Lawrence Parker introduces a 1938 New Masses article by Granville Hicks on US writer John Dos Passos and argues that the latter’s work is ripe for re-appropriation and re-examination by the revolutionary left. 

A recent online conversation with US comrades led to a discovery that surprised me. It’s apparently quite difficult to buy the works of writer John Dos Passos (1896-1970) in the US and he’s not awfully well known on the left. For an English leftist that seems quite peculiar given that one can usually buy some of this author’s works on most British high streets (usually Three Soldiers, the USA trilogy or Manhattan Transfer). These three works, published in the 1920s and 1930s, have a certain cult appeal on the British left although Dos Passos has also been marketed more widely as a modernist, rather than as a leftist, writer. It’s also worth mentioning that Jean-Paul Sartre classed Dos Passos in the 1930s as “the greatest writer of our time” in relation to the USA trilogy. 

The historian Michael Denning argues that USA’s stellar reputation in the 1930s “is particularly curious because it must be admitted that the book no longer lives for American readers”¹. He adds: “In part, Dos Passos’s decline was a result of his political trajectory: to put it crudely, his move to the radical right lost him his left-wing admirers, while the undisputed sense that his early works [i.e. ones written when Dos Passos was in the orbit of the left] are his finest has made him a difficult icon for the right.”² 

It’s unquestionable that Dos Passos moved to the political right in the 1940s. In the New Masses³ article from 1938 reproduced below, Granville Hicks (1901-82), a Marxist literary critic who was shortly to leave the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) in 1939, details Dos Passos’s status as a fellow-traveler of the international Communist movement in the 1920s, after he had been radicalized by the experience of being a volunteer ambulance driver in the First World War. By the 1960s, Dos Passos was supporting Republican presidential Barry Goldwater. He later backed Richard Nixon and was throughout this period a vocal anti-Communist. This was apparent in his literary work, notably Most Likely to Succeed (1954), a brutal dissection of the machinations of the CPUSA in the Hollywood left. Communists are also a malign presence in novels such as The Grand Design (1949) and Midcentury (1961). Hicks’s article represents an earlier fracture in Dos Passos’s relationship with the Communist left and it is the CPUSA’s critique that arguably still frames his reputation among the US left to this day. 

While Dos Passos’s later allegiance to the political right sharply conflicted with his past as a Communist fellow traveler, in some senses he stood stock-still. In 1939 he wrote: “My sympathies lie with the private in the front line against the brass hat; with the hod-carrier against the strawboss, or the walking delegate for that matter; with the laboratory worker against the stuffed shirt in a mortarboard; with the criminal against the cop.”⁴The only outlet for such a universal anti-bureacracy stance after Dos Passos’s split with the CPUSA ended up being anti-Communism and support for Republicans. 

But that background didn’t quite close off all the author’s radical sympathies. In Richard Hill’s fine 1970 essay, he draws our attention to the similarities between two Dos Passos characters: Fainey McCreary (Mac) in USA and Blackie Bowman in 1961’s Midcentury. “Both are Wobblies – members of the International Workers of the World, devoted to the syndicalist purpose of ‘building the new world in the shell of the old’. Both are sympathetic to socialism and anarchy, seeing in them a kinship with their own syndicalism. Both are Irish itinerant laborers, harvest hands, and sailors. Both are tempted – by women and prosperity – to leave the labor movement and settle down. Both distrust Communists from past experience, though they have joined with them in popular fronts and free speech fights.”⁵ 

Dos Passos’s resurrection of his line of freebooting Wobbly heroes in the form of Blackie Bowman stands in partial contrast with some of Midcentury’s starker themes of fear and paranoia that power the spine of this affecting work. Here, we are also plunged into a series of ‘Investigator’s notes,’ which follow a gumshoe as he collects testimonies on labor racketeering: “The small gray man pops into the hotel room and shuts the door sharply behind him. He shoots frightened glances around the walls, into the bathroom, through the half-opened door, under the bed even, and starts trotting back and forth like a hamster in a cage. His little clawlike hands have some brown stains on them.”⁶ Dos Passos may have shifted to the radical right but this hadn’t damaged his critical faculties or his ear for human suffering.

