
York, 1952), p. 80.. Schorer says: "The structural machi
nations of Dos Passos . . -. sure the desperate maneuvers" of
a man "committed to a [naturalistic] method of whose limi
tations" Dos Passos despairs. He calls Dos Passos a "sym
bolist manque" (p. 80) who ends as allegorist.
212
victimized by it. As in his earlier novels, Dos Passos
adopts a naturalistic method to convey satiric social criti
cism. In Dos Passos' ambitious but depressing spectacle,
life is possible only to one like Jimmy Herf, who revolts
against the machine, leaves the city, and travels his own
individual road.
CHAPTER IV
THE V.g.A. TRILOGY
I .. . .
A Portrait of Decline and Fall
After Dos Passos finished Manhattan Transfer, he main
tained his position as an independent radical and continued
j
jto publish critical articles and literary reviews in the
j"leftist" journal, New Masses
T
finished his second play,
Airways
r
Inc. (1928) for the New Playwrights Theater, and
idevoted much time and effort during 1926 and 1927 to the
Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee which hoped, in vain, to
jsave the two Italian anarchists from the electric chair.
jAlthough people stopped talking about it immediately after
wards, the executions of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, accord-
1 2
jing to Malcolm Cowley and Walter Rideout, later became an
|
1h
Echoes of a Crime," New Republic. l&XXIV (August 28,
1935), 79.
i •.
2
The Radical Hgyel in the United States; 19QQ-1954,
p. 134.
214
important symbol of "the class war" during the depression
1930's and affected Dos Passos more profoundly than any
3
other historical event except World War I. Whereas the
Soviet experiment, before the disillusioning Stalinist
massacres and purges of the 1930's, had convinced Dos Passos
that it was fulfilling "the aspirations for freedom and
4
social justice of the working classes of Europe," the
I " •
jSacco-Vanzetti Case convinced him that justice had been
|
destroyed in the United States. As he proclaimed in his
pamphlet written to inform public opinion about the case:
"If they [Sacco and Vanzetti] die what little faith many
millions of men have in the chance of Justice in this coun-
'• 5
try will die with them." As Alfred Kazin comments, the
; Sacco and Vanzetti Case provided Dos Passos with "the cata-
6
lyst" and the conception of "the class struggle" as a
theory of history that made U.S.A. possible. Shortly
' ^Rideout, p. 158.
4"The Desperate Experiment." Bookweek. I (September 15,
1963), 3.
5
John Dos Passos, Facing the Chairi Stgry Of the
Americanization of Two Foreicmborn Workmen (Boston, 1927),
p. 126.
! *
!
6
On Native Grounds, p. 275.
215
afterwards, he began writing the first volume of the trilogy
that would acidly chronicle American life during the first
three decades of the twentieth century. This first novel,
The 42nd Parallel (1930). eventually grew into two more
novels, 1919 (1932) and The Big Money (1936), all of which
t —
were collected in a 1938 edition and given the title U.S.A.
Into the U.S.A. trilogy Dos Passos packed "the same
;emotional impetus, the same burning vision of modern deca-
!
I 7
jdence, and the same sense of urgency" that had character
ized his first collective novel, Manhattan Transfer. Al
though startlingly original in itself, Manhattan Transfer
;was only the preliminary apprentice-piece for his master-
work, U.S.A. As Mrs. Gelfant says:
The earlier novel helped bring his creative faculties
to the point of their fullest development, and the frui
tion of his talents, the fulfillment of the form he was
seeking to embody and assess the times, is displayed
in the trilogy, (p. 166)
As satirical historian, Dos Passos' object in the U.S.A.
;novels was, he said later:
to keep up a contemporary commentary on history's changes
always as seen by somebody
1
s eyes, heard by somebody's
ears, felt through somebody's nerves and tissues. . . .
7
Gelfant, p. 166.
216
Everything must go in. Songs and slogans, political
aspirations and prejudices, ideals, hopes, delusions,
frauds, crackpot notions out of the daily newspapers.
8
{Following the pattern of Manhattan Transfer
r
Dos Passos
j
wanted the U.S.A. trilogy to convey both public and private
history: public in the sense that it would relate the
historical events of the time that appeared in the daily
newspapers; and private in the sense that it would reveal
j
the private lives of typical Americans who experienced these
I
i e
events, and, in addition, the author's personal experience
of them. Therefore, Dos Passos adapted and transmuted the
technical devices of Manhattan Transfer in order to achieve
this double focus on the collective social group and the
private individual.
First, to show that "personal adventures illustrate
the development of a society" (p. 3), Dos Passos continued
to use a large cast of characters from different locations,
occupations, and social strata, whose lives criss-cross or
parallel. Again more interested in conveying a cross-
section of society than the dramatic development of one or
two characters, Dos Passos shifted the narrative from one
i
8
BP0ftweeK, I (September 15, 1963), 3.
217
life to another in order to stress the simultaneous exist
ence of his large cast of characters within his historical
|framework. However, he lengthened the case history of each
j
main character, thereby creating more credible personalitiee
i
!
|than the stilted puppets of Manhattan Transfer.
1 Next, Dos Passos created three new technical devices
to broaden the dimension of the novel and to blend fiction
land history. Out of the prose-poems of Manhattan Transfer
Dos Passos evolved the device called the Newsreel. This
I
device, a montage of headlines, stories/"popular songs,
I
speeches, and statistics, serves to indicate the particular I
historical period in which the narratives take place and
suggest the quality of the "mass mind" or collective atanos- j
I
|
phere of each period. Dos Passos also included twenty-six j
i
brief Biographies of such representative public figures as |
Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, William Randolph Hearst, Woodrow
Wilson, Eugene Debs, and Rudolph Valentino, because many of
these men embodied the ideals and aspirations of a large --
segment of Americans of that historical period and, thus,
are shown as being influential in shaping the values and
goals of the fictional characters. In their personal suc-
icesses, confusions, and defeats, the lives of these famous
i
men in many instances parallel the lives of the imaginary
218
characters and show the common effect of the general his
torical currents upon both. A third device, which evolved
i
|out of the impressionistic prose-poems and interior mono-
i .
jlogues of Manhattan Transfer, is The Camera Eye, fifty-one
|autobiographical fragments showing the author's own atti
tude toward the events in which his characters are involved.
Thus, these four different methods of presentation convey
jDos Passos' personal view, of contemporary events in terms
i
of fiction, history, biography, and autobiography.
This method of dramatizing history by means of alter
nating devices suggests an analogy to the multiple approach
used in film documentaries. Dos Passos, himself, has made
the cinematic analogy in describing his method:
Somewhere along the line I had been impressed by Eisen-
stein's documentary films like the "Cruiser Potemkin."
Montage was the word used in those days to describe the
juxtaposition of contrasting scenes in motion pictures.
I took to montage to try to make the narrative stand up
off the page.®
And several critics of Dos Passos
1
work have made the same
analogy. For example, Horace Gregory, in his review of The
9"Confessions of a Contemporary Chronicler," Art and
the Craftsman: The Best of the Yale Literary Magazine 1836-
1961. eds. Joseph Hearned and Neil Goodwin (New Haven,
|1961), p. 20&.
219
Biy Money
f
maintains that Dos Passos
1
technique has been
skillfully borrowed from the motion picture. Says Gregory:
... the entire work ( U.S.A.) may be described as an
experiment in montage as applied to modern prose. We
may assume that the work is a scenario of contemporary
American life . . . concerned with the stream of action
in social history; no single character dominates the
picture, no single force drives toward a conclusion;
it is rather the cumulative forces, characters, episodes
that are gathered together under the shifting lens of
the camera; images of action cure superimposed and from
the long rolls of film Mr. Dos Passos (to complete the
analogy), like another Griffith, Pabst or Eisenstein,
has made a selection of cell units in news, subjective
observation, biography and fictional narrative.
The personal view of history that Dos Passos
1
docu-
1
mentary suggests, the view that he had already sketched in
Manhattan Transfer
T
is the disintegration of American soci
ety under monopoly capitalism, and beyond that, the dehuman
izing effects of modern industrial civilization. T. K.
Whipple remarked, in his review of U.S.A. in 1938, that the
trilogy conveyed both a political and moral theme: "The
class struggle is present as a minor theme [he said]; the
inajor theme is the vitiation and degradation of character in
10"Dos Passos Completes His Modern Trilogy: Eloquent
jand Incisive Satire Displayed in Scenario Style," New York
Herald Tribune Books. August 9, 1936, p. 1.
220
such a civilization."
11
Like Three Soldiers and Manhattan
Transfer. U.S.A. is another satiric chronicle directed
!against the mechanized world that, Dos Passos believed, was
i 12
|destroying "man's struggle for life." In Three Soldiers
|the army became the mechanized force that destroyed the
! individuality of its soldiers and turned them into auto-
I
matons or martyrs; in Manhattan Transfer, the city, another
mechanism, changed its inhabitants into hollow men; and in
U.S.A.. America under monopoly capitalism, still another
|corrupting force, destroys the ideals, goals, and human
jfeelings of both its so-called successes and failures. As
Dos Passos has described his kind of novel:
!
It was a chronicle of protest. Dreiser and Norris had
accustomed us to a dark picture of American society.
Greedy capitalists were getting in the way of the at
tainment of the Jeffersonian dream every American had
hidden away somewhere in his head.
Dos Passos* over-all conception of his U.S.A. trilogy
as a documentary of the decline and fall of American culture
Dos Passos and the U.S.A.," Nation. CXLVI (February
19, 1938), 210.
12"Looking Back on U.S.A.." New York Times. October 25,
.1959, section 2, p. 5.
1
3"confessions of a Contemporary Chronicler," p. 204.
221
under monopoly capitalism probably derived from an analogy
to Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, "his
14
adolescent Bible." As Walter Rideout has remarked:
I
i
| As the trilogy develops, one sees that it is the history
of the rise and incipient decline of yet another empire,
chronicled with the ironic detachment of a twentieth-
| century Gibbon who happens to be a novelist.
15
I
i .
jThere cure many allusions to Gibbon both in U.S.A. and in
jother works of Dos Passos. The "autobiographical" narrator
i
|
of Camera Eye (19) mentions that he "liked" reading Gib-
jbon; and Jay Pignatelli, another Dos Passos archetype in
ia later novel, attempts to emulate Gibbon, "the satirical
i
17
historian" and considers working "on a new Decline of the
West only more like Gibbon than like Spengler" (p. 452).
i
In still another scene, Jay says: "About time for a new
Gibbon ... to concoct another history of civilization's
14
Time. August 10, 1936, p. 52.
ISRideout, p. 161.
•^U.S.A. (New York, Modern Library edition, 1938), I,
239. All further references to U.S.A. will be from this
edition; volume and page numbers appearing in the text will
be cited in this manner: The 4Snd Parallel=l? 1919=11;
and The Big Money=III. followed by the page number.
17
John DOS Passos, Chosen Country (Boston, 1951), p.
|172.
222
decline and fall" (p. 358).
In U.S.A.. Dos•Paaaoa draws suggestive analogies be-
I •
tween some of the public figures in the Biographies who
represent "the system" and the corrupt politicians of an-
i ' •
cient Rome. In 1919. when Dick Savage and Anne Elizabeth
Trent observe Woodrow Wilson speaking in the Roman Forum,
! '
Dick is disturbed by Wilson"s facet
! «
"A terrifying face, I swear it's a reptile's face, not
warmblooded, or else the face on one of those old Roman
politicians on a tomb on the Via Appia. ... Do you
know what we are, Anne Elizabeth? we're [alfi] the
j Romans of the Twentieth Century. . . ." (II, 374)
i
Dos Passos' scathing portrait of William Randolph Hearst
jtreats Hearst, too, as a modern Roman:
!
Perhaps he [Hearst] liked to think of himself as the
young Caius Julius flinging his millions away, tearing
down emblems and traditions, making faces at togaed
privilege,- monopoly, stuffedshirts in office; Caesar
1
s
life like his was a millionaire prank. Perhaps W. R.
had read of republics ruined before.... (Ill, 470)
And it seems more than coincidence that Dos Passos' Bio
graphy of J. P. Morgan includes the facts that Morgan col
lected "Gallo-Roman bronzes," that "Rome was his favorite
jcity," (II, 339), and that Morgan "died in Rome in 1913"
(II, 336).
| If Dos Passos' pessimistic conception of modern
223
American history as a process of decline and fall was, in
part, a projection of his anger and frustration at America's
18
failure to.realize the "Jeffersonian dream," the literary
j
land mythical counterpart of that dream was identified in
j
his mind with Walt Whitman's democratic vista. There cure
i -
several direct references to Whitman in Dos Passos
1
letters,
essays, and novels, including U.S.A., and the expansive
istyle, the epic catalogues, and the vision of "virgin"
America that one finds in the Biographies and Camera Eyes
probably owes much to Whitman. Walter Rideout quotes a
i
letter in which Dos Passos says that he "read ... a great
i 19
deal of Whitman ... as a kid." Rideout says that al
though U.S.A. is a somber and negative book, it nevertheless
contains glimmerings of affirmation. Rideout declares:
The positive hope of U.S.A. comes from Walt Whitman, of
whose revolutionary quality Dos Passos wrote. . . . one
sees that Whitman's love of the American spoken word lies
behind Dos Passos
1
own colloquial style in the stories,
and like the poet, the novelist has tried to include,
not just New York, but all America in his work. (p\ 162)
Early in his career, Dos Passos had mentioned Whitman as the
model for contemporary writers who wished to re-establish a
Confessions of a Contemporary. Chronicler," p. 204.
j ^Rideout, p. 155.
224
link between modern industrial society and the roots of the
American past. Whitman, said Dos Passos:
... abandoned the vague genteelness that had charac-
{ terized American writing . . . and, founding his faith
| on himself, on the glowing life within him shouted
j genially, fervidly his challenge to the future. . . .
An all-enveloping industrialism . . . has broken down
j the old bridges leading to the past, has cut off the
| possibility of retreat. Our only course is to press
on. Shall we pick up the glove Walt Whitman threw at
the feet of posterity? Or shall we stagnate forever
... producing nothing from amid our jumble of races
but steel and oil and grain.
20
i
i
There are several direct references to Whitman in U.S.A.
T
but all in contexts that seem to indicate that America has
missed its chance for potential greatness or has destroyed
its best men. Any optimism present in the trilogy is, at ,
21
best, hesitant. In Camera Eye (46), the narrator, who is
!an individualist, tormented by the easy but dubious slogans
|
he has used at a labor rally, goes home to read and think:
... I go home after a drink and a hot meal and read
20,1
Against American Literature," New Republic. VIII
(October 14, 1916), 269-271.
^^Alvin B. Kernan, "A Theory of Satire," in A. B. Ker-
nan, ed., Modern Satire (New York, 1962), p. 168. Mr. Ker
nan says: "Somewhere in his dense knots of ugly flesh the
satiric author or painter usually inserts a hint of an ideal
which is either threatened with imminent destruction or is
already dead."
225
(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
I power and bring back (I too Walt Whitman) our story-
! book democracy. . . . (Ill, 150)
'
The actual Americans in the Biographies who are treated
i
sympathetically usually reflect Whitman's ideals in some
way; but these figures are either ignored or hated by their
i
|own country. Isadora Duncan, who "found no freedom for
i
Art in [puritanical] America" (II, 158) and was forced to
i
f
achieve fame in Europe, "was an American like Walt Whitman;
the murdering rulers of the world were not her people; the
marchers were her people . . ." (II, 157). And Frank Lloyd
Wright, the architect, is another great creative talent
wasted in a society that is too enmeshed in the tangle of
finance and machinery to grasp his vision of a new society.
