SEARCH FOR A WHEEL

...If I haven't slaved and worked my fingers to the bone for every piece of bread I've eaten in this house...

...I agree with you absho-lootely, pard...

...There is a large cast in Dos Passos' fiction, and his stage is full...

...It is time to recognize that Dos Passos was a member of one of several American nations from the beginning of his career...

...What he says of Spain was true of much of his American commentary: "All I could write was what I saw on the surface...

...For fronting his own reality would involve coming to grips with the meaning of LaFollette's crusade, not parroting Jefferson's libertarian catchwords...

...What holds them together...

...Well, I declare...

...We know nothing about them at all, really...

...But, as he says of our national post-World War II program, "Intentions aren't enough...

...Reviewed by Louis Filler THIS collection of old and new articles, interlarded with commentary, takes Dos Passos from the pages of the New Mosses, in the middle of the 1920's, to Life and the National Review in more recent years...

...How does one progress from Dos Passos' bitter, and, I think, enduring commentary on the Sacco and Van-zetti case ("all right we are two nations") to the kind of condoning of slavery itself which accompanied his treatment of The Head and Heart of Thomas Jefferson...

...Note his view of American life: where reformers are addle-pated sentimentalists, the best of them no better than sincere, where T.R...

...LaFollette's campaign in 1924 was an end, rather than a beginning...

...Can one name a better...

...Re-read U.S.A., and observe the knowing references to Harriman (not Averell), "Teddy," "Waiting for the Robert E. Lee," and other certified Americans and popular songs...

...And now Dos Passos writes like a conservative, and hates communism, and fears and despises socialism, and interprets the New Deal as having been no more than a hollow shell filled with power-hungry men and fellow-travelers...

...It suggests that Dos Passos, at the time, felt a stake in American capitalism and was in some fashion defending it...

...The common element in both his viewpoints was and is a lack of interest in people as people, struggling within traditions, social relations, economic need, racial and sectional concerns...

...What actions flowed—and flow from his program...

...Or artist types...

...building a new society in the shell of the old"), and where typical Americans are working stiffs with revolutionary or, if nothing more, rebellious tendencies, confused or opportunistic middle-class elements, self-deceiving or hypocritical business or leisure-class elements...

...They were to have had all the art of the Willa Cathers, the emancipation from literary devices and heroics of Dreiser, the sense of America of a Stephen Vincent Benet, the revolutionary courage of a John Reed and a Randolph ; Bourne, the factual substance of an Upton Sinclair—and all this they were to have made into a new cultural and intellectual thing which used some of the vital old elements (the "usable past") and discarded the obsolete and dead...

...It is just that these earlier travels had a deceptive air of destiny and control about them...

...Lindsay grew tired of reciting "The Congo" to women's clubs, and swallowed fire...

...They are written for a generation which thought itself free and superior...

...every man for himself, and the devil take the hindmost...

...Actually, of course, he assumed its devilish inadequacies and hoped for its ruin...

...Manhattan Transfer was perhaps his most meaningful work of the 1920's, with its tremulous sense of urban complexity and youthful confusion, its frustrated desire to love and live beautifully...

...The point is that Dos Passos thought, at the time, that he had enough history—enough, and to spare...

...Most of his generation saw no use in it at all...

...I was going to say that he belonged to the anti-American nation...

...What has been the sum of his activities...

...That was a period in which American capitalism seemed a much greater danger to the Russian experiment than the other way around...

...Perhaps he simply can't...

...He has come home again, but bearing no great gifts...

...But he is not quite so much a conservative as he is (or remains) a loose bearing in search of a wheel to turn...

...they had, perhaps, eyes like desert Arabs, faces like Van Gogh's selfportraits...

...He was in favor of what he thought America ought to be...

...and this took the form of being committed to the rootless elements of the left...

...The Spanish debacle was the end of the line so far as his neo-Marxism was concerned...

...Land sakes, it gives me a headache to read most books, an' I don't get much time, to tell the truth...

...All of which justifies, or does not justify, Dos Passos' own course, from radical contempt for American perspectives to conservative contempt for radical perspectives...

...Such are Dos Passos' common people...

...All right we are two nations...

...Dos Passos retells his part in the case at length, and finds nothing to qualify in his old bitterness against those who put Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair, nothing to qualify in his curious (and significant) admiration for the anarchist elements involved in the conduct of the case...

...Readers will, no doubt, recognize Dos Passos' compound words...

...And Lincoln Steffens ended up, to the applause of Dos Passos' generation, scornful of his own old Progressive Era, a maverick follower of the communist party line...

...There was "the fear of writing something that would be seized on by anti-Soviet propaganda in the West...

...And yet Dos Passos was the best of his generation...

...The people he saw were wellbuilt and healthylooking, or meanlooking, greenfaced...

...He thinks he was interested in freedom...

...It needs to be noticed, first, that John Dos Passos was the best of them, their literary statesman: the best of the "younger generation," the youth, the left-wing politicos, the artists bent on freeing language and the right to deal with sex, off-beat characters, revolutionary situations, social conditions...

...Dos Passos says that The Theme Is Freedom—and one may readily grant that he meant well...

...Increasingly, Dos Passos remarks upon signs and intimations which should have warned him against the Marxists and communists, who not only sabotaged the campaign to free Sacco and Vanzetti, but exploited the difficulties of the miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, murdered as much of freedom as they could in America, and, of course, more in the U.S.S.R., and who, finally, destroyed the Spanish Republic by proving more adept at executing non-Stalinist defenders than at killing Franco's men...

...but this would not be quite accurate...

...He has not learned how to front reality...

...Dos Passos, with his generation, flowered with his roots in the air...

...but plain people, family people, people committed to common social obligations step forward only to add decor to his story—never, never to say anything of individual consequence...

...It was a shorter distance to Pearl Harbor and his spontaneous recollection of Stephen Decatur's "hackneyed toast...

...Dos Passos, the son of a wealthy corporation lawyer, went through Harvard, as he says, "without getting the faintest notion of what American history was about...

...This is a tricky way of putting the matter...

...His reports on our war in the Pacific, the Nurenburg trials, England under Labor are not really worse writing dran his earlier reports on radical labor, hungry America, Moscow and Madrid...

...He was quite willing to enjoy whatever goods the country had to offer...

...To a certain extent such elements had no great faith in themselves...

...He, at the least, maintained a facade of continuity from the past to his present...

...It failed, and, in the process, made a period-piece of Dos Passos...

...He conveniently forgets his old indifferences to grass-roots America: the people who voted for La Follette in 1924, trades-unionists, poets like Va-chel Lindsay, social thinkers like Lincoln Steffens...

...Today, Dos Passos remembers all his old reservations against communists...

...He was not interested in discovering what it was...

...Why did Dos Passos not notice all this at the time...

...In fact, he was interested in being uncommitted...

...Dos Passos quotes it with a certain self-consciousness, but there can be no doubt that "My country right or wrong" is the foundation stone of his present creed...

...The Sacco-Van-zetti affair was where Dos Passos began to get off the American train...

...is just another ironic portrait, labor leaders best represented as shifty characters (unlike Big Bill Haywood, who "worked with the I.W.W...

...The record of the AFL during the 1920's is well-known...

...This comment wants supplementing—though one might well ask what it is that they taught at Harvard...