John Dos Passos: one man, one life

National Review, Dec 31, 1985 by J.O. Tate

OF ALL those individuals who supported and contributed to NATIONAL REVIEW in its early years and who, in so doing, helped raise to a national and even international level an awareness of traditional values and an informed consciousness of the tides of history, none brought more impressive credentials or more experience than did John Dos Passos.

"Dos," as his friends called him and as he frequently signed himself, had in 1947 been elected to Chair 14 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters--a seat formerly occupied by Theodore Roosevelt and Willa Cather, among others. And he was to receive the Gold Medal for Ficion from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1957, from the hand of William Faulkner, who, bored by stem-winding speeches, thrust the medal at Dos Passos and said only, "Nobody deserved it more or had to wait for it longer."

By a process of familiar irony, the established honors accorded to Dos Passos were in recognition of the "radical" writings of his younger years. There had been a time when Dos Passos was a darling of the Left. His bestknown work, U.S.A., a trilogy consisting of The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), was an unparalleled monument of modernism, a panoramic, kaleidoscopic collage of a confused, dynamic, and brutal America that had lost its soul along with its mind. The survey of decadence and suppression nicely suited, or so it was thought, the purposes of the socialist power-brokers and even the Communist Party. But the leftists had misread their man, even though he was one of many who identified the Sacco and Vanzetti case as a sort of Dreyfuss affair.

For Dos Passos was always his own man, always a crusty individualist who was as suspicious of organized, power-seeking political movements espousing Big Government as he was of the monolithic prerogatives of Big Business. Indeed, when Franklin Roosevelt ran against Herbert Hoover, Dos Passos didnht vote for the Socialist, Norman Thomas, but instead signed a letter (with Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Edmund Wilson, Sidney Hook, Upton Sinclair, and others) backing the Communist candidate, William Z. Foster. But Dos Passos couldn't be taken for granted, because he saw himself as on the side of the underdog, because he never stopped traveling and observing, and because he never stopped thinking.

He had once hoped that the "Russian experiment" would produce something good, but developments proved otherwise. The final break with the Left came when Dos Passos refused to mince words about the murder of Jose Robles, his Loyalist friend, during the Spanish Civil War. Ernest Hemingway thought his peer Dos Passos was naive; but it was Hemingway, after all, who was naive, and it was Hemingway who told Dos that "the New York reviewers will kill you. They will demolsih you forever." Dos Passos nevertheless published his "Farewell to Europe" and turned toward a further analysis and exploration of the United States of America, which he pursued for the rest of his life.

The energy and inquisitiveness Dos Passos exhibited, particularly after his father's death, in 1917, point perhaps to an understandable anxiety about identity. John Dos Passos was born out of wedlock in 1896, when his father was 52 and his mother nearly 42. His father, John Randolph Dos Passos, grandson of a Portuguese immigrant from Madeira, had fought in the Civil War and become a prominent lawyer. He wrote The Anglo-Saxon Century, announcing principles that his son was to repeat many years later. But the younger Dos Passos had not the status of a son, leading instead, with his mother, "a hotel childhood" that included school in England. At Choate, and more so at Harvard, Dos Passos was imbued with the high culture of his day, read widely, and, as a romantic young man, absorbed the modernistic vibrations of the time. He was to become an Imagist, a poet and a dramatist, as well as a "social historian." He knew it was necessary to confront the experience of World War I, and, when his father died, he was free to serve in an ambulance corps.

The coeval of Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Sinclair Lewis, Dos Passos began his career with One Man's Initiation: 1917 (1920) and followed it with Three Soldiers (1921), a book to mention in the same breath as All Quiet on the Western Front. By 1925, with Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos was an accomplished artist who had composed a brilliant, corrosive portrayal of urban America. Dos Passos was associated with the New Masses, reported for the Daily Worker, and was arrested next to Edna St. Vincent Millay while protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

Yet Dos Passos was already disillusioned with the Stalinist manipulation of the Left before the Spanish crisis. Afterward he made clear what that betrayal meant in Adventures of a Young Man (1939). As John Chamberlain wrote in the obituary published in these pages, "If he had made Glenn [the protaginist] a politically innocent bridge dynamiter and put him into a sleeping bag with Ingrid Bergman, the verdit [of the New York reviewers] would have been different." After that "break," Dos Passos went on to fulfill the destiny of his tempestuous romance with America, as can be seen in some of his book titles: The Living Thoughts of Tom Paine (1940), The Ground We Stand On: Some Examples from the History of a Political Creed (1941), Chosen Country (1951), The HEad and Heart of Thomas Jefferson (1954), The Theme Is Freedom (1956), The Men Who Made the Nation (1957), Prospects of a Golden Age (1959), Mr. Wilson's War (1962), Occasions and Protests (1964).