Modenism and the affirmation of the self: the case of John Dos Passos

Revista de Estudios Norteamericanos. 11.<' I ( 1991).pp.59-67 MODERNISM AND THE AFFIRMATION OF THE SELF: THE CASE OF JOHN DOS PASSOS TOWNSEND LUDINGTON University ofN. Carolina Modemism, a much discussed topic among literary critics in recent years, is not easy to define; yet in its numerous versions it is the major artistic and Jiterary movement that emerged around the tum of this century and !asted well in to it -sorne critics would argue that it still exists toda y, although most would assert that post-modemism now holds sway. The movement was extremely important for the novel in the United States, because it enabled a generation of writers coming of age after World War 1 the opportunity to express new attitudes in new ways. One student of the modemist novel wrote that the movement, displays a revolt against prevalent style, even a rage against ali established arder, and concomitant formal inventiveness ... Modernism exalts th e literature of disruption over the literature of affirmation. Modemist epistemology views the world as a function of the perceiver and devalues cognition and rationality as means of knowing. Modem industrial society is seen as an historical trap in which the individual is powerless to act. Consequently, traditional systems of belief -including religion, history, and philosophy, especially Romantic transcendentalismare called into question and may be supplanted by art, or sometimes by Freudian, Marxist, or existential visions of reality. 1 1. Thomas Evans, North Carolina Central Univcrsity. unpublished paper discussi ng lrving Howc, "Th e Idea of Th c Modcm ", in Literary Modernism ( Gr ecnwich, CT ; Fawcetl. 1967 ). pp. 11 - 40. 60 Tow11.1e11d L11 di11gro 11 Again and again modemist writers exprcssed thcir conviction that "the individual is powcrless to act"; yct again and again they acted, their very acts of writing a dcmonstration that they hada from of power, although that might only be aesthctic -art to oppose the brutality of an industrial, chaotic world. No United States author became more caught up in the movement tha n John Dos Passos, whose life and most importan! work placed him directly at the centcr of literary modemism. Coming to believe that the individual was trapped by mass socicty, he constantly asserted that thc self could be affirmed by words which, if well used, might rebuild history. Five quotations can serve to make the point: Under various tags: futurism, cubism, vorticism, modemism, most of the best work in the arts in our time has been the direct product of [the crcative tidal wave that spread over the world from the Paris of before the last European war]. ~ IA writer] whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history. ·1 U.S.A. is the slice of a continent. U.S.A. is a group of holding companies, sorne aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theatrcs, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a publiclibrary full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U.S.A. is the world's grcatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills. U.S.A. is a set of bigmouthed officials with too many bankaccounts. U.S.A. is a lot of men buried in thcir uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U.S.A. is the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. But mostly U.S.A. is th c spcech ofthe people. • how can I make them feel how our fathers our uncles haters of oppression carne to this coast how say Don 't !et them scare you make them feel who are your oppressors America 2. John Dos Passos. Forcword to Blaisc Ccndrars. Panama or The Acfre11t11r es o( My Sel'ell Une/es (Ncw York; Harpcr. 1931). p. vii. 3. John Dos Passos. Introduction to T/ir ee Soldiers (New York; Random House, 1932). p. viíi. 4. John Dos Passos. U.S.A. (Boston; Houghton Mifl1in. 1963), p. vii. Modemism and th<' affirmation ofthe sel{ Th e case of John Do . ~ Pas s os 61 rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtaltorneys collegepresidents judges without the old words the immigrants haters of oppression brought to Plymouth how can you know who are your betrayers America or chat this fishpeddler you have in Charlestown Jail is one of your founders Massachusetts? 