Dos Passos Bitter Again:
WEBSTER, HARVEY CURTIS
Dos Passos Bitter Again Most Likely to Succeed. By John Dos Passos. Prentice-Hall. 310 pp. $3.50. Reviewed by Harvey Curtis Webster English Department, University of Louisville; author, "On a...
...Alastair Cooke's Generation on Trial, or the novels of Manes Sperber will recognize...
...There was silly talk about how, come the revolution, no children would he born idiots (as there is in Mr...
...Dos Passos and believe that he will again become the excellent novelist he potentially always is...
...Dos Passos's novel), about just how the play, novel, poem should be written to accord with the gospel of Marx as modified by the theological Russians...
...Dos Passos, who knows, were being given lessons by Senator McCarthy, who doesn't...
...But this too generalized anger rises to almost insane proportions in Most Likely to Succeed...
...and Mr...
...Dos Passos's twelfth novel is "the story of an incomplete man...
...There were Sam Fausts who prayed for the revolution that would not benefit them, Elis who wouldn't be taken into the party and had a consequent: rough time...
...author, "On a Darkling Plain" Most Likely to Succeed centers about Jed Morris—who was, according to his classmates...
...I hope this contribution to anti-Communist hysteria is unlikely to succeed...
...There were, are and perhaps always will be "Jeds...
...Excepting Eli and Jed's father, neither one of whom seems more than a caricature of "goodness," all of the characters seem to have been conceived to support a belief that Communists have always been exemplars of original sin...
...Sam, that rising attorney, he can't be a Commie...
...Dos Passos's unwillingness to make his people human beings, the writing sounds more like something beaten out of True Confessions than something written by one of America's most honorable and honored novelists...
...There were Communist cells that dominated the left-wing theater, that penetrated Hollywood studios...
...Most Likely to Succeed does have some value as social history...
...He lay with his eyes closed...
...When I love 'em they stay loved.'" Later, there is this pretty characteristic bit of dialogue: "'Preposterous,' said Jed...
...he's too prosperous.' "'Maybe that's why,' Eli hissed into his ear...
...As a consequence of Mr...
...No doubt...
...Though I honor Mr...
...But Mr...
...Dos Passos's distinguished career leads one to expect a good novel on this theme, particularly since he seemed in Chosen Country to have rid himself of the anger about almost everything that made District of Columbia a less satisfactory novel than USA...
...Jed, you're a babe in the woods.'" Remembering the authenticity of Mary French and Ben Compton in USA, of some of the left-wingers in District of Columbia, these passages and many like them do seem preposterous...
...Worst of all, there is the implication that his story is representative...
...Jed does write some plays that stay on Broadway a while, joins up with the Communists, gets to Hollywood, makes money, sleeps with many women...
...Dos Passos, "one of America's great writers," as the dustjacket rightly says, knows better than to present pictures in black and white rather than characters...
...Most Likely to Succeed is no more representative than the McCarthy hearings of what really went on in the last two decades among Communists...
...As anyone who has read Granville Hicks's Where We Came Out...
...In the words of the dustjacket, Mr...
...In the early part of the book, Jed, who has just slept with a rich girl, thinks: "That was his favorite role the slum child who wins the golden girl...
...I am afraid he nearly ends up by convincing me that what I know was true about the Thirties wasn't...
...warped by his own selfishness," a book that "probes the factors that have turned many 'Jeds' into misguided, destructive citizens who seek to change a way of life that benefits them...
...It is as if Mr...
Vol. 37 • September 1954 • No. 39