Although Wright is treated optimistically as a man who dog
gedly overcomes adversity, his achievements, according to
iDos Passos, have been ignored by America:
His plans are coming to life. His blueprints, as once
Walt Whitman's words, stir the young men:—
Frank Lloyd Wright,
patriarch of the new building,
not without honor except in his own country. (Ill, 433)
As Malcolm Cowley has observed, the "drift" or
226
PP
"decline [that] can be deduced from the novel as a whole"
is America's change from a mobile to a stratified society.
jSays Cowley:
I
I At the beginning of "The 42nd Parallel" there was a
general feeling of hope and restlessness and let's
take a chance. . .. . But at the end qf "The Big Money"
all this has changed. Competitive capitalism has been
transformed into monopoly capitalism; American society
has become crystalized and stratified, (p. 24)
|At the end of the trilogy, says Cowley, America is hopeless
ly divided into an upper and lower class with "no longer any
bond between them; they are two nations" (p. 24). In social
and economic terms, Dos Passos' interpretation and critique
of the trend toward monopoly capitalism in American society
since the turn of the twentieth century, with the resulting
"class struggle" and "a conflict between finance and pro
duction," seems ideologically indebted to the theories of
23 ^
Marx and Veblen. The book is a product of the depression
1930's, and as such embodies many of the cliches believed
by liberals during that period. As Lionel Trilling
22
"The End of a Trilogy," New Republic. LXXXVIII
(August 12, 1936), 24.
"This fact has been pointed out by Max Lerner, Horace
Gregory, Joseph Warren Beach, Blanche Gelfant, Walter Ride-
lout, and others.
227
observed, U.S.A. was "exciting because of its quality of
cliche: here sure comprised the judgments about modern
j
American life that many of us have been living on for
! ,,24
{years."
In Dos Passos
1
interpretation of American life, as he
presents it in U.S.A., industrial capitalism, already in
trenched at the turn of the century, is "the system" that
:has destroyed the "old" American dream of brotherhood and
|individual liberty and has created a "new" American dream
based upon success and material gain. Because of its ex
ploitation of the workers and its expansionist tendencies,
American capitalism becomes responsible for the "class
25 ' <
struggle"; and America's involvement in World War I.
Behind the smoke-screen of Woodrow Wilson's idealistic
phrases about "the War to save democracy" from the Huns,
24"The America of John Dos Passos," Partisan Review.
IV (April 1938), 26.
^^When Fenian McCreary's father loses his job, early in
The 42nd Parallel. Fenian's uncle Tim, the printer.and so
cialist, blames it on "the system." Tim says: "It's the
fault of the system that don't give a man the fruit of his
labor. . . . The only man that gets anything out of capital
ism is a crook, an' he gets to be a millionaire in short
order. . . . But an honest workin' man like John or muself
| rsicl we can work a hundred years and not leave enough to
ibury us decent with" (I, 15).
228
the real reasons the United States enters the European con
flict are to protect American capital abroad, to save the
Morgan loans to the Allies, and to weaken or destroy the
growing labor movement and revolutionary sentiment that
26
existed in this country. The War, a world-wide capitalist
plot, succeeds in destroying the progressive movement in
this country by channeling the energies, formerly devoted.
|to liberal reforms, into super-patriotism and by suppressing
dissenting views, including those of such revolutionary
! 07
labor organizations as the I.W.W. By stifling institu-
26
Maxwell Geismar, in Writers in Crisis, has called
this theory which interpreted the War as a plot of the big
interests "the economic devil theory of the First World War;
the single truth analysis upon which a generation was
raised" (p. 118). Don Stevens, a young radical, expresses
the theory to Eveline Hutchins in a New York restaurant:
"He said that there wasn't a chinaman's chance that the U.S.
would keep out of the war; the Germans were winning, the
working class all over Europe was on the edge of revolt, the
revolution in Russia was the beginning of the worldwide
social revolution and the bankers knew it and Wilson knew
it; the only question was whether the industrial workers in
the east and the farmers and casual laborers in the middle
west and west would stand for war. The entire press was
bought and muzzled. The Morgans had to fight or go bank
rupt. 'It's the greatest conspiracy in history'" (II, 131).
2
7
This view is implied in the Biographies of Debs,
Haywood, Everest, Hill, 'Bourne and Reed. See my comments
on these figures later in this chapter. The radical, Ben
Compton, is suppressed and failed for his speeches against
[the war. See U.S.A.. Ill, 436, 447.
229
tional reforms, the war also starts the spiral toward mono
poly capitalism, and the wild stock speculation of the boom
and bust 1920*s which further exploited the workers by new
i
28
;speed~up techniques of mass production. The frantic and
j
aimless 1920's, the era of "the big money," symbolizes the
decline and fall of moral, political, and economic reform
in the United States. In the 1920's the American dream be-
comes synonymous with the success myth, leisure-class liv-
i
29
xng, and loose inorals. The age disregards the wisdom of
men like Thorstein Veblen who suggest the need for a "com-
monsense society dominated by the needs of the men and
women who did the work" (III, 101-102). In Dos Passos
1
view, the final decline of American democratic idealism
after the War is symbolized by the execution of Sacco and
30
yanzettx; and the death rattle of the present American
2®See my comments on the Biographies of Taylor, Ford,
and Insull. Also see the reflection of this view in the
dialogue between Charley Anderson and Bill Cermak in U.S.A..
Ill, 309-313.
^
9
This view, is reflected in the stories of Margo Dow-
ling and Charley Anderson. See also the Biography of Val
entino in U.S.A.. Ill, 189-194.
3°Mary French says: "If the State of Massachusetts can
kill those two innocent men in the face of the protest of
ithe whole world it'll mean that there never will be any jus
tice in America ever again" (III, 451). See also Camera
230
)
|economic system begins with the stock market crash, which
jputs an end to the whole era of American expansionist capi-
! 31
italism since the beginning of the century.
i
A Satirist of Manners
In Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos had attempted to
chronicle the destructive effect of industrial capitalism
jupon the varied lives of typical people living in America's
|largest city, and much of the narrative of U.S.A. centers
i
i
upon New York City, the geographic and symbolic focal point
of The 42nd Parallel. Though the lives of his main charac
ters intersect in New York, Dos Passos extends the scope of
his trilogy to record his characters' movements to such
other large cities as Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Chicago,
Seattle, Los Angeles, Miami, and St. Paul, and also to its
small agricultural, lumber, and mining towns in different
parts of the country. Furthermore, in a manner that sug
gests Dos Passos' nearly total recall or careful documenta
tion of his extensive travels in the army or as a corres
pondent, the picaresque excursions of his many characters
by ship, train, and plane, take them to Canada, Mexico,
Eye (50), U.S.A.. Ill, 461-464.
I 31g
ee
the Biography of Samuel Insull in IIll,
525-532.
231
South America, England, Belgium, Spain, France, Italy, the
West Indies, and the Near East. As John Chamberlain has
|remarked, Dos Passos wished not only to satirize "America
i
'on the make'" but also "the effect of Americanization on
i *
I 32 ,
ithe world."
i
•i The twelve main characters and dozens of lesser figures
who take part in this panorama of the pre-War, the .War, and
;the post-War eras of American history depicted in the three
. !
jnovels, represent American types from different parts of
jthe country, with different religious and social backgrounds
land different talents and aspirations; and, as such, they
itypify the American character of that period. Dos Passos
relates their detailed case histories in a swiftly moving
third-person narrative method that sums up an immense amount
of minute facts from the point of view of each character's
personal limitations, and individual speech and thought
patterns. Since Dos Passos also wishes to establish the
relationship between the governing historical forces and th€i
decisions his characters make with regard to these forces,
he periodically interrupts the narratives with Camera Eye
sections, Newsreels, and Biographies to provide the reader
|
32
New York Times Book Review. March 2, 1930, p. 5.
232
with relevant background information the characters are
unable to articulate. Dos Passos' realistic subject matter,
his documentary method, his reportorial style of narration,
j ' .
|and his use of social and economic determinism, all identify
jhi^ method as naturalistic. Yet his ironic treatment of
his characters' almost two-dimensional shallowness and
33
superficiality, their greed, lust, and hypocrisy, and
their general lack of redeeming traits, his attempts to
jbuild a case for the "class struggle" by his tendency to
iseparate his characters into exploiters and workers, his
I
loading the dice to insure that his characters suffer inner
jmoral defeat, if they are exploiters, or victimization, if
they are workers, again, as in his earlier novels, identify
i.
the aim of the trilogy as satirical criticism that uses a
naturalistic method to indict "the system."
33
Claude-Bdmond Hagny, L'acre du Roman Americain (Paris;
Editions du Seuil, 1948), p. 136. Hiss Magny says: "Les
personnages de Dos Passos sont toujours portes par un de-
termini sme guelconque, generalement economique. ... La pein-
ture d'etres superficiels, bi-dimensionnels, reduits a leurs
determinations les plus intriseques est deja par elle-meme
une satire, une mise en accusation de l'ordre etabli, meme
si la revendication sociale demeure informulee (et elle
s'exprime assez dans U.S.A.. encore que ce soit de la ma-
niere la plus objective, a travers certaines coupures de
ipresse)" (italics mine).
As John Chamberlain says about The 42nd Parallels
! The actual stories o£ his five characters cure all told
! in straightaway prose with overtones of datire. . . .
i The book being satire, Mr. Dos Passos has "interpreted"
| his people in terms of irony to emphasize aimlessness.
And Maxwell Geismar says that "Dos Passos
1
disoriented
! 35
political view" causes him to omit any positive qualities
i .
existing in American society:
j
Dos Passos shows us the heights and the depths of Ameri
can society, the extremes of the Success Myth and those
of revolutionary radicalism. But he omits, we may al
most say, the bulk of the American people in his survey:
| those who live on the middle-ground . . . those who are
neither as rich nor as happy as they might be, perhaps,
but who are also neither corrupted nor ground down by
the prevailing patterns of society. So too in the indi
vidual presentation of his people, Dos Passos the novel-
| ist avoids any . . . common decency or happiness, or
perhaps even the common facts of life. (p. 126)
jGeismar suggests that Dos Passos
1
"entire American critique"
should be viewed "not so much the historian's verdict as
the poet's lament," and his "discontents . . . the symbols
for those of an indignant and disturbed soul" (p. 128).
36
Although most of Dos Passos' picaresque characters
34
New York Times Book Review. March 2, 1930, p. 5.
35Wrjters in Criaia. p. 126.
36
Arthur Mizener, "The Gullivers of Dos Passos,"
234
are from middle-cla.ss and lower-class backgrounds, and all,
at the beginning, sure "innocents" in search of experience
and their own identity, they soon become identified either
|as "innocent idealists" (the radicals) who uphold the "old"
I traditions of American individualism or "innocent rascals"
i
j(the exploiters) who compromise their individuality to "the
| corrupting forces of an organized society which demands
37
conformity." The typical Dos Passos picaresque hero,
i
'says Mizener:
i
i
... may be a young man of innocent and incurable good
will, like the early Gulliver; or he may be the equally
innocent rascal who believes that happiness is to be
obtained by being smart and financially successful, like
Saturday Review
T
XXXII (June 30, 1951), 6-7, 34-36. Mizener
isays that Dos Passos "is a good novelist of a kind almost
unique in our time" who should be approached "by way of the
tradition of comedy exemplified ... by Ben Jonson and
Swift" (p. 6). Like Jonson, says Mizener, Dos Passos "sees
ipeople" as "representative cases, each of whom contributes
... to our understanding of the drift of the community's
life"; he writes "the most serious kind of satiric comedy
. . . immediately ironic about the shortcomings of . . .
society and, beyond that, about the permanent defects of
humanity" (p. 7). For the influence of the English pica
resque novelists of the eighteenth century and "Pio Baroja's
modern revival of the Spanish picaresque style" on Dos Pas
sos, see "Confessions of a Contemporary Chronicler," pp.
>205-206; also "A Novelist of Revolution," in Rosinante to
the Road Again, PP. SO-IOO.
I ^Mizener, p. 34.
235
Volpone. ... In either case he is finally destroyed
or at least defeated, (p. 34)
!The "inner" defeat of the exploiters and the forceful
t
i
{destruction of the idealists by organized American society
|constitutes, according to Mizener, a satire of America's
)
institutions; in other words, Dos Passos illustrates that
the old traditions of American democracy have now become
corrupted by the values of capitalism; that its former
j "
ideals of "anarchistic individualism," and "egalitarian-
| 38
ism" have, in modern predatory America, degenerated into
39
slogans and manners. As a satirist of these prevailing
•*
8
Mizener points out that Do's Passos, in the tradition
'of Jonson and Swift, attacks the vices he observes in the
jindividuals and institutions of his own day: "... Jonson,
basing his attack on the humanistic and Christian attitude
professed by his age, held up to deadly ridicule the capi
talist acquisitiveness and puritan pretentiousness of the
early seventeenth century. . . . Swift, basing his attack
on the Christian reason and the benevolence professed by
the eighteenth century, attacked the functionless ritual and
the brutality of his society. ... In the same way Dos Pas
sos, taking quite seriously the anarchistic individualism
land the egalitarianism of the American democratic tradition,
attacks with satire the institutionalized corruption and the
disintegrated lives produced by the two mighty opposites of
our society—industry and politics" (p. 34).
39dos Passos says in his introductory note to the Mod
ern Library edition of The 42nd Parallel (1937) that for
American writing to continue alive, the writer must "test
{continually slogans, creeds, and commonplaces in the light
!of freshly felt experience."
236
manners, Dos Passos points out, ironically, that if a char
acter honestly adheres to the old ideals, he goes down; but
! '
} • .
|if he exploits the slogans of democracy and individualism
j
ifor personal gain, he succeeds, but dies inside.
S •
| In U.S.A.. J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard,JMargo
j
jOowling, Richard Ellsworth Savage, and Charley Anderson all
jcompromise with "the system" and succeed at the cost of
i •
their individual moral identity, their human feeling, and
I
sometimes even their lives. The treatment of Moorehouse,
i
the central figure in U.S.A., around whom most of the other
characters revolve, represents Dos Passos' ironic view of
;the American success story. The fanatically ambitious
Moorehouse rises through the course of the trilogy from
selling real estate, and doing public relations work for
|commercial corporations and the Red Cross to become an ad
visor to President Wilson at Versailles and, finally, head
of an advertising firm during the 1920's.
In The 42nd Parallel
T
young Johnny Moorehouse dreams
of becoming a song writer, reads Success Magazine, and ad
mires the real-estate slogans of his boss, Mr. Hillyard,
that suggest a connection between buying homes and "Ameri
canism." Johnny recalls one such slogan which he emulates
;in his own advertising copy:
237
". . . the owner of realestate raid links himself by
indissoluble bonds to the growth of his city or nation
. . . letting the riches drop in to fsic 1 his lap that
are produced by the unavoidable and inalienable growth
in wealth of a mighty nation. . . ." (I, 205)
{
Puritanical about sex but practical about business, Johnny
chooses to exploit his "blue-eyed and boyish" smile (I, 194)
by marrying the dissolute Annabelle Strang for her money.
His moral compromise illustrates what Mizener has called
j . . ' .
I"the core of Dos Passos
1
work . . . an isolating, individual
40
struggle
1
! between idealism and corruption. Although he
llearns from the bellboy in the hotel where Annabelle is
staying that she has slept with several men in the hotel,
Johnny decides to marry her because she represents a way
toward his American dream:
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 . . . this connection with money and
the Strangs; opportunity knocks but once at a young
man's door. (I, 193)
Soon afterwards, he divorces Annabelle, obtains a settlement
i
changes "Johnny" to the more fashionable "J. Ward" and goes
into the advertising business. His loss of identity and
i • •
gradual dehumanization at this point is suggested by this
*°Mizener, p. 34.
238
passage in which he identifies with the products he sells:
Shaving while his bath was running in the morning he
would see long processions of andirons, grates, furnace
fittings, pumps, sausagegrinders, drills, calipers,
vises, casters, drawerpulls pass between his face and
the mirror and wonder how they could be made attractive
to the retail trade. (I, 251)
After marrying Gertrude Staple for her money, hie sets up a
public relations office in New York during an era of labor
|
strife and runs a propaganda campaign, using democratic
i ' - '
j
slogans and "labor fakers" to arbitrate strikes between
I .
