The Fourteenth Chronicle

...This understanding would take him above the petty ideologies that flowed around him and into aworld of internal and external freedom...

...Of all the things in this world a government is the thing least worth fighting for...

...He wrote to Rumsey, "At school I was a most unsocial friendless little beast—and it has been hard to shake off the habit of solitude...

...When Katy died in a car accident in 1947, Dos Passos was thrown into a three-year period of despair...

...Today in college English courses it is commonplace to be assigned novels by such comparatively inferior writers as Kurt Vonnegut or Norman Mailer...

...His trilogy, U.S.A., stands as one of the most powerful and unique series of novels in the history of American literature, and for those three novels alone he should have won a Nobel prize...

...This sense of individualistic moral purpose pervades his letters and diaries...

...Dos Passos realized that he was happiest when he was free to do whatever he chose...

...His unusual lifestyle, poor eyesight, and lack of athletic ability caused him to be considered "different" at school and he found it difficult to make close friends...

...Born January 14, 1896, the illegitimate son of John R. Dos Passos and Lucy Madison, Dos Passos learned early to live with the painful loneliness that was to follow him throughout his life...

...Nonetheless, his concern and interest in life never waned...

...He never identified himself totally with ideological leftism, nor did he end his career thinking of himself as a rightist...

...In spite of these lasting friendships, Dos Passos often remarked that he felt alone in this world...

...In 1949, Dos Passos married Elizabeth Holdridge and settled into the life of a farmer...

...Evidently, he was immediately infatuated and they were married in August 1929...

...Although youknow there are people who sort of have solitude in their blood, who are just as lonely in a crowd or on a mountain top —I may be one of them," It seems that the only period of his life in which he managed to evade this solitude was during his marriage to Katharine Smith...

...Thus, when he produced Midcentury, decidedly conservative in thrust, and when he increasingly became identified toward the end with National Review, which printed his last piece, many viewed him as an apostate...

...Suddenly I find I had been completely ignorant of these things...

...It was for this reason that Dos Passos ultimately recognized America as his home, and his works after this period reflect a new-found satisfaction in America...

...The final letter in this collection–to the Committee on Admissions of the Century Association, sponsoring the membership of Bill Buckley--demonstrates, I think, Dos Passos's basic attitude toward ideological matters: "Since the grand old days of Bob Benchley no one has appeared in the animal world so full of high spirits and sheer animal warmth...

...Although he continued to correspond with his friends after Katy's death, his letters seem to lack the vibrant spark of life that had been so noticeable in his earlier communications...

...In the fifties and sixties, it meant siding in many instances with the Right...

...His extensive travels befone and during the war years brought him into contact with a vast array of people, many of whom would remain his lifelong companions and correspondents...

...He was moved by the search for' a purified society which was not based upon any one ideology, but rather one in which man could follow his own philosophical dreams and desires...

...He traveled abroad with his mother during his early years and boarded in London while attending school...

...But it was his closest friends, Rumsey Marvin, Robert Hillyer, Dudley Poore, and Stewart Mitchell to whom he would turn in times of trouble and ecstasy...

...Unfortunately, this sort of judgment does occur...

...It makes you wonder how much else there is that you dont [sic] know about...

...And in Dos Passos's case it is totally unwarranted...

...This recognition must have led him to the belief that all men, no matter what social or political views they hold, require individual liberty...

...The war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self-seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting...

...Even when death hit on September 28, 1970, Horsely Gantt noted that "inquiring, interested look on his face that typified him throughout his life...

...Although an avowed pacifist, he became an ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I and then a sergeant in the American army...

...I had thought myself fairly well versed in the miseries of life...

...No one held Bob Benchley's occasional political acts against him...

...His influence on American literature has been profound, yet somehow he has never received the recognition he deserves...

...He stood alone as a man facing a world whose manners and morals were often foreign to his own...

...Dos Passos ended as he began, a man alone, an individualist in search of that society which would allow him the fullest possible exercise of his individualism...

...Their life together was total bliss for Dos Passos, even though they were constantly broke and in debt...

...He later considered these experiences to be "the most valuable part of my education during those years...

...Isolated socially, Dos Passos developed into a sensitive and observant young man who eventually felt compelled to leave school and explore the "endless welter of experience...

...Mary Jo Doyle...

...Some believe that Dos Passos rests in limbo because of what was perceived as an ideological shift, During the early years, the Left claimed him, and the American literary establishment was and continues to be leftist...

...In the thirties this often meant making common cause with the Left...

...The letters and diaries of Dos Passos bring out personality common to the age of the lost generation...

...They had one daughter, Lucy, whom he adored, and his final years were divided among traveling, writing, and farming...

...If we ever become sufficiently sophisticated to view him in this way, perhaps he will be released from his sentence in limbo to take his rightful place among the very few giants of American literature...

...The consequences of Dos Passos's convictions took the form not so much of damnation as a long stretch in limbo...

...In a Faustian sense, Dos Passos was a man willing to face the consequences of his convictions, and as he stated in one of his letters, "A man writes to be damned, not to be saved...

...Dos Passos's battlefield life further confirmed his "enthusiastic pacifism," and his reflections in a letter to Rumsey Marvin point to his total disillusionment with the entire process of making war...

...Such figures as Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Gerald and Sara Murphy, Upton Sinclair, and Ernest Hemingway were to shape his life and his works in the years to come...

...He felt that without this ultimate freedom man was doomed to fall under the machinations of a bureaucratic government...

...And it's interesting to note that the techniques of Mailer's least flawed novel, The Naked and the Dead, rely heavily on many of those techniques pioneered by Dos Passos...

...But as these letters and diaries prove, Dos Passos must ultimately be viewed as the quintessential American, a man beyond ideologies...

...It was also during this period of his life that he began work on his first novel, One Man's Initiation —1917...

...He had close friends whom he worshipped and loved, but at the same time he felt a need to instruct and entertain them...

...He met Katy while visiting Hemingway in Key West, Florida, in April 1928...

...He continually fluctuated between socialism and American democratic ideals during his early years (most often leaning toward the former), and eventually reached his own conclusion as to the inordinate rights of man...