Part of the over-hasty dismissal of Dos Passos is embedded in the CPUSA’s rejection of the author, which, as Hicks makes clear in the article below, is largely on political grounds. The latter is suspicious of Dos Passos’s “irresponsibility” in flirting with the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM), an organization whom the ‘official communist’ movement was busy persecuting in Spain. Hicks also objects to Dos Passos making Communists “narrow sectarians” in The Big Money, the final installment of the USA trilogy. In fact, Hicks plays down Dos Passos’s critique of the party. The Big Money was considerably harder on the CPUSA as it drew to a close. It is perfectly clear, in the narratives associated with the fictional character Mary French, a party sympathizer, that Dos Passos sees the CPUSA as another bureaucratic machine that mangles human beings. Such distortions even start infecting the rhetoric of the well-meaning and hardworking French. An oppositionist, Ben Compton, asks French about the whereabouts of a party comrade. She replies: “‘He’s gone to Pittsburgh on secret partywork and, for God’s sake, shut up about it. You just got hold of me to pump me.’ She got to her feet, her face flaming. ‘Well goodbye, Mr Compton… You don’t happen to be a stoolpigeon as well as a disruptor, do you?’”⁷ The divisions between Dos Passos and the CPUSA were further widened on the publication of the former’s Adventures of a Young Man (1939), the ultimate anti-Hemingway Spanish Civil War novel, where an expelled Communist oppositionist goes to fight as a volunteer only to be caught up in a nightmare world of Stalinist persecution.⁸

However, the reasons behind the world Communist movement’s previous acclamation of Dos Passos in the 1920s and 1930s were scarcely any better than those informing his departure from the left. The Soviet interest in Dos Passos, as recorded in the International Literature journal in the first half of the 1930s, is framed in extremely shallow terms. A record of an organized discussion in Moscow in 1933 includes these remarks: “What’s good in Dos Passos? That he is seeking. That he is active and hates the old world. That he has experienced in his own skin the meaning of peace and war (capitalistic). That he is broad. That he is candid. That he is simple (cries of – ‘Yes! Yes!’).”⁹ By this token, Dos Passos becomes the equivalent of a kind of left-empiricist country bumpkin. This type of analysis appreciates nothing of the complex modalities of works such as USA and Manhattan Transfer.

The beginnings of a more interesting critique of Dos Passos were offered to the world Communist movement by György Lukács. He drew upon US writer Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) to suggest that Dos Passos’s characters were flawed in their creation: “Lewis praised Dos Passos’s ‘natural’ – i.e. modernist – compositional methods as an enormous advance on older narrative conventions. Yet, speaking of the creation of character, he was forced to conclude: ‘It is undeniable that Dos Passos has failed so far to produce characters as memorable as Pickwick, Micawber, Oliver Twist or David Copperfield or Nicholas Nickleby … and he will probably never do so.’”¹⁰ These observations contain a moment of truth. USA, with its newsreels, historical biographies, sensuous and immediate ‘camera eye’ and fictional character narratives (Dos Passos partially resurrected this style in the later Midcentury) represents a fragmentation of consciousness and characterization that conveys an implicit pessimism and irrationality. Dos Passos’s fictional characters mostly bob along on the tide of events. This certainly compresses their subjective interior and scope in a manner that doesn’t occur in more classical realism. But to raise up Terry Eagleton’s devastating injunction against this line of reasoning, “why should accurate cognition and representation of the real afford aesthetic gratification?”¹¹. Whatever the limitations of the characters in USA, whatever the sense that they are traveling down an endless cul-de-sac, it does not mean that the Wobbly Mac or Communist sympathizer Mary French are somehow impossible to identify with or any less enjoyable. USA is a beautiful read above anything else and I can still remember the joy of discovering it for the first time 20 years later. 

In truth, the left’s justification for applauding Dos Passos was just as aesthetically dubious as its reasons for rejecting him. This process was mostly dependent on how much he was willing to trim his sails to prevailing Communist winds, which in Dos Passos’s case was not much at all. Marxist thinkers have always been able to value the literary works of writers with sometimes reactionary politics. To that end, all of Dos Passos’s works, and not just the ones from the 1920s and 1930s we think are ‘Marxist’ or ‘near Marxist,’ are surely ripe for meticulous re-appropriation and re-examination by the revolutionary left. 

