Dos Passos: A Life

...with the 1949 publication of The Grand Design, a long, angry novel whose principal villain was none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Stalinoid reviewers like Granville Hicks began regularly dismissing the author of U.S.A...

...by 1975, the posthumous publication of Dos Passos's final novel, Century's Ebb, attracted the attention of only one serious critic...

...Suddenly he smelt a social-fascist rat...

...and Midcentury, those sprawling conglomerations of "newsreels" and "Camera Eyes" and detachable biographies of everybody from Henry Ford to Jimmy Dean, have little or nothing to do with the literary sensibility of our time...

...What happened...

...It is, in short, a "pure" biography rather than a "critical" biography...

...The results, though a trifle stuffy, were perfectly acceptable...

...she certainly conveys it more vividly, useless details and all...

...Moreover, enough factual boners emerge in the general welter of confusion to make the attentive reader suspicious of Miss Carr's detail work...

...Whittaker Chambers certainly qualifies...

...Dos Passos's "contemporary chronicles" are to the modern, post-Jamesian novel of character as non-Euclidean geometry is to geometry...

...indeed, Jean-Paul Sartre, writing as late as 1947, called Dos Passos "the greatest writer of our time...

...Townsend Ludington, a Dos Passos scholar, launched a pre-emptive strike on the title of definitive Dos Passos biographer a few years ago with his John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey, a long, sober-sided, liberal-minded survey of Dos Passos's life arid work...

...Rich, fascinating, titanic, masterly, approved by the wife and kids: At 624 pages of agate-sized print, what more could you want...

...or Midcentury with minimal editing...

...Her book starts off with a prologue cast in the form of a prose poem (no kidding) about Dos Passos's father...

...Miss Carr, who obviously has read every word John Dos Passos managed to get into print, seems to be operating on the assumption that her readers have done the same thing...

...her book contains neither plot summaries nor critical discussions of Dos Passos's work...

...surely no responsible editor would have permitted Miss Carr to shovel such nonsense into an ostensibly serious biography...

...I'm not sure that I'm willing to go quite that far-but had a really gifted biographer like Matthew Bruccoli written Dos Passos: A Life, Dos Passos's reputation and achievement might finally have come into proper focus for readers like me...

...A his last deficiency is the most frustrating of all...

...It's nice to know the name of the primer from which Dos Passos studied Russian in 1928, but it would be equally nice to have a convenient checklist of his published writings- and nicer still to have some thoughtful discussion of them...

...Her sins in this department are far too numerous to list: detailed analyses of Dos Passos's juvenile verse, a list of twenty-seven popular books published in 1925, a lengthy paragraph enumerating the kinds of people who made the cover of Time in the twenties and thirties, a catalogue of authors who won the Nobel Prize for literature instead of Dos Passos...

...He is, along with Dreiser, the great unread American classic, and the reasons are perfectly clear: the size of his output, the color of his politics, the unstylishness of his technique...

...he foreseeable future turned out to be four years long, for we now have a new Dos Passos biography...

...Then the bottom fell out...

...There are more than a few people around who see Dos Passos as a unique and important figure in the history of American literature: an American Orwell whose stature has been clouded by the unremitting hostilities of the literary left...

...Initially acclaimed as a socially conscious anti-war novelist with decided Communist leanings, Dos Passos first got into trouble with his critical backers after a sobering visit to Spain in 1937 convinced him that the Russians weren't all they were cracked up to be...

...books like U.S.A...

...On the whole, Miss Carr seems to have a clearer sense of Dos Passos's personality than does Mr...

...This effusion, and the three others like it with which the larger sections of Dos Passos: A Life are marked off, is a naive and painful pastiche of Dos Passos's own badly dated, Whit-manesque biographical narrative style...

...Thus, they are not read and will not be read, given the way things work in our literary establishment, until somebody writes a first-rate critical biography of Dos Passos, one that properly fuses life and work into a coherent and arresting whole...