I labor and management at the expense of labor. In 1919 and
i
The Big Money
f
Moorehouse is depicted as a "public success"
rather than an individual human being, as if his success
had usurped his humanity. He degenerates into a "thing,"
41
no more than a "mask" of his former self, "a goddam mega-
41
In
answer to Bernard OeVoto's criticisms of Dos Pas
sos characters as lacking "life," Malcolm Cowley points out
jthat both E. R. "Doc" Bingham and Moorehouse had been "liv-
|ing men" but had become "masks" during the course of the
jtrilogy. Says Cowley: "Like J. Ward Moorehouse, he [Bing
ham] had shriveled into a caricature of himself when he
bluffed and finagled his way into a fortune. That is one of
jthe points Dos Passos is trying to make—or better, it is
one of the lessons he has drawn from his own observation of
people." See "Reviewers on Parade: II," New Republic
T
XCIII (February 9, 1938), 23-24. Also see Lionel Trilling's
comments on Dos Passos' characterization in "The America of
John Dos Passos," Partisan Review. IV (April, 1938), 29-32.
I •
239
phone" (II, 297) as one character calls him. Others begin
to notice that "he looks so terribly tired" and is "begin-
j
ning to break up" (III, 488). A walking dead man, Moore-
house now has a "big jowly face as expressionless as a
cow's" (III, 478). Having made a fortune in advertising by
prostituting democratic principles, his final campaign is
to promote E. R. Bingham's patent medicines and to lobby
i
against impending government regulation by using slogans
j .
identifying Bingham's quack products with "self-help" and
"individualism." As Dick Savage says to Moorehouse: "This
lis going to be more than a publicity campaign, it's going
to be a campaign for Americanism" (III, 494). A lonely and
hollow man with an insane wife, Moorehouse finally has a
i
heart attack and lies dying while Savage takes over the
firm.
As Moorehouse learns to exploit his boyish charm, so
Eleanor Stoddard learns to exploit refinement, and Margo
Dowling, sex, to reach their goals of success. Ironically,
42
because both of these "new women" of the War generation
42&s Hubert Creekmore tells us in his introduction to
The Satires of Juvenal (New York, 1963), Juvenal's longest
poem, Satire VI, contains a "castigation of the 'new woman"'
iof Rome. Says Creekmore, "She was not the industrious,
{secluded, virtuous woman of early Rome; she moved about town
240
are completely opportunistic, unscrupulous, and unfeeling,
they gain "the big money" in the predatory and amoral world
i
of U.S.A. Born of a poor Chicago family, Eleanor hates her
poverty and resents the fact that her father works in the
Chicago stockyards. She learns to cultivate esthetic tastesi
!
|to escape ugliness and to acquire leisure-class habits
! -
|needed to get ahead socially. After lesurning about art and
|cultivating a French accent to sound aristocratic, Eleanor
|
!takes advantage of her friend Eveline Hutchens' social con
nections to rise from sales girl to Moorehouse's interior
decorator and, later, his confidante. During the War,
Moorehouse obtains an important position for her with the !
Red Cross in Paris, where she comes in contact with inter
nationally prominent people. After the War, she deserts
Moorehouse and converts to Catholicism in order to marry a
wealthy Russian £>rince. Joseph Warren Beach has alluded to
Eleanor's "bourgeois" mentality that combines an essential
!heartlessness and amorality with an utmost correctness of
sentiment. Her "insincerity and a confusion of mind," says
Beach, "are no bar to success in a world of free-for-all
jas she wished, joined men at their dinners, schemed and .
murdered for wealth and power, and in general lived a life
of her own" (pp. xiv and xv).
241
competition, where much is gained by the cultivation of the
43
right forms of sentimentalism." Dos Passos visually con-
jveys Eleanor
1
s cold-blooded refinement by his continued
]
i
references to her "coldly chiselled profile" (II, 393), her
!
"hard, chilly way" (II* 302), and her "shrill and rasping"
i
Ivoice (III, 487).
! • •
j Dos Passos' portrait of Margo Dowling and her pica-
resque adventures down the East Coast to Florida-and finally
I
to Hollywood contains much comic satire. Her deceptive
maneuvers that lead her to stardom give Dos Passos a chance
to burlesque the manners of the money-grabbing, social-
climbing film colony that is dominated by ego-maniacs like
director Sam Margolies. Margo, a kind of modern Moll Flan
ders, starts her sordid adventures by being raped by her
foster father, a ham actor; then she proceeds to hop from
one bed to another, sleeping with a series of actors, marry
ing a Cuban who is both sexual pervert and dope-addict,
getting syphilis, attempting to trick a rich college boy
into marrying her, meeting Charley Anderson while stranded
in Florida during the real-estate boom and milking him for
a few thousand before his death, and finally journeying to
I
|
43
ftmerican Fictiont 1920-1940. p. 65.
0
I
242
the West Coast. Thoroughly amoral and ruthless, having "no
intention of letting her life interfere with her work,"
t
(III, 364) Margo tricks Sam Margolies into making her a
star by exploiting her sex appeal and pretending that she
j
has an aristocratic Spanish background. By sleeping with
the "right" men and by cultivating the cold, bland fa9ade
of a "porcelain doll" (III, 553), Margo, ironically, rises
to become "the nation's newest sweetheart" (III, 426).
Dick Savage and Charley Anderson are sympathetically
l
portrayed until they compromise their aims and ideals to
i
"the big money." Another artist-esthete like John Andrews
and Jimmy Herf, Savage's moral degeneration serves as an
example of what might have happened to Dos Passos' other
"poets against the world" if they had not rebelled against
"the system." Prom a poor but cultured family living near
Chicago, Dick at first aspires to become a serious poet.
He receives a Harvard education that is paid for by family
connections and a scholarship, becomes a pacifist-radical
through the influence of his socialist friends living in
the Harvard Yard, is annoyed with the stuffy academic at
mosphere and the class snobbery that exists, joins the
Norton-Harjes ambulance group, and, while serving in France
i
land Italy with the Red Cross, becomes disgusted with the
243
absurd butchery of the War. His career paralleling that of
the "Camera Eye" narrator up to this point, Dick loses his
i
jposition with the Red Cross for writing letters to his
Sfriends that attack the War and is hauled before army au-
i
thorities before being sent back to the States to face the
draft. Dos Passos satirically portrays these official rep
resentatives of "the system" by catching the hostile and
l •
I
sententious quality of their rhetoric. One officer says to
Dick:
i
j "... anybody who gets in the way of the great machine,
the energy and devotion of a hundred million patriots
[that] is building towards the stainless purpose of
; saving civilization from the Huns, will be mashed like
a fly. I'm surprised that a collegebred man like you
hasn't more sense. Don't monkey with the buzzsaw." ]
| (II, 209)
—
Choosing at first to express his denunciation of the
War by escaping to the Spanish border and writing poems of
revolt against the "cannibal governments" (II, 211) of the
world, Dick loses his nerve, goes home, and uses family
contacts to gain an army commission. His compromise with
"the system" results in nothing less than the loss of his
former ideals and identity. His lawyer friend, the influen
tial Hiram Halsey Cooper, forces Dick to maintain a hypo
critical silence about the war from that time on:
244
"only one thing you must promise ... no more peace
i talk till we win the war. When peace comes we can put
| some in our poems." . . . Dick nodded; it made him sore
! to feel that he was blushing. (II, 348)
j
| Back in Paris as an officer, Dick becomes an ambusgue
like Moorehouse; he exploits the war for his own advantage
and uses his education to entertain people with his witty
stories. After being responsible for Anne Trent's death,
he decides to join the Moorehouse advertising agency, de
ceiving himself by thinking that he will continue to write
i
I
jserious poetry. He writes to his mother:
I ' *
It's the type of work that will allow me to continue my
real work on the side. Everybody tells me it's the
opportunity of a lifetime. (II, 394)
But as contact man and slogan writer for Moorehouse, Dick
prostitutes his literary talent until he feels "sour and
gone in the middle like a rotten pear" (III, 478). Aware
of his own flattering and insincere remarks to Moorehouse,
whom he realizes is a fraud, Dick degenerates into "the
ruins of a minor poet" (III, 492) who thinks that with a
larger salary he will be able to reorganize his life, and
who escapes his conscience through alcoholic fantasies and
homosexual sprees in Harlem with Negro male prostitutes.
The story of Charley Anderson's decline and fall from
245
promising inventor to stock speculator and alcoholic illus-
I
trates what Max Lerner has described as "the tragedy of the
I
itechnician in a money age" and "a footnote to Veblen's 'The
44
jEngineers and the Price System.'" The son of a boarding-
j •
house keeper in Fargo, North Dakota, Charley is introduced
jin The 42rtd Parallel as a talented mechanic with aspirations
!
|
ito study engineering. He leaves home and travels through
! *
I the Middle West, is nearly tricked into marriage by a girl
• i '
jin St. Paul, sees the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, goes north
to New York to attend school, learns briefly about radical-
• *
ism from Ben Compton while there, and finally enlists as a
i
mechanic in the ambulance corps. In The Big Money he re-
jturns as an aviator, experiences the postwar slump, and is
I
jout of work until he joins Joe Askew in manufacturing air
planes. After a promising start, Charley's weakness for
rich women and liquor result in his deserting his friend
Joe and destroying his own talents as a mechanic-inventor
by trading his Askew-Merritt stock and becoming a director
of the Tern Company, a rival concern in Detroit. Noticing
that the financiers, not the engineers and inventors, reap
44i>The America of John Dos Passos," Nation
T
CXLIII
| (August 15, 1936), 187.
246
"the big money," Charley gradually spends more time at the
stock exchange than at the factory. Tricked into marriage
jby the calculating and frigid Gladys Wheatley, his ensuing
1
high life and an airplane accident start him on the road to
j
ruin. Partially crippled by the accident, divorced by his
I ' •
jwife, and frozen out of the Tern Company by stock manipula-
t ""
j *
11ion, Charley degenerates into an alcoholic who has nothing
I
left but his commercialized sexual relationship with Margo
Dowling. He ends his life violently in a reckless attempt
i.i
to beat an express train to a crossing with his automobile.
In contrast to these opportunists who suffer inner
defeat, Fenian "Mac" McCreary, Ben Compton, and Mary French
|are idealists who are victimized by the predatory society of
U.S.A. Called by Maxwell Geismar "a chronicle of American
45
Failure," Mac's story, appearing next to Biographies of
Debs and Heywood, is symptomatic of the struggle of the
laboring class for better working conditions and a higher
standard of living during the prewar years of the twentieth
century. When his mother dies from overwork and his father
is laid off his job, young Mac is forced to live with his
Uncle Tim, a socialist printer, in Chicago. After receiving
i
|
45
Writers in Crisis, p. 113.
247
an education in radicalism from his uncle, Mac undergoes a
series of adventures that lead him through the Middle West
I
to the West coast cities of Seattle, San Francisco, San
Diego, and, finally, to Mexico. Unlike the exploiters,
i •
Mac's aims are more than selfish. As he says to his com
panion Ike Hall on the journey to the Coast: "I wanta
study an' work for things; you know what I mean, not to get
to be a goddam slavedriver but for socialism and the revo-
i
jlution ..." (1,^77). But because of his lack of experi
ence and his good nature, Mac's fate is to be "outa luck in
this man's country" (I, 78). He is exploited by the fraud,
Doc Bingham, for whom he sells pornographic books without
salary, cheated by prostitutes in Seattle, and tricked by a
San Francisco girl, Maisie Spencer, into giving up his
fight for the I.W.W. during the Mining Strike in Goldfield,
Nevada, in order to settle down to a boring middle-class
marriage with her in San Diego. Although he eventually
leaves Maisie to join Zapata and his revolutionaries in
Mexico, he again loses his revolutionary enthusiasm when he
is persuaded by a pretty Mexican girl to settle down with
her and assume the quiet life of keeping a bookstore.
Ben Compton's story, interspersed with Biographies of
{radicals John Reed, Randolph Bourne, Wesley Everest, and
248
Joe Hill, illustrates the suppression of radicals and paci
fists who protested America's involvement in World War I.
It also illustrates the tragic fate of the individualist
jwho refuses to conform to the demands of either the capi
talist system or the.Communist Party. From a middle-class
Jewish family in Brooklyn, Ben becomes a Marxian radical
and, like Mac, gains his practical education as an underdog
i
during his wanderings through Minnesota, Canada, Vancouver,
and Seattle, where he and other members of the I.W.W. are
hounded by strike breakers working for the lumber -interests
in the Northwest. Back in New York, Ben becomes an agita
tor and leader in the radical movement and is clubbed by
police for speaking at the Paterson textile strike and given
a ten-year jail sentence for being a conscientious objector.
After being martyred for his radical ideals, he is also
driven out of the Communist Party for deviating from the
Communist line. Although disillusioned, Ben tells Mary
French after the War that he will go on fighting alone for
the rights of the oppressed.
Mary French, a socially-conscious girl from an upper
middle-class family in Colorado, detests the snobbery of
the rich girls at Vassar College and goes to Chicago to do
'social work for Jane Addams at Hull House. After going east
249
to Pittsburgh, she experiences the brutal suppression of
the striking workers at the Pittsburgh mills and becomes
Iinvolved in the radical labor movement. She works for
| ' •
George Barrow, Moorehouse's strike arbitrator, who exploits
j ' •
both her body and intelligence, and she becomes disillu
sioned after she learns that Barrow is a "labor faker"
working for the big interests. Refusing to be bribed by
jher mother's money, she remains a radical, living succes
sively with Ben Compton and Don Stevens, and going to jail
for protesting in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti. Hardened
by her observation of human brutality, she is further dis
illusioned when Stevens, whom she loves, deserts her to
marry a girl assigned to him by the Communist Party. Al-
v'
.1 •.
though she goes on fighting against oppression, Mary, like
Ben, has been victimized by both "systems" and consequently
has lost her innocence and human feeling. As she tells
Barrow, whom she later meets at a party: ". . .1 haven't
any feelings any more. I've seen how it works in the field.
. . . It doesn't take a good heart to know which end of a
riotgun's pointed at you" (III, 553).
The lesser figures, Eveline Hutchins, Janey and Joe
Williams, and Anne Elizabeth Trent, also suffer either
250
46
actual death or petrification of feeling from their con
frontation with "the system" or its representatives. A
typical upper-class girl like Mary French, Eveline lacks
Mary's social conscience and remains a dilettante who
i
fashionably surrounds herself with "interesting" bohemians
j
jand radicals as well as big business executives to alleviate
her boredom. Like Eleanor, Eveline cultivates the arts as
|a way of escaping life which "seemed too filthy and horrid"
! - •
(II, 113); but lacking Eleanor's ruthlessness and drive,
Eveline fails to gain "the big money." Instead, after a
string of illicit affairs, when her life becomes "too tire
some" (III, 484), she commits suicide.
Janey Williams, the daughter of a retired Georgetown
tow-boat captain, receives an early education in racial
bigotry from her mother, reads success stories and studies
stenography and typing in high school, and finally gets a
job as J. Ward Moorehouse's personal secretary. A foil for
Moorehouse, who overworks her, she identifies herself with
his interests, convinced that Moorehouse and Barrow are
great men because they are listed in Who's Who. Another
"inno.cent rascal" out for personal gain, Janey rejects her
46
Tr
iiiing, p. 31.
