TABLE OF OONTiNTS

Page Table of Abbreviations •.•.•.•.•.•..••••.•.•••••••••• iii

Chapter One ...... 1.

Chapt er Two ...... •...... 13

Chapter Three...... ~ ...... 51 Chapter ]'our ...... 92 Bibliograpl1y ...... 113

...;

i:i, Table of Abbreviations

ADV= Advertisements for Myself AN= The Armies of the hight BS= Barbary Shore CC= Cannibals and Christians DP= The Deer Park --GWSOc The Ground We Stand Un MSC= Miami and the ~iege of Chicago

ND= The ~aked and the Dead NO= Number vne OFM= Of a Fire on the Moon PP= The Presidential l)apers

USA, 42P:;: U.S.A.'· '.i.1he 42nd Parallel USA, 1.fil= U.S.A., l\ineteen, Nineteen

USA, ,-BM=· u. S. A., The Big Money

iii Chapter One

The Purpose of Writing History as Metaphor

-1- . -2 Recurrent obituaries and charges of irrelevance have continually plagued the historical profession..1 Historians need the fresh wind of effective content to resuscitate history from its alleged irrelevance. One possible method would be the current ever-increasing bent among historians toward a reconstruction of the past based on factual materials substantiated by computerized statistical tech­ niques. Yet in no way does this method adequately explore man's internal experience nor offer an accomodation to the rapid, nightmarish sweep of past events into present consciousness. 2 A second approach would be the more idea- tional approach that is followed by intellectual histor­ ians and by adherents to the m~thods of the American

Studies move~ent. This large group of historians uses literature as handmaiden to history and inspects literature as cultural attitude reflectors, ~s social documents.3 This usage is fortunate when. compared to the previous time when historians dismissed literature as something "fanci­ ful", but this second approach still forces history into the past tense. Yet there is an alternative way for historians to use literature that will give relevance to.history. Histor­ ians can revere literature !!,! history, even as metahistory, because literature performs the true functions of histor­ ical explanation as well as and often better than histor­ ical writing that does not draw, or only indirectly draws -3 upon subjective perceptions. One such integral aspect of literature of great potential instructive value to histor­ ians is the use of metaphor. A cri ti.cal appreciation of metaphor and its sponsor, literature, and a recognition that history itself is a metaphor can open new and most profound avenues to a fuller understanding of the rele­ vance and presentness of history. It has been fifty years since James Joyce delivered his extremely metaphorical definition of history. Wrote Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken." To date the rich implications of Joyce's metaphor have slept virtually unnoticed and unused by professional historians. Only within the past decade have certain New Left historians, notably,Staughton Lynd, and a number of consensus-oriented liberals, such as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., indeed come around to view htstory as something nightmarish, but mainly because history has not fulfilled their personal goals. 4 The great majority of professional historians remain dominated, as British novelist Paul West noted, by "elders imbecilically suburban, armed in Great Society cant and dead-scared of even half a metaphor."5 Perhaps West is overly caustic, but I believe that he is essentially correct. It is a debatable question whether most historians know why they are using a metaphor when they do use one. Too often the metaphors used resemble

\ displays of erudition~ la Cotton Mather, but are devoid -4 of any organic correspondence to the material.

In explaining how metaphor works, I~A. Richards made the distinctions of tenor and vehicle in his The Philo­ sophy of Rhetoric (Oxford, 1936). The tenor of a metaphor, according to Hichards, is "the underlying or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means. 116 The vehicle functions as the agent of comparison, as the part which brings off the identification, description, or symbolic suggestion. Aesthetically speaking, the vehicle should not be a mere embellishment of the tenor, nor should the

tenor be an exc.use for intro~ucing a particular vehicle. When used effectively together, Richards wrote, "the vehicle and tenor give a meaning of more varied powers than can be asc;i:bed to either. 117 For brief examples of tenor and vehicle let us take a simple metaphor like Macbeth ''s assertion, 11 Life is but a walking shadow." Here "Life" is· the tenor, the idea being described; "a walking shadow" is the vehicle, the figure which bears the force ,and thrust of the metaphor's comparison. With more complexly-worded and extended metaphors like history, one may find either the tenor or the vehicle not explicitly, stated, but rather implicitly suggested. Before we proceed farther, a clarification of the usage of the word "history" in this essay is in order. So . far in this. chapter, the word has been employed in its conventional sense. Throughout the remainder of the essay, however, the word will be used on two levels: first, the more or le·ss accepted definition of history as the past experience of man, which will be written uncapitalized, and secondly, a metaphorical level, which will be referred to as History. The second level differs from the first in the following manner. To write a record of only the past experience of man is like compiling a physics laboratory report which measures how many amperes of electricity crossed a particular wire' at a given time. Both exercises scarcely attempt to penetrate the nature of their respect­ ive phenomena. The second level, History, is the metaphor- ical definition of history; it metaphorizes history. Also History gives history the attributes of a character,' and History casts his_tory as a dramatis persona in the drama of the universe. The second level, History, also precludes' the "pas·tness", the irretrievabili ty of history by sus­ pending o~e's disbelief in non-empirical phenomena, by granting life to supposedly "dead" events. Perhaps History does not actually comprehend the nature of history, since the pursuit of truth is, as Kierkegaard would say, "a never-ending approximation." But the suggestive power of metaphor propels one closer to a nature than does any factual definition. The largest benefit, then, of literature to histor­ ical writing is that literature forces the historian to contemplate the nature of history as revealed by metaphor. -6 Just as literature can offer, by model, metaphors· "as large and simpl~ and useful as those by which the Greeks drew scattered stars into constellations"~ it can also offer gravely majestic and complex metaphors to match the histor­ ical event. In itself history is a metaphor, History, an approximation of a nebulous set of phenomena; History is not a measurement of past experience. Norman Mailer was on. the right track when he wrote, "If the universe was a lock, its key was metaphor rather than measure."9 The authority of our own senses warns us that the margins of any definition of any event waver too much under close scrutiny and against the backdrop of other interpretations. We can know or sense many phenomena, including parts of the past, only by an intuitive process, not by intelligence (which is the sum of measures). The metaphorical History is greater than the sum of its parts. Historians may read around and about an era, they may survey its literature, listen to its music, and observe its plastic arts, but if they do not envelope time and make the metaphorical leap to incorporate that era into our present consciousness, then their endeavors are at most antiquarian and essentially in vain. Two necessary concomitants of the metaphorical History are existential philosophy and historiographical and moral relativism. The existentialists' emphasis on the enormous or overwhelming present, on the so-called existential moment, has warded off most historians from employing that philosophy-• s tenets. Yet actually existentialism and history are not antipodal. In fact, much of what the existentialists have said about time, space, and history has been a narrowed modification of Henri Bergson's concept of duration. 10 The existentialist approach contains bene- fits for historical conceptualization much like Wilhelm Dilthey's idea of Erlebnis, the conceptualization of the past not as a dead fact, but as actualized future bec9me past. 11 As with Joyce's metaphor of History as a night­ mare from which he is trying to awaken, the past for the existentialists is only too vividly impinging on the present and the future. Since atheistic existentialism grants possibility to an illimitable number of choices, it harbors within itself an explanation of the ironies at which person after person stands aghast. At the least, the philosophers of existentialism remain provocative gadflies reminding historians "that the study of history, if it is to be worthwhile must be relevant to the needs and aspira­ tions of contemporary men. 1112 Historians need not restore historical writing to the flatulent position of teacher of morals, as embodied in James Anthony Froude's platitude: "History is a voice for­ ever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and .wrong. 111 3 Nor need they stand with George Santayana's famous maxim, "Those who can. not remember the past are -8 c~ndemned to repeat it. 1114 Since the past heavily condit- ions the present, it is extremely conducive to remembrance, and even if the past were to be repeated, there is no reason to speak of the past in pejorative terms. Histor­ ians need not cast moral judgments on any event or person; perhaps the natural order of things is nightmarish. More importantly, historians should encourage courageous decis­ ions within moral relativism, decisions which may employ a method condemned by normal morality. Likewise they must attune their methods to historiographical relativism. What wisdom Carl Becker imparted when he wrote in his cardinal essay of relativism, "Everyman His Own Historian": There is lodged in Mr. Everyman's mind a mass of unrelated and related information and misinformation, of impressions and images, out of which he somehow manages, undeliberately for the most part, to fashion a history, a patterned picture of remem­ bered things said and done in past times and distant places. It is not possible, · it is not essential, that this picture should be complete or completely true: it is essential that it should be useful to Mr. Everyman; and that it may be useful to him he will hold in memory, those things only which can be related with some reason­ able degree of relevance and harmony to his idea of himself and of what-he is doing in the world and what he hopes to do.15 Also if History is a metaphor, it can have all the properties of metaphor; including that of personification: The concept of History as a force in the universe is prob­ ably as ancient as the fear and awe of divine providence and intervention. One often hears of History being invoked -9 (by historians and politicians alike) as though it were a god. At other times History remains as impersonal mani- festations of a mechanistic universe. Or many times one finds History personified as a character much as the poets personify to the hilt the virtues and vices. The works of two American novelists vitally concerned with American history, John Dos Passos and Norman Mailer, suggest the ways in which metaphor reveals History. The

study couid be ·~xtended ·'beyorid' 'America:n literature with ' similar results to the works of an Andr/ Malr'aux or an Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Other American novelists such as William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, F. Scott Fitzgerald, or William Styron (all of whom have been as concerned with American history as have been Dos Passos and Mailer) have been treated elsewhere. 16 Dos Pas.sos and Mailer have developed two interesting and different but not antithet­ ical concepts of History.- The chief virtue of these two novelists, and of imaginative literature in general, is that they haveI heightened their historical consciousness to the metaphorical History. Both Dos Passos and Mailer employed History as a . central, functional, organic metaphor in the'ir works. Dos Passos used the raw stuff of history as his tenor, with which he combined the vehicle of his literary techniques and characters to form the metaphorical History. Con- versely, Mailer used history as his vehicle to suggest a -10 far more unfathomable tenor, namely the inner experience of man. Then both writers personified History, ~ast it as a dramatis persona. Dos Passos viewed History as something basically constricting, and Mailer thought, and still thinks that History, if properly achieved, could have some great potential for liberating consciousness and action.

1For example see Part IV, "Escape from History? The Present Imperative" in Leo Hamalian and Frederick_R. Karl, eds., The Radical Vision, Essays for the Seventies (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Go., 1970), particularly Karl's article, "The Uselessness of the Fast", 262-74. 2 Perhaps nothing ought to sicken the heart of a genuine humanist more than articles such as a recent one entitled "Clio's Weapons", the author of which gives top billing to com­ puterism and xeroxography and speaks nary a word about metaphor or its sponsor, literature. H.J. Hanham, "Clio's Weapons", Daedalus, G, 2, (Spring, 1971), 509-19.

3see William V. 0 'Connor, '~The Novel as Social Document", American Quarterly, IV, 2, (Summer, 1 952)' 169-75.

4For a concise explanation of New Left histor­ iography see Irwin Unger, "The 'New Left' and American History", American HistoricaJ Review, LXXII, 3, (July, 1967;, 1237-63; and for a brief and perceptive report on consensus historians see John Higham, "The Cult of the 11 'American Consensus' , Commentary, XXVII, (.b,ebr- uary, 1959), 93-100. ·

5Paul West, "Adam's Alembic or Imagination versus me~", New Literary History,!, 3, (Spring, 1970)' 536. 6 1.A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1936), Lecture V, "Metaphor", 89-115; material cited here, 97. -11

7 Ibid. , 100.

8.irred Chappell, "Six Propositions About Literature and History", New .Literary History, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 517.

9Norman Mailer, as quoted by Peter s. Prescott, "I Sing the .Body Electronic: Norman Mailer as Walt Whitman", Look, X:XXV, t, (January 12, 1971), 78.

10Henri Bergson, a mystical but mainly evolu­ tionist philosopher, speculated that intensive (qualitative) facts, inner experience, time and spatial movement could only be comprehended through "duration", an everchanging multiplicity of interlocking states of consciousness, a continuum'.of :Perceptions, with past memories composing present time, all experience rolled into one moment. The existentialists claim that man acts upon this moment to choose an alternative for the future, often suffering in doing so the anguish of despair described so well by Kierkegaard. They do grant, however, that the range of ,individual or societal choices is restricted by.past experience. The Christian branch of existentialism, represented by Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel, contends that man opts for God at t~is juncture; the atheistic wing maintains that at every exist­ ential moment man redefines himself, and since God does not exist, all choices are possible (the source of anguish), except that man's past .experience will influence his choice. Here the atheists split over proscription. Sartre seeks to overcome the past, while Heidegger advocates passivity.

11 Hisham B. Sharabi, "The Existentialist Approach to History", Historian, XXVI, 2, (February, 1964), 170. 12 John C. English, "Bxistentialism and the Study of History", ;:>ocial Science, ALI, 3, (June, 1966), 156. .

13James Anthony Froude, "The Science of History", lecture in London, It'ebruary 5, 1864, -12 reprinted in Chauncey C. Starkweather, ed., Essays of British Essayists (New York: The Colo~ial Press, 1900), 284. 14 See also Santayana's discussion of the role of history in. his Life of Reason, II, Chapter 2.

1 11 5carl L. Becker, "Everyman His Own Historian , American Historical Association Presidential Address, 1931, reprinted in Becker, Everyman His Own Historian (New York: Appleton-Century­ Crofts, Inc., 1935), 245.

16For Faulkner see Cleanth Brooks, William Faulkner, The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1.963), especially Chap. 14, "History and the Sense of the '.tragic"; and the short Bibliogr~p!J.y in.Walter K. Everett, Faulkner's Art and Characters (New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1969). For Robert Penn Warren see Mary hance Huff, Robert Penn Warren, A Bibliography (New York: David Lewis, 1968), especially 122-71; and Ladell Payne, "Willie Stark and Huey Long: Atmosphere, Myth, or Suggestion", American yuarterJ.x, XX, 3, (Fall, 1968), For Fitzgerald see Selected Bibli­ ography in Sergio Peroza, The Art of F. Scott Fitzgerald (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), 227-35; the Selected Bibliograp~y in Charles E. Shain, F. Scott Fitzgerald, University of Minnesota Pamphlets on American Writers No. 15, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1961); 46-8; the Selected_ Bibliography in Arthur Mizener, F. Scott Fitz- erald A Collection of Critical Hssays Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: .t'rentice-Ha.11, 1963), 173-4. For Styron see Bibliography in David D. Galloway, The Absurd Hero in American . Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966), 200-10; and M.1. Ratner, "Styron's Rebel", American yuarterly, li..XI, 3, (J!~all, 196.9),_ 595-608. Chapter Two.

John Dos Passos' Concept of History

/

-1 3-:- -14 John Dos Passos strove to sing the orderly American epic, to write the modern Great American.Novel. His appetite for embracing the whole of American history in his fiction reached Whitmanesque proportions, even if his manner remained more subdued than that of the grey-bearded poet. Dos Passos' love affair with. America, however, had a curiously strained quality. Like a wallflower who can­ not shout his whisperings of admiration and scorn to the belle of the ball, Dos Passos stood on the periphery of the ball, enchanted with the vibrancy of American life, but abhorrent of the unthinking ~ndustrialization and urban­ ization of the Twentieth Century. He never denied the present existence of mechanization, but he deplored the

extensive spirit~al toll it took from America. Dos Passos lamented the corruption of Jefr'ersonian agrarian virtues. Writing.about this commitment to agrarianism, British critic.Mi°chael Millgate thought that it blunted Dos Passos' criticism of urban-industrial America1 but in truth, Dos Passos, along with Thorstein Veblen, worried over the loss of the instinct of workmanship and the general dampening effect that industrialization and urbanization had on American idealism and tranquillity. Thus Dos Passos sought to register in his fiction his complaints about mechanization. John Roderigo Dos Passos was born on January 14, 1896, in Chicago. He was an illegitimate child born to two -15 respectable high-society satellites, corporation lawyer and McKinley supporter, John Randolph Dos Passos and vivacious Virginian landowner, Lucy Addison Sprigg. In order to prevent embarassment to themselves, young John's parents kept him cloistered at the Virginia family estate until 1907, when they sent him to Choate School. Five years later he matriculated at Harvard and graduated from there cum laude in 1916. Heavily immersed in youthful idealism, Dos Passos volunteered for overseas ambulance service, but his father forced him to study ~rchitecture at home and abroad. Within a. year both his mother and father died, releasing John from familial commitments. Dos Passos, who was in Spain at the time of his father's death, re-enlisted at once in the Norton-Harjes ambulance corps, and served with the Italian Red Cross until his discharge. When America entered the war, Dos

Passos served s~x months in the U.S. Army in France until his discharge in the spring of 1919. Instead of returning to America, he remained in Europe for three years as an expatriate and adventure seeker. 2 Although bitter at America's lapse from idealism, Dos Passos was not as caustic as extreme expatriates like Edward Estlin Cummings~ Dos Passos found a bohemian, footloose life in Europe more appealing than the industrial routine in America. While in Europe, he wrote two novels, Three Soldiers and One

Man's Initiation, and one a3:_legorical trav~logue, -16 Rosinante to the Road Again. In 1922 Dos Passos returned to the United States and found bustling New York City suitable fare for his next· nove~ Manhattan Transfer (1925). The tragic case of Sacco and .Vanzetti:enlisted·much of his energies during the mid­

Twenties and sharpened his polit~cal consciousness. Dos Passes aligned himself with the socialist Left over the next ten years, but he never adhered to any doctrinaire position. This constant demand for independent politics formed the core of Dos Passos' ·political thought,_ and as the political spectrum shifted during the Thirties, he found himself being smeared by the Left as a turncoat.

After dabbling in other ~iterary genres during the 1920's, Dos Passos published the first novel of his u.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel in 193Q. In 1932 he added Nineteen, Nineteen and in 1936, The Big Money .. Dos Passes rapidly lost sympathy for both the.doctrinaire and liberal· Left during the late Thirties, and thus directed .. the satire Of his second trilogy, District of Columbia against com­ munism, fascism, and the New Deal. · Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949) comprised that trilogy. In 1941 he brouant out his version of the American liberal_ tradition, The Ground We Stann un. Disillusioned by what he.felt was crass e:x;ploitation of noble idealism during Worl~ War I, Dcis Passos remained at odds with American society until after World War II. After covering the war and the subsequent Nuremberg War Trials for Life, Dos Passos lost an eye in an auto­ mobile accident which killed his first wife. During the Fifties, Dos Passes wrote several unsuccessful novels (Chosen Country, Most Likely to Succeed, The Great Days, and Midcentury) and more volumes of popular history (The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson, The Men Who Made the Nation, and Mr. Wilson's War). By the Sixties Dos Passos identified with the conservative Republicans and contri­ buted articles to the National ~eview. On September 28, 1970, John Dos Passos died, cursed in some Leftist circles, neglected by the literary establishment, and weakly admired by the American right. Always a shy, soft-spoken man, Dos Passos maintained a passionate concern for individualism in American life. Some critics have suggested that Dos Passos psychologically suffered from a "Telemachus" complex due to neglect during childhood by his often absent father, but probably they have misread or read too much into Dos Passos' autobio­ graphical writings. 4 He was searching more for an accept-. able fatherland than a father. In Dos Passos' early years, as Walter Rideout noted, "his conviction that individual freedom was being lost within a steadily congealing social organism attracted him to any expression of revolt. 115 In his middle age, the same· conviction raised a strong but more muted protest. John Dos Passos truly was, as Maxwell -18 Geismar: wrote, 11 a Diogenes in modern dress',', searching not just for the proverbial. honest man, but for an honest 6 appraisal of American history.

