John Passos - The 42nd Parallel

I have no desire to cause you or your father any pain or publicity, but in the first place you must refrain from degrading the name of Moorehouse while you still legally bear it and also I shall feel that when the divorce is satisfactorily arranged I shall be entitled to some compensation for the loss of time, etc., and the injury to my career that has come through your fault. I am leaving tomorrow for Pittsburgh where I have a position awaiting me and work that I hope will cause me to forget you and the great pain your faithlessness has caused me.

He wondered for a while how to end the letter, and finally wrote

sincerely JWM

and mailed it.

He lay awake all night in the upper berth in the sleeper for Pittsburgh. Here he was twentythree years old and he hadn’t a college degree and he didn’t know any trade and he’d given up the hope of being a songwriter. God damn it, he’d never be valet to any society dame again. The sleeper was stuffy, the pillow kept getting in a knot under his ear, snatches of the sales talk for Bancroft’s or Bryant’s histories, .. “Through peachorchards to the sea…” Mr. Hillyard’s voice addressing the jury from the depths of the realestate office in Wilmington: “Realestate, sir, is the one safe sure steady conservative investment, impervious to loss by flood and fire; the owner of realestate links himself by indissoluble bonds to the growth of his city or nation… improve or not at his leisure and convenience and sit at home in quiet and assurance letting the riches drop in to his lap that are produced by the unavoidable and inalienable growth in wealth of a mighty nation…” “For a young man with proper connections and if I may say so pleasing manners and a sound classical education,” Mr. Oppenheimer had said, “banking should offer a valuable field for the cultivation of the virtues of energy, diplomacy and perhaps industry….” A hand was tugging at his bedclothes.

“Pittsburgh, sah, in fortyfive minutes,” came the colored porter’s voice. Ward pulled on his trousers, noticed with dismay that they were losing their crease, dropped from the berth, stuck his feet in his shoes that were sticky from being hastily polished with inferior polish, and stumbled along the aisle past dishevelled people emerging from their bunks, to the men’s washroom. His eyes were glued together and he wanted a bath. The car was unbearably stuffy and the washroom smelt of underwear and of other men’s shaving soap. Through the window he could see black hills powdered with snow, an occasional coaltipple, rows of gray shacks all alike, a riverbed scarred with minedumps and slagheaps, purple lacing of trees along the hill’s edge cut sharp against a red sun; then against the hill, bright and red as the sun, a blob of flame from a smelter. Ward shaved, cleaned his teeth, washed his face and neck as best he could, parted his hair. His jaw and cheekbones were getting a square look that he admired. “Cleancut young executive,” he said to himself as he fastened his collar and tied his necktie. It was Annabelle had taught him the trick of wearing a necktie the same color as his eyes. As he thought of her name a faint tactile memory of her lips troubled him, of the musky perfume she used. He brushed the thought aside, started to whistle, stopped for fear the other men dressing might think it peculiar and went and stood on the platform. The sun was well up now, the hills were pink and black and the hollows blue where the smoke of breakfastfires collected. Everything was shacks in rows, ironworks, coaltipples. Now and then a hill threw a row of shacks or a group of furnaces up against the sky. Stragglings of darkfaced men in dark clothes stood in the slush at the crossings. Coalgrimed walls shut out the sky. The train passed through tunnels under crisscrossed bridges, through deep cuttings. “Pittsburgh Union Station,” yelled the porter. Ward put a quarter into the colored man’s hand, picked out his bag from a lot of other bags, and walked with a brisk firm step down the platform, breathing deep the cold coalsmoky air of the trainshed.

the spring you could see Halley’s Comet over the elms from the back topfloor windows of the Upper House Mr. Greenleaf said you would have to go to confirmation class and be confirmed when the bishop came and next time you went canoeing you told Skinny that you wouldn’t be confirmed because you believed in camping and canoeing and Halley’s Comet and the Universe and the sound the rain made on the tent the night you’d both read The Hound of the Baskervilles and you’d hung out the steak on a tree and a hound must have smelt it because he kept circling round you and howling something terrible and you were so scared (but you didn’t say that, you don’t know what you said)

and not in church and Skinny said if you’d never been baptized you couldn’t be confirmed and you went and told Mr. Greenleaf and he looked very chilly and said you’d better not go to confirmation class any more and after that you had to go to church Sundays but you could go to either one you liked so sometimes you went to the Congregational and sometimes to the Episcopalian and the Sunday the bishop came you couldn’t see Halley’s Comet any more and you saw the others being confirmed and it lasted for hours because there were a lot of little girls being confirmed too and all you could hear was mumble mumble this thy child mumble mumble this thy child and you wondered if you’d be alive next time Halley’s Comet came round

I was in front of the national palace when the firing began. I ran across the Plaza with other thousands of scurrying men women and children scores of whom fell in their flight to cover

NEW HIGH MOUNTAINS FOUND

Oh Jim O’Shea was castaway upon an Indian Isle

The natives there they liked his hair

They liked his Irish smile

BEDLAM IN ART

BANDITS AT HOME IN WILDS

Washington considers unfortunate illogical and unnatural the selection of General Huerta as provisional president of Mexico in succession to the overthrown president

3 FLEE CITY FEAR WEB

He’d put sand in the hotel sugar writer says he came to America an exile and found only sordidness.

LUNG YU FORMER EMPRESS OF CHINA DIES

IN THE FORBIDDEN CITY

La cucaracha la cucaracha

Ya no quiere caminar

Porque no tiene

porque no tiene

Marijuana que fumar.

ignoring of lower classes in organizing of republic may cause another uprising

600 AMERICANS FLEE CAPITAL

You shall have rings on your fingers

And bells on your toes

Elephants to ride upon

My little Irish rose

So come to your nabob and on next St. Patrick’s day

Be Mrs. Mumbo Jumbo Jijibhoy Jay O’Shea

When she was small she hated everything. She hated her father, a stout redhaired man smelling of whiskers and stale pipetobacco. He worked in an office in the stockyards and came home with the stockyards stench on his clothes and told bloody jokes about butchering sheep and steers and hogs and men. Eleanor hated smells and the sight of blood. Nights she used to dream she lived alone with her mother in a big clean white house in Oak Park in winter when there was snow on the ground and she’d been setting a white linen tablecloth with bright white silver and she’d set white flowers and the white meat of chicken before her mother who was a society lady in a dress of white samite, but there’d suddenly be a tiny red speck on the table and it would grow and grow and her mother would make helpless fluttering motions with her hands and she’d try to brush it off but it would grow a spot of blood welling into a bloody blot spreading over the tablecloth and she’d wake up out of the nightmare smelling the stockyards and screaming.