John Dos Passos Books

Townsend Ludington's 1980 and Virginia Spencer Carr's 1984 volumes weigh in about the same, over five hundred pages of closely printed text. I have the hardcovers, although both biographies have appeared in paperback reprints, Ludington's a decade ago and Carr a few years back. Despite his earlier works being edited by Ludington in three handsome installments in the Library of America series in the past few years, even these languish, absent even from the giant city libraries near me. Outside of nods to the USA trilogy or maybe "Manhattan Transfer" or in a pinch, "Three Soldiers," not many readers bother with him.

Conventional wisdom, shared even by his admirers, tends to denigrate his later novels and histories and biographies, after his gradual embrace of "middle-class liberalism" after his disillusionment with the manipulation of the Left by Stalinists in the 1920s and 1930s. None of his works remain in print which were written after his fall from favor with the Left. The Library of America selections span the twenties and thirties, and it's for his rendering of the ideas, events, and trends of the first three decades of the last century that Dos Passos will be remembered. Like many writers who outlasted their early impact and kept at it, he resented being labelled the "USA" author forty years later, but without this contribution to American literature, there'd be no pair of hefty biographies on my shelf or any other that matter over a century after his birth.

Few today may read Dos Passos, at least in America, but as with Jack London, Upton Sinclair, or James T. Farrell, this one time literary lion of the Left inspired many in Europe and the Third World with his chronicles that mingled a Camera Eye of the passing scene, a mordant Newsreel span of current events from the Wilson-Harding-Coolidge-Hoover years, and meticulously observed, if often distant and mechanical, scurryings of individuals as they resisted the machinations of "competitive Capital," "Monopoly Capital," and the triumph of the Organization Man, with "the big money."

Ludington gains the edge over Carr for his diligent incorporation of Dos Passos' correspondence, which he corrected from its previous printing as the collected letters. Carr earns her merit by adding the letters to DP, from his agent Bernice Baumgartner, his first wife Katy, Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, and others who hated and loved DP. Ludington tends to concentrate more on DP's own career; Carr expands to notice, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald complaining to Max Perkins about sales of "Tender is the Night" vs. "1919," or Edmund Wilson's sangfroid in his letters vs. his astonishing poverty at one point.

Neither biographer gives much notice to the actual works. Ludington's masterful comparison of the real event that DP reported on vs. its transformation as the "Body of an American" section in USA that covered the selection of one of four bodies for the WWI representative of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier remains an anomaly. He tends to cite a few reviews of each work after a brief paragraph or two summarizing each DP book as it was issued. Carr adds more context and often quotes a far greater range of positive and negative reviews for each work, but she rarely offers her own judgment of the work at hand.

Ludington stresses, as his subtitle emphasizes, the "odyssey" intellectually and politically that DP made over the century. You understand his opposition to technocrats, centralized power, and elite planners who conspire to ruin liberty and crush self-government, according to DP's constant resentment. You also understand, against the frequent criticism of his fiction, why DP relies on cliché and cant. He strives to make you listen to the truckdriver, the lobbyist, the ad-man, the gladhander, or the idealist who walked among us once, especially in an era before TV managed to empower the spin doctors and when radio or film could spend their own charms trying to sway the masses. His characters, from "Manhattan Transfer" on, remain less lovable and more caricatured than those created by his peers, but DP meant to use them as true satirists do, as Thackeray did in "Vanity Fair," to highlight the shortcomings and exaggerate the ambitions that ordinary folks harbored.

Ludington sums up DP's "lover's quarrel with the world." (507) You appreciate how he could go from marching for miners in Harlan County or against the conviction of Sacco & Vanzetti to sharing a stage with John Wayne, if not Strom Thurmond! He stubbornly, as Ludington documents, sought the ideal of Jefferson's gentleman farmer-- especially after inheriting his father's plantations on the Potomac-- while somehow having to live hand-to-mouth for years, borrowing from his friends constantly, writing incessantly, and travelling studiously as a free-lance journalist in war and peacetime, home and abroad, always talking to whomever he met, thinking and listening just as carefully. Ludington, more than Carr, shows how far this habitual stance of self-reliance could take him, into dangerous support at one time of Joe McCarthy, such were his distrusts of American weakness against his former Communist cabal. Dos Passos kept warning his audience, however much it dwindled, of the dangers of power when concentrated into the hands of a few, no matter their rhetoric of inclusion.

Carr depicts DP as a coach on the sidelines, a fellow-traveller at times but not a party man by nature. The artist Adolph Dehn said of him, even at DP's most radical stage in 1928: "One sees better if one sits on the fence." (qtd. 235) The Left idolized him and then excommunicated him, but DP, as both biographers realize, lacked the credulity to follow any leader. This outsider aura began in his days as an illegitimate son of a wealthy capitalist and his long-time mistress, to his gawky status at Choate, and his aesthetic posing at Harvard-- this stint's richly detailed by Carr). He hated war, but wished to see it. This led to his ambulance-driving volunteer duty in the French trenches of 1917, which sparked his wish to both save the world for the little man and resist any program or power that would in doing this crush the freedom he learned increasingly to admire as the American contribution. This led, as Ludington explains with more evidence than Carr, to his distrust of both sides as they mouthed democracy in the Cold War, to his advocacy of Goldwater, and his impatience with hippies and the New Left on the campuses where he lectured before his death in 1970.

Determined to champion the common man even as he became the country squire his father longed to be, in his temperament he stayed his own man, infuriating more than he inspired as the decades went on. In the thick of ideological allegiance, as the Communist Party in the U.S. courted DP, he remained a refusenik. He sided with "the scavengers and campfollowers." (qtd. Carr 299) He agreed in 1932, as did most of his peers, that the American system was doomed to inevitable failure and collapse. But, while the capitalist failure loomed in the Depression as obvious, he could not discern any collapse. A plutocracy appeared to him more likely to spring from American soil than a Red dictatorship of the proletariat. Seventy-five years later, post-Cold War, it seems that Dos Passos' prediction has long come to pass!

Both academics draw on his widow's and daughter's permission to use the archives, and while Carr adds a few reminiscences from his family, Ludington uses his earlier editing of his letters to enrich his study. I assume both scholars worked in the same time, the 1970s, on their works, and although my back-to-back perusal of both uncovers the same content carefully sifted, each has its advantages. Carr gives more of the flavor of his times. She's superb on conveying Harvard during WWI, DP's courage as he rescued the wounded under fire, and the background of the Spanish conflict. You understand more his relationship with both his wives and his children, and the tensions that his commitment to living off others' generosity as he determined to make it as a writer created in his friendships and his family. Ludington probes into his mental evolution as he challenged leftist orthodoxy, and how he grew into a more consistent, organic, and daring critic of both D.C. and the Kremlin, the fat cats on both sides of the Iron Curtain, than the stereotype of an addled right-wing convert that many disappointed critics continued to peddle in the media for the three dozen productive years after he returned from Spain and challenged liberal platitudes with what he struggled to see as the sinister truth.

Both scholars inevitably repeat much of the same detail in this man's seven-and-a-half decades of a life spent as what Time magazine a bit clunkily but typically phrased it, in an echo of Dos Passos' own style, a "champion of the individual, an implacable foe of organized Bigness." But, after learning much from a two-time plunge into Dos Passos' life and his career, largely from primary sources well annotated by both professors, one can then return to not only Dos Passos' essays and fiction in print, but an intrepid reader may seek out the other works that languish in the rarely visited holdings of a few libraries today. Dos Passos, as you will agree after these two biographies have been finished, deserves for a full understanding of his defense of the individual against the political machine and the bureaucratic system, a careful study of his many writings, for which Carr and Ludington at least give if not in-depth criticism of their own, then at least a reminder of what awaits the few who delve off the path of conventional thinking from left or right, as he searched for himself.

P.S. See also Stephen Mock's 2005 study of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the break of the two men over the murder by Communists of DP's old friend Jose Robles in 1937.

Ably edited by Townsend Ludington (Boshamer Professor of English and American Studies, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill), Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941 is an 880-page anthology of diverse writings by John Dos Passos. In addition to his powerful work depicting on war, tension, and other crucial portraits of the twentieth-century world, Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941 also collects together under one cover his various essays, letters, and diaries, including those that recall his time as an ambulance driver in World War I. Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916-1941 is a classic resource of unforgettable literature. Also very highly recommended is the companion volume (also edited by Townsend Ludington), John Dos Passos: Novels 1920-1925 (1931082391, $35.00) which features "One Man's Initiation: 1917"; "Three Soldiers"; and "Manhattan Transfer".