5 we have only words against POWER SUPERPOWER 6 The first quotation comes from Dos Passos's foreword to his translation of Pa11a111a or The Adventures of My Seven Uncles, by Blaise Cendrars. Published in 1931, th e piecc reílects the tremendous influence European modemists such as Ccndrars, Picasso, Modigliani, Marinetti, Chagall, Maikovsky, Mey er hold, Joyce, Stravinski, Prokofieff, and Diagileff had upon the American author, who, overwhelmed by the Great War, had sought in the mod emists new modes to describe the disordered world he saw before him in the l 920's . The second quotation is from his 1932 introduction to the Modem Library edition of Three Soldiers, th e 1921 novel that brought him fame, not for the form, which was hardly radical, but for its bitter denunciation of organization, wa r, and thc industrial age. "A writer who writes straight is the architect of history", he declared grandiosely. Alchough we should be skeptical, we should also rccognize that the statement was more one of hope than of certainty. If other American modernists such as the poet Wallace stevents found "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself' sufficient, Dos Passos, shaken by war, sought orclc r, and eventually, affirmation, in history. The third quotation is a piece Dos Passos wrote in 1937 as a kind of introduction to The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The BiR Money when they were published together as U.S.A.; while the fourth is from "Camera Eye (49)'' ncar the end of The Big Money. ln the autobiographical piece Dos Passos meditates upon the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. The fifth quotation is also from The BiR Money; it is the last line of the final "Ca mera Eye" and the title line of the biographical sktech about the financeer and embezzler Samuel In sull. Togethcr che se le ctions reflect Dos Passos's conviction that only through languagc, used accurately and not to discort or disguise, can any truths be affirmed abouc th e pase as history and about the present, as the speech of the people. "Rebuild the ruined words worn slimy in the mouths of lawyers districtattomeys co ll egcprcsidcnts judges," he pleaded, because, renewed, these words could protect :'i. U.S.A. : T/11 : Big Moncy, p. 391. 6. U.S.A. : T//r Hig Money. p. 464. 62 Tow11send Lu dington the people from the corrupt brokers of power. In the last "Camera Ey e," having found an identity for himse lf in an affiliation with the common people -coal mine rs on strike in Harlan County, Kentuckyhe spoke as one among the " we " who had only words against "power superpower." But these could suffice if u se d truly, and that is what, as author, he had tried to do in the trilogy U.S.A. There, laid out befare us through the narrative devices of the "Camera Eye," the fic tional narratives, the biographical sketches, and the Newsreels is the language of the nation which constitutes its history during th e period 1900-1930. It is, of course , a history of a nation hurtling ever faster from boom to bust, but Dos Passo s's point was that only through understanding themse lv es truly could Americans comprehend the causes of their great collapse in 1929. Th e quotations, thus, all look back; they are the affirmations after the fact of a modemist who had found himse lf during the years prior to 1930. The process was lengthy and involved the searing experience of war, the discov er y of new forms, and the acceptance of history as a way to find meaning among the chaos of the twentieth century. Finally, of course, in Do s Passos's case to tak e refuge in history led him away from the modero. He tumed to writing about a past as it had never quite been. So enamoured di d he become with the "Go ld en Age" of Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers of the United States that he idealized it and half lost touch with h is own time, but that is another story, one which need not concem us her e. Born an illegitimate child in 1896, Dos Passos had reason to struggle for self affirmation. Lonely, living what he la ter ca lled a "hotel childhood," he was an obvious example of the adolescent alienated from a country he neither knew nor was sure he love d. As he matured he passed through Harvard University, whose young intellectuals were in the throes of cultural rebellion; there the seeds of modemism were planted in him. But by itself the Harvard experience was not enou gh to se ver his bonds with the Victorians. Dos Passos emerged in 19 l 6 a bit the aesthete given to imagist poems such as one entitled "Salvation Army ," wh ic h exhalted the co mmon: ... the fanfare of the street, ... The noise of marts, And dinning market stalls, where women shout Their wares, and meat hangs out- Grotesque, distorted by the gas flare's li ghtlnto one sacred rh ythm for the Dev il 's spite. 