...Dos Passos needs to be reevaluated in a literate and systematic way...

...The main problem with the text proper is its extreme and inappropriate length, the direct result of Miss Carr's inability to omit unnecessary detail for the sake of overall clarity...

...Ludington may not have been all that happy with where his subject ended up, but he was clearly determined to show with reasonable objectivity how he got there...

...was not a standard-bearer of conservatism...

...Miss Carr may be a master interviewer, but she certainly has no business getting anywhere near a typewriter without a bodyguard...

...Four months before his death, Dos Passos wrote to a friend about the "strong tide of prejudice" that had prevented his later books from getting a fair hearing: Mike Gold, a fanatic with a delicate nose for heresy, had been hailing me as a proletarian writer and fellow traveler...

...Still, it is hard to overlook Miss Carr's flaws as an author and biographer...

...anybody who starts out writing for The New Masses and ends up writing for National Review is doubtless inherently deserving of a good biography...

...To Dos Passos himself, the answer was perfectly clear: His political beliefs had gotten him blacklisted by the literary left...

...The Commies decided I was a goddamn reactionary and let loose...

...the illegitimate son of an eccentric corporate lawyer and a well-bred daughter of Maryland society, he hurtled from Harvard to World War I to Hemingway to Sacco and Vanzetti to the Spanish Civil War to Edmund Wilson to National Review with a dizzying vigor that could have come straight out of the pages of U.S.A...

...The amount of influence the Communists have had on the liberal in-gangs that have made a hash of non-partisan literary criticism in this country would make an interesting study...

...By 1951, Arthur Mizener's claim that "John Dos Passos has very nearly achieved the rank of a neglected novelist" was pretty much taken for granted...

...Miss Carr, for example, provides lengthy excerpts from an exchange of letters between Dos Passos and Hemingway regarding a Dos Passos review of The Sun Also Rises for the New Masses-without bothering to quote any of the review itself...

...The story of John Dos Passos's fall from critical grace is a book in itself...

...An editor, for openers...

...She may be confused about the political affiliations of the young Bill Buckley, but she at least took the trouble to interview him (as Ludington did not) and to present the results of her revealing interview in Dos Passos: A Life...

...All of this is particularly unfortunate because Miss Carr's book contains a great deal of valuable material, particularly on Dos Passos's later years, that Townsend Ludington either overlooks or ignores...

...And Dos Passos's life, politics aside, was a biographer's paradise, a fantastic tale that discouraged plausibility at every turn...

...Dos Passos: A Life is a huge slab of data assembled by Virginia Spencer Carr, Carson McCullers's maudlin biographer, proclaimed by its dust jacket to be "a rich, fascinating biography of a literary titan" written by "a master interviewer" with "the cooperation of Dos Passos' wife and daughter...

...and, given the current state of Dos Passos criticism and the prior existence of a perfectly competent "pure" biography, it is for the general reader a more or less pointless endeavor...

...But not the major reclamation job we needed-not by a long shot.not by a long shot...

...Dos Passos's life is in itself a "contemporary chronicle" of supreme interest...

...Rich and fascinating, yes...

...trilogy, John Dos Passos seemed firmly established as the leading American novelist of the thirties...

...Dos Passos: A Life is so clotted with this kind of thing that important details get lost in the shuffle or omitted entirely...

...As it is, we are left with the unassimilated raw materials of a great biography...

...she claims at one point that "Our Town was awarded the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for fiction" arid elsewhere asserts that William F. Buckley, Jr., "Yale's most prominent radical as a student in the early 1950s...

...no further biographical efforts, it seemed, would be necessary for the foreseeable future...

...Things do get better in the prose department, a few clunky academic fanfares ("Dos Passos may have had more satisfying interdependencies, but none was more influencing") notwithstanding...

...Ludington...

...as "bewildered, ill-tempered, often petulant, never passionate...