I remember that I once asked the author to define postmodernism. The discussion had arisen because I had erroneously thought that the novel was in real danger of being rendered an obsolete form. My mind had conceived hideous scenarios that included best- seller lists being topped by commentary and analysis."Des," so I says, gesticulating rather vaguely at his dissertation, "what's all this about?" His succinct reply went, "To give you a very brief answer, you could say that literary postmodernism [here, you can read this to mean literary theory] is the phenomenon of books about books."

.....for the cognoscenti out there, this may serve as only a most basic and poorly expressed outline of literary theory, but I think that, at least in this instance, we have an example of a book about books that is, in its own right, a real book. The author has set himself some incredibly difficult tasks: to attempt to capture the combinatory essence of Joyce/Freud/Dos Passos as a composite that mirrors the life of the city; to search for the sense of apotheosis/catharsis that lurks only on the periphery of this period of lierature (most of us make do with expanations of mood in a given section of text that has the almost banal effect of a 'you-know-I-mean); and all this to be completed whilst maintaining a suitably academic gravitas(=tone).
Anyway, I'm happy to state that the author has managed to do the above, whilst in addition delivering a real sense of narrative flow (the section that develops the epitaphic in Joyce's work seems particularly convincing) - I hope to see more of his work.

The USA trilogy comprises three books that really read as one continuous story. It tells the tales of numerous individuals as they are buffeted by the currents of history around the early part of the 20th century. The format of the novels is uncoventional: interspersed among the passages about the characters in the book are news headlines, vignettes of historical figures and autobiographical sketches. There is no single plot, and there is no tidy ending for many of the characters

The lives are consumed by the search for money, alcohol and sex. The most passionate people are the lrft-wing activists, who are presented sympathetically in their struggles for the working class. However, despite the exacting detail of the lives of the main players, conspicuously absent - except for brief instances - is love. Without this particular quality, the characters' lives seem purposeless.

This is a monumental work, a great American novel. It is long, and there are many characters and details to remember; however it is well worth the effort to read.

I believe that the USA trilogy presented here (thankfully, under one roof- when I first read it I had to scrounge around for the third book-The Big Money) was the first time that I had read a novel than used the literary devices that the author John Dos Passos used here. Vignettes, bits of poetry, snap biographies, headline banners all are employed here to great effect to both set up the drama of the narrative (such as it is) and interplay between the various characters. Today we are all very familiar with the device; as the modern reader has E.L. Doctorow to rely on to continue this tradition as he has done in his works such as Ragtime and The Book of Daniel. But back then it was rather an unusual and one that today's literary scholars have taken apart piece by piece in their efforts to discount this work as a worthy insight into a slice of Americana in the first third of the 20th century.

The stories here cross between the exploits of the rich (and their wannabes) and the exploitation of poor (and their gonnabes). As is natural in a novel, modern or otherwise, we also have the search for love, the trauma of lost love, the inevitable longings for love and the occasional betrayal of that emotion. We have hustlers (in high and low places), drifters, grifters and midnight shifters. In short, a regular cross-section of the white native and recetn immigrant population of that period. We see them in America and the other noted spots of the period, such as Mexico, Europe and Russia. We see them as political, anti-political, non-political and clueless, wise or broken. In some 1300 pages we get a companion as much as a novel. For those of a certain generation, including this writer's these characters- creative designers, high powered executives, labor organizers, scabs, revolutionaries were types we were at least familiar with from stories in childhood. Well, friends they are back here in this edition. So take your time and get re-introduced to a slice of America that is long gone and ain't coming back.

A short comment on the author- at this period in his life (the 1920's) he was an ardent leftist of some persuasion. (I have asked around but nobody believes that he was actually in the American Communist Party although in Spain in the 1936-37 he was, according to my sources, close to some of the Americans in the International Brigade and wrote some good articles on their exploits and their trials and tribulations.) All this is by way of saying that I think that youthful leftist political slant helped fuel the book and gave it a vitality lacking in some of his latter work when he got old and cranky about politics and became a 'spiritual godfather' for the right wing Young Americans for Freedom in the early 1960's.

I read this as a teenager - big mistake! What a depressing libel on America that never looks at the humanity of the people, the warmth in people's hearts, the successes of the free enterprise system and their open politics. It took me a few years of working for a living to realize how distorted dos Passos' vision was.

Certainly there where injustices in the country at the time but no story purporting to encompass the nation should be so imbalanced. Of course, a harsh look at the insipient fascism of the Wilson administration was prescient (see Goldberg's "Liberal Fascism" for a more sober analysis.)

While there are memorable passages, mostly it was boring if not for the repeated portraits of sleaze and low life. What attracted me to the trilogy was the short piece on Steinmetz, an electrical genius comparable to, but saner than Tesla. Working in real engineering, it was nothing like what the picture dos Passos painted and never could have been.

I can't see recommending anyone wasting their time on these volumes today. Today's leftists would enjoy the reinforcement of their anti-Americanisms but that's like recommending heroin to Percodan addicts.

What does history mean to you? For every college student who has taken an American literature class that covers the early twentieth century, they will come across excerpts of THE USA TRILOGY: 42nd Parallel, 1919, and BIG MONEY. Through out the reading of John Dos Passos' THE USA TRILOGY, this question may penetrate through the mind of each reader that encounters these three books, which were quite innovative during the time in which they were published. This three-volume publication is rich with historical references that pertain to the Civil War, WWI, Industrial Age, and the Russian Revolution. This may be a travel log through Post Modern twentieth century history when writers spontaneously wrote about every bit of observation and engraved them in large volumes of text. Dos Passos was one of those novelists that evolved during the post-WWI age.

Dos Passos wrote about the ever-changing American landscape after World War I that affected the politics as well as the social structure that occurred as a result of the inclusion and exclusion of immigrants that erupted with much nationalistic and xenophobic fervor as well as paranoia. Historians may consider this period in history as the first wave of the Cold War. However, his topics concentrate on the build up of urban development and union formation in the city versus break down of rural and small town constructs of the country. From New York to the coastline of Hampton Roads, Dos Passos covers a wide terrain.

With its experimental poetry and newsreel and newspaper headline layout, the book reads like countless interruptions or intermissions between the narratives. Dos Passos creates a tremendous amount of vivid images that may create a mental picture of the words conveyed in the book. There are splashes of imagery and symbolism that represent the atmosphere in which Dos Passos experienced, which resembles a biographical and bibliographical array of experiences that influenced what he wrote. Therefore, the reading of this fine text takes both an objective and subjective point of view because of its creative nonfiction slant.

Dos Passos' work may be critiqued by literary academics, but speaking from a historical perspective, this set of novels have the history of the early twentieth century in the form of snapshots of the period from narratives that resemble oral histories to commentaries of US history that span from regions divided by the war of the states to the upheaval of the Great Depression. This book is recommended for those who are enticed with US history in the form of a novel. It may take months or a summer to seriously read, but it will be worth the read.

USA is billed as a trilogy, but I defy anyone to read The 42nd Parallel, 1919, or The Big Money as a stand-alone book and come away satisfied that they've read a story. Indeed, it's difficult to milk a plot out of the combination. Dos Passos presents a steady stream of characters throughout the "trilogy" whose paths occasionally cross. But, the interaction of characters doesn't ensure a plotline and USA singularly fails to develop one. What there is instead are sequential experiences of men and women in the early 20th century either battling it out with the evils of capitalism or, far less frequently, riding high upon it's rising tide.

Dos Passos wrote these books while in total thrall with socialism and, not surprisingly, somewhat taken with the communists. Accordingly, he offers a gritty, pessimistic, cynical rendition of America that is more artifice than actual. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find a Dos Passos character making something as mundane as a wise decision. All too often, his creations choose the path that is destined to end in personal tragedy. As the reader, I often felt I was privy to a 1920's version of Jerry Springer with the never ending supply of relentless drunks, STD sufferers, deserters, suicides, serial adulterers, batterers, and child molesters. Interwoven within these character "studies" are abbreviated newreel clips (largely obscure), real-life contemporary bios (well done), and autobiographical stream of consciousness bits that work on some levels, but not on most.

Though there's no doubt that many industrial labor practices of the early 1900's were abhorrent by any reasonable standard, Dos Passos might have preferred our progress thereafter to Solzhenitsyn's gulags. Far less sanguine about the prospects of communism, he undoubtedly would have created a less cynical American novel. Indeed, by 1964 Dos Passos had completed an ideological 180 with his support of Barry Goldwater. Though some may think this a pendulum swing too far, such political nimbleness might explain the strong whiff of subjectivity emanating from his earlier social commentary. 3 stars.