7 7. ··sa lvalion Army'', Harvard Mo11thl y. 62 (March, 1916 ). 12 . Mod emi sm al1(f the affirmat ion of the se/f: The ca se o /John /Jos Passos 63 His intended revolt against propriety scarcely needs to be pointed out; yet it was of a fin de siecle sort, not that of a modemist as we understand the term. Dos Passos's modemism stemmed specifically from the searing experience of the Great War. As he drowsed aboard the ship taking him to Europe in June 1917 he wrote a poem in his notebook which reveals his awareness that a break with the past was imminent: I have no more memories Before My memories with various strands Had spun me many misty-colored towns, Ful! of gleams of halfheard mu sic. Full of sudden throbbing scents, And rustle of unseen passers-by Vague streets rainbow glowing Forme to wander in ... Today, As if a gritty stinking sponge Had smeared the slate of my pale memories, I stand aghast in a grey world, Waiting ... I have no more memories. 8 Little more that a month later he scrawled furiously in his notebook. "Pa ri s - A stran ge París of whores and tragically sad widows -The abandon of complete misery - My God -how ridiculous it a li is - I think in gargoyles." He wanted to write; a novel "ca ll ed the Dance of Death" carne to mind: he expected, however, that the title would be much used by the time he got to it. "l'm dying to write," he continued, "but all my methods of doing things in the past merely disgust me now, ali former methods are damned inadequate -the stream of sensation flows by - I suck it up like a spon ge." Anguished, he be li eved "Horror is so piled un horror that thcre ca n be no more": and he became convinced that che world had been shattered by the general conflagration: "My God what a time." he burst out. "A li the cant and hypocrisy, a li the damnable survivals. ali the vestigcs of old truths now putrid and false inf ect the air. chokc you worse that 8. The Fourtee111'1 Clmmicl e: Lelfers and Diaries o(.loh11 Doe Passos. ét l. Town s end Ludin g:lo n ( 80,ton. Ga mbil. 19 73). p. Xó. 64 Tow11se11d Lc1di11gto11 German gas -The ministers from their damn smug pulpits, the business men - the hernies about war -my counlry right or wrong -oh infinities of them!" '1 After the one major offensive near Verdun in which he drove ambulances, he confided to his diary that he wanted, to be able to express, later -ali of this -ali the tragic and hideous excitement of it [:] ... The grey crooked fingers of the dead, the dark look of dirty mangled bodies, their groans & joltings in the ambulances, the vast tomtom of the guns the ripping tear shells make when they explode ... And through everything the vast despair of unavoidable death of lives wrenched out of their channels - of all the ludicrous tomfoolery of govemments. 10 As these images piled up, they caused him to scrub his artistic canvas clean of fin de siec/e dabblings. But the process was slow; back in Paris in the summer of 1918 after service on the Western front and in Italy, Dos Passos drifted happily in a kind of aesthetic twilight. "I live on the lle St. Louis, in the Scine, a beautifully old seedy part of Paris that I !ove," he wrote a friend in the United States. "I spend my time writing and sketching up and down the river." 11 The drawings, pleasant if not extraordinary, are nostalgic for what had been before the war. Shortly, they, like his writing, would change both in subject and fom1. That change, of course, marked his commitment to modemism. First came the change in subject; from two novels which, loosely speaking, were about the aesthete's search for Life, he tumed to registering the impact of the war. One Man's lniriarion-1917, written ata furious pace during the summer of 1918, recorded an autobiographical hero's introduction to the nightmare of Verdun. The far more sophisticated Three Soldiers took an autobiographical John Andrews and other young Americans through war and the brutalizing crush of military organization. But neither book seems entirely the work of a modemist. That carne four years later, in 1925, with the publication of Manhattan Transfer, the novel in which Dos Passos seemed consciously to assert his creative will through the form he imposed upon his material. "I had done a lot of reading knocking about the warwracked world," he commented much later: Sorne of the poets who went along with the cubism of the painters of the School of Paris talked of simultaneity. There was something about 9. The For1rtee111lr Chmnicle, pp. 89-90. 