II The U.S.A. trilogy was John. Dos Passos' most ambitious, artistic, and historically-conscious work. It will be use­ ful to discuss some of the artistic and structural prob­ lems of the trilogy, because they will contribute to an understanding of Dos Passos' use of history and History. In u.s.A.,'Dos PSiSSOS tried to set down in print the raw stuff of American history; he wanted to list and to translate the songs, false and true, which the Americans of 1900 to 1929 had been singing. His excellent use of narrative and story-telling prompted Jean Paul Sartre to write in 1938, "Dos Passos invented only one thing, the art of storytelling. But that is enough •••• I regard John Dos Passos as the greatest writer of our time. 117 Despite this accqlade from Sartre, U.S.A. has certain problems. Because Dos Passos struggled to encompass a socially-centrifuging America with a centripetally-oriented 11 s.ymmetrical series of hell pits", U.S.A. suffered several artistic flaws. 8 Marshall McLuhan deftly pointed out Dos Passos' preference for the Imagists' . "romantic tapestries and static contemplations of the ornate panorama of existence" over the "desire to be a romantic of action. 11 9: Arthur Mizener tho_ught that the "architectural orderliness" -19 of U.S.A. organized "a set of notes °for people and events, rather than. a fully realized.action. 1110 ·In content U.S.A. has two gaping omissions: no treatment of racial tension in the Deep South and no convincing assimilation of the heavy underswell of American home and family lifeo Maxwell Geismar commented on this second defect: With them Jihe characters of U.S.A:1 there is no love, no friendship, no satiS'tactions of family life at all, and in the end very little family life at all, and in the end very little human give-and-take in the common business of living ~no signs of . flexibility in this vast, rigid, encompassing framework of human narcissism, perversion, and sterility.11 Another problem with U.S.A. is one of definition. Is it a novel, or rather are its three components novels? Or is it simply re-arranged history? The publishers referred to them as contemporary chronicles, but that term is too modest. · U.S.A. aspired to the same literary pretensi_ons of sociop·sychological insight which many a successful roman fleuve or Bildungsroman also claimed. In our own age when the "non-fiction" novels of Capote, Styron, and Mailer are held in such high repute as novels, there is no reason for not granting the same distinction to U.S.A. Dos Passos used literary techniques to try to transmute history from chronological narrative to an epic tale. A small controversy has arisen· as to what extent Dos Passos let his subject present itself or how much he mani­ pulated it. Did Dos Passos impose a conceptual system on -20 his material? McJJuhan asserted that Dos Passos let his medium follow the dictates of the subject. 12 But Geismar and Alfred Kazin were closer to the mark. Geismar called

Dos Passos the 11 archetype of the rational writer", and Kazin, the most perceptive critic of Dos Passos, sensed

11 that the . hardness behind U.S.A. is an idea, not a feel4-.r•. _; ing. 111 3 Most telling is Dos Passos' donning of the clo:,th of a medieval moralist in his Everyman play of U.S.A., "The Body of An American." Also problematic is the locating of Dos Passos' per­ sona in the trilogy. His persona glows most prominently in his biographies of inventors, a reflection of his affinity

to Veblenian rationalism. In.the "Camera Eye 11 sections his persona "moralizes shyly, in a lyric stammer. 1114 But else­ where its appearance ranges in intensity from the hyster­ ical shrieking at Sacco's and Van;Zetti's deaths: "they have clubbed us off the streets ••• they have built the electric chair and hired the executioner to throw the switch ••• all right we are two nations ••• we stand defeated America" (USA, BM, 413-4) --to the deadpan description of the killing of luckless merchant seaman, Joe Williams: l]uring a barroom brawl in Franc:i Joe laid out a couple of frogs and was backing off towards the door, when he saw in the mirror that a big.guy in a blouse was bringing down a bottle on his head with both hands. He tried to swing around,_ but he didn't have time. The bottle crashed his skull and he was out. (USA, 1919, 205) Even with these limitations and points of controversy, -21 however, U.S.A. is a work of genius. Wrote Kazin: But the great thing about U.S.A. is that though it sweeps up so many human lives together and intones their waste and il­ lusion and defeat so steadily, we seem to be swept along with them and to see each life perfectly at the moment it passes by us.15 '

III In U.S.A., Dos Passos employed American history as the tenor (the idea being described) of the trilogy's central organizing metaphor, History. He constructed no unbelievable details or plots; he hired no Ariel to whip up a tempest of fantasy or surrealism. .U.S.A. was a natur­ alistic novel with some philosophic overtones. As the tenor, the raw stuff of American_ history, the sentiments - and actions of the years between 1900 and 1929 were de­ scribed and explained by the vehicle (the figure perform­ ing the c.omparison) •. Here the vehicle was multi-faceted; Dos Passos used four modes of expression: collaged "News- reels", prose-poem "Camera Eye" impressions, narratives of the experiences of twelve main characters, and capsule bio­ graphies of twenty-seven eminent Americans. The tenor,

history, and the :fourpart..-vahiclec c.ombin~d: ~o farnL:thEk.·::-: .l­

metaphor',: Historyi~~i=oDOS\ .. :f?assosvthen-:..:.Pexsonifi.~d-':.the-resU.l t­

ant:;metaphor: History lorded over ~he scurrying scenario with a fatalistic interest, molding the lives of the human participants. The interplay of metaphor, vehicle and tenor in U.S.A. -22 is very intricate. .l!,or example, Margo Dowling, a vehicle herself, is the fictional counterpart of the experiences of Isadora Duncan and Rudolph. Valentino. Their experiences in turn are subjectively described in each one of their own capsulized prose-poem biographies, which are vehicles of the tenor content, in this case, the careers of glamcm.r­ ized celebrities who cashed in on the demand in America for flashy cultural heroes. Then to come full circle, History molds the lives of the celebrities, Duncan and Valentino included, and their screaming audiences. Or to take a simpler example, Charley Anderson is the vehicular comment on the misapplication of Veblenian ideas to in­ dustry. Or for a third example, Thorstein Veblen himself appears· in his capsulizec;l biography as a vehicle, recording ·the failure of rapport between the intellectuals and

~merican society. The U.S.A. trilogy is a chronicle, a narrative novel of the hopes and defeats of native socialism in The 42nd Parallel, of the .intern.ational revolutionary movement in Nineteen, Nineteen, and of Veblen's technocratic dream in The Big Money. At the beginning of The 42nd Parallel a gambling confidence abounds among the characters and the times in general; by the end of The Big Money, American society, according to Dos Passos, had crystallized and stratified into tw0 class~s, not Marxian but Veblenian. The war, the governmental corruption, the false idealisms, -23 the sabotaging competitive capitalist system --all these henchmen of .History polarized American society. Dos Passes' narrative, itself a vehicular description of American history, was not linear. Rather Dos Passos spliced and collaged several stories into one larger story. His interweaving was masterful. The total effect of the tri­ logy is one of completeness; the work escapes the pieced­ together jerrybuilt tonality of amateur documentaries. Dos Passos marshalled four modes or techniques in his attempt to explain American.history. The first, and seemingly the simplest, is the "Newsreel", short collaged clippings from headlines and excerpts from newspaper passages. In an unpublished dissertation, Donald England traced the sources of the "Newsreels" of The 42nd Parallel and showed how Dos Passos manipulated the headlines and fragments. What England failed to pursue were the impli- cations of these juxtapositions, which were done for ironic statement and to re-create the experiences of a subway passenger hurriedly catching snatches of headlines, gulp­ ing them in disjointed fashion into his consciousness. Note the dizzying variety and light ironies of Newsreel.IV from The 42nd Parallel:

"I met my love in the Alamo when the moon was on the rise Her beauty quite bedimnied its light So radiant were her eyes"

, • t.• during the forenoon union pickets turned back a "-Eton loaded ldth fifty campchairs on its way to the fire engine house at :Michigan Avenue and Washington street. 'rhe chairs, it is reported, "Were ordered for the convenience of policemen detailed on strike duty -24

FLEETS NAY t-;EET IN BATTLE TODAY ~ST OF LUZON

three big wolves were killed before the dinner. A grand parade is proposed here in ~hi.ch President Roosevelt shall ride so that he can be seen by citizens. At the head ldll be a caged bear recently captured after killing a dozen dogs and injuring several men. The bear will be given an hour's start for the hills then the packs "Will be set on the trail and President Roosevelt and the ·guides will follow in pursuit.

Three Columbia Students Start Auto Trip to Chicago on Wager

GENERAL Sl'RIKE NOW THREATENS

"It's moonlight fair tonight upon the Wa-abash''

OIL Kl1G'S HAPPYESI' DAY

one cheiub every five minutes market for all classes of real­ estate continues to be healthy with good demand for factory sites residence and business opportunities court bills break labor

BLOODY SUNDAY IN MOSCOW

lady angels are snashed troops guard oilfields ;America tends to become empire like in the days of the Caesars five-dollar poem gets rich husband eat less says Edison rich pokerplayer £alas dead 'When he draws royal flush charges graft in Cicero

STRIKE MAY MEAN REVOLT IN RUSSIA

lake romance 'of two yachts murder ends labor feud Hichi­ gan IUOs all over.Albion red flags in St. Petersburg

CZAR YIELDS TO PEOPLE

holds dead baby forty hours families evicted by bursting wate:nnain

CZAR GH.A.. ~TS CONSrITUTION

"From the fields there comes the breath of new mom hay Throueh the sycamores the candlelight is gleaming"

(USA, 42ndP, 49-50) -25 The "Newsreels" form the basic structural framework, the historical underpinnings of the novels; one can easily re­ orient oneself chronologically in U.S.A. by reading the nearest "Newsreel". The second mode of expression is the "Camera Eye", autobiographical prose poems in the Joycean manner. All of the "Camera Eyes" fit more or less into the surrounding novel, but some are too personal or too introspective for solid connection to or commentary on the main narrative. Their chief functions are to introduce literary time and to inject into the novels what the "Newsreels" lack: color, tastes, smells, etc. Quite a few of the "Camera Eyes" are, as their name suggests, snapshots of the environment. For example, note the cubistic description in "Camera Eye" (29) from Nineteen, Nineteen:

the raindrops fall one by one out of the horsechestnut tree over the arbor onto the table in the abandoned beergarden and the puddly gravel and my clipped skull where my fingers move gently forward and back over the fuzzy knobs and hollo-ws spring and "We've just been swimming in the .Eame 'Nay off somewhere beyond the fat clouds on the horizon they are hammering on a tin roof in the rain in the spring after a s~im in the Mame ~~th that hammering to the north pounding the thought of death into our ears the ltlney thought of death stings in the spring blood that throbs in the sunbunied neck up and do~n the belly under t~e tieht belt hurries like cognac into the tips of my toes and the lobes of my ears and my fingers stroking the fuzzy closecropped skull shyly tingling fingers feel out the limits of the hard immortal skull under the flesh a deathshead and skeleton. sits wearing glasses in the arbor under the lucid occasional raindrops inside the new khaki uni- fonn inside my twentyoneyearold body that's been swimming in the Marne in red and whitestriped trunks in Chalons in the spring (USA, 1919, 63) -26 If Dos Passos had set himself up as a Gulliverian­ proportioned allego~y of History, as Mailer has, then the "Camera Eyes" would be charged with more significance. As it was, they were the peripheral part of the scheme of U.S.A. They do represent the Education of John Dos Passos, but Dos Passos was reluctant to press the comparison of his own "history" to History. The narrative of fictional characters' lives is the third mode. Dos Passes traced the metamorphoses of twelve major characters and assorted lesser ones. He delineated no character in detail. They are not grotesques, but rather nondescript zombies, or as McLuhan termed them, "victims of a collective trance from which they do not struggle to escape. 111 7 Dos. Passos imbued none of the char- -acters, with the.possible exception of Mary French, the social worker turned Communist, with any endearing qual­ ities or any permanent, noble virtues or strengths. Mill­ gate remarked on Dos Passos' technique of drawing his characters: Dos Passos creates a documentary effect by reporting everything in the same tone of voice; the humour is deadpan, the tragedy is viewed with apparent detachment. "Tragedy" indeed is hardly the word to use in this context, for tragedy demands a personal responsibility and freedom to choose that Dos Passos' characters do not have; this is a "naturalistic" novel, and the characters are in the grip of forces they are powerless to control.18 · The characters are vague on purpose. They are fuzzy -27 stereotypes, and as such gave U.S.A.· a singularly powerful

lateral fle~ibility. They in themselves were not import­ ant to Dos Passos except as each acted as a separate re­

lector and as a tabula ~ of historical events and bold forces. As critic Arnold Goldman observed, "Dos Passos allows historical events --the outbreak of war, the Peace .Conference-- to be responsible for the movements of his characters, the basic shapes of their lives and in turn of his fiction. 111 9 Furthermore, the characters serve as an interrelated set of vehicles. ,The twelve main persons are all loosely related non-familially to each other as History swept them together. This interrelation added dimension to the book in a Faulknerian sense, as the viewpoints of two or more characters describe the same event. Whereas Dos Passos left the main characters purposely vague, he drew the subjects of his fourth mode, the cap­ sulated b·iographies, crystal-clearly, not necessarily as people but as symbols. These biographies are by far the best written pieces in the trilogy. By skilfull use of ellipsis, summary and compression, Dos Passos packed into a few pages each the lives of twenty-six eminent actual. Americans and one extracommon American, the ·Unknown ·

Soldier. Dos Passos' SYIF:pat~ .forc;each,:::characte·rLf·elliinto four general categories: favorable --the radical idealists, the common man, and the functional theorists who followed their own dreams; moderately favorable --inventors who ~28 were in themselves noble, but whose ideas and inve,ntions were perverted by big business; moderately unfavorable --politicians and other crowd pleasers; and unfavorable --big businessmen. 20 These figures were ostensibly the "molders" of America in their own right, but as vehicles describing the tenor, history, these characters were sub- servient to History. Certainly History got the best of hunchback idealist Randolph Bourne, who at the end of his biography is reduced to a ghost:

If any man has a ghost Bourne has a ghost, a tiny twisted unscared ghost in a black cloak hopping along the grimy old brick and bro"Wnstone streets still left in do"Wntown New York, crying out in a shrill soundless giggle: "War is the health of the-state." {!I§!, 1919, 91) When Dos Passos combined the novels into the one- volume edition of the trilogy in 1937, he added a prelude, "U.S.A." and an epilogue, "Vag" •. These two devices serve as admirable structural bookends, keeping the continuity and striking the despairing tones of the trilogy. The young man in "U.S.A." walks hungrily into a city, ears ringing from shouts of opportunity, but the same young man, more haggard in "Vag", is forced out of the city, a vagrant who senses only too explicitly the sham of American op­ portunity. The experiences of the young man are allegor­ ical as are those of the Unknown Soldier, an American Everyman in "The Body of An American". In the manner of the symbol employed, Dos Passos collected the fragments -29 of A~erica into one John Doe, who was sent to fight a rich man's war in France. "The Body of An American" is perhaps the most effective and most economic blending of fiction and history in American literature: the Unknown Soldier is at once fictional and historical. The ending of the poem is particularly poignant:

The shell had his number on it.

The blood ran into the ground.

The service record dropped out 9f the filing cabinet when the quartennaster sergeant got b),.otto that time they had to pack up and leave the billets in a hurry. · The identification tag \\as in the bottom of the Marne.

The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of bluebottle flies, and the incorruptible skelton, and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki

they took to Chlhons-sur-Narne and laid it out neat in a pine coffin and. took it home to God's Country on a battleship and buried it in a sarcophagus in the Memorial .Alnphi theater in the A.rlinf:,rton National Cemetery and draped the Old Glory over it and the bugler played taps and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column. of the Wash­ ington Post stood up solemn and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God's Country it -r.-as to have the bugler play taps and the three volleys made their ears ring.

Where his chest ought to have been tl~ey pinned the Congressional Medal, the D.S. C., the tt.6daille Mili taire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, the Vitutea .Mili tara sent by QUeen Marie of Rumania, the Czechoslovak War Cross, the Virtuti Militari of the Poles, a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish, Jr., of New York, and a little wampum presented by a deputation of Arizona redskins in warpaint and feathers. All the Washingtonians brought -3()'

flowers.

1'.bodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies. (USA, 1919, 411-2)

IV. It might seem too reductionist to present "The Body of An American" as the distillation of American experience.

Yet the final tone of U.S.A. is one of death~not iife. Four of the twelve central characters suffer physical death, two by suicide, during t.he course of the trilogy. Another is on the threshold of natural death. All twelve, however, are stricken by spiritual or mental death long before the end of the trilogy as they fall prey to what John Wrenn called "the great antagonist of the trilogy, 21 - complacency", an impersonal, outward symptom of the work- ings of .History. If the characters' lives, their own "historie-s" were to resemble an energy curve, we would find all the characters in U.S.A. past their energetic peak and well on the way to stasis. Kazin was not being flippant when he wrote that in U.S.A. all equations come to equal zero. 22 The end result of History, ·as suggested by Dos. Passos, is the apotheosis of dullness. He himself wrote: It•s as if the carnage of the European War and the years following it and the rapid mechanization of life had entirely dulled the imaginative response (putting yourself in the other man's place) that's biologically at the bottom of feei~ngs of mercy and com­ passion. 23 -31 The lives of the twelve characters personify Dos Passos' worst fears about America. J. Ward Moorehouse, the aluminum-foil sun in U.S.A.'s revolving universe, is born on the ]'ourth of July, and hence comes to embody loud but·deedless patriotism. Moorehouse starts out as a hard­ working Horation Alger type and soon meets his windfall in the form of marriage into a rich family and entry into the rising public relations business. Each time we encounter him, Moorehouse is a shade more respectable, a decibel ~ louder, an inch more inflated, but also a cup emptier. After his constant uncritical defense of capitalist pre­ rogative and his long soft rest upon the flimsy laurels of defunct status quo ideas, Moor.ehouse breaks down physically, ironically while his softsell agency is landing a fat con­ tract with a health food supplier. After years of grovel­ ling before the Moloch of History, Moorehouse awaits his death as the trilogy closes. Eleanor Stoddard, Moorehouse's soulless mistress and confidante, grows more refined, bitter, and sexless. Significantly an interior decorator at the outset, Eleanor forsakes her meager pretense at aesthetics and throws her­ self into the intricate social politics of Moorehouse's circle. Near the end of the trilogy she spurns Moore­ house. and promises to marry an elderly Russian nobleman, an arrangement she knows will be sterile. Eleanor has a Passionate hatred of dirt of any kind, whether it be social -32 scum or honest sweat. She is emblematic of the haughty, austere WASP-ish tradition that retains a stranglehold on vibrancy. She is a schemer, a calculator, a perfect com­ plement to Moorehouse's windy dynamism. Eveline Hutchins, Eleanor's dilettantish friend, begins the trilogy in a state of utter ennui. American life for her is "just too tiresome". Her experiences range from an abortive business venture with Eleanor to Red Cross work in France and an exceedingly dull marriage and motherhood. Always seeking an impossible excitement, she sleeps around with bohemians. After her marriage she manages two affairs and throws regular parties for her parlor-radical friends. Unable at last to overcome her boredom, Eveline commits suicide. In Richard Savage we find a more complex character. Much of ·savage's early idealism seems to be drawn from Dos Passos' own experiences, but the Oak Park, Illinois birth­ place and Savage's very name suggest Ernest Hemingway as a possible model. In any case, Savage bears the constant burden of trying to recoup his family's lost status. At first Savage has severe misgivings over the question of. innocence, but soon dispatches those traumas with a preacher's wife and reverses his philosophy in a welter of hedonistic bohemianism at Harvard. · The American entry into the war forces Savage back to his former realities, and only a machination by a family friend spares Savage a jail sentence. Instead he ships out with the Norton-Harjes -33' ambulance corps, In France Savage discovers the hypocrisy inside the war effort and returns as a disillusioned cynic. That same old family friend manuevers Savage through the best social circles and lands him a position at Moorehouse's firm. Savage soon folds before the con- comitant social pressures, has short affairs with Eleanor and Eveline, and comes full circle to be the willing pro­ tege/ of J. Ward Moorehouse. The life of Richard Savage is the grim record of the death of pre-war idealism in America and of its subjugation to mechanistic capitalism. Anne Elizabeth Trent, daughter of a nouveau riche family of Dallas, Texas, succumbs to Savage's charms while they both are in Italy. He is on the verge of loving her, but when she tells him that she is pregnant, all he can see is her blatant crudity. Resolutely Savage leaves Anne to her own devices. Extremely upset, she commits suicide in retaliation while on a crazy flight with a drunken Italian aviator. The case of.Charley Anderson is especially tragic. After a knockabout childhood in Minnesota and North Dakota, Charley leaves the sticks for the war and afterwards re- turns as a war hero. Charley is intent on perfecting an. airplane engine for commercial development. Conditioned by American historical success myths, Charley shoots for the "big money", but only succeeds in developing a starter. Discouraged, he launches into a downward spiral of booze -34 and broads. Then one evening, while in a drunken stupor, Charley races a train to a crossing, only to stall on the tracks. The train smacks his car, because ironically the starter misfunctioned. Charley Anderson's demise symbol­ ically reflects ·the defeat of the Veblenian technocratic dream. The situation is no better for labor than for manage­ ment. Fenian 11 Mac 11 McCreary grows up in the Irish quarter in Middletown, Connecticut, and Chicago, amid a series of lowpaying printing jobs. One day he gets wind of the Wobbly movement in the Old Northwest and goes off on a relentless search for "action" in that movement. Invari­ ably he ge.ts exploited at every turn by conniving elements within the solidarity front. At one point Mac marries and settles down in San .Francisco, but as soon as he realizes that he cannot mix marriage and revolutionary politics, he hits the road again. Eventually Mac ends up in the thick of the Mexican revolution and counterrevolution. But this time, instead of clearing out for the territories, Mac stays, buys a bookstore, and marries a Mexican girl. Of all the characters only Mac winds up with anything resem­ bling happiness. Yet even that is pyrrhic.in nature and symbolically outside the confines of the United States. Dos Passos, himself of Portugese extraction, had an affinity for the latinate peoples and cultures. Ben Compton represents the urban Jewish radical. As a -35 skinny, bright but myopic Brooklynite, Ben rebels against the Orthodox stance of his parents and trains himself to be a well-sharpened weapon for socialism by becoming a lawyer. Unnecessarily paranoid, Ben adheres rigidly to socialist doctrine. For all his pains, he speaks at a large strike meeting and receives a sound thrashing in the ensuing riot at the'hands of the police. At his trial, Ben catches a prison stretch at Atlanta. He is released after ten years and returns to New York only to find the socialist movement in sad disrepair. After an abortive love affair with Mary French, Ben faces an uncertain future, having been expelled by the mainline Stalinists. Mary French, too, has troubles with the Stalinists. She experiences a tense childhood in Colorado, where her father, a genuinely altruistic doctor is ·constantly tor­ mented by her very ambitious mother. After her father dies, Mary's mother sends her East to prestigious Vassar. Lured by dreams of becoming another Jane Addams, Mary re­ linquishes college for a job as a newspaper reporter in Pittsburgh. When she is sent one day to investigate the radical agitation in the steel mills, she returns a truth­ ful report and is promptly fired. Indignant at this shock to her ideals, Mary throws herself heart and soul into the

