1919
I’ve finished up 1919, and started on The Big Money.
Anyone who abandoned the project before the end of 1919, go grab your copy, skip to the end of the book, and read “The Body of an American” chapter. It stands alone as a prose poem, a sort of “I Hear America Putrefying.” But it also pulls together Dos Passos’ ambitions and his omnivorous approach to portraying WWI-era Americans. Well, white WWI-era Americans, but that’s another conversation.
The idea of the Unknown Soldier always had an imaginative pull to me: as a kid, I was fascinated by the way indeterminacy could stand for universality. (Uh, spoiler alert: the Unknown Soldier dies near the end.) In this one chapter, Dos Passos does for the dismembered doughboy what he does for all his other characters, but more so. He follows the soldier not just from birth, but from conception, all the way to his confused, shell-splattered demise. Along the way, the soldier’s identity slips from one person to the next, and since Dos Passos’ characters often serve as little more than cameras through which we see places, the soldier stands for the land in all its variety as much as for the American people. Read it.
For those of you still keeping up, here are some topics for consideration.
Sex
What a miserable bunch of sad sacks these characters are, fumbling along in frustration until someone gets pregnant, at which point everything falls apart. The revolutionaries all talk big about freeing themselves from bourgeois notions of sexual propriety, but their revolution never quite arrives. Sexual liberation proves just as elusive — or illusory — as the workers’ uprising, and the two ideals are caustically juxtaposed. The bourgeois characters also dabble in liberated rhetoric when it suits their urges, but always fall back on convention somehow. Pregnancy, in almost every case, sets the rules.
So I keep wondering: if these characters could exercise the autonomy they claim they’d enjoy, what would they do with it? Would they be any happier?
Violence
Dos Passos makes no secret of his sympathies for the Wobblies and other heroes of American socialism, and his account of the Seattle General Strike, and the brutal response of the forces of reaction, makes Howard Zinn’s version seem cool and dispassionate. But there’s nothing about these earnest revolutionaries that suggests they’d be any less eager to employ rifle butts than Ole Hanson was. Just as with sex, none of the characters seem to have what it would take to wisely use the power they’re chasing. A pessimistic read of the series (is there any other kind?) suggests that by WWI, our institutions were already beyond democratic control, even by the well-intended, and that in the U.S., force and only force would dictate peoples’ economic and political lives.
American Immunity
Conspicuously absent in the book is a “war is hell” thread. Dos Passos hints at the horrors of trench combat, but the American characters who volunteer for service in WWI, whether in the military or driving ambulances, spend their time whoring and cafe-hopping. Pregnancy is a bigger threat to their well-being than Zeppelins or mustard gas. Americans are revered by the French not for their heroism, but for the material abundance they represent. I consider this one of the novels’ finest touches.
Along these lines, here’s a picture of an American ambulance driver. The driver’s name is Walt Disney.
Did you know someone made a rock opera about the Seattle General Strike? Now you do.
Yeah, that’s why I was pushing Body of an American — it’s as good as anything in American writing. In fact when you announced this project and I reread the trilogy it struck me again and I shared it with a colleague who had been an NCO with the 82nd Airborne and isn’t a
literature” type — has never read, say, Faulkner. He was stunned, particularly by the “Say buddy can you tell me how to get to my unit” bits (which I find blood-curdling).
I’ve been trying to remember something else I read — can’t remember by who — about the Unknown Soldier, depicting a young American dying next to a German, hating the war, realizing his sacrifice would become one more monument, a name on some town’s plaque, being used to send more young people off to die, and rising up in fury to rip off his dog tags and throw them into the brush to prevent them identifying his body and using him as a symbol. Not as powerful as Body of an American but as bitter.
Incidentally part of the discussion that moved you to this thing was somebody’s idea that USA should be eased from the “canon” of essential American works (freakishly under-read though it already is). I find it hard to believe anyone who’s gone to the end of 1919 takes that idea much seriously.
— Sanjay · Nov 5, 05:22 PM · #
Sanjay: I wrote a piece commenting on somebody else’s (not a TAS-er) piece about booting books from the canon. That person mentioned the U.S.A. trilogy. I pointed out that nobody reads Dos Passos anymore – he’s effectively already been booted – and that he’s probably due for a reassessment and potentially a re-introduction to the canon.