I read this book at the suggestion of my father and I found myself completely immersed in a historical tale of Woodrow Wilson and the war that consumed the world. Dos Passos' writing is spectacular and adept, leaving many indelible images of Wilson and the events at that time in your mind. More than any other, the moment I best remember from this book is the image of Woodrow Wilson, following his speech asking Congress for a Declaration of War. He is sitting at a desk, where he states to his advisor, Colonel House, that he had just asked for the death of thousands of American young men, yet the people cheered his Declaration of War. He then begins to weep. It's images like these that allow this book to remain one of my favorite works on the United States.

John Dos Passos wrote this history of World War One in 1962, and much of it appeals to my nostalgia for the great ideas that were expected to make the world safe for democracy in that century. Dos Passos is sensitive to the progressive issues which were supposed to make politics meaningful to ordinary participants in the process, but the end of the book runs into prohibition, the moralistic attempt to legislate the end of all evils, which produced an economy of booming illegality and immorality on a scale that this book does not attempt to encompass. Wilson's great wish, when the Treaty of Versailles was placed before the Senate, was, as Wilson put it, "The united power of free nations must put a stop to aggression and the world must be given peace . . . It has come about by no plan of our conceiving but by the hand of God who has led us into this way." (p. 483). This is at the beginning of Chapter 24, which is called "The Supremest Tragedy."

President Wilson, somewhere in this book, is asking the people who are talking to him for a continuation of his ideal: please find an American president who can think of the entire world to come after him. He did not mean that American corporations need to acquire the right to see the whole world as booty in their quest for profits. Personal details on how Wilson actually perceived the world include the Wilsons preparing for "the final longdrawn ceremonies of a dinner at the Elysee Palace:" (p. 482):

(When the invitation came from Poincare Wilson flew off the handle. He vowed he would not sit down at table with the swine. It was as if all the resentment of the frustrations suffered in Paris were focussed into hatred of the stubby little President of the French Republic. It was all House and Henry White could do to convince him that not to accept the invitation would cause an international incident. Perhaps Mrs. Wilson had already clinched the matter by getting a special dress for the occasion designed for her by Worth.) (p. 482).

One of the major characters in this book is Teddy Roosevelt, who became President in September 1901 after President William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, in the Temple of Music of the Pan-American Exposition. The assassin declared that he had been inspired by "Emma Goldman who was inciting working people in Chicago to bring about the triumph of right and justice through anarchy. . . . The Chicago police arrested Emma Goldman but the judge turned her loose for lack of evidence. Editorials demanded the deportation of foreign anarchists." (p. 4). This book keeps bringing in T.R. as representative of the politics of these times until he was "too weak to talk." (p. 432). "By Christmas T.R. was thought sufficiently recovered to go home. Two weeks later he died, without a murmur, in his sleep in his own bed at Sagamore Hill." (p. 433). There was a Congressional election campaign shortly before the armistice is 1918. Late in July T.R.'s youngest son, Quentin, "had been shot down fighting a formation of German planes. At first he was listed as missing. Then the Germans reported his death and burial with full honors behind their lines near Cambrai." (p. 432). T.R. made a campaign appearance "in Carnegie Hall, flashing his eyeglasses and clacking his teeth and waving his arms with his legendary zest" (p. 432):

On October 26, before a packed and cheering audience, he hauled the President over the coals for his call for a Democratic Congress. He denounced the arrogance of Wilson's conduct of the war. With his customary combination of wild inflammatory statements and commonsense reasoning he tore the Fourteen points to pieces, crying out that they were shams and would not bring the peace with justice the American people wanted. (T.R. hadn't been able to get Wilson's war away from him: maybe he could carry off the peace.) (p. 432).
Photograph number 25 from 1916 shows a campaign truck with a sign on the front that says:

VOTE FOR WILSON
PEACE WITH HONOR
PROSPERITY
PREPAREDNESS

On the side: WHO KEEPS US OUT OF WAR?

The captions on the photos are brief, as skimpy as subtitles in a silent movie. By 1916, "on the western front the British had lost half a million men and the French nearer two million, with the gain of only an occasional thousand yards of shellpocked mud on the Flanders front." (p. 156). Wilson's Secretary of War, Lindley Garrison, and Assistant Secretary Breckenridge resigned because they favored universal military service while Wilson still thought "that the Administration could not move faster towards military preparation than the people moved." (p. 160). Eight soldiers and eight civilians were killed in Columbus, New Mexico by several hundred men led by Villa on March 9, which was about the size of any problem an American Secretary of War ought to be able to handle, and "Wilson picked a man after his own heart. Newton D. Baker was a progressive reformer and a Wilson man from long before Baltimore. He was reputed to be an ardent pacifist." (p. 161).

There are some exciting descriptions of the war in France and the confusing situation in Russia at that time. Details like "The growth of war exports, without compensating imports, tended to fill the railroad yards in the east with empty freightcars waiting for a westerly load. On top of that the prolonged cold spell froze up locomotives, trapped barges on rivers and canals and increased the nationwide demand for coal and petroleum products." (p. 297). People couldn't use the internet to plan their trips, back then.

Memorial Day was spent reading this 1921 novel, in a battered copy from the back shelves of the Los Angeles Public Library's stacks, where the volume had been, the librarian told me, damaged by the sprinklers set off to quench the great fire that destroyed much of the old building over twenty years ago. This fragile book seemed a casualty of its own, like
its characters, who rush off to the French front only to hurry up and wait. Two of them enter the "Oregon forest," the Argonne campaign, but the assault itself takes up only a few harrowing, nightmarish, disconnected scenes halfway through the narrative.

Dos Passos emphasizes the detachment of his characters from their peaceful or uprooted surroundings. Much of the book roams about the mental landscape of its three protagonists, rather than what happens in terms of action. It conveys more the tedium of bureaucracy and the formation of the conformist, against which the sensitive individual chafes. The five chapters have titles that make sure a reader nearly ninety years ago does not forget what, for us, may be unmistakable concepts. "Making the Mould" follows soldiers as they are processed; "The Metal Cools" shows them in France waiting for mobilization; "Machines" takes them closer to the war; "Rust" follows them after peace is declared; "The World Outside" shows them away from the camp; "Under the Wheels" returns them to military control.

Dos Passos, as biographies by Townsend Ludington and Virginia Spencer Carr (both reviewed by me) document, took his own ambivalence against war as one who volunteered as an ambulance driver to witness it into this novel. It's a young writer's effort, ambitious yet a bit awkward, but if you have read his later sprawling chronicles, the relative compression of scope here may demonstrate how Dos Passos sought to integrate modernist perspectives into a standard "boy goes off to fight" storyline. He sought, perhaps as one of the first successful WWI novels in print-- or still in print-- in America, to show a social mechanism grinding away that "Catch-22" or "Full Metal Jacket" or "Dispatches" would do for future conflicts that pitted people against power. In a time when many still remained optimistic about government, idealism, and the impact of culture upon the masses, Dos Passos sought to warn his audience about the degrading effects of patriotic cant, Christian platitudes, and military hypocrisy.

In "Three Soldiers," Dos Passos' first "mature" work, the coming-of-age stories familiar to early 20c readers mingle with a broader assault on conformity. The author listens to speech and it rings sharply. He watches for fog and shade and sun with his trained eye that looked as a painter would what his soldiers witness and struggle to understand. These themes of ordinary people overwhelmed by the world that appears to loom far above the reach of any of us who wander through it deepened to enrich Dos Passos' most successful novels, "Manhattan Transfer" (reviewed by me) and the USA trilogy, with their author's insistent message of resisting any political creed or organizational system that sought to stamp robots out of, or into, wriggling fragile flesh.

We've all seen films or photographs of the lunar landscapes of WWI, but here, in Dos Passos' evocation, we share the shock of the first glimpse of this to a soldier. He may have seen few if any snapshots or film reels of the battleground. Here's his sudden arrival at the demarcation of the actual frontline.

"As they started down the slope, the trees suddenly broke away and they saw the valley between them full of the glare of guns and the white light of star shells. It was like looking into a stove full of glowing embers. The hillside that sloped away from them was full of crashing detonations and yellow tongues of flame. In a battery near the road, that seemed to crush their skulls each time a gun fired, they could see the dark forms of the artillerymen silhouetted in fantastic attitudes against the intermittent red glare. Stunned and blinded, they kept on marching down the road. It seemed to Chrisfield that they were going to step any minute
into the flaring muzzle of a gun."

