Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

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Radically American: John Dos Passos, Culture and Politics / Alice Béja

 

Abstract: This essay takes the well-known and near-canonical figure of John Dos Passos, considering his own claims to a form of radicalism independent of political parties and their perceived ideological rigidity. Drawing upon documentary and non-fiction writings, the essay evaluates the writer’s negotiations of radicalism within the constraints of a so-called national political character.

 

Introduction

<1> In 1925-26, John Dos Passos reported the Passaic strike, one of the first major strikes led by Communists. In May 1926, he was one of the founders of the radical magazine New Masses, which in the 1930s, under the guidance of Mike Gold, became a mouthpiece for the CP-USA. In 1926-1927, he actively participated in the campaign to save Sacco and Vanzetti, and even went to jail for taking part in a demonstration shortly before their execution, which took place on August 23rd, 1927. In August 1930, he headed, with Theodore Dreiser, the Emergency Committee for Political Prisoners. In May 1932 he was elected honorary member of the presidium of the John Reed clubs, and in October he campaigned for the communist candidates to the presidential election by joining the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford [1]. Granville Hicks, who distrusted all writers from the "lost generation", praised Dos Passos for his political stance in The Great Tradition:

If there are harsh words to be said about such men as Eliot, Hemingway and Faulkner, it is not because one cannot understand the reason for their failures, nor because one is loath to pay tribute to their virtues, but because the futility of the ways they have chosen to follow must be recognized. And since that is true, we have reason to feel and to show satisfaction in the achievements of John Dos Passos. So typical of his generation in his training and interests, so conscious of their dilemmas, so responsive to the causes of their despair, he has scorned to imitate their evasions, has known but never surrendered to their gloom, and has succeeded where they failed. Whatever place the future may grant his books, he cannot be denied the historical importance of having been a challenge to a generation that considered itself safely lost. (292)

<2> This certificate of good conduct, delivered by the Communist Party's leading literary critic, seems to leave no room for doubt concerning John Dos Passos's political beliefs. Like many others in his generation, he came to realize, through a number of events, that he could not go on criticizing America from a solitary standpoint, but needed a structure to voice his remonstrances, a structure which would enable him to transform his words into actions. The rise of the Communist party in the 1930s and its insistence on cultural politics thus enabled him to fulfill his aspirations, and to fight capitalism with his comrades.

<3> However, when one is dealing with writers, or artists in general, things are seldom so simple; public declarations must be contrasted with the actual fiction produced, to assess a political involvement which is often ambiguous. And certainly so in the case of John Dos Passos, who was never a member of the Communist party, and broke with the left altogether as soon as 1937, having already distanced himself from the Communist party in 1934-1935. Moreover, putting aside his fiction, whose complexity we shall not analyse here, even his nonfiction, most notably the articles he published in New Masses and other magazines and newspapers during his radical period (1925-1935), remains polysemic, never wholehearted, always "on the suburb of dissent" [2].

<4> This expression is not chosen at random, since the question of the relationship between centre and margin is at the heart of cultural politics in the 1930s in the United States. As Michael Denning has shown in The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century, the experience of the popular front in the 1930s, coupled to developments in the fields of advertising and of the culture industry, enabled popular culture, once confined to the margins of cultural life – and even denied the name of culture – to come to the fore and assert itself as a " mainstream " cultural practice [3]. In this context where the margin became the centre, some writers, such as Mike Gold, chose to be at the centre of this evolution while others, and we include John Dos Passos in this group, inexorably remained in the periphery. This refusal of the centre is a constant both in his fictional and non-fictional works, and Dos Passos defined himself as a middle-class writer, a "gentleman volunteer", to all intents and purposes. This does not mean, however, that he was not involved in the debates of his time, or that he was not conscious of the class struggle and unwilling to take part in it ; on the contrary, through his contributions to New Masses he fuelled the debates of his time on the relationship between art and politics, and ceaselessly questioned the assumptions both of the communists and of the liberals.

