REASSESSMENT
The grand design
ANDREW SINCLAIR
U.S.A. John Dos Passos (Penguin Classics 21s) What was U.S.A.? Dos Passos asked himself this question at the beginning of his immense trilogy on life in America from the opening of this century until the Great Crash of 1929. And he answered his question by stating that U.S.A. was geography, holding companies, unions, laws, radio, movies, stock quotations, public libraries, big-mouthed officials, buried veterans, the letters at the end of an address far away from home. U.S.A. meant all these things and more to Dos Passos, but mostly it meant the speech of the people, 'in his mother's words telling about longago, in his father's telling about when I was a boy, in the kidding stories of uncles, in the lies the kids told at school, the hired man's yarns, the tall tales the dough- boys told after taps; it was the speech that clung to the ears, the link that tingled in the blood; U.S.A.'
Only John O'Hara has listened to the people of modern America speak as carefully as Dos Passos has listened; but he has never had the continental vision of his fellow hearer and novelist. Dos Passos is unique in seeking to execute quite such a grand design, which might dominate a continent and achieve the impos- sible 'Great American Novel.' He was the Napoleon of American literature in the 1930s. His U.S.A. trilogy was his advance towards Moscow, his quest after explaining the social problems of a great land mass by the arms of American marxism. It was his boldest attempt in the novel and he nearly achieved his objec- tive, the unification of a continent through his ideas. But since the 'thirties, Dos Passos has been steadily on the retreat from Moscow, shedding his red bag and baggage by the way- side, bitterly complaining from the far right flank about the horrors of the Russian winter and continual cold war.
Yet perhaps Dos Passos owed more to the Napoleon of the American cinema, D. W. Griffith, than he did to the Little Corporal himself. Unlike so many modern epics, U.S.A. was not written for the cinema, but from the cinema. It is the first and most successful appli- cation of the principles of the Russian docu- mentary and the American historical film saga to the art of the novel.
Dos Passos is explicit about his intentions. In each section of the book, he intercuts the stories of some four characters exactly as Griffith did in Intolerance. Between these epi- sodes of individual lives, three sorts of cine- matic vision are set down in words rather than pictures. The first is called 'Newsreel' and is a montage of newspaper clippings which gives a fragmented sample of the year in question. The second is called 'Camera Eye' and is a series of consecutive jottings from an individual voice, which pinpoints a class and place and time, like a sequence shot from one character's point of view. The third is a potted documentary biography of the life of a great capitalist, poli- tician, inventor, or rebel, which might serve as the commentary to a series of film clips on the career of that man.
Thus Dos Passos uses the techniques of the cinema to present a total novel of American society. His uncanny ear and skill vvith lan- guage give almost the reality of camera reportage to his work. Yet no arrangement of the written word can seem as actual as a nims- reel picture, no cobbled vignettes can give the idea of a continent so effectively as a series of flashes built into a montage. A novel can be- come the script for an epic film, but it cannot replace that epic film. Like Griffith, Dos Passos was doomed to fail in his attempt at produc- ing the Great American Saga, although he innovated a whole style of literature, in which fact and fiction were so cunningly intercut that the hand of the editor seemed to disappear into the stuff of things. All subsequent writers of modern sub-epic have stolen from Dos Passos what he translated from Griffith, yet none has approached the scope and power of his work, as none has approached Griffith.
After thirty years, U.S.A. still appears a flawed masterpiece. The design of the trilogy is brilliantly successful, with its running themes of revolutionaries (first the W'obblies, then the Communists) growing old and getting no- where, of capitalists tricking their way to fortune, of a rural nation becoming involved in a European war and an industrial economy when both go against the American grain. Yet the characters of Dos Passos suffer from exactly the emptiness behind the subjects of docu- mentary films. His heroes and heroines are perfect in speech and style and surroundings; but they are only pieces in the grand design. His capitalist villain, J. Ward Moorehouse, is too obviously a villain; his proletarian heroes are too full of asphalt and immediacy. Dos Passos's characters, caught brilliantly by their speech, exist in little more than their speech; yet, by speech alone, a man does not reveal too much of himself.
This is a great novel of written talk, which supplies the commentary to the moving picture running in the curious cinema of the mind that conjures up images from a printed page. It is a worthy attempt to make the novel relevant in the age of the movie; but its failure lies in overuse of the means of the movie. Dos Passos gives up most of the techniques by which the novel can outdo the cinema- its ability to ex- plain motive behind action, its presentation of unreality and mythology and nuance, its denial of time and the moment and the exterior. U.S.A. is Griffith in words; it is one of the attempts—made more successfully by Joyce and Kafka and Cdline—to create a new structure for the novel after Proust had ended in per- fection what Richardson had begun, the long psychological novel.
After thirty years, U.S.A. remains the best
source for the climate of intellectual opinion during the New Deal. The prejudices of the intelligentsia of that time about the history of the preceding thirty years are all mirrored —their nostalgia for their vanishing rural and small-town roots, their disillusion with Theo- dore Roosevelt and progressivism, their bitter- ness against Woodrow M ilson's entry into the First World War, their fear of a conspiracy of manufacturers and bankers sshich may rule the world. Dos Passos, while seeking to explain the mentality of the whole of the United States between 1900 and 1929, succeeds best in giving an accurate picture of the radical mind between the Great Crash and the First New Deal.
A rereading of U.S.A. today provides some clues as to why Dos Passos swung so shabbily in European eyes from she far left to the far right -a most American direction. Already in U.S.A., the biographies reveal an admiration of the great capitalists, mixed up with con- spiracy theories about their power. In the recent disappointing sequel to U.S.A. called Mid- century, the admiration for the tycoons remains, while the conspiracy theories are transferred to the old heroes, the leaders of the left. Dos Passos was already disillusioned with the unions in the 'thirties; he wanted radical action. Now he wants radical conservation. The reactionary is the revolutionary in reverse.
Alas! for Dos Passos, the retreat from Moscow has been less applauded than the ad- vance towards it. Yet U.S.A. remains the supreme novel as cinema epic, the social con- science of depression Hollywood between hard or soft covers.
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