The rest of the book, after a few vividly sketched battle vignettes, settles down into post-Armistice routine, as John Andrews, the stand-in for Harvard grad Dos Passos, cultivates his aesthetic eye while grousing at the indignities of mass crowd control and his own chapped sensibility. I found him a familiar type, perhaps fresher in Dos Passos' times than ours. Dos Passos pours most of his effort into this soldier's story, after the battle, but it fails to sustain its vigor, although his youthful restlessness and ambition borrowed from their author appear on the page as genuine and honest. The fault's more with the slow pace, unrelieved by excitement. This may portray a side of military life often left out of books, but it's dull.

As "a sort of socialist," Andrews hates "the psychology of slavery," although he must mutter this more than mouth it, for fear of a court-martial. Later in the novel, he and his fellows must face the courage of his convictions. Rumors of uprisings in Paris contend against punishment labor battalions and fates of deserters. From the vantage point of a fresh Soviet revolution, some of his fellow soldiers whisper their hopes for a Communist future; Dos Passos' registers their yearnings but his characteristic caution at any utopia peddled can also be sensed, despite his own radical yearnings at this time.

It's all described well, yet often repetitively. Conversations in one bar after another. Smells of food and rain and sludge. Dappled leaves alternate with mud and grease. Andrews' endemic ennui does drag long sections down after he recovers from a shrapnel wound and heads off to study in Paris. Here's a representative excerpt, as Andrews waits.

"There were other buglers. He wondered how many buglers there were in the army. He could picture them all, in dirty little villages, in stone barracks, in towns, in great camps that served the country for miles with rows of black warehouses and narrow barrack buildings standing with their feet a little apart; giving their little brass bugles a preliminary tap before putting out their cheeks and blowing in them and stealing a million and a half (or was it two million or three million) lives, and throwing the warm sentient bodies into coarse automatons who must be kept busy, lest they grow restive, till killing time began again."

The first up facing the bugle, Fuselli, from San Francisco, begins "Three Soldiers" to complete the trio, two coastal men and the Midwesterner representing a cross-section of America. Fuselli's swerve away from marching off to the front to putting in for an instant transfer to a post well behind the lines confused me. Perhaps Dos Passos meant to convey the inexplicable split-second decision made by a man under pressure, but without any prior preparation for this, Fuselli's ambition to rise in the ranks kept puzzling me, as he'd not shown any aversion to seeking out combat previously. He does show up briefly a couple hundred pages later, after falling out of favor during a battle, but this is left rather vague, via a quick conversation with Andrews, by now on "school detachment" at the Sorbonne.

Unlike Fuselli, but like Andrews, the other soldier enters the novel as a Casual (like Dos Passos himself), suited not for the regular Army. He and Andrews wait to be shipped off; Fuselli has been, but vanishes from much of the novel's middle sections. Chrisfield, a Hoosier farm boy, is jittery and brittle, but due more to his hair-trigger temperament rather than any reveries, as his pal "Andy" is prone to fall into, about a fin-de-siecle Queen of Sheba voluptuary's embrace. These earn prose recalling Stephen Dedalus' contemplations, minus the religion or the guilt. Andrews' vision of the France he finds is filtered through Flaubert. He falls for Jeanne, and stays in Paris to master piano.

"Chris" gets into scraps and he represents one of the common men with whom New York City-raised Andrews learns to deal with, however uneasily. They both wander, together and separately, into cafes, brothels, fields, and cities. Eventually, Chrisfield fades and Andrews continues largely on his own through the rest of the novel. The scenes stay simply composed, but remain attentively rendered in clear prose. It's the author's style, more than the often mundane plot, which keeps you intermittently involved. There's a welcome arrival or threat of military intervention that carries you with a bit more pep through the final chapter.

Dos Passos always faced critics who faulted him with treating his characters more as pieces to be manipulated than rounded figures. I welcome novelists who double as historians, taletellers who tend towards sociology, but those expecting more visceral tension and manufactured bouts may be disappointed by a conflict novel that tends to stay away from the thunder. Dos Passos sides with those who struggle against donning the uniform, who scrabble against the clanking ranks and file clerks. You can see in this early novel that his habitual manner of setting down his stories as social commentary more than psychological exploration remains, nonetheless, his characteristic approach as a writer, take it or leave it.

John Dos Passos was the son of a Chicago attorney. He was born in 1894 living until 1970. He is most famous for his "USA Trilogy" and "Manhatten Transfer." The work under review is "Three Soldiers" set in the waning months and early years following World War I. It concerns:
1. Dan Fusseli a poor uneducated Italian-American from San Francisco who dreams of becoming a corporal, winning the hand of the girl back home and fighting the Germans. He realizes none of these modest goals.
2. Chris Chrisfield is a farmer from rural Indiana who murders a mean sergeant named Anderson. He deserts the American army following the war while stationed in Paris. He often dreams he is back home again in Indiana.
3. John Andrews like author Dos Passos is a Harvard graduate. He is a musician who is bored by the deadly mindless tedium of the army. He also deserts the army, meets a sophisticated Parisian woman and falls in love with a French barmaid. He is captured on the last page of the novel facing at least 20 years in Leavenworth for desertion.
It is manifest that Dos Passos has used the three main characters to represent the different geographical regions of the United States. The characters differ in their educational levels. All three musketeers become very disillusioned with America, the US Army and the government.
These characters mirror Dos Passos's hatred of war which he developed while serving a brief time in France during the war. At this time he was also infatuated with communism and the radical left wing of the political spectrum. The book reminds me of TS Eliot's "Wasteland" poem put into no-nonesense prose by the Harvard Midwestern author.
There is little plot development in the novel. Anyone expecting to read of World War I combat will be disappointed since no battle scenes are given. The regiment in the story does not get a chance to participate in the gory battles of that horrendous war.
Dos Passos is good at vivid descriptions and the inner feelings of his characters. We sense the boredom, fatigue and war weariness of the men involved. There is quite a lot of profanity for a book written in 1921. The book is realistic in its depiction men at war. I gave the book five stars since it does have a strong antiwar focus and deserves a wider readership. The novel could be well used in a classroom setting focused on World War I.

John Dos Passos was one of the few to tackle all these themes in one work, the gigantic USA. In Three Soldiers, an early novel set during the war before Weimar, he draws on personal experience to capture the clackety-clack of the war-machine. As in his masterwork, he uses popular song and bittersweet evocations of innocent youth in the face of ruthless power to trace the breaking of young men's dreams. With his elaborate narrative structures and seemingly effortless prose he shows that it is not just war that requires the suppression of liberty but modern industrial society too. But unlike the greatest first world war novel Journey To The End Of The Night there are signposts here of socialist paths that led far away from dystopia.

The three soldiers to whom the title refers are Dan Fuselli, a working class Italian-American from San Francisco, "Chris" Chrisfield, an Indiana farm-boy, and John Andrews, from New York, the novel's main protagonist. All three went into the U.S. Army during the first world war and met during basic training. While Fuselli's big dream is to become a corporal and Chris just wants to get to the front to kill German soldiers, Andrews wants to become an accomplished musician and composer. Andrews is by no means a coward and does not shirk combat, but after the armistice is declared he has great difficulty taking orders from his superiors. As Andrews tells his French girlfriend, "every order shouted at me, every new humiliation before the authorities, was as great an agony to me." Andrews had managed to get permission from an officer for a School Detachment, which meant that he would be allowed to study music. He, instead, proceeds in a series of inexplicable misbehaviors to throw it all away.

_Three Soldiers_ is a colorfully written and probably fairly accurate study of various men's reactions to military life and the kind of discipline and regimentation inherent in that type of life. While many found it difficult to adjust to what they saw as a form of slavery, some of these soldiers chose to desert, believing they could eventually blend in with the civilian population on the European continent. Finding a French woman to marry seemed an easy solution. John Andrews was an intelligent, sensitive, well-educated and sophisticated young man. He even spoke French fluently. That he so capriciously chose the path that he did made absolutely no sense to me at all in this otherwise gripping and likable novel.

To read this novel as a war novel is a mistake. World War I is mearly the canvas upon which Dos Passos paints his story. If individuals have a responsibility to their government, what responsibility does that same individual have to his/her own conscience? "Three Soldiers" attempts to answer this question. As with most great works of literature, the story can be read on two levels.

At the surface you have the stories of three men with different desires of who and what they want to be. There is a theme of Socialism and anti-war here as well. It's a good story at the surface level. What makes this novel great, however, is that there is an underlying message here, wrought with symbolism. It's the study of the awakening of the individual and the choices he (John Andrews) makes. It's a study of moral courage in the face of insurmountable odds.

