Novel and Tract
Friedman, Melvin J .
Novel and Tract MIDCENTURY, by John Dos Passos. Houghton Mifflin. 496 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Melvin J . Friedman JOHN Dos PASSOS has been almost unique among novelists in his uncanny ability...
...and the District of Columbia trilogy, but it seems uncomfortably documentary even in the longer narrative sections...
...The accomplished story-teller and delineator of character hides behind the chronicler, the social historian...
...Only the exceptional ones can withstand the dulling effects of a wornout social system...
...Dos Passos skillfully parallels the careers of his fictional creatures with those of celebrated contemporaries...
...Reviewed by Melvin J . Friedman JOHN Dos PASSOS has been almost unique among novelists in his uncanny ability to remain politically committed without compromising his devotion to fiction...
...His long narrative sections read almost like sociological case histories of victimized workers...
...This latest Dos Passos is built on the same large lines as U.S.A...
...But conspicuously absent from Midcentury are the ingenious "Camera Eye" notations of the earlier trilogy...
...In U.S.A., Dos Passos had defined a new type of novel which satisfied the experimental vigor of the Thirties...
...The narrative is made to weave in and out of the documentary with a labyrinthine complexity...
...The sections in Midcentury entitled "Documentary" recall the tone of the "Newsreels" in U.S.A...
...Dos Passos seems intent on disenchanting us about labor unions, strikes, "wobblies," and displaced Marxists...
...The reader is expected to reconstruct the fact-fiction interplay into an aesthetic whole...
...With their absence of punctuation, truncated syntax, metaphorical flourishes, and verbal plays, they gave U.S.A...
...By rooting out the self-induced corruption which seems to be destroying the working class, Dos Passos is offering a thinly-veiled defense for his own conservatism...
...The most compelling sections of Midcentury are probably the profiles of distinguished Americans: Eleanor Roosevelt, Douglas MacArthur, Robert M. LaFollette, Jr., Robert Oppenheimer...
...It is not accidental that Dos Passos should be at his most poetic when he offers his profiles of these olympian figures...
...It made its own compromise with the stream-of-consciousness novel of Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Faulkner and went in its own original direction...
...In method, Midcentury does no;t differ essentially from U.S.A...
...Midcentury thus has an organizing principle which keeps the diverse parts together and helps make possible the total symphonic effect...
...Like Malraux he has managed the complete volteface from extreme left to extreme right...
...The profiles regularly alternate with the narrative and reinforce its direction...
...Blackie Bowman, who soliloquizes from a bed in a veterans' hospital, multiplies instances of the corruption of labor unions...
...The portraits of Terry Bryant, Blackie Bowman, Lorna Hubbard, Jasper Milliron, and Stan Goodspeed, which offer the uneasy literary basis for the novel, pale before their historical counterparts...
...Alan Pryce-Jones made this point when he said in Harper's: "Where trouble begins is in realistic fiction which makes no use of poetry yet cannot forbear to experiment with construction...
...he is especially successful with the Stan Goodspeed-James Dean juxtaposition...
...It seems clear that the enriched poetic prose of the "Camera Eye" belongs with the tamperings with structure which Midcentury has already taken over from U.S.A...
...Even the financially independent Jasper Milliron suffers from the pressures of betrayal in high positions...
...unlike him he has continued writing novels even after he has deserted his leftist phase...
...It is much more of a "preaching novel" than the earlier trilogy...
...The "Investigator's Notes," which Dos Passos purposely keeps anonymous, reinforce the futility of a Terry Bryant or a Blackie Bowman when confronted by organized labor...
...a poetic foundation...
...He seems to insist, by implication, that one can honorably side only with the status quo in the Fifties...
...Dos Passos seems to be telling us that hundreds of small men are victims of debilitating forces...
...Midcentury uses many of the same tools but for quite a different purpose...
...He traces Terry Bryant—one of his least convincing fictional portraits—from his release from the service through his death as a martyr for ^the cause of free enterprise...
Vol. 25 • September 1961 • No. 9