251
brother Joe, cuts herself off from her lower-class roots,
and loses her human feeling to become "the role" she assumes,
j
|that of efficient secretary and cold, lonely spinster.
|
The story of Joe Williams illustrates the average
"underdog" enlistee's experiences during the First World
! —
War. In his adventures as a sailor who travels from South
America to England and France, Joe becomes a typical victim
iof the War, just as Mac and Ben become victims of the class
i
struggle. Convinced that the War is a plot of the big
interests, Joe deserts the navy for the Merchant Marine, is
torpedoed by German submarines, tortured and humiliated by
the British Secret Service, ignored by his sister, tricked
into marriage by Del, a working girl who commits adultery
with other servicemen, and killed in an absurd barroom
brawl on the night of the armistice. •
Finally, "Daughter," Anne Elizabeth Trent, a warm
hearted country girl from Texas, goes East and witnesses the
Paterson textile strike and then decides to serve in the
Near-East Relief during the War. She meets Dick Savage on
a train to Rome, and naively gives herself to him, thinking
that he loves her. Discovering she is pregnant, she is, at
first, confident that Dick will marry her, but becomes dis-
i
illusioned when he chooses a career with Moorehouse and
252
deserts her. Distraught by her condition and Dick's rejec
tion, she foolishly asks a drunken French pilot to take her
i
up in a plane and dies in the crash.
j
Like Three Soldiers and Manhattan Transfer. U.S.A. con
tains a gallery of masterfully portrayed satiric caricatures
of predatory.types that are sharply and corrosively sketched
by visual close-ups of their mannerisms and by repetition of
i
their cliched speech patterns. George Barrow is shown as a
little man "shaped like a string bean [with] a prominent
twitching Adam's apple and popeyes" (II, 363) who disguises
his lust for young women by speaking to them about "the art
of life" (I, 312). Sam Margolies is portrayed as the typi- j
: !
cal Hollywood self-styled genius with "pouting lips" and a
"beaklike profile" (III, 407) who dresses "all in white
flannel with a white beret" (III, 401). He shows Margo his
office that is "hung with Chinese paintings and a single big
carved gothic chair set in the glare of a babyspot opposite
a huge carved gothic desk" (III, 402). Sam uses "the broad
a" (III, 399) and refers to his days as a starving photo
grapher as "My New York period" (III, 406). He speaks con
fidently about his "total recall, I never forget anything
I've seen. That is the secret of visual imagination" (III,
j
|417). Gladys' father, Mr. Wheat ley, the banker, gives his
253
I daughter and Charley Anderson "a lot on the waterfront with
riparian rights at Grosse Pointe" as a wedding present and
!
|tells them:
i
I
They ought to build on it right away if only as an in-
! vestment in the most restricted residential area in
| the United States of America. . . .I'll chip in the
lot and you chip in the house and we
1
11 settle the
whole thing on Gladys for any children. (XII, 302)
And last, Doc Bingham is portrayed in a burlesque man
ner similar to Mark Twain's portraits of the Duke and the
I
i
Dauphin in Huckleberry Finn. In The 42nd Parallel. Bingham
assumes the role of a disseminator of "culture" who recites
snatches of Qthelip while he sells Maria Monk. The Popish
Plot, and Dr. Burnside's Complete Sexology to travelers on
trains and lonely wives of farmers in the hinterlands.
Later, Bingham re-appears in The Big Money as a health ad- j
diet and millionaire head of Bingham's Patent Medicines that
are being promoted by Moorehouse. In his portrait of this
fraud who adopts a new disguise for every product he sells,
Dos Passos suggests that in a predatory society it is not
personal integrity but a cleverly disguised fa$ade that is
necessary to gain material success. Dos Passos also implies
that the J. Ward Moorehouses are the modern equivalent of
jthe traveling swindlers of the frontier era. As Bingham
254
says to Dick Savage:
"... had I grown up in your generation I would have
found happy and useful work in the field of public re
lations. But alas in my day the path was harder for a
young man entering life with nothing but the excellent
| tradition of moral fervor and natural religion I ab
sorbed if I may say so with my mother's milk. (Ill,
.498)
On the basis of his character portrayals, Dos Passos'
thesis seems to be that no satisfactory or happy life is
possible in the modern wasteland of corrupt capitalist so
ciety. From a political point of view he is radical, yet
not doctrinaire; anarchistic, not communistic. Although
his characters are roughly divided into the "two nations"
composed of workers and exploiters, radicals and capitalists,
the radicals, Mary and Ben, are victimized by both the com
munist and capitalist "systems." From a moral point of
view, the characters are divided into the idealists, whose
ends are not purely selfish, and the cynical opportunists,
embarked on a selfish guest for material gain. Ironically,
the moral decline and fall of the "new" America under indus
trial capitalism from traditions of the "old" America is
ishown by the outward defeat of the idealists who have sup
ported democratic principles of freedom and justice, and by
|the inner corruption of the opportunists who use the old
i
255
ideals as slogans to gain money and power. Surrounded by
the hostile forces of this corrupt society, all the charac
ters lose either their ideals, their innocence, their human
Ifeelings, or their lives. Dos Passos, as in his earlier
i -
i
novels, adopts the method of naturalistic determinism as a
i •
satirical weapon. Unable to permit any degree of human
fulfillment in a society which he hates, he, instead, loads
the dice against his characters,as a means of indicting "the
system."
!
| as Documentary Satire
The Newsreels
The Newsreels in U.S.A., which supposedly provide a
'factual documentary of the general trends in American life,
iactually become a unique device for Dos Passos to comment
ironically on the panorama of moral and political disinte
gration that he presents in the trilogy. As Blanche Gelfant
says: "The Newsreels record such inanities, falsehoods, and
ironic perversities that by contrast the inanities and
ironies that are fictional begin to seem more true to
.47
life." Even an unbiased selection of news items from the
I
47
The American Citv Novel, p. 172.
256
average daily newspaper would convey a highly critical view
of one's society, since most news is composed of the sordid
and sensational rather than the normal occurrences of human
ilife. However, Dos Passos has carefully selected and ar-
|ranged his headlines, stories, and songs to convey a slant
ed view of American history that is consistent with the
view presented in his fictional narratives, namely, the
i
decline and fall of American democracy under monopoly capi
talism.
j ' •
! His primary rhetorical device in the Newsreels is that
| i
jof ironic contrast. By carefully juxtaposing contrasting
|views of the main historical trends in American life from
the Spanish-American War to the Stock Market Crash of 1929,
mixing democratic slogans with headlines about social in
justices, banal love songs with stories about violent lynch-
ings, statistics showing rising corporate profits with sta
tistics about war casualties, notices about stock booms
with those about jobless workers, Dos Passos ironically
displays the paradoxes and incongruities that exist between
American ideals and actual practices in the modern machine
•age.
Beginning on an ironic note, Newsreel I stresses the
i
ioptimism and confidence of American public opinion at the
| 257
...
beginning of the twentieth century. Like a symphonic over
ture, the headlines blare:.
i
NOISE GREETS NEW CENTURY
1 LABOR GREETS NEW CENTURY
| CHURCHES GREET NEW CENTURY (I, 4)
i
The emphasis in Newsreel I is upon territorial expansion
and manifest destiny. Senator Beveridge says:
The twentieth century will be American. American thought
will dominate it. . . .The regeneration of the world,
physical as well as moral, has begun, and revolutions
never move backwards. U, 4-5)
But one news story points out that ex-President Harrison
Iquestions whether "territorial expansion" is "the safest
iand most attractive avenue of national development" (I, 4);
land in the background, a repeating dissonant counter-melody
i
implies that America's expansionist tendencies would even
tually lead this country into World War I:
There's been many a good man murdered in the Philippines
Lies sleeping in some lonesome grave. (I, 5)
Newsreel VI reflects the rise of industry that is to produce
r" ~ •
an increasing conflict between capital and labor. The
machine age produces a new breed of owner-millionaires:
"HARRIMAN SHOWN AS RAIL COLOSSUS"•(I, 80); but the workers
jwho create the profits become the victims of factory
I
t
I
258
accidents. A juxtaposed news report reads: ". .-. when
the metal poured out of the furnace I saw the men running
|to a place of safety. . . . The hot metal ran over the poor
|men in a moment" (I, 80). And juxtaposed next to the senti-
I
mental love lyrics of "On moonlight bav" is the headline,
"MOB LYNCHES AFTER PRAYER," hinting that underneath the
{conventions and civilities of American society there exists
i •' •
the hatred and"violence that is to find an outlet in World
War I.
i Newsreels XVIII and XIX indicate Dos Passos
1
slanted
views of the intellectual climate in the United States at
|the time of its entrance into the War. By juxtaposing
patriotic songs, excerpts from Woodrow Wilson's speeches,
i"
news about the Morgan loans to the Allies, and statistics
jshowing the profits of the munitions makers, Dos Passos sug
gests that the United States is entering the war to save the
profits of the big interests, not "democracy." One Newsreel
excerpt reads:
Over there
Over there
at the annual meeting of the stockholders of the Colt
Patent Firearms Manufacturing Company a $2,500,000 melon
was cut. The present capital stock was increased. The
profits for the year were 259 per cent. . . . (I, 362)
259
President Wilson's rhetorical appeals for war, coming
shortly after his election on a platform of peace, sound
coldly sententious. In one excerpt, Wilson suggests that
|the U.S.A. should go to war for principles that have kept
jher at peace:
"... that the day has come when America is privileged
to spend her blood and her might for the principles that
gave her birth and happiness and the peace that she has
treasured. God helping her she can do no other. . . .
| (I, 351)
Another Newsreel of 1919 contrasts the maudlin patri
otic views of those at home with the disillusionment of the
! '
!
enlistees who have fought the war. Here are two juxtaposed
1
. • i
|views of "Old Glory":
|
When I think of the flag which our ships carry, the
only touch of color about them, the only thing, that
moves as if it had a settled spirit in it,—in their
solid structure; it seems to me I see alternate strips
of parchment upon which are written the rights of liber
ty and justice and strips of blood spilt to vindicate
these rights, and then,—in the corner a prediction of
the blue serene into which every nation may swim which
stands for these things.
Oh we'll nail Old Glory to the top of the pole
And we'll all re-enlist in the pig's a-r-r-h (II, 4)
Several other Newsreels in 1919
r
by juxtaposing patriotic
songs'-and news stories about the suppression of workers and
radicals, imply that "the war to save democracy" ironically
260
48
ended the chance for democracy in America.
Some of the Newsreels in The Big Money cleverly blend
jazz lyrics and news stories to convey the overriding mater
ialism of the boom age. Newsreel XLV combines a success
story, an automobile advertisement, and the song
R
tr Mil
4
"!
Blues to stress the increasing importance of money and sta
ll-
tus during this period. After the story about a working
i
boy who became "the intimate of bankers," (III, 18) song
|lyrics are inserted about a worldly woman who lured a man
away from his girl:
l
St. Louis woman wid her diamon
1
rings
| Pulls dat man aroun' by her apron strings. (Ill, 18)
This song is followed by an advertisement which appeals to
i
i
the need for social prestige:
I Just as soon as his wife discovers that every Ford is
\ like every other Ford and that nearly everyone has one.
; she is liKely to influence him to step into the next
social group> of which the Podge is the most conspicu
ous example, (m, 18)
But Newsreel XLVI suggests that while big business prospered
poverty existed among lower-class groups during the 1920's:
48
See Newsreels XLII (p. 455) and XLIII (p. 466).
261
The times are hard and the wages low
ave her Johnny leave her
The bread is hard and the beef ia salt
It's time for us to leave her
| BANKERS HAIL ERA OF EXPANSION (III, 26)
i
J Closely paralleling the fictional narratives, the News-
reels in The Big Money contain headlines, news stories, and
advertisements that comment ironically on three centers of
interest in the novel: Detroit, Hollywood, and Miami.
Newsreel LIX, preceding Charley Anderson's arrival in De-
i
troit and his subsequent catastrophe, is filled with opti
mistic chamber-of-commerce ads that stress the city's indus
trial achievements and historical traditions. One excerpt
reads:
the stranger first coming to Detroit if he be inter
ested in the busy economic side of modern life will find
a marvelous industrial beehive; if he be a lover of na
ture he will take notice of a site made forever remark
able by the waters of the noble strait that gives the
i city its name. . . . (Ill, 285)
Newsreel LXIII, immediately following Margo's exploits in
Hollywood, suggests Dos Passos
1
view of the film colony:
but a few minutes later this false land disappeared
as quickly and as mysteriously as it had come and I
found before me the long stretch of the silent sea with
not a single sign of life in sight. . . . (Ill, 426)
i
I
And Newsreel LVIII expresses Dos Passos
1
ironic view of what
262
the real estate developers have done to America's virgin
land. One excerpt from an advertisement romanticizing
Miami's real estate boom reads:
which in itself typifies the great drama of the
Miami we have today. At the time only twenty years
ago when the site of the Bay of Biscayne Bank was a
farmer's hitchingyard and that of the First National
Bank a public barbecue ground the ground here where
this ultramodern hotel and club stands was isolated
primeval forest. . . . (Ill, 277)
Finally, Newsreel LXVI dealing with the Sacco and Van-
zetti executions: "H0U1ES DENIES STAY," (III, 460) and
Newsreel LXVII containing the first news of the Stock Market
!Crash of 1929: "WALL STREET STUNNED" (III, 519), represent
i .
|to Dos Passos the final moral, political and Economic de
cline of America from its early optimistic hopes at the
beginning of the century, its tragic involvement in the
|World War that put an end to social reforms in this country,
|and its relapse into the materialism of the 1920's, symbol-
i
jized by the rise and fall of monopoly capitalism and the im-
imorality and frivolity of that period. Ironically, at the
i
beginning of the great depression of the 1930's, the head
lines still reflect the kind of nearsighted optimism that
had characterized the mass mind at the start of the twentieth
century: "MARKET SURE TO RECOVER FROM SLUMP" (III, 520) and
263
"PRESIDENT SEES PROSPERITY NEAR" (III, 521).
The Biographies
Another method by which Dos Passos relates his fiction-
jal characters to the wider social background is to include
itwenty-six brief portraits of representative Americans whose
"lives seem to embody so well the quality of the soil" in
49
jwhich his characters grow. Like the fictional characters,
I
Dos Passos' biographical figures taken from the worlds of
business, labor, politics, journalism, science, technology,
i
and the arts, fall roughly into the "two nations" of ideal
ists and opportunists, those for reform and those who sup
port the status quo, those who have wished to improve the j
lot of the common man and those who have been concerned !
primarily with their own self gain. In general, like Dos
Passos' fictional characters, these men also constitute a
gallery of portraits representing defeat and death. The
idealists are defeated by "the system," and the opportunists
are excoriated for their personal moral confusions, con
flicts, or inadequacies that have prevented these figures
from having lived fulfilled lives. All of the portraits are
i
49
John Dos Passos' introduction to the Modern Library
jedition of The 42nd Parallel (New York, 1937) .
264
treated ironically. If a figure represents the ideals of
the "old" America, Dos Passos eulogizes him and turns his
irony on those forces which have caused his defeat; if a
figure represents "the system," Dos Passos makes him the
direct target of ironic criticism.
Consistent with the theme of the trilogy, presented in
the narratives and Newsreels, the picture of American soci
ety that the lives of these prominent figures reflect is
the decline and fall of American culture under the capital-
list system. In this almost totally bleak, pessimistic
interpretation of American history, the group of businessmen
and financiers neglect the needs of the public in order to
increase their monopolistic power; the politicians generally
are guided by either their own corrupt ambitions or by an
!
imperialistic spirit that leads America into war; the labor
leaders and radical journalists are either defeated or
killed by the reactionary political forces during and after
the war; the ideas and inventions of the technicians and
scientists are exploited by big business; and America's
serious artists are neglected while its inferior popular
artists and motion picture heroes are catapulted to fame.
Since Dos Passos
1
Biographies are composed of facts
j
taken out of newspaper stories and pictures, data from Who's
Who in America, and the speeches and writings of these men,
they are, in one sense, realistic documentaries. However,
Dos Passos' radical politics and personal animus toward
many of these public figures, combined with his aims of
satiric criticism, cause him to cleverly slant the facts anc
distort these portraits through a number of rhetorical de
vices. First of all, he exaggerates and distorts some facts
50
land omits others. Next, as in the Newsreels, he care-
i
ifully arranges and juxtaposes different facts for purposes
!of ironic contrast. This is especially effective if, for
i
example, there has been a discrepancy between a man's
speeches and actions. By omitting and distorting facts,
Dos Passos tends to reduce the complexity of his figures to
caricatures which emphasize either praiseworthy or objec
tionable traits. These caricatures become more pronounced
through his use of other devices such as ironic titles,
repeated phrases or motifs which "type" his figures, and
close-up visual portraits which exaggerate objectionable
50p
O
r more information about the distortions, omis
sions, and inaccuracies in almost all of Dos Passos
1
Bio
graphies, see William F. Nelson, "An Analysis of John Dos
Passos
1
U.S.A.
r
" unpublished dissertation (University of
Oklahoma, 1957), pp. 194-244. Hereafter cited as Nelson.
