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3. Friendship Won't Stand That: John Howard Lawson and John Dos Passos's struggle for an ideological ground to stand on
- The University of Alabama Press
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CHAPTER 3 TOWNSENDLUDINGTON Friendship Won't Stand That: JOHN HOWARDLAWSONAND JOHN DOS PASSOS'S STRUGGLE FOR AN IDEOLOGICAL GROUNDTO STAND ON Late in August 1937 the dramatist and screenwriter John Howard Lawson wrote from Hollywood to his friend John Dos Passos. Lawson was attempting to convince him that there was merit in trying to make a film of Dos Passos's novel The Big Money, the third volume of which would be published the next year as the trilogy U.S.A. Lawson admitted he would like to work on the film: he needed the job; and, as he told Dos Passos, who was skeptical of the project, he thought "certain vital things could come out of it," by which he meant that he hoped a film with a social message might be produced. Lawson by this time in his career was deeply committed to the Communist party yet was writing film scripts that had little if any social import, so his comments to Dos Passos were in part a justification of the clash between his radical politics and Hollywood commercialism. "I have no control over what's done with [The Big Money] any more than you have," he declared in his letter, "and I think it's perfectly proper to work under those conditions." - "So you see I don't agree with you about the movies," he continued, adding, "nor about religion or politics-for that matter." By 1937 he had been arguing politics with Dos Passos for several years. The strain was showing; earlier Dos Passos, attempting to continue their relationship despite growing ideological differences, had written that friendship was a matter of "gratuitous illogical and purposeless bonds." No, responded Lawson, it was not just that, but "a rather serious business, and is based on a good deal of understanding-not only understanding of where people agree, but of all the vast and complicated and psychoneurotic and intellectual and emotional factors which may and do cause people to disagree. . . . As long as friends have a decent respect for themselves and their friendship, they say anything they damn well think, and I don't see why either should get angry about it." But Lawson, in fact, was simmering. Dos Passos's Struggle for Ideological Ground 47 Their friendship had strained to the breaking point, and two years later, after the publication of The Adventures of a Young Man, Dos Passos's novel of protest against the Communists, it would end. 1 What irritated Lawson in August 1937 was Dos Passos's article "A Farewell to Europe," which had been published in the journal Common Sense the month before. In it Dos Passos decried European ideologies, which, left or right, now seemed to him futile and, fascist or communist, totalitarian. He had journeyed to Spain the previous spring along with Ernest Hemingway to investigate conditions in the civil war and to make a film supporting the Loyalists' struggle against the rebel Franco. But once in Spain, Dos Passos had been shocked to learn of the execution of his close friend Jose Robles Pantoja, an educated man whom he had known since 1916 and who had returned from a post at Johns Hopkins University to fight for the Loyalists. The more Dos Passos learned about the circumstances surrounding Robles's death, the more certain he became that it had been at the hands of the Communists, whom Robles had apparently observed covertly organizing to assume power in Spain, were Franco to be defeated. "Behind the lines," Dos Passos asserted about the situation among the Loyalists, "a struggle as violent almost as the war had been going on between the Marxist concept of the totalitarian state, and the Anarchist concept of individual liberty."2 Disillusioned and bitter, Dos Passos had returned to the United States in June 1937, any allegiance with the Communists entirely vanished, and his farewell appeared a month later. When he wrote Lawson after the "Farewell" was published, he said in effect that he had washed his hands of foreign ideologies and had "settled down to getting [his] own private menagerie into [his] own private ark," to which Lawson responded in the August letter, "That's a perfectly dignified thing to do. I don't think much of ivory towers, but I can certainly respect a friend who wants to sit in one and says, 'Come in and have a drink, but be courteous enough to respect my feelings and let's layoff politics'-but when you say that...