<5> To understand this oblique stance, it is therefore important to analyze the cultural atmosphere of the time, largely influenced by the left and its various political and cultural institutions within the " cultural apparatus " (C. Wright Mills) of the United States. The tradition of radical studies, initiated by Daniel Aaron and Walter Rideout and later criticized and furthered by Alan Wald, Michael Denning and Barbara Foley, among others, depicted and analyzed the debates of the time and discussed the link between radicalism and the American cultural tradition, pushed to its limits in Earl Browder's slogan "Communism is Twentieth Century Americanism"; indeed, the 1930s marked not only the emergence of a popular leftist culture, but of a national literary history. Was this part of what Michael Denning calls " a laboring of American culture "(Introduction, xx) or, on the contrary, was it yet another example of the capacity, as Sacvan Bercovitch has shown, of the American consensus to "co-opt the energies of radicalism: to absorb the very terms of opposition into the promise of the New"(438)?

<6> The study of some of Dos Passos's political nonfiction can shed light on this question, since this writer, both in his novels and his articles, always discussed the idea of America in relation to his own radical stance. In fact, his political position was above all constructed from his status as a writer, and therefore from his vision of literature. The evolution of his point of view, even over the short decade that marked the height of his political involvement with the left, shows us that, careful to always maintain his independence, and in spite of his "centrality" in the literary landscape of the time (a centrality augmented by his being a male, white, middle-class writer), he made a point of using his writing as a "piece of litmus paper to test things by"(Pizer, 82).

<7> "Radical studies", which emerged in the 1950s and then were reborn in the 1970s and 1980s through "cultural studies", have shown the intensity and fecundity of the debate over cultural politics at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in leftist circles. From the Bohemians of Greenwich Village in the 1910s to the activists of the John Reed Clubs in the 1930s, ideas were plentiful and controversies heated. Daniel Aaron, in Writers on the Left : Episodes in American Literary Communism, describes and analyses, through a deliberately non-partisan paradigm, the complex relationship between the American Communist Party and the cultural left, the numerous avatars and metamorphoses of Lincoln's Steffens's exclamation after he returned from the USSR in 1921: "I have seen the future, and it works!" The questions of centre and margin are crucial to the understanding of Aaron's analysis: his stance is different from the one Michael Denning later adopted. Daniel Aaron does not describe the coming to the fore of a new culture, but the codification and expansion of a central paradigm of American thought. As Alan Wald writes in his introduction to the Morningside Books edition:

(...) Aaron's central thesis remains the basis of the bulk of the most productive scholarship in the field that has ensued. He argues convincingly that the Depression and the Communist Party did not create literary radicalism; it focused and canalized an indigenous tradition that had, and still has, its own roots and raison d'etre. (xvi)

<8> In other words, Aaron, by examining a period which had been neglected by traditional scholarship, wishes to recentre the debate; however, his focus on the failure of the alliance between the cultural left and the Communist Party and his insistence on radicalism as a version of Americanism, in the end, throw him back into the mainstream, an attitude which is criticized for instance by Wald, who pleads for a redefinition of leftist culture and an acknowledgement of the diversity it brought forth, a diversity hitherto ignored by the tenets of "Americanism". Wald calls for the opening of a "second front", identifying the specificity of radical literature and cultural politics, which are to be seen not merely as another avatar of the American yearning for protest and renewal, but as a promotion of class within American society, a society which was initially founded on the principle that all men are created equal, therefore skirting the traditional class oppositions entailed by the heritage of feudal societies in Europe:

Thus it appears that, in the wake of all the ‘culture wars’ of recent decades, a new war is beginning to be waged, a second front has been opened, against the literary canon, and it is one that needs to be in part a ‘class’ war. This is because, even though Communist-influenced fiction writers and poets did pioneer issues of importance to women and people of colour in their writings, if not always their critical theorizations, it was specifically the promotion of class culture, and culture viewed through the prism of class, that was understood as the hallmark of Communist effort (Wald, 1994: 69).

