A Depression-era novel about American tumult has—perhaps unsurprisingly—aged quite well.

By Matt Hanson

6:00 A.M.

“U.S.A. is the slice of a continent,” John Dos Passos wrote, in his novel “The 42nd Parallel,” from 1930. “U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatres, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world’s greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is the speech of the people.”

The “U.S.A.” trilogy—written by Dos Passos in the late nineteen-twenties and nineteen-thirties, and consisting of “The 42nd Parallel,” “1919,” and “The Big Money”—was an attempt to describe American life in tumult, from top to bottom. Writing at a moment of economic dissolution and technological transformation, Dos Passos hoped to show how Americans of all kinds were responding to the bustling mess of modernity—what his friend Edmund Wilson called “the American jitters.” In its time, the trilogy sold well, and it was highly praised by Jean-Paul Sartre, William Faulkner, and others. But since then its fortunes have been jittery, too. For many decades, the “U.S.A.” novels, often published as a single volume, were a yellowing tome, more respected than read. Dos Passos came to be seen as an also-ran—a secondary character in the stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and other writers of the Lost Generation.

Then, in 1998, a board of luminaries convened by the Modern Library placed the trilogy on its list of the best novels of the twentieth century. In 2013, David Bowie listed “The 42nd Parallel” as one of his favorite books; that same year, George Packer—who has written about Dos Passos for The New Yorker—used the trilogy as a structural inspiration for “The Unwinding,” his nonfictional account of twenty-first-century America on the fritz.

There’s a reason that Dos Passos’s Depression-era modernism seemed suddenly relevant. The present was coming to look a lot like the past. The novels combined the stylistic innovations of the European modernists, which Dos Passos had used to evoke a shifting media landscape, with fiercely committed leftist politics that were resurgent in the new millennium. He had written a linguistically adventurous national portrait for a precarious age—his, and ours.

The “U.S.A.” novels follow many characters from different levels of society as they hustle, knowingly or not. A gruff dockworker, a social-climbing actress, an idealistic labor organizer, a cynical advertising man, a patriotic fighter pilot—wisely or foolishly, these characters traverse the grimy and gilded paths of the American class system, sometimes meeting one another, sometimes fading away. Dos Passos’s Balzacian ambition was to paint in detail on a wide social canvas. He succeeded only to a point. His hardboiled tone is one limitation: many readers will only be so interested in the fates of grungy, inarticulate men named Mac. And there are few people of color in the novels—a serious flaw in their grand design.

It’s in the interludes between the chapters, though, that Dos Passos’s writing feels strangely fresh. There, he breaks into the narrative to conduct prose experiments. The “Newsreel” sections are montages of quotations selected from various media sources. In the “Camera Eye” sections—inspired by the camerawork of the newly popular cinema—the author’s memories appear in a Joycean flow of words and images. (Dos Passos imagined the camera lens as a tool for self-examination, rather than self-display.) Finally, detailed but highly subjective portraits of historical figures appear at intervals, from Presidents and financiers to radical journalists and labor agitators. Collectively, these interstitial experiments show the cumulative effects of history and media on the inner life of an ordinary person.

In the “Newsreel” sections, text from actual newsreels flows together with snippets from newspaper articles, lines from popular songs, and excerpts from radio broadcasts. These bursts of information seem random but were carefully selected for maximum effect. Hurtling themselves at the reader, they are too brief to be fully explicable, but too portentous to be ignored.

In the “Camera Eye” sections, we move from the media to memory. Dos Passos grew up largely in European hotel rooms, as the lonely bastard son of a wealthy Portuguese-American lawyer. (At the time, this status carried real social stigma.) He then attended élite institutions—Choate, Harvard—before volunteering as an ambulance driver in the First World War. The “Camera Eye” interludes make the fleeting bits of information we encounter in the media (“bags 28 huns singlehanded”) visceral and real.

History is always personal in Dos Passos; these poor medics are discovering firsthand the horror that the news omits. Unlike Hemingway, who responded to chaos by carving out clean, simple sentences, Dos Passos portrays his inner life as raw, messy, and ambivalently associative. His style, in its way, suggests how the twenty-first century’s preferred mode of expression and argument—the rant—fits into the larger media ecosystem. Bloggy essays, emotive social-media posts, and even text messages, with their nervous run-on sentences and eccentric punctuation, are a natural response to information overload: a way of channelling and acknowledging the hectic, perpetually uncertain state of the world and the barrage of intense, often contradictory information that is constantly being produced to describe it. Dos Passos arrived at his own, pre-tech version of this style.