266
physical characteristics and imply, symbolically, despicable*
.
moral traits. It should be emphasized that Dos Passos'
portraits should not be judged on the basis of factual
I accuracy, but as imaginative and poetic interpretations
jthat transcend the factual. They reflect Dos Passos'
skilled use of the American colloquial idiom to achieve
tonal effects that vary from the panegyric to the comic to
>the tragic* ^and from sarcasto to the most savage irony.
Some of Dos Passos' most derogatory sketches are of
those businessmen, financiers, and efficiency experts most |
: I
closely allied with "the system." In these sketches, Dos |
i
Passos emphasizes the obsessive concern of these men with
money, power, or fame, their exploitation of common workers,
or their immoral business practices.
Dos Passos' brief portrait of Andrew Carnegie, the
steel tycoon, emphasizes Carnegie's materialism, his drivincr
ambition, and his acquisitiveness. In a rhythm created by
Whitmanesque catalogues and repetitions, Dos Passos relates
Carnegie's Horatio Alger rise from poverty to wealth to his
narrow concern for profits at the cost of his humanity.
Instead of being a humanitarian, Carnegie, according to Dos
Passos, believed in things:
267
he had confidence in railroads,
he had confidence in communications,
he had confidence in transportation,
he believed in iron. . •
i
Dos Passos uses the device of ironic contrast to destroy
the image of Carnegie's philanthropic aims. The title of
the biography, "Prince of Peace," becomes ironic when Dos
I
Passos implies that Carnegie's large donations to "libraries
and scientific institutes" (I, 265) came from the war prof-
51
its of his steel plants: ^
| whenever he made a billion dollars he endowed
an institution to promote universal peace
always
except in time of war. (I, 265)
Through an imagistic sketch, information from Who's
SJhSL, and newspaper articles, Dos Passos depicts Minor C.
Keith, the "Emperor of the Caribbean," as a typical American
^Nelson (p. 197) has called this portrait one of the
least accurate of those in U.S.A. He cites numerous factual
errors, among them the facts that during the Civil War Car
negie had no steel to sell and that the war merely delayed
Carnegie's rise as a railroad executive. During the Span
ish-American War, says Nelson, Carnegie had already planned
his retirement and sold out his holdings to the Morgan in
terests in 1901. Carnegie was retired for fourteen years
when World War I started and created indignation in his
native Scotland by his peace views in the early days of the
jwar. Nelson cites as his source B. C. Forbes, Men Who Are
flatting America (New York, 1916).
268
imperialist who is dominated by the drive for wealth and
guilt-ridden from the deaths of thousands of men who helped
.
|build his C9sta Rican railroad. Keith, a founder of the
I
United Fruit Company, is caricatured by the repeated phrase,
"He could smell money" (I, 242), and by a newspaper photo
graph that displays him with "an uneasy look"under the
52
eyes." Keith's insatiable greed is communicated in the
humorously repetitive pattern of E. E. Cumming's poetic
i
I
phrasing:
j
but cattle and fish didn't turn over money fast enough
so he bought hogs and chopped up the steers and boiled
the meat and fed it to the hogs and chopped up the fish
and fed it to the hogs,
but the hogs didn't turn over money fast enough,
so he was glad to be off to Limon. (I, 242-243)
In his biography "The House of Morgan," Dos Passos
focuses primarily upon John Pierpont Morgan from the time
young Morgan supposedly "turned some money over reselling
condemned muskets to the U. S. Army" (II, 337) during the
Civil War to the time when he became "the undisputed ruler
^U-S.A.
T
I, 244. Nelson (pp. 196-197) says that
Keith's photograph does not characterize him as having an
uneasy look, and it is doubtful that Keith was weighed down
by the social implications of his,actions. Keith's Costa
Rican railroad was, says Nelson, a challenge rather than
isimply an opportunity to amass a fortune, and that three of
|his own brothers died in the jungles during its nineteen
years of completion.
269
of Wall Street" (II, 339). Dos Passos deflates Morgan's
stature by visually caricaturing him as a "bullnecked iras
cible man with small black magpie's eyes and a growth on
his nose" (II, 338), and "the boss croupier of Wall Street"
(II, 337), who "liked to take pretty actresses yachting" (II,
339). Depicted as a somber man, cut off from humanity by
his greed, Morgan is shown sitting alone in his "glassedin"
office playing solitaire, a man "famous for his few words,
Yes or No . . . and for that special gesture of the arm that
i
meant, What do I get out of it?" (II, 337). Ironically
i '
substituting the word "profit" for "expense" in the cliched
phrase, Dos Passos points out that "In the panic of '93/ at
no inconsiderable profit [sic] to himself/ Morgan saved the
i
|U. S. Treasury" and "after that what Morgan said went" (II,
|338). Through ironic juxtaposition, Dos Passos implies that
the entrance of the United States into World War I was to
save the Morgan loans rather than "democracy":
By 1917 the Allies had borrowed one billion, nine-hundred
million dollars through the House of Morgan: we went
overseas for the democracy and the flag. (II, 340)
In a tone of bitter sarcasm, Dos Passos stresses that it is
f • '
the bankers who benefit from war:
I (Wars and panics on the stock exchange,
I machinegunfire and arson, ..
270
bankruptcies, warloans,
starvation, lice, cholera and typhus:
good growing weather for the House of Morgan.)
Dos Passos
1
biography of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the
industrial engineer and father of scientific management,
depicts Taylor as a symbol of the mechanization he helped
accelerate after the war. By repeating the phrase, "it got
results," (III, 20) Dos Passos suggests Taylor's puritanical
and compulsive nature and his lack of sympathy for the com-
jmon worker. Ironically, before Taylor's American Plan for
j .
^industrial speed-up and mass production becomes widely
adopted, he suffers a breakdown, like a worn-out machine,
and dies "with his watch in his hand" (III, 25).
Henry Ford is ironically depicted as a man, like Tay-
!
jlor, who accelerated the age of mechanization but who re
mained alienated from the automobile era he created. A
53u..s.A. . ii, 340. After citing several factual errors
in Morgan's portrait, Nelson (pp. 214-218) says that "good >
growing weather" of the Morgan interests seems to have been,
|not war, but peace, good times, the rapid expansion of the
economy, and the lack of Federal banking and anti-monopoly
jlaws. And Dos Passos is recently quoted as saying: "I
think now I was too hard on J. P. Morgan in U.S.A. ...
Reading over the history lately ... I felt poor old J. P.
did everything he could to talk people out of World War I."
See Dan Wakefield, "Dos,Which Side Are You Ob?" Esquire.
XXXII (April 1963), 118.
271
conic and pathetic figure in Dos Passos
1
sarcastic portrait,
Ford exemplifies the worst qualities of American puritanism,
He is both a shrewd practical businessman and a narrow-
minded bigot:
'
The precepts he'd learned out of HcGuffey's Reader, his
mother's prejudices and preconceptions, he had preserved
clean and unworn as freshprinted bills in the safe in a
bank. (Ill, 52)
5
I . "
I Dos Passos satirizes Ford's speed-up techniques and the
! '
exploitation of the workers within Ford's plants by recre-
atingin language the deadening mechanization of the assem-
!
bly lines:
! (. . . the Taylorized speedup everywhere, reach under,
adjust washer, screw down >bolt, shove in cotterpin,
| reachunder adjustwasher, screwdown bolt, reachunder-
adjustscrewdownreachunderadjust until every ounce of
life was sucked off into production and at night the
workmen went home grey shaking husks) (III, 55)
Out of touch with the age he helped create and baffled by
its complexity, Ford became a rabid anti-Semite, blaming
jthe Jews for everything that he hated about contemporary
life:
. . . the Jews had started the war, Bolshevism, Darwin
ism, Marxism, Nietzsche, short skirts and lipstick.
(Ill, 53)
i "
I • .
According to Dos Passos, Ford became "a passionate
272
antiquarian" in his old age and withdrew from the problems
of the depression era (which he blamed on the immorality of
jthe poor) by rebuilding his father's farmhouse and moving
i
11
the new highway where the nevr-model cars roared and slith-
i
lered and hissed" away from his door; Ford wanted "every-
i
i
!thing . . . the way it used to be, in the days of horses
and buggies" (III, 57).
The newspaper man, William Randolph Hearst, is ironi-
jcally depicted as a "poor little rich boy" (III, 466) with
ja "prurient hanker after the lusts and envies of plain un-
monied lowlife men and women" (III, 470) from whom he felt
•separated by his haze of millions. Another corrupt and
imperialistic capitalist, according to Dos Passos, Hearst
misused the press for selfish ends of power and personal
aggrandizement and built an empire of print on ".the rot of
i
democracy" (III, 470) by exploiting the common man's "pruri
ent" interest in sensationalism and scandal. Hearst's im
perialism and pro-fascism is illustrated by his repeated
attempts to incite war with Mexico, his pro-German attitudes
during World War I, and his admiration for "Handsome
Adolph," another demagogue who rose to power "out of the
jrot of democracy" (III, 477). Dos Passos ironically por-
|trays Heeurst's frustrated political ambitions by punning on
273
the word " spend" in the repeated reference to the newspaper
czar as "a spent Caesar grown old with spending/ never man
{enough to cross the Rubicon" (III, 477).
I
! In the biography "Power Superpower," Dos Passos treats
i
|the career of Samuel Insull, who rose from office boy to
!become the czar of electricity, as a symbol of the rise and
fall of monopoly capitalism during the boom and bust 1920's,
I Dos Passos musters a moral indictment against Insull and
I
big business by sprinkling the biography with bits of In-
sull's letters and speeches7 One excerpt reveals Insull's
intent to stifle the competition of other public utilities
I companies through monopoly:
; i diaflQVfired that the first essential, as in other
I Utility business, was that it should be operated as
a monopoly. (Ill, 526)
i
His anti-labor sentiments are exposed in another excerpt:
My experience is that the greatest aid in the efficiency
of labor is a long line of men waiting at the gate.
(Ill, 527)
By placing Insull's embezzlement trial after the Camera
Eyes which describe the Sacco-Vanzetti executions, Dos Pas
sos ironically suggests that the law is controlled by big
business. Dos Passos accurately cites that Insull*s em-
| • .
jbezzlement of ten million dollars of his stockholders'
274
funds was interpreted as "an honest error" in accounting.
He points out ironically that:
i
T.
j Thousands of ruined investors . . . who had lost their
! life savings sat crying over the home editions at the
thought of how Mr. Insull had suffered. The bankers
! were happy, the bankers had moved in on the properties.
(Ill, 532)
In Dos Passos' laudatory portraits of suppressed and
i ' '
martyred I.W.W. labor leaders and radicals, his ironic con
demnation is turned upon the representatives of "the system"
iwho destroyed these men. His four portraits of Eugene Debs,
;Big Bill Haywood, Joe Hill, and Wesley Everest symbolize
the early hopes for the "workers' cooperative commonwealth"
(I, 27) that were destroyed by suppression of the I.W.W.
i
during and after the War. Debs, a founder of the I.W.W. anc
Ipresidential candidate of the Social Democratic Party, is
I
sentimentally portrayed as the "Lover of Mankind," who
wanted "a world brothers might own/ where everybody would
jsplit even" (I, 26). Dos Passos cites the failure of nerve
in Debs' followers, who loved him "as an old kindly uncle"
(I, 28) to aid him after he had spoken against war in 1918
54
and "Woodrow Wilson had him locked up in Atlanta. ..."
|
54
U.S.A., I, 27. Nelson (p. 195) says that although
{Wilson denied Debs executive clemency, Dos Passos'
275
Dos Passos implies that because they believed President
Wilson's patriotic slogans, the workers became afraid of
Debs:
i
I - • •
j but on account of the flag
| and prosperity
and making the world safe for democracy
they were afraid to be with him
or to.think much about him for fear they might believe
him. . . . (Ill, 28)
Dos Passos* biography of Big Bill Haywood, another
II.W.W. leader and aggressive revolutionist, praises Hay-
i
wood's courageous fight against the big interests for the
rights of the workingman and attacks those who sentenced
him to twenty years in jail for sedition. Haywood is de
picted as:
an organizer, a speaker, an exhorter, the wants of all
; the miners were his wants; he . . . spoke . . .to
miners striking for an eight hour day, better living,
a share of the wealth they hacked out of the hills. •
(I, 94)
;Dos Passos indignantly refers to the decline of civil liber
ties during the war that made Haywood, like Debs, a victim
statement about Wilson locking him up in Atlanta is a
strange interpretation of the facts, if taken literally.
jNelson also comments that Debs' sympathizers continued to
jwork for his release, arid that he received nearly a million
{votes for president in 1920 while in Atlanta Penitentiary.
i
276
of social hysteria and injustice:
They went over with the A.E.F. to save the Morgan loans,
I to save Wilsonian Democracy, they stood at Napoleon's
j tomb and dreamed empire . . all over the country at
i American legion posts and business men's luncheons it
| was worth money to make the eagle scream;
j they lynched the pacifists and the proGermans and
the wobblies and the reds and the bolsheviks.
i
Haywood's trial is described as a travesty of justice at
which
j ... Judge Landis the baseball czar with the lack of
formality of a traffic court handed out his twenty
year sentences and thirty-thousand" dollar fines. (I,
! 96)
The biography of Joe Hill, the wobbly organizer and
musician, implies that Hill was framed and executed for his
i 55
labor agitation. Hill is described as an immigrant ideal
ist who "dreamed about forming the structure of the new
jsociety within the shell of the old" (II, 422). According
to Dos Passos, when Hill organized the workers at Bingham,
Utah, the Mormons hated him as much as the railroad compa
nies did: .
55jj
e
ison says (p. 218) it is^ difficult to determine
what actually happened, but there is no feeling in contemp
orary accounts that Hill was framed.
277
56
The angel Moroni didn't like labororganizers any bet
ter than the Southern Pacific did ... [and] moved the
| hearts of the Mormons to decide it was Joe Hill shot a
grocer named Morrison. (II, 423)
| ' • .
i
One of Dos Passos' most bitterly satirical biographies,
l
| "Paul Bunyan," concerns the Armistice Day, 1919 massacre in
j
Centralia, Washington, when, ironically, one group of ex-
servicemen representing the employers and super-patriots of
the town raided the I.W.W. hall, clashed with wobbly ex-
j
servicemen, and lynched and mutilated Wesley Everest. First
lof all, Dos Passos illustrates the paradoxes within demo
cratic institutions created by extremist groups who violate
democratic principles in the name of patriotism and demo- j
cracy. But the savage indignation of Dos Passos' depiction
iof the Everest lynching, reminiscent of Goya and Swift,
transcends the class struggle and expresses the more uni
versal theme of man's inhumanity to man. The lumber mono
polists are cuttingly portrayed as men who, in the name of
democracy, free enterprise, and profits, forcefully stifle
.the rights of the workers to better wages and hours:
The timber owners . . . were patriots; they'd won the
war (in the course of which the price of lumber had
gone up from $16 a thousand feet to $116 . . .); they
56
0ne of the Mormon prophets.
278
set out to clean the reds out of the logging camps;
free American institutions must be preserved at
any cost ...
so they formed the . . . Legion of Loyal Loggers,
they made it worth their while for bunches of ex-
soldiers to raid I.W.W. halls, lynch and beat up or
ganizers, burn subversive literature.. (II, 457)
After a group of businessmen mutilate and hang Everest from
the Chehalis River bridge, those at the inquest jokingly
report that Everest broke out of jail, tied a rope around
jhis neck, jumped off the bridge, and shot himself full of
holes.^
The biographies of Randolph Bourne, John Reed, and
Paxton Hibben portray these three journalists as humane
idealists who became radicals out of their sympathy for the
poor and oppressed, their hatred of war, and their belief
that the heritage of democratic freedom and justice had
collapsed in the United States. The central theme of the
Hibben biography is the decline of the American Dream:
Thinking men were worried in the middle west in the
years Hibben was growing up there, something was wrong
with the American Republic, was it the Gold Standard,
Privilege, The Interests, Wall Street? (II, 178)
57
According to Nelson (pp. 220-222) there was no in
quest; the sheriff simply reported that Everest had com-
jmitted suicide. Dos Passos' account of Everest's death, he
jsays, is for the most part factually accurate.