John Andrews (the central character) initially joins the army out of a sense of duty, then begins to recognize how he has been stripped of all who he was and has begun to conform to the "machine" of society. Disgusted, he takes his first tentative steps back toward who he really is at heart. The moment of epiphany comes when, after having been wounded and waking up in a make-shift hospital surrounded by busts of great men of the past, he decides that he must make his stand to change the world in what ever way he can just like the men represented in the busts above him did. His choices eventually drive him to desert the army while in Paris. The real choice comes near the end of the novel when he is presented the opportunity to return to the army with no consequence to his prior desertion. (I won't ruin the ending for you!)

There is a strong element of socialist propoganda in the novel. I am no more a socialist than I am a horse, but the reader should remember that this novel was written before the failings of socialism were widely known. It was a much more idealisic time and the evils and harshness of socialism had yet to be realized. The socialist element of the novel need not deter the reader from the true message: the courage and triumph of individual freedom.

At the risk of pointing out the obvious, none of the featured reviewers on Amazon's page for this novel mention the seemingly most obvious point about Dos Passos' style, which is that it's heavily influenced by Jazz rhythms and structures in its cutting between different characters and different points in time to flesh out and vary basic themes. The occasional interruptions by random characters echo the way a soloist seizes on elements or variations of a musical phrase to lend depth and context to an entire piece.

I realize this is all pretty pedestrian: after all, it's New York in the mid-20s, duh. However, some of the reviewers make the novel sound almost like proto nouveau-roman, which seems to me to be both little unfair, and also to make the novel sound a lot more confusing and difficult than it actually is.

In fact, I think an ordinary modern reader consciously or subconsciously familiar with musical and cinematic structures and techniques will have no great trouble understanding what Dos Passos is doing.

Manhattan Transfer is a subway ride through New York - both across its geographic landscape - a burgeoning metropolis, the heart of the American economy; but also, slums, dark alleys and industrial wasteland. Likewise it is a ride across the ethnic and social landscape - self-made men, fatcats, bored bourgeois bohemians and anarchists, destitute immigrants, ambitious chorus girls, and washed up stock brokers.

Dos Passsos's book is like a running paragraph that only briefly stops to take us from one sub-scape to another - his voyeuristic way of relating the social current of WWI and 1920's New York to the everyday lives of people, many of whom are caught up in that current. Dos Passos does not quite uncover any new ground or dig deep into any one point - he covers a lot of ground - there is a sense of equilibrium one gets from reading his prose. Just a few just-below the surface issues he tackles are the budding concerns of untested feminism, the moral puritanism of the Prohibition; less oblique are the issues of unfettered capitalism.

Indisputably, Dos Passos's ability to weave in and out of lives while weaving the tapestry of an exciting period in NY and America is admirable. Still, there is an aloofness in a book whose characters are less important to the story than the social forces that encompass them. With no one to anchor the story (despite some possible tenable arguments for the recurring characters), the story just keeps floating along. It doesn't have to end after 400 pages, it can run on ad infinitum.

'Manhattan Transfer' is certainly a curious read. It contains dozens of interwoven threads of people living in New York during World War I. Many of these threads are utterly forgettable, some are quite interesting. What makes 'Manhattan Transfer' so interesting is the narrative (..Dos Passos really captures the vernacular of locals) and the historical perspective; New York of 1918 is much different than it is today. So while certainly not for everyone, 'Manhattan Transfer' is a worthy diversion for those tired of fiction found on supermarket shelves.


Bottom line: less ambitious than his more famous 'USA Trilogy', Dos Passos is in fine form with his earlier work 'Manhattan Transfer'. Recommended.

Yes, a five-star book compared to most of them, but compared to "USA," this novel's a warm-up, between 3 & 4 stars, rounded up for innovation if not poise. In the start of each chapter you get marvelous, miniature modernist riffs, reminding me of saxophones, Carl Sandburg, Whitman, and Joyce (he loves those runoncompounds too); these anticipate the "Camera Eye" vignettes that would enrich "USA"'s own prose concoctions. Jimmy Derf (some surname) and Ellen Oglethorpe emerge at the end as the two main characters; others come and go much like life itself--the central figure is not one human but a cast of millions. As an urban reporter here, Dos Passos excels at capturing the snatches of dialogue, smells of the bums, grit of the air (it's rare that nature itself is shown as less than threatening, when it's evident at all), and shouts and noise that, then as now, relentlessly hums and pounds along Manhattan's streets. It's naturalism combined with realism.

Since "USA" for all its flaws is one of my favorite novels, I wanted to compare "MT." The pace is very quick: I read this in three sittings, one per main section. What still seems innovative eight decades later is Dos Passos' ability to skip forward within a dialogue to show how the minutes pass even as the characters are speaking--you hear enough to understand that moment, but the next line may be a half hour later into the situation or scene or action. This "jump-cut" characteristic becomes a bit maddening at times, as it does in cinema, but technically it's fun to watch! This adds to the filmic parallels that flow through "MT," which keeps the clips coming much as a well-edited docudrama might pull off.

After 9/11, some readers of the opening pages of "Moby Dick" noticed headlines of "war in Afghanistan" and the like that seemed to presage the current turmoil, 150 years before. Towards the end of "MT," my eye lingered as I re-read this paragraph: from a failed con-man talking to a slick lawyer: "I happen to know from a secret and reliable source that there is a subversive plot among undesirable elements in this country...Good God think of the Wall Street bomb outrage...I must say that the attitude of the press has been gratifying in one respect...in fact we're approaching a national unity undreamed of before the war." (part 3. ch. 1)

Dos Passos rarely lets his characters stand still and think things through. They try, but there's always someone bursting through the door, or buttonholing them on the street, or the danger, in one dramatic case, of daydreaming leading to disaster. He captures the frenetic speed demanded by NYC, and 20c city life, in this chronicle of a couple of handfuls of characters drawn to the bright lights, and the indifference of the city towards their ambitions and schemes. It's not uplifting or casual reading, but for an immersion into the sensations that ran through and past those who grew up from about 1900-1925, this novel, while uneven, captures what it must have been like for the latest generation who thought they were the first to invent novelty, encounter licentiousness, or concoct flim-flam and skulk around in deceit and skulduggery. Homosexuality, racism, injustice, bootlegging, protest, complacency, war-fever, and rags-to-riches and back down: all these color and vivify the portrayals of the few who stand for millions more in Manhattan.

The slang may have changed since then, and the buildings have grown higher, but the people, even though they are more types than rounded (with the exception of about half-a-dozen who endure through most of the novel)--they are the kinds of figures you can still encounter today on any crowded street.

Manhattan Transfer's plot is a series of interwoven stories that span several generations of interconnected lives in early twentieth-century New York City. The most appealing element of the book is Dos Passos's beatifully poetic descriptive prose. The mini-plots are a bit over-contrived and difficult to follow; he assigns them less attention and care than his descriptions of the city itself, but this is his intention. As a reader, I felt no emotional connection to any of the (many) characters I met; I did, however, feel a deep attachment to the city. It is an organic being in Dos Passos's cosmology--it is in fact the book's protagonist, almost as though it's the city's growth we're meant to be charting through the decades and its relationships with its inhabitants, rather than vice versa. His use of verbs is brilliant and rather unique: the city "breathes," it "sweats," it "sighs"; it is alive. As a book lover, you'll appreciate the language, and as a New Yorker, you simply can't not read this novel.

and they shall reap the whirlwind."


"Breaking Point: Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles" is Stephen Koch's excellent examination of the destruction of the friendship between American writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos during the Spanish Civil War. The Spanish Civil War served as a crucible on which many relationships (between people and between people and their ideology) were either forged or broken. In the case of Dos Passos and Hemingway once they entered the political whirlwind of the Spanish Civil War that friendship was irretrievably fractured.

It is not well-remembered that, at the height of his fame, Dos Passos was placed on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) had been enormous successes. By the time Volume III, "The Big Money", was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos, he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend, anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles, apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Dos Passos reports that he told Hemingway that "the question I keep putting to myself is what's the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?" Hemingway replied "civil liberties, [__ _ _ ]. Are you with us or against us?" It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy.


The Civil War proved to be the point in time during the first half of the 20th-century at which many intellectuals and artists (literary and otherwise) of the left had to face an apparent conflict between their personal sense of morality and their ideology. Until the Civil War the various factions of the European and U.S. left seemed to live together (with the exception of post-revolutionary Russia) in a fractious and far from symbiotic relationship. However the Civil War transformed what had merely been a dysfunctional relationship among various Marxist groups, anarchists, and socialists into one that was physically dangerous and fratricidal. Although Koch's "Breaking Point" focuses on the relationship between Dos Passos and Hemingway (and Dos Passos and Robles) the story also paints a broader picture of a time and place where many intellectuals and artists (literary or otherwise) on the left had to face an apparent conflict between their personal sense of morality and the socio-political imperatives of their ideology. Orwell and Dos Passos resolved this conflict on the side of their personal morality. Others were not so well-inclined. "Breaking Point" paints a vivid picture of the life of the 'intelligentsia' in the crucible that was Spain.