Communist organizing movement. In., place of finding a rewarding life, all she finds is one as a cog in the rigid, humdrum party bureaucracy. -36 Margo Dowling is easily the most perverted character in the trilogy. Reared by an acting troupe, Margo devel­ ops a theatrical presence early. After a nightmarish child-marriage to a Cuban, Margo returns to America, set on making herself a show business star. Once in Hollywood, she treads down all human obstacles between herself and success, and even hires her Cuban ex-husband as her chauf­ feur. Stereotypically, Margo sleeps her way up the show­ business ladder; finally she attains her goal of stardom, but she has become a jaded and vainglorious caricature of a human being. In our last glimpse of her, we see her responding in reflex manner to flashing camera lights. Janey Williams, Moo,rehouse' s private secretary, loses the lilac dreams of her Georgetown girlhood, and grows progressively tight~r, primmer and dryer with her unquest­ ioning faith in efficiency. But it is her brother Joe, who is most at the mercy of History. After a family quarrel, Joe enlists in the Navy, but deserts during war­ time after assauiting an officer. With forged papers and no passport, he joins the merchant marine. During one shore leave, Joe meets and later marries a girl, who makes him promise to raise his rank. Joe conscientiously begins his education, but ships out once more to get money to pay the costs of education. Due to wartime security,· Joe gets detained in France, his ship is torpedoed twice, and he gets shipped back and forth across the Atlantic twice. -37 When he arrives home finally, he finds his wife regu.larly cheating on.him. Joe leaves enraged, signs on for another voyage, and meets his death in a French barroom. Abou.t Joe Williams, Kazin wrote: Gloe Williami} is hu.rled between continents, Joe, the su.preme Dos Passos cipher and vic­ tim and symbol, su.ffering his life with du.rob u.nconsciau.sness of how ou.trageou.s his life is, and continually dropped from one ship to another like a piece of cargo.24 Such is the sad face of life in U.S.A. But the face changed with aging and new wrin~les appeared. As Dos Passos grew more disenchanted with the doctrinaire Left during the late Thirties, he retreated to a more ambival­ ent stance toward History. He portrayed some new mani- f estations of the villainou.s side of History in his second trilogy, District of Columbia, bu.t in that trilogy and in a work of popular history, The Ground We Stand On, he fou.nd a part of .History, the liberal tradition, to be a source of strength for American society.

v In Dos Passos' second trilogy, District of Columbia, he forsook any grand overview of the nation comparable to that in U.S.A. and instead concentrated on the problems of returning dynamic, flexible government to Washington. The District of Columbia contains more autobiographical and straight political material than does U.S.A., and consequ­ ently the artistry suffers. Written over a ten-year span, -38 the trilogy becomes progessively duller and tract-like as Dos Passos resorted to more political commentary than art. Each novel rejects the validity for democracy of one dif­ ferent ossifying historical agent. Adventures of a Young Man (1939) satirized communism, Number One (1943) lashed out at native fascism, and The Grand Design (1949) expres­ sed bitterness at the shortcomings of the New Deal. Dos Passos strung th trilogy around the disintegrating Spotswood family, Herbert and his two sons, Glenn and Tyler, all of whom are reduced ,to shambles by their adopted movements. The Spotswoods are unrepresentative of family life in the trilogy, for Dos Passos balanced each unfort­ unate Spotswood demise with an example of confident, inte­ grated family life. He presented a pattern of affirmation ·as well as rejection, an affirmation begun with the in- ventors in U.S.A. In Adventures of a Young Man, Glenn Spotswood grows up sensing the hypocrisy of the American dream, a hypocrisy so pervasive that it has permeated American society to the extent that a woodlands resort becomes a bastion of con­ servative stodginess and red-baiting. After an encounter with a shallow brand of Freudianism at Columbia, Glenn steeps himself in Communist labor-organizing drives in the Appalachian coal fields, much as Dos Passos himself worked on a drive in Harlan County, Kentucky in 1931. Having a mystical Trotskyite bent, Glenn clashes with the Stalinist -39 wing, unfavorably personified by brutish Dr, Jane Sparling. After a failure to save several arrested miners from jail, and after a few beatings by local toughs, Glenn realizes that he has been used as a pawn. The Spanish Civil War breaks out then, and Glenn.volunteers on the lioyalist side. But the Communists, who are. exploiting the war for polit­ ical purposes and who distrust~:Glenn, assign him to an out­ of-the-way post and shrewdly arrange his ambush. If Glenn is too weak or too circumstanced to overcome these historical forces, ~aul Graves draws on them for strength. Paul's vision of utopia is the static pastoral, small family farm. A childhood pal of Glenn's, Paul learns scientific farming, marries confidently, and goes to the Soviet Union during the Twenties as a technical advisor.

This last move Paul .regards as a hard-headed, pr~gmatic venture, not as a polLtical move. Adventures of a Young Man capsulated Dos Passos' strong anti-Communist stand expressed as early as 1932 in his doubts about Marxism: It seems to me that Marxians who attempt to junk the American tradition, that 1 admit is full of dry rot as well as sap, like any tradition, are just cutting themselves off from the continent. Bome­ body' s got to have size to Marxianize the American tradition before you sell the American worker on the social revol­ ution. Or else Americanize Marx. 2' In the second novel, Number One, Glenn's dissolute older brother, Tyler, is scapegoated by a native fascism. Disgusted by his aimless war-inspired apathy and by the -40 legacy of his weak-willed pacifist father, Tyler takes what he thinks is a positive step by joining the machine of Texan politician, Chuck "Number One" Crawford, a proto­ fascist, loosely based on Huey Long. So reminiscent of Charley Anderson in The Big Money, Tyler works his way up the organization to the spot of pre.ss agent, but succumbs to a vicious circle of drink, women and cigarettes. He gropes blindly for a way out, but his vision is too blood­ shot, his strength too spent. He begins to criticize Crawford, and when Crawford and some friends are nearly exposed for a crooked oil-lease dea+, they pressure a drunken Tyler into signing the bonds, thereby sending him to prison. The most poignant scene in the novel occurs near the end, when Tyler receives a letter from his recently-killed brother, a letter of his brother's re­ conciliation to America (NO, 280-2). Tyler breaks down

and weep~ at his helplessness. Dos Passos' subject of affirmation in Number One is partially the family life of Chuck Crawford (although he

disapproves of Crawford's ruthless poli~ics), but mainly the "people." In the long prose poems that intersperse· the chapters, Dos Passos drew powerful pictures of the

dogged efforts _of "the little man. 11 The poems start "When you try to find the people, always in the end it comes down to somebody ••• " and that somebody is a farmer, a mechanic, a chainstore clerk, etc. Still, the running -41 theme of the novel implies that these "little men" can both foster· and be used by fascism. As Kazin wrote of Number One: "Its tragedy was too dense, the theme too tonal a disgust; history emerged in it only as a brazen Aztec god on whose altars everyone was broken and sacrificed. 1126 The third novel, The Grand Design, follows Herbert Spotswood from a pacifist to a hate-preaching anti-Hitler radio announcer. Dos Passos does not center on Spotswood, but rather uses him as a mouthpiece for his own political disappointments. The villain of the novel is the New Deal. The protagonists, Paul Graves, now returned from the Soviet Union and spearheading a rural renewal bureau, and Millard Carroll, Paul's sincere but bureaucratically hamstrung superior, fight a losing battle for a genuine New Deal for the farmers. The tight, loving Graves and Carroll famil­ ies again reflect Dos Passos' return to the simple virtues. History appears as the slippery rhetoric of Walker Watson, Secretary of Agriculture, a piece of "Presidential Timber" modelled after the real Henry Wallace. Written in 1949, The Grand Design retrospectively explored the latent fascism within the New Deal. In the lat_e Thirties, Dos Pas sos managed to wring out of American history a liberal tradition with which to com­ bat fascist ideology. In October, 1936, Dos Passos wrote to F. Scott Fitzgerald, "I'm trying to take courses in -42 American history, and most of the time the course of the world events seems so frightful that I feel ••• that I've got to hurry to get the stuff out before the big boys crack down on us. 112 7 The printed result was The Ground We Stand On (1941), a work intended for popular consumption. In the introductory essay, "The Use of the Past", Dos Passos stated his theory concerning the use of historical tradit- ion. One must look to the past in order to find "a sense of continuity with generations gone before, ~hici.i] can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present", and in order to give one "That cantilever bridge into the future that we call hope a firm foundation in whai; has been" (GWSO, 3, 8). This bridge and lifeline, Dos Passos thought, could be found in the American liberal instinct: On the whole the struggle has been· carried on thus far without destroying the fabric o·f society. In any cross-section of our history you can find the political liberal instinct running like a binding thread through the welter of interests, inertias, impulses, greeds, fears, and heroisms that make up any event. (GWSO, 9) . In the face of fascism, Dos Passos felt that this tradition could be comforting: When we wake up in the night cold and. sweating with nightmare fear for the future of our country we can settle back with the reassuring thought that the Bnglish-speaking peoples have these habits engrained in them. (GWSO, 9) In the.main body of the work, Dos Passos takes one on a long ramble through the lives and writings of Hoger -43 Williams, Franklin, Samuel Adams, Jefferson, Joel Barlow, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge, pointing out their liberal tendencies. Dos Passos claimed that this liberal tradit- ion has been "elastic enough to allow drastic changes in­ side of its fabric" (GWSO, 11). But that statement is proscriptive and at variance with his usual descriptive tone. As Dos Passos himself admitted, the liberal trad- ition has not been regnant in America: We must never forget that men don't make up much of their own behavior; they be­ have within limits laid down by their heredity, their upbringing and their group background. Th~t is why individual men feel so helpless in the face of soc­ ial changes. Modifications in the struct­ ure of any organization of men can't ever really take effect till the next generation. A revolution can keep people from behaving in the old. way but it can't make them behave effectively in the new way •. (GWSO, 10-11)

VI . So much discussion has been devoted to the techniques and characters of U.S.A. and District of Columbia, because they all illustrate Dos Passos' conception of History as a "matrix". Before we explore the meaning of matrix, let us recapitulate briefly Dos Passos' usage of history. Dos Passos used the raw stuff of American history, the past experiences of man, as the tenor, the idea being described by his vehicle (his literary techniques and his characters). The tenor and vehicle combined to produce the metaphorical History. Now Dos Passos personifies History and finds that -44 it acts as a matrix. By matrix I do not mean the purely mathematical definition of matrix as any array of numbers and symbols. Matrix, as used here, refers to a lattice­ type arrangement which first provides structure and second molds and channels persons and ideas.· In the novels, Dos Passos remained ambivalent on the morality of the matrix, that is, if the matrix was a thing of unadulterated evil or a positive good. In U.S.A. he flatly denounced History as too constrictive, but in his second trilogy, District of Columbia, he found certain parts of the matrix to be strangulating, but also other parts of the matrix to be sources of cementing social strength. One has only to recall the earlier discussion of hist- ory as tenor to realize the obviousness of Dos Passos' use ·of the structural elements of the matrix. The actions form the co-ordinates of position.and movement, and the sentiments chart the avenues of thought. Willard Thorp elaborated on this trellis-like quality of History as a matrix: {If the characters of U.S.A. are without depthJ at least they have extension, rather as if they could only be known by their relations with the other char­ acters whom they touch, the co-ordinates so to speak, whic~ determines their position for us.28

As a molding agent, History a~ _matrix has some determin­ istic qualities: avenues dwindle in width and length, possible futures die or grow tenebrous, and the demands of -45 the system crowd out free choice and will. Traditions and systems, particularly those in U.S.A., ossify, routinize, and dehumanize. At the end of Nineteen, Nineteen, Dick Savage wishes that he "was hard enough so that [lie wouldn 1.I] give a damn about anything lli.ecausiJ When history's walk­ ing on all our faces is no time for pretty sentiments." (USA, 1919, 403). By the end of The Big Money, Savage's wish has become reality: Now we may like the way American business does things or we may not like it, but it's a historical fact like the Himalaya Mountains and no amount of kidding's going to change it. It's only through public relations work that business is protected from wildeyed cranks and demagogues who are always ready to throw a monkeywrench into the industrial machine. (USA, BM, 453) Operating through organizations, institutions, and entrenched interest groups, History as matrix tends to stratify societies, to stultify creativity, and to foster mechanistic behavior almost to the point of Skinner-box predictability. Moorehouse's platitudes are standard and clichtd. Eleanor chooses sterility. Eveline and Charley search for unattainable excitement. Margo has a reflex for camera lights. Mac, and Ben, and Mary opt for the same old tired slogans of the revolutionaries. It would be too simplistic to say that History as matrix is static as opposed to dynamic. Great.amounts of social activity and social change do occur .in the novels, but the mobility is limited and nearly always illusory, -46 patterned, futile, and predictable. Characters in U.S.A. or District of Columbia may act upon their own volition, but they usually just tighten their nooses, stir their own quicksand. The stasis is not so prevailing as to preclude decay and disintegration. Walter Rideout, respected critic of proletarian novels, has perceptively commented on Dos Passes' intellectual debt to Edward Gibbon (whom young Dos Passos admired greatly): "As the trilogy l].s.A'] develops, one sees that it is the history of the rise and incipient decline of yet another empire. 112 9 Nor does History as matrix preclude idealism --it either breaks the ideals or perverts the semantics. Jtior example, from "Camera Eye" (49) from The Big Money:

rebuild the ruined 'Wards ~m slimy in the mouths of la\\yers districtattomeys collegepresidents judges ~~thout the old ~urds the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers .America or that this fishpeudler you have in Charlesto1-tn Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts? (USA, BM, 391) If Dos Passos' novels are not completely static, they certainly do not embody a dynamic principle. If static is an inadequate adjective, perhaps claustrophobic is L better.30 American society seems self-contained in Dos Passes' works; one gets no sense of a body of mankind travelling on a trajectory through the universe. The panorama which he presented was an enclosed hall of mirrors with the images redoubling on themselves. Vision is cur- tailed and tunnelled. That U.S.A. has been fairly easily adapted to the stage is more testament to its "extended ,. -47

11 microcosmicness • It is no accident that Dos Passos' in- clination for architecture should find expression in his novels and popular histories. Dos Passos' concept of History as matrix is pessimistic. By emphasizing claustro- phobic tendencies rather than entropic ones, History as matrix tells us that our choices as both society and individual are limited and not likely to expand. Norman Mailer's concept of History, much more optimistic, posits an entropic state of affairs likely to keep expanding.

1 Michael Millgate, American Social Fiction 2 James to Cozzens (Edinburgh and ~ondon: Oliver and Boyd, 1964), 210. 2 For an intermittent account of Dos Passos' expatriation see Malcolm Cowley, Exile's Return (New York: Viking Press, 1934J and Carlos H. Baker, Ernest Hemingwa), A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1969 •

3Dos Passos often expressed disillusion over the discrepancies between ideals and actual­ ities of the American cause. dee U.S.A., 121..2, 84: 11 This war's a goddam whorehouse. 11

4see John H. Wrenn, John Dos Passos (New York: Twayne Publishers, lnc., 1961;, Chap. i "A Modern Telemachus", Chap. 2 "Peregrinations in Print" and Chap. 3, "Homeward Bound".

5walter B. Rideout, The Radical Novel in the United States, 1900-54 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 157. 6 Maxwell Geismar, Writers in Crisis, 1925-40 (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Co., 1947), 91.

7Jean Paul Sartre, as quoted by Kazin, "John Dos Passos: Inventor in Isolation", Saturday Review (March 15, 1969), 19; the similarity -48 between Sartre and Dos Passos does not go beyond admiration of style. Dos Passos was not an existentialist, or rather his fiction shows no significant existentialist overtones. His characters define their existence in terms of their essence.

8Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds (New York: Harcourt, .Brace and ~forld, 1 942), 315.

9Herbert Marshall McLuhan, "John Dos Passos: Technique versus ciensibility" in A. Walton Litz, ed., Modern American Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 138, 149.

10Arthur Mizener, The Sense of ~ife in the Modern American Novel (.Boston: Houghton­ Mifflin, 1964;, 149. 11 Geismar, Writers iri Crisis, 127. 12 McLuhan, "Technique versus Sensibility", 140. 1 3 Geisma~, Writers in Crisis, 87; Kazin, "Inventor in Isolation", 17-8. 1 · 4K azin,· u- n N a t'1ve Groun d s, 3-3J •

15Ibid., 353.

16veblen's ideas influenced two large parts of the tenor, the efficiency and Progressive movements. Although Veblen's ideas do in­ fluence the tenor and his life as vehicle mirrors the despair of the intellectuals, Veblen was controlled and molded by History, which he was helping to create.