Granville Hicks ‘The Moods and Tenses of John Dos Passos’ New Masses, 26 April 1938

(Annotations by Lawrence Parker)

John Dos Passos’s publishers are wisely doing their part to make the country conscious of him as a major literary figure, and they have accordingly issued two omnibus volumes of his work. USA is, of course, his famous trilogy: The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money. Journeys Between Wars is made up of his travel books: much of Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), almost the whole of Orient Express (1927), and most of those sections of In All Countries (1934) that deal with foreign lands. It also contains some sixty pages on Dos Passos’s visit to Spain a year ago. 

Comparison of the two books makes it quite clear that Dos Passos’s deeper experiences go into his novels, leaving his more casual impressions to be recorded in the travel essays. Journeys Between Wars shows that he is at his best when he is describing the persons he meets or recording his own moods. The padrone in the Spanish restaurant, the Sayid on the Orient express, the Danish accountant on his way home from America – these are effectively drawn. And the journal of the camel ride from Baghdad to Damascus is as pleasant a personal record as can be found in modern literature. But there is not much – and I have now read most of these essays twice – that the mind holds onto. Other novelists – Gide, Lawrence, Huxley¹² – have written travel books that belong with their major works, but not Dos Passos.

The explanation, which has some importance for the understanding of Dos Passos as a writer, seems to me fairly clear. He deals, consistently and no doubt deliberately, with impressions – the specific scene, the precise emotions, the exact conversation. The seeing eye – even “the camera eye” – is admittedly the first virtue of the travel writer. But it is equally certain that the memorable travel writers have not been afraid to draw conclusions from what they saw. Don Passos is afraid: no milder word will do. What one feels in Journeys Between Wars is neither a casual holiday from the job of thinking nor a conscientious elimination of ideas for some literary purpose but a deep emotional unwillingness to face the intellectual implications of things seen and heard. 

And the extraordinary thing is that this shrinking from conclusions is to he found even in the last section, the section dealing with Spain in 1937. Dos Passos tells of crossing the border from France, of a night on the road, of executions in Valencia, of a bombardment of Madrid, of a fiesta of the Fifteenth Brigade¹³, of a trip through some villages, and of an interview with officials of the POUM.¹⁴ But there is not a word about the issues between the loyalists and the fascists, not a word about the differences between the loyalist government and the POUM. It seems incredible that any author, considering all that is involved in Spain today, could keep such silence. Do not suppose that Dos Passos is merely maintaining an artistic objectivity, holding back his own opinions so that the reader can arrive unhampered at the truth. He simply has refused to think his way through to clear convictions. He has sympathies – with the loyalists as against the fascists and apparently with the POUM as against the government. But even the Spanish crisis cannot shake him into thought. 

The only approximation to a conclusion comes as Dos Passos is leaving Spain, and, characteristically, it is in the form of a question: “How can they win, I was thinking? How can the new world of confusion and crosspurposes and illusions and dazzled by the mirage of idealistic phrases win against the iron combination of men accustomed to run things who have only one idea binding them together, to hold on to what they’ve got?” This passage has been quoted by almost every conservative reviewer of the book, and quoted with undisguised satisfaction. “We told you so,” one could hear them saying. “There’s no sense in trying to help Spain. It’s all foolishness to hope for social justice anywhere. Let’s make the best of things as they are.”

The truth is that it is impossible to avoid having opinions, and the only question is whether or not they are based on adequate information and clear thinking. If Dos Passos had faced the responsibility of the writer, and especially the radical writer, to use his intellect as well as his eyes, if he had been concerned, not with avoiding conclusions, but with arriving at sound ones, I think he would have come out of Spain with something more to say than these faltering words of despair. Afraid to think, he has yielded to a mood, and the reactionaries are delighted with his surrender. Both that surrender and his flirtation with the POUM are results of an essential irresponsibility.

Dos Passos’s irresponsibility takes two forms: unwillingness to think and unwillingness to act. Several years ago, I remember, at the time when he was perhaps closest to the Communist Party, he said something to the effect that he was merely a camp-follower. In Journeys Between Wars there is a revealing passage. (It is, of course, creditably characteristic of Dos Passos to reveal himself.) When he was leaving the Soviet Union in 1928, the director and the actors of the Sanitary Propaganda Theatre came to see him off. The director said, “They want to know. They like you very much, but they want to ask you one question. They want you to show your face. They want to know where you stand politically. Are you with us?” Dos Passos continues: “The iron twilight dims, the steam swirls round us, we are muddled by the delicate crinkly steam of our breath, the iron crown tightens on the head, throbbing with too many men, too many women, too many youngsters seen, talked to, asked questions of, too many hands shaken, too many foreign languages badly understood. ‘But let me see… But maybe I can explain… But in so short a time… there’s not time.’ The train is moving. I have to run and jump for it.”