Koch provides the reader with background information on the friendship between Dos Passos and Robles and between Dos Passos and Hemingway. This background also provides the literary and political milieu in which Dos Passos, Hemingway and their contemporaries operated. Koch does not paint a flattering picture of Hemingway. He comes across (rightly I might add) as a raging bully tormented by a lethal combination of arrogance and insecurity. This arrogance and bullying shows up in stark terms once the story moves to Hemingway's and Dos Passos' time in Spain reporting on the War. Dos Passos is confounded and depressed by the murderous political intrigue while Hemingway adopts his typical macho "war is war" posture and doesn't appear to give these horrors a second thought. Hemingway's arrogance and bullying is not news to be sure but it is always worth being reminded that there is no correlation between great talent and a pleasing personality. In fact, to the extent there is a correlation it is just as likely to be an inverse rather than direct one. Dos Passos, though treated better by Koch, does not come across as a hero either. Rather, there seems to be an indecisive, almost Hamlet-like aura to him and his ongoing inability to stand up to Hemingway's verbal and psychological onslaughts. Nevertheless, it is clear that Dos Passos had, like Orwell, a keener, far less naïve eye when it came to the political in-fighting that did as much damage to the Republican cause as Franco (and Hitler's and Mussolini's) bombs. Hemingway was a political naif who had neither the time nor inclination to question Stalin's and the Comintern's murderous intrigues in Spain. In many respect's Hemingway fit Lenin's definition of a "useful idiot" to a t.

"Breaking Point" is an excellent political and literary biography. It is well worth reading.

I was thrilled to read this book. As a young man, my first reaction when I read the early Hemingway was literary enthusiasm, an enthusiasm that waned as I matured. I also have been ambivalent about Dos Passos. I was never quite convinced by the official story that Dos Passos' writing got progressively worse as his politics did too. I have read the late Dos Passos and the early Dos Passos. Whatever "changed" about his work to justify condemning the later works to oblivion while keeping the early works in print was lost by me - the late Dos Passos was as good a writer as the early Dos Passos.

This book filled in a lot of gaps and lacunae in my own understanding of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the 1930s. It should be noted that for many decades there was an official story about Spain, America, and communism in the 1930s. In the official story, the Spanish civil war was a real war fought to win between the leftist republicans (the good guys) and the fascists of Franco (the bad guys) and in the end the bad guys won.

The fall of the Soviet Union has turned the official story on its head, but only for those who have paid attention. Anyone unfamiliar with this change in our historical understanding of the nature of the role of the Soviet-Stalinist machine in the US, Spain, and elsewhere should review the "annals of communism" series published by Yale.

In general Koch makes a good case as a detective, putting forth a plausible hypothesis that fits the the post-soviet facts. Koch's argument is consistent with what we now understand the situation in Spain in 1936 to be. I found nothing Koch says about Hemingway or Dos Passos that is inconsistent with what I already knew about these two and their relationship. And Koch hangs all the facts together in a fun, vulgar, cheap, pot-boiler, pulp fiction style that actually makes it fun.

What I find amazing are the reactions other readers have had to this book on Amazon. They range from the enthusiastic (like me), to those who find Koch's style awful, to those who are upset by either Koch's post-soviet notion of the history of communism, Spain and America in the 1930s or by Koch's depiction of particular people, most notably, Hemingway. Koch is not a bad writer. But he has written this book in a rather crass, tabloid style that, in my mind, fits the material of his story perfectly. Heavily footnoted, academic prose would have suffocated the story Koch is telling. Instead, we get a chummy narrator who cajoles, contradicts himself, back tracks, and then sets the record straight. It is all quite entertaining and easy to read. If you want the footnotes, they are in the back of the book, and should be consulted in due course. As I mention above, some people have difficulty believing that Stalin was able to play the world as we now know he did. Everyone got played. Hemingway the least of them.
As for Koch's depiction of Hemingway, there is nothing outrageously new here for anyone who has ever done any sort of real research into Hemingway. Hemingway changed women like he changed underwear. Hemingway was drunk most of the time. Hemingway had a peculiar moral compass that placed great importance on personal bravado and acts of courage. Hemingway was a politically uncommitted, largely disengaged, and easily influenced by the times. Hemingway had the ego of a rock star. And now we know, Hemingway, like dozens of others of his generation, got played by the Stalinists. Is any of this controversial? And yes, To Have and Have Not was a cut-and-paste job. Who can fault Koch for opining that the book was trash?

For me, Koch's story does what every good piece of non-fiction should do - send me to the end notes to find out what books to read next.

A very nice read, with much feeling for the atmosphere of the period. However, Stephen Koch has written a book halfway between fiction and non-fiction, and it is too often unclear where fact ends and fantasy begins. In many cases historical facts are presented incorrect. This is especially problematic where negative qualifications of (at the time) living persons are given without a shade of proof. A small example, is his qualification of Joris Ivens's Dutch cameraman John Fernhout (in the USA known as filmmaker John Ferno) as a 'Comintern-apparatchik' (page 62). On the basis of the available archive material in the Netherlands and the USA there is no reason whatsoever to assume that Fernhout had anything to do with the Comintern. Never in any research about Dutch persons and their connections with the Comintern or Soviet-services did Fernhouts name turn up. He is mainly remembered as, well, Ivens's cameraman, and as the filmmaker in the household of Crownprinces Juliana of Holland during her exile in Canada in Woldwar II. In Stephen Kochs book, Fernhout is just one of many people who are called Comintern agents rather rashly.
The main matter I would like to adress is Stephen Kochs verdict on Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who is one of the main characters in his book. The author says Ivens was a 'Comintern agent' and 'Comintern apparatchik'. It is fair to admit that Ivens's position was a lot more complicated than that of others. Stephen Koch writes himself that his judgement on Ivens is based on my book 'Living Dangerously. A Biography of Joris Ivens'. But I never used the term 'Comintern agent'.
There is no doubt about the fact that Ivens was a member of the Dutch communist party at the time, and that in the thirties he was in almost permanent contact about his filmwork with communist and Comintern organisations. Unfortunately Stephen Koch does not define what a Comintern agent is, but I would suggest that such an agent was at least
1) Not free to do what he liked. Defecting or disobedient agents were liquidated or called back to Moscow and never heard of again.
2) He would have some serious secret mission.
I have called Ivens a freelance communist. In my view he was one even as a partymember. He was completely loyal to party politics, but nevertheless remained largely independent at an organisational level. The relationship between Ivens and Comintern organisations was one of consultation between two parties rather than one of giving or receiving orders. An obvious exception was his work at Meshrabpom Studios in Moscow - a studio that was part of the Comintern apparatus - where he was an employee before he went to the United States.
As for the secrets, in Spain Ernest Hemingway was fully aware of the fact that Ivens was a card carrying communist. John Dos Passos knew that he was an unconditional admirer of the Soviet Union well before they departed for Europe (Ivens's views were apparent even from his public speeches in the USA). It was clear from the beginning that Joris Ivens would be the director of their film 'Spanish Earth' and would thus have a decisive say.
The secret mission from Moscow that Stephen Koch suggests is: Ivens came to destroy the literary avant-garde of which John Dos Passos was considered the main representative in the US. For this reason Ivens was supposed to stir up contradictions between Hemingway and Dos Passos. This theory is a red line through Stephen Kochs book, but in my view this is mere speculation and hardly realistic. Such a plot would have been contrary to communist policies of the time: every Western artist, modern or old-fashioned, was hailed by the communists as long as he or she sympathized with practical communist policy. In general I don't believe in, and see no proof for, the suggestion that Ivens's doings connected to Hemingway and Dos Passos were concocted on forehand since 1936 or even earlier.

Koch is the author of one of the most interesting books of modern criticism, STARGAZER, one of the first books to take Andy Warhol seriously, so in my book he may be forgiven many sins, but THE BREAKING POINT is pretty bad.

As history, who knows? I can't believe all the things he dishes out about the power of the Politburo to enforce the Popular Front and its supposed hegemony of US culture. And his condemnation of the filmmakers who made THE SPANISH EARTH is just unpleasant. Ivens was no Soviet agent, he was a committed documentarian. (That's not to say that THE SPANISH EARTH isn't a boring piece of schlock.) What sets Koch apart from other writers, however, is his incessant banality as a writer, as a stylist. He is incapable of writing a single sentence without committing some go for broke solecism. He will set your teeth on edge from page one, right from the moment you discover that he plans to refer to his two protagonists as "Hem" and "Dos" all through the text, thus stripping them even of the dignity of their names. (Martha Gellhorn becomes "the Girl.")