17McLuhan, "Technique versus Sensibility", 139. 18 Millgate, American Social· 1!1iction, 131. 19 Arnold Goldman, "Dos .Passos and his U.S.A.", New ~iterary History, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 475-6. -49 20 The members of the categories are as follows: Favorable: Eugene Debs, "Lover of Mankind" William Haywood, "Big Hill" Robert La.:F1ollette, Sr., 11 Jt1ighting Bob" Jack Reed, "Playboy" Randolph Hourne, "Randolph .rlourne" Paxton Hibben, "A Hoosier ~uixote" Wesley .l!.verest, "Pau.l Bunyan" The Unknown ooldier, "The .rlody of An American" Thorstein Veblen, 11 '.rhe .Bitter Drink" Wright Brothers, "The Campers at K.itty Hawk" Jt1 rank Lloyd Wright, "Architect" Moderately Favorable: Luther Burbank, "The Plant Wizard" Thomas hdison, "The blectrical Wizard" Charles Bteinmetz,· "Proteus" Frederick Taylor, 11 The American Plan" Henry Ford, "Tin Lizzie" Moderately Unfavorable: William Jennings Bryan, 11 The Boy Orator of the Platte" Theodore Roosevelt, "The Happy Warrior" Woodrow Wilson, "Meester Veelson 11 Isadora Duncan, "Art and Isadora" Rudolph Valentino, "Adagio .Jane er"· William Randolph Hearst, "Poor .Little Rich Boy" Unfavorable: Minor c. i.eith, "hmperor of the Caribbean" Andrew Carnegie, "Prince of Peace" J.1'. Morgan, "The House of Morgan" Samuel Insu.11, "Power Superpower"

21 wrenn, John Dos Passos, 16~.

22.Kazin, On Native Grounds, 342. 2 3Dos Fassos, as quoted by Kazin, On Native Grounds, 377. 24 Ibid., 356. 25 Dos Passos, as quoted by Daniel Aaron, Writers on the ~eft (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961)1 192. -50

26.Kazin, "Where l~ow, Voyager?", New Republic, CVIII, 11, (March 15, 1943), 353.

27Dos Passos, as quoted by Wrenn, John Dos Passos, 76-7.

28willard Thorp, American Writing in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 139-40.

2 9Rideout, Radical Novel in US, 161; also see USA, 1.212., 324-5.

30This claustrophobic quality resembles the contents of Robert Heilbroner's remarks on "The Closine;;-in of History" in his The Future as Histor~ lNew York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook,.1960). Chapter Three

Norman Mailer's Concept of History

-51- -52 In many ways, Norman.Mailer has been the reverse of John Dos Passos. 1ike Dos J:>assos, Mailer used an animated History as a central metaphor in his writings, but instead of viewing history as the tenor of that metaphor, that is, the idea being described, Mailer employed history as the Vehicle to describe and ill.uminate a more unfathomable tenor, namely the inner states of man. Constantly Mailer forces us to realize that there exists a body of phenomena of consciousness behind the raw stuff of history, and that if we are to gain any insight i'nto our own existence, we must come to realize the necessity of attempting to describe the interior as well as the exterior by way of their meta­ phorical combination, History. Perpetually outspoken in sentiment apd slightly eccentric in action, Mailer has flung himself to the forefront of postwar literary and social controversies.

Born on January 31, 1923 in ~ong Branch, New Jersey, Mailer passed through a conventional boyhood in Brooklyn after his parents, Isaac and J! 1anny Mailer moved there. Norman graduated from Boys High School in Brooklyn in 1939 and entered Harvard to study aeronautical, engineering. While at Harvard, Mailer divided his energ}es between his major, house football, and creative writing seminars, the last because, according to Mailer himself, before he had entered Harvard, he had formulated the desire to be a major novelist. -53 After ·graduation from Harvard in 1943, Mailer drafted and inducted into the U.S. Army. He viewed this happen­ stance as advantageous in that he could collect rich ex- perience and material for a war novel. He even turned down a desk job for rifleman duties. He served with the 112th Cavalry stationed at Ban Antonio, Texas, and spent eighteen months overseas in the Pacific theater and after the surrender, in Japan and the Philippines with occupation forces. Mailer returned stateside ·in 1946, but soon left for study at the Sorbonne. This sojourn to France was most likely in Mailer's case a mild form of expatriation. In Paris he wrote his immensely successful first novel, The Naked and the Dead. Returning to America in 1948 to re- ceive critical acclaim, he followed by campaigning for

Progressive Party Presidential ca~didate, Henry Wallace.

Mailer engaged in ~eftist political argument, but like Dos Passos, he did not join any specific political group. In 1951, after a divorce from his first wife, Mailer published the commercially disastrous but unfairly overlooked Barbary Shore. The half-successful Hollywood novel, The Deer Park, followed in 1955, but only after a protracted dispute over censorship. On the political side, Mailer co-edited Dissent magazine from 1953 to 1963 and in 1956 co~founded The Village Voice.· During the late Fifties, Mailer resided in Greenwich Village and still frequents -54 that section. , After The Deer Park, Mailer virtually abandoned pol- itics for a time and turned to mystical speculations on existentialism and the Hipster. He voiced these views in The White Negro (1957) and Advertisements for Myself (1959). In 1960, Mailer seriously "threatened" to run for the mayoralty of New York City (Mailer frequently claimed that during the Fifties and Sixties he had been running for the . Presidency in the privacy of his own mind), but an untimely and well-publicized stabbing of· his second wife cut that venture short.

Throughout the Sixties and so far into the ~eventies, Mailer has diversified his literary output. He re-worked

The Deer Park into play ~orm and published a volume of

·poetry entitled Deaths for the ~adies and Other Disasters (1962). In 1963 he offered to John Kennedy The President­ ial Papers, a collection of essays, and in 1966 to £yndon Johnson another volume in the same mode, Cannibals and

Christians. Thi~ fine-tuned style of creative journalism combined with the imaginative fiction of An American Dream (1965) and Why Are We In Vietnam? (1967) to culminate in his The Armies of the Night (1968), which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Following in this same

vein came the coverage of the 1968 presidential convent~ ions, Miami and the Siege of Ghicago (1969). By 1967, he rewrote The Deer Park play, and created three self-financed -55 movies in 1968: Wild 90, Beyond the Law, and Maidstone. In 1969, Mailer ran with fellow writer Jimmy Breslin for the Mayoralty of New York City on the Existentialist platform, promising to bring imagination into city politics. They finished fourth out of five tickets. 1 Also during that summer, besides separating from his fourth wife, Mailer reported the Apollo 11 moonshot for Life magazine; since then he has expanded the moonshot articles into a booklength account, Of a ]'ire on the Moon (1970). His latest literary ventures have been some more workings in creative journalism: writing up the Ali-Frazier boxing fight. for --Life in March, and polemical discussions for and against Women's Liberation, The Prisoner of Sex (1971). Currently residing in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Mailer has promised that a major novel is forthcoming. Although he has been unfairly accused of literary quackery and intellectual exhibitionism, Mailer has been a fresh and unpredictable respite from the colorless postwar literary world •. With his "reckless flair, go-for-broke raids on the universe" Mailer has been engaged, as fellow

~itterateur Seymour Krim reported, in a humbling contest with Time and History --encrusted with wiseguyisms and super­ ficiality and petty brutalities, but always redeeming them by the heroic or intellectually michaelangelesque muscle of his vision.2 -56 II Besides Mailer's acknowledged content, structural and stylistic debts to James Farrell and Dos Passos, and his intellectual reverence for Hemingway, Mailer has definite affinities with French writer Andre Malraux •• In. La Con­ dition Humaine (1934), Malraux used a set of historical evenj;s, the Chinese Kuomintang revolutionary insurrection of 1927, as a vehicle with which to explore the inner psychology of phenomena like love, sacrifice, political consciousness, etc.; in short, 'he used history to make a philosophical statement about the human condition. Mailer, too, has been delivering philosophical verdicts on the human condition, which paradoxically he disparages and re-affirms. In this way, Mailer has been deeper and more introspective than Dos Passos. Alfred Kazin, as insightful a critic of Mailer as of Dos Passos, pinpointed this paradox in Mailer. Writing in a recent article about Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon, Kazin found Mailer trying - . to "bring to some portentous world-historical consummation the battle in himself between so many Rotarian loves and so many Spenglerian despairs."3 Mailer often goes so far· as to use history not only as a vehicle but as an allegory. If we mean by allegory a narrative in which persons, places and things are employed in a consistent and continuous system of equivalents designed to deliver a critique, often moral, of human experience, then all of Mailer's fiction ~57 deals to a varying degree in allegory. 4 The history used in these works not only acts as a vehicle to describe the inner states of man, but also draws together a patterned statement on.the larger meaning of those inner states. One novel, Barbary Shore, for instance, .is short and. pointed - enough to be a parable. Each character represents not only a historical aspect of the communist and anti-communist movements in America, but also comments on the meanings of that clash of ideologies for the present consciousness of individual man and American society. All this discussion about the human condition does not mean that Mailer has no inclination for social critic- ism; on the contrary, he has a vitriolic but keen penchant for social commentary, which for its metasociological insights is rivalled only by Tom Wolfe.5 The Presidential fapers, Cannibals and Christians, and Advertisements for Myself contain excellent socially-acute essays on.a kaleido­ scope of subjects from David Riesman to "kleenex-box" architecture, from "On. Fallout, Napoleon, Goethe, and Peni­ cillin" to 11 .A Note on Comparative Pornography". All of the coverage of the presidential nominating conventions outstrips sociological candor in their descriptions of delegates and party bosses and candidates. The novels, too, take precious snapshots of American life and record in middling to superb fashion sections of dialogue. The first chapter of 'l!he Deer Park can. hardly be surpassed for its -58 marvelously detailed sketching of the gaudy and insipid artificiality of the swank American resort, and the .:. '·· :'. stretches of dialogue and telephone conversation in An American Dream demonstrate how keen_ Mailer's ear is for the inane cocktail chatter and blustering throatcutting language duels which make up so much_ of American convers­ ation. Still, to view Mailer's works as reflectors of cult­ ural attitudes is to overlook their main import, because Mailer's incessant targets have been internal not external. In_ several places he has written: "The.· actions of men_ not their sentiments make history", but he has used history, these actions of men, to illuminate not only the darker sentiments but the deepest motives behind them. The tenor of Mailer's metaphorical History is comprised of these subterranean, unquantifiable, often_ irrational motives. In this sense he is much more metahistoricalthanDos Passos. Mailer never expressed his theory better than in the following passage from The Presidential Papers: Since the First World War Americans have been leading a double life, and our history has moved on two rivers, one visible, the other underground; there has been the history of politics which is concre~e, factual, and unbelievably dull if .not for the consequences of the actions of some of these men; and there is.a~subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely .and romantic desires, that concentration of ecstasy and violence which is the dream life of the nation. (PP,38) -59' Clearly Mailer has been interested in confronting that second river and informing us as to what exten.t we are swimming in it. This second river is the tenor of Mailer's History, the "dream life of the nation" which he essays to describe by the vehicle of history. So if history is indeed for Mailer the actions of men more than their sentiments, let us look. to the plots and characters of his works.

III The Naked and the De.ad (1948) thrives more on non­ action and tension rather than on sustained action. Mailer focuses on an Army platoon caught up in an. invasion of Anopopei, a Japanese-held island. On the surface, the novel is a war novel, but Mailer uses the. war as a vehicle to explore the confrontation of mechanized man and nature, and as a backdrop for an allegorical statement about American society. The platoon comprises a fair cross­ section of American life and types, except for want of a

Negro: Martinez, a nervous Mexican-American striving to~ prove his patriotism; Red Valsen, a Thoreauvian Montana drifter; Gallagher, a right-wing Boston Irisher; Polack, a Chicago tough; Roth, a spineless atheist ex-Jew; Goldstein, a naive Orthodox Brooklyn Jew; Ridges, a fundamentalist Mississippi farmer; Woodrow Wilson, a sensual Southern Cracker, who is a grotesque caricature of President Wilson; Minetti, a Bronx wop; Stanley, a sniveling corporal; Sgt. Brown, a superpatriot from Tulsa; and another sergeant who eventually receives Mailer's guarded sympathy, Sam Croft, a psychopathic 'rexan modelled after Melville's Ahab. The platoon is directly commanded by Lt. Hearn, an impotent Midwest liberal and holdover from the "Lost Generation", and by Gen. Cummings, a latently-homosexual proto-fascist. After the initial attack on Anopopei stalls, Cummings orders Hearn and Groft to lead a daring attack over Mt. Anaka on the Japanese rear guard. Croft, who until then had been in unchallenged control of the platoon, resents Hearn and engineers his death by ambush. Wilson gets wounded, and Goldstein and Ridges exhaust all their ener­ gies carrying him out bf the· jungle, only to have Wilson die enroute and float away from their grasp while they are crossing a river. After tpe ambush, Croft forces the patrol to scale Mt. Anaka, which symbolically represents nature ana God in Mailer's transcendental coda. Roth misses a step on a narr.ow ledge and plunges to a horrid death. Tension in the platoon mounts so much after Croft kills a helpless bird, that he has to resort to gunpoint orders to the rebellious Red Valsen. But the whole ascent founders moments later when a nest of stinging hornets sends the men. scrambling down the mountain. After this ironic turn, Croft admits defeat. The whole venture is . meaningless, however, because in the few days that the patrol has been out away from the front, a blundering -61 subordinate to Cummings, Major Dalleson, has accidentally tricked the· Japanese into surrender. This fact is doubly ironic for Cummings, who had planned strategies for a month and at the time of the surprise victory is off ex­ plaining to his superiors the difficulty of taking the

islan4. ~till, Cummings assumes nominal credit for the victory, even though he knows that he has failed to carry out his military and political theories. In the end, The Naked and the Dead rejects liberalism (Hearn) and fascism (Cummings) 'as suitable modes of socie­ tal direction. Hearn's impotence and indecision signi­ ficantly contribute to his death. Cummings expresses his own kinetic trajectory theory of history (ND, 441-4), but he is so distant .from the actual front that his theory is ineffectual. Mailer suggests through the vehicle of history in the novel that the primitive force of a Croft or the incipient Hipsterism of a Martinez have more potent­ ial for power. Croft seemingly carries out Cummings' theories in the field, but he has a crude, kinetic vision of his own destiny. Mailer pictures Croft as a madman, yet until he upsets the hornets, Croft is the character

m~st sympathetic with natural forces: he knows what the other side of the hills look like. Martinez, the scout, makes the farthest reconnaisance into the jungle, that is, . symbolically the deepest penetration into his existence. After his existential renewal, Martinez emerges as a man -62 of strength, confident of ±he authority of his own senses. The final victor in The Naked and the Dead is not any man in particular, but rather an indifferent nature. As a spiritual descendant of Moby Dick, Mailer's novel also explores an assault by man on nature and pronounces the mad assault as folly. Natural forces and accidents deter­ mine the outcome of the campaign on Anopopei. Croft cannot scale the mountain and Cummings cannot execute his 9verly­ efficient plan. As Richard Foster wrote, The Naked and the Dead shows that "a g:i:eat spasm of nature, an inevit­ able motion of history, has superseded the efficacies of indi~idual men. 116 The individual men are inefficacious, because the mechanized army has dehumanized them. Near the end of the novel Red, reacts to this dehumanization: You carried it alone as long as you could, and then you weren't strong enough to take it any longer. You kept fighting every­ thing, and everything broke you down, until in the end you were just a goddam little bolt holding on and squealing when the machine went too fast. (ND, 548) Though Mailer remains very pessimistic about this dehuman­ ization by machine, he finds the human spirit intact even if the men are stripped spiritually "naked" as are the soldiers in The Naked and the Dead. Mailer deplores the war-caused reversion to brutishness (he would prefer men to be seers in tune with nature), but he reaffirms the ienacity of the human spirit as evidenced by the grim and nearly superhuman efforts by Hidges, Goldstein and Martinez. -63 Despite rejecting liberalism and fascism, and reaffirm­ ing human nature, The Naked and the Dead· does not provide a fu.11 plan of action suited to the inner drives of man. By 1951, Mailer found communism to be no more promising than liberalism or fascism. In Barbary Shore (1951), as critic Chester Eisinger wrote, Mailer "lays commu.nism to rest as a meaningful phenomenon. and as a way to personal salvation. 11 7 Mikey .Lovett, a partial amnesiac due to a war injury, moves into an eerie rooming house in .Brooklyn. The surreality of the situation at once sets an allegor­ ical tone to the book. One of the first lessons Lovett learns is that history is the vehicle:

The man lives in this city, but he has never seen these streets. The architecture is strange, and the people are dressed in unfamiliar clothing. He looks at a sign, but it is printed in an alphabet he cannot read.

His .hand folds upon his heart to still its beating. It is a dream, he thinks, hugging his body in the rear of the cab. · He is dreaming and the city is imaginary and the cab is imaginary. And so he goes on.

I shout at him. You are won6 , I cry, although he does not hear me; this city is the real city, the material city, and your vehicle is history. Those are the "WOrds I use, and then the whole image shatters. (BS, 7) For the greater share of the novel, .Lovett encounters some of the grossest distortions of life in.America. His gaudy landlady, Beverly Guinevere (ironically named after "royalty") is emblematic of all the shallow and fickle

~ tastes of America. Another roomer, Arthur McLeod, is an ex-Stalinist, and later turns out to be Guinevere.' s -64 estranged husband. \~henever l.iovett meets him, McLeod is cleaning the bathroom, an act symbolic of his attempts to purge himself of political sin. This purging is to no avail, because another roomer, Leroy Hollingsworth, is an undercover agent for the F.B.I., who is tracking down McLeod. Also a Cassandra-like Lesbian, Lannie Madison, arrives to accuse McLeod of murdering Leon Trotsky, to which McLeod was a bureaucratic accomplice. Lovett witnesses the horrific extortion of McLeod's confession. Hollingsworth pressures McLeod for a "little object", which is never defined, but most likely is a symbol for McLeod's soul or the vitality of the revolution­ ary consciousness. Early in the novel, McLeod begins to groom l.iovett as a new-breed revolutionary: "•··.And do you ever stop to think that it's you and your ilk who have no theoretical capacity? What do you know of history in your soft squeamish way? Have you any idea of how many revolutionaries have to be devoured to improve the lot of a common man one bloody inch?" He blew cigarette smoke in_my fac~. "Do you know what a dream is, and what an agony'i" (BS, 88)

A virtual tabula ~ from the s,tart, Lovett begins to receive twinges of memories about his own possible past as a Trotskyist. As he becomes more embroiled in the I ' McLeod controversy, Lovett loses the freedom secured by amnesia. At the end of the book, McLeod presents the "little object" to Lovett just before being gunned down by Hollingsworth's henchmen. Hollingsworth then absconds -65 with Guinevere and Monina (her three-year old daughter, a perfect replica and mimic of Guinevere) to Barbary, hence, back to barbarism. Leaving Lovett to await the rising of the revolutionary Phoenix, McLeod has taught him a dynamic principle of history. As Mailer's first exist­ ential character, Lovett courageously confronts the education of his enormous present; the static means of communism are dead, but the original utopic vision still remains in Lovett's consciousness. Even with his newfound political charge and his real­ ization that history is dynamic, Lovett gets no green light for action from Mailer. The novel ends before Lovett can act, thus implying that the likes of Guinevere and Holling­ sworth constitute America's future, and that that is a .false shore of hope. Though Mailer had existentialism 11 willy-nilly forced on him 11 (ADV, 86), .in Barbary Shore,

Mailer does not demonstrate its psychic potential. ~he book is badly claustrophobic in tone and the last third degenerates into straight political debate. As John Aldridge said, the general mood of Barbary Shore is "loin­ wrung, post-masturbatory. 118 Yet Mailer considered that that tone contributes to the working of the vehicle: Yet, it could be that if my work is alive one hundred years from now, Barbary ~hore will be considered the richest of my first three novels for it has in its high fevers a kind of insane insight into the psychic mysteries of titalinists, secret policemen, narcissists, children, Lesbians, hysterics, revolutionaries --it has an air which for me is the air of our time, authority and -66 nihilism stalking each other in the orgiastic hollow of this century. (ADV, 87) Authority and nihilism continue their deadly hunt for each other in Mailer's third novel. The Deer Park (1955) bears, according to Aldridge, "the marks of an act of she-er will working against an enormous inertia of imagi­ native fatigue and lost hopes. 119 Mailer's narrator, one

Sergius O'Shaµgnes~y is an orphan and a war hero rendered impotent by his memories of bombing orphans at Hiroshima. The central metaphor of The Deer Park takes the form of a search for sexual potency. Sergius escapes to Desert D'Or~ a film colony like Hollywood, a modern version of Louis

XV's court of pleasure, the "Deer }:lark". Desert D'Or• ....1 is a hellish conglomeration of ostentatious architecture and ostentatious lives. It is a reflection of the worst parts of the American cash-sex nexus. .Eve.rything there is arti­ ficial and philistine. The only color absent is the color of nature and the pastoral dream, namely green. At Desert D'Or emotion is routinized; maudlin plots bring great acclaim. Sexuality has lost all meaning, as is brutally shown when producer Herman Teppis tries to arrange a mar- riage between femme fatale Lulu Meyers and an avowed homo­ sexual actor, teddy Pope. Desert D'Or suf£ers fro~ the past, ".a cancer, destroying memory, destroying the present, until emotion was eroded and the events in which one found hlms·e·lfi were l:dways in- dangei-'· of. b(3ing. dead" as._ .tne ·'past." (DP, 176) I.•"• .I '..' • ·. , • l ..t I ·, ·1~ ·; _.. _ - -67 Sergius strikes up a friendship with Charles Eitel, a film director past his artistic prime. Eitel, too, ,;has problems with his past. He was a Communist in the Thirties and for that reason a congressional committee is invest­ igating him. Though Mailer takes the pains to tell the reader that Eitel's name is pronounced 11 eye-TELL 11 (DP, 25), Mailer has only pity for him. Fo awhile Bitel considers standing his ground and almosts finds love with a dancer, Elena Esposito, but in the end he recants to the committee and loses the courage to love Elena.