279
And later:
... no more place in America for change, no more place
for the old gags: social justice, progressivism, revolt
against oppression, democracy; put the reds on the skids,
no money for them,
j no jobs for them. (II, 184)
John Reed
1
s biography gives Dos Passos a chance to
satirize the academy, social injustice, and Woodrow Wilson,
his favorite target. Reed, depicted as an idealist repre-
i
jsentative of the "old" democracy, "was a Westerner, and words
meant what they said" (II, 14). Dos Passos sarcastically
i
refers to Harvard as a college which "stood for the broad £
; i
and those contacts so useful in later life and good English j
prose" (II, 12) and as a rusty machine that grinds out de
grees:
... the rusty machinery creaked, the deans quivered
under their mortarboards, the cogs turned to Class Day,
and Reed was out in the world. . . . (II, 13)
In depicting Reed's experiences of social injustice while
reporting the Paterson textile strike, Dos Passos ironically
juxtaposes the ideals of America's forebears and the short
comings of democracy under capitalism:
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;
not much of that round the silkmills when
j in 1913 . • -
he went over to Paterson to write up the strike,
S textile workers parading beaten up by the cops.-..,. . (11,14
280
Upon Reed's return to the United States after covering the
Russian Revolution, he discovers that Wilson is "cramming
the jails" (II, 16). Reed's Harvard friends cure described,
I
in a parody of Wilson's phrase, as being "in the Intelli
gence Service making the world safe for the Morgan-Baker-
Stillman combination of,banks . . (II, 16).
Randolph Bourne is also depicted heroically as resist
ing the restrictions upon civil liberties when the War
started and, as a consequence, having his writings sup
pressed and his living jeopardized:
... in the crazy spring of 1917 he began to get un
popular where his bread was buttered at the New Republic;
for New Freedom read Conscription
r
for Democracy Win
the War, for Reform Safeguard the Morgan Loans ...
(II, 104-105)
The constant theme running through Dos Passos' por
traits of four politicians, including two American presi
dents, is the failure of democratic liberalism brought e&out
by the personal flaws of its leaders. William Jennings
Bryan is characterized as an ambitious opportunist and po
tential demagogue with "a silver tongue in a big mouth" (I,
;172), who gained the votes of the "plain people" by blending
his political rhetoric with "the plain word of God" (I,
1173). A so-called progressive, Bryan's intellectual
I 281
|limitations are suggested by his provincial adherence to
Fundamentalism and his opposition to scientific progress:
i
In Dayton he dreamed of turning the trick again, of
setting bade the clocks for the plain people branding,
• flaying, making a big joke
| of Darwinism and the unbelieving outlook of city
folks, scientists, foreigners with beards and monkey
morals. (I, 172)
After his withdrawal from politics to become a Florida real
estate salesman, Bryan, Dos Passos insinuates, still har
bored a frustrated ambition to become President. Ironical-
!
;ly, three days after Bryan dies of a stroke, an electric
i
!
exercising horse, like the one he had seen the President
I
use, is delivered to him in Florida.
Theodore Roosevelt becomes, in Dos Passos
1
sketch, both
a ludicrous and pathetic figures • a priggish and amateurish
politician, adventurer, and imperialist who is excessively
concerned with his public image and who, ironically, dies in
obscurity in a more complex era that he was unable to under-
jstand. Dos Passos repeats key words such as "righteous" and
"bully" to ridicule Roosevelt's follies in applying his
Calvinistic morality: "white was white and black was black"
(II, 144) to complex foreign and domestic problems, and his
flashy false heroics in Cuba where his amateur warriors:
282
. . . were digging trenches and shovelling crap and
fighting malaria and dysentery and yellowjack
to make Cuba cosy for the Sugar Trust
and the National City Bank. (II, 145)
At first things "were bully," but later "things weren't so
ibully any more" when "the world war drowned out the right
eous voice of the Happy Warrior in the roar of exploding
lyddite" (II, 147).
*.
Woodrow Wilson is bitterly attacked for being an inept
i
politician and an ambitious and righteous man who was per-
jsuaded by the big interests to lead America into war. In
i . •
his slanted portrait, Dos Passos implies that Wilson's pro
grams of "reform" were merely convenient stepping stones to
the Presidency:
... so he left Princeton only half reformed to be
Governor of New Jersey . ~. .so he left the State of
New Jersey half reformed raid . . . and went to the
White House . . . (II, 244)
By ironically juxtaposing Wilson's platform promises with
his actions Dos Passos, by omitting and oversimplifying
facts and thus distorting history, suggests that Wilson was
a hypocrite and opportunist:
I wish to take this occasion to sav that the United
States will never again seek one additional foot of
territory bv conquest;
and he landed the marines at Vera Cruz. (II, 245)
283
Wilson's change of foreign policy from peace to war is also
satirized:
Five months after his reelection on the slogan He
kept us out of war. Wilson pushed the Armed Ship Bill
through congress and declared that a state of war
j existed between the United States and the Central Powers:
Force without stint or limit, force to the utmost.
(II, 245)
The ironic title of Wilson's biography, "Meester Veelson,"
suggests that Wilson, by his compromises at Versailles,
destroyed the hopes of the Europeans who "were burning
candles-in front of his picture cut out of the illustrated
[papers" (II, 247). In a bitter parody of Wilson's slogan,
i
Dos Passos suggests that Wilson destroyed democratic free
doms in America: "If you objected to making the world safe
for cost plus democracy you went to jail with Debs" (II,
!
1246). By caricaturing Clemenceau, Lloyd George, and Wilson
at the Peace Conference as "Three old men ishuffling the pack,
dealing out the cards" (II, 248), Dos Passos implies that
greedy imperialism, not humane idealism, dictated the Treaty
of Versailles: "machine gun fire and arson/ starvation,
lice, cholera, typhus;/ oil was trumps" (II, 248).
In contrast to his satiric treatment of Bryan, Roose-
ivelt, and Wilson, Dos Passos eulogizes "Fighting Bob" La
|
Follette as an honest politician who resisted the
284
destructive influence of the monopolies and the war hysteric i
|upon democratic government. "An orator haranguing from the
jcapitol of a lost republic," (I, 368), La Follette died:
i
!
| lonely with his back to the wall, fighting corruption
| and big business and high finance and trusts and . . .
| the miasmic lethargy of Washington. (I, 368)
In his Biographies of three "wizards" of the early
century, Thomas A. Edison, Charles P. Steinmetz, and Luther
Burbank, Dos Passos implies that American scientists and
inventors unwittingly contributed to the growth of the
j
machine age, became the tools of the monopoly capitalists,
lor were victimized by an ignorant and bigoted American mass
I
j
public. Edison is depicted negatively as a man who, like
IFord and Firestone, "never worried about mathematics or the
j*.-.
social system or-generalized philosophical concepts" (I,
! . • \
301). A human machine, without a social conscience, Edison,
according to Dos Passos, illustrates the narrow pragmatism
in the American character which contributed to the decline
of democracy in this country. Steinmetz is depicted as
being concerned about the welfare of mankind:
. . .on his broken back he felt the topheavy weight of
society the way workingmen felt it on their straight
backs, the way poor students felt it, was a member of a
socialist club, editor of a paper called The People's
j Voice. (I, 326)
285
Despite his socialist sympathies, Steinmetz allowed himself
to be exploited by General Electric, who "humored him" and
"entered [him] in the contract along with other valuable
apparatus" (I, 327) until "he wore out and died" (I, 328).
Burbank, "The Plant Wizard," who produced thousands of new
varieties of plants by using Darwin's theory of natural
Selection, is an example of the creative spirit that is
destroyed by the forces of ignorance and bigotry. Consis
tent with his theme that America defeats or kills its best
men, Dos Passos eulogizes Burbahk as "a sunny old man,"
(Iy_83), who is persecuted by Fundamentalist church groups
who "got wind that he was an infidel and believed in Darwin
58
. . . and they stung him and he died puzzled" (I, 83).
In the Biographies of Isadora Duncan and Rudolph Val
entino, two dancers who achieved fame on the stage and in
films, Dos Passos' irony is directed toward the material
istic and philistine American mass public that is indiffer
ent to art, hostile to individualists who defy conventional
bourgeois values, and fickle in its worship of fraudulent
5®Nelson (p. 95) correctly mentions that Dos Passos
persuades the reader that these attacks on Burbank's Dar
winian principles had something to do with his death. Bur-
jbank, however, was 78 when he died of natural causes.
286
Hollywood standards of success. A recklessly gay and tragic;
figure, Miss Duncan is admirably portrayed as an authentic
I artist who is completely devoted to her craft and who re-
j
tained her great sympathy for the poor and oppressed of the
jworld. Significantly, in a mechanized age hostile to art,
Miss Duncan and her two children are both killed by a mod- .
ern machine, the automobile.
I Valentino, however, is negatively portrayed as an ef-
feminate Italian immigrant who lusted after popular success
and wealth: "he wanted to make good in the brightlights;
jmoney burned his pockets" (III, 189). Dos Passos' portrayal.
of Valentino's skyrocketing fame, his sudden death, the
i '
hysterical crowds at his funeral, and his plunge into ob-
i
! '
scurity soon after his burial becomes an ironic criticism
59
.of the frivolous and superficial 1920's.
Though the era of the 1920's adored and fawned upon
popular heroes like Valentino, it ignored or frustrated its
masterless men of originality and vision like Thorstein
j
Veblen and Frank Lloyd Wright. Veblen, perhaps more than
5
^Citing Alan Arnold's biography, Valentino (London,
1952) as an accurate-source of information, Nelson (p. 234)
says that Dos Passos' portrait is based on the inaccuracy
and fantasy of many newspaper articles and has little rela
tion to the actual life and feelings of the famous movie
[star._ '
287
Marx, is the key figure in Dos Passos' concept of an America
that "has become self-divided because of an inner conflict
60
between social ideals."
| Veblen, a teacher, social theorist, and ironic critic
of American leisure-class values, is depicted as a profound
thinker who, like Socrates, was forced by his society to
swallow "the bitter drink" (III, 93) of rejection. A bril
liant eccentric and non-conformist in a world of "yesmen,"
i
who "couldn't get his mouth round the essential yes" (III,
98), Veblens
suffered from . . . the unnatural tendency to feel with
the workingclass instead of with the profittakers. There
were the same complaints that his courses were not con
structive or attractive to big money bequests and didn't
help his students to butter their bread, make Phi Beta
Kappa* pick plums off the hierarchies of the academic
grove. (Ill, 100)
Veblen, infers Dos Passos, pointed out the two alternatives
open to American society. It could become either
... a warlike society strangled by the bureaucracies
of the monopolies forced by the law of diminishing
returns to grind down more and more the common man for
profits,
or a new matteroffact commonsense society dominated
by the needs of the men and women who did the work and
the incredibly vast possibilities for peace and plenty
^^Gelfant, p. 169. See also Beach, p. 60.
288
offered by the progress of technology. (Ill, 102)
Dos Passos points out pessimistically that America has not
heeded Veblen and has chosen the road to war and monopoly.
America has taken the products of its technological genius
land has exploited them for profits or for destructive pur
poses instead of using them to create a better society.
"
The airplane, invented by the Wright Brothers and subse
quently used as a weapon of war, serves as an example of
|America's ill use of its indigenous creativeness; but the
i
|achievement of the Wright Brothers transcends the parasitic
exploitation of the airplane by business and military men:
... but not even headlines or the bitter smear of
newsprint or the choke of smokescreen and gas or chat
ter of brokers on the stockmarket . . . can blur the
memory
of the chilly December day.
two shivering bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio,
first felt their homemade contraption ...
soar into the air
above the dunes and the wide beach
at Kitty HaWk. (Ill, 285)
And Frank Lloyd Wright
1
s vision of "the Usonian city" (a
society based upon "union" and '"use") may someday be real
ized, Dos Passos implies; but only after Americans "blot out
every ingrained habit of the past [and] build a nation from
jthe ground up with new tools" (III, 432).
289
In his two portraits of "collective" Americans, "The
Unknown Soldier" and "Vag," placed at the end of 1919 and
jThe Big Money. Dos Passos shows the destructive effects of
World War I and monopoly capitalism upon its average Ameri
cans; the young men of the war generation who wanted "lib
erty" but received "death," and those of the depression
1930' s who sought "opportunity" but found only "starvation."
! Placed after the sardonic portraits of J. P. Morgan
and Woodrow Wilson, and the martyred radical intellectuals
land labor leaders, the biography of the Unknown Soldier
reaches a crescendo of mordant irony that makes this sketch
*
one of the most effective attacks on war that have appeared
in modern literature. In deftly arranged juxtapositions
that contrast the maudlin newspaper accounts of the burial |
ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery with brutally real
istic scenes of the typical enlistee's experience at the
time he is hit by a stray mortar shell, Dos Passos shocks
the reader into an awareness that the ^average soldier in
the A.E.F. was not a hero fighting "the war to save demo
cracy" but the victim of an absurd slaughter; cannon fodder
expended for the personal ambitions and imperialist aims of
politicians and financiers.
I Dos Passos starts with a cynical account of the
290
selection of John Doe from the piles of year-old corpses in
the stench of the Chalons-sur-Marne morgue:
i
Make sure he aint a dinge, boys,
Make sure he aint a guinea or a kike,
how can you tell a guy's a hundredpercent when all
you've got*s a gunnysack full of bones ... (II, 468)
He then creates, in rhythmic Whitmanesque catalogues, a
compressed portrait of the "collective" American of the war
'.generation from the moment of his conception to his death,
jincluding a roll call of the many towns and cities where he
lived and was educated, his prizes, recreations, occupa
tions, even the slogans and cliches absorbed into his streait.
of consciousness during his maturation:
Thou shalt not the multiplication table long division,
Now is the time for all good men knocks but
Once at a young man's door, it's a great life if Ish
gebibbel, The first five years'11 be the Safety First
Suppose a hun tried to rape your my country right or
wrong, Catch 'em young . . . (II, 471)
Next there follows an unpleasantly candid description of
John Doe's army induction and training, and the ridiculous
accounts of the loss of his identification tag "in bed with
a girl named Jeane" (II, 471), and the loss of his service
record that dropped out of the filing cabinet when the
quartermaster sergeant got blotto . . ." (II, 472). In Dos
j
jPassos' recapitulation of the soldier's "unheroic" death,
291
John Doe is separated from his battalion, killed by a stray
mortar shell, his body eaten by trenchrats and bluebottle
flies, and his "incorruptible skeleton" taken home to "God's
Country" draped in "Old Glory" (II, 473). As the bugler
plays Taps, a multitude of medals are pinned "where his
chest ought to have been" (II, 473). The final line in the
biography—and in 1919—ironically depicts Woodrow Wilson,
the president Dos Passos holds responsible for the War and
the deaths of "collective" John Doe, placing flowers on the
coffin: "Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies" (II,
473).
"Vag" represents what has happened to the archetypal
American who, in the opening sketch of the U.S.A. trilogy,
is searching, like Walt Whitman, for the mythical meaning
of America; the young man who ubiquitously identifies him
self with many American types he sees on his journey around
the country and who possesses a gargantuan urge to partici
pate in a multitude of events and to find the proper words
to describe the U.S.A. By showing that this young man has
become the typical hungry proletarian wanderer of the de
pression period hitching a ride westward along the 42nd
Parallel in search of a job and the lost opportunities that
America once presented, Dos Passos implies that monopoly
292
capitalism, as Veblen predicted, has ground down the common
man for profits and has turned the U.S.A. into "two na
tions," the rich and the poor. The plight of "Vag" who
"waits with swimming head, needs knot the belly, idle hands
numb" (III, 561) is contrasted with the luxurious comfort
of businessmen in the transcontinental plane that passes
overhead; the old ideals of America have been defeated; the
country has forgotten its common man and limits its oppor
tunities to those who control its economic and political
power.