His rib poking gets painful around page 9 or 10. Yes, Dos Passos is great, but not for the reasons Koch cites. And despite what Koch asserts, without argument, TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT and THE FIFTH COLUMN are not bad books. They are indeed among the most interesting US novels and plays of the last century. Koch is like a novelist attempting to enliven history with a novelist's little tricks, gleaned from the WRITERS DIGEST. Get right in there, focus on your characters, make them quirky, show what they're drinking and wearing. Imagine their thoughts. Tell us what they're thinking. Make one an angel, the other a devil, that way the reader will be able to distinguish them. Well, I loved STARGAZER but this one's for the birds.

This book is absolutely important for people interested specially in the following topics: Spain, 20th century history, communism, literature (Dos Passos, Hemingway), politics, and modern history in general. It is recommendable for any book reader also because it is masterfully written. Like a detective story, the author has done a tremendous work of investigation.

By the way, this follows Stephen Koch's previous work "Double Lives", which is, I believe, the "intellectual father" of this new book, since they are very related.

There is much to be amazed of, much to learn about, in this story. The role of the Soviet Commintern in world politics and its consequences in our social lives is something that I can't stop being amazed at. How they handled people, propaganda, ideas, and changed evil into good and viceversa in (mostly) everybody's minds deserves more attention from us, the people, so we don't go through the same story again.

There are three contending sides in this political/criminal story: the communists (aka Stalinists) and their servants (propagandists, artists, hit-men), the independents (non-stalinist communists, anarchists, and other revolutionaries), and the vanity fair people (rich, stupid, intellectual and irresponsible fellows who lent their names to one or the other side of the battle that caused the lives of many REAL working-class people. This book is a good incentive to pause and reflect upon the miseries that many irresponsible self-called intellectuals have caused on us, common folk. They never fought, they never risked their lives, but they helped to provoke (and still do) the wars and dictatorships of the 20th century immensely. From Marx (who never met a factory worker in his rascal life) to Picasso, Garcia Marquez, Hemingway, Dos Passos, Hammett, Orwell, even Einstein or Delano Roosevelt, were practically puppets in the hands of the soviet agenda.

Here we have the Stalinists (Commintern) killing thousands of anti-fascists and saying they were fascists, and at the same time pacting with the nazis in Germany in order to share Europe between the two countries. And everybody believed it! But what this book is about is not so much the big picture, but the involvement of some of its most relevant artistic protagonists. We deal here with very personal and human stories.

Jesus was right, you mustn't hate your enemies, you must love them.If you go out looking for enemies, whether it is "the rich" or the "Jews", you may find him where you never thought: in your own side. Robles looked for enemies among the rich in Spain (paradoxically, he was one of them), took sides with those he thought were the "good" side against those he thought were the "fascist" side; well, he got himself his due reward.

Or also:
"Judge not, that you be not judged." Matt. 7:1 (Robles judged wrong)

This is a review of the Mariner paperback edition, published by Houghton Mifflin. The U.S.A. trilogy is wonderful, and Dos Passos' seemingly artless style--it's as if each of the many characters whose fates he intertwines has written his or her story as a chatty, intimate letter and Dos Passos has simply edited them lightly--fairly sweeps you along. BUT don't buy this edition! The covers are beautifully designed, but these volumes contain a scandalous number of typographical errors. The proofreader, if there was one, was clearly asleep on the job.

Those words, written by John Dos Passos while serving as a Red Cross Ambulance Driver during the First World War, provide the underlying theme for "1919", Volume II of Dos Passos' "USA Trilogy".

Dos Passos is one of the (now) lesser known literary giants of the first half of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. By the time Volume III (The Big Money) was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell, made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Dos Passos reports that he told Hemingway that "the question I keep putting to myself is what's the use of fighting a war for civil liberties, if you destroy civil liberties in the process?" Hemingway replied "civil liberties, [__ _ _ ]. Are you with us or against us?" It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy.

1919 takes up where "42nd Parallel" left off. President Wilson, despite his 1916 campaign slogan "He kept us out of War" had taken the United States to war against Germany in 1917. Many of the characters found in 42nd Parallel, including Eleanor Stoddard, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eveline Hutchins, and Joe Williams find their to France. Along with a few new characters, their lives intersect and divert throughout the war and the subsequent peace talks at Versailles. With the exception of J. War Moorehouse these are all relatively `little people' who have no real influence on the course of events but who simply must endure them.

In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, 1919 is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times. The writing is terse and enjoyable. The highlights of the book for me were his biographical sketches. His mini-biography of Woodrow Wilson ("Meester Vilson"), J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt and Joe Hill say more about those men than many full length biographies. His closing biography, of the Unknown Soldier ("The Body of an American") picked from among the unidentified American casualties of the war,is a beautiful, politically charged piece of writing."

The use of the Camera Eye, biographies, and newsreels create a literary mosaic that leaves the reader feeling he is in the middle of a multi-media experience within the confines of a book. Later generations of writers have adopted this technique to great success. E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime is a case in point. (Doctorow wrote an appreciative foreword to this edition.)

1919 is a worthy successor to 42nd Parallel that leaves this 21st-century reader with a feeling that he had stepped back almost 100 years to a different time and place in American history. I would only note that his book will not be appreciated unless one has read "42nd Parallel". It is an investment in time that no reader with an interest in political (or politicized) fiction will regret making.

This is a great book - arguably the best of the trilogy, although it should be said that none of these books really stands on its own; U.S.A. is a single book in three volumes. Compared to other versions of Dos Passos, Mariner's quality paperback editions leave a great deal to be desired. Even the Signet mass markets featured the original Reginald Marsh illustrations, which add a great deal of texture to the experience of reading the novel. I don't know why they weren't included here. Their absence almost feels pretentious, part of a general move toward the more respectable, 'literary' QP format, after Signet's humbler, plebian MMs. Moreover, Mariner's 1919 is littered with printing errors, sometimes two or three in a paragraph. Given the fragmented nature of [much of] Dos Passos's text to begin with, Mariner's contribution of spelling mistakes and other typos can make a conscientious reader feel paranoid. Read the book, but seek out another edition.

I was prompted to read this book (and many others by the author) by an Amazon.com reviewer of Norman Mailer's 'The Naked and the Dead.' The reviewer completely trashed the Mailer World War II book, which I always believed was as good a war novel that had ever been written. The 'Naked and the Dead' was a groundbreaker in many ways, and set the tone for his great literary career that has ultimately had some ups and admittable downs. The reviewer said that if I want to see some 'real writing', to read John Dos Passos.

So in a way, this is more for the reviewer than anyone else. Even with all the interesting bells and whistles (the use of newsreels in the form of verse and even bleeping out his own cursewords, s______t or f________g, gee what are we three years old now!), '1919' is an outright snorefest. I challenge you to get past the first twnty pages without hitting your head as you fall down in despairing boredom. Please, do all of yourselves a favor and stick with the real deal, Norman Mailer.

After reading and greatly enjoying the first volume (The 42nd Parallel) in Dos Passos' acclaimed "USA trilogy", I quickly moved on to this next volume. Picking up where that one left off, it takes the reader from America's entry in World War I through the end of the war. As with "The 42nd Parallel", this is done by following several characters through the war era, interspersed with Dos Passos' experiment modernist sequences "The Camera Eye" and "Newsreel." (These are kind of abstract prose collages or montages comprised of headlines, snatched phrases of songs, news clippings, and random phrases -- presumably intended to convey some of the mood and seeming frenetic pace of the time. At the time they might have seemed startling and striking, however to me they muddy up what is already a wide-ranging and complex narrative.) There are also sketches of major figures, such as Woodrow Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, Joe Hill, J.P. Morgan, and the Unknown Soldier, which are miniature masterpieces of biography.

Unfortunately, while that first book was a revelation, I found this one exceedingly tedious. Dos Passos' antiwar sentiment is so strong and vociferous throughout the book that it lacks the range of the first book and settles into a more or less repetitive rut. While it's certainly instructive to see how almost a century ago, a nation could be easily seduced by manufactured patriotism, Dos Passos' take is so decidedly ideological that he masks some of the complexities of the situation. His bitter cynicism about it all -- which, to be fair, was hard won through his ambulance duty on the Western Front -- results in a very negative novel, in which all relationships are a failure, all promises broken, all politics corrupt, and even those who mean well are rendered ineffective by larger forces.

