Books in Brief: Dos Passos: Artist As American

Dos Passos: Artist As American, by Linda W. Wagner (Texas, 220 pp., $14.95). Can an American writer ever again fill the office of citizen-artist, vacant since Whitman’s death? John Dos Passos wanted the job, and a new generation of readers must begin to judge how far he succeeded. The contemporaries of Dos Passos, the “first generation,” posed some enduring questions about the writer’s technique. In 1936, for example, Bernard DeVoto asked whether Dos Passos’s focus on externals and the outsides of his characters in U.S.A. deprives fiction of its preeminent value, “the exploration of individual human nature.” When Dos Passos himself described his fiction he forsook the term “novel,” the genre of character exploration, and invented the genre of “contemporary chronicle” to indicate his mix of history and narrative, in the tradition of Vanity Fair and War and Peace. Dos Passos wrote in 1935 that the novelist should “capture the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.” One of the contributions of Linda Wagner, a “second generation” reader, is to assemble Dos Passos’s comments about his work. Unfortunately, she lacks any faculty for judging the difficulty of integrating history, character, and politics in fiction. It’s fine for Dos Passos to have an explicit moral position, she says, because Norman Mailer has one too. It’s all right for Dos Passos to “share” his sentiments in later fiction because of “the present demand for a feeling of intimacy in our relation with a writer.” What we need, however, is someone to say whether (and how) the democracy of Whitman and Jefferson, celebrated in Dos Passos’s later works, can be rediscovered and represented by a literary artist. We need someone to show whether Dos Passos succeeds, and whether his 1934 call for “a passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy” is a chimera or our last hope. It’s a particularly urgent task for conservatives, given the nation’s turn to the right in this perilous but opportune moment.

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Daniel E. Ritchie

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Dos Passos: Artist As American, by Linda W. Wagner (Texas, 220 pp., $14.95). Can an American writer ever again fill the office of citizen-artist, vacant since Whitman’s death? John Dos Passos wanted the job, and a new generation of readers must begin to judge how far he succeeded. The contemporaries of Dos Passos, the “first generation,” posed some enduring questions about the writer’s technique. In 1936, for example, Bernard DeVoto asked whether Dos Passos’s focus on externals and the outsides of his characters in U.S.A. deprives fiction of its preeminent value, “the exploration of individual human nature.” When Dos Passos himself described his fiction he forsook the term “novel,” the genre of character exploration, and invented the genre of “contemporary chronicle” to indicate his mix of history and narrative, in the tradition of Vanity Fair and War and Peace. Dos Passos wrote in 1935 that the novelist should “capture the snarl of the human currents of his time, so that there results an accurate permanent record of a phase of history.” One of the contributions of Linda Wagner, a “second generation” reader, is to assemble Dos Passos’s comments about his work. Unfortunately, she lacks any faculty for judging the difficulty of integrating history, character, and politics in fiction. It’s fine for Dos Passos to have an explicit moral position, she says, because Norman Mailer has one too. It’s all right for Dos Passos to “share” his sentiments in later fiction because of “the present demand for a feeling of intimacy in our relation with a writer.” What we need, however, is someone to say whether (and how) the democracy of Whitman and Jefferson, celebrated in Dos Passos’s later works, can be rediscovered and represented by a literary artist. We need someone to show whether Dos Passos succeeds, and whether his 1934 call for “a passionate unmarxian revival of AngloSaxon democracy” is a chimera or our last hope. It’s a particularly urgent task for conservatives, given the nation’s turn to the right in this perilous but opportune moment.