<9> Wald's stance is radically different from Aaron's, though he acknowledges the debt his generation has to the founders of radical studies; he presents himself as a Marxist, whereas Aaron adopted a neutral position, and, from The New York Intellectuals (1987) to Exiles of a Future Time (2002), re-examines the 1930s while having in mind the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s. His insistence on minority artists, which were ignored by Aaron, is a symptom of this new attitude.

<10> In a way, Michael's Denning's expression "the laboring of American culture" tries to reunite those two approaches, by showing how leftist culture managed to impose itself in the American cultural apparatus of the 1930s, yet never totally blended into the mould of the mainstream. In The Cultural Front, Denning does not limit his analysis to the CPUSA, but examines all the institutions which rendered possible this affirmation of popular culture on the American scene, trying to go beyond the traditional opposition between communism and liberalism, between Americanism and ethnicity:

It is clear that the stark opposition of revolutionary socialism and middle-class liberalism or consumerism does not adequately grasp the subtleties of this new working-class culture, these new patterns of loyalty and allegiance, these new ideologies. To say that most workers were not communists surely does not mean that their values and beliefs were shaped by the languages and symbols of liberalism or mass consumerism. Rather, the culture of the CIO working-class was marked by a sustained sense of class consciousness and a new rhetoric of class, by a new moral economy and by the emergence of a working-class ethnic Americanism. (8)

The Cultural Front as a theoretical and historical framework thus enables the critic to construct a new vision of the left in the 1930s, which does not shirk its ambiguities nor its contradictions.

<11> In fact, these ambiguities were already present and discussed in the works of the time. What is particularly interesting in the analysis of cultural politics in the 1930s is that it is during that period that there emerged, in many ways, a genuine American cultural criticism. This can be seen in the realm of literary history, with the works of Granville Hicks, V.F. Calverton, Edmund Wilson, F.O. Matthiessen, or that of the history of American thought (see V.L. Parrington, Van Wyck Brooks, Malcolm Cowley). These books contributed to a codification of the relationship between culture and politics, while sparking the debate on how this relationship was to be conceived. The notion of a national culture emerged, coupled with a construction of an American literary tradition, characterized from the start by the necessity to protest existing systems and the surge toward social and cultural progress. As Caren Irr writes in The Suburb of Dissent:

Concentrating on prose and especially the novel, Hicks and his contemporaries describe the broad trend of American literature as a flow, a flowering, a maturing, a current, a tradition, or a liberation. They chart a timeline that begins with a few lonely voices in the Puritan wilderness, struggles on to Cooper's robust frontier romances, peaks in the golden day of Whitman's epic poetry, strides bravely into Twain's honest Western humor and Dreiser's urban realism, and nearly peaks again in the naturalist muckraking era until it arrives at the glorious present. In short, theirs is a narrative of progress. Whether the critic considers the fetters on American literature to be Puritanism (Hicks) or gentility (Parrington) or the European cultural heritage (Calverton), he is primarily interested in documenting how the novel came to burst those fetters. These literary histories record a steady and irreversible tale of triumph. (29-30)

<12> Granville Hicks thus aimed at establishing a canon, a "great tradition" of American literature culminating in the proletarian novel, the centerpiece of this impeccably laid table. National culture was put at the core of radicalism; the USA was tired of being the periphery of Europe. As e.e. Cummings wrote: "France has happened more than it is happening, whereas America is happening more than it has happened" (quoted in Aaron, 112). There was a need to find a new grammar of American history, to establish the continuous present of American culture, perpetually reclaiming and re-interpreting the past. This Hegelian historicization of literature under the auspices of an ill-defined Spirit however, was not unanimously hailed among the writers and critics of the left. Philip Rahv and William Phillips (who reconstituted the journal Partisan Review after their break with the Communist Party), like James T. Farrell, for instance, pleaded for a more complex view of literature, which, according to them, could not be reduced to the furthering of social progress. "I think that literature must be viewed both as a branch of the fine arts and as an instrument of social influence. It is this duality, intrinsic to literature, that produces unresolved problems of literary criticism", wrote Farrell in his A Note on Literary Criticism (11). Some intellectuals wanted to displace the focus, to struggle against an overwhelming, centralized interpretation of literature which sometimes bordered on propaganda, by reclaiming the margin.

