Reading Those Classics #7

Classic Set in the Big Apple. It’s about New York City, though that’s like saying Anna Karenina is about Russia.

Manhattan Transfer – John Dos Passos

When I was a kid I went through a jigsaw puzzle phase. I found that the way to start is with the four borders and then work in. But struggling to decide where to begin reviewing Dos Passos’ masterpiece reminded me that I stopped wasting time with puzzles when I broke down badly on a 1000-piece puzzle of Convergence by Jackson Pollock. That is, in the novel with so many characters, so many situations, so many scenes, so many set pieces where do you start telling somebody what this is about, why it is worth reading?

Because we get to watch as Dos Passos reaches his goal of composing his picture puzzle about the stuff that happens to a variety of New Yorkers in the Roaring Twenties. Now that ought to be sufficient to draw any Flapper and Sheik Fan like me who already knows Dashiell Hammett, early Aldous Huxley, that pop history reporter Frederick Lewis Allen, Bernarr Macfadden, Edmund Wilson, and of course that poster child of  the Jazz Age F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The stories New Yorkers of all kinds are all broken up and time stretches out to cover about 30 years leading up to the middle Twenties. We meet characters, some alone, some in tandem; we lose characters for a time and find them later. Dos Passos weaves so many stories, sets such a fast pace, and many characters have such dull names - Stan Emery, Ed Thatcher, George Baldwin, Joe Harland, etc. etc. – that following all these alienated people through their journeys on the City’s mazy noisy streets becomes desperately difficult sometimes. Granted, some have names that are memorable, such as Phineas P. Blackhead, a putrid inflamed plutocrat who gets exactly what he deserves when he mocks his servant Ahmed for servility.

I mean, between the descriptions of the city noises and smells and the dramatic cinematic scenes - it’s so intense that it’s tiring after about 45 or 50 minutes’ reading. But Dos Passos’ voice is always clear and engaging, so powerful and imaginative that it never puts the reader off.

He pushed up the window and leaned out. An L train was rumbling past the end of the street. A whiff of coal smoke stung his nostrils. He hung out of the window a long while looking up and down the street. The world’s second metropolis. In the brick houses and the dingy lamplight and the voices of a group of boys kidding and quarreling on the steps of a house opposite, in the regular firm tread of a policeman, he felt a marching like soldiers, like a sidewheeler going up the Hudson under the Palisades, like an election parade, through long streets towards something tall white full of colonnades and stately. Metropolis.

Sure, though Dos Passos is like any other modernist in that he has discarded Victorian certainties, he is still a moralist. But I never have a problem with an author pointing out being bored, alienated, cynical, and passive are not useful responses to capitalism during any of its stages. And living a personal life full of foolishness, cowardice, willful unfairness, and determined ignorance doesn’t do self or others or the world any good either.

But to my mind the draw of this kaleidoscopic, noisy novel is the astonishing ability of Dos Passos to make us see by lightning flashes.

Click on the title to go to the review.

Prize Winning Classic: The Moviegoer – Walker Percy

Classic Novella: Old Man – William Faulkner

Classic Epistolary Novel: Augustus – John Williams

Classic Comic Novel: Thank you, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse

Classic Short Stories: New York Stories – John O’Hara

Classic Air Pilot Memoir: Wind, Sand, and Stars - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry