Second Novel in a Classic Trilogy: If a historical novel is one that depicts a particular period through the use of fictional characters, then the USA Trilogy counts as historical fiction though Dos Passos was writing about his own time. The reader can find fictional portrayals of factory hands and Wobblies, farmers and small-town businessmen, journalists and state troopers, and other Americans struggling to get over during the first 35 years of the 20th century.
The first novel of this trilogy The 42nd Parallel closes with parades in our American streets that were held to pump up patriotic enthusiasm in support of the entry of the USA into World War I, the war that put paid to the 19th century. This novel takes the great turning point of the Great War as its main event, with the action taking place in France and Italy, Chicago and the port cities of the US, and at sea. An inveterate traveler, Dos Passos even paints a brief scene with our hero Joe on the bum in, of all places, Gaylord, the only city in north central Michigan’s Otsego County, a spot nobody from Michigan would ever expect to find in a novel.
The themes - political lies, exploitation, socialism, absurdity of war, war as outcome of capitalistic excesses, personal irresponsibility as barrier to social change - are presented in an angry tone, calling to mind other Lost Generation novels like Antic Hay, Good-bye to All That, and Dos Passos’ own Three Soldiers. The stories of five characters are told in an almost clinical tone like a journalistic report, but still accentuating the impression of impending disaster. With the war being just a symptom of an acquisitive society on steroids, gone berserk with war frenzy, the protagonists are denied just one moment of rest and, despite sometime successes, facing inevitable failure in the end.
Dos Passos doesn’t narrate the process of failure in perfect honed sentences like Hemingway or bright poetic sentences like Fitzgerald. Dos Passos’ prose is detached, impersonal. It lurches and clomps sometimes, especially when characters have been on a bat (binge). Other paragraphs move inexorably, like lava making its way down a slope to burn down a house. But albeit clunky or grey at times the prose never feels slow; it always moves forward, in my view as a reader who wouldn’t know fine writing if I tripped over it.
Dos Passos’ thesis is that the Great War unleashed demons and devils in the U.S.A. Economic woes. Jingoism. Xenophobic fear of people with names like Hilda and Otto. Violence directed at pacifists, labor agitators, and so-called spies. Dos Passos was always on the side of outsiders that were perceived as different. And he had a tendency to decry abuse of power. The forces of order in democracies such as the U.S.A., the UK and France are portrayed as mindless authority treating everybody equally - as if everybody belongs in jail. Being picked up for not having the right papers or being tossed into a paddy wagon near a demonstration or in any city crowd – such misfortunes just happen as sudden and random events. Near the Western Front, near misses with explosions and shrapnel make injury and death just as sudden and random.
Working in the hospitals of the Red Cross, Dos Passos was in fact a 22-year-old ambulance driver (along with 19-year-old Ernest Hemingway) during the hostilities so his descriptions of life just behind the fronts ring true. Dos Passos' familiar is Richard Ellsworth Savage. A Harvard graduate and volunteer in the ambulance corps and the Red Cross, would-be fiction writer Dick notes with sadness the bad effects of the war on his drunken, brawling friends, now louts and good-for-nothings. His sensitive melancholy doesn’t stop him from acting like a shit with Texas country girl Anne Trent.
In Parisian bistros and in Italian trats, the war feels distant yet brutal and never-ending, a monochrome backdrop for the disenchantment of most of the main characters with other people, the world, the course of their own lives. With the armistice signed, euphoria soon gives way to anguish of not having a clue what fate might have in store for them.
“But if you thought war was disgusting, wait and see peace... Oh, yes, wait and see peace,” predicts cynical Mr. Robbins. Dos Passos’ vision of American nihilistic greedculture is strong beer, hinting why the Twenties seemed so nightmarishly frenetic in its partying, money-making, nutzy fads and fancies, and senseless crime a la Loeb and Leopold. Only the character Ben Compton maintains a sense of integrity. At least Dos Passos grants it’s possible to act with integrity even in an amoral culture, desperate for money and wasteful of talent and innovation, but we note the unfortunate place Ben Compton ends up too. “It’s a great life,” characters observe more than once, “if you don’t weaken.”
As in the first volume, Dos Passos uses curious literary techniques between chapters of straightforward narration of action centering around a half-dozen or so characters. The passages named Camera Eye are written in stream of consciousness. Apparently inspired by his own experience, they are bursts of emotions and impressions on topics like travel and scenery. I found them to be generally comprehensible but sometimes they went over my head.
In another kind of interlude, Dos Passos gives short Biographies of big names like T.R., J.P. Morgan, Joe Hill, Edison, and Schoolmaster Wilson. I remember in primary school learning about Charles Steinmetz; I wonder if elementary school students still hear about Proteus, “the sorcerer’s apprentice who loosed the goblins and the wonder-working broomsticks in his master’s shop and then forgot what the formula was to control them by.” Or has he been dust-binned along with gun-toting Annie Oakley?
Mavens like Huxley, Boorstin and Postman have been warning us a long time about the white noise of mass media as a background to our political, social and economic lives. Dos Passos used the Newsreel technique to capture the incessant static of massmedia and the voracious appetite Americans had for consuming newspapers, magazines, pulps, comics. Dos Passos lists fragments of bloviating quotations, cocky predictions, horrid misdeeds, old popular songs [Ja Da Ja Da Jing Jing Jing] and bizarre headlines. [Girl Steps On Match; Dress Ignited; Dies]. My favorite: [Eclipse Four Seconds Late].
Because they are incomplete and disconnected and taken out of context and put together in no particular order, the Newsreel will feel extremely familiar to us distracted post-moderns in light of how we skim and scan and scroll our devices for infotainment, as discriminating as a country dog consuming kibble at home, scraps from trash, treats from neighbor kids, and deer carrion.
Still worth reading? Hell, yes. He’s a documentarian for hardcore
readers who wonder how the U.S.A. changed from 1900 to 1935. For technique, Dos
Passos does colloquial speech and its importance in characterization in his own
way. For relevance, he deals with the
perennial theme of Authority versus Resistance, for acting with personal
responsibility and against letting yourself get pushed around, for the
individual in opposition to the group.
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