The passage, so palpably sincere and so pleasant, reminds us that, even in a broader sense, Dos Passos has always been uncommonly detached. Indeed, detachment is almost the keynote of Journeys Between Wars. In the extracts from Rosinante Dos Passos is “the traveler”; in Orient Express he is “the eastbound American”; in the Russian section he is “the American Peesatyel”. Perhaps it is no wonder that in writing about Spain in 1937 he is still merely an observer. It is no wonder that he has seldom tried to write about the revolutionary movement from inside, and, when he has tried, has failed. It is no wonder that he has never communicated the sense of the reality of comradeship, as Malraux¹⁵, for example, communicates it in Days of Wrath. 

Yet there was a time when Dos Passos seemed willing to try to think clearly and to feel deeply. His second play, Airways, Inc., was bad dramatically, but in it Dos Passos at least made an attempt to be clear. There was a sharp difference between that play and The Garbage Man, and an even greater difference between The 42nd Parallel, first novel of his trilogy, and Manhattan Transfer. In The 42nd Parallel Dos Passos seemed for the first time to have mastered the American scene. The technical devices used in this novel and 1919 perplexed some readers, but Dos Passos himself appeared to be relatively clear about what he was trying to do.

Airways, Inc. was published in 1928, The 42nd Parallel in 1930, and 1919 in 1932. Here, then, are three or four years of comparative clarity. And in those years Dos Passes was close to Communism. At this time he actually believed in something like the Marxian analysis of history, and it worked. He also felt a stronger confidence in the working class. Communism did not make him a novelist, but it made him a better novelist. 

What I failed to realize at the time of the publication of 1919 was the extent to which Dos Passos’s interest in the Communist Party was a matter of mood. He had not sufficiently overcome his fear of conclusions to make a serious study of Marxism, and he had only partly subdued his passion for aloofness. Little things could – and, as it happened, did – disturb him. He was on the right track, but not much was required to derail him. 

In the four years since he left the track Dos Passos has gone a long and disastrous way. Last summer, as has been said, he came out of Spain with nothing but a question mark, and committed himself to a hysterical isolationism that might almost be called chauvinistic. Last December he and Theodore Dreiser held a conversation that was published in Direction.¹⁶ Dos Passos’s confusion – equaled, I hasten to say, by Dreiser’s – is unpleasant to contemplate for anyone who expects some semblance of intellectual dignity in a prominent novelist. He is still looking for an impartial observer of the Soviet Union, and thinks he has found one in Victor Serge.¹⁷ His new-found devotion to the United States continues to run high: “America is probably the country where the average guy has got a better break.” “You can’t get anywhere,” he says, “in talking to fanatic Communists.” He talks about revolution: “A sensible government would take over industries and compensate the present owners, and then deflate the money afterwards.” And this is his contribution to economics: “Every time there is a rise in wages, prices go up at the A&P.”¹⁸ 

After one has noted the banality, the naivete, and the sheer stupidity of most of Dos Passos’s remarks in his talk with Dreiser, one knows that politically he is as unreliable as a man can be and is capable of any kind of preposterous vagary. But I am interested in Dos Passos’ politics only insofar as they influence his writings, as of course they do. When 1919 appeared, I believed that Dos Passos had established his position as the most talented of American novelists – a position he still holds. As early as 1934, however, I was distressed by his failure to shake off habits of mind that I had thought – quite erroneously, as it turns out – were dissolving under the influence of contact with the revolutionary movement. At that time, reviewing In All Countries, I said: “Dos Passos, I believe, is superior to his bourgeois contemporaries because he is, however incompletely, a revolutionist, and shares, however imperfectly, in the vigor of the revolutionary movement, its sense of purpose, its awareness of the meaning of events, and its defiance of bourgeois pessimism and decay. He is also, it seems to me, superior to any other revolutionary writer because of the sensitiveness and the related qualities that are to be found in this book and, much more abundantly, in his novels. Some day, however, we shall have a writer who surpasses Dos Passos, who has all that he has and more. He will not be a camp-follower.”