<13> From 1925 to 1935, John Dos Passos was actively engaged in radical activities. His novel Manhattan Transfer, published in 1925, had strengthened and broadened his artistic reputation, and his friendship with people like Hemingway and John Howard Lawson drew him toward left-wing circles, in Europe and in America. His numerous trips show his desire, not only to know what was going on in the world, but to find out how the class struggle was enacted in other countries. When he went to Marocco in 1925, he was eager to observe the resistance of the berbères, led by Abd el Krim, against the French; in 1926 in Mexico, he was thrilled by revolutionary art and travelled with Mexican painter Xavier Guerrero, who was a regular contributor to New Masses. It is this same curiosity that prompted him to go to Spain during the civil war, a trip which led to his breaking up with Hemingway and with the left in general. Dos Passos, in his political involvement, combined actions and words, applying Emerson's maxim, "words are also actions, and actions are a kind of words"(290). As was mentioned above, he covered the Passaic textile strike in 1925-26 in New Jersey, took part in the demonstrations protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1926-27 and worked with Theodore Dreiser on the cases of the Scottsboro Boys and the Harlan County miners. He therefore was part of the main battles waged by the left against the forces of capitalism during those years, and amply reported on the strikes and demonstrations through numerous articles for such magazines and newspapers as New Masses and The Daily Worker.

<14> Dos Passos also engaged in the development of the cultural apparatus of the left. He helped found New Masses in 1926 and contributed regularly to its columns until the beginning of the 1930s, when he found himself utterly estranged from Mike Gold's views on the relationship between culture and politics. He created the New Playwrights' Theatre with John Howard Lawson at the end of the 1920s, an ambitious project which aimed at associating modernist techniques to a radical content, for a working-class audience. In "They Want Ritzy Art", Dos Passos denounces the cultural atmosphere in the United States, which condemns any authors whose aims go beyond that of making a living:

The underlying idea was that any play in the writing of which the author had a more serious aim than making money was highbrow or communistic or worse. Authors mustn't have opinions, particularly political opinions. (Pizer, 113)

<15> Dos Passos contributed several plays to the New Playwrights' Theatre, including The Garbage Man (originally entitled The Moon Is a Gong) and Airways, Inc., none of which had a great success. However, the article just cited shows the importance this initiative had for Dos Passos, both as an artist and as a radical. He goes as far as calling the theatre, and art in general, a "center of resistance"(Pizer, 114), the only means to crack the evenly applied veneer that characterizes American culture, embodied by the American Mercury and Ford cars. This uniformity must be boldly challenged, with literature the tool most adequate to revealing its flaws. It is also interesting to see that while the content of the plays is radical - Airways, Inc. is the story of a strike that ends in the death of its leader, Walter Goldberg - their formal structure is resolutely modernist, and often influenced by the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein, whose technique of montage in particular had a major impact on Dos Passos's fictional works.

<16> Dos Passos's "resistance" was never more intense than when he participated in the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The execution of the two Italians in August 1927 was a turning point both in his career as a writer and in his political consciousness. The U.S.A. trilogy is haunted by the ghosts of Sacco and Vanzetti, and Michael Denning goes so far as to say that "in some ways, the central formal problem of the trilogy always remained how to represent Sacco and Vanzetti, or, perhaps, better, how to represent the nation and its people in a narrative that culminates in the passion of Sacco and Vanzetti" (192). In other words, for Dos Passos, the 1930s started in 1927. This shift in perspective is remarkably described by Alessandro Portelli in Il testo e la voce, when he compares the image of the car in The Great Gatsby and The Grapes of Wrath:

The Joads' car is a means of transportation, and the important thing about it is the engine; Gatsby's is a means of communication, and what counts is the bodywork.