The Satiric Narrator
The Camera Eve
In contrast to the documentary approach of the News-
reels and Biographies, the subjective, impressionistic
method of the fifty-one Camera Eyes in U.S.A. supplies an
inner personal dimension to this same historical period not
possible in Dos Passos
1
other narrative devices. As Dos
Passos said, he wanted the U.S.A. chronicles to be a "con
temporary commentary on history's changes, always as seen
by somebody's eyes, heard by somebody's ears, felt through
293
61
somebody's nerves and tissues." In an unpunctuated and
jumbled stream-of-consciousness style reminiscent of James
Joyce's interior monologues in Ulysses. Gertrude Stein's
repetitive phrasing, and E. E. Cummings' verbal preciosity,
the Camera Eye records the fragmented impressions of its
narrator as he grows to manhood and experiences the same
historical forces that shape the lives of the fictional
characters. Since the Camera Eye narrator possesses the
moral awareness lacking in the fictional characters, his
personal commentary constitutes a body of social criticism
that becomes increasingly direct and indignant as the narra
tor realizes that he is powerless to oppose the existing
intrenched evils of his world.
Whereas the objective treatment of the fictional narra
tives of U.S.A. focuses the reader's attention upon the
"scene" and the satiric narrator remains invisible behind
the "scene," the Camera Eye places the reader's attention
62
upon a satiric narrator or "basic satiric persona" whose
public image or dramatized life may or may not accurately
6J-Bookweek. I (September 15, 1963), 3.
62Alvin B. Kernan, "A Theory of Satire," in Modern
Satire. p. 176.
294
reflect the life of Dos Passos himself. The reader may
choose to regard the Camera Eye narrator not as Dos Passos
himself but as "one poetic device used by the author to
~
express his satiric vision" (p. 170). As Kernan says about
satiric works in general:
Somewhere in the midst of the satiric scene or standing
before it directing our attention to instances of folly
and vulgarity and shaping our responses with his lan
guage, we usually find a satirist. In some cases he
remains completely anonymous, merely a speaking voice
who tells us nothing directly of himself, e.g., the
narrator in most satiric novels. In formal satire where
the satirist is usually identified as "I" or may even
be given the author's name ... he begins to emerge
from the shadows of anonymity, and, while his back is
still turned to us, he speaks of himself from time to
time, giving us hints of his origins and his character,
(p. 170)
Kernan says that it is possible to define in general terms
the essential traits and attitudes of this basic satiric
narrator who appears in the works of many satirists such as
Juvenal, Pope, Byron, Swift and Philip Wylie. According to
Kernan, this narrator, "the satirist," presents himself to
his reading public in the pose of a simple, honest man,
frequently of "humble but honest origins" and a "rural back
ground" (p. 171), whose moral code is "traditional" and
"straightforward" in that he upholds the rules his ^fathers
have passed down to him. Kernan declares:
295
He [the satiric persona] views life in social terms and
exhorts his audience to return to the ways of their
fathers, to live with fortitude, reason, chastity,
honor, justice, simplicity, the virtues which make for
the good life and the good society, (p. 172)
However, "the satirist" usually departs from his pose of
the mild and just man to rage indignantly because he is
convinced "that there is no pattern of reason left in the
world" (p. 172). He persuades the reader that "things are
so bad, vice so arrant, the world so overwhelmingly wicked"
(p. 172) that he is forced to attack these conditions be
cause "he regards himself and his satire ... as the only
method of correction left, the last hope of mankind" (p.
173). Since "the satirist" wants to persuade us "that vice
is both ugly and rampant," says Kernan, "he deliberately
i
distorts, excludes, and slants" (p. 174) his portrait of
society, implying that "distortion of literal reality is
necessary in order to get at the truth" (p. 174). Thus,
paradoxically, his pose of being the honest, simple and
artless man is at variance with the fact that he "turns out
to be the most cunning of rhetoricians, highly skilled in
all the tricks of persuasion" (p. 174).
The first-person Camera Eye narrator, whose indignant
critique of his world seems analogous to that of the narra
tor in Juvenal's "formal satires," conforms closely to
296
these essential traits of "the satirist" as described by
Kernan. He is an innocent and honest young man who prefers
a primitive agrarian society to the sophisticated society
of the city, who is more at home on a horse than in a dress
suit at some formal occasion, and who prefers to identify
himself with the poorer classes of society. He is an in
dividualist who senses corruption and conformity in his
surrounding social institutions which have degenerated from
the traditional virtues he has inherited from his fore
fathers and that threaten his freedom and integrity. His
persuasive and eloquent rhetorical appeal in support of the
pure ideals of the traditional past and his scathing con
demnation of the contemporary corruption against which he
has only words of protest, seems paradoxically at odds with
his pose of simplicity and candor.
In Camera Eye (I), "Jack," the narrator, is an inno
cent, sensitive child who is suddenly initiated into a world
of adult violence, characteristic of the twentieth century.
In Holland during the Boer War, Jack and his mother are
confronted by an angry mob who think the two Americans are
English citizens with whom the Dutch are at war. Shocked
by adult irrationality, the boy naively believes that the
mob is throwing stones at him because he has stepped off
297
the cobbles "on the bright anxious grassblades . . . the
poor hurt green tongues shrink under your feet maybe thats
why those people are so angry and follow us shaking their
fists they're throwing stones grownup people throwing
..63
stones, ...
Although he is from an upper-class background, the
narrator rebels against the racial and class prejudices of
his own class and identifies with those of humble origin.
As a child he becomes aware of racial discrimination when
he overhears his parents speak about Negroes. His father
taunts his mother: "What would you do Lucy if I were to
invite one of them to my table? They're very lovely people
Lucy the colored people . . ." (I, 13). And his mother
relates to him the shooting of a "greaser," that had occur
red on one of her trips to Mexico, with apparent indiffer
ences
Mother was so frightened on account of all the rifleshots
but it was allright turned out to be nothing but a little
shooting they'd been only shooting-a greaser that was all.
... (I, 25)
r"""
63U.S.A.. I, 5. The quotes from the Camera Eye sec
tions, that are included in the text, duplicate the lack of
punctuation, the run-together phrasing, and the unusual
spacing of the original passages.
298
The narrator is critical and ironic in his portrayal of
such upper-class types as the "fashionable lady" who "cant
bear the scent of tradespeople" (I, 223) and the two "good
clean young" American college students who break through
picket lines and attempt to operate the streetcars during
the strike in order to show "a lot of wops" and "foreign
agitators this was still a white man's [world]" (I, 245).
The young man is more at home in a rural setting on
his horse "Rattler" (I, 260) than in the city, and becomes
a non-conformist who is criticized by his father. During a
political discussion, his father tells him that "thinking
the way I think I couldn't get elected to be notary public
in any county in the state . . ." (I, 174). His views of
religious, political, and educational institutions are nega
tive. He participates in the communion services in a Pres-
t
byterian church but his detached description of the Eucha
rist ritual seems to ridicule its "you had to gulp the
bread and put your handkerchief over your mouth and look
holy and the little glasses made a funny sucking noise" (I,
108). Taken on a visit to The House of Representatives and
the Senate by an old major, the narrator senses corruption
in "the long corridors full of the dead air" and in the
glances of the legislators: "the old men bowing with quick
299
slit eyes . . . and big slit unkind mouths" (I, 97). And
at Harvard, Jack, like Dick Savage, refuses to "grow cold
with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incense-
burner and a volume of Oscar Wilde" (I, 302). After gradu
ation, when the narrator becomes a pacifist and radical, he
attempts to persuade the reader that the forces of evil in
the world are embodied by the capitalist system and its
representatives. He views the world as a scene of conflict
between opposing forces: we and they.^^ Against the cor
rupt institutions of capitalism, which have supposedly
caused the war and have stifled individual freedom, the
narrator poses the virtues his fathers have passed down to <
him.
•<
The young man is present in the audience at Madison
Square Garden when Max Eastman speaks against the War, and
recalls that "we clapped and yelled for the revolution and
hissed for Morgan and the capitalist war" (I, 349); and
when the "cops" prevent Emma Goldman from speaking he is
angered by the suppression of the democratic rights of free
64as Kernan says, the satirist "sees the world as a
battlefield between a definite, clearly understood good,
which he represents, and an equally clear-cut evil" (p.
173).
300
speech guaranteed by the American forefathers: "...
everybody said it was an outrage and what about Washington
and Jefferson and Patrick Henry?" (I, 350). On a ship
bound for Prance, after having joined the ambulance service,
the narrator ridicules those supporting the war:
the Roosevelt boys were very brave in stiff visored
new American army caps the sharpshooter medals on the
khaki whipcord and they talked all day about We must
come in We must come in
as if the war were a swimming pool ... (I, 363)
Landing in Bordeaux, he observes sardonically:
". . .up north they were dying in the mud and the
trenches but business was good in Bordeaux . . . and
the munitionsmakers crowded into the Chapon Fin and
ate ortolans and mushrooms and truffles . . ." (I, 364)
The narrator then experiences the front-line horrors
of War:
<-*'
. . . 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 ambu
lance alive and haul out dead . . . (II, 101)
Afterwards, his attacks on those who caused the war become
more indignant, and his appeal is again to his democratic
heritage upon which the warmongers have trampled. Phrases
from Patrick Henry's speech appear in his protests:
there must be some wav thev taught us
301
Land of the Free conscience Give me liberty or
give me Well ^hyy g^ye US death (II, 102)
After the war ends and "Jack" awaits discharge in
Paris, his momentary hopes for the Socialist Revolution
fade when the police suppress the Paris strike on May 1,
65
1919. Typical of "the satirist," the narrator is now
convinced that the evil forces that caused the war have
gained control of the Versailles Peace Conference and the
fate of the postwar world. His mood at an anarchist picnic
is pessimistic:
But God damn it they've got all the machineguns in the
world all the printingpresses linotypes tickerribbon
curling irons plushhorses Ritz and we you and I?
1
bare-
hands a few songs not very good songs plutot le geste
proletaire. ... (II, 420)
Arriving in New York from the Near East, he portrays
himself as a wanderer "who had hung from the pommel of the
unshod white stallion's saddle" (III, 29) and an individual
ist who has been more at ease in "the barren Syrian hills"
(III, 30) than in the "white tie," "boiled shirt," and
"patent leather pumps painfully squeezing the toes" (III,
65Instead of being "the first year of the new century"
(the French title of the translated version of 1919). the
year was the beginning of inflation and poverty in Europe
and the amoral and materialistic 1920's in the U.S.A.
302
30) that he is forced to wear at a formal occasion. He
feels cramped by the mold of city life which again forces
him into "the forsomebodyelsetailored dress suit" and into
"somebody else's readymade business opportunity" (III, 31).
He is uncomfortable at a Greenwich Village party where "the
personality must be kept carefully adjusted over the face"
(III, 125), and he leaves early. Unwilling to ally himself
with the "oppressors" and to "make money in New York" (III,
150), he protests with the "underdogs" and speaks out at
labor meetings? but he remains skeptical of communist slo
gans. He prefers to remain aloof from organizations in
order to preserve his individual identity (his innocence),
to read Martial, the Roman satirist, and to peel "the onion
of doubt" (III, 150).
The "image" of the narrator in the Camera Eye sections
dealing with the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (49 and 50) and the
Harlan County mining strike (51) is that of an honest and
courageous man who is outraged by the injustices committed
against these poor immigrants and workers, and frustrated
by- the fact that America has been conquered by "strangers"
and their "hired men" who "have clubbed us off the streets"
(III, 461) and:
303
have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut
down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities'
into slums and sweated the wealth out of our people and
when they want to they hire the executioner to throw
the switch. . . . (Ill, 463)
Looking at these sections as satiric literature rather than
as documentary, we see that Dos Passos has conveyed the
narrator's feelings father than the facts about these
events, and has transformed these isolated and local abuses
66
of the law into symbols that correspond with the theme of
his fictional narratives: namely, that under corrupt capi
talism the old institutions of America have become decadent,
that the exploiters have used the old slogans to oppress
the working class, and that as a result America has become
divided into "two nations." As the narrator in Camera Eye
(50) says:
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. . . . (Ill, 462)
The tone of this Camera Eye, described by Alfred Kazin
67
as "an eloquent hymn of compassion and rage," is that of
66See Rideout, pp. 131-134.
67p
n
Native Grounds, p. 274.
304
condemnatory and abusive invective; but invective that
attains the status of satiric poetry through its intense
passion, its high-minded appeal to American principles, and
its artful use of persuasive rhetoric. As David Worcester
says:
When an invective-piece is sublime in utterance, when
it reflects the thwarted passion of a great soul for
the good, when it is sincere, and when its wrath is
not too long-sustained, it is satire.®®
Aside from the narrator's own sincere feelings of indigna
tion about the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti and the
starvation and shooting of the coal miners, he adopts a
number of rhetorical devices such as analogy, repetition,
and parallelism to persuade the reader that the "corrupt
system" is responsible for these abuses. Since Vanzetti
was an Italian immigrant who had lived and worked as a fish
peddler in Plymouth, Massachusetts, he is identified, by
analogy, with America's first immigrants who landed at
Massachusetts Bay to create a country free of oppression.
Dos Passos builds his indictment by first recreating,
through repetition and parallelism, a Whitmanesque vision
of virgin America before it was despoiled by its new
6®The Art of Satire (New York, 1960), p. 20.
305
conquerors:
. . . this is where the immigrants landed the round
heads the sackers of castles the kingkillers haters
of oppression ... on the beach that belonged to no
one between the ocean that belonged to no one and
the enormous forest that belonged to no one . . .
(Ill, 435)
<•
But in corrupt modern America, "where another immigrant
worked fsic 1 hater of oppression who wanted a world un-
fenced" (III, 436), many have lost sight of America's origi
naL ideals; and it is the narrator's aim to "rebuild the
ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers district-
attorneys collegepresidents judges," to show America those
who are its "betrayers," and to point out that Vanzetti
"this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of
your founders Massachusetts" (III, 437).
Although these Camera Eye sections exhibit "the rarest
69
kind of good writing," one thinks of them as "a furious
70 .
and somber poem," not as a reliable documentary of the
facts. As Charles C. Walcutt has said about the Sacco-
Vanzetti passages:
Leavis, "Mr. Dos Passos Ends His Trilogy,"
Scrutiny j v (December 1936), 296.
70
Malcolm Cowley, New Republic
T
LXXXVIII (August 12,
1936), 24.
306
The trouble here is that the indictment has been torn
loose from the facts. People are not virtuous because
they are poor. If we choose to be sentimental about
trees, it was the poor pioneer who cut down and burned
the hardwood forests . . . whereas the' big corporations
that cut the pulpwood conserve their trees carefully
and have over the decades increased their reserves be
yond the nation's needs. The prairies were gulched by
the poor farming and overgrazing of the pioneers, too,
long before they were fenced and'restored and protected
by the avaricious big money farmers.71
And again, Walcutt says:
It is true that the possessors of great wealth and
power have abused both, and yet he [Dos Passos] has
loaded the dice so heavily in favor of the common man
that the reader is skeptical when Dos Passos is most
earnest. His idealism has lost its hold on fact.72
Our final impression of the Camera Eye narrator, con
sistent with Dos Passos' theme of "decline and fall" as
presented in the narratives, Newsreels, and Biographies, is
that of the hopeless defeat of the idealist who has boldly
71
American Literary Naturalisms A Divided Stream, p.
289.
?2page 289. See my discussion of Walcutt in Chapter I
of this study. Using a biographical approach, Walcutt as
sumes from Dos Passos' "deterministic method" that Dos Pas
sos As. a philosophical determinist and that the "idealistic"
narrator of The Camera Eye is. Dos Passos. But Walcutt ne
glects to explore the tone and intent of Dos Passos' work.
A rhetorical approach, however, shows that both Dos Passos'
"determinism" and his Camera Eye narrator are "devices" to
accomplish his primary intent, the satirical indictment of
"the system."
