The Novelist as Political Traveler

...What comes through in Townsend Luding-ton's balanced and readable biography is a writer who found the world outside more fascinating than himself, and a revealing though slanted glimpse of 20th-century history as seen by a man of unusual energy, curiosity and intellectual integrity...

...We have something better to teach the world than the Russians have," he wrote Wilson in 1958...

...The whole New York Jewish theater guild, Damrosch, Otto Kahn, Mike Gold culture (I mean Jewish in the best sense)," he wrote to a Communist friend, John Howard Law-son, in 1934, "is an echo of the liberal mitteleuropa culture that has just bitten the dust with such a fearful crash in Europe...

...A man of hearty appetites, domineering character and adventurous instincts, he made and spent fortunes, bought and sold yachts, kept up several homes simultaneously, earned the largest fee every paid to a lawyer up to that time for organizing the American Sugar Refining Company, invested in projects (such as diesel engines and tunnels under the Hudson) that proved premature, got to know several Presidents while lobbying in Washington, and wrote a book advocating The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People...

...His arguments with his lifelong friend Edmund Wilson over their political and literary differences reveal Dos Passos to be a much more judicious political thinker than one could possibly deduce from the condescending disparagement of most of his liberal or Leftist critics...

...He kept returning to Jefferson and the Founding Fathers in his historical books as reminders of the possibility of a purer type of "selfgovernment," although he never succeeded in showing how an outlook developed for a nation of independent small farmers could be applied to an advanced industrial and urban society...

...The gentle aspects of Dos Passos' personality—his introspection, his sensitivity in personal relations, his loyalty to friends, his responsiveness to color and form and music—can be traced to a childhood spent almost exclusively among adult females...

...This is no portrait of the artist at work...

...But there is a troubling element in his thinking that I had not suspected before reading this biography: Himself only two generations removed from his poor Portuguese immigrant grandfather, Dos Passos very early acquired a strong streak of Anglo-Saxon nativism that rejected Continental influences, in particular those purveyed by "Jewish New Yorkers...

...The essential thing is the politics of balance and moderation...

...Unlike his friends, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Dos Passos did not create for readers a charismatic personality or autobiographical characters they could identify with...

...Thus while he cooperated with the Communists in defense of striking workers and Sacco and Vanzetti, his greater empathy was for the independent syndicalism of the International Workers of the World, the " Wobblies" who were suspicious of any kind of government intervention...

...In the midst of his prodigious output, he traveled with a compulsiveness that would bring glee to any psychoanalyst's eye...

...In the year 1924 alone, while writing Manhattan Transfer, he lived briefly in Far Rocka-way and Brooklyn, went of f to New Orleans, walked and rode through Florida to Key West, returned to New York, sailed for France, joined Hemingway for the bull fights at Pamplona, took a 200 mile hike with friends across the Pyrenees, and after stops at Antibes, Strasbourg, Paris and London, wound up back in New York, meeting the publisher's deadline...

...His first memories are of a "hotel childhood" in Europe, principally in Brussels and London...

...It is true that Dos Passos once spoke of himself as a satirist, and the "Newsreels" and biographies in U.S.A...

...Dos Passos came closer to the mark when he referred to his novels as "contemporary chronicles," an understated but essentially accurate description of his unique effort to convey the flavor of an historical period through a combination of fictional and nonfic-tional devices...

...Salinger, we only now, 10 years after his death, have the first (and probably definitive) biography of John Dos Passos...

...Among the charms of this study is Dos Passos' totally idiosyncratic response to writers and books universally approved by the conventional literary wisdom...

...Governments are only makeshifts—like patent toothpaste—less important perhaps—and who would die for toothpaste, or kill for it," he wrote in 1917...

...Luding-ton's reconstruction of Dos Passos' parental background and early years makes it at least possible now to understand the emergence of the novelist from a strangely uprooted childhood...

...A week later he informed Wilson: "After reading endless volumes I find I can no longer do without it...

