Dos Passos Obsessed

...These episodes are "colorful" and implausible...

...The business of a novelist," he declared then, "is to create characters first and foremost, and then to set them in the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history...

...Unfortunately, the glow faded from his prose with the repudiation of his beliefs and the dislocation of his values...

...Dos Passos became an admirable artist-reporter and a "good writer," if we define good writing in his own words as "the reflection of an intense and organized viewpoint toward something, usually toward the values and processes of human life...

...He was a better writer, as Robert Gorham Davis has said, when he was a worse social and historical diagnostician...

...When a writer subordinates character and style to political ideas, he runs the risk of yielding himself to the tendencies of history...

...He was soaked in his age...

...He has rejected many of his old beliefs, but he is still more deeply obsessed with the betrayed and betrayers of his past than he is with the undiscovered America of the future...

...He never created a single memorable figure—no Sister Carrie, no Babbitt, no Gatsby...

...American literature, Smith College This is a sad book, the weakest of Dos Passos's novels and a melancholy reminder of the author's own great days when his beat-up characters stayed tough and his prose was taut...

...Today Dos Passos's convictions do not convince...

...His closeness to history, as well as his own powerful convictions, seemed to energize his prose and make parts of U.S.A...

...The end of the novel finds him in a Miami airport after the Cuban fiasco, adrift like Dos Passos's other seekers, and waiting for the day when he "might be needed...

...Everything in a novel that doesn't work towards these aims is superfluous or, at least, innocent daydreaming...

...The real hero of the novel is not Lancaster but his good friend, Roger Thurloe (James V. Forrestal), the only Government official who divines the menace of Soviet imperialism and whose public frustrations are paralleled in Lancaster's private woes...

...Washington, whose moral disintegration Dos Passos has been recording since The District of Columbia, is still the jangling nerve-center of his collapsing world, and once more we meet the public figures (most of them slobs, idiots and scoundrels) of Roosevelt's and Truman's America...

...Any honest observer with a knack for reporting, Dos Passos thought, could make a "record for this time," but few writers ever created "living and rounded characters...

...His heroes have been himself, first of all, and the great personalities who towered over the times he chronicled...

...Even in the Thirties, Dos Passos never quite lived up to his own requirements for the novelist...

...One line of the novel, told in the historical present, takes up his shabby adventures with the girl whom he unreasonably hopes will rejuvenate him...

...sometimes literary artistry can more than make up for the inadequacy of thought...

...The hero is an aging journalist, once internationally known, who is trying to make a new start in Havana with a thoroughly disagreeable redheaded girl 30 years his junior...

...Because Hemingway, for all his limitations, is a disciplined artist, there is a level beneath which his work simply cannot sink, whereas writers like Sinclair Lewis or Dos Passos have no such built-in preservers...

...He relives the events of World War II that he saw and reported: the battle of Britain, Pearl Harbor and the Pacific war, the days of liberation, the death of the President, and the shock of Hiroshima...

...Pages in this novel are hardly more than re-writings of the stories Dos Passos wrote for Life magazine in 1945 on the Pacific war, Vienna, and the Nuremberg trials, later collected in Tour of Duty...

...and In All Countries almost incandescent...

...The important sections of the novel, however, consist of a mechanically arranged set of flashbacks into Roland Lancaster's turbulent past...

...his literary yearnings toward a salvageable America, his illustrations of grass-roots vitality, his excursions into history, his affirmation of what he once denied are not imaginatively assimilated into his fiction...

...After Thurloe "slipped quickly through a hospital window and let himself drop," Lancaster's journalistic career is finished...

...Dos Passos, the preacher and seeker, has been tempted into this practice in some of his recent novels and particularly in The Great Days...

...But, if his characters seem to us now like figures in a swiftly unfolding procession, not men and women with souls and interior histories, the livid world through which they moved was marvelously presented...

...In The Great Days, tinged a little with self-pity and self-revulsion, Dos Passos is still ringing the alarm bell and shouting to arouse his beloved but somnolent country, but his message is getting monotonous and his characters are growing dim...

...Dos Passos himself seldom released his characters from his own grasping self-preoccupations or permitted them to drive off the highways of history into private pastures...

...Hemingway once made a sardonic remark in Death in the Afternoon about the writer who puts "his own intellectual musings, which he might sell for a low price as essays, into the mouths of artificially constructed characters...