The opposition between the engine and the bodywork defines the two sides of the 1929 crash. (242) [4]

<17> The injustice represented by the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, which Dos Passos in a letter to President Lowell of Harvard University called a "judicial murder", made him focus on the engine, on the mechanisms that operated the vast machinery that was the American political system. His involvement with the case started in 1926 when he wrote a lengthy article for New Masses entitled "The Pit and the Pendulum", in which he recounted not only the main stages of the affair, but also his own visits to Sacco and Vanzetti in jail. He drew a portrait of the two men as philosophers - especially Vanzetti - honest workers, anything but highwaymen. This article was then rewritten and augmented and was published for the Sacco Vanzetti Defence Committee under the title Facing the Chair: Sacco and Vanzetti; The Americanization of Two Foreign-Born Workmen. It is a collage of excerpts from the trial transcripts and affidavits, passages written by Dos Passos himself, and declarations made by several prominent intellectuals and organizations about the Sacco-Vanzetti case (Anatole France, Eugene Debs, the American Federation of Labor). The question of the addressee in this book is interesting; Dos Passos sometimes seems to address the radicals who were involved in the case, when he calls for international organization of the workers against this injustice, but more often than not he seems to want to reach a wider audience, by denouncing the judicial system in general and transforming Sacco and Vanzetti into symbols of the perversion of American ideals. The land of the free, which makes of the pursuit of happiness an inalienable right of man, has become a soulless machine:

And for the last six years, three hundred and sixtyfive days a year, yesterday, today, tomorrow, Sacco and Vanzetti wake up on their prison pallets, eat prison food, have an hour of exercise and conversation a day, sit in their cells puzzling about this technicality and that technicality, pinning their hopes to their alibis, to the expert testimony about the character of the barrel of Sacco's gun, to Madeiros' confession and Weeks' corroboration, to action before the Supreme Court of the United States, and day by day the props are dashed from under their feet and they feel themselves being inexorably pushed towards the Chair by the blind hatred of thousands of wellmeaning citizens, by the superhuman involved stealthy soulless mechanism of the law. (Dos Passos, 1927, 71)

The indeterminacy of the audience is, moreover, perceptible in the title of the book, where the term "workmen" resigns its specificity in favor of the ironic "Americanization" and of the universal and threatening "Facing the Chair". Dos Passos stresses throughout the pamphlet the fact that the Sacco-Vanzetti case threatens the very foundations of the American system: "Don't forget that people had been arrested and beaten up for distributing the Declaration of Independence" (54).

<18> Therefore, John Dos Passos's radical involvement was always linked to his vision of America and Americanism. American topoi such as the figure of the lone pioneer proliferate in his nonfictional works: metaphors of discovery and development (almost in the photographic sense) are recurrent. In "The New Masses I'd Like", Dos Passos writes:

Why shouldn't the New Masses be setting out on a prospecting trip, drilling in unexpected places, following unsuspected veins, bringing home specimens as yet unclassified? I think that there's much more to be gained by rigorous exploration than by sitting on the side lines of the labor movement with a red rosette in your buttonhole and cheering for the home team.

The terrible danger for explorers is that they always find what they are looking for. (...) I want an expedition that will find what it's not looking for. (Pizer, 82)

