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John DOS Passos and His Invention of America

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John DOS Passos and His Invention of America REFLECTIONS John DOSPassos And His Invention of America Asked to name The Great American Novel, most critics would pick from the trio of national classics-Moby Dick, The Adven- tures of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby. A few others would claim that the great book has not yet been written. But if there were a prize for The Great Novel of America, it would go, with far less debate, to John DOSPassos's three-part movie-in-prose, U.S.A. (completed 1936). Capturing the voices and faces of Americans from virtually all walks of life, DOSPassos presented an ironic, kaleidoscopic portrait of the nation's experience dur- ing the tumultuous first three decades of the 20th century. Here, Alfred Kazin looks at the man and at his remarkable book. by Alfred Kazin In June 1932, a discouraged month and year in the history of the United States, John Roderigo DOSPassos sat down in his Province- town, Massachusetts, house at the end of Commercial Street to write a new preface to his antiwar novel of 1921, Three Soldiers, published when he was 25. Three Soldiers was being reissued by the Modern Library, a reprint series so inclusively "modern" in its taste that Petronius's Satyricon was in it along with Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus and John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World. The reissue of Three Soldiers was a tribute to DOSPassos's emerging reputation in the 1930s as a solidly "social" nov- elist with distinctly radical views. His trilogy U.S.A., which was to be completed in 1936 with The Big Money, had already taken shape with The 42nd Parallel (1930) and 1919 (1932). In his preface, DOSPassos re- sponded to the honor with heartfelt memories of the hopes with which he had written Three Soldiers: The Wilson QuarterlyINew Year's 1985 154 JOHN DOS PASSOS The memory of the spring of 1919 has not faded enough. Any spring is a time of overturn, but then Lenin was alive, the Seattle general strike had seemed the beginning of the flood instead of the beginning of the ebb, Americans in Paris were groggy with theatre and painting and music; Picasso was to rebuild the eye, Stravinski was cramming the Russian steppes into our ears, cur- rents of energy seemed to be breaking out everywhere as young guys climbed out of their uniforms, imperial America was all shiny with the idea of Ritz, in every direction the countries of the world stretched out starving and angry, ready for anything turbu- lent and new, whenever you went to the movies you saw Charlie Chaplin. The memory of the spring of 1919 has not faded enough to make the spring of 1932 any easier. But it was 1932, and American radicals were countering the na- tional breakdown with militant new hopes of their own. DOSPassos, in the spirit of the '30s, dutifully went on: Today, though the future may not seem so gaily colored or full of clanging hopes as it was thirteen years ago . we can at least meet events with our minds cleared of some of the roman- tic garbage that kept us from doing clear work then. Those of us who have lived through have seen these years strip the bunt- ing off the great illusions of our time, we must deal with the raw structure of history now, we must deal with it quick, be- fore it stamps us out. The left-wing novelists of the '30s never matched DOSPassos's springy style and inner gaiety. But his contempt for the "romantic gar- bage that kept us from doing clear work then" was right in style and dominated left-wing literary thinking about the decade just past. By 1933, the great United States, with a quarter of its work force unem-- ployed, thousands of people wandering the roads looking for jobs, food, shelter, and with a desperately pragmatic FDR trying any stratagem to keep America together, was a country of punctured illusions and was virtually bankrupt. Roosevelt, who had not been superior to the specu- lative madness of the '20s, now decried the period as an "age of mam- mon, full of self-seekers." If you traveled about the country as frantically as DOSPassos al- ways traveled and were sensitive to common, unliterary persons (un- like his friends E. Hemingway and e. e. cummings), you put them into your books. DOS Passos was not contrite about the "jazz age" like his friend Scott Fitzgerald, who by 1936 was regaling the readers of Es- quire with the news of his "crack-up." Nor was he so heavy-footed in the direction of Communism as Theodore Dreiser, whose Tragic Amer- ica (193 I), the usual writer's journey through depression America, would not replace An American Tragedy (1926) in the affections of those