Summer 2001 John Dos Passos Newsletter 1 John Dos Passos NEWSLETTER No. 8 Summer 2001 PASSING AND THE AMERICAN IDENTITY MACHINE: RACE, CLASS, AND SEXUALITY IN U.S.A. by Jayson P. Harsin In the tarpaper morgue at Châlons-sur-Marne in the so that they may include themselves in the abstract identity. reek of chloride of lime and the dead, they picked out the Melvin Landsberg’s essay “Homosexuality and pine box that held all that was left of Black-White Relations in U.S.A” has opened a space for eenie menie minie moe plenty other pine boxes stacked discussion of the topic of passing in Dos Passos’ trilogy, up there a monumental work whose fricative, poetic conscience containing what they’d scraped up of Richard Roe for American democracy is of enduring value.3 While and other persons unknown. Only one can go. Landsberg’s reflections in that essay are a welcome ini- How did they pick John Doe? tiation of dialogue, I find the topic worthy of still further Make sure he ain’t a dinge, boys. attention. Thus, I would like to take this opportunity to give make sure he ain’t a guinea or a kike, it an even fuller discussion by opening the scope of the how can you tell a guy’s a hundredpercent when all metaphor “passing” to include one more social category, you’ve got’s a gunnysack full of bones, bronze buttons class. In the following pages, I want to explore the way stamped with the screaming eagle and a pair of roll put- Dos Passos, through his formal synergy of the narratives, tees?1 Newsreels, biographies and Camera Eyes, depicts and critiques a regime of white corporate capitalist identity- With these words, John Dos Passos launches one of formation.4 It is my claim that race, sex, and class-passing the most poetically and critically powerful biographies of are dictated by that identity regime. To begin with, I want to his entire U.S.A. trilogy. It is a subversive biography in consult the work of the prominent cultural historian George the very fact that it appears as a biography of a nobody Chauncey, who provides an important historical framework who is everybody, and yet one who can not be everybody for understanding what is at stake for Dick Savage and within the strictures of what I wish to call the American Tony Garrido as homo-to-hetero-sexual passers in early Identity Machine. The Unknown Soldier memorial may be ‘teens and 1920s New York.5 From there I will explore said to embody another national fantasy (following Lauren how homosexual passing relates to race and class-passing Berlant’s use of the term), by which national identity can in view of a hegemonic national identity formation. somehow simultaneously pass as many and one, E Pluribus Unum.2 Passing thus becomes the national master trope par excellence in a society based on the fantasy of classless- ness and liberty for all. It is a particular social masquerade Also in this issue . that pertains to an activity whereby an identity legally or socially subordinate or disreputable (non-white, poor, Melvin Landsberg, “A Novelist and homosexual, woman, etc.) is deliberately masked by the His Biographer” / 12 performance of an identity more socially acceptable and lucrative. The nation must constantly pass for something John Dos Passos, Four letters to in the abstract, which it will not permit in the particular. Charles W. Bernardin / 15 And in the particular it demands certain citizen-subjects to refashion themselves according to widely known but Abstract of Ph.D. Dissertation / 17 simultaneously unutterable hegemonic identity standards, 2 John Dos Passos Newsletter Summer 2001 Codes, Spaces, and the Risky Business of Gay USA is significant evidence that Dick deliberately represses his homosexuality in order to pass in (white) corporate What does it take to be an American? “How can you capitalist culture (with whatever unconscious assistance). tell a guy’s a hundredpercent?” This is one question that But to better understand that societally encouraged self- Dos Passos’ trilogy can’t help but answer sardonically. disguising, it is important to spatialize (see it geographi- As the “Body of an American” biography suggests, “he” cally) and historicize it. cannot be many things. Among those many illegitimate First, it is necessary to distinguish among the codes, identities is a homosexual one. The character Richard activities (power currents) that traverse and partly govern Ellsworth Savage provides us with a good place to begin different social spaces. A person’s identity in one space is an inquiry on homosexual passing. Interestingly, Savage not the same identity in another space, to the person him/ bears many of the distinguishing features of a Freudian herself or to those who are observing and labeling him/ 10 theory of homosexuality.6 He is raised by his mother and her. To claim otherwise