Upward Mobility in the U.S.A.
As the characters in The 42nd Parallel start to converge, every one of them has demonstrated some type of pluck or ambition. The biographical sketches (Thomas Edison, natch) hit the same chord: initiative is everything.
Industry, as seen through the eyes of his characters in 1915-1916, isn’t a dehumanizing System, but a vital force that can be harnessed by men and women of ambition and the right kind of zeal. I suspect that as time goes on, it’s this temptation that lures the radicals away from their principles, but I’m not sure yet.
Matt, for those of us just getting started and working to catch up, would you mind including with these posts a rough section location for how far you’ve gone? It would help me with pacing.
— Max Socol · Sep 15, 03:23 AM · #
I’ve been coy about exactly where I am because I don’t want to impose a schedule, even implicitly. Since you ask, though, I’m around p. 270 in the Library of America edition.
— Matt Frost · Sep 15, 04:34 AM · #
Stop imposing your harsh regime on us, Matt.
— Freddie · Sep 15, 05:27 AM · #
I am thoroughly bummed I missed the opener of this, and I have a big pile of professional reading and much parenting to catch up on. But I’ve read USA two or threetimes so maybe I can get caught up fast, and read through the thing this weekend or next.
One interesting thing about your observation about the characters ``selling out’‘ is to think about how it might apply, by the way, to Dos Passos himself.
I discovered USA half my life ago, just after college. I was going to work every day with 42nd Parallel, 1919 and Big Money in my pockets and an older woman friend, who would’ve been in highschool in the mid ’60’s, spotted them and talked about reading them in highschool, which she seemed to feel was pretty normal for her generation. Naturally I was surprised: in those days basically all the Dos Passos you could get was those three books, and (the rather inferior) Manhattan Transfer, and of course the books had faded into obscurity (maybe online book buying has changed this void). I still remember the awe I was feeling on that first read — I was a real Faulkner devotee, and of course one hears so much back-and-forth about Faulkner and Hemingway, and then you find Dos Passos and think, shit, this stuff, not Hemingway, is was what was pushing Faulkner as an experimentalist. And the sweep of the thing … it seemed amazing to me that this stuff had been swept out of the cultural awareness of most Americans, and here was this woman saying it had been commonly read.
Her take was that, well, Dos Passos was so very extremely right-wing that people had gotten rather turned off to him and he rapidly faded from view. I was doubly floored, since (sorry if there’s a spoiler, I don’t quite remember which biography is in which book save for the glorious one that ends 1919 and which is among the best, and surely the bitterest, two or three pages written in America) the book is obviously pretty socialist or even flat-out Communist: you have glowing bios of Veblen and Steinmetz and scorn on Bryan for the kind of sell-out you describe above, and you have an odd ode to Sacco and Vanzetti as de facto American founding fathers. So I looked into it and got the story: radical leftist Dos Passos, becomes so alienated by the Spanish civil war that he becomes radical rightist. OK. Maybe thereby pissing off all factions in American life so thoroughly as to make himself a grossly underappreciated writer.
But that makes one wonder how the Dos Passos who worte USA would’ve written, in the end, about Dos Passos. I know that later in life Dos Passos wrote a memoir (a straightforward one, as opposed to The Camera Eye) but I haven’t read it (I held in my hands for a while an autographed copy inscribed to a friend at a used bookstore, and stupidly didn’t buy it). Has anyone read the thing? What was Dos Passos’ take on the guy who wrote USA?
— Sanjay · Sep 15, 01:04 PM · #
Sanjay,
Thanks for joining us. I tried to email you but the message bounced.
— Matt Frost · Sep 15, 02:20 PM · #
How’d you… oh yeah, there’s the email submission up there. Well, the x’s don’t really belong there.
Don’t know that I have much to say. But, geez, I am going to reread “Body of an American” tonight….
— Sanjay · Sep 15, 03:21 PM · #
This looks like a must-have, and has been on my to-buy list for years now. Sadly it will probably remain there a while. But Packer’s observation of how our great three prewar novelists used to be four, is spot-on.
— Sanjay · Sep 15, 04:32 PM · #
After you finish the USA trilogy you should really revisit Manhattan Transfer sometime, Sanjay. I read it for the second time about a month ago and unlike most of the books i’ve revisited over the years (including Auster’s Manhattan Trilogy) my love for it only grew. It’s harder than USA in some ways and definitely more experimental. The book is threaded with scenes and characters that are sometimes only a paragraph long and he doesn’t always announce who’s speaking or where the action is taking place, but you get the hang of it after a few pages and the dialogue and evolving relationships—they develop over twenty years without very many time markers—are devastatingly beautiful.