Nor does Sergius alone ~peak for Mailer. He remains too vague as a character. Sergius carries on an unsatis­ fying affair with Eitel's ex-wife, the flighty Lulu Meyers, who restores his _potence, but disgusts him with her shal- . lowness. ·After Bi tel recants, Sergius lets that friendship cool too as he grows disillusioned with the glamour and lights (artificial, not sunlight) of Desert D'Or. When the philistine producers beg him to play himself in a movie story of his peculiar life, Sergius balks at the artificiality, considering it cowardice: "Too many men and

too much history adds up to the death of patsies. 11 (DP,· 276) Sergius chooses against his past, which can turn him into a patsy for the producers, for a better present and future. He departs Desert D'Or for the "real world where . orphans burn orphans and nothing is more difficult to dis­ cover than a simple fact." (DP, 318). First he struggles -68 along as a writer and as a dishwasher. then studies bull­ fighting in·Mexico, and winds up teaching that art in Greenwich Village. Mailer may try to promote Sergius as an existential alternative lifestyle, but somehow Sergius is ludicrous and not convincing, He tries to escape his own history, but cannot confront his own soul. It is Marion Faye who Mailer finally admires in The Deer Park. Faye i.s a bisexual pimp, pusher, and marijuana smoker, who has disowned his past and who has no illusions about morality in the present. · Like Lovett and 5ergius,

Faye lives in the enormous present, but unlike them he ·re~ mains to control his own soul. Unobtrusively he generates much of the "action" in an otherwise static resort. Faye is Mailer's prot~-Hipster, the man who experiences

I Kierkegaardian dread and who voices Sartre's 11 N0 11 to the nausea~ing pastimes of American society.

IV The search in the first three novels for a dynamic, existential character has great import for Mailer's view of History. Mailer has been on a constant quest to free man from the complacency of accepting Histo~y to be a matrix.10 History for Mailer absorbs and exposes History as matrix as the shallow, static manifestation of a more dynamic, subtler concept of History, which. requires an.. entropic st.ate of imagination to comprehend it. }1 or Mailer History is not a prison, bl.Lt rather it is chaos in the -69 non-pejorative sense. History as matrix may well describe the Mondrian-like side of life, but it cannot apprehend the formless forces which account for so much of man's actions. Some essential premises to Mailer.t:s view of History are: ( 1 i) the uni verse contains an innumerable number of alternatives of action; (2) kinetic energy predominates over inertia; (3) the universe has a divine plan, not static, but relative and always shifting and changing; (4) this divine plan can only be implemented by attuning one.ts self to natural action and can only be comprehended by the authority of one~s own senses, instincts, and intuitions; (5) an existentist outlook and accomodation is necessary for comprehension of the phenomena of the universe; (6) one must have the courage to ride or drive, to direct History; and (7) History is thrust --spatial, vectoral, and sexual connotations included. ~et us now briefly elaborate upon each of these premises. Instead of being a matrix, the possible operating field for History is unbounded. Our earth in locomotion has at least two and probably an infinite number of route choices across the universe. ~here are at, least two, according to Mailer, because.the universe is still a battleground for a God and a Devil, probably inconceivably unlike our conventional definitions of deities, but never­ theless they are engaged with Miltonian fervor in a battle -70 for mankind's souls. .decently, Mailer has expressed the fear that this God is losing, because mankind is buckling under to cancerous manifestations of the Devil: plastics, frozen foods, deodorants, and totalitarianism in thought (co-incidentally all are charter members of the matrix). Between the God/Devil extremes lies a spectrum of choices

o~ action and nuances of sentiment. Mailer, of course, recommends that we take those actions (equals history) which are least artificial, most natural and hence closest to God.

11 The actions of men not their sentiments make history~• Kinetic energy propels, overcomes the final psychic

inertia of the matrix. ~hereas the actions of the char­ acters of U.S.A. _too closely match their sentiments, and as for Hamlet, "lose the name of action", Mailer's success­ ful characters attune themselves to the psychic currents and by action imitate nature, follow a divine plan. He phrases his proscription for action most baldly at the end of The Deer l'ark when he has God, "the oldest of the philosophers" answer "in His weary cryptic way", "Rather think of Sex an action rather than a sentiment as Time, and Time as the connection of new circuits." (DP, 318) Since The Deer Park, Mailer has expanded this proscription to include a general revolt of consciousness, a kinetic . vision beyond simply one of sexual freedom. As Mailer declared in Advertisements for Myself, he is "imprisoned -71 with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time." (ADV, 15) Mailer expounds an expansiv.e brand of neo-Transcend­ entalism. His divine plan, oversoul if you will, the pro-. scriptions of God, manifests itself in the natural instinctual and intuitive actions of man. This plan is relative; there is no one set pattern of truth beyond that which appears to each man through the authority of his own , senses. An existential outlook and accomodation is a vital element of Mailer's History. Existence precedes essence; hence, one should define one's historical essence from his historical existence. Although one does not know the out­ come of the trajectory through the universe, one should nevertheless take the plunge, act upon the existential moment, and accept the consequences. One should not let the past rule the present, except only insofar as the past propels the present. The rest of the past is dross, im­ pedimenta. Each moment, the only valid time unit in existential philosophy, should be utilized imaginatively. What is important is accomodation to fluidity, is to

initiate, to accept, and to confront chang~. Mailer's existential theory is very eclectic. He synthesizes Nietzsche!s will to power, Kierkegaard's concept of dread, Heidegger's revelation of being, and Sartre's action upon

the existential moment and immortal "NO" •. Like l~ietzsche, -72

Mailer wants man to conquer truth (with proper ~ierke­ gaardian appreciation of dread), but only the undistorted, undiluted, unadulterated truth which Heidegger claimed is uncovered by revelation, man. at each moment acting accord-. ing to.any number of possibilities.

Like Sartre, Mailer seeks to overcome History. ThUS~ courage is another keystone to his philosophy. One can r~de, that is, be driven by History, or one can drive it. The former can lead to its most extreme form, History as matrix, so one (or a society) should struggle against the possibility of deterministic molds and must have the Pro­ methean courage to direct History. As James Toback claimed, Mai1er "is Toynbee telling us that if a civiliz­ ation is to survive, it must respond to the reality of challenge. 1111 Mailer subscribes to Joyce's "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awaken", but he will not take any easy ways out of the struggle. Mailer con­ tinuously rages against cowardice; he has no sympathy for pathetic losers, or for the deaths of patsies. Last but not least, Mailer finds the concept of thrust tied in inextricably with History. Mailer's History does move us spatially and temporally by the thrust of kinetic energy. The earth also moves vectorally, although the direction of the vector probably changes at each existential moment. And certainly for Mailer thrust has sexual connot,ations. His idea of the apocalyptic orgasm -73 as an. expander of consciousness buttresses History's entropic tendencies, but· even moreso the power behind sex mirrors Mailer's proscription to control History. 0ne "makes" History; one l'rides" History. "He would have his hand on the rump of History and Norman.was not without such lust." ( OJ:t'M, 5) Mailer has not always stressed all of these ideas equally, since some date from his complete acceptance of existentialism circa 1955. Hence his first three novels view History mainly as a matrix, though one can note a progression toward a more dynamic view. As critic Irving Howe wrote, Mailer has had "a fear of stasis, of an hist- orical period ruled by functional rationality and increas­ ingly deprived of the hunger for utopia." 12 ~'his fear has driven Mailer, as Jean Malaquais noted in his critique of ~he White Negro, to search for. a new vanguard "to re­ place the slumbering proletariat, a new self-propelling force to jog history. 1113 Novelistically, Mailer proceeds from a vision of ·almost total despair in ~he Naked and the Dead to qualified hope in An American Dream to allegorical societal salvation in The Armies of the ~ight. His non­ fiction and creative journalism follow the same trend. Mailer, like Dos Passos, made history into History. In Mailer's works, History is a locomotive, in the sense of engine-propulsion and carriage, physical and spiritual. The main idea of History as locomotive is that the loco- -74 motive both propels and carries the world-society and earth on a probably random trajectory through an unbounded universe. Since Mailer assumes that the earth is but a celestial spaceship on an existential, therefore unpre- cedented, journey thro:µgh ··this universe to an ultimately unfathomable apocalypse, he sees no reason why one's con­ ception of History should not be as expansive, as jagged and jolting, and as amoebically fluid as this extra­ galactical peregrination. Although Mailer's theories' have at times approached amoebic vagueness, who is to .say that in his suspension of form there may not be a hair-trigger of .truth of some sort, which if pulled, will blast the earth to its destiny? Mailer is readily. and blatantly proscriptive. As Diana

Trilling wrote, his temperament is 11 adversary not fugitive, hortatory not seisrnographic. 1114 Whereas Dos Passos'

History as matrix spoke of death, Mailer's History as loco-,. motive accomodates itself to d~ath and speaks of a hope of life. ]'or all his cranky pessimism, Mailer is an optimist at heart. Has he had his own "intimations of immortality"? Perhaps --there's the clue. With Mailer, especially with An American Dream, we have returned to the hopes of romant­ icism. His heroic society correlates to Carlyle's elabo- rated heroes, but Mailer asks us to embrace both the good . and the evil. Maileresque Romanticism has absorbed the lessons of realism and naturalism, and strives to draw -75 the symbols of societal salvation.

v Mailer's non-fiction writings after The Deer Park and before The Armies of the Night represent refinements on the concept of .History as locomotive and nearly success­ ful attempts to break clear of Dos ~assos' passive meta­ phor of History as matrix. The first order is a stiff one: to find a workable hero/driver, that is, a dynamically existentialist protagonist for the locomotive. Marion Faye, all said and done, is only an inkling of an effective model, because he eventually succumbs to self-destruction instead of attaining self-fulfillment. :B'aye drops his

1 11 "hipness'-~ and turns ! beat • In The White Negro (19-J7), Mailer speculates that an assimilation. of black 11 0001 11 into the white psyche will create a level of heightened consciousness sufficient to accelerate History. This essay was reprinted with other essays, fiction,. journalism, interviews, poetry, and plays in Advertisements for Myself (1959). This autobiograph­ ical narrative rambling anthology is as instructive for Mailer (for Myself) as for the reader; it does much theo­ retical spadework and legwork for later essays and novels. While lack of space prevents any detailed discussion of all the elements of this disjointed non-fiction novel, three liberally-quoted passages suffice to give a sense of caliber and content: -76

::>ociety at any mornent is the stubborn retarded expression of mankind's previous and partially collected experience, Yet our previous experience is the past, it is our kno\o.'­ ledee of death, and theologians to the side ••• ! would arbue most seriously that growth is a ~reater mystery than death. All of us can understand failure, we all contain failure and death 11~thin us, but not even the successful man can begin to describe the impalpable elations and apprehensions of ero;.th. ~en we can all agree, including odd dialectical idealists like myself, that history is not foreseeable c?.nd the future is unkno\rn, fte must all agree that although society is a machine, it does not determine man's fate, but merely processes nine­ tenths of his possibilities on the basis of what society has learned from the past ••• -since 11e are all advanceu in our dreams beyond the practical social possibilities open to our immediate time, that present livin& time which is all but stra.neled by the slow mechanical detenninations of society, we know and.feel that whatever happens to us ·will happen as the reaction 9eheen our urgent desires to express ourselves, to discover the passionate attachment of our lives, and the resistant mechanical net~ork of past social ideas, platitudes and lies. (ADV, 266-7)

(for perhaps the most intense and dedicated of the artist's purposes is to accelerate historical time itself). The velocity of history is made by the rate of increase of human consciousness, provided that consciousness can express itself in action end so alter society. (For where consciousness cannot be supported by the couraGe to make one's action, then consciousness lapses into despair and death.) (ADV, 302)

Since the Frotestant is the historical embodiment of the great 'Will which deadened the flesh (in all cruelty and no taste, one must insist that cancer has been their last contribution to civilization), the \\bite Protestants ulti­ mate sympathy must be with science, factology, and committee rather the.n with sex, birth, heat, flesh, creation, the sl.'eet and the funky; they must vote, manipulate, ·control, and direct, these Protestants who are at the center of potier in our land, they must go for what they believe is reason when.it is only the Square logic of the past, and so if' a time of apocalYPse is on its way, they must finally be aiainst the freedom of the body and the democracy of the flesh, they must go 'With the Russians rather than the Hip, for the Soviet sense of science and fonnal procedure 'Will be the more attractive to them, or rather leas terrifying than the violence of the street fighter, the rebirth of sex, and the rounds of the ball. (ADV, 357-8) -77 As could be expected, Mailer's concept of the Hipster aroused some pointed criticism. James Baldwin argued per­ suasively against Mailer's belief in overt Negro oversexual­ ity. "Norman, like so many others," wrote .daldwin in 1961, "refuses to give up the myth of the sexuality of Negroes. 111 5 Most of the criticism failed to do justice to Mailer's '·· essay, because those critics did not catch the distinction between passive "beat" and aggressive "hip". .But other criticism maintained with more validity that even the aggressive Hipster is too far from the levers of societal control to be effective. 16 In 1960 Mailer found a man on the verge of societal control who he thougnt had the exist­ ential make-up of a Hipster in disguise: Jack Kennedy.

After all, Kenne~y had experienced and overcome dread during that famous long swim during World War II. Perhaps, speculates Mailer, Kennedy could fill the yawning need for valid direction in America:

JJnerica' s need in those years v.as to take an existential turn, to 'Walk into the nightmare, to face into that ter­ rible lo6ic of history t.hich de~:.anded that the country and its people must bel.:ome extraordinary and more t1.d­ venturous, or else perish, since the only altenw.tive was to offer a false sectiri ty in the power and the pe.nacea of or~anized religion, family, anri the Fil, a totalitar­ ianization of the psyche by stultifying tec.hniq_ues of the mass media nhich *oulu seep into ever1one's most private associations and so leave the country po;.erless against the }lussit·ns even if the cier.ouement ~ere to tc;i{e fifty years, for in a corupeti tion l>etlieen totalitarianisms

the first llk'lXim of the prizefight mana0 er 'WOuld doubt­ less apply: 11 Hur1gry fighters ·win fights." (FP, 4j-4) -78 The written result, "The Existential Hero: Superman Comes to the Bupermarket", coverage of the 1960 Los Angeles nominating convention, is some of Mailer's best writing to date. It forms the· core essay section of The Presidential Papers (1963). After the election in 1960 and such fias- cos as the Bay of Figs incident, Mailer grew partially disenchanted with Kennedy. DO Mailer seriously collected together some essays stressing the need for existential politics and accomodation to the locomotive of History, in the hopes that Kennedy would read and take head. Three years later in Cannibals and Christians, a simi- lar anthology of essays and fiction, Mailer found cancerous specters looming ahead on the horizon. The Devil is win­ ning the universe; History threatens to stagnate into re­ petition, to become a nightmare, a matrix again. The Christians don't seem much different from the Cannibals. The chief villain in totalitarianism in thought, which re­ ceives excellent portrayal in "Architectural Excerpts".

