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John Dos Passos
Almost every one writer can say that they are influenced by their
childhood and past. Memories flood back to them as they encounter a similar
experience or similar situation in their earlier years. No doubt a
significant factor in their writing, the past from a specific writer's life
usually adds more depth and complexity to their works. Because these
previous experiences are from the author's actual life, the scenes and
subjects related to the theme are more accurate and realistic, and may even
be more appealing to read. These past voices may appear either consciously
through the author's works, or sometimes unconsciously, guided maybe by
some early childhood memory. Well, whatever the case, John Dos Passos was
such a man that appeared to have been significantly influenced by his past.
Born un-rooted to any plot of land, his life was a mission to search for
new ground on which to grow, which can be seen as an major theme throughout
all his works.
Dos Passos grew up to a turbulent childhood, being unconventionally
born on January 14, 1896. His father, John Randalph Dos Passos, was a
prominent attorney and his mother, Lucy Addison Sprigg, a housewife and an
excellent mother. Because his parents were not officially married until in
1910, he was considered "illegitimate" for about 14 years; this theme of
alienation is found in many of his writings. Most of the time spent during
his childhood was with his mother, who travelled abundantly, and this was
the time where he grew closer to his mother and started to drift away from
the man he called "dad". His travels with his mom led him to places such as
Mexico, Belgium, and England. Dos Passos's association with France began
when he was very young, and his knowledge of the language was quite
thorough. Much of his French expertise is showed off in his works,
including Manhattan Transfer.
Dos Passos first attended school in the District of Colombia. As he
grew up, he spent some of his childhood in Tidewater Virginia. He began
attending Choate School where his first published writings were articles
for the Choate School News. Upon completing Choate School at the age of
fifteen, he entered Harvard University in 1912. At Harvard, he continued
his journalism by joining the Harvard Monthly. While at Harvard, he
developed a close, long-lasting friendship with E.E. Cummings. During this
time at Harvard, the spirit of idealism swept the country. Dos Passos was
stirred by ideas of idealism and began to write short autobiographical
tales for the Harvard Monthly, which showed vague idealism. He later
graduated in June of 1916.
Out of college now, Dos Passos choose to volunteer for ambulance duty
overseas but his father rejected his idea. So instead, he decided to make
his first long visit to Spain, a country which held fascination for him all
his life, to study architecture. With the death of his father lather in
1917, he joined the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Group and sailed for France.
During his tour of duty as an ambulance driver, he collaborated with a
friend, Robert Hillyer, on alternate chapters of a novel, and after several
revisions, it became One Man's Initiation - 1917. This book was based
largely on his own wartime experiences in France and Italy. His second
novel, Three Soldiers, was published in 1920.
In 1915, Harper published Manhattan Transfer, a city novel in which
Dos Passos first began to use the experimental techniques he would develop
more fully in his major contributions to American fiction. The themes of
this novel are typical of Dos Passos's work: alienation, loneliness,
frustration, and loss of individuality but Manhattan Transfer " was his
first success at creating a 'collective novel' where a unifying theme is
conveyed through multiple facets of character and situation." (Wrenn,32) He
borrowed styles from Flaubert, Zola, Balzac, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot
and found many technical and artistic ideas in early twentieth century
French literature.
Taking segments of his life, Dos Passos intermingled it with his
imagination to make Manhattan Transfer what it is. The autobiography is
placed almost entirely within the life of a single fictional character,
Jimmy Herf, a young newspaper reporter with ambitions to become a writer.
The role of Herf was not simple to bring the author's experience into the
novel, but probably instead to show him as being like a rebel, overcoming
obstacles that success command, and finding values that counter what
society feels important. But also representing Dos Passos, was Armand Duval,
"Congo Jake", an anarchist and bootlegger who learns how to ridicule the
law and get away with it. He illustrates Dos Passos's side that desired
independence from his parents, producing a theme of individual liberty.
The theme of Dos Passos not being born to any plot of land, with his
life a mission to find new ground on which to grow is representative by
Jimmy Herf's life. Jimmy arrives in Manhattan hopeful of a new life; to
settle down with a beautiful wife and acquire a satisfying job. He
eventually does win the heart of Ellen Thatcher and becomes a successful
writer, but in the end he allows Ellen to divorce him, and on the last few
lines of the book he says,
At a cross-road where the warning light still winks and
winks, is a gasoline station, opposite of the Lighting
Bug lunchwagon. Carefully he spends his last quarter
for breakfast. that leaves him three cents for good
luck, or bad luck for that matter. A huge furniture
truck, shiny and yellow, has drawn up outside.
" 'Say will you give me a lift?' he asks the
redhaired man at the wheel.
" 'How fur ye going?'
" 'I dunno... Pretty far.' " These last words of the novel
suggest a optimistic point of view upon Herf, as he walks out of Manhattan
as a homeless vagrant, without family, without money, on toward a new life.
Dos Passos may have viewed New York as a place of entry upon U.S.A.
