AMERICAN AUTHORS CHALLENGE--JUNE 2022--JOHN DOS PASSOS

A good many critics have called John Dos Passos one of America’s greatest writers. So why have I never read any of his work? (Aside from the fact that his U.S.A. trilogy is massive, and intimidating in the Library of America’s single volume of over 1300 pages.) Why was Hemingway required reading in my high school English courses, and Dos Passos never mentioned? Why has it taken 9 editions of the American Authors Challenge for his name to make the list? Why can I not recall seeing a single one of my well-read LT contacts mentioning him, even in passing, let alone reviewing one of his novels? (Feel free to jump in here and refute this if you know otherwise.) His modernist, experimental style may frighten readers off. His politics veered from left to right, so maybe no one in academia was comfortable putting him on the curriculum during my turbulent college years. It also makes the decision of where to start reading him somewhat problematic, unless one is willing to begin at the beginning and carry on through his entire oeuvre. I’ve always “known” about him, and I own an awful lot of his output, but really, I knew nothing about him before setting off on the research for this post.

Dos Passos was born in a Chicago hotel room in 1896 to Lucy Madison, an unmarried woman whose name he carried until 1910, when his father, John Randolph Dos Passos, finally married her. His mother raised him mainly in Brussels and London until he was enrolled in Choate Preparatory School in Connecticut at the age of 11. He subsequently graduated from Harvard, and took off to join the ambulance corps during World War I. He was looking for “adventure”, but found something else—a profound disillusionment with the Victorian sensibilities he had up until then taken for granted. He became friends with Ernest Hemingway, until experiences in the Spanish Civil War sent them in opposite directions ideologically, and Hemingway’s tendency to abuse his friends and lovers in his fiction dealt a fatal blow to the relationship. Dos Passos flirted with both communism and anarchism in the 1920s, but a visit to Russia in 1928 left him unimpressed with communism as a solution to the evils of capitalism. He became more and more conservative in his views, even briefly expressing qualified support for Joe McCarthy, but his fundamental mistrust of any form of bureaucratic power over the individual always prevailed. He came to a new appreciation of the Founding Fathers and their philosophy. The man who had written an article for The New Republic criticizing the Democratic party for selecting Franklin Roosevelt as their Presidential nominee in1932 now contributed essays on the heart and mind of Thomas Jefferson to American Heritage magazine, and The National Review.

In his fiction, Dos Passos used techniques like non-linear narrative, stream of consciousness, multiple points of view, fictional news clippings and artistic imagery borrowed from music and painting. Dos Passos himself sketched and painted throughout his life, leaving a legacy of hundreds of visual art works. His literary reputation is based primarily on his early novels, and critics have not been particularly kind to his later efforts.

Dos Passos lived the last 20 years of his life in Northeastern Virginia, on a farm inherited, after a long legal battle, from his father. He died in 1970, and although he seems to have had no use for organized religion, is buried in the historic Yeocomico Episcopal Churchyard in Kinsale, VA. Most of his archives are held by the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.

I don't want to commit to the whole USA trilogy, but I will give the first book a try - The 42nd Parallel.

Hi - taking The Wild Card this time, with POETRY OUT OF WISCONSIN.

I'm gonna try out Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer.

Karen O.

Having read the USA trilogy (1449 pages in Modern Library's "giant edition"), I'm not traveling that road again. I have Manhattan Transfer on The Infinite Shelf™ and a belief that I've read it. ...But flipping through its pages, my eyes see nothing familiar. I thus will not wave it off. That might be The Read.

Manhattan Transfer appeals to me, by its description, the most of Dos Passos' many works. Although I have some of his journalism on hand, and may try that.

>5 weird_O: I had a need to consult my reading log and discovered I DID read Manhattan Transfer, completing it 9/12/2014. Close to eight years ago. I scanned the Wiki entry about the book, and still I remember nothing of it. So. I'll just go ahead with a re-read.

>7 weird_O: I dutifully started re-reading Manhattan Transfer midweek last. Before I'd finished the first chapter, I had to acknowledge that this choice might have been made in error. I read the book in 2014, but I remember nothing of it; I scanned the Wikipedia entry and bells did not ring. As I read the first 11 pages of the 404-page tome, I quailed at each and every absent word space, every absent hyphen. What the hell?

leadentired
brickpurple
lanternedjawed grayfaced woman
skyblue and smokedsalmon and mustardyellow quilts
dollarproud eyes
highbrowed cleanshaven...face
narrowwindowed sixstory tenement
hookandladder
romancandle
theyve
coaloil
spiralfluted horns
neckshave
greasyskinned moonface

At least for now, I'm setting this aside.

Mmmm. Probably for all time. Yes. Surely. Wild Card!!!

>8 weird_O: Hmmm...I'm not terribly averse to that sort of thing, but it does seem he may have gone overboard (see what I did there?) with it.

I've been reading a bit of Dos Passos's early non-fiction. I find the tone condescending and dismissive, especially for such a young man, no matter what the subject. As an example, he had this to say, in 1916, about American literature:"...I defy anyone to confine himself for long to purely American books without feeling starved..." and goes on to call it a "rootless product". Well. Granted, a lot of what we consider our greatest literary achievements in this country came along a little later in the 20th century, but how the man could simply sweep aside Twain, Melville, Poe, Frederick Douglass, Louisa May Alcott, London, Crane, and all the authors whose productivity was just revving up, with the pronouncement that "Our books are like our cities; they are all the same" bewilders me. The only American he had any praise for was Whitman. As for being "rootless", I don't even know where to begin. Every American author had roots somewhere, of course, but the country was a lot younger than its European progenitors so naturally it took a while for a national literature to "feel" like it was rooted here. But there seems to be a contradiction in Dos Passos's complaints. Does the literature feel new and untethered? Well, all right, it WAS new. Does it feel derivative? Well, then, it HAD roots, didn't it?

One day I'll get around to the man's later work, and his fiction, and see whether he changed his tune. And whether I think he contributed anything to the national literary identity. Right now, he's kind of ticked me off, and I'm not in the mood.

"like our cities; they are all the same"

Had he... been to any American cities? What a singularly odd thing to say.

I also defy anyone to read Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, and Little Women and declare them all the same. I mean, what? (Show me the whale willie jokes in Little Women, JDP. I'll wait.)

And I don't even LIKE AmLit!

...I'm going to bed.

>11 lycomayflower: Just read in ARCTIC DREAMS that Melville said the tusk of the Narwhal was a letter opener.

>11 lycomayflower: EXACTLY. What you said. Except for not liking AmLit. Where DID your parents go wrong?

Well, Dos Passos landed with a decided thud. Maybe we'll all be happier with Gish Jen? The July Thread is up.

>14 laytonwoman3rd: Thanks to those who took one for the team. I may not get to Gish until later in the year, but I'm ready for Denis Johnson, 2 new and one fave reread Train Dreams.