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 42nd 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.
