Dos Passos: Artist as American (review)

110Reviews Wagner, Linda W. Dos Passos: Artist as American. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979. 176 pp. Cloth: $14.95. Dos Passes: Artist as American is the first book to attempt the full view of the writer's work made possible by the publication of his posthumous novel, Century's Ehb, and the superb collection of his letters and early diaries, The Fourteenth Chronicle. Century's Ebb (1975), which he knew would be his last book, shows Dos Passos firm in his old hatred of dehumanizing systems and open to the new hope for humanity he saw in the technology of the moon landings in 1969. It is a final, moving testimony of his integrity and complexity as an observer. The letters (1973), especially the early ones to Rumsey Marvin, add hundreds of earnest, lively comments about his writing to the mass of statements that grew in a half century of essays and interviews. They uncover the authentic young writer who became the "architect of history." "The only accurate critical view," Professor Wagner writes, "is that which regards his aims as writer and historian and considers the evident seriousness which shaped his life as a writer" (p. xxiii). To achieve such authority, she has examined almost everything that he ever wrote about his work, along with most of the notes and drafts collected in the Dos Passos archive of the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia. A judicious selection of this reading becomes the framework of her study. "Explosions of fresh vitality in any art necessarily destroy the old forms," Dos Passos wrote in a 1923 letter (Fourteen Chronicle, p. 346), and the critic seeks at once to show that verses in A Pushcart at the Curb are actually full of imagist vitality routing earlier conventions (Dos Passos: Artist as American, p. 5). She would help explain the hope rising through despair in Century's Ebb by recalling that Dos Passos once said, "but we did believe too that if people used their brains the modern world could produce a marvelous society" (University of Virginia Collection; Dos Passos, p. 172). To finish the portrait of a writer whose "audacity . . . defied age" (p. 175), she is inspired to choose this line from a letter to Marvin, "and Rummy, when are you and I going to walk together to the moon and back?" (Fourteenth Chronicle, p. 282). This theme of Dos Passos' persistence serves Professor Wagner well in the difficult task of describing a long, complicated career. No other book about the writer is as clear and informative about his work after U.S.A. This critic, who has written about other poets, understands that the ties between Dos Passos and Whitman were drawn ever closer for more than fifty years until, in the frank identification with Whitman in Century's Ebb, we receive acknowledgement of the only true model of the curiosity that, more than anything else, characterized Dos Passos. A vivid impression ofone of the century's great writers, this book is amazingly concise for all that it covers, all of Dos Passos' words that it summons, all of the other critical opinions it notes so generously. It moves quickly from the Harvard "bell glass" to the moon shot, not merely in exposition that never drags, but also in swift perceptions of an early promise and a later fulfillment, intuitions of the twenties leading to proofs in the fifties and sixties. The book is also relatively brief because it does not study sources in such depth as, for example, Melvin Landsberg's Dos Passos' Path to U.S.A. It does not rig historical canvases or dwell much on the writer's politics. This can produce such statements as "The 42nd Parallel was written in 1929, 1919 in 1930, and TheBigMoney in 1932-33—all years before Roosevelt's reforms had much impact" (pp. 98-99), where it is puzzling to remember not only the actual dates of Roosevelt's presidency but also that Dos Passos did not complete The Big Money until 1935. To say that Number One, published in 1943, was "an expose of Huey Long . . . governor of Louisiana, whose misuse of power was already notorious" (p...