Private Historian

(See front cover) Old history is in books and new on front pages. Yet neither tells the whole story of a people, a period, a place. Behind the extraordinary news in the papers, the decisive events described by historians, lies a mass of anonymous, miscellaneous human happenings, comprising the routine stuff of daily living. This is private history and, though it rarely gets into public history, it outweighs soldiers and statesmen, battles and booms, in the final balance of time.

To relate these minutiae of contemporary experience to the broad sweep of historical developments has been the task, for the past ten years, of a novelist named John Roderigo Dos Passes. Last week Author Dos Passos, 40, offered readers a novel called The Big Money* that stood midway between history and fiction, the last of a series of three books that constitute a private, unofficial history of the U. S. from 1900 to 1929.

The Method. With The Big Money John Dos Passos brought to a close one of the most ambitious projects that any U. S. novelist has undertaken. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money run to 1,449 pages, detail the careers of some 13 major characters and a host of minor ones, picture such widely separated locales as pre-War Harvard, Wartime Paris, Miami during the Florida boom, Hollywood, Greenwich Village, Detroit. This trilogy also includes 27 brief biographies of such representative public figures as Steinmetz, Luther Burbank, Henry Ford, Sam Insull, Hearst, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, artfully spaced throughout the three volumes. The author provides, in addition, a shorthand autobiography in the form of 51 poetic interludes, called The Camera Eye, which show his own attitude toward the events in which his characters are involved. Like most works of fiction that are written in tandem, each novel in Dos Passos' series makes sense in its own right, gains in cumulative intensity if read in its place in the whole impressive scheme.

Appearing complicated to the point of bewilderment at first glance, this narrative method emerges in The Big Money as ingeniously simple. Basis of the book is the life stories of a few men and women whose careers converge or parallel each other. Some, like the promising but spineless Harvard intellectual, Dick Savage, have figured prominently in the previous volumes. Red-faced, hard-drinking Charley Anderson barely appeared in The 42nd Parallel; Margo Dowling, dissolute and disillusioned cinema queen, makes her debut in The Big Money. Dos Passos' method is to follow one of his characters through some meaningful experience or period in his life, then shift to another. Between chapters he inserts the short biography of some real public figure whose career forms an oblique commentary on the imaginary character just described.

Charley Anderson, for example, is a well-meaning, good-hearted aviator who won the Croix de guerre in the War. He has genuine mechanical ability, works as a mechanic for a time, gets along well with plain men when he sees them as individuals. But pursuit of the Big Money corrupts his native talents as well as his good nature, eventually kills him. Dos Passos frames the story of Anderson with thumbnail sketches of Henry Ford, Frederick Winslow Taylor, inventor of scientific management; and Thorstein Veblen. Like Ford, Charley Anderson had native mechanical skill, loved to tinker with machines. Like Taylor, he suffered because he tried to speed up production, to make manufacture efficient, and shrank from the resulting hostility of workmen. Veblen, a lifelong student of the conflict between production and finance, who saw the constant "sabotage of production by business," adds an ironic footnote to Charley's tragedy.

Thus Dos Passos intimates that the stories of his characters are not exceptional or unique, that the waste, confusion, purposelessness in their lives, as well as their good human qualities and inborn talents also appear in the lives of famed figures in public history.

The Material. The Big Money begins with the return of Charley Anderson from France. After a brief glimpse of Manhattan, he gets a cramped job as mechanic in his brother's garage in St. Paul. But Charley wants to get in on aviation's ground floor, incidentally pick up some of the Big Money he sniffs in the post-War air. Almost as soon as he gets it, women and liquor finish him off.

Mary French takes a different road. A Colorado doctor's daughter who hates her hateful mother, she goes from Vassar into settlement work and from there into the labor movement, falls in love with one radical hero after another, only to be betrayed by all of them. Drowning her personal despair in work for the Cause, she finally emerges as an impersonal, efficient cog in Revolution's painfully assembling machine.

