John Dos -Passos
The Big Money. By John,P,osyassos. (Constable. 7s. 6d.) Is the trilogy form0 by The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen-Nineteen and The Big Money Mr. Dos Passos has tried to describe the growth of Modern -Ameriea. The. Big Money is concerned with post-War America of the bOoin'period; those who have read the first two volumes will notice that Mr. Dos Passos' hopes, founded on the socialist movement, have turned almost' to despair. "In Ankrica _we are defeated," he says. He still believes in the. socialist movement and the values it embodies ; he still adMires the courage, stubborn- ness and integrity of the working-class ; but he does not doubt the triumph of the Big Money. In this book his characters, with one exception, are among the victors and show what the victory means. The most typical and important of them is Charley Anderson, war-ace, aeroplane inventor, manufacturer and financier, whose hectic career of money, drink and bed ends in a car-smash in Florida ; he has a female counterpart in Margot Dowling, who after an unfortunate marriage to a Cuban qucan, and various amorous vicissitudes, becomes a screen star—the 'world's newest sweetheart. As in Mr.. Dos Passos' other novels, these biographies are interspersed with News Reels composed of newspaper cuttings and extracts from popular songs, the Camera Eye which is an almost automatic record of immediate responses to the American scene, and sketches of actual persons typical of the period he describes ; those especially of Carl Veblen and Valentino have a melancholy- brilliance.
Mr. Dos Passos has an extraordinary knowledge of his subject. More perhaps than a novelist, he is a historian, a sociologist and a reporter. The descriptive passages of the Camera-Eye-are often reporting of the greatest -service:- He does not, however, succeed in dramatising all his knowledge. Mr. Dos Passos is indeed more interested in telling the truth, in explaining a historical process, in expressing certain moral values, than in creating works of art ; his- elaborate technique should not conceal this ; and what he wishes to do he does with immense efficiency. I have seen him described, by thoSe. who dislike the truth, as indus- trious, patient, painstaking, as if these were the failings of mediocrity ; -what this really means is that Mr. Dos -Passos, who has many very strong and sometimes naive impulses, an admiration for size and power, a melodramatic sense of the struggle between capital-and labour, an acute pleasure in the objective world and especially in landscape, a nostalgia for childhood which is repeated in a nostalgia for the vanished America of the frontier and small democracy, has disciplined these impulses by a technique which makes his Writing sometimes monotonous and sometimes affected.
His methods have curious results. They divide the real and the fictional worlds ; but the real characters•d're invested with far greater poetic: force than the imagined ones. The real characters express direetly the conditions under_which they live ; the fictional ones are submerged by Them. • The real characters are typical and heroic ; the fictional characters ate typical but puppets. Mr. Dos. Passos' poetk gifs-go into his descriptions of what is real ; his patience and industry into what is imagined. In his work the real and the imaginative never 'perfectly coincide. - This may he a fault, but in these books it is also a virtue. They escape that claustrophic quality which belongs almost necessarily to most novels, how- ever good ; they do not imprison us in the heads,- emotions or lives of their characters. Mr. Dos Passos always allows, or rather compels, us to look beyond his fictions into a wider and more varied world ; in this his work has a real originality. That world is America and American democracy, the real heroes of his book, for which he has a feeling comparable to Whitman's. It is not Mr. Dos Passos' fault if he has at length to show us his heroes defeated, corrupted, betrayed and beaten up by the Big Money. GORONWY RRES.
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