is to flatten out space and differ- Aunt Beatrice, and like Dos Passos’ father, Dick’s father ence, to assume that a person’s perception of him/herself is was largely missing throughout his childhood. When Dick that which the rest of the town, or group, or state, or world does remember his father, the memories include abuse.7 holds as well. It is to deny the social base of identity and Moreover, throughout Dick’s adolescence and later life, social knowledge, human relations stretched across space the narrator describes him in alternately homosexual and time. Second, if we do not historicize homosexuality and bi-sexual terms. At his summer job as bellboy at the in U.S.A., we are surely more likely to project our own Bayview hotel, Dick is not attracted to the waitresses in current assumptions and codes onto it, possibly even the room next door. On the contrary, “Through the thin conjuring up what is otherwise not there or, alternately, partition they [he and his friend] could hear the waitresses blinding ourselves to what is. By taking account of the in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went work of leading cultural historians, my analysis sees Dos to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and Passos in conversation with certain historical and spatial cheap facepowder that drifted in through the cracks in the regimes of homosexuality. wall” (though his disgust here is perhaps part of his class Homosexuals in the early 1920s and before led double identification/passing signaled by “cheap”). At the boys’ lives that corresponded to multiple social spaces and the prep school Dick “had dreams about girls and thought a norms/behavior they sanctioned. As George Chauncey lot about sin and had a secret crush on Spike Culbertson, has written in his cultural history Gay New York: Gender, the yellowhaired captain of his school ballteam.” Further, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World “all kinds of things got him terribly agitated” at that age, 1890-1940, “The complexity of [New York’s] social and girls’ underwear in storewindows as well as “the tanned spatial organization made it possible for gay men to con- skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun struct the multiple public identities necessary for them to on the beach.”8 But alas, Dick does not behave according participate in the gay world without losing the privileges to popular or medical norms of 1920s homosexual devi- of the straight: assuming one identity at work, another in ance and thus cannot neatly be explained by Freud.9 There leisure; one identity before biological kin, another with gay friends.”11 Chauncey discusses “double lives” mainly in terms of gay men who reveal a homosexual identity in one space or social circle and conceal it in yet another. Of THE JOHN DOS PASSOS NEWSLETTER course, Dick Savage would be an extreme version of the “double life,” for he does not betray a homosexual identity The Newsletter seeks to promote scholarship on to others until the Harlem episode. On the contrary, his is a and interest in Dos Passos’ writings and biography, case of very successful repression, revealed to us through and will publish short articles on these subjects. It the narrator’s window into Dick’s thoughts and dreams.12 will also publish news items, notes, letters, and que- ries on these and other relevant matters. Among these Take for example his dream while on the train to Rome, matters are work in progress, manuscript locations during the war. and accessions, bibliographies, and textual scholar- Dick’s dream on the train almost perfectly foreshad- ship. ows the Harlem debacle at the end of The Big Money. In it For return of manuscripts, contributors should Dos Passos demonstrates why the Newsreels and Camera send, along with their submissions, stamped enve- Eyes must not be seen as mere context for or formally lopes addressed to themselves. They should address distinct from the narratives. The headlines, songs, etc., all queries and manuscripts to the editor, Melvin are exactly what fill his characters’ heads and give them Landsberg, Department of English, University of “equipment for living,” in Kenneth Burke’s phrase. This Kansas, Lawrence, KS 66045-2115. and only this formal complexity can give the reader a win- dow onto Dick’s double life as well as onto the discursive COPYRIGHT © 2001 by Melvin Landsberg tentacles of the American Identity Machine. Headlines of newspapers slide into desires of a bisexual nature: “Dick All rights reserved. was asleep dreaming of a girl rubbing her breasts against Summer 2001 John Dos Passos Newsletter 3 him purring like a kitten, of a popeyed man making a Margo Dowling, young as she is (she marries Tony at age speech, of William Jennings Wilson speaking before the 16), to have known.