307
defended the old traditions against the new forces that have
wrecked America. Observing him "in the drizzling- rain"
watching "with scared eyes" (III, 464) the coffins of Sacco
and Vanzetti, or in the jail at Harlan County watching the
"angry eyes" of "the law" (III, 524), we hear repeated the
words "we are beaten" (III, 462) and "we stand defeated
America" (III, 464). Although the satiric narrator stands
alone, surrounded by evil, and protests: "We have only
73
words against POWER SUPERPOWER," his words of anger and
despair constitute an indictment of a society that has al
lowed its old ideals and its sensitive men to perish while
selfishly pursuing power and material gain. Again, Dos
Passos' attack is leveled against the moral complacency that
has allowed this decay, and his pessimistic determinism
serves as a device to accomplish his aims of satiric social
criticism.
In summary, Dos Passos, as satirical historian, was
probably indebted to Gibbon for his over-all conception of
the decline and fall of American civilization under monopoly
73u.S.A.. Ill, 525. As Alvin Kernan says, the satiric
narrator suffers "an agonized compulsion to appraise the
ills of the world and cure them by naming them" (Modern
Satire, P. 173).
308
capitalism. For his politically oversimplified interpreta
tion of American history, which was acceptable to many
liberals and radicals during the depression 1930's, Dos
Passos drew upon the critiques of Marx and Veblen to por
tray the modern American scene during the first three dec
ades of the twentieth century in terms of a "class struggle"
between capitalists and workers, business and technology,
idealists and exploiters, and the "haves" and "have-nots"
of America's "two nations." However, beyond its specifi
cally political theme, the U.S.A. trilogy resembles Dos
Passos
1
earlier novels and plays in that it embodies a moral
protest against the defeat and degradation of human beings
living in a modern mechanized and materialistic world. Like
Dos Passos
1
earlier works, U.S.A. levels its indictment
against "the system," which is, in this instance, the cor
rupt institutions of modern America under industrial capi
talism. Typical of the satirist, Dos Passos intensifies his
attack by , contrasting his distorted portrait of a totally
debased "real" world with his noble dream of the heroic
past, in this case, a vision of the unrealized Jeffersonian
dream of an egalitarian democracy founded upon freedom and
justice.
While acknowledging Dos Passos' theory of history to^be
309
oversimplified and anachronous, one must still consider
U.S.A. an important and readable American novel because of
its vivid, swiftly moving fictional panorama of these his
torical events, its unique technical experiments, and its
scathing satire of modern materialistic society. Drawing
upon the achievements in the modern arts and successfully
blending social comment with esthetic form, Dos Passos has
ambitiously recorded the broad currents of the American
scene in an experimental manner that never has been suc
cessfully duplicated in American fiction. Particularly
analogous to film documentary techniques, U.S.A. combines
fiction, history, biography, and autobiography to satiri
cally expose America's moral, political, and economic de
cline and fall. Again, in U.S.A. Dos Passos uses a deter
ministic method in his fictional narratives to illustrate
that the predatory forces of capitalism have produced a
modern wasteland in which all the characters of America's
"two nations" of idealists and exploiters suffer either
outward defeat or inner corruption. While his Newsreels
and Biographies pretend to factually document the historical
trends and the lives of some of America's representative
public figures, Dos Passos, as satirist, slants the facts
s-
to expose only the follies, stupidities, and brutalities of
310
the American mass public and to bitterly condemn the moral
confusions and inadequacies of these prominent men who con
tributed to America's decline. Finally, Dos Passos uses
the Camera Eye as a satiric device to awaken the public
conscience and to indignantly denounce the corrupt exploit
ers who have ravaged America's virgin land, defeated Ameri
ca's best men, and undermined the American democratic heri-
tageof freedom and justice.
CHAPTER V
SUMMARY
The contention of this study has been that Dos Passos
is primarily a satirist who writes novels in order to com
municate satirical social criticism. It has been shown
that since there are no definitive critical studies of Dos
Passos' fiction available, a confusion exists among critics
as to the literary value and classification of his work.
Many critics have tended to distort the meaning of Dos Pas
sos' novels by assuming they are supposed to be "realistic"
or "objective" reflections of American social history.
Therefore, these critics have either neglected or attacked
significant aspects of his work that have diverged from
realism. However, by focusing upon Dos Passos as a sati
rist, this study has sought to clear up much of the existing
confusion about his work.
In Chapter I, the general characteristics of satire and
the satirist were outlined, and critical evidence was cited
311
312
to indicate that these characteristics are present in Dos
Passos
1
fiction. It was stated that, in general, the sati
rist is a moral idealist who is angered and disgusted by
the vice and folly he observes in his society, and who
attempts to expose, to criticize, and to reform social man
ners or morals. Satire is distinguished by social criticism
conveyed in an ironic tone ranging from the comic to the
bitter or tragic. It was pointed out that the subject mat
ter and literary forms of satire can be infinitely variable,
and that in a form characterized by its realistic subject
matter, such as the novel, the satirist pretends to "mirror"
social behavior and to tell the whole truth about it, when,
actually, he wishes to one-sidedly display its most repel
lent qualities in order to relieve his anger and to shock
his audience into an awareness of its moral complacency.
Furthermore, the satirist compares his "caricature" of a
debased reality with his noble dream of "the good society"
or of ideal human behavior.
In our survey of a variety of critical opinion about
Dos Passos
1
work it was pointed out that many critics have
either referred directly to his novels as satires or have—
often disparagingly—alluded to qualities in his novels that
are generally found in satiric literature: social
313
criticism, irony, distortion, hatred, contempt, indignation,
bias, moral idealism, and so on. Prom additional critical
statements of those who have called Dos Passos a naturalist,
it was found that while the term naturalism generally im
plies a writer's belief in biological or environmental
determinism, the term is more useful in explaining general
similarities than specific differences between writers and
cannot accurately characterize the style, tone, and intent
of one specific writer's work. -Tt was pointed out that
critics who have labeled Dos Passos a naturalist tend to be
imperceptive of the meaning of Dos Passos' work, that is,
its tone and intent. The term naturalism has been variously
defined by critics and seems applicable to Dos Passos' fic
tion only if it is understood that Dos Passos uses the
deterministic method as a device that serves his general
aims of satiric social criticism.
In the examination of Dos Passos' own statements in
his articles, letters, reviews, prefaces, and speeches, it
was found that he has spoken both explicitly and implicitly
about the satirical aims of his work. He has referred to
himself as a satirist who has criticized men as he has ob-
served them in particular moments because they failed to
measure up to his idealistic expectations of human nature
314
in general and has called himself a satirical chronicler who
presents a dark view of society in his protest novels in
order to prod people into thinking.
In the discussions of Dos Passos' early career and his
war novels, One Man's Initiation—1917 and Three Soldiers,
it was suggested that Dos Passos
1
career follows the pattern
of the disillusioned idealist turned satirist. It was
pointed out that Dos Passos first exhibited his moral
idealism in his college essays, when he compared the human
achievements of ancient Greece and the Renaissance with
man's present degradation in the modern machine age, and
when he expressed skepticism regarding ideas that scientific
and industrial progress would lead to man's moral perfec
tion. It was then mentioned that Dos Passos' pessimism
concerning the direction of modern civilization was inten
sified by the war hysteria in the United States during 1917
which ended the progressive era in this country and tram
pled upon democratic rights of free speech and assembly.
Dos Passos' anger and frustration about the entrance of
America into the First World War and the subsequent decline
of democracy in this country led him into political radical
ism as an outlet for his naive beliefs that modern society
was controlled by intrenched capitalists, war-mongers, and
315
chauvinists. Civilization, he thought, could only be saved
by a social revolution that would abolish war and establish
a new cooperative commonwealth devoted to the good of the
common man.
Dos Passos' recognition of social injustices, his re
bellion against his own genteel social class, and his dis
gust with the War Were the chief driving forces behind his
bitterly ironic war novels. In these novels, Dos Passos
attacked war, the causes behind war, and the propaganda
slogans and nationalistic hatreds that perpetuate war. In
his ironic contrasts between an idyllic past and a barbaric
present, his mordantly satiric sketches of man's inhumanity
to man, and his ludicrous caricatures of officers and pub
lic figures who had supported the War, Dos Passos, as sati
rist, intended these novels to portray the war as brutally
as possible. He wished to shock his audience out of its
prevalent patriotic and romantic beliefs that the First
World War had been, in Woodrow Wilson's phrase, "a crusade
for democracy," and that the Allies had been humane heroes
while the Germans had been rapacious barbarians. As satiri
cal reporter, Dos Passos adopted an impersonal and docu
mentary style of narration to feign objectivity while pur
posely slanting his portrait of war to eliminate or to
316
ridicule the heroic and to focus entirely upon the irration
al and depraved actions of men in the army training camps
and on the battlefield. Adopting a deterministic method
for purposes of satiric social criticism, Dos Passos depict
ed his enlistees as helpless victims of the "system" and
portrayed the War and the army camps as symbols of the
mechanized destruction of traditional human values in a
debased modern civilization.
The bitterly ironic tone of Dos Passos' literary works
that followed his war novels continued to illustrate the
satirist's intention to portray a dark and garish picture
of modern industrial society. Disillusioned by the War and
the postwar reactionary political trends in America, Dos
Passos chose to return to agrarian Spain where he discov
ered his own anarchistic individualism and idealism in the
Spanish character, and his future role as a social historian
<»»
and destructive critic of contemporary American culture.
After returning to the United States in 1922 and becoming
involved with other radicals in the class struggle, Dos
Passos resolved to use his literary and journalistic talents
to attack the bland optimism, success worship, social and
political conformity, and super-patriotism that he believed
were destroying America's democratic ideals. His growing
317
interest in American political and social institutions and
in avant-garde experiments in the arts resulted in his first
expressionistic play, The Garbage Man, and his first "col
lective" novel, Manhattan Transfer, both satirical dissec
tions of American urban culture.
Important as the first "collective" novel in American
literature, Manhattan Transfer was radically different from
conventional novels that dealt with the limited story of a
few central characters. Instead, the novel focused upon
the city itself, attempting to characterize the whole at
mosphere and movement of New York and, foreshadowing his
U.S.A. trilogy, to chronicle the social and economic trends
of American life from the beginning of the twentieth cen
tury. But because of Dos Passos' antipathy toward American
society of the 1920's, he slanted his documentary to depict
the same one-sidedly ugly view of the city that One Man's
Initiation had presented of war and Three Soldiers had pre
sented of the army. His portrait of New York became a dis
torted caricature rather than a realistic mirror of the
city's complexity, and a caustic satire of the materialistic
and mechanistic trends that were undermining the American
dream and threatening the individual. Besides ironically
documenting the negative aspects of American life, Dos
318
Passos inserted urban symbolism and recurring images of
death and sterility into his portrait to create an under
lying expressionistic vision of the city as a monstrous
destructive mechanism and as a desolate, rootless wasteland.
Embodying this poetic vision, Dos Passos
1
characters tended
to become astutely drawn caricatures: living corpses,
hollow men, moving around aimlessly in this death-in-life
atmosphere. Although Manhattan Transfer fails to accurate
ly reflect the whole truth of the American scene, the novel
is successful as a technical experiment and as incisive
satire. Although Dos Passos adopts an impersonal method of
narration and the use of mechanistic determinism, the novel
tends to become a modern morality play (like The Garbage
Man) in which all the characters who remain in the city are
crushed: both its social successes and failures are either
damned or doomed. As in his war novels, Dos Passos uses
determinism as a device to convey satiric social criticism.
After finishing Manhattan Transfer. Dos Passos devoted
much time and effort during 1926 and 1927 to the Sacco-
Vanzetti Defense Committee, which hoped in vain to save the
two Italian anarchists from the electric chair. Their,
execution profoundly affected Dos Passos and other liberals
and radicals and became a symbol for "the class struggle,"
319
the unifying theme and theory of history upon which Dos
Passos based the three novels of his U.S.A. trilogy: The
42nd Parallel (1930), .1212. (1932), and The Big Money (1936).
However, beyond its specifically political theme, the
U.S.A. trilogy resembles Dos Passos
1
earlier novels and
plays in that it embodies a moral protest against the defeat
and degradation of the individual by the mechanized and
materialistic world. One recalls that in One Man's Initia
tion—1917. the war is the destructive force that makes the
enlistee its victim; in Three Soldiers the army becomes the
mechanized "system" that destroys the individuality of its
soldiers and turns them into automatons or martyrs; in
Manhattan Transfer the city, a sterile wasteland, changes
its inhabitants into hollow men; and in U.S.A. America under
monopoly capitalism, another corrupting force, destroys the
ideals, goals, human feelings, and lives of both its so-
called successes and its failures.
In U.S.A.. as in his earlier novels, Dos Passos inten
sifies his satirical attack upon "the system" by contrast
ing his distorted portrait of a debased "real" world with
an idyllic vision of the heroic past. In One Man's Initia
tion—1917. Martin Howe protests against modern man's illu
sions of moral progress by contrasting the orderly and
320
peaceful Middle Ages with the horrors of war which symbolize
to him the eclipse of human civilization; in Three Soldiers
John Andrews, another disillusioned idealist, muses upon the
vivid life of the Renaissance as an age of strong individu
alists who tower above the ant-like image of modern man who
has shrunk before the vast mechanical contrivances he has
invented; and in Manhattan Transfer and U.S.A.. Jimmy Herf
and the Camera Eye narrator, Dos Passos
1
later moral spokes
men, protest against the corruption of modern industrial
America and the decline of the Jeffersonian dream.
It has been stated that Dos Passos was probably in
debted to his favorite historian, Gibbon, for the over-all
theme of the U.S.A. trilogy: the decline and fall of Ameri
can civilization under monopoly capitalism. Drawing upon
the achievements in the modern arts and successfully blend
ing satirical comment with esthetic form, Dos Passos ambi
tiously recorded the broad currents of the American scene
in an experimental manner that never has been successfully
duplicated. Analogous to documentary film techniques, U.S.A.
combines fiction, history, biography, and autobiography to
portray America's moral, political, and economic decline
and fall from its early promise of becoming an egalitarian
democracy.
321
In his fictional narratives, Dos Passos again adopts a
deterministic method to build his thesis that no satisfac
tory or fulfilled life is possible'in the wasteland of
modern corrupt capitalism. Dos Passos ironically shows the
moral decline and fall of the "new" America under industrial
capitalism from the democratic traditions of the "old" Amer
ica, by the outward defeat of the idealists who have sup
ported democratic principles of freedom and justice and by
the inner corruption of the opportunists who have used the
old ideals as slogans to gain money and power. The News-
reels of U.S.A. which supposedly provide a factual documen
tary of the general trends in American life, actually be
come a unique satiric device for Dos Passos to suggest a
portrait of moral and political disintegration. By careful
manipulation and juxtaposition of the facts that are re
flected in the headlines and stories of the Newsreels, Dos
Passos displays a slanted view of history and the ironies,
paradoxes, and incongruities that exist between American
ideals and actual practices in the modern machine age. Like
the fictional characters, the public figures in Dos Passos'
Biographies fall roughly into the "two nations" of idealists
who represent the "old" democratic traditions and the ex
ploiters who represent the present capitalist system. Using
322
several rhetorical devices to slant the facts of these
satirical Biographies, Dos Passos portrays the defeat of
the idealists by "the system" and excoriates the moral
weaknesses of the exploiters who have contributed to Ameri
ca's decline. Finally, the angry invective of the Camera
Eye's satiric narrator, who protests the defeat of the old
traditions by the predatory forces that have wrecked Ameri
ca, becomes an indictment of a society that has~ allowed its
democratic heritage and its best men to perish while self
ishly pursuing power and material gain. Again, as in his
earlier novels, Dos Passos
1
attack is leveled against "the
system" and the moral complacency of those who have allowed
the decay of humanistic traditions; and his pessimistic
determinism serves as a device to accomplish his aims of
satiric social criticism. -
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Worcester, David. The Art of Satire. New York: Russell
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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Asset Metadata

Creator Belkind, Allen Joyland (author)

Core Title Satirical social criticism in the novels of John Dos Passos

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Language and Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, Modern,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-167912

Unique identifier UC11351201

Identifier 6608774.pdf (filename),usctheses-c17-167912 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 6608774.pdf

Dmrecord 167912

Document Type Dissertation

Rights BELKIND, ALLEN JOYLAND

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus, Los Angeles, California 90089, USA