who obstinately respected Dreiser as a storyteller despite the great man's untrustworthy mind and derivative opinions. On the other hand, The Wilson QuarterlyINew Year's 1985 155 JOHN DOS PASSOS DOSPassos was not so smug as that great satirist of the American scene, H. L. Mencken, who never seemed to know that there was a depression, and who made light of Hitler as if he were just another redneck dema- gogue from the Deep South. DOSPassos, though a distinctly upper-class product of Choate, Har- vard, and the Norton-Harjes Volunteer Ambulance Service, and a diffi- dent, elusive, elaborately hesitant character in public, was the grandson of a Portuguese shoemaker from the island of Madeira. The shoemaker's son, John Randolph DOSPassos, was born early enough in the 19th century to be a drummer boy in the Civil War, a dominating corporation lawyer in the palmiest days of the age of enterprise, and counsel to the American Sugar Refining Company when the Have- meyers controlled virtually all the sugar refined in the United States. He was a Republican stalwart, an authority on the law of the stock ex- change, and the author of Commercial Trusts: The Growth and Rights of Aggregated Capital. "It is a primary object of every well-founded govern- ment to encourage the acquisition of individual fortunes." His son, with his sardonic view of American capitalism and Ameri- can character, had good reason to scorn official pieties. Born in a Chi- cago hotel room in 1896, DOS Passos was the illegitimate son of a 42-year-old Southern gentlewoman, Lucy Sprigg Madison, and the 51-year-old John Randolph DOSPassos, who was a married man unable to divorce his Catholic wife. Lucy was a widow, and until her son was 16-his birth was never registered-he was known as John Roderigo Madison. The father, a great figure in respectable business and political circles of the time, tried to hide his son's existence. Mother and son were forced to live abroad, and the son remained John Roderigo Madi- son for two years after his parents finally were married. Mr. Wilson's War John Randolph DOS Passos, the self-made son of the Portuguese shoemaker, was an extraordinary character; whatever pains he in- flicted on his isolated, sensitive son, he was a godsend to a future novel- ist. It is easy to see why the novelist derided authority figures who resembled his innocently pompous father, why he was obsessed by American history, which immigrants' children used to consider the great romance. Lucy and little John Madison had to be kept out of the way. DOSPassos had even more of a "hotel childhood" than Henry and William James: mostly in Brussels and London, with furtive visits to the father in Washington and Virginia. It was from growing up among Alfred Kazin, 69, is Distinguished Professor of English at the City Univer- sity ofNew York. Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., he received a B.S.S. from the City College of New York (1935) and an M.A. from Columbia University (1938). Among his many books are On Native Grounds (1942), Bright Book of Life (19731, and New York Jew (1978). This essay is adapted from An American Procession, copyright 0 1984 by Alfred Kazin. Reprinted by per- mission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. The Wilson QuarterlyINew Year's 1985 156 JOHN DOS PASSOS DOSPassos being arrested in Boston, Massachusetts, for protesting against the Sacco-Vanzetti death sen- tence in 1927. foreign languages that DOS Passos became convinced that ordinary speech is the index to a society; he was to say in his most famous book, 'But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people." With his earliest feeling that "the voyages never stopped," he was to register in his prose not just the speedup of history but his Victorian mother's attempts to escape the "shame" of her son's illegitimacy. For the rest of his life, DOSPassos was to think that the way out of any prob- lem was to keep moving. The constant movement of his characters was to be more memorable than their personalities. The rapidly flashing, image-crackling style of physical sensation he developed not only came out of the painful but exciting unsettlement of his early years; it be- came his way, in the early "Camera Eye" sections of U.S.A. that relate the author's personal experiences, of blurring everything he still needed to conceal. DOSPassos clearly felt himself to be a special case, thrown into a succession of contradictory situations and scenes, to which a highly stylized literary response was sufficient. Even the "Jef- fersonian" tracts he wrote after his disillusionment with the Left, books that were politically simple-minded, were invigorated by the physical images that dizzyingly moved his style.
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