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Review of The 42nd Parallel

by John Dos Passos

Presented by Patrick J. Goss to The Book Club on Friday, March 25, I9BB

Tonight we look at The 42nd

, the first volume in John Dos Passos'sweeping trilogy of the first three decades of the twentieth century. We begin with a look at the life of Lhe Parallcl

author. John Dos Passos was born in 1896, the illegitimate

son of

rather mature parents. His father was 52 years oId. Both his mother and his father had sons 18 years order than he by their first marriages. His parents did not marry until L9L2, after the death of his father's first wife. Most of John,s early childhood was spent in Europe, where his parents coutd rive together openly. He did not have a normal family life. He suggests in his autobiography that he and his mother rived in seclusion and quiet for rong periods of time until the arrival of his glamorous and exuberant father gave their rives a kind of enchantment for a short period of time. He was forced to attend an Engtish school, where he felt totally out of p1ace. He hated that experience, and by 1910 had persuaded his parents to educate him in the united states, where he was enrolred at Choate.

His father was a strong influence on him, despite their Iimited contact. The elder Dos Passos was the son of an immigrant from the Portuguese island of Madeira. He was an ardent abolitionist and served as a youngster as a drummer in a Pennsylvania regiment in the civil war. He studied law and began practicing in New York City in 1867. He was a phenomenally successful corporate lawyer. He earned and spent a large fortune. He attempted to guide the development of his son's mind, directing his reading, giving him books, and encouraging him to write to him in French. Atthough his legal work put him in contact with the titans of industry and finance, he was a lifelong Democrat and very active poIiticaIly. One of the great passions of John Dos passos, life was travel. His peripatetic youth had perhaps inclined him to that interest. His father also encouraged his wandering. He passed examinations to enter Harvard university in rgrr at the age of 15. His father rewarded him with a typicar eighteenth century grand tour of Europe. After he graduated from Harvard in 19r0, he was determined to join an ambulance unit in France, but his father deterred him for a time by offering to pay for a winter of study in Spain to work on his Spanish and to study architecture. His father died in L917. severaL months after his death, .lohn did go to Europe as a volunteer with the Norton-Harjes

unit and then with the American Red Cross. When the U.S. entered the war, he joined the medical corp of the American army. After the Armistice he spent several months in Paris, then went to Spain as a newspaper correspondent, Iater joined Near East Relief in Turkey and the Caucasus, and from there made his way to Iran and Beirut. He saw much of the world during the next 50 years of his life, developing a special interest in Brazil because of his Portuguese heritage. Europe remained, however, his main passion. It is surprising to find that an author who chronicled the history of the first third of this century and who was throughout his adult life caught up in the study of American history was cut off from the American scene during his maturing years. He lived in Europe with his mother and traveled between Boston, New York, and Washington when he was in this country. Choate and Harvard were upper-c1ass retreats. What awakened Dos Passos and his contemporaries to history was the events surrounding WorId War I the war, the Russian Revolution, the Versailles settlement, the socialist-communist movement in a1l its manifestations, and the depression. A central experience in Dos Passos' Iife was his involvement with socialism and communism. Socialism had been a strong force for a long time, but the Russian Revotution became the focus for many young people of good wi11. The evils caused by the Versailles settlement, post-war readjustment, and ambulance

depression intensified the attraction of the Russian

experiment. Disillusionment with what was going on in Russia came late for many. For Dos Passos it came early. His contemporaries on the left turned on him when they discovered he had abandoned the cause, and their attacks damaged his literary reputation the rest of his life. It is important to remember, however, that Dos Passos was never a doctrinaire socialist or communist. He was always too independent a thinker. He became a socialist in 19L7. His social views were greatly influenced by his feelings about the war. He believed that the secret purpose of American intervention was to quench revolution in Europe. The repressive actions of the American government against those identified as socialists, conmunists, anarchists, or wobblies fueled those feelings after the war. He wrote for The New Masses during the 1920's. He became involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, wrote articles about that phenomenon, and stood on picket lines in Boston. Also during the L92O's, he was involved with John Howard Lawson's New Playwrights' Theater. He had published a successful war novel, Three So1diers, in L92L and Manhattan Transfer in L925, but most of his literary output in the 1920's consisted of journalism and plays he wrote for the New Plalrwrights' Theater. You wilI recal1 that he had studied architecture in Spain after graduating from Harvard. He also was a painter.