Dos Passos thus refuses what is at the heart of the doctrine of the Communist Party, which is the idea that the new system is already known and needs only to be applied. His conception of literature and politics revolves around the image of the individual pitted against the dominant discourse. The paradox being that this representation is itself part of a master narrative on America, the land of the individual, the promised land which is always open to discovery. He wants experimentation, in arts as well as in politics, and he insists on the revelatory power of literature; the important thing is to show what no one sees, and to show it in such a way that it cannot be forgotten. In the same article, he later writes: "I'd like to see a magazine full of introspection and doubt that would be like a piece of litmus paper to test things by" (Pizer, 82). His fear of codification, of the concentration of power, whether in the hand of businessmen or politicians, led him to adopt controversial political positions, especially after his break with the left. During the 1920s and 1930s however, he tried to maintain a paradoxical stance, calling for social reform and aesthetic experimentation without renouncing what he saw as his own artistic independence. There again, the important thing for him was to reclaim the margins. The explorer must not satisfy himself with the map he has brought along, he must go on to the unchartered territory and draw its contours with an unprejudiced mind. In his "Statement of Belief" published in The Bookman in September 1928, Dos Passos likens the writer to "a sort of truffle dog digging up raw material which a scientist, an anthropologist or a historian can later use to permanent advantage"(Pizer, 115). Through these metaphors we see that the relationship between art and politics becomes much more complex, since the writer refuses to have his art " serve " any ideology whatsoever. Which does not mean he cannot be politically involved. Or that there is such a thing as total independence from a preexisting discourse. Dos Passos's radicalism is rooted in the political culture of the United States, and he ceaselessly goes back to the foundation of the Republic to account for the perversion of the system in his times. Michael Denning has made of the trilogy a symbol of the "fall of the Lincoln Republic", but more generally, it seems to us that Dos Passos, both in his fiction and in his non-fiction, always has a double aim: to denounce the mechanization of politics while appealing, not only to the workers, but to Americans as Americans, to make them remember their foundational dream. In other words, he uses his radicalism to fuel his revolt, but refuses the solutions offered by this same radicalism, or at least their embodiment in the Communist Party. Institutionally and politically he remains at the margins, while reclaiming the symbolic centre.

<19> Dos Passos always claimed his independence as a writer. In fact, his attitude toward politics directly derived from his status as a writer, from his conception of literature. As Townsend Ludington writes: "He could repeatedly join political groups, sign petitions, or lend his name to organizations like the National Executive Committee of the Moscow-based Proletarian Artists and Writers league – acts that many people took to mark a firm commitment, but they did not because he remained a skeptic" (253). This skepticism was more of a consciousness of his own craft, a vision of writing as an occupation which could not but be stifled by too pervasive an ideology. In the 1932 preface to a new edition of Three Soldiers, Dos Passos, who by that time had already distanced himself from New Masses and the Communist Party, writes about his belief in " straight writing ", which does not compromise with politics, one way or the other. This does not mean that the writer cannot have an influence. On the contrary; he deals with language, and must be free to use it as he pleases in order to imprint his mark on it:

The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that speech enduring by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and phrases of today and makes of them forms to set the mind of tomorrow's generation. That's history. A writer who writes straight is the architect of history. (Pizer, 147)

Though Dos Passos deplores in this text the diminished power of books in his time, his conception of literature as a center of resistance is not fundamentally altered, although it is more a linguistic resitance here than a political one. The metaphor of "whittling" rejoins that of the litmus paper; the writer must endlessly come back to the language, to "the speech of the people", as it is called in the Prologue to U.S.A., in order to come as close as possible to the real thing. Dos Passos's views on literature and on the independence of the artist with regards to politics are best expressed in "The Writer As Technician", which was published for the American Writer's Congress in 1935. In this text, Dos Passos breaks with Marxism and with the cultural apparatus developed by the CPUSA throughout the 1930s, and his position is close to that which was later adopted by the founders of Partisan Review. Though he did not renounce a possible political aim in fiction, his stance (which was both hearfelt and slightly artificial) was to show that this aim was to be chosen by the writer in absolute independence:

A writer, a technician, must never, I feel, no matter how much he is carried away by the noblest political partisanship in the fight for social justice, allow himself to forget that his real political aim, for himself and his fellows, is liberty. (...) To fight oppression, and to work as best we can for a sane organization of society, we do not have to abandon the state of mind of freedom. If we do that we are letting the same thuggery in by the back door that we are fighting off in front of the house. I don't see how it is possible to organize effectively for liberty and the humane values of life without protecting and demanding during every minute of the fight the liberties of investigation, speech and discussion that are the greatest part of the ends of the struggle. (Pizer, 170-171)

Through this text, Dos Passos asserts his desire to deal with politics in fiction through the means that fiction offers, and not through a predetermined frame that would thwart his creative practice. He uses again the term " whittle " to describe what a work of art is built from: " the need for clean truth and sharply whittled exactitudes, men's instincts and compulsions and hungers and thirsts " (Pizer, 171).