Also, the politics in this book definitely take a back seat to its humanism. One of the main characters becomes a socialist of sorts by the end of the book, but it fails to make sense of his loneliness and alienation which are so comprehensive and aimless and overdetermined by the end that he might as well be anything, or believe anything, since the feeling is the thing. Actually, i was struck by Packer’s contention (in the above suggested article) that Dos Passos never developed the interior lives of his characters; he definitely never relies on realistic renderings of interior monologues or even ordinary aims and desires but he fills the descriptions of their circumstances with more emotion than any other writer i know (a sort of inverted Flaubert). And his dialogue is amazing.
— Giles · Sep 15, 07:57 PM · #
I’m surprised you think that. It always seemed to me (OK, this is at least is less true of Transfer than USA) like a lot of Dos Passos’ characters were really just stock pieces there to move his stories; that’s certainly true of J. Ward Moorehouse Richard Ellsworth Savage, maybe less so of the Williamses and Anderson (sorry if I’m misremembering names). NB I don’t think that in any way lessens the work, it’s a different use of character is all. The obvious example for me is the young Pynchon whose characters in Gravity’s Rainbow are deliberately a bit two-dimensional, serving only to move the story, and the old Pynchon in Mason and Dixon showing us tenderly how the men bond, and age. He’s gotten interested in different aspects of storytelling but it doesn’t make one work lesser. I think that’s the point that’s being made about Dos Passos in that review.
Rereading that review brought me back to a book I’ve read since — Vollmann’s Europe Central — and which I also mentioned during TAS‘s summer literary inflammation. It’s sort of an obvious segue: artistic figures as manipulated under totalitarianism.
That said, maybe The Breaking Point isn’t a buy. I appreciate that documentaried have changed: now if you watch some PBS documentary on the Galileo, say, it will be undercut with footag of some actor playing Galileo walking around looking serious: it adds nothing but I guess it doesn’t detract and the form has changed that way. And so I guess literary biography can do the same thing. God knows, I have a copy of Morris’ Dutch I got years ago (boy, you just knew lots o’ hardcovers of that sucker would get remaindered at Barnes and Noble for spare change) and I still haven’t quite gotten up the stomach to plow through the deliberately fictionalized biography.
— Sanjay · Sep 15, 09:59 PM · #
I think it was Howard Hawks who once boasted that he could turn the worst story ever written by Hemingway, which, he decided, was ‘To Have or Have Not,’ into an Oscar-worthy Hollywood film, and would do so by more or less dispensing with any over-arching plot, or by creating the illusion of an over-arching plot but spending all of his energy and time on rendering each scene between the characters into a finely-cut jewel. He filmed The Big Sleep by Raymond Carver and one of his editors halfway through production discovered that there was an extra body in the plot for which there was no obvious motive or culprit. Hawks agreed. He wrote to Carver to ask who the murderer was and Carver said he didn’t know. Maybe there was no murderer, he said, in any case the scene was good enough to leave in despite not moving the plot along. Carver and Dos Passos have next to nothing to do with one another of course, but Dos Passos too seems cooly indifferent to plot (at least in MT, i have to admit to only reading the 42nd Parallel and finding the news headlines and poems and shifting perspectives much less effective than in MT, where they are subtle and seamless).
In MT, plot emerges reluctantly as the result of a thousand finely honed scenes between the dozen or so main characters, who are all related by circumstance and milieu. And in fact when you make your way through the book you delight so much in the scenes and the unbelievable language—“like sticky tendrils of vines glances caught a her as she passed”—that it seems somehow profound when ‘plot-elements’ start to come together, always in retrospect and after stopping to think about things a little bit. Maybe it’s a style that rewards slow reading, i’m not sure, but i’m an unbelievably slow reader and love it when i’m drawn into the minutia of a text. So in other words i guess i can’t agree with ‘the stock-pieces’ observation since for me the story is so secondary that it’s practically non-existent, a function of the characters, who are in turn somehow a function of these wonderfully wrought scenes full of sarcasm and jokey patois and sadness. Also, i should say, the scenes are not composed primarily of events but people talking about events and otherwise doing things to one another through their words and gestures.
— Giles · Sep 15, 10:59 PM · #
Howard Hawks my ass. He had Faulkner do the screenplay, got Bogart, and an awesomely sexy young unknown…
— Sanjay · Sep 15, 11:02 PM · #
Those things no doubt helped! He wasn’t stupid.
— Giles · Sep 15, 11:10 PM · #
Howard Hawks my ass. He had Faulkner do the screenplay, got Bogart, and an awesomely sexy young unknown…
Kind of the point, no?
— Freddie · Sep 16, 02:07 AM · #
Wait, wait wait — you only read 42nd parallel? It’s a great book — and easily the least of the three. Good; I’ve been thoroughly flummoxed by your putting Transfer above USA.
— Sanjay · Sep 16, 10:27 AM · #
True. I suspect i’ll always have a problem with the assertion that MT is inferior to USA. It’s just too perfect in my view. But i’m hardly in position to claim the opposite is true either.
— Giles · Sep 16, 01:42 PM · #
Of course in the post above, i meant Raymond Chandler not Carver. Bizarre.
— Giles · Sep 16, 01:55 PM · #