10. Tire Four1ee111h Clrronicle. pp. 95-96. l l. Tire Fourtee111lr Clrmniclc. pp. 194. Modernism wul tll<' ajjirmation ofthe self' Thc case of John Dos Passos 65 Rimbaud's poetry that tended to stand up off the page. Imagism. Direct snapshots of life. Rapportage was a great slogan. The artist must record the fleeting world the way the motion picture film recorded it. By contrast, juxtaposition he could build reality into his own vision: montage. New York was the first thing that hit me when 1 got back home (from traveling abroad in the early 1920's]. 1 started rapportage on New York. Sorne of the characters out of abandoned youthful narrative got into the book, but there was more to the life of a great city than you could cram into any one hero 's career. The narrative must stand up off the page. Fragmentation. Contrast. Montage. The result was Manhattan Transfer. 12 Perhaps it is unfortunate he was not a theorizer; there are few if any neat quotations which express precisely the point that the form of Manhattan Transfer is an affirmation of the self; yet it is. Such a conscious ordering of materials, such stylizing, cannot but be that. Like the artists who had influenced him, the variety of what he showed as well as the multiple perspectives, the devices of fragmentation and montage, and the effort to create an impression of simultaneity were the imposition of his creativity upon what he tenned "the panorama of history that roarcd past my ears." u For him, as for visual artists, there was no longer a single, simple, linear (or photographic) reality. Forro and content werc, as he observed in 1928 about his friend E.E. Cummings's avant-garde play Him, the means "to generate fcelings and put them immediately up to the understanding, ... to express sensations rather than tell about them." Dos Passos explained that a "narrative exposition style [which 1 take to mean not only telling, as opposed to showing, but a semblance of objective realism] does not give us the satisfaction it once did. We want to recreate the event more immediately ." 14 To do that meant amassing the raw materials of a time and place and shaping them in stylized fashion on the page. Thus, Manhattan Transfer begins with an impressionistic passage that tries to convey the sights, sounds, and smells of a ferry slip; it is imm ed iately followed by two narrative sequences. Anda short while later, in the second chapter entitled "Metropolis," Dos Passos inserted fragments from a newspape r. The result has the effect of a collage, a fragmented, multi-perspectivc, but finally partial vision of a modero city. Furthermore, it is a vision of the present, not the past, and one in which the charactcrs who pass on and off stage can find no particular meaning. They rcma in alienated in good modernist fashion, even if we, through the forro, come 12. Portion ora manuscript cntitled "How the Contemporary Chroniclcs Bcgan'", pp. 3-4. Box 47. Foldcr 14 of thc Dos Passos collection at th e Univ er sity of Virginia. Charlottesville, VA. 13. Manuscript. p. 3. 14. "M r. Dos Passos on 'Him .... Ncw York Times. April 22 , 1928, Sec. 9, p. 2. 66 Tow11se11d L11dington to understand what the city is and is not. One character commits suicide; another dies too drunk to save him se lf in a fire; a third, des cribed as a porcelain figure , responds to an offer of marriage, "I guess I can stand it if you can George"; and a fourth, when asked how far he intends to travel after he ha s walked out of the city past "dumping grounds full of smoking rubbishpil es," responds, "l dunno ... Pretty far." 15 None gains perception ora sen se of order. This modemist novel, however, by an author rebelling against the past, is what he later termed a "chronicle of the present." 