His historical portraits, too, reflect a world in which the ground is shifting. Dos Passos presents his eccentric biographical sketches of Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt alongside portraits of radicals: the Socialist Presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs, the radical essayist Randolph Bourne, the labor organizer Joe Hill. He gives equal space to those in power and those who spent their lives seeking to break it up. The most moving of all the historical portraits is the eulogy to the Unknown Soldier, which closes “1919.” A sombre depiction of the funeral cortege honoring the fallen, in Arlington National Cemetery, concludes with the observation that “Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies”—an expression of controlled, understated rage. On the one hand, Dos Passos seeks to revise history, just as we now look to reassess the legacies of our “great men.” But his all-encompassing collection of portraits also suggests the limits of such revision: the American narrative is the product of opposing forces that are unlikely to subside.

The line for which Dos Passos is best known comes from his anguished account, in “The Big Money,” of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial: “All right we are two nations.” The statement’s terse, sleepless tone resonates now as it did then. Dos Passos was writing amid worldwide shock after the execution, in Boston, of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two Italian-immigrant anarchists convicted of murder. The conviction, based on flimsy evidence, had been influenced by seething anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment. Dos Passos interviewed Sacco and Vanzetti in their jail cells and was arrested during a demonstration on their behalf, on the Boston Common.

Appalled as he was by the trial, Dos Passos wasn’t surprised. Over the course of his life, he’d come to see America as a permanently divided country. We’re often told, in hand-wringing tones, about the growing differences between red and blue states, and about our increasingly divisive political and social rhetoric. But, in Dos Passos’s view, division has been the rule in American life, not the exception; he considered it to be authentically American. The “U.S.A.” novels plumbed the depths of our rifts, and explored how they might be widened by a media-saturated age, and by the fragmentation of information and the latent social hysteria that come with it.

Dos Passos was often an early reader of manuscripts by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other writers; they’ve since gone on to be more famous than he is. Perhaps his peers trusted him because he perceived, with special clarity, the conflicting sociopolitical forces that were shaping modern life and giving it its texture—forces that are still at work in our digitized Gilded Age.

• Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at the Arts Fuse. He lives in New Orleans.

Fun facts about writers and about our favorite, EMH. More photos added by me. Best, Christine

George W. HuntOctober 25, 2019FacebookTwitterEmail

Photo by Gregory Culmer on Unsplash

George W. Hunt, S.J., served as editor in chief of America from 1984 until 1998. A literary scholar who specialized in the work of John Cheever and John Updike, he often used his weekly column to report on books he was reading or new authors he had discovered. Books about books were of special interest to him and so, in his honor, for this fall literary review, we reprint this Of Many Things column from Feb. 20, 1993.

“The books that you really love give the sense, when you first open them, of having been there. It is a creation, almost like a chamber in the memory. Places that one has never been to, things that one has never seen or heard, but their fitness is so sound that you’ve been there.”

The speaker is John Cheever, and his remarks are captured in a delightful diversion for gloomy winter days, entitled The Writer’s Chapbook, edited by George Plimpton. This chapbook is a compendium of observations from our century’s greatest literary artists, culled from interviews with over 200 of them and originally published in The Paris Review. It is organized under specific headings, such as Style, Plot, Character, Symbols, Critics, Editors, Writer’s Block, Films and so on, wherein each topic is personally addressed in refreshing and often startling ways.

For example, we learn under the heading “Work Habits” that Ernest Hemingway rose at dawn to write, James Baldwin waited until the quietest hour of the night, Truman Capote and Evelyn Waugh often wrote in bed. Robert Frost would take off his shoe and use its sole for a desk and William Kennedy composed so many re-writes of his novel Legs that they eventually stacked up to match the height of his six-year-old son. Some more examples:

On Early Literary Inspirations: “I always say Hemingway, because he taught me how sentences worked. When I was fifteen or sixteen I would type out his stories to see how the sentences worked.” – Joan Didion.

“You know what made me want to become a journalist? Reading Evelyn Waugh’s Scoopwhen I was about eleven. Enough to make anyone want to be a journalist!” – Nadine Gordimer.

“As a writer I learned from Charlie Chaplin. Let’s say the rhythm, the snap of comedy; the reserved comic presence—that beautiful distancing; the funny with sad; the surprise of surprise.” – Bernard Malamud.

On Creating Characters: “Ends always give me trouble. Characters run away from you, and so won’t fit on to what’s coming.” – E. M. Forster.

“If I explained how [the process of turning a real-life character into a fictional one] is sometimes done, it would be a handbook for libel lawyers.” – Ernest Hemingway.

“It was not [E. M. Forster] who fathered that trite little whimsy about characters getting out of hand; it’s as old as the quills, although of course one sympathizes with his people if they try to wriggle out of that trip to India or wherever he takes them. My characters are galley slaves.” – Vladimir Nabokov.

On the Audience: “As I write I think about Auden, what he would say—would he find it rubbish or kind of entertaining? Auden and Orwell.” – Joseph Brodsky.

“The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, colorblind, authorially biased, who has read the books I have read.” – Anthony Burgess.

“I occasionally have an anti-Roth reader in mind. I think, ‘How is he going to hate this!’ That can just be the encouragement I need.” – Philip Roth.