The book introduces a new set of characters, including a sailor, a poet, a Jewish radical, a small-town Texas woman, and a preacher's daughter. However, for some reason, their tales aren't nearly as compelling as those in "The 42nd Parallel." While this may be because they are overshadowed by the war, it doesn't help that many characters from that earlier book turn up in France to steal a good deal of the narrative thunder. In any event, what was exciting about the first book is decidedly less so here, and I don't think I'll move on to complete the trilogy -- at least not any time soon.

The first three decades of the twentieth century in the United States were pivotal in defining what, eventually, the nation would become. At the turn of the century the country was just beginning to find its feet on the world geopolitical scene, ceding power to the colonial powers of Europe but maintaining a dogged independence. A mere thirty years later the United States had not only risen to share world power but dared become a leader on the world stage as the country's wealth, ingenuity, and exportable culture transformed this former isolated nation. This transformation was not lost on John Dos Passos; neither was the importance of history in defining those qualities that became amalgamated and distilled into what is commonly known as national character.

To underscore the importance of these three decades, Dos Passos spent over six years in researching and writing what was to become his materpiece, The USA Trilogy. In these three novels, the author experimented with various narrative techniques combining traditonal story telling; stream of consciousness writing (The Camera Eye sections); biographies of important contemporary persons; clippings from newspapers; snatches of popular songs; advertisements, etc., that created a well definied historical foundation for the events and characters of his novels. Overall, the author was successful in his effort: seldom has history been so well understood by a writer of fiction. The reader not only shares the lives of Dos Passsos' characters but is fully immersed in the politics, culture and economic upheavals of those eras.

Seen as a whole, the trilogy is powerful; however, when the three novels are examined separately as individual works, weaknesses that were camouflaged by the success of the overall scheme are made manifest. The Big Money is the last and worst of the three parts. It seems that the author began to weary as he reached the end of his effort. Dos Passos spends less attention to the Camera Eye sections and biographies (by far, the best two areas of the trilogy) and spends the majority of his attention on developing and bringing to a conclusion the lives of his characters, some of whom have been present in every novel of the trilogy. His attempts at characterization were not successful and his characters come across as wooden caricatures, blindly following the plot from one episode to another, never giving any insight into what motivates them (with the possible exception of the pathetic Mary French). The reader just doesn't care for or about them. Also, perhaps Dos Passos was going through a sort of political catharsis himself and perhaps this added to the malaise and hastiness that is evident in this final novel. The darling of the American left would eventually become an avid backer of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. Four stars for the trilogy, three stars for The Big Money.

So says John Dos Passos in `The Big Money", Volume III of his USA Trilogy. Just as Benjamin Disraeli saw two nations in mid-19th century Britain ("who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws...the rich and the poor"), John Dos Passos saw two nations in the United States in the roaring 1920s.

Dos Passos is one of the (sadly lesser known literary giants of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) were enormous successes. By the time "The Big Money" was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Hemingway's friends and most of the hard left literary community joined in. It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. Unlike Orwell, whose fame and reputation survived and grew after his Spanish Civil War experience, Dos Passos slowly fell out of the public eye. That fate is a shame when one considers the enormous energy and creativity that went into the USA Trilogy.

The idea of two paralel nations, one for the rich and their minions and one for the huddled masses, provides substance to Dos Passos' unique multi-media structure. In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, The Big Money is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches (The Camera Eye) in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times.

The key fictional characters in "The Big Money" are Charley Anderson, Mary French, Margo Dowling, and Richard Ellsworth Savage. The "Great War" is over and the USA has, in the words of Warren G. Harding, returned to normalcy. The roaring 20s is in full swing". In one America the characters experience the world of prohibition and speakeasies; stock speculation by millions of Americans are buy and selling shares on profit and margins that are as ephemeral as they are risky. In the `other' America the characters see labor at war with management. Union busting and red baiting is the rule not the exception and urban workers; particularly immigrants are seen as Bolshevik threats. Charley Anderson crashes and burns after a meteoric rise. Mary French is absorbed in the workers' battles of the 1920s and Margo Dowling sleeps her way to fame and fortune in Hollywood.

The biographies cover the same two nation ground with min-biographies of Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst amongst them. Dos Passos' personal Camera Eye observations reach their emotional climax as the story reaches the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It is here where Dos Passos makes his two nations observation.

The Big Money is a worthy finale to The USA Trilogy. After re-reading the entire trilogy, thirty years or so after my first exposure to it in High School, I think it safe to say that it has still holds up under perhaps more mature observation.

The USA Trilogy remains one of the major literary works of the (U.S.) twentieth century and remains a work that should be read and read again. Highly recommended.

With the parallel 42 and the first catastrophe -1919 - this novel constitutes a trilogy focusing the sentimental , political and economic panorama of USA.
The big money talks about the generation that bloomed after the WW1 ; the lost generation the maxim expression of a media class in advanced discomposure state The story of its pathetic failure, hidden under the veils of the apparent triumph , of many characters who walk through the harsh proof years toward an uncertain destiny .
This book will give you a vital information about the possible consequences of a war to the moral and economic factors of a nation .
Dos Passos was somehow the echo of those dark voices in the first years of the XX Century best known as the perverse poets , headed for Baudelaire and Verlaine , whose role was to expose the crude reality no matter how filthy was .

This is probably the most amusing book of the USA trilogy, with a lot of sex and a certain amount of playfulness in the writing. Dos Passos is the kind of writer, however, who is often funnier when he is being scathing than when he trying to amuse. His politics are so badly dated that he often comes across as a reactionary pig just when he wants to be a revolutionary.

Case in point -- lovable Charley Anderson, the flyer who wants to become a captain of industry, is ultimately destroyed by his own lust, greed, and stupidity. Along the way, however, Dos Passon represents him as a "victim" of the rapacious Senator Planet, who is meant to be some sort of predatory aristocratic homosexual. The irony is that the mild, practically gallant flirtation the senator indulges in seems positively tame today, but Dos Passos sees it as The Ultimate Horror. Who coulda thunk that gay-bashing would go stale in just sixty years? Dos Passos sure didn't see it coming.

Other interesting thing, of course, is that Charley is the easy prey of his rich, cruel grasping wife. Some of their sex scenes are sexy, and the irony is that Gladys is a lot more of a feminist heroine than Mary French. When she doesn't want sex with Charley, she says so! I guess to dumb old Dos Passos it's only working men who have the right to go on strike.

By the same token, Margo Dowling, the luscious and high-spirited movie queen who makes it big in tinsel town, is actually quite a likeable charcter. But Dos Passos can't help taking digs at her first husband, a handsome Latino hunk who is -- guess what -- a gay man. Was there some kind of Latino self-loathing here? Dos Passos was a Portuguese, and not particularly masculine. Anyway, some of Margo and her husband's adventures are funny, but Dos Passos can't let them speak for themselves. He has to keep reminding you that handsome Ramon is a sissy -- like that justifies having him murdered off stage.

Read this book if you feel like a few cheap laughs on a man who outlived all his own ideas by a good thirty years.

Stacked up against other Lost Generation contemporaries like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dos Passos strikes a more minor key. His characters are unmemorable, his prose flat to the point of journalese, and his stabs at experiment, like the "Newsreels" interleafed between chapters, are so much chrome on some otherwise pretty conventional novelistic fenders.

But I think that limited scope is also a strength in his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy. With singleminded determination Dos Passos hammers together, scene by scene and newsreel by newsreel, a stark portrait of the Twenties as an era of greed, confusion, and above all a kind of free floating moral emptiness, a big, powerful, rudderless America cruising blithely on the froth of events. He shows you how the small guys get crushed without wallowing in a lot of sentiment about it, and how the fat cats alternately sleeken or decline into a sea of booze and betrayed ideals without resorting to cartoon stereotypes of `the Man'. You feel sorry for almost everyone on some level in this story, though Dos Passos keeps his lens distant enough to avoid pity, or the tragic glamour of a Jay Gatsby, in order to focus on the larger outlines of the postwar, post-Puritan world his specimens move in.

You don't need to read the preceding books in the Trilogy to enjoy The Big Money. It picks up the characters from the other two volumes, but the novel isn't really so much about these people as it is about the busts and bubbles that push them through history. It'll be hard to look at the Twenties as the colorful era of flappers, speakeasies, and the Charleston again after reading The Big Money; Dos Passos exposes the postwar malaise behind the excess in a way that brought to mind parallels with our own post 9/11 USA. I wonder who's our Dos Passos today? Maybe a filmmaker?