(cc, 233~7), The· chief human villains are Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson, largely because they are dinosaurs intellectually. America is the proverbial sad state of affairs according to Mailer circa 1966:

In a modern ~orld which produces mediocrities at en ~ccelerating rate, and keeps them alive by surgical gymnastics which go beyond anyone's patience but the victim, the doctor, and tbe people who expect soon to be on the operatinc table thems~lves; in a civilization where compassion is of political use and is stratified in welfare progrB.li1s l'Jhich do not build a better society 1_ -,' . ·.· :··. . 1 i. ' . ~ ;· ' :_ (;

~~ _, .. ' .. ·. 1~·'.' .· ..•. ·· l ·1 l ! f, ·~ J 1, :-·v,:·*~"~--, ..r:·.) -,._~~ t.~.J.tl 1 r . tJ ': 1: • ., , • ', .' .' \ • 1 ... I '. ; . ' , ~. J ·.' -79 but shore up a 'WOrse; in a w'Orld whose ultimate logic is trar, because in a world of war all overproduction and overpopulation is possible since peoples and com­ modi tiea may be destroyed wholesale ~in a breath, a world of such hypercivilization is a world not of ad­ venturers, entrepreneurs, settlers, social arbiters, proletarians, agriculturalists, and other egocentric types of a ctynamic society, but is instead a 'WOrld of whirlpools end fornlessness t1here two huge tyPes begin to reemerge, types there at the beginning of it all: Cannibals and Christians. (CC, 3)

VI Mailer has more success in delineating his concept of History as locomotive in his novels An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam?. Mailer wrote An American Dream in the short space of eight monthly instalments for ~squire during 1964. ~ike those works of Dostoievsky and Dickens written under the pressure of deadlines, An American Dream has the high tension of immediate impression. An American Dream is Mailer's most maligned novel. Criticism has ranged from historian Christopher.Lasch's dismissal of the novel as a ~otboiler and Granville Hicks' denouncement of it as a sloppily-written hoax to a slowly increasing body of more ~ppreciative commentary. 17 uxonian Richard Poirier wrote that Mailer describes "our history as Hawthorne might have written: just as private and nearly as melodram­ atic and allegorical." 18 John v·iilliam Uorrington foand the work to be "a devastatingly accurate portrayal of what passes for 'life' .in America. 1119 Helen Weinberg treated . 20 it as a su.perb example of the Kafkan mode, anct Max Schulz saw Dantesque parallels to An American Dream and called it -80

Mailer's 11 .Uivine Comedy". Schulz, a fine critic of the American. Jewish novel, wrote of An American Dream: The contemporary scene as Mailer conceives of it offers us a half-way house of penance, a wild border, a .rlarbary Shore,_ between the hell of flaccid feelings and the heaven of dynamic being --a purgatory where morally and emotionally bent by circumstances, we either retreat into solipsistic sensuality (whose hell is pictured in The Deer Park) or advance toward existential renewal \whose heaven is depicted in An American Dream). 21 Stephen Richards hojack, the protagonist of An Amer- ican Dream, is the embodiment of the mythical American dream: Harvard graduate, famous television talk show host, war hero, ex-Congressman, professor of existential psych­ ology, and husband of a rich heiress. His marriage, finan­ cial condition and psychic health, however, are in sad repair. Severely provoked one evening by- his spiritually cannibalistic wife, Deborah, Rojack strangles her and starts on a long· spiritual pilgrimage back to psychic health. Un the pilgrimage Rojack lives out the subterranean American dream: right after the murder, Rojack has an athletic sexual bout, anally and vaginally, with the German maid,

Ruta; he beats the rap from the cops by making Deborah'~ death look like a suicidal jump out the window and by then winning a battle of wits with detectives; he falls for a hard-bitten blonde singer named Che;rry, who was with a fugitive Mafia leader ironically caught by the police in the car accident caused by the fall of Rojack's wife's corpse; he faces down Cherry's tough Mafia-connected friends -81 at the bar where she sings; he wins her love in bed and beats up her black Hipster stud, singer Shago Martin, when Shago shows up at Cherry's apartment and starts taunting Rojack; he overcomes the torments of Deborah's satanic father, Barney Oswald Kelly, who also has Mafia connections; and Rojack resolves his fear of death by a symbolic walk on a parapet outside Kelly's hotel suite. All of this happens in thirty-two hours. Hojack appears to have at­ tained complete existential renewal and to have controlled his own destiny. But not quite·, because Cherry mistakenly gets killed by a friend of ~hago's in.retaliation for

Shago's gangland death. ~he leaves Rojack a lucky streak at gambling, however, and he wins enough to pay his debts and to finance a trip t,o.Guatemala and Yucatan. Rojack alone lives to tell the tale. The plot of Hojack's thirty-two hour dark night of the soul is melodramatic, but it: serves its purpose of caricaturing and rejecting History as a matrix. Hojack himself is an enlarged prefabricated Pop Art hero, and his adversaries, the villains: The Mafia, C.I.A., Harlem, and High Society are larger than life; they are manifestations of what Mailer has called "that godawf'ul '.rime magazine world out there." In one sense, An American Dream is one long denouement, because the climax occurs at the start of the book. By killing his wife, Rojack rejects all that she represents and initiates a series of role-sheddings. -82 Stripped of these hindrances and reasoned encumbrances, Rojack has to listen to the authority of his own senses. As professor of existential psychology, liojack main­ tained the thesis that magic, dread, and the perception of death are the roots of motivation. During his night and day of confronting existence, Rojack tests his thesis and proclaims its validity. After beating up Bhago, Rojack ' keeps Shago.'. s -~Umbrella. for .its magical powers; the umbrella literally and figuratively saves him from death at Barney Kelly's suite. Kelly tries to 'push Rojack off the parapet, but Rojack whacks him with the umbrella. Hojack also has a fine appreciation of dread, which sustains him through

his third-degree session at the poli~e station. The per­ ception of death likewise forms a vital strand of Rojack's ·philosophy. An American Dream explores the significance of intercourse: with God, the Devil,, the inner recesses of the mind, the vagina and the anus. During his frolio with the maid, Rojack debate over which orifice to ejaculate into, because he envisions the vagina as steamy life, but the anus as sterilie death. Having thus perceived death, Hojack chooses the anus, thereby confronting death. Once one recognizes that Rojack is a composite alle­ gory, one can see the implications for History as loco­ motive. Rojack's fusion of existential ideas with existent­ ial action almost conquers all his adversaries, who in this case are large components of the matrix. His power through -83 his ideas wins his freedom, however, as Weinberg noted, "the ideas cheat him of the only ameliorative truth achieved through the authority of his senses, his love for Cherry."22 And Rojack may vey well come, as .rlrom Weber suggested, 11 to regret his total renunciation. of reason and discipline, his_· mistaking aggressive violence for courage, his imprudent neglect of love. 1123 Btill, the main thrust of his exper­ ience puts Rojack back 11 on the road", heading for Yucatan and Guatemala to confront heavier jungles. One must remember that when Mailer wrote An American Dream in 1964, America had within the previous two years lost her fount of idealism, Jack Kennedy, and her sexual innocence symbol, Marilyn Monroe. In the wake of such deprivation Mailer feels compelled to offer guidance --certainly Rojack is an extended Kennedy figure, and Cherry (the eternal virgin) is a Marilyn surrogate. But as we are now finding out, a lapse in Kennedy idealism mired America in the Great Swamp of the Vietnamese war. - . In his next novel Mail.er moved directly to explore the historical and psychological implications of the war. In Advertisements for Myself, Mailer writes about the language of Hip: 'What makes the language of Hip a special language is that it ••• is a pictorial language ••• imbued ~1th the uialectic of anall but intense change, a lan6u!l£e for the microcosn ••• for it takes the immediate experiences of any passing man and maenifies the dynamic of his movements, not specifically but abstractly so that he is seen more as a vector in a net~urk of forces than as a static character in a crystallized field. {ADV, 322) -84 For these reasons, in. Why Are We in Vietnam? Mailer liberates himself from grammar. He speaks in disc jockey chatter (with a good deal of obscenity to evacuate dread and defeat) through D.J. Jethroe, a Texas Hipster who fancies himself to be at times a Harlem spade in disguise. When D.J. recounts the "history" of the bear hunt up into Alaska, for the first time in Mailer's fiction. does one actually get bumped, pushed, shoved, and propelled along by the plot. Mailer succeeds in matching the language and diction to his locomotive concept.

~hy Are We in Vietnam? is a tour-de-force best ex­ pressed in the double-edged title. Mailer explains first why we ~ in Vietnam as due to a yearning for national adventure that has been stifled by History as matrix, and then asks pointblankly why are we in Vietnam, when all the violence and adventure we could want is in our own national soul. At. the end of the book, D.J. and Tex, his friend, don't need Vietnam, even though they are going to enlist. The plot is simple and again allegorical D.J., his friend Tex Hyde, and D,J.'s corporation executive father, Ru.sty Jethroe, the archetypal Ugly American, go on a bear hunt to Alaska. After a few days of sparse "hunting, D.J. finally spots and shoots a bear. But Rasty, who was along also and who shot after D.J., claims the bear as his own kill. D.J. realizes how completely jaded his father's philosophy is and spiritually breaks with him, and by -85 implication from Rusty's matrix. D.J. and Tex then go on an unarmed existentia:j. jaunt through thick potentially dangerous forest. Along the way they reach a heightened sense of consciousness of the primitive forces in nature, culminating in a vision of the aurora borealis. As the boys romp literally, the locomotive romps metaphorically. The historical meaning in Why Are We in Vietnam? has to be derived because the novel does not concern itself directly with Vietnam. D.J. and Tex, like their youthful American colleagues, do the actual fighting of the war for an inflated older generation repesented by Rusty, who are only too happy to mouth the old familiar platitudes and to reap the credit for any "victory". After their unarmed jaunt, D.J. and Tex realize the falsity and hypo­ crisy of the war effort. Yet the ending presents a dilemma. Why are the boys, especially D.J., so eager to go to Viet­ nam? Perhaps to encounter an existential adventure over there? Perhaps, but more likely Mailer is suggesting that the courage and idealism of youth has been misdirected. Although they have gained their heightened perception of natural destiny, D.J. and Tex do not know where to direct their powers. For this reason and the problem that D.J. is shakily drawn as a character, not always identifiable as anything more than a voice, Why Are We in Vietnam? fails to offer any conclusive solution or direction for the locomotive beyond that of the manhood-initiation hunt. -86 We await the clearer, more precise tones of The Armies of the Night.

VI The protagonist of The Armies of the Night (the title comes from Matthew Arnold's poem, "Dover .Beach") is non_e other than Mailer himself in the third person, set up as an allegory of History. The first part of Armies of the Night, "History as a Novel" is the fictionalized account of , Mailer's own very real arrest at the October, 1967, peace march on the Pentagon. The second part, "The Novel as History" is Mailer's written history of the entire battle for the Pentagon. Mailer himself is the locomotive and maker of History (AN, 68), a comic hero of monumental _disproportions confronting History and rescuing it from the aridity of the matrix. Mailer helps to lead the wedge of the march; Mailer firms up the front lines. Until he stumbles over a rope, makes a run for the edifice and gets arrested --ah, the absurdity of it all! Mailer makes the moral choice for arrest, an admittedly not seemingly very grave risk, but in view of a possible continuing war "of twenty years", perhaps an act of great catalytic signific­ ance. Mailer, himself a 11 :.Ueft conservative" thinking "in the style of Marx in order to attain certain values sug­

gested by .Edmund Burke" (AN, ~08), cannot condone all the lifestyles and political wings present at the march. But as self-proclaimed general, Mailer is more than glad to see -87 a rising level of consciousness. fhe Armies of the Night is basically a book of dynamic optimism. The Armies of the Night is a significant milestone in Mailer's writing career, not only because the book won him the two literary awards, but because it forced Mailer to re-evaluate hi.mself and his metaphor Of History, which in The Armies of the Night is one and the same. The arrest had the effect of a confirmation of his radicalism:

11 (After twenty years of radical opinions, he ffiaile!] was finally under arrest for a real cause.) 11 (AN, 157). Mailer finally had to confront his metaphor of History, and he was forced to realize several truths. He had been writing for twenty years and had been under his own mandate to change the consciousness of our, times for ten; yet many of the social changes in America had occurred without his further­ ance or hindrance of them. Still, Mailer had remained an unpredictable individual, so his basic theories were still intact. But after the fateful juncture of Mailer and History on the steps to the Eentagon, his theories could never again pretend to be all effective; their value would li_e in potentiality and symbolicness, and even then there would be limits: There 'Was an aesthetic economy to symbolic gestures --you must not repeat yourself. Arrested once, TV land ~ould accept him (conceivably) as a man 'tlilling to stand up for his ideas: get busted t'tlice the same day, and they 'lr.-OUld View b.im as a freak-out panting for arrest. (r:ailer' s habit of livine --no matter how un&-uccessfully-- "~th his ima~e, was so encrained by now, that like a dutiful spouse he was forever consulting his better half.) (.AN, 183) -88 Mailer has not accepted the fact of his relative

impotency so easily. True in Armies of the i~ight, he does wax comic over his demotion, but in the books since he has lamented his removal. from the center of History-making. Jack Richardson said that in Miami and the t>iege of Chicago, History "succeeded in winning the right of co-existence" with Mailer, but actually it was vice versa. Mailer signi­

ficantly trims down his persona from 11 Mailer 11 to "the Reporter", and stands bewildered at much of the contra..;. "diction and polarization. For .instance, his ambivalence on Richard hixon: ••• the reporter did not know if the candidate was some last wry hope of unity or the square root of minus one, a rudder to steer the ship of state or an empty captain above a direction­ less void, there to loose the fearful nauseas of the century. '(MSC, 82) Likewise in his latest piece of rapportage, Of a Bire on the Moon, and his recent polemic, The Prisoner of Sex, Mailer finds himself losing control of the event or trend. In the moon book, Mailer, known as Aquarius, is keenly appreciative of the existentialist quality of the moon­ shot, but fears that since the power element of the matrix, the WASP, engineered the flight, they might return to deaden, deodorize, and de-emotionalize yet another bold adventure into heavenly frontiers. "NASA propriety spoke

11 1 of supercongelations of moral lard ( O.h M, 387). '.l'he question Mailer continually asks about the moonshot is "Was the voyage of Apollo 11 the noblest expression of the -89 technological age, or the best evidence of its utter in­

sanity?" (u~·M, 387). In The Prisoner of Sex, Mailer, here "The Prize-Winner", expresses deep fears that Women's Liberation will become another mind-molding wing of liberal totalitarianism and a further stride away from natural forces. Instead of being a liberating force and contributor to History as locomotive, Women's Liberation threatens to perpetrate a heartrending matrix. It is too early to predict where Mailer will go next, but it seems safe to venture that he will stress the potential powers of History as locomotive.

1For a fascinating account of the campaign see Joe Flaherty, Managing Mailer (New York: Coward-Mccann, 1970) and for the collected speeches, see_~eter Manso, ed., Running A1ainst the Machine (li-arden City: Doubleday, 1969 •

2seymour Krim, "A 'Hungry Mental Lion", Ever­ green Review, IV, 11, (January-February,--:r-§60), 178, 184.

3Alfred Kazin, "The World as a lfovel: From Capote to Mailer", New York Heview of Books, (April s,·1971), 30.

4Mailer's moralism seems meta-ethical. He is by no means an absolute moralist; rather his moralism has a hierarchy of evil and goodness. His characters are not totally good nor are they all good •.

5see Tom 'frol~~ 's The .t<:and~-:-.Kolored, Tangerine­ Flaked ~treamline ~aby (19 )), The ~ump House . Gang (1968), '.J..'he Electric Aoolaid Acid 11est (1968), and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauin the lt'lak Catchers ( 1970 • all New York: J!'arrar, btraus and Giroux) -90

6Richard :E'oster, Norman Mailer, University of Minnesota }iamphlets on American Writers No. 73 (Minneapolis: :"University of Minnesota Press, 1968)' 11 •

7chester E. Eisinger, Fiction of the Forties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 93.

8John Aldridge, Time to Murder and Create (New York~ David McKay, 1966), 1S9.

9Ibid., 159.

10:E'or a similar attitude, but a more conventional and probably more practical acceptance of historic forces, see hobert Heilbroner, The Future as History (New York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbook, 1960), especially "The l!'uture as History".

11 James Toback, "Norman Mailer Today", Comment­ ary, XLIV, 4, (October, 1967), 75.

12rrving Howe, A World More Attractive (New York: Horizon Press, 1963), 1~S.

13Jean Mala~uais, as quoted by Howe, Ibid., 126.

14Diana Trilling, "'l'he Hadical Moralism of Norman Mailer" in Nona .LJalakian and Charles Simmons, ed., The Creative Present (Garden City: Do':lbleday., 1 963), 148-9.

15James Baldwin, "The Black Boy .Looks at the White Boy", Esquire (May, 1961), reprinted in Baldwin, hobod,y .h.nows 111,y Name (l\ew York: Dell Publishers, Dell Paperback), 174.

16] 1or example, see George A, Schrader' s penetrating critique, "Horman Mailer and the Despair of Defiance", :fale rieview, LI, 2, (Winter, 1962), 267-80.

17christopher .Lasch, The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963, The---rutellectual as a Social ·.rype (New York: Hu.ndom House, 1965), 340; Granville Hicks, "An American Dream", -91 Saturday Review (March, 20, 1965) reprinted in Hicks, J.Jiterary Horizons (New York: New York University l'ress, 1970), 281-2.

18Richard l'oirier, "Morbid-Mindedness", Comment­ ary, XXXIXX, 6, (June, 1965), 91. 19 John William Corrington, "An American Dreamer", Chicago Review, XVIII, 1, (1965), 63. 20 Helen K. Weinberg, The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Gontemporar.y .fiction ( l thaca: Cornell University ~ress, 1970), 128-40~

21 Max F. Schulz, "Mailer's Divine Comedy", Contemporary Literature, IX, 1, (Winter, 1968), 40.

22weinberg, New Novel in America, 131.

2 3Brom Weber, "A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's An American Dream", The Hollins Critic, II, 3, (June , 1 9 6? ) , 1 1 •

24Jack Richardson, "The Aesthetics of Norman Mailer", New York B.eview of Books, XII, 9, (May 8, 1969), 3. Chapter Four

The Limitations of Historical Writing and Literature as History as Hemedy

"La vie peut se passer de logique, la litt~rature, pas. 11 (Life can get along without logic, but not without literature) -J-ul es Renard

-92- -93 Dos Passos' concept of History has been one of con­ striction and death and Mailer's concept, one of potentia+ liberation and hopes of lif'e. Mailer posits that the in­ dividual can be an individual within and without society by following a dynamic principle, but Dos Passos doubts that any action can liberat.e man from the weighty burden of the past.' :Both writers have had to confront their own metaphors. Mailer has found that his metaphor is not so omnipotent as he thought. Dos Passos re-stated his meta­ phor to include the possibility of beneficial tradition like J·eff ersonian liberalism. Historians will find it helpful to realize that the ·written record of history is in fact History and that they have been dealing in metaphor quite extensively. Histor­

ians, too, must confront their own metaphors. Dos ~assos and Mailer clearly demonstrate a workable synthesis of metaphor and history. Their use of history may violate the sensibilities of extreme historicists, but the two novelists.necessarily drew together scattered elements of history in order to comment on man's existence. Dos Passos and Mailer transformed history into the metaphorical History in order to demonstrate and spell out the larger meaning of history for present consciousness. It only remains, then, for historians to adopt these techniques and to employ appropriate metaphors and to develop a meta­ phorical definition of hi.story. -94 .Because historians have adopted· few of the above suggestions. to date, the present practice of writing history suffers from severe limitations. Some historical writing has been eminently unreadable and elephantine, ., h because historians have mismanaged their style. Most works, however, having unfortunately been deadened by the misguided direction of a new scientific historicism, resort to language that has been too simplistic and insubstantial for adequate description of history.1 Secondly, current historical writer~ fail to stem the annihilation of past and even present historical facts, because most historians fear that to vivify the past event is to deny its 11 accur­ acy11. 2 Thirdly, the present logical and empirical positivistic philosophical bases of historical writing fail to account for unique phenomena. and nuances, for which only existentialism can offer explanation; likewise posit­ ivists have been remiss in discriminating between those partsof the past that actually influence the enormous or specious present and those that are dead embers in Carl Sandburg's bucket of ashes. 3 l<'ourthly, historical repre­ sentation of monolithic'ally linear historical time insu.lts men's subjective perceptions of time as something erratic.4 Lastly, and most significantly, while current historical writers are capable of describing external experience, they affer very little insight into internal, imaginative experience.5 -95 Literary history, the American Studies movement and particularly literature are able to transcend the above 6 1 imi.. t a t•ions • As Leo Marx, one of the most brilliant theorists of covert culture7 wrote: Because the language of imaginative literature tends to be figurative and because the control­ ling context of the individual work usually is imagistic or metaphoric, the message --the element reducible to discursive statement-- is only a part and not necessarily the most im­ portant part of the meaning.a An often uncritical overreliance on statistics and on content analysis, two poncomitants of the accentuated drive toward scientized historical writing, has hindered social, economic, diplomatic, military, political, and even intellectual history to a degree. Much precious meaning has been lost in the translation into what statistical and content analysis buffs confidently call "meaningful" cate-· gories.9 How can statistical laws give scholars any comforting direction or explanation, when so many of man's actions are overt responses to covert sentiments, them- selves an internal response to environmental stimuli and instinctual, perhaps ontological needs.'.or desires?·+ How can a historian restricting himself to content analysis explain the meanings of a literary works which is itself a historical artifact? Such questions could be multiplied, but the·' point has ·already been made that the affective, emotional, and internal natures of an event escape com- puteristic techni9.ues. Hence, historians could instead -96 rely heavily on literature and literary techniques for better explanation of internal experience.