“When I write, I aim in my mind not toward New York but toward a vague spot a little to the east of Kansas. I think of the books on library shelves, without their jackets, years old, and a countryish teenage boy finding them, and having them speak to him.” – John Updike.

On Humor: “Make the reader laugh and he will think you a trivial fellow, but bore him the right way and your reputation is assured.” – Somerset Maugham.

“Humor is emotional chaos recollected in tranquillity.” – James Thurber.

“If you can make a reader laugh, he is apt to get careless and go on reading. So you as the writer get a chance to get something on him.” – Henry Green.

These wonderful, random selections confirm Elizabeth Hardwick’s comment that “the greatest gift is the passion for reading. It is cheap, it consoles, it distracts, it excites, it gives you knowledge of the world and experience of a wide kind. It is a moral illumination.”

This article also appeared in print, under the headline “‘It Consoles, It Distracts, It Excites’,” in the Fall Literary Review 2019 issue.

Good morning! The below article by John Krull is so interesting and a great observation of the end of the 1920’s. I greatly enjoyed it and it’s short enough for me to read on a busy Saturday. I hope you enjoy this look at Hemingway and two of his contemporary. Tomas Wolfe also had Max Perkins as his editor and Hem at times was jealous. Best, Christine

By John Krull
TheStatehouseFile.com

INDIANAPOLIS – They appeared within days of each other, like flowers blooming just as a storm hit.

Three of America’s enduring novels – William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel” – were published in the autumn of 1929, just days before the stock market crashed and sent the nation into the most profound economic depression in its history.

John Krull, publisher, TheStatehouseFile.com

Vastly different books written by vastly different men, the novels shared at least one thing in common. They were signs of something stirring in American culture, a willingness to peer beneath the surface and record without hesitation what one saw in the scurrying places down below.

Hemingway’s book came first. It was published on Sept. 27, 1929.

Taken often – particularly in the movies – as an aching tragic love story, “A Farewell to Arms” is much more than that. Hemingway is often – and with justice – criticized for his macho chest-thumping and seeming celebrations of combat, but his relationship with war was more complicated than his myth suggests.

In “Farewell,” his lovers flee a World War I in which rules and alliances seem to have been shattered. Comrades kill comrades and chaos reigns.

Hemingway wrote of the importance of exhibiting “grace under pressure” because he saw that the world often made no sense. It was crucial to maintain presence of mind when reason itself seemed to have abdicated the throne.

Faulkner’s book appeared next, on Oct. 7. A tour de force, American letters hadn’t ever seen anything like “The Sound and the Fury.” In some ways, American literature still hasn’t.

It was an explosion of modernist technique. A tale told by several voices, it is the story of a doomed Southern family. Each narrator carries wounds and each wound was inflicted by history.

In the course of the story, Faulkner probes and exposes all the sore points of the Southern heritage – race, incest, guilt, defeat, despair.

Before Faulkner, Southern literature celebrated regional notions of chivalrous conduct, a mythology grounded more in wishful thinking than historical fact.

After Faulkner, such denials of Southern reality became harder, even impossible, to sustain. He’d torn away the concealing curtain.

Wolfe’s book followed Faulkner’s less than two weeks later, on Oct. 18. Now often dismissed as self-absorbed coming-of-age story, “Look Homeward, Angel” was more intricate than that. Wolfe, with a master’s degree from Harvard, was the best-educated of his literary contemporaries – and he likely was the best-read of them.

“Look Homeward, Angel” mingled elements of James Joyce, Sherwood Anderson and Sinclair Lewis to take a penetrating look at the not so quietly desperate life of a Carolina mountain boom town. It slices away at one of the sustaining myths of American life, that small communities were temples of virtue and rectitude.

Six days after Wolfe’s book came out, “Black Thursday” happened and the stock market started its long, hard dive. Five days later, “Black Tuesday” – Oct. 29, 1929 – happened and the debacle was complete.

Over the next decade, as much as 25 percent of the American population – and in some parts of the country the number was closer to 40 percent – would be jobless. The stock market and the American economy wouldn’t return to the levels known before the crash until the early 1950s.

The despair Hemingway, Faulkner and Wolfe depicted became the national norm.

But they demonstrated a diamond-like resilience in the American character. However profound our devotion to illusion may be, we Americans periodically do find the clear-eyed courage to peer into the darkness and not blink.

Hemingway, Faulkner and Wolfe weren’t saints. Tortured men, they all drank too much and battled demons from their own experience and, often, of their own making.

Each writer came to a hard end. Hemingway, of course, committed suicide. Faulkner suffered a series of debilitating injuries and illnesses brought on by heavy drinking before he died. Wolfe succumbed to tuberculosis of the brain, brought on, one story has it, because he shared a bottle of whiskey on a raw day with a sickly hobo.

Each, though, left his work as a kind of monument, an affirmation that there is harsh beauty in truth.

And a timeless reminder that we Americans can’t make dark times any lighter by ignoring that darkness.

John Krull is director of Franklin College’s Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.