The Prospect Before Us. By John Dos Passos. (Jolla Lehmann.
Ifs.) THE first problem with which Mr. Dos Passos' new book confronts the reader is to assess how seriously it is to be taken. Here we have a book concerned with the situation confronting mankind today, by the author of U.S.A.—one of the most remarkable American novels that appeared between the two wars. Written in the form of a series of lectures delivered to an audience which includes typical representatives of the American population—a farmer; a business-man, a trade-unionist, &c.—the book often resembles a March of Time commentary more closely than the work of enquiry which, at times, it purports to be.
Dos Passos is very rightly concerned with the problem of power in modern society—not merely the power of the State over its citizens, but also "the power over men's lives of the various strati- fied corporations which, whether their top management calls itself Capitalist or Socialist, are so admirably adapted by their pulls of centralisation to the uses of despotism." This, to Dos Passos, is a problem which must be solved and solved fast. The solution will mean inventing machinery " to control the power of the administra- tion, not only in the public interest but in the interest of each private individual."
In order to find this solution he thinks it obvious that you must study the behaviour of people in society and not what they say about society. A few pages farther on he relates this method of enquiry to the way in which you study ants. He does not, of course, obey his own injunction—how much every zoologist must long to be able to listen to the conversation of ants !—but instead he takes his readers on a rapid journey in space and time through Britain, South America and the U.S.A., surveying the political and social institutions of the lands he visits and paying considerable attention. to what people say, rather more, in fact, than to what they do.
If the aim of the book is quite clear, the course which it follows, and above all the conclusion at which it arrives, is considerably more obscure. The two lectures on Great Britain, "Ordeal by Fire" and "Ordeal by ' Government" are so superficial—though the first might be thought flattering and the second an obituary in the "this hurts me more than you" spirit—that they make one feel that novelists should stick to describing worlds of their own imagina- tion rather than worlds of which others have experience. But perhaps one should not pay too much attention to Dos Passos on the subject of England. He appears to be one of those old- fashioned Americans who combine a sentimental admiration for the idea of Great Britain with a feeling of deep, almost religious, horror when he considers our activities. Though the Labour Government is, in his view, busy constructing an instrument of tyranny, the Conservatives are still aristocrats accoutred in morning coats, top hats and monocles. His conclusion, which he conveniently finds a bookseller in the Charing Cross Road to express for him, is
that "England is dead, quite dead "--r-ta statement which booksellers generally confine to the book-trade.
This is not to say that Dos Passos does not try to be objective. He paints a most gloomy picture of American influence in South America, and he is permanently apprehensive about the kind of society that is developing in his own country: But he appears to be unable to divest himself of national and ideological prejudice. A disillusioned radical, he retains the emotional make-up of a New Dealer, and engaged on a work of political enquiry he has not unlearned the high-school interpretation of American history. "In my own opinion," he writes, "the political discoveries upon which the Government of the United States and its constitution were founded apply to men living in any economic system," an obsetva- tion which appears to neglect recent European and South American experience, to say nothing of the rest of the history of mankind. Yet he notices in England in 1941 that "the moral formation of top-dog Englishman and under-dog Englishman" is similar, and he displays, almost flamboyantly, in his descriptions of American farmers, millers and workers, the classlessness that is so typical of his country. From such observations, however, he never concludes that here he has stumbled upon two factors which are essential if Anglo-American democracy is to work ; that without a shared tradi- tion and a degree of economic homogeneity, the political discoveries of 1776 are largely inapplicable ; and that self-government in the southern states of the United States of America has never been self-government for the negroes for precisely these reasons.
Yet even if we admit, as we must admit, that our form of government is not applicable to all nations at all times, as far as we ourselves are concerned Dos Passos's original question about the control of power is very relevant and in urgent need of an answer. Unfortunately our author provides no answer. The last section of his book, where one hoped it might appear, starts with a tear- jerking description of some American Air Force boys returning to New York from the war, moves on to a lyrical description of farming, milling and labour unions and ends with a few pages of rhetoric about the American way of life. MARK BONHAM CARTER.
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