16 It would take the shock of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti to tum him toward history for an answer to the modemist search for meaning. They died in 1927; after an extended trip to Russia, from which Dos Passos retumed unconvinced that communism was the solution to the ills of monopoly capitalism, he set out to chronicle the first three decades of the twentieth century. Rebuilding the foundations -the Janguage- of democratic govemment ruined by "lawyers di stricta ttomey s collegepresidents judges" would, he hoped, enable Americans to make se nse of the presen t. The first step was to understand the past, and so, using multiple narrative device s such as he had in Manhattan Transfer but adding more, he s et out to write a trilogy that would present a collage of the U.S.A. as many layered, or angled, as he could make it. What one needs to recognize is that modernists, Dos Passos among them, still had faith in the validity of language, if truly used. Words signified things -facts- that could be accepted. Through words laid out so as to expose falsity, one could gain insight, co uld see a pattem to history. But, someone might wonder, Dos Passos was treating fact as fiction; hence was he not denying history? Partly, is the answer, yet U.S.A. is less fiction than first it might seem. The same year as he began the trilogy he commented in a "Statement of Belief' that the ideal form of narrative would be one that combined fiction and hi story, and he saw himself "sor t of on the edge between them, moving from one field to the other very rapidly." 17 The "fictional" elements are the narratives about characters such as Mac, J. Ward Morehouse, Richard Ellsworth Savage, and Charlie Anderson. Yet each of these is less fictional than we may think; ali draw heavily from Do s Passos 's experiences and knowledge of actual people, while the Camera Eyes, biographies, and Newsreels are "fac t," granted always the slant Dos Passos gave them to co nvey his ironic sense of history. As Alfred Kazin observed while speaking about U.S.A., " The old faith that 'history' exists objectively, that it has ascertainable order, that is what the novelist mo st depends on and appeals to, that 15. Ma11haua11 Tra11sfer (Boslon: Houghlon Mifflin, 1953(. pp. 375, 404. 16. Contemporary Chroniclcs ", Carleum Miscel/any. 2 (Spring, 1961 ), p. 25. 17. "Slatemenl of Belief', Bookman. 68 (Sepl. 1928), 26: "Thc Art of Fiction XLIV". Paris Re1·iew. no. 46 (Spring 1969), 64. Modernis111 and thl' affirnw1io11 of the . wlf : Thr case of Jo/111 D os Pa.u os ó7 'history' cven supplies the strucrure of the novel - this is what distinguishcs the extraordinary invention that is Dos Passos's U.S.A. from most nove ls published since 1940." 1" Dos Passos, thus. can serve as one model of thc American writcr who carne to modemism during the early twentieth cen tury. a writcr who. while discarding many of the old truths, in sorne ways like William Jam es bcfore him willed himself to believe in the possibility of order. although to discern what that might be was an arduous, even well nigh impossible task. He was too much the economic detem1inist to believe that the individual might find refuge on sorne island in the stream of events, as his sometimc friend Ernest Hcmingway did. or to be sa ti sfied with a prívate existence in the present, natural world as Wallace Stcvens was. He hoped to find answcrs by trying to sorl through the nation's language, which was its history. Such faith. if it can be called that, is what sc parates thc modcmis ts from thcir successors, the post-modem ists, novelists such as Thomas Pynchon in V or Gravity's Rainhow. and E. L. Doctorow. in Ra grime. for whom the twentiethcentury is so blurrcd as to make fact and fiction. hencc "history". indecipherable. But while wc may find it fashionable to accept the absurdity, apocalypse. and chaos in post-modern apocalyptic or 11011-fiction novels as absolutes on an intellectL1al leve!, on a more personal onc most of LIS are conscious of sorne sort of order or system to things even if it not be ovcrarching. 19 We continLlc. I believc. to owe a debt to the modernist s, whose visions introduced LIS to the snarl that is OLlr age. but whosc works are affirmations that the se lf can create. Of thc p!L1nge into the murky depths beyond, they might wam LIS, "That way madness lics." 18. ln1roduc1ion l\l Tl1 e Forr v- S ern1 11/ Para/Id (Ni:w York: Ncw Am er ican Lihrnr ). 1969). pp. \-V I. 19. For an cxccllcnl discu ss ion or this. scc David Lodgc ... Thc No vclisl al lhc Cro ssroads .. . T ll<' No1 ·el Tot/111·. cd. Malcom Bradhury <T olo wa. N.J.: Rowan ;md Li 11Jdidd. 1978 l. pp. J 08 -1 09.