Margo Dowling, on the other side of the fence, starts as a child actress, survives a nearly disastrous marriage to a Cuban pervert to become successively show girl, mistress, Hollywood extra and at last a queen of the screen.

Richard Ellsworth Savage, first introduced in 1919 as a young Harvard poet turned opportunist among the glittering opportunities of the Peace Conference, is shown in The Big Money as a prematurely tired junior executive who works hard at being yes-man to J. Ward Moorehouse, the great stuffed shirt of the public relations world. When J. Ward finally falters, Dick Savage is right there to take over.

Besides these principal pegs on which Author Dos Passos hangs his narrative, scores of other characters appear, reappear and fade away. Eveline Hutchins, the Chicago Jazz-age girl, attains a Manhattan salon only to end her career with an overdose of sleeping powder. G. H. Barrow, labor-faker, gets a paunch and a fur overcoat by "settling" strikes. Ben Compton, a Brooklyn Jew turned radical and one of Mary French's lovers, finds his life ruined when he is read out of the Party for being a "disrupting influence." All of them -- in politics, manufacturing, advertising, Wall Street, the cinema -- are swimming for their lives in the stream of the Big Money, fighting desperately against the current, sucked under or bobbing successfully along with the descending river.

The Manner. Two unique fictional devices, in addition to the biographies of famed individuals, interrupt the stories of these people in their rapid rises and catastrophic falls. One is the Newsreel, an effective muddle of headlines, fragments of speeches, news stories, popular songs. Each about a page long, they serve to fix the time of the action as well as to suggest the general moral and intellectual climate of the U. S. during the period. Thus the Newsreel that follows a chapter telling of Margo Dowling's miserable marriage includes a song that was popular at the moment, headline reference to topics that were then being discussed : . . . the kind of a girl that men forget

Just a toy to enjoy for awhile

Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous

Under His Policies

PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING

Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall

Berating Couple Near Murder

Scene, New Witness Says

SHEIK SINKING

Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several hours later he underwent. . . .

Last and most perplexing of Dos Passos' innovations is The Camera Eye. Purpose of these autobiographical prose poems is to suggest the shifting point of view of the author as he turns his imagination on the characters who fill his book and the combination of influences that have made him the individual he is and given him the point of view he holds. Like fragmentary warnings scattered through the volumes, they constantly remind the reader of the author's bias, warn him that Dos Passes' picture of reality has been colored by his personal experiences. After the chapter in The Big Money describing Charley Anderson's return to the U. S., The Camera Eye relates memories of Dos Passes' own homesick return after the War: spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook

Then the ordeal of looking for a job in the post-War Depression:

the pastyfaced young man wearing somebody else's readymade business opportunity is most assuredly not the holder of any of the positions for which he made application at the employment agency

By the time readers have followed the careers of Dos Passes' characters, studied the sharp, ironic sketches of U. S. public heroes, absorbed the confusion and hysteria of the Newsreels, they are likely to feel that they have received a vivid cross-section report on some U. S. history in a manner neither novelists nor historians supply. They may question whether ordinary private life during that period was as confused and chaotic as Dos Passos represents it, whether he has not overshot his mark in bringing so many of his characters to violent ends, so many of their hopes to tragic frustrations. But they can admire without reservation his narrative style, bare but not bleak, naturalistic but not dull, and his cunning blend of the literary and the colloquial. Dos Passos believes that a writer's modest job is to be an "architect of history." He never talks about creation in connection with his work. His job, he feels, is simply to arrange the materials, confining any artistic high jinks to decoration that will enhance the outlines of the building without weakening its structure.

The Man. Dos Passos the man is deceptively unlike Dos Passos the writer. Tall, baldish, bobbing and very nearsighted, he looks like a clever, kind, slightly startled Bill the Lizard in Alice in Wonderland. Born in Chicago, his family, friends and fancy have taken him so many hithers & yons about the Western World that a casual acquaintance might be hard put to name his habitat. His grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant who became a shoemaker in Philadelphia. His father, "a self-made literate," volunteered as a drummer-boy in the Civil War, was invalided out of the Army of the Potomac when he was 14. He went on to become a successful corporation lawyer, an anti-Bryan Democrat, the author of various respectable treatises on such subjects as interstate commerce, the husband of a Southern lady who presented him with Son John Roderigo at the age of 48.

