The Newspaper and Other Sources of Manhattan Transfer

THE NEWSPAPER AND OTHER SOURCES OF MANHATTAN TRANSFER Craig Carver* John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer has for some time now been considered an early example of reportage fiction, or as Allen Belkind puts it, an example of a "hybrid blend of fiction and documentary."1 This hybrid has survived in such contemporary works as In Cold Blood, in which Truman Capote imaginatively fleshes out facts with human psychology, and The Armies of the Night, in which Norman Mailer filters very recent history through his own psyche and impressions. Embellished facts or impressions of contemporary history are important in Manhattan Transfer, however, only insofar as theyreveal thenature of the city and, by extension, the nature of America and modern society. Though writing some ten years after the publication of Manhattan Transfer, Dos Passos observed that "American writers who want to do the most valuable kind of work will find themselves trying to discover the deep currents of historical change under the surface of opinions, orthodoxies, heresies, gossip and journalistic garbage of the day."2 Though he seeks to see beneath the surface of his society, he is not averse to using the flotsam of the surface; indeed, it forms a substantial portion of his technique and intention. Ironically it is the"journalistic garbage of the day," notwithstanding his repeated denouncement of it, that is the kind of documentation that most often informs his own hybrid mixture. Perhaps his most common, but by no means his mostimportant, use of the newspaper is as a reference work. Manhattan Transfer is replete with historical details most of which were for two reasons most likely collected from the newspapers: first, because old newspaper editions were readily available to Dos Passos in the public library; second, and more importantly, because newspapers were detailed to a much greater extent than either a history book or his own memory could be, the more minute and seemingly insignificant the detail, the more historically authentic his work. Thus, Dos Passos extracted whole headlines and "Craig Carver is a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin completing a dissertation on James Joyce. He has published previously in theJames Joyce Quarterly. 168Craig Carver paragraphs from the newspapers for his novel, much the way Picasso clipped selected words and phrases from newsprint for his collages. After arriving in the city, Bud Korpenning eats breakfast then goes to a barbershop where he reads the newspaper account of Nathan Sibbetts' unpremeditated murder of his own mother.3 Because Bud also committed parricide, Sibbetts' presence at first appears to be another instance of complementary characters in juxtaposition. More accurately, however, it is the juxtaposition of a fictional character with an actual person for there was in fact a Nathan Sibbetts. Dos Passos has inserted word-for-word Sibbetts' confession published in the June 4, 1904 New York newspapers.4 Significantly there are several other historical allusions to the spring of 1904 which occur only in Bud's sections: the "automobile riots" (p. 25),5 Alton B. Parker's presidential bid against Theodore Roosevelt (p. 17), and the military engagements at Port Arthur (p. 17) and the YaIu River (p. 92) in the Russo-Japanese war. These references in the novel do litde more than establish die date of Bud's sojourn in the city. In all probability, Dos Passos already had in mind a specific historical period whenhe went to the 1904 papers for correlating data for his novel. It may have been during hisresearch in the papers that he came upon the Sibbetts story which he decided to use as a bit of esoteric history thematically coinciding with the biography of one of his characters.6 The newspaper, thus, was a creative tool and much of the historical incident and documentation of the novel was probably arrived at in this way. This creative process would explain, for example, another obscure allusion that merely functions as a bit of realistic detail. As Ellen rides the bus to meet George Baldwin in chapter one of the second section, she overhears someone remark as the bus passes the Waldorf: " 'Aint [sic] them flags swell Billy. . . . That funny one is cause the Siamese ambassador is staying there...