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Deserters h Whatever Gertrude Stein meant when she called Ernest Hemingway and his expatriate entourage a lost generation—lost to whom or to what?—it is now clear that some of the young Americans born around 1895 were more lost than others. Stein may have seen limited promise, at least when measured against her own unimpeachable genius or her friend Picasso’s, in this band of ambitious refugees from the American Midwest and South. They had learned what they knew of art and life in the brothels and museums of Paris, and in dragging corpses from the battle‹elds of Italy. Stein herself, with her cubist décor and her mannered prose, schooled them in what one of their number, John Dos Passos, called “a certain esperanto of the arts that has ‘modern’ for its trademark.” A century later, with their popularity and prestige undiminished, it is hard to feel sorry for such perennially found writers as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, even as other writers of the Great War (such as Claude McKay, author of Home to Harlem) have been retrieved from oblivion. No lostness to complain of here when the British lost Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, and Gaudier-Brzeska, and the French lost Charles Péguy and Alain-Fournier. Actually, the previous generation (Stein’s own) has more pathos if less real war, with the burnout and early passing of Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. Not every luminous name of the entre deux guerres has retained its gloss. Recent salvaging efforts applied to the reputations of Edna Millay and Sinclair Lewis yielded mixed results. Now it is John Dos Passos’s turn, and we have about three thousand pages 93 of prose, courtesy of the Library of America, to help us make up our minds. The adjective neglected has dogged Dos Passos’s reputation almost from the beginning—a peculiar form of recognition . From about 1925 to 1936, no American writer seemed more promising or more “serious” than Dos Passos, but by 1951 the critic Arthur Mizener could remark that Dos Passos had “very nearly achieved the rank of a neglected novelist.” This eclipse was partly the result of World War II, which made such “committed” writing of the thirties as Dos Passos’s masterpiece, the trilogy of novels gathered under the immodest title U.S.A., seem—except in France, where Sartre called Dos Passos “the greatest writer of our time”—somehow beside the point. Dos Passos’s sharp swing to the political right after the war, when he supported Joseph McCarthy and later Barry Goldwater, disgusted critics on the left without inspiring conservatives to read his preconversion works. When the Library of America reprinted U.S.A. in 1996, it seemed a dutiful homage to a classic that no one but graduate students reads anymore. The unexpected commercial success of that volume has inspired two sequels: a clutch of early novels, including the durable Manhattan Transfer (1925), and a miscellany of travel writing, journalism, letters, poems, and diaries. It remains to be seen whether these well-intentioned, well-annotated, and reverential volumes will bring Dos Passos back to life or bury him once and for all. Whatever the quality of his work, Dos Passos’s con›ict-ridden life has an enduring fascination. He was born John Roderigo Madison in a Chicago hotel in 1896, the bastard son of a prominent New York corporate lawyer and his mistress, both of whom were married to others. His father, John Randolph Dos Passos, was the son of a Portuguese cobbler, but this exotic lineage did not prevent him from publishing in 1903 a political treatise entitled The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Uni‹cation of the English–Speaking People. After what he called a “hotel childhood” wandering with his mother through the fashionable capitals of Europe and learning French before English, John Madison had a formal education in line with his father’s WASP ideals. At Choate, he was teased as a wimp with a foreign accent. At Harvard, from 1912 to 1916, he majored in English, found like-minded artsy friends such 94 as E. E. Cummings, wrote poems for the Advocate, and was deeply impressed by the modernist Armory Show of 1913. His parents meanwhile had married, having shed their respective spouses, and John Madison became John Roderigo Dos Passos, Jr. Soon after his Harvard graduation, Dos Passos traveled to Madrid—the ‹rst of many sojourns in Spain—to study architecture and Spanish, and made...

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