Like a transit point where people enter and leave from. Thus, the first
settings with Jimmy Herf and Congo are set aboard ocean liners entering the
port of New York. We find Congo talking to one of his friends,
I want to get somewhere in the world, that's what I
mean. Europe's rotten and stinking. In America a fellow
can get ahead. Birth don't matter, education don't
matter. It's all getting ahead The book directs the readers
attention to the fact that Manhattan is only a temporary place: " the
emphasis on fire and destruction, the theme of 'The Burthen of Nineveh',
and the recurring motif of the song,
Oh it rained forty days
And it rained forty nights
And it didn't stop till Christmas
And the only man that survived the flood
Was longlegged Jack of the Isthmus" (Wrenn,122) Besides being
the title of one of the chapters in book, the Isthmus may have been
Manhattan Island, which was like a strip of land connecting Europe to
mainland U.S.A.
Although Jimmy Herf was the main character of the novel, when he ends
up marrying Ellen Thatcher, a beautiful and talented young Broadway actress,
the book shifts toward her direction and we are drawn into her life. "She
grows up, becomes an actress, marries and divorces a homosexual actor,
marries the observer-protagonist Jimmy Herf, becomes a successful editor,
enters the world of the powerful, divorces Jimmy, and drifts toward another
marriage." (DBLv9,44) She may have represent what Dos Passos believed the
characteristics of his life, which were ruthless and unforgiving, could
have been.
Although the novel centers it's attention mainly around Jimmy and
Ellen, Dos Passos produced it so that we also bare witness to the other
fifty or sixty more characters in the novel to obtain the sense of " being
intimate witnesses to a series of interwoven human dramas." (DLBv9,44) We
witness the story of Stan Emory, the high-spirited but drunk architect who
commits suicide; of Joe Harland, failed financier turned alcoholic; of Bud
Korpening, a young boy looking for a job in the city but is driven to his
death by the fear of it; of Anna Cohen, who dies sewing dresses for the
wealthy.
When Dos Passos's mother died in the April of 1916, it threatened to
destroy whatever balance there was between his head and his heart. His
father, being a stranger to him, was not there when he needed him, and
instead, the only person he could trust in time of despair was his mother.
He had known her intimately, and she had become a part of him. But this
death was not the only that occurred for only a few months later, Dos
Passos's father died too." It was the end of parental authority, of his
feelings of moral responsibility to the ideals of class which his father
presented, and his boyhood." (Wrenn,39) Dos Passos wrote prolifically and
sought the literacy career to prove to his father that he was the man his
father was, and worthy of his father's name. These deaths influenced him to
write an upcoming novel called Rosinante to the Road Again, which portrays
two characters, Telemachus and Lyaeus, who are made in the image of Dos
Passos.
Besides his parents deaths, he was " subject to a number of influences
which might have developed in him the penchant for puzzling about the
meaning of what people said an did." (Wrenn,35) From his grandfather, he
may have acquired a certain Latin sensitiveness tending toward emotionalism.
From his father, a keen mind alert for significant details, and from both a
restlessness of spirit that would keep him ever searching for the better
society, the better way of life. His stormy childhood may have induced his
habit of first grasping details before he could comprehend the whole. And
because he was born in hotel, his mind and attitude developed the influence
of home, a place he never really knew. " The rootless existence of his
childhood left him longing for something to belong to, something to believe
in." (Wrenn,35)
Some of the unique styles and techniques of writing used today were
established by Dos Passos. He employed several features into his works,
such as one called the "Newsreel", which used newspaper headlines, words
from popular songs, and advertisements to surround the action and
characters. Another technique was called "The Camera's Eye", which gave the
author's view of his subject and sections of actual events, such as the
Succo Vanzetti trial. " Dos Passos regarded his style as providing a social
and historical background in which individual actions reflected larger
patterns he saw in his society." (WBv5,313) Using these innovative
techniques, Dos Passos was able to present a compare and contrast
perspective that presents the reader with a multidimensional view of the
first thirty years of American life in the twentieth century. More than any
of his contemporaries, Dos Passos embraced the novel as a means to persuade
- and to persuade in a political direction.
When Dos Passos died in 1970, the world not only lost a great writer,
but one ranked among the most important American writers of the century. "
Dos Passos believed that his novels served as a catalyst that forced people
to study their lives; man has the ability to recast his present in terms of
the past while allowing the future to exert it's influence." (Patrick,346)
Searching for a place to belong, Dos Passos made himself a environment in
which he was accepted. As Jean-Paul Sartre declared in 1938,
He is not, perhaps, " the greatest writer of our time "
but as a political novelist and chronicler of American
civilization from 1900 to the Great Depression, Dos
Passos has an established place in American literary
history (CLCv32,125) For years he did not enjoy the critical
esteem that his contemporaries, Hemingway and Faulkner, had but today
critics have begun to understand the importance of his writing, and finding
them major works of fiction and time capsules of a critical period of U.S.
history.
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