<20> Paradoxically, it is from the moment when Dos Passos formulated this theory of artistic practice, which he had in fact been applying to his fiction throughout the 1920s and 1930s, that he started to produce his most "ideological" works. After the completion of U.S.A (The Big Money was published in 1936) and his total break with the left, his fiction was, for the most part, violently anti-Communist, and blinded by those same flaws he had made a point to reject. Though Dos Passos himself claimed he had never altered his political course but always aimed at depicting "man's struggle for life against the strangling institutions he himself creates"(quoted in Pizer, Introduction, 15), his focus on the Communist Party as the source of the strangling certainly had an influence on his work and, according to most critics, a rather negative one. The years of his great works, from 1925 to 1936, were also those when he kept questioning the relationship between art and politics, ceaselessly negotiating his stance within the cultural apparatus of the left. His contrapuntal approach enabled him to escape the major constraints of the political atmosphere while never relinquishing the curiosity and the involvement which spurred him ahead, both in his partisan actions and in his fictional works. The crystallization of his resentment on the Communist Party after the Second World War froze the movement and instability which had until then been characteristic of his work.

<21> John Dos Passos wrote of himself, in the 1968 preface to a new edition of One Man's Initiation: "Amateur proletarian or gentleman volunteer? Young people love to act a part, but I could never quite decide which character I was playing" (Dos Passos, 1969, 28). Although one must always be careful with writers' reinterpretation of their own actions, this seems to us quite a good way to characterize Dos Passos's position in the 1920s and 1930s. His involvement was genuine, but he was always eager to retain his autonomy, his freedom. His preoccupation, as a writer, was with language, and the various articles he wrote at the time show that his was a quest for meaning, and that the preemptive interpretations of the Communist ideology could not satisfy him: "The words are old and dusty and hung with the dirty bunting of a thousand crooked orations, but underneath they are still sound. What men once meant by these words needs defenders to-day" (Pizer, 172). Through re-contextualisation and re-interpretation, he wanted to dust down the "old words". Inversion and paradox were tools he did not hesitate to use, as when, at the end of the trilogy, he calls the rulers of America "strangers", whereas Sacco and Vanzetti are identified with the founders of Massachusetts (Dos Passos, 1938, 1084).

<22> This permanent displacement, this ex-centricity is characteristic of Dos Passos's fiction, of his articles, and of his life as a perpetual traveler. His oblique stance would liken him to a character described by T.S. Eliot in a letter to Sir Herbert Read he wrote in 1928:

Some day I want to write an essay about the point of view of an American who wasn't an American, because he was born in the South and went to school in New England as a small boy with a nigger drawl, but who wasn't a southerner in the South because his people were northerners in a border state and looked down on all southerners and Virginians, and who so was never anything anywhere and who therefore felt himself to be more a Frenchman than an American and more an Englishman than a Frenchman and yet felt that the U.S.A. up to a hundred years ago was a family extension (quoted in Klein, 16).

After the first world war, W.B. Yeats wrote: "Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold ". The American left tried to re-create a centre around what Michael Denning called a "working-class ethnic Americanism" (8), by codifying the relationship between culture and politics and spurring experimentation in different social classes and different artistic genres. However, the link between radicalism and Americanism was always ambiguous, and the internationalist aims of the American communist movement at best dubious. As Caren Irr writes about 1930s literary history:

Thus, in a paradox typical of American exceptionalist thinking, the 30s critics simultaneously narrate the supposedly unique maturation of American literature while also insisting that this maturation be the prototype for all other properly national literatures. (30)

This centrality of leftist culture, which Michael Denning calls the laboring of American culture, is not accepted by all. The Popular Front, the age of the CIO, remain a road not taken, a "vanishing mediator" (Denning, 27), and some authors and critics in the 1930s felt there was a risk of hegemony in this centrality, a hegemony of the Communist Party of the United States.

