Dos Pasos

John Dos Pasos: An International American
by
Terrence Crimmins

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     John Dos Pasos lived the first fifteen years of his life in Europe. An illegitimate child, he was raised there by his mother. His father, John Randolph Dos Pasos, came to visit them, occasionally, in his travels as a prominent corporate attorney, but it was not until his first wife died that he was able to marry John's mother and have them move back with him to the United States. John initially had trouble in American boarding schools, where the multilingual young man's foreign accent, gawky frame and thick glasses made him the object of ridicule amongst his classmates, but he eventually began to fit in. After he graduated from Harvard he moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan where he began his literary career.
    In what eventually became known as Greenwich Village, John Dos Pasos began to hobnob with people who were on the cutting edge of the literary scene, like John Reed, Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald and E. E. Cummings. And, like many of his well traveled companions, he went off to become part of the drama of World War I. In his case, it was as an ambulance driver, though in some respects Dos Pasos was not a model employee. Constantly rebelling against annoying regulations from the far off bureaucracies that he felt responsible for the war, his temperament was far removed from patriotic enthusiasm. Like his later opposition to the death penalty against Sacco and Vanzetti- (whom he considered innocent immigrants lynched by mass hysteria)- in Boston, Massachusetts in 1927, Dos Pasos was very suspicious of large governmental organizations.
    After the war Dos Pasos began to write the novels for which he is today most remembered, starting with Manhattan Transfer, (1925). Dos Pasos never thought that it was his job as a writer to tell other men what to do. He felt, rather, that his novels should paint a picture of society as it was, to expose mankind's difficulties by showing them realistically. Following the directions of an author that was very influential on him, Walt Whitman, Dos Pasos sought to use a "moral microscope" upon humanity, as he'd read in Whitman's essay Democratic Vistas. And this he achieved most substantially in the USA Trilogy, a series of three novels published in the late twenties and thirties, the characters of which lived through a wide array of troubles in America and Europe. From a hard working plane mechanic to a wealthy industrialist, the characters' situations show Dos Pasos' broad experience in his travels about the globe and the United States. In between these narratives Dos Pasos used three different techniques, in one to two page segments, to capture that fast paced life he saw developing with technology: the News Headlines, repeated one after another, depicting the fast paced instantaneous changeovers of newspapers; The Camera eye, a straight prose description flow in the mode of a camera describing notable things Dos Pasos had seen in his travels about the globe; and Biographies, which gave thumbnail sketches of noted Americans such as Thomas Edison and Charles Lindberg. The USA Trilogy was clearly a landmark work in the way it described the broad panorama of the human experience in the early Twentieth Century.
    Up until the late thirties Dos Pasos sympathized with the prevalent political liberalism of the writers of his day. But in 1937, views he formed about the Spanish Civil War changed his opinions about world events. Ernest Hemmingway, like most Americans who were interested in the war, sided with the Republican side. The Reublicans were fighting against Franco and the Fascists, who were supported by Italy and Germany- (i. e. Mussolini and Hitler). Who could root against those fighting for freedom against the fascists? But Dos Pasos, through his own experience in Spain during the war, came to see things differently. He saw injustice in the Communist Party's help to the Republican side, particularly in the disappearance of his friend Jose Robles, who, he suspected, had been assassinated because he ran afoul of the communist bureaucracy. Dos Pasos saw this as evidence of the intransigence of the Communist Party and its dictatorial methods. Unlike Hemmingway, who saw the Republican side as the one of truth and justice, Dos Pasos saw them as just another form of potential dictatorship. He saw the war as one between the fascists on one side, and the communists on the other, both of which he found equally unappealing. And so John Dos Pasos left to go back to America, a land he increasingly came to regard of being blissfully free of such terrible disagreements. Hemmingway, however, regarded Dos Pasos exit as a betrayal, and the two author's formerly close friendship would thereafter exist on rocky ground.
    For the remainder of Dos Pasos life- (he died in 1970)- his shift to the political right would alienate most of his close literary acquaintances, who were disappointed in his changed political beliefs. Further trouble came for Dos Pasos when he was involved in a tragic car accident that killed his wife and made him lose his right eye. But he was a stalwart man, and just a few years later he was remarried to a woman with whom he would spend the rest of his life, while he continued his career as a prolific writer.
    He never again quite achieved the spirit of a work as distinguished as the USA Trilogy, but he produced novels, plays, essays and even popular historical works. He felt himself different than his colleagues in that, though he was an ardent foe of communism, he was equally suspicious of institutions in general, including large corporations. He disliked large cities, in fact, and most admired the ideals of Thomas Jefferson- (of whom he wrote a biography)-and the ideal of the yeoman American farmer. As he lived out the end of his life on the farmland that he'd inherited from his father, and watched mankind struggling on the world stage about him, one of his quotes expressed his feelings well: "The basic tragedy my work tries to express remains monotonously the same: man's struggle for life against the strangling institutions he himself creates."

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