John Passos - 1919

Through the fourth major mode of address of the book, those Joycean passages under the heading “The Camera Eye,” Dos Passos records his own nameless life of sensations beginning with his early boyhood. These are perhaps the most enigmatic interludes. Like the Newsreels and brief biographies they give a topographical dimension to the text, as if points in the main narrative were being held under a higher lens magnification. They also implicate the narrator in the narrative, serving to underscore his moral commitment to the act of writing. But with his characteristic self-denigration, Dos Passos once justified these sections to an interviewer as planned lapses into “the subjective,” a way of keeping this terrible contaminant out of the rest of the manuscript.

Here we should remember D. H. Lawrence’s warning not to trust the writer but the book. As with Dos Passos’s self-effacement, his objectivity, which is the literary form of self-effacement, masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger, and, above all, the audacity to write a novel that breathes in the excitements of all the revolutionary art of the early twentieth century — whether Joyce’s compound word streams or Rivera’s proletarian murals or D. W. Griffith’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s film montages.

The stature of U.S.A. was immediately recognized by the critics of the day. By the time of its publication as a completed one-volume trilogy in 1938, the novel was generally regarded as a major achievement, although displaying the characteristics of a highly controlled vision. Malcolm Cowley thought of it as a “collectivist novel” perversely lacking the celebrations of common humanity that would be expected from a collectivist novel. Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to fail ure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.

But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies — and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher.

But U.S.A. is an American novel after all, and we recognize the Americanness of the characters. They really do have a national specificity. In fact, the reader now, half a century further along, cannot help remark how current Dos Passos’s characters are — how we could run into Margo Dowling or Ward Moorehouse or Charley Anderson today and recognize any one of them, and how they would fit right in without any trouble. How they do. U.S.A. is a useful book to us because it is far-seeing. It seems angrier and at the same time more hopeful than it might have seemed in 1938. A moral demand is implicit in its pages. Dos Passos says in his prologue that above all, “ U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” He heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation.

— E. L. Doctorow

Oh the infantree the infantree

With the dirt behind their ears

ARMIES CLASH AT VERDUN IN GLOBE’S

GREATEST BATTLE

150,000 MEN AND WOMEN PARADE

but another question and a very important one is raised. The New York Stock Exchange is today the only free securities market in the world. If it maintains that position it is sure to become perhaps the world’s greatest center for the marketing of

BRITISH FLEET SENT TO SEIZE

GOLDEN HORN

The cavalree artilleree

And the goddamned engineers

Will never beat the infantree

In eleven thousand years

TURKS FLEE BEFORE TOMMIES

AT GALLIPOLI

when they return home what will our war veterans think of the American who babbles about some vague new order, while dabbling in the sand of shoal water? From his weak folly they who have lived through the spectacle will recall the vast new No Man’s Land of Europe reeking with murder and the lust of rapine, aflame with the fires of revolution

STRIKING WAITERS ASK AID OF WOMEN

Oh the oak and the ash and the weeping willow tree

And green grows the grass in North Amerikee

coincident with a position of that kind will be the bringing from abroad of vast quantities of money for the purposes of maintaining balances in this country

When I think of the flag which our ships carry, the only touch of color about them, the only thing that moves as if it had a settled spirit in it, — in their solid structure; it seems to me I see alternate strips of parchment upon which are written the rights of liberty and justice and strips of blood spilt to vindicate these rights, and then, — in the corner a prediction of the blue serene into which every nation may swim which stands for these things.

Oh we’ll nail Old Glory to the top of the pole

And we’ll all reenlist in the pig’s a — h—

Joe Williams put on the secondhand suit and dropped his uniform, with a cobblestone wrapped up in it, off the edge of the dock into the muddy water of the basin. It was noon. There was nobody around. He felt bad when he found he didn’t have the cigarbox with him. Back in the shed he found it where he’d left it. It was a box that had once held Flor de Mayo cigars he’d bought when he was drunk in Guantanamo. In the box under the goldpaper lace were Janey’s high school graduation picture, a snapshot of Alec with his motorcycle, a picture with the signatures of the coach and all the players of the whole highschool junior team that he was captain of all in baseball clothes, an old pink almost faded snapshot of his Dad’s tug, the Mary B. Sullivan , taken off the Virginia Capes with a fullrigged ship in tow, an undressed postcard picture of a girl named Antoinette he’d been with in Villefranche, some safetyrazor blades, a postcard photo of himself and two other guys, all gobs in white suits, taken against the background of a moorish arch in Malaga, a bunch of foreign stamps, a package of Merry Widows, and ten little pink and red shells he’d picked up on the beach at Santiago. With the box tucked right under his arm, feeling crummy in the baggy civies, he walked slowly out to the beacon and watched the fleet in formation steaming down the River Plate. The day was overcast; the lean cruisers soon blurred into their trailing smokesmudges.

Joe stopped looking at them and watched a rusty tramp come in. She had a heavy list to port and you could see the hull below the waterline green and slimy with weed. There was a blue and white Greek flag on the stern and a dingy yellow quarantine flag halfway up the fore.

A man who had come up behind him said something to Joe in Spanish. He was a smiling ruddy man in blue denims and was smoking a cigar, but for some reason he made Joe feel panicky. “No savvy,” Joe said and walked away and out between the warehouses into the streets back of the waterfront.