For a time after writing Three Soldiers he thought his future might Iie in art. He designed sets for the theater, and in fact that was his chief interest in the theater His radical political activity continued into the 1930's,

with Theodore Dreiser and others to investigate conditions among the coal miners in HarIan County, Kentucky. He infuriated some Communist Party leaders when he refused to stand trial for his actions in Harlan County to become a martyr. One of his final projects was to be a movie about the Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Madrid government. He broke with Hemingway, who was also involved in that project, because he was unwilling to sacrifice truth to propaganda and because he saw the Spanish cause becoming a pawn to Stalinist politics. when he went

The foremost significant influences on Dos Passos were his coming to grips with the actualities of life

in the United States, the experiences of World War T, his involvement in radical politics, and the influence of European naturalism and realism, which flourished in this country in this century. I already have touched on the first three influences, and I move European now to the influence of European literature. literature had been influenced by realists and naturalists for half a century. Writers in the United States and England had been slower to follow this movement. After World War I a whole generation of experimenters and plain speakers appeared Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, e.e.

cummings, and Scott Fitzgerald.

Dos Passos had known cummings

at Harvard and in France. Flaubert was a special favorite of Dos Passos' , and Dos Passos also was influenced by the Spanish writers he met during his post-graduation travels. Theodore Dreiser, who was older than the authors in this new group, was perhaps Dos Passos' most important American influence. Of him Dos Passos wrote:

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novels that opened the way through the genteel reticences of American nineteenth century fiction for what seemed to me to be a truthful depiction of people's lives. Without Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalism none of us would have had a chance to publish even. Dos Passos was never a member of the "lost generation" group in Paris, although he passed through occasionally. You will remember that he had begun traveling to Europe before this expatriation and that his travels continued after the others were repatriated. His aloofness from trends and coteries also set him apart from this group. He probably first met Hemingway during their service in ambulance corps in lta1y in 1918. They met again in Paris and had become close friends by L924. Dos Passos was not present for the running of the bulls in Pamplona that Hemingway immortalized in The Sun Also Rises, but he was there the next year. He skiied with the Hemingways in Austria and hunted with Ernest in Montana. His future wife had grown up with the Hemingways, and they were present at Hemingway's struggle with a tuna that provided the basis for

The OId Man And The Sea. Their friendship gradually ended

as

overbearing. I already have recounted his disagreement with Hemingway about the making of a documentary film about the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos' attitude about the literary acquaintances of his youth exemplifies his independent-mindedness. In his autobiography he observed, "In the private universe I was arranging for myself, Iiterary people generally, and particularly Greenwich Village and Paris exiles, were among the excommunicated categories. Their attitude toward life made we want to throw up. But as soon as r got to be friends with one of them he or she became the exception, unique and unassailable." This same attitude in the political arena Hemingway became more

caused former comrades to believe that he had abandoned

doctrinaire beliefs that he probably had never held, dt least not as unquestioningly as they had. When he returned to the United States in 1922 he roomed for a time in the same house as Hart Crane. He associated with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and recalled an afternoon when the three of them and Sherwood Anderson drove to Great Neck, which was to be the setting of The Great Gatsby. He came to know Edmund Wilson, Donald Ogden Stewart, and even Whitaker Chambers, "then a spooky littIe guy on hush-hush missions as a Communist Party courier

In later years he became more a reporter of his times, writing several books of history. He toured the European and Pacific theaters during World War II. He attended the Nuremberg trials. His first marriage came to an untimely end in 1947, when his wife was killed in an automobile accident. He lost an eye in the same accident. He remarried in L949, and a daughter of that marriage was born in 1950. With a part of his vast fortune, Dos Passos' father had bought an estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His father }ost that estate, but Dos Passos regained a portion of it in L94O. He settled there permanently in L946. He became obsessed with a study of Jefferson and the other founding fathers. He continued to be a caustic, careful observer of contemporary life and continued to travel and to write to the extent that his health permitted. He died in L970. I do not want to leave the impression that USA is his only fictional work. It was not. Three So1diers, published in L92L, received critical acclaim, as did Manhattan Transfer. He wrote eight novels after USA. Several of those are of interest chiefly to biographers of Dos Passos. Three were grouped together as the District of Columbia trilogy Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (L943) , and The Grand Desiqn (1949) - but they do not have the cohesiveness of USA.