II The American historians' acceptance of American liter­ ature (or any art, for that matter) as a valid mode of comprehending that nebulous phenomenon called the American experience has not been. one of unalloyed welcome. To date most American historians outside the realm of American Studies either remain virtually ignorant of the rich imagi­ native and introspective powers of American literature or they slough over it in token fashion. hven most of those historians within the American Studies movement still treat literature as a handmaiden to history; only a few such as Russell Nye will grant that history and literature are branches of the same tree, and fewer still will contend along with Martin Duberman that literature is stealing more secrets from the gods than historical writing is. To main­ tain any such expeditious or begrudging attitudes toward literature is to.forget that history itself is of the genus

11 story 11 and that Clio serves not only as the muse of chrono­ logy and historical narrative, but also of epic poetry. The historical antecedents of the feud between histor­ ians and literary men, which is at present in a tense truce under the auspices of American Studies, are easily discoverable. Prior to the advent of scientific history writing in America, the better historians, Prescott, Motley, -97 Bancroft, and Parkman, to name a few, emulated their fiction­ wri ting counterparts with their masterful use of metaphor and dramatic narrative. The scientific historians' dis- gust with "fancy" scotched this longstanding cross-fertili­ zation of ideas. In the late ~ineteenth Century most hist­ orians neglected the intensely metasociological novels of Henry James. 10 The historical works of Theodore Roosevelt among others sparked a return to the imaginative technique. This tradition has most notably been carried on by Samuel Eliot Morison. But outside of Arthur Schlesinger, Sr.'s suggestions in "Social History in American £iterature 11 in 1928~ 1 most historians professed little interest in litera­ ture beyond that of treating it as trivial and tangential to true historical concerns. During the Thirties and early Forties several occur­ ences quelled this initial interest by historians. The study of American literature per se, which prior to World

War I had been treated as an extension of ~ritish litera- ture, assumed an·upstart brassiness in the Thirties~ especially after that field's first professional journal, American Literature, began publication in 1929. Many historians grew enamoured at first of Vernon ~ouis Parring­ ton' a Main Currents in American Thought (1927-30), but they 12 1 a t er re bku e d his. rig1 . "d d"1a 1 ec t•1c. In like manner, historians shunned the outpourings of propagandistic fiction during the Thirties, except as it fit their ideology. -98 Historians thought that the main fly in the ointment was the rise of the New Criticism to prevalence. Repre­ sented by such literary luminaries as Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, Robert .Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom, the New Criticism continued T.S. Eliot's contention that an onto- logical humanistic pattern of experience exists in every age despite historical context. Also the hew Criticism shifted value emphasis from the external ideas of a fiction work to the efficacy of its internal mechanisms. Historians promptly charged the New Critics with violent ahistoricism, aand thus the debate began, a debate with advocates from each side often shouting too obstreperously to hear the other. 13 The feud has since cooled with their merging into American Studies. As noted critic of British literature David Daiches wrote in 1962: It is clear by now, howeve+, that the New Critics never intended to claim such free- dom {!rom historical discipl~n'fil.;. they would regard, rather, any historical investigation of what certain words meant at a certain time, or of a relevant pattern of ideas which belonged to the period when the work was pro­ duced, as a necessary preliminary establishment of the text ••.• ~uch activity they would con­ sider as often necessary but pre-critical. Criticism for them begins with an investi­ gation of the way words are made t9 work in the given example of literary art. 4 With the arrival of war in the Jl;orties, historians began to criticize negatively the literary works of the Lost Generation and Depression as overly disparaging of American life. The most classic and perhaps most extreme -99 statement of the historians' war-heightened hostility to literature was The Literary Falley (Boston, 1944) by Bern­ ard DeVoto, an amateur but ironically one of the most literary of historians: [ihe literary fallacy assume§] that a culture may be understood and judged solely by means of a literature, _that ;_literature embodies truly and completely both the values and content of life, and finally that life is subordinate to literature.15 Amidst all this heated debate, a few men were attempt­ ing a synthesis of history and ,literature. F.O. Matthies- sen's American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford, 1941) and Alfred Kazin's On Native Grounds (New York, 1942) remain as monumental period studies. Hobert Spiller's essays and Howard Mumford Jones' Ideas in America, particularly his essay "American Literature as an Instrument of Cultural Analysis" cleared the avenue for the arrival of American Studies in the late . 16 F or t ies. The American Studies movement seemed well-founded when in 1948, Spiller et al published their Literary History of the United States and when in 1949, the American

Studies Association began issuing ~he American ~uarterly. The movement grew compatibly with the rise' of intellectual history. This complementary relationship has fostered the best studies of the American past yet. In one vein, for instance, Henry Nash Bmith's seminal study of symbol and myth in the American West, Virgin .Land (Cambridge, 1950) -100 showed how those symbols and myths superseded in the Amer­ ican consciousness the raw reality of the West. Smith's book stimulated R.W • .rl. Lewis' fuzzy and slightly untenable thesis about American innocence, The American Adam (Chicago, 1955); and both works influenced the best synthesis yet of history, myth and dream, .Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford, 1964). These works, however, are still oases on the semi-arid landscape of American ~tudies., The hybrid discipline has not lived up to its vast potential for societal introspect­ iop. The historians should shoulder the bulk of the blame. The line-up of the three authors of the works mentioned above is indicative: Bmith, Lewis and Marx are all profes- sors of English. In 19)8, a decade after its birth, Amer­ ican Studies had to be reminded by another professor of English, Frederick Hoffman, that a knowledge of literature, especially its mythic qualities, is e~sential to excellent synthesis~ 17 In' 1963, Roy Harvey Pearce, still another professor of English, searched for a historian who could fill his formula of combining "a Parringtonian sense of the informing power of the historical-cultural situation with a New Critical sense of the informing power of the . . . t. 1118 crea t ive imagina ion. And as late as 1969, ~eo Marx had to def end the "unscientific methodology" of American Studies before a symposium of historians. Also one of the -101· best articles in fhe American Quarterly recently, on Poe and the American dream, was written by Charles L. Sanford, another esteemed professor of hnglish. 19 The great majority of historians writing in American Studies remain mired in the cautious swamp wherein they

11 view American literature as "cultural attitude reflectors , that is, one can find out what were the prevalent social attitudes toward such subjects as poverty, business, labor, etc. in the literature. fhis reading of literature is a superficial strip mining of content and rarely unearths the deep veins of sociopsychological insight. Admittedly, the novels of manners contain much of this surface social de- scription, but they also deliver an undercurrent of trench­ ant sociopsychological commentary. With those later works that are not strictly novels of manners, the cultural at­ titude reflectors approach is foolishly subsidiary. One can hardly find more profound or subtler encounters with the American pastoral dream than in Theodore Dreiser's

Sister Carrie, F. Scott ~1 i tzgerald' s The Great Gatsby, John Steinbeck's ·rhe Grapes of Wrath or Norman Mailer's An Amer­ ican Dream. Ironically· the cultural attitude reflector. approach has defeated itself to an extent. Popular litera­ ture tends to describe the popular concepts and attitudes· more accurately historicism-wdl.se than does highly imagi­ native literature, because as ~eo Marx pointed out, the writers of the latter were more "emancipated" from the -102" 20 prevai·1· ing cult ure. Most telling on the cultural atti~ tude reflector stance is the fact that it misses the far richer history of covert thought beneath the overt action or sentiment.

III Historians can view and use literature as a sort of metahistory. The foilowing conceit as an example suggests the sad inflexibility of current historical writing. The historian cannot, due to the present generally conceived

bounds of history, allow ~avy Crockett or Daniel Boone on the moon. J!'irst, many historians who do not suscribe to the school of John William Ward will quibble over Crockett and Boone being cast as symbols of the American quest for new frontiers. 21 · Secondly, many of those who will allow Crockett or Boone as symbols will restrict the validity of the symbols to a certain time period and even to a spec­ ific geographical area. That is, they will deny that both Crockett and Boone chronologically could live in 1971 or that the two could be outside of an area, say bounded by the Atlantic to the east, Canada to the north, the Hooky Mountains to the west, and Mexico to.the south. And thirdly eYen those who will grant Crockett or Boone as symbols time-machine powers and astronomic. : distance range, will reject the re-translation of Boone and Crockett into flesh ·and blood. ·Yet that very type of conceit is a commonplace

occurrence to a novelist. ls.~his not a more suggestive -103 and yet accurate explanation of that ever-westering part of the American psyche than the bureaucratic droning about the American virtues which sent Keil Armstrong, et al up in their ultra-mechanized conestoga wagons? Historians can adopt more figurative modes and liter- ary devices to improve the _quality of their writing, but more importantly they should render genuine respect to literature as history. Historical writing posits no less a hypothetical reality than does literature. The advant­ age gained from literature is that literature has a greater repertoire of devices and a greater allowable vocabulary to describe and to suggest a frankly hypothetical reality. Even this necessity of accepting a hypothetical reality is not detrimental to explanations of human experience. Man has a desire for a metaphoric enlargement of "fact"; he has a need for myth. What if the myth has a greater impact upon the psyche than. the reality? A delusion, a value judgment we make about perception, is perceptible and there- . . fore capable of real cause and effect. Perhaps Robert Penn Warren stated the problem's solution best: Historical sense and poetic sense should not in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth. we ~ive, and in our' living constantly remake. 2 Literature can provide or restore to historical writ­ ing an introspective dimension. Historical writing could strive not only to individuate between events, but to -104 individuate inside the events as does literature. A well- trimmed and powerfully suggestive metaphor can catapult one over some quantum-leap gap to the very points of inter- section between existential reality, the collective consc­ iousness, and the individual products of the mind. A simple but __ intricate novel like The Great Gatsby can feed both our cognitive and affective understanding of those needs, fan­ tasies, and fears behind a public act w!thout forcing one to swallow the castor oil of voluminous and convoluted scholarly prose. Or conversely, a structurally difficult novel py James or Faulkner can take one through the laby- rinthine significances and counter-significances of an event. As John Higham wrote: The distinctive contribution which the best students of literature make is not, I think, the analytical precision characteristic of the best philosophical enquiry. Rather it is a sense of the imaginative and em~3ional overtones in the history of thought. Particularly can literature help historical writing accomodate itself to the existentialist approach. Most highly imaginative literature, even before existentialism was philosophically described, dealt with problems of~being, with existential situations. ~artre is both also a play­ wright and novelist and Heidegger's ideas ~ound clarified resonnce in the works of writer Albert Camus. ~·urthermore, literature is always alive, that is, it re-happens as one reads it. This fact suggests to our minds the Joycean view of History as a nightmare from which he is trying to awaken. -105 Rather than transporting us back into the past, literature invades our present and parades its "past" events before ( our present-conscious vision. Paradoxically, literature can. maintain a precision of sorts simultaneously with allusion and illusion. The use of .an otherwise neutral word in an ironic or illuminating context can secure for the reader a much clearer perception of emotional tone. A reader has only to think of what charge, what delight an efficacious use of ellipsis or compression works on himself to realize the power of liter­ ature. Or if a historical event demands ambiguity or am­ bivalence, literature creates a spectrum of possible interpretations; for example, recall the masterful mani- pulation of ambivalence toward Governor Willie btark in Robert Penn Warren's All the i<:ing's Men, a novel closely based on the career of former Governor Huey Long of Louisiana. In any case, history can be six- or eight­ dimensional. as literature is. As Roy Harvey Pearce declared about the dimensions of history: History must be for us not milieu but ambiance --not setting but the very at­ mosphere which the man of high imagi­ nation breathes so that he can live and do what he must do.24 . The historian can learn innumerable lessons from the fiction of William J!'aulkner. In Absalom! Absalom!, for example, he re-creates and recounts the history of a southern plantation owner from several different viewpoints -106 until we as readers formulate our own conception of the truth about the man, a truth.which may not be the "truth", but certainly as valid as any other view. Faulkner's char- acters slide in and out of "reality" just as man fills his days in this undifferentiated continuum of fact and fancy, of confusion of imagery and knowledge. Also Faulkner's usage of time poses the tricky questions of sequence and impact of event. People do not dream or remember in nar- rative or sequence. Certain events have more significance than others and may influence one's thinking both ways in time, that is, an event riow past in our memories, thereby influencing that former future for one's present conscious- ness. Of especial use to historical writing is the whole concept of literary time. One must remember that to com- prehend .temporal succession means, as I,ouis Mink said, "to think of it in both directions at once, and then time is no longer the river which bears us along, but the river in aerial view, upstream and downstream seen_ in a single survey. 112 5 Time after all is an idiolect, a differing concept for each sensor. Thus literary time is erratic_, fluid but hardly ever linear, except for eff.ect. :Ui terary time, perhaps as .l!'red Chappell pictured it, "flowing fabric made up of scores of single threads~ all knotty, distent, frayed, broken, lumpy, 1126 is a more accurate reflector of men's perceptions of time. -107 As literary men, Dos Fas sos and Mail.er were well aware of these benefits of literatu.re to historical writing. Neither of the two writers refrained from applying liter­ ary techniques to their non-fictional writings. The lesson for historians is clear. ~ven those writings on the most irrelevant piece of the minutiae of history could stand to benefit from an imaginative presentation. More importantly, Dos Passos and Mailer serve not just as stylistic models for the historians, but the con­ tent and the concepts in their works could be effective samplings of a deeper, more satisfying history. Dos Passos and Mailer did not hang back from fleshing out the skeleton just because no pictures of the original beast existed.

Both formed a metaphorical History, Dos ~assos by using history as the tenor and his literary techniques as the vehicle, and Mailer, by using history as the vehicle to describe the inner states of man. Then both novelists chose to personify their metaphors. Dos Passos saw his History acting as a matrix, molding and structuring the society. Mailer pictured his History as a locomotive with the potential to loosen the boundaries of society and realize the American dream of freedom. These workings in the affective dimension could provide great stimulus to historical writing that would grapple with the very problems of existence. -108

1several of the works of Perry Miller are "eminently unreadable" because his. style presents a thorny thicket, nut the complexity can probably be attributed to the elusiveness and subjectivity of his content. The problem today is the oversimplification of the langu­ age. Dissertations usually suffer from this attempt to write clear, straightforward, in­ formative prose. The language and style just do not carry the complexity and affective nuances of the subje·ct. George Rogers Taylor's The Transportation Revolution reads like an article from the Wall Btreet Journal and con­ centrates on the external economic aspects and disregards any internal reactions to the transportation binge. This passionate bent for historicism and scientific covering laws makes the epistemo­ logical assumption that knowledge can be transmitted in precisely defined units. The expectation is that one can say or write or define a concept and trigger an exactly replic­ able response in another's mind. This dream flies in the face of not only all we know about semantics and connotation, but from existential philosophy. dtandardized language tends to act as a least common denominator which will not drill deep for hidden truths. ciuch easy language lends itself to deception, i.e., one can hide behind recognizable phrases of general meaning. ~ee Mailer's discussion about Lyndon Johnson's use of catch-phrases (CC, 50-1). 2 A recurrent plague upon the house of history is.the annihilation of historical fact, wh~ch Sartre likened to sitting in the back seat of a car backwards, watching the present scenery become past. Historians have never been com­ fortable with this irony. ~aradoxically they have allowed that since a fact becomes past they can no longer relive it or experience it accurately, yet all the while they distribute the accolades of historicism to that same fact. Likewise the hopes that some historians enter­ tain about the description of contemporary facts are naive and fallacious. une can not help but squirm with Daniel Aaron when he wrote in an essay entitled "The '.I.'reachery of Recol~ection 11 in .bremner, ed., .Essays on History and Literature (Golumbus, 1966), 2): -109·

'What gives the historian of contemporary events the _sense that he is somehow face to face· wi. th reality is that the "facts" be purports to reveal are still close enough to the moment of their birth to give him the illusion of their plasticity and liveness. Higor mortis has not frozen them; the facts are not yet artifacts. Or to change the metaphor, recent facts retain for a time an afterglow.

Probably a more accurate description of con­ ~emporary events is on~ like the following excerpt from ~incoln Steffens' essentially literary autobiography, wherein he recounted his experiences during the Russian Revolution of 1917 (The Autobiogr~ph,y of ~incoln Steffens, Vol. II, Harvest Paperback, 749.):

••• History':' Ho;.· can you get history in the making, on the spot, as it happens? There were several histories all going on· together, unconnected, often contradictory narratives that met and crossed, and --they -were all "history". We heard aplenty of them; 111e must have missed many more. l\obody could, nobody \I/ill ever hear them all. History is impossible. Putting together stories I heard, the stories of the old government, of the new govennent, of odd witnesses, of soldiers, sailors, ~urkers, of the Joviets, I lay, not the history, but my history straight like this. It is not the trutn; it my compact version of some truth and some lies thet counted like facts; for rumor is a revolutionist and a historian.

3 11 1 tell you the past is a bucket of ashes". Carl Sandburg, "Prairie" in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg. (New fork: Harcourt, ~race and Jovanovich, 1970),85; see discussion in Chapter One on :Existentialism and .b'ootnote 10; see Becker's essay "hveryman His vwn Historian" for an argument against the "building-br:i,ck" theory of knowledge and a discussion about how selected parts of the past rather than the total past influences the specious present. 4 L:>ee .b,. E" .. Sparshott' s exhaustive discussion of periodization in history writing, "Notes on the Articulation of Time", 1''4ew Literary History, 1, 2, (Winter, 1970), 311-)4. -110

5£erhaps the most devastating statementcof the limitations of history writing was elo­ quentli.d~liv~red by h~storian Mar~in Dube~man. 11 11 ( The l11m1 tat ions of H1story , Antioch Review, AXV, 2, ~0ummer, 1965), 283-96.) As a historian Duberman concerned himself with the interrelat­ ionships of psychology and history, particularly of the anti-slavery vanguard, and wrote biograph­ ies of Charles .b1rancis Adams and J-ames Russell Lowell. Jv:any of Duberman' s theoretical articles and pieces on the abolitionists have been col­ lected into a volume called The Uncompleted Past (New York, 1969). History as presently conceive~ wrote Duberman, can.at the'most describe external human behavior; it cannot explain internal human personality. Even intellectual history, by concentrating on public expression of ideas, slights the private confrontation of man's inner experience which produced the articulation. ¥or Duberman, this inability to recapture the inner life makes any reconstruction of the past public life suspect. The burning question he asked is "Can a public act be understood separately from a man's private needs, fantasies and fears':' 11 '.l.1he question could be extended to a society's needs. The picture Duberman paints i~ grim. He offers literature as a solution, and has managed a simultaneous career as a playwright and historian.

6 see Henry Nash .Smith, 11 08.n 'American Studies' 11 Develop a ~::ethod 'i , American 1.tu.arterly, IX, 2, (Summer, 1957).

7see Marx's book, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the 1:1astoral ldeal in America 10xf6rd: Uxford University ~ress, 1964).

8Marx, 11 American Studies --A Defense·of an Unscientific Method", hew J.itterary History, I , 1 , ( l!' al 1 , 1 9 6 9 ) , 81 •

9For example, Stephen Thernstrom's highly- praised Poverty and ~regress: 0ocial Mobility in a Nineteenth-Uentury Gity (Cambridge, 1964), a study constructed from census reports and assessors records. ~hernstrom acknowledged the bookts statistical inadequacies, but he still made the probably unwar..ranted assumption that each member -111 of Newburyport's lower, unskilled class was imbued with the Algeresque hope of social mobility.

10see Russell l'4ye, "History and Literature: 11 Branches of the ~ame Tree , in iiobert H. Bremner, ed., ~ssays on History and ~iterature, 127-31; for an example of literary man using history see the novels of frilliam Gilmore Simms or his Views and Reviews of American ~iterature, History and l"iction.

11 Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., "Social History in American :Literature", Yale Review, XVIII (1928), 135-47.

12~erhaps the experience of ltichard Hofstadter is typical. ~ee his Th~ ~rogressive Historians (New York: Alfred ·A. mopf, 1968), 350; and Robert Skotheim, American Intellectual Histories and Historians (~rinceton, 1968), 149. 1 3see ·vv • .K. Wimsatt, 11 History and (.;ri tic ism: A Problematic Relationship" PMLA, :LXVI, (February, 1951), 21-31.

1 1 4David Daiches, 11 i he New

15.Bernard DeVoto, The Literary ~allacy(Boston: Little, Brown Co., 1944), 43.

