Reading Those Classics 2024 #2

The First Novel of a Classic Trilogy: I taught English in Japan from 1986 to 1992. Six years felt about two years too long. But what was I supposed to do? Leave a good-paying job only to return to a country in the midst of a recession, a jobless recovery so disheartening that America elected a near-unknown ex-governor of a small state over an incumbent president? Dos Passos’ theme here is timeless: how big history, big capitalism, and big wars affect little lives. Like mine.

The 42^nd Parallel – John Dos Passos

The novels of the U.S.A. Trilogy cover from about 1900 to 1917 (this novel), the WWI years (1919), and the 1920s (The Big Money). Dos Passos tells the stories of handsomely-compensated minions of big business like an interior decorator and a P.R. man but also of average American working people. His overarching message is that capitalism is a system that enriches a few but makes the USA a hard country to live in for the many. Dos Passos does not trust entities like labor unions, political parties, the military or government because corporate interests, to enhance their own perpetuation, grind down individualists.

And Dos Passos, not a populist, has no illusions about The Little Guy or The Forgotten Man. Men are too dense and unfocussed, too distracted by sex, alcohol, poker, brawling, wanderlust when single and overwork, spats, in-laws, kids, competition, success, and debt when hitched to be able to focus on working for social and political change. And young single women have to spend energy on protecting themselves from males that range from the sincere but immature boy to the dangerous adult male predator. Married women have to focus on child-care, elder-care, husband-maintenance and housework. Both men and women are subject to the stress of not having enough money for rent or food or child-care, feeling low self-esteem from being looked down for not having any money, constant racial and ethnic conflict, and the specters of addiction and violence.

Mac a.k.a. Fainy McCreary grows up in poverty at first in New England but after his mother dies, his father ships him and a sister to relatives in Chicago. His uncle is a socialist in the traditionally lefty trade of printing. But when reactionaries hire thugs to wreck his uncle’s shop and presses, Mac goes on the bum. He gets involved with a radical union but against the advice of his true-believer comrades, he marries a California woman and has two kids. But domesticity and unemployment suffocate him and he deserts his family to do the revolution thing in Mexico.

Janey Williams grows up in a poor working-class family in Washington D.C. She does well in school, getting a good grip on spelling, punctuation, and business writing. Landing jobs as a steno, however, is challenging as is her social life with a series of no-good men. As war clouds gather, she feels she has to leave a good-paying office job because they voice pro-German sentiments. In New York, she gets lucky as she impresses PR Man J. Ward Moorehouse enough to turn a temp job into a steady position.

Joe Williams is Janey’s brother and like many boys seems a bit cognitively challenged and emotionally unintelligent, in other words, doing poorly in school, getting into fights and unable to maintain human connections with anybody. He treats his family as badly as he does anybody else. As a young man, he wanders from place to place, working at nothing much. Wanting to see the world, he joins the Navy but the discipline and harsh treatment drive him to desert. In a time when the system couldn't track people so easily, he goes AWOL and goes back to his ne’er-do-well ways.

J. Ward Moorehouse starts as a young lover of words but soon wises up and chooses advertising over literature. Using the gift of gab and never letting scruples distract him from networking, he enters the newish profession of PR after marrying a wife with money enough to provide him the capital to launch his own company. He astounds his clients - oil companies, fruit companies - with his ability to befog and bamboozle by assembling high-sounding phrases into meaning-free position statements.

From an upper middle-class family, artistic Eleanor Stoddard is like Moorehouse, totally focused on acquiring money and influence in big bad New York City. Her field is interior decorating and she starts a company with her friend socialite Eveline Hutchins. In a comic set piece they are hired to do the production design for an avant-garde band of Bold New Talents for the New York stage. Eleanor also teams up with Moorehouse, as a client who gets her other clients, and as a platonic friend (really – cold Eleanor is an ace) which drives Moorehouse's wife literally crazy with jealousy and anxiety.

Near the end of the novel we are introduced to Charley Anderson. Trained as a mechanic, he is naive and open-handed, which greedy main-chancers are eager to exploit. He goes fight in Europe and his story is continued later in the Trilogy.

In addition to the straight narrative that tells the story of six people determined to get money if they have none or get more money if they have some, Dos Passos uses three curious literary techniques. The first is the short biography told in punchy phrases, short sentences, and even poems that impart left-leaning takes on the likes of Eugene Debs, a labor leader whose followers just watched as the federal government put him in jail for being anti-WWI*; Luther Burbank, plant wizard who made the folks nervous because he thought natural selection was true; and Big Bill Haywood, founder of a radical union and who jumped bail in March 1921 and ended up in the USSR, and his ashes are buried in the Kremlin Wall, as I noted with great surprise while sightseeing in Red Square in the late 1990s.

The “Newsreel” sections feature headlines, quotations, lyrics of popular songs and snatches of snappy ads, breathless newspaper stories and political bloviating. These sections provide the reader with a feeling of how pressing and hectic urban life felt, at least as reflected in newspapers. The material is out of context, as ephemeral and trivial as Three Things You Need to Know Now is in our present day.

“The Camera Eye” sections are written in stream of consciousness in which Dos Passos gives impressions of people and places, strange and ordinary. I found some of these passages unintelligible but for the most part I enjoyed them. I thought they worked fine mainly because they weren’t very long.

Granted, Dos Passos is writing about working class and lower middle-class people that face precarity, exploitation, boredom and despair; youth with zilch prospects of children or home ownership; high prices and rising rent; unending social unrest due to injustice to huge swathes of the population; cynical self-dealers enabled by flacks and spineless mass media beholden to circulation numbers. Sure, nothing that's relevant in our postmodern-a-go-go culture, right?

Still worth reading in 2024? Sure, especially for hardcore readers into those disillusioned and rebellious writers of the Post-WWI world like Aldous Huxley, Faulkner to some extent, and the Willa Cather of One of Ours. Dos Passos, like Sinclair Lewis, had pointed things to say about life in American small towns and the American absorption in business and money-spinning. More than Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dos Passos was willing to force readers to look at the violence endemic in American life, against women, kids, minorities, malcontents, and any poor bastard a drunken sullen mob doesn't like the looks of. I mean, if the Twenties were about anything, it was about artists – modernists - putting off traditional restraints upon frankness and making people look at their vison of the truth. 

So this is the novel for you if still retain the ability to function while you hold in mind at the same time that though the past is a different country, the past is never dead, it's not even past.

*Debs ran for President from a federal prison in West Virginia in 1920 so there's nothing new under the sun.