...Born in a Chicago hotel in 1896, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of an enormously successful corporate lawyer (himself the son of an immigrant Portuguese shoemaker) and a genteel 42-year-old widow whose ancestry went back to colonial Maryland...

...Confined to bed during one of his recurrent attacks of rheumatic fever, Dos Passos waded through Proust on Edmund Wilson's instigation: "Oh Doctor Wilson I have followed your advice religiously...

...Nor did his work have a comparable stylistic glitter or psychological resonance...

...After his marriage in 1929 to Katharine Smith, a childhood friend of Hemingway, Dos Passos' wanderlust persisted, making him the ideal recorder, in U.S.A., of a mobile society of drifters: sailors, union organizers, itinerant workers, advertising executives, movie stars, and airplane pilots...

...His admiration for his subject at times impels him to include too many details of travel and too many youthful effusions...

...The stream of sensation flows by...

...This liaison, romantic and affectionate on both sides, was not legalized until the father's first wife died in 1912...

...In the bulk of his narratives, though, the satiric element is hardly visible...

...And these were reinforced by the reaction his French accent and thick eyeglasses drew from "the clean young American Rover Boys" of Choate School, who hazed him and dubbed him "Frenchie" and "Four-Eyes...

...Dos Passos went on to argue that only a native radicalism could compete with the forces of a native fascism...

...Nor was Dos Passos ever blind to the dangers of corporate chicanery or a materialist mentality...

...Since Dos Passos was a confiding diarist in his youth and a faithful, high-spirited letter writer until his death in 1970, his nomadic regimen is amply detailed in his own hurtling and colorful prose...

...At any particular moment, Dos Passos could be working simultaneously on a novel, a magazine article, a play (in the 1920s), and a work of history or reportage (after 1940...

...His error was to extrapolate a sweeping dismissal of European and Jewish culture from his own narrow experiences with a particular kind of New York Jewish radical...

...I suck it up like a sponge," he wrote in his journal...

...It is hard to reconcile these deprecatory images with the authoritative confidence of U.S.A.—with its intimate mastery of the workplace and of business, its driving, whirlwind pace, its relentless judgments of public figures and social institutions...

...including The42ndParallel, 1919md TheBigMoney),deserves to be placed on the small shelf of first-rate and enduring American novels...

...If the purpose of fiction is to give us a quickened sense of life, however, then his magnificent trilogy, U.S.A...

...The biography makes it clear that, although his affiliations changed sharply, the novelist's political goals remained basically the same: to advance the cause of personal liberty and resist statist encroachments...

...I can feel a delicate mould of libido growing all through me, producing a pale fluorescence of tiny incests, tangled inferiorities, a light fuzz of thwarted desires, like you find when you open a rotten peach...

...Townsend Ludington, who teaches English at the University of North Carolina, is a meticulous scholar with a good sense of organization...

...I don't like German novels anyway...

...Ludington, in fact, is far better at following the incremental changes in Dos Passos' political views than he is at offering a serious critical assessment of the novels, which he regards as primarily "satires...

...Dos Passos was among the very first of American literary radicals to recognize the hypocrisy and brutality of the Soviet regime and to reject the apologia that the ends justified the means...

...This appetite fueled Dos Passos' creative drive...

...The major achievement of Luding-ton's biography is to illuminate the relationship between the writer and his writing...

...In Edmund Wilson's early novel about Greenwich Village bo-hemianism, / Thought of Daisy, Dos Passos makes his muted entry as Hugo Bamman, a shy, gangling young man who stands quietly against the wall at a party, leaving early, but first courteously expressing his "stooped, stuttered and bubbled good nights...

...His rebelliousness made him sympathetic not only to socialism but to the new movements in the arts, such as Expressionism, Futurism and surrealism, and in time his plays and novels reflected this openness to experiment...

...His father's more direct legacy was a very masculine desire to experience everything, to be part of history and to influence events...

...He responded to a request by Van Wyck Brooks: "I can't write a tribute to Thomas Mann because I think he was an old bastard...

...He answered that he had been a "certain kind" of writer who, like Stendahl and Thackeray, told stories involving "the presentation of the particular slice of history the novelist has seen enacted before his own eyes...

...My I enjoyed learning that you hate Gide—Hope he's in hell," he wrote to e.e...

...These contributed to a fierce youthful anger against the pompous and powerful, against "the all-pervading spirit of commerce," against governments and authority of any kind...

...But the decline of Dos Passos' reputation surely has as one of its sources, along with his increasing conservatism, a widespread critical dismissal of his fiction as essentially repor-torial...

...One can sympathize with Dos Passos' political philosophy without finding in Barry Goldwater or Robert Taft men of Jefferson's mold, not to say stature...

...With intelligence and precision, Ludington reports Dos Passos' shift from a flaming revolutionary to a conservative who supported Joseph McCarthy, briefly with subsequent regrets, and in 1964 backed Barry Goldwater...

...do have a high sardonic content...

...Strangely, even in letters to literary friends, Dos Passos almost never discussed his own writing, except in terms of the pressure on his time...

...Yet anyone interested in American literary life, and especially the Leftist literary politics of the 1920s and '30s, will be grateful for his careful documentation of the intricate disputes Dos Passos kept getting into because of his irrepressible independence of mind...

...Despite the admiring portrait he painted of his father in Chosen Country, his most autobiographical novel, Dos Passos resented his father's failure to acknowledge paternity and the embarrassment the clandestine relationship imposed on his mother...

...cummings...

...What I mean by harping on the Jewish note is that I am just beginning to realize how much of the New York rebellious mentality is a Jewish European import and how it is dying out now that the sources have been bottled up...

...Although his father provided well and corresponded regularly, boy and mother saw him only on rare trips...

...But one tends to forgive Dos Passos his lapses and exaggerations because they stemmed from a deep-rooted individualism that virtually always went against the fashionable currents...

...He simply believed that democratic capitalism was the least evil of available alternatives because it had interstices where mavericks could find a protective place...

...John Randolph Dos Passos could have been invented by Theodore Dreiser...

...He wanted to "annihilate these stupid colleges of ours, and all the nice young men in them, instillers of stodginess in every form, bastard culture, middle-class snobbism...

...And no one knows this material better than Ludington, who some years back did an excellent job of editing The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, a fascinating companion volume to the new biography...

...The intention is clearly to recreate as exactly as possible the moment to moment experience of daily life in the widest range of individual types and social classes ever captured in American fiction...

...It is surprising that, in a period when armies of academics search out the lives and psyches of obscure writers, when at least half a dozen books have been published about the still youthful John Updike and scores of essays about the reclusive J.D...

...There are several sympathetic Jewish characters in Dos Passos' fiction, yet he seems not to have made any Jewish friends or to have read any part of the large body of Jewish and Eastern European writing that is skeptical, deflating of pompousness, and full of the humor he found lacking in the dogmatic Jewish Communists he met in New York...

...Ludington documents an almost manic productivity...

...I can think of no work of fiction or history that conveys a sense of American life in the opening three decades of the 20th century as vivid, as many-sided, as intellectually provocative or, despite its generally disabused outlook, as exhilarating as U.S.A...

...In Streetsof Night, the partially autobiographical novel Dos Passos started while still a student at Harvard, the hero is amoony esthete, a timid art historian who can merely dream of an active, vital life in the larger world...

...But there were countervailing influences, derived from Dos Passos' double response to his father...

...In his loneliness, young Dos Passos became a voracious reader, a methodical diarist, a budding poet, and a solitary walker...

...Reviewed by Nathan Glick Former editor, "Dialogue" Why was a novelist "meddling in history," John Dos Passos asked of himself in his later years...

...are you sure this is a first-rate product you recommended...

...I have applied hot and cold Proustian complexes to my extraverted limbs and joints, but Dear Sir and Dr., I get little or no relief____The sentences escape me like strands of undercooked spaghetti—Oh Dr...