— Noah Millman · Nov 5, 05:27 PM · #
As for me: I’ve been totally derelict in writing about the trilogy, but I’m really enjoying reading it. I’m only about 1/3 of the way through 1919 because I lost my copy in Chicago a couple of weeks ago and have yet to replace it, but I should get a new copy this weekend. I’m sure I’ll still be done with the trilogy by Christmas.
Dos Passos strikes me as the writer that Tom Wolfe wishes he was. Both authors’ characters are driven primarily by desire, appetite, and (especially) status anxiety. Both have the ambition to portray all of society, to capture a whole civilization and its ethos. But only one developed a style (actually, a whole collection of related styles) that matched his ambitions; only one created a whole universe of characters who, if they aren’t really conscious and self-reflective in the manner of, say, a character in Austen or Tolstoy, fairly throb with life.
The other guy I kept thinking about was Orwell, particularly Down and Out and Keep the Aspidistra Flying. U.S.A. is a whole lot better than the latter, but somehow kept reminding me of it – something similar about the relationship between sex and status anxiety. Down and Out is funnier, of course, than U.S.A., but partly because Orwell is perpetually apart and observing, while Dos Passos really plunges in to his world.
Anyway, even as far as I’ve gotten so far, it’s a great book.
— Noah Millman · Nov 5, 05:38 PM · #
Yeah, but actually I think in your comments above (and very much in Frost’s comments) your actually doing the book a disservice: it’s not one book but two, at war with itself, really. When Frost observes the characters’ self-defeating narcissism (or when you talk about what drives them) you’re talking about one half of the book but not the other (and then there’s say Mary French, who is also a kind of glorious failure, but not really of the sort you’ve been discussing). Dos Passos has his heroes in USA, it’s just that they appear in the bios. Steinmetz in particular is just glowing and in general he is wowed by the scientists and engineers of extraordinary talent, the great thinkers.
So he gets split. On the one hand it’s a book about the working stiff and sailor, which makes Dos Passos stand out mightily from the other Lost Gen writers: unlike Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dos Passos writes about the poshlost (Faulkner kind of does too but it’s of course constrained regionally and socially and they aren’t really his theme). He’s a sort of American Dostoevsky; there’s a kind of sympathy with the Underground Man, if you look at Frost’s comments about what these people long for and their total inability to figure out what they’d do if they got it (not that I mean to push that parallel too far). But the fact is the book is also elitist and doesn’t really believe in, or care much for, the poshlost. I mean, rah for the Union, rah for the IWW, horray for the worker, but, damn, what a shame they’re all such a bunch of losers. Dos Passos’ world is driven forward not by them but by a few great men, a few strivers, and their ambition. The Ford is this huge tragic figure that Dos Passos seems to empathize with, maybe becuase he’s a man of the second type but so awesomely brutal to the first type.
[Heh, heh — I grew up near the Wayside Inn and have probably ridden my bike through its grounds a thousand times. I think about that whenever I read the Henry Ford bio.]
I think the ideological war in Dos Passos which we’ve already discussed is exactly on display in that schizoid nature of USA, and that Gemini nature is really what makes the trilogy so damn great.
— Sanjay · Nov 5, 06:37 PM · #
Incidentally, re-reading USA made me desire very very much to re-read Man in Motion, which I last read maybe twenty years ago. Obviously it was written much later but it was written by someone who was clearly familiar with USA and it grapples with many of the same themes, and in retrospect it seems like a natural compare/contrast. Probably won’t get aound to it for a while.
I am thrilled by Millman’s comments on style because I’m still kind of affronted by Suderman’s observation that Dos Passos didn’t have a really distinctive style. Reminds me of sitting around near Berklee in ’98 with some guitarists discussing Bill Frisell: one of them didn’t like him so much, and complained that his style and tone were just really not distinctive and “one-phrase-identifiable” like Metheny’s or Abercrombie’s. Which made everyone’s jaw drop: I mean, if you just don’t like the guy, fine, but if you can’t recognize him (especially back then, before the leagues of imitators) in about two seconds, you really should get your hearing examined. Dos Passos’ voice is recognizable!
— Sanjay · Nov 6, 04:50 PM · #
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