Now that Dos Passos is not in any sense a revolutionist and does not share at all in the vigor of the revolutionary movement, what about the virtues that I attributed to his association with the Communist Party? I am afraid the answer is in The Big Money, most of which was written after 1934. One figure dominates The Big Money to an extent that no one figure dominated either The 42nd Parallel or 1919. It is Charley Anderson, the symbol of the easy-money Twenties, the working stiff who gets to be a big shot. (“America is probably the country where the average guy has got a better break.”) His desperate moneymaking and drinking and fornicating take place against a background of unhappy rich people and their unhappy parasites. Further in the background are some equally unhappy revolutionists, who are either futile or vicious. (“You can’t get anywhere in talking to fanatic Communists.”)

It seems to me foolish to pretend that an author doesn’t choose his material. Dos Passos didn’t have to lay his principal emphasis on the hopeless mess that the capitalist system makes of a good many lives. He didn’t have to make his two Communists narrow sectarians. He didn’t have to make the strongest personal note in the book a futilitarian elegy for Sacco and Vanzetti.¹⁹ There must have been a good deal in the Twenties that he left out, for large masses of people did learn something from the collapse of the boom, and the Communist Party did get rid of factionalism, and the workers did save Angelo Herndon²⁰ and the Scottsboro Boys, even though they failed to save Sacco and Vanzetti.²¹ The Big Money, in other words, grows out of the same prejudices and misconceptions, the same confusion and blindness, as the conversation with Dreiser.

The difference is, of course, that there is a lot in The Big Money besides these faulty notions. I have written elsewhere about Dos Passos’s gifts, and I need only say here that I admire them as strongly as ever. I know of no contemporary American work of fiction to set beside USA. But I also know that, because of the change in mood that came between 1919 and The Big Money, USA is not so true, not so comprehensive, not so strong as it might have been. And, though I have acquired caution enough not to predict Dos Passos’s future direction, I know that, if he follows the path he is now on, his claims to greatness are already laid before us and later critics will only have to fill in the details of another story of genius half-fulfilled.

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1. M Denning The Cultural Front: the Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century London 2010 p167.
2. Ibid.
3. New Masses was a US Marxist magazine associated with the CPUSA.
4. Cited in D Aaron Writers on the Left New York 1969 p366.
5. https://kirkcenter.org/best/dos-passos-a-reassessment/
6. J Dos Passos Midcentury Cambridge, Mass. 1961 p104. The US Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in Labor and Management (also known as the McClellan Committee) ran from 1957-60. It was formed to study the extent of criminal activity in US labor-management relations.
7. J Dos Passos USA London 1966 p1167.
8. Aaron op cit pp356-366 devotes a whole chapter to the reception of this novel.
9. Cited in ibid p460n.
10. G Lukács The Meaning of Contemporary Realism London 1979 p58. The characters that Lewis refers to are the creation of Charles Dickens (1812-70).
11. T Eagleton Walter Benjamin or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism London 2009 p84.
12. André Gide (1869-1951); DH Lawrence (1885-1930); and Aldous Huxley (1894-1963).
13. Otherwise known as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which comprised mainly English-speaking volunteers and was part of the International Brigades that fought for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War.
14. The Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista was a left-wing organization active around the Spanish Civil War that was repressed by the Republican government under the influence of the Soviet Union and its agents.
15. Georges André Malraux (1901-76) was a French novelist, art theorist, and minister of cultural affairs.
16. ‘A Conversation. Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos’ Direction January 1938.
17. Victor Serge (1890-1947) was a Marxist novelist and historian who became an opponent of the Soviet Union.
18. A US chain of grocery stores that operated from 1859 to 2015.
19. Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were Italian immigrant anarchists who were accused of murdering a guard and a paymaster during an April 1920, armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts, US. They were executed in the electric chair at Charlestown State Prison in 1927. Dos Passos was deeply involved in the defense campaign.
20. Angelo Braxton Herndon (1913-97) was an African-American labor organizer arrested and convicted of insurrection after attempting to organize black and white industrial workers in 1932 in Atlanta, Georgia. The prosecution case rested heavily on Herndon’s possession of Communist literature, which police found in his hotel room. The United States Supreme Court eventually ruled in Herndon’s favor in April 1937.
21. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African-American teenagers, aged 12 to 19, accused in Alabama of raping two white women in 1931.