I am not as familiar with the work of Dos passos as I was with the work of other authors r have presented to the c1ub, so f have relied in my background comments to a great extent on interpretations and biographical information that I was not especially famitiar with before I started this study. Perhaps as a corrective to that reliance on the work of others, in my presentation of the book itserf, r will rery almost who11y on my own analysis. The most striking things about rhe 42nd parallel are Dos

Passos' attempt to dear in a serious way with the history of this country in the twentieth century up to the time of its

entry into worrd war r and the devices he uses to achieve that goal. r do not mean to impry that Dos passos tried to write a comprehensive history of an American epoch. He did not. But he did attempt to convey, in this inventive novel, what to him were some important rearities about the history of that period. Although Alfred Kazin was wrong in his introduction to our edition of this book when he said that Dos Passos' father was a lltcKinrey Repubrican, he was right when he cited Dos Passos' view of history as something that alienates him from contemporary readers. Dos passos believed that it was possibre to decipher what realry had happened, dn estimable chore, and arso to make some sense out of that knowledge.

The 42nd Paralte1 was published in 1930. The other volumes in the USA trilogy were published later in the

1930's. The Big Money ends in L927 with the efforts of Mary French to save Sacco and Vanzetti. Although Dos Passos did not deal with the Depression or the beginnings of the New Dea], those events must have been of concern to him when he wrote this book. I believe that his confining his trilogy to the years that led up to the Depression marks him as a serious student of history. Serious students know just how much the history of one epoch is determined by prior events. In his three-volume work, The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur Schlesinger , Jt. , managed to get through only the first couple of years of Roosevelt's first administration. In the first volume, The Crisis of The Otd Order, Schlesinger addresses himself to the years between 1919 and 1933, but in fact he goes back to the turn of the century to explore the roots of the movements and ideas of that time. Similarly, and merely by way of example, Dos Passos' own involvement,, however idiosyncratic, in radical politics in the 1920's is reflected in his treatment of radical politics and working class people during the previous two decades. I am sure what is most memorable to readers of USA is the form of the book. The newsreels, the camera eye segments, the biographical sketches, and the narrative all serve their own functions.

IO

rn the camera eye sections, Dos passos lets us grimpse his recollections of his own experiences during the years covered by the narrative. One critic, and I do not believe it was Kazin, compared the style of these short pieces to the styre of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, which we read recently. I think the comparison is apt. The newsreer sections serve several functions. First, the newsreel was an important popular art form for readers of Dos Passos' generation. Evoking that form evokes the d9e, even if the use of the newsreer in the earriest years is something of an anachronism. second, for younger readers the newsreel form evokes something we have seen of that era the film of action in World War I, of Teddy Roosevelt, of Woodrow wilson, of Jack Johnson taking a dive to Jess wirrard, and of a hundred other images. Third, everything in the newsreel section - the stories of news events long forgotten, the stories of events that will never be forgotten, and the popular songs of the time - places the action of the narrative sections in context. Just how much readers of my age grean from the newsreel sections depends on their knowledge of history, especially popular history, of that time, but everyone will find something in each section to rocate the action of the nover. A word shourd be said about Dos Passos' great ear for the voice of American popular culture. He picks the apt popular song. He chooses the

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correct trivial incident or earth-shattering event to capture the spirit of the d9€, and he records these events in the vernacular of Lhe newsreel. The biographical sketches also provide a context for the events of the novel. The words and lives of some of the historical figures - Debs and Hay^rood and LaFollette are echoed in the action of the narrative and the attitudes of the characters. Those sections also give Dos Passos an opportunity to comment directly on the history of that time by showing us how he feels about some of the notable people of that time. He writes admiringty and movingly of his heroes Debs, Halrwood, Burbank, Edison, and LaFollette. He savages Bryan, Minor Keith, and Carnegie and pities steinmetz. rt is no accident that he admires those he sees as independent thinkers, even if, as with Debs and Halrwood, they are identified as belonging to a movement. He pities Steinmetz because of his lack of independence. The characters whose lives he traces in this novel are from the working crass. Dos passos was greatry infruenced by naturalism, which allowed writers to deal with ordinary people but which typically condemned those people to decrine because of forces beyond their understanding or control. Decline of Dos Passos' characters does not seem as inevitable as that of the characters in Dreiser's fiction, but r believe it is fair to say that Dos Passos was influenced by the determinism of realism and naturalism. L2