<23> John Dos Passos, throughout his career in the 1920s and 1930s, was a fellow traveller who always chose his own itinerary. His blend of Americanism and radicalism, his distrust of the concentration of power, whether in the hands of businessmen or politicians, paradoxically made him into a marginal writer, in the sense that he chose to stay at the periphery of the evolution of the relationship between culture and politics, though ceaselessly continuing to debate it. His main concern was with literature and with language, with the "old words" of which he tried to unearth the original meaning, inevitably mythical. He remained in the position of the young man in "Vag", at the edge of the road, uncertain whether he is raising his fist in rage or merely asking for a ride, an ambiguous figure oscillating between his desire for involvement and his unquenchable individualism: "The young man waits at the edge of the concrete, with one hand he grips a rubbed suitcase of phony leather, the other hand almost making a fist, thumb up" (Dos Passos, 1938, 1182).

Works Cited

Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Bercovitch, Sacvan & Jehlen, Myra (ed). Ideology and Classic American Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front; The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1997.

Dos Passos, John. «The New Masses I'd Like», New Masses, 1 (June 1926), in John Dos Passos; The Major Nonfictional Prose, ed. Donald Pizer, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.

---. "They Want Ritzy Art", New Masses, 4 (June 1928),8, in Pizer, op. cit.

---. Introduction to Three Soldiers (New York: Modern Library, 1932), v-ix, in Donald Pizer, op. cit.

---. "The Writer As Technician", Henry Hart ed., American Writer's Congress, 1935, in Donald Pizer, op. cit.

---. Facing the Chair; the Americanisation of two Foreign-Born Workingmen. New York: Oriole edition, 1977 (facsimile of the 1927 edition).

---. U.S.A. London: Penguin, 1938 (2001).

---. One Man's Initiation, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969.

Emerson, Ralph W. "The Poet", in The Essential Writing of Ralph Waldo Emerson. New York: The Modern Library, 2000, 287-307.

Farrell, James T. A Note on Literary Criticism, New York: Vanguard Press, 1936.

Hicks, Granville. The Great Tradition. An Interpretation of American Literature Since the Civil War, Revised edition, New York: Macmillan, 1935.

Irr, Caren. The Suburb of Dissent: Cultural Politics in the United States and Canada during the 1930s. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Martin Kallich, «John Dos Passos Fellow Traveler: A Dossier with Commentary». Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 1, N°4 (Jan 1956), 173-190.

Klein, Marcus. Foreigners: The Making of American Literature, 1900-1940, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981.

Ludington, Townsend. John Dos Passos: A Twentieth Century Odyssey. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1980.

Portelli, Alessandro. Il testo e la voce : Oralità, letteratura e democrazia in America, Roma: Manifestolibri, 1992.

Wald, Alan M., Writing from the Left: New Essays on Radical Culture and Politics. London: Verso, 1994.

Notes

[1] For a more precise account of Dos Passos's radical activities, see Martin Kallich, «John Dos Passos Fellow Traveler: A Dossier with Commentary», Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 1, N°4 (Jan 1956), 173-190. [^]

[2] This expression is found in a 1950 poem by W.H. Auden and constitutes the title of Caren Irr's book on cultural politics in the US and Canada in the 1930s. [^]

[3] See Denning's introduction to his book. [^]

[4] "La macchina dei Joad è un mezzo di trasporto, e la cosa importante è il motore; quella di Gatsby è un mezzo di comunicazione, e quello che conta è la carrozzeria.

L'opposizione fra carrozzeria e motore definisce i due versanti della crisi del '29." Our translation. [^]

 

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