Reading Those Classics #6

Third Novel in a Classic Trilogy: Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy can be read out of order; I did it second, third, first.  But Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy has to be read in order; the first The 42nd Parallel is about pre-WWI America, the second 1919 during the war, the third during the Roaring Twenties. Reading in order is more likely to give us hardcore readers that frisson of familiarity that we get from, say, meeting recurring characters in The Barchester Novels. In order will help us predict interaction when characters we already know meet each other for the first time in the story.

The Big Money – John Dos Passos

The last novel of the U.S.A. Trilogy tells the story of Margo Dowling, a pretty blonde with big blue eyes. She is punished for her beauty at the age of sixteen when she is raped by her stepfather Frank, a down-at-heels vaudevillian. To escape the situation, she marries musician Tony Garrido, a homosexual with eyelashes that make everybody quiver. Margo flees with him to his native Cuba where his traditional family encloses her in purdah. To prevent ever being vulnerable again, Margo becomes determined to succeed in show business through sheer ruthlessness to make up for her lack of talent. I’m always up for a Hollywood novel, and Dos Passos writes satirically on the familiar and dear theme of Tinsel Town Without Pity. Or Taste. Or Elan.

A naturalist writer, Dos Passos was a modernist too in the sense that he wasn’t going to sweep certain topics under the rug. He had to have been among the first major American writers to deal with rape, incest, the sequelae of sexual abuse and trauma, homosexuality closeted and not, culture shock, and the amorality of the entertainment business when most people didn’t even know they were topics or thought it best not to talk about them when they did.

Another major character is radical Mary French. Her father was a selfless M.D. doctoring for the poor in Colorado who eventually works himself to death during the 1918-20 flu epidemic, one of the few references to that pandemic I’ve seen in the literature of that time. With her father as a role model, Mary feels compelled to help the less fortunate. She volunteers for Hull House in Chicago. She works as a crusading reporter trying to bring wider attention to the brutal conditions of workers raising families in poverty.

Somehow, despite her best efforts, the poor you will always have with you and the cause costs her just about everything. She has no connection with her family. Her romances are with conniving creeps disguised as good party men. Being a self-sacrificing labor activist earns more scut-work assigned by careerist comrades. Working on the side of angels attracts the hatred and contempt of the authorities. It forces the perennial question, what is it about positions of authority and political activism, right or left, that attracts such small men.

This novel also tells the story of Charlie Anderson, who was introduced in the first novel of the trilogy. He returns from WWI where he fought as an aviator, but soon has to butt heads with the mindless avarice of a culture whose members have no kin or friends when it comes to the pursuit of a dollar. Charlie is kicked out of his brother’s house back in the old hometown because Charlie is unwilling to parade being a veteran in order to pump truck sales at his brother’s Ford dealership. His brother is under pressure from Ford to puff sales so his brother pressures Charlie to work in both marketing and the repair shop.

Charlie cannily sees commercial aviation as the next big thing and moves to The Big Apple to do R & D on engines and drum up investors. There’s no escaping pressure from partners, investors, brokers, and industrial spies who are avidly following the lure of big money. Charlie idiotically sets his matrimonial sights on a society madcap who ends up mailing him one the funniest Dear John kiss-offs in the history of American literature. His innovative and money-making style is not enough to prevent his partners from selling his ass out. Charlie is just a guy, emotionally stunted in the usual ways and without the sense heaven gave a goose to tumble to the fact that he is one of those people who have no business relieving pressure with alcohol. That particular enemy of promise sends him on sprees where he makes day-trading and contractual decisions with the acumen of Barney Gumble.

As for characterization, Dos Passos runs a set of players through the three volumes, switching roles from main to secondary and back, with some only appearing in this last one. Readers with a hankering for cognitive closure may well complain that after a thousand or so pages, the outcome for most characters proves to be merely banal. In fact, it feels as if Dos Passos simply deserts characters, not telling their fate at all or disposing of them in accidents or brawls.

Decent and earnest, Dos Passos thinks power absolutely corrupts the military, the cops, the government, political parties, the labor movement, and businesses of all sizes. Historical and social and economic forces put pressure on individuals. Besides that, their personal choices, clouded up by foolishness, intemperance and fear, are disastrous just about every time.

Dos Passos has a tough-minded sensibility like Smollet, Fielding, Austen and Thackeray in that his outlook is skeptical of ambition and endeavor. When we reach a point where we dare to think, “I’ve arrived” the ever-changing world will smirk, “Well, kiddo, try this misdiagnosis – car crash – pandemic – transfer to a mad supervisor – recession – mood disorder – on for size.” Dos Passos makes the hardcore reader wonder about our own complex yet ordinary realities and how internal and external forces influenced our own decisions as to marriage and work and mobility.

Like the other novels in the trilogy, this one has interspersed biographies about figures like Woodrow Wilson, Bob La Follette, Joe Hill, Thorstein Veblen, Rudolph Valentino, Thomas Alva Edison, Henry Ford, W.R. Hearst, and Isadora Duncan. The tone is acerbic, the stance left-leaning. With Dos Passos the opinionated documentarian, the politics sometimes drowns everything else out. Such were the times – the 1920s were as nutty as the1970s.

I think the U.S.A. Trilogy would be a great choice for a hardcore reader who is seriously into the time period. Reading them one after the other would be a leisurely experience to take up for a season, for a lockdown. Me, I’m always in the market for reading a Great American Novel like All the King’s Men, Edwin Mullhouse or Sometimes a Great Notion, but especially a story from the era between the wars like  Look Homeward Angel or Light in August. Dos Passos’ snapshot of the U.S.A. in the Twenties makes this a must-read for readers into that gaudy decade.