Dos Passos' meshing so many different elements into one

book and dealing with so many different characters who take

turns occupying the center of the stage prevent him from developing any character fulIy. I am not sure that failing is simply a function of lack of space. Dos Passos seems to stand off from the characters in the narrative. There is a coldness to his treatment of everything about them. Perhaps it is his direct, even journalistic, style that leaves that feeling of coldness. None of the characters ever ceases to fascinate, however. The common thread in the decline of each character seems to me to be the failure or inability of each to find any nobler purpose to connect with, though I must confess that that analysis is antithetical to determinism. Mac is drawn to political action, but he is always ready to abandon his current political activity for a joyless drunken night on the town or a cushy living arrangement. Some of Janey Williams' hopes died with the death of Alec, her brother Joe's best friend and one of the characters in the narratives with energy and an inkling of something better. AS a girl, Janey is horrified by her father's spanking iloe. As a young woman, she is embarrassed for her friends to see Joe. Alec's death breaks one of the ties that holds Joe to Washington. He joins the navy, deserts, and

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drops in on Janey from time to time as his wanderings bring him back to Washington and later to New york.

J.

is in many ways the central character of The 42nd Parallel. He is shalIow, bloodless, and almost devoid of erementar human desires. Even sexual desire is awakened rerativery late and rather weakry. His relationship with Eleanor Stoddard threatens his economically advantageous second marriage, but there is little hint of any passion between him and Eleanor. He makes two marriages of convenience. His inability to find real joy in a sexual relationship is a weakness he shares with other characters in the narrative sections. What we find most unappealing about Moorehouse is his berief that what is most important is not what happens but how events are portrayed. He would have been right at home in a white House pubric relations operation that handles minor and major disasters and faux pases by putting the proper "spin" on events. Moorehouse is the ultimate booster but without the heartiness and gregariousness of Babbitt. He believes what he says and suffers for it. He has ptunged into some unwise investments and other business ventures and is setting up dummy businesses to hide assets or in some other nefarious way deal with his probrems. A lot of other characters are taken in by the public rerations way of dearing with thingsr ds is evidenced by the conviction, Ward Moorehouse

L4

repeated by several people, that the Germans are cutting off

the hands of Belgian children. Dos Passos conspires to bring his characters together from time to time in ways that are not completely convincing or even necessary. Moorehouse, G. H. Barrow, and Janey Williams end up in Mexico at the same time Mac is there, and there are contacts between them. Benny Compton and Charley Anderson are in the same bar in New York just before Charley ships out to France to join an ambulance corps. Janey Williams had lived with Benny and his sister for a time, and Benny's sister still works for Moorehouse. Benny quotes his sister's knowledge of Moorehouse's activities as evidence that the monied interests were behind the war. He also quotes Debs.

This mixing of fact and fiction has been tried recently by E.L. Doctorow in Raqtime. Dos Passos' choice of the title of this book reveals that he thought this coming together of his characters was symbolic of forces that drew these disparate people to New York in the same way that weather moves from west to east to New York along the 42nd parallel. He spoke of " . alternate areas of high and low pressure forming slightly north of the Canadian border, frequently in the vicinity of Medicine Hat . cyclonic disturbances blizzards in winter sweeping east and south following a weII-defined track approximatety along the 42nd. paraIlel." 15

USA was

adapted, with the collaboration of Dos Passos,

for a stage presentation. The actors portray the characters from the narrative. The newsreel segments are actually shown on a screen on the stage. Sti1l photographs are flashed onto the screen. The actors step out of their roles to recite the biographical sketches. Dos Passos did not end his work in USA with The 42nd Parallel. Some of the characters appear in the next two volumes. None has sections named after him in 1919, but Joe Williams, Eveline Hutchins, and Ben Compton are central characters in that book. Charley Anderson is a central character in The Biq Money. Dos Passos drops his characters from the stage as abruptly as he introduces them. The 42nd Para1lel does not end. It just stops. USA does not end. It just stops. The same can be said for history and for this review.

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