16bee Spiller's essays in The Third Dimension (New York: MacMillan \Jo., 196:;,;; and Jones, Ideas in America (Cambridge, 1944). 17 F'rederick Hoffman, "The Knowledge -of Literature: Suggestions for American Studies", American Quarterly, A,2, ~t. 2, (Summer, 19j8), 199-205. 18 Roy Harvey Pearce, "Literature, History, and Humanism", College .&;nglish, A.A.IV, 5 (J!'ebru.ary, 1963), 371. . .

~ 9 charles .L. Sanford, "hdgar Allan Poe: A Blight -112 on the Landscape", American yuarterly, J..£..., 1, (Winter, 1968), '.:>4-66.

20Leo Marx, "American citudies --A Defence", 88.

21 By the John William Viard School, I mean the practice of employing a man or event as en­ capsulating of focusing symbol of an age or trend. l!'or a concise example see 1'/ard, "The Meaning of J.Jindbergh's Plight", American Quarterly,~' 1, (Winter, 1958), 3-16.

2.2Robert Penn :ivarren, as quoted by .t:earce, "Literature, History and Humanism", :;71.

23John Higham, "Intellectual History and Its Neighbors", Journal of the History of Ideas XV, 3, (June, 1 954), 34). 24 Pearce, "Literatur~, History and Humanism, 11 373.

25bouis O. Mink, "History and .l!'iction as Modes of Comprehension", hew .Literary History, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 556. 26 i·red Chappell, 11 Six l:'roposi tions About Literature and History", hLH, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 517. . Bibliography

-113- -114

Works Pertaining to Chapters One and :B1our:

Aaron, Daniel, "Self or ~ociety't", hew Yok Times Book Review, (:b1e_b. 14, 196:5), 1, 37-9.

, "~f.lhe 'freachery of Hecollection" in l!obert H. Bremner,--- ed., Bssays on History and £iterature. Columbus: Ohio State University ~ress, 1966) Abell, vvalter, "Myth Mind, and History", Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, IV, 1, 77-86 .

.beard, Charles, "That Noble Dream11 ·'in .Fritz·, Stern,, ed~, ~ The Varieties of History. Cleveland and New York: World Publ. Co., 1956. Becker, Carl, Everyman .dis Uwn Historian, hew York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 193,.

Bullock, Alan, 11 ~1 he Historian's Purpose, History and Metahistory", History '.Coday, I, 2, (:E'eb., 1951), 5-11. Chappell, Fred, Six Eropositions About J.Jiterature and History", New .Literary History (hereafter NLH), I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 513-2~. Collingwood, R.G., The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1946. Crane, R.S., The Idea of the· Humanities, I, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.

Curley, Thomas F., "The ~uarrel with Time in American Fiction", American Scholar, XXIX, (Autumn, 1960), 552-60. Daiches, David, "The New Criticism" in Robert E. Spiller, ed., A Time of Harvest, American Literature, 1910- 60. New York: Hill and Wang, 1962. DeMan, Paul, "iiiterary History and J.Jiterary Modernity", Daedaluus, XCIX, 2, (Spring, 1970), 384-403. DeVoto, Bernard, The Literary l!'allacy. .Boston: Little, Brown, 1944. Dozer, Donald M., "History as ..l!'orce", l'acific Histor- ical Review, JUXIV, 4, (Nov.,. 1965), 375-95. - Duberman, Martin, "The Limitations of History", Ant­ ioch Review, AXV, 2, (Summer, 1965), 283-96. -115

11 11 Eisenstein, Elizabeth li., Clio and Chronos , History and Theory, Beiheft 6, (1966), 24-35. Elkins, 8tanley, "A Novelist Looks at History", New Republic, CXXA.VI, 24, (J~e 17, 1957), 20~1. English, John 0., "Existentialism and the Study of History", Social Science, .A.LI, 3, (June, 1966), 153-60. Garrett, George, "Dreaming with Adam: Notes on Imagi­ 11 nary Hdistory , NLH, I, 3,. (bpring, 1970), 407-21. Hanham, H.J., "Clio's Weapons", Daedalus, C, 2, (::>pr- ing, 1971), '09-19. . Harrison, J.A., 11 Time and the American Historian", South Atlantic ~uarterly, L.X.IV, 3, (Summer, 1965), 362-66. Havard, William C. , 11 The Burden of the Literary Mind: Some Reflections on Robert i'enn Warren as Historian", South Atlantic ~uarterly, .LA.II, 4, (Autumn, 1963), 516-31.

Heilbroner, Hobert, '.i'he :E1uture as Histor;y:. New York: Harper and How) Harper Torchbbok, 1960.

Higham, John, 11 lntellectual History and Its Neighbors•: Journal of the History of Ideas, i..V, 3, (J~e, 196::>) 339-47.

Hoffman, l!'rederick J., 11 '11he Knowledge of lii terature: Suggestions for American Studies", American yuarterly, X, 2, pt. 2, (Summer, 1958), 199-?0:>. Jones, Howard Mumford, '.I:'he Theory of American Li tera­ ture. Ithaca: Cornell University ~ress, 1965. , Ideas in America. Cambridge: Harvard Univers- ity Press,--- 1944 •.

11 Kracauer, ::>iegfried, •lifime and History , History and Theory, Beiheft 6, ( 1966), 64-78. Lerner, Max, "Notes on Literature and American Civil­ ization", American Quarterly, XI, 2, pt. 2 (::>ummer, 1959), 211-24. Levin, David, In Defense of Historical liiterature. New York: Hill and· Hang, 1967.

Marx, Leo, "American ;:;,t~dies -- A Defense of an Un­ 11 scientific Method , I~LH, I, 1 , O'all, 1 969), 7')-90, -116 Mink, Louis 0., "History and .E'iction as Modes of Com­ prehension," ~LH, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 541-;58. Mizener, Artur, "The '.Chin Intelligent Face of American li'iction", Kenyon Review, A.VII, 4, (Autumn, 1955), 507-24. Neff, hmery, The Poetry of History. New York: Colum­ . bia University ~ress, 1947. Nevins, Allan, The Gateway to History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1938. Nye, Russell, "History and .Literature: Branches of the Same Tree", in .rlremner, ed., Bssays on History and Literature, 127-;58.

O'Connor, 11illiam Van, "The Hovel as bocial Document~ American ~uarterly, IV, 2, (Summer, 1952J, 169-75. Pearce, Roy Harvey, "Literature, History, and Human­ ism", College E.nglish, XXIV, 5, U·eb. , 1963), 364-72. Pollock, Hobert c., "History is a Matrix", Thought, .XXVI, 101, (Summer, 19)1), 205-18. Richards, I.A., The Philosophy of tihetoric. New York: and London: Oxford University Press, 1936.

Sartre, dean Paul, 11 Bxistentialism 11 in .Leo Hamalian and Frederick H. Karl, eds., fhe Radical Vision. hew York: Thomas Y, Crowell, 1970. Shlesinger, Arthur M., Sr,, "Social History in American Literature", Yale Review, .AV III, ( 1 928), 135-4 7. Sharabi, Hisham B., "The hxistentialist Approach to History",-Historian, X.x.VI, 2, (.Feb., 1964), 167-7:5. Sparshott, 1''.E., "Notes on the Articulation of Time", liLH, I, 2, (Winter, 1970), 311-34. Spiller, Hobert B., The Third Dimension. New York: MacMillan, 1965. Starr, Chester G., "Historical and }Jhilosophical Time", History and 1'heory, beiheft 6 (1966), 24-35. Stern, Alfred, "J!'iction and Myth in History", Diogenes, ~2, (Summer, 1963), 98-118~ · von .Leyden, w., "History and the Concept of Relative Time", History and '.l.'heory,_ II, 3, \ 1963), 262-85. -117 ·west, .Paul, "Adam's Alembic or Imagination.versus me 2 ", NLH, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 523-39. Wimsatt, W.K., Jr., "History and Criticism: A Probl­ ematic Relationship", :t'MliA, .LXVI, (li'eb., 19:>1), 21-31. Woodward, c. Vann, "The Historical Dimension", Virginia ~uarterly Review, X£XII, 2, (l:)pring, 1956), 2?8-67.

Works Pertaining to Chapter Two: Works of Dos Passos: Adventures of a Young Man. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939. The Grand Design. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1949.

The Ground We Stand .Un. .i:rnw York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941. Number One. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943. Occasions and Protests. Henry .riegnery Company, 1964.

U.S.A.: I. The 42nd Earallel II. ~ineteen, hineteen III The Big Money. ~oston: Houghton Mifflin, 0entry Paperback, 1963. Articles by Dos Passos: "U.::>-.A. Revisited", Atlantic Monthly, CCX.III, 4, (April, 1964), 47-55. "(Jn the Way to the Moonshot", The hational Review, XX.III, 5, (1!1eb., 9, 1971), 13?-6.

Critical Articles or ~ooks on Dos Fassos: Aaron, Daniel, Writer on the Left. New York: Harcpurt Brace, and World, 1961.

11 , "The Riddle of John Dos I'asses , Harper's Magaz...,..i_n_e-,-CC.X.XIV, 1342, (March, 1 962), 55-60. Beach, Joseph W., American iiction, 1920-40. hew York: MacMillan, 1941.

Blake, Nelson M., Novelists' America, ~iction as History, 1910-40. Syracuse: Syracuse University ~ress, 1969. -118

Cooperman, utanley, ~~orld War I and the American Novel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins ~ress, 1967. Cowley, Malcolm, 1xile's Return. New York: Viking, 1 934-. , ed., After the Genteel Tradition. Carbondale: Southern--= Illinois University ~ress, 1936. ___ , The .Literary bituation. New York: Viking; 1954. Davis, Robert G., J-ohn Dos :i!assos. University of Minnesota l'amphlets on American 'lvri ters No. 20. .Minne­ apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1962. DeVoto,.Bernard, "John Dos Passos: Anatomist of uur .T.J!D_es", Saturday Review of .uiterature, XIV, 15, (Aug. 8, 1 936)' 13+. . Eisinger, Chester E,, li'iction of The :B'orties. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Farrell, James T., '11 Dos :i;Jassos and the Critics", American Mercury,. XLVII, (Aug., 1939), 489-94. French, Warren, ed., The Forties: Fiction, Poetry and Drama. Deland, lt1 la.: Everett/l!.dwards, 1969.

Geismar, Maxwell, ~vri ters in Grisis , '.the American Novel, 1925-40. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947.

11 Goldman, Arnold, "Dos }iassos and His U.S.A. , NLH, I, 3, (Spring, 1970), 471-83. Kazin, Alfred, un Native Grounds. hew York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1942. , "Where Now Voyager?", New Republic, IJVIII, 11, (Marc~h_,i,...,..,5-, 1943), 353-4. _ , "John Dos :t>assos: Inventor in Isolation" Saturday Heview, (March 15, 1969), 16-9+. Lynn, .Kenneth S., ed., tforld in a Glass (selections from Dos }assos' novels) ~oston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Madden, Charles F .. , talks with authors. Garbbndale: Southern Illinois University ~ress, 1968. McCole, 0. John, l.iucifer at Large. New York: Long­ mans, Geen, 1937. -119 McLuhan, Herbert Marshall, "John.Dos Passos: Tech­ nique versus ciensibility" in A. Walton .uitz, ed., Modern American J.i'iction. New York: uxford University .Press, 1963. Millgate, Michael, American Social Fiction, James to Cozz~. Edinburgh and ~ondon: lJliver & Hoyd, 1964. Mizener, Arthur, The Sense of .Life in the Modern Novel. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964. Rideout, Walter B., The Hadical Novel in America, 1900- 54. Cambridge: Harvard University ~ress, 1956. Scherer, Mark, "John Dos Passos: A Stranded American", Atlan;tic Monthly, GC.X..6.VII, 3, (March, 1971), 93-6. Strauss, Heinrich, American Literature in the Twen­ tieth Century. New York: Harper and Row, Harper ~orchbook, 1965. Thorp, Willard, American Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University }ress, 1960. Wade, Mason, "Novelist of America: John Dos :Passos", North American Review, CCX~IV, 2, (Winter, 1937-8), 349-67.

11 11 Wa~efield, Dan, Dos, 11hich Side Are You On'? , Esquire, LIX, 4, (April, 1963), 112-8.

Walcutt, Charles G., American ~iterary 1aturalism, A Divided Stream. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1956. ,

Wilson, Edmund, The Shores of .Light. New York: 1!1arrar, Straas, 1952.

\~renn, John H., John Dos Passos. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1961. Unpublished material:

England, Donald G., "The Newsreels of John Dos ~assos' The 42nd Parallel: .::>ources and Techniques" (unpublished Ph.D. dEsertation) University of ~exas at Austin, 1970. Grundy, Ernest H., 11 The i.iost Generation in Historical Perspective Criticism, 1930-60" (unpublished Ph.D. dis­ sertation) University of Denver, 1969~

Workman, Robert, "11wo hovelists and their Views of War" (Mailer and Dos l?assos) ( unpublished M.A. thesis) Ohio State University, 1961. -120 Works Pertaining to Chapter Three: Works by Mailer: Advertisements for Myself. G.P. Putnam's-.rlerkely Medallion ~aperback. (19j9)

An American .Jream. New York: Dell paperback, 1970 ed.· The Armies of the idght. New York: New American i,ibrary, Signet paperback. Barbary Shore. New York: New American J.iibrary, :Jignet paperback.

Cannibals and Christians. l~ew York: Dial :Press, 1966.

'.J..ihe Deer ~· hew York: Berkley Medallion paperback. Miami and the oiep;e of Chicago. New York: hew Amer­ ican Library, ~ignet .t!aperback. The Naked and the Dead. New York: New American ·. Library, 0ignet paperback.

Of a ]1 ire on the Moon. Boston: Little, .orown, 1970. The Presidential :Papers. New.jork: Berkley Medallion paperback. The Prisoner of Sex • .Boston: J.,ittle, Brown) 1971. Why Are We in Vietnam'?. New York: .Berkley Medallion paperback. Arti9les by.Mailer:

11 11 '.l..'he Ali-:H'razier Pight , i,ife, .L.X.X, !O, (March 19, 1971). Critical articles on Mailer:

Aldridge, John Vi., '.rime to Ji'iurder and Greate. New York: David McKay, 1966.

11 11 , ]'rom Vietnam to Obsceni ty , Harper's Magazine, CCXXX,,..,..VI"'""",-_,...141 3 (l11 e b. , 1 968) , 91-7.

i3aldwin, James , "~he .rilack .boy Looks at the White Boy", bsguire (May, 1961), · reprinted iri .Baldwin, hobody Knows My Name (l~ew iork: Dell .t!ubl. -121 Brower, Brock, "Norman Mailer, Always the Challenger", Life, LIX, 13, (~~pt. 24, 196~), 94-117 • .Bryant, Jerry H., "The .Last·of the Social :t:irotest Writers 11, Arizona i.,luarterly! .A.IX, 4, (Winter, 1963) 32'.5- 35. Carroll, Paul, "Playboy Interview: Norman Mailer", Playboy, XV, 1, (January, 1968), 69+. Gorrington, John. W., "An American Dreamer", IJhicago Review, XVIII, 1 (196~), 58-66. Dickstein, Morris, review of Mailer's uf a Fire on the Moon, New York '.rimes Hook .lieview (January 10, 1971), 1, 42-45. Dupee, F.W., "The American Norman Mailer", Commentary, XXIX, 2, (.H·eb., 1960). Fiedler, l.ieslie, Waiting for the End. New York: Stein & Day, 1964.

l!'oster, Richard, l~orman Mailer. University of Minne­ sota Pamphlets·on American IV'r'iters No. 73., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota ~ress, 1968. Gilman, Hichard, "Why Mailer Wants to be President", New Republic, CL, 6, l~eb. 8, 1964;, 17-20+.

__ , "What ~ailer Has Done", New Republic, Cl.iVIII, 23, (June 8, 1968), 27-31. .

Gindin, James, "Megalotopia and the WASP: ~ihe l!1 iction of Mailer and Updike", The Centennial B.eview, XV, 1, (Winter, 1971), 38-52.

Glicksberg~·Charles I •. , "Norman Mailer: 'rhe Angry Young Novelist in America", Wisconsin :Jtudies in Gontemp­ orary Literature, I,. 1, (Winter, 1960), 2'.5-34. Hassan, Ihab, Radical Innocence: '.lb. e Contemporary American l'iove 1. 1fow York: Harper and .tww, Harper 'l'orchbook, 1 961. . Hoffman, irederick, "l~orman Mailer and the lievol t of the Ego: Some Ubservations on Hecent American l.iiterature", Wisconsin cltudies in Uontem orar biterature, I, 3, (Fall, 19 0 ' 5-12. Howe, Irving, A World More Attractive. New York: Horizon ~ress, 1963. -122

Kauf'man, Donald .L., Norman Mailer, The Countdown \~'he Ji'irst Twenty Years). Carbondale: ciou.thern illinois University,·1969.

Kazin, Alfred, "The ·viorld as r~ovel: }'rom Capote to 11 Mailer , New York Review of ..dooks, AAVl, 6, (April 8,1971) 26-30. Krim, Seymour, "A Hungry Mental Lion", hvergreen Review, IV, 11, (JanTi'eb., 1960), 178-86. J.Jasch,, Christopher, The New liadicalism in America, .. 1889-1963, fhe Intellectual as a ciocial ~ype. New York: Random House, 196). Leeds, Barry H., 'I'he Structured Vision of Norman Mailer. hew York: ~ew York University ~ress, 1969. Mudrick, Marvin, "Mailer and Styron: Guests of the 11 J1stablishment , Hudson Review, .XV II, 3, (Autumn, 1964), 34 6 _.~()6. Noble, David, The bternal Adam and the riew World Garden. hew York: George ~raziller, 1968. Podhoretz, Norman, Doings and Undoipgs. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1.964. Poirier, .Richard, "Morbid-Mindedness"·, Commentary, xxxr.x, 6. (June, 1965), 91-4.

J?respott, Peter ::l., "I Sing the .rlody blectronic: Norman Mailer as \ial t Whitman", :Wook, ili..V, 1 (Jan. 12, 1 971 ) ' 78. Richardson, Jack, "'rhe Aesthetics of horman Mailer", New York Review· of .cloaks, Ail, 9, (May, 1969), 3-4.

Hichler, Mordecai, "Norman Mailer", ~ncounter, X.XV, 1, (July, 1965), 61-4 •. Sale, Roger, "Watchman, 1Vhat of the Night':'", New York Review of Boo.ks, XVI, 8, (May 6, 1971 ) , 13-17. Schrader, George A., "Norman Mailer and the Despair of Defiance", Yale lteview, .LI, 2, ()iinter, 1962), 267-80.

1 Schulz, Max } ., "Mailer's Di vine Comedy", Gontem­ . porary .ui tera ture, It., 1 (VI inter, 1 968 j, 36-57. Bolotaroff, b.obert, "Down Mailer's Way", Chicago Review, XIX, 3, (June, 19&7), 11-25. -123

·Toback, James, 11 N~rman Mailer Today", Commentary, XLIV, 4 (October, 1967), 68-76,

1 , "At l:>lay in the ..1! ields of th.e Bored", .H.sguire, LXX, -§.-,--c=nec., 1968J,150-5+. .

Trachtenberg, Alan, "Mailer on the ~teps of the Pentagon", Nation, GGVI, 22, (May 27, 1968), 701-2. Trilling, Diana, "The liadical Moralism of Norman Mailer" in Nona .rlalakian and Charles >iimrnons, eds., The Creative Present. Garden 0ity; Doubleday, 1963. Vidal, Gore, "The Norman Mailer Syndrome", Nation, CXC, 1, (Jan. 2, 1960), 13-6. Wain, John, "Mailer's America", New Republic, CLV, 14, (Oct. 1, 1966), 19-20. Weber, .Brom, "A Fear of Dying: Norman Mailer's.·.· An American Dream", The Hollins Critic, II, 3, (June, 1965), 1-11 • . Weinberg, Helen K., The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University ~ress, 1970.