Dos Passos and Forrestal

John Dos Passos has turned aside from his diggings into the sources of the American patrimony to write a novel principally concerned with a martyr to the American cause: James V. Forrestal. The Great Days (Sagamore, $4.50) is, however, far more than a tract. Dos Passos accomplishes much in little, managing to compress within 312 pages a photographically realistic account of Forrestal’s anguish and doom, a dirge over an aging journalist’s lost week end in Havana and, finally, a rendering of the plight of the uncommitted in the crash and fury of these times.

Dos Passos’ protagonist (his hero is Forrestal under the name of Roger Thurloe), the thoughtful, gallant, humanistic war correspondent Roland Lancaster, is brought to see the face of the enemy by Thurloe, by a “broadfaced little Balkan . . . with light brown monkey eyes” at the press hostel bar in Nuremberg and by his own acuity; but he refuses final commitment, hoping to remain a witness and a non-participant. He becomes, instead, an Outsider. We find Lancaster, at fifty-nine, widowed, rejected by editors, shunned by comrades of the international journalistic knight errantry, dismally pubcrawling in Havana with a “new girl,” Elsa.

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Forrest Davis

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John Dos Passos has turned aside from his diggings into the sources of the American patrimony to write a novel principally concerned with a martyr to the American cause: James V. Forrestal. The Great Days (Sagamore, $4.50) is, however, far more than a tract. Dos Passos accomplishes much in little, managing to compress within 312 pages a photographically realistic account of Forrestal’s anguish and doom, a dirge over an aging journalist’s lost week end in Havana and, finally, a rendering of the plight of the uncommitted in the crash and fury of these times.

Dos Passos’ protagonist (his hero is Forrestal under the name of Roger Thurloe), the thoughtful, gallant, humanistic war correspondent Roland Lancaster, is brought to see the face of the enemy by Thurloe, by a “broadfaced little Balkan . . . with light brown monkey eyes” at the press hostel bar in Nuremberg and by his own acuity; but he refuses final commitment, hoping to remain a witness and a non-participant. He becomes, instead, an Outsider. We find Lancaster, at fifty-nine, widowed, rejected by editors, shunned by comrades of the international journalistic knight errantry, dismally pubcrawling in Havana with a “new girl,” Elsa.