Young John cut his literary milk teeth on Marryat, got from Masterman Ready such an inviting whiff of the sea he once considered going to Annapolis. He remembers being carted around a good deal by his travel-loving parents--to Mexico, Belgium, England, to Washington, and tidewater Virginia. In England he had a year at a private school, afterwards prepared for Harvard at the Choate School. At Harvard, where he was in the same class (1916) with Authors Robert Nathan and Robert Littell, he wrote for the literary magazines but was distinctly not one of "Copey's" (Professor Charles Townsend Copeland's) boys. Dos Passos was constantly on the point of leaving Harvard but never quite got around to it. Though he graduated cum laude, he thinks he got little out of college, regards his four years there as largely wasted. Like his father, he is a self-made literate. Gibbon's Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire was his adolescent Bible.

After Harvard, Dos Passos went to Spain, with the idea of studying architecture. Instead, he enlisted in a French ambulance service, transferred to the A. E. F. as a private in the Medical Corps. He wrote his first book (One Man's Initiation), a story based on his war experience, published in England. As a correspondent and free lance in Spain, after the Armistice, he wrote his second, Three Soldiers, which made him a name in the U. S. with its four-letter realism. With Manhattan Transfer (1925), in which he started experimenting with the form he later perfected in The 42nd Parallel, his literary reputation was solidly established. Besides his novels, he has written two books of travel, a volume of essays, a volume of verse, three plays, translated Poet Blaise Cendrars from the French and adapted a novel by Pierre Louys for the cinema (The Devil Is a Woman).

He sketches and paints in near-professional manner but has not lost his amateur standing as an artist. He writes wherever he happens to be, finds crowded Provincetown on Cape Cod as good a place to work as any. There in his harborside cottage he lives between travels, with his handsome wife. (She writes for women's magazines under the name of Katherine Smith.)

Unlike most novelists, Dos Passos seldom talks shop, has no liking for professional discussion of his own or his contemporaries' work. He considers writing a full-time job like any other. His own working habits are as steady as a farmer's. He gets up early, works through the morning wherever he happens to be. In Provincetown he swims before lunch, goes sailing every afternoon, takes little or no part in Provincetown's art-colony doings. Since he is traveling most of the time his household has something of the air of a dwelling that is just being moved into, with trunks and crates crowding the back rooms, books that he uses for research scattered around the walls.

Except for his tenderly polite manner and the enthusiasm that bubbles in his R-less, drawing-room voice, he might be mistaken for a member of Harvard's famed Porcellian Club. He is "Dos" to a wide acquaintance, but he has few intimate friends. At parties he is famed for his polite but sudden departures, for leaving his hat in a special place by itself, so that he will not have to rummage for it when he makes his getaway. Sensitive of other people's feelings to the point of anguish, he will sometimes blurt out what he fears is an unpalatable truth, then hastily cover up his remark with polite qualifications. Conversationally compact of nods and becks and wreathed smiles, he is a very different sort of fellow at his writing table.

Unworried at the size of his audience, John Dos Passos thinks that "the power of writing is more likely to be exercised vertically through a century than horizontally over a year's sales." With those who claim they write for money or for self-expression he has no patience. The affectations of literary people annoy him no end. To those who have exaggerated ideas about their art or their position as artists, he is apt to crack back: "A man writes to be damned, not to be saved." Alone among U. S. writers, Private Historian John Dos Passos has taken as his subject the whole U. S. and attempted to organize its chaotic, high-pressure life into an understandable artistic pattern. To find the equivalent of his nationalism one must look abroad, to Tolstoy's War and Peace, to Balzac's Comedie Humaine, to James Joyce's Ulysses.

*Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

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