Review of

Presentedon Friday,

The 42nd Parallel

by Patrick J. GossMarch 25, I9BB

by John Dos Passos

to The Book Club

Tonight we look at The 42nd Parallcl , the first volume inJohn Dos Passos'sweeping trilogy of the first three decades of

the twentieth century. We begin with a look at the life of Lhe

author.

John Dos Passos was born in 1896, the illegitimate son of

rather mature parents. His father was 52 years oId. Both hismother and his father had sons 18 years order than he by theirfirst marriages. His parents did not marry until L9L2, afterthe death of his father's first wife. Most of John,s earlychildhood was spent in Europe, where his parents coutd rivetogether openly. He did not have a normal family life. He

suggests in his autobiography that he and his mother rived inseclusion and quiet for rong periods of time until the arrivalof his glamorous and exuberant father gave their rives a kindof enchantment for a short period of time. He was forced toattend an Engtish school, where he felt totally out of p1ace.

He hated that experience, and by 1910 had persuaded his parents

to educate him in the united states, where he was enrolred atChoate.

His father was a strong influence on him, despite theirIimited contact. The elder Dos Passos was the son of an

immigrant from the Portuguese island of Madeira. He was an

ardent abolitionist and served as a youngster as a drummer in a

Pennsylvania regiment in the civil war. He studied law and

began practicing in New York City in 1867. He was a

phenomenally successful corporate lawyer. He earned and spent

a large fortune. He attempted to guide the development of hisson's mind, directing his reading, giving him books, and

encouraging him to write to him in French. Atthough his legal

work put him in contact with the titans of industry and

finance, he was a lifelong Democrat and very activepoIiticaIly.

One of the great passions of John Dos passos, life was

travel. His peripatetic youth had perhaps inclined him to thatinterest. His father also encouraged his wandering. He passed

examinations to enter Harvard university in rgrr at the age of15. His father rewarded him with a typicar eighteenth centurygrand tour of Europe. After he graduated from Harvard in 19r0,

he was determined to join an ambulance unit in France, but hisfather deterred him for a time by offering to pay for a winterof study in Spain to work on his Spanish and to study

architecture.

His father died in L917. severaL months after his death,

.lohn did go to Europe as a volunteer with the Norton-Harjes

ambulance unit and then with the American Red Cross. When the

U.S. entered the war, he joined the medical corp of the

American army. After the Armistice he spent several months in

Paris, then went to Spain as a newspaper correspondent, Iaterjoined Near East Relief in Turkey and the Caucasus, and from

there made his way to Iran and Beirut. He saw much of the

world during the next 50 years of his life, developing a

special interest in Brazil because of his Portuguese heritage.

Europe remained, however, his main passion.

It is surprising to find that an author who chronicled the

history of the first third of this century and who was

throughout his adult life caught up in the study of American

history was cut off from the American scene during his maturing

years. He lived in Europe with his mother and traveled between

Boston, New York, and Washington when he was in this country.

Choate and Harvard were upper-c1ass retreats. What awakened

Dos Passos and his contemporaries to history was the events

surrounding WorId War I the war, the Russian Revolution, the

Versailles settlement, the socialist-communist movement in a1l

its manifestations, and the depression.

A central experience in Dos Passos' Iife was his

involvement with socialism and communism. Socialism had been a

strong force for a long time, but the Russian Revotution became

the focus for many young people of good wi11. The evils caused

by the Versailles settlement, post-war readjustment, and

depression intensified the attraction of the Russian

experiment. Disillusionment with what was going on in Russia

came late for many. For Dos Passos it came early. His

contemporaries on the left turned on him when they discovered

he had abandoned the cause, and their attacks damaged his

literary reputation the rest of his life. It is important to

remember, however, that Dos Passos was never a doctrinaire

socialist or communist. He was always too independent a

thinker.

He became a socialist in 19L7. His social views were

greatly influenced by his feelings about the war. He believed

that the secret purpose of American intervention was to quench

revolution in Europe. The repressive actions of the American

government against those identified as socialists, conmunists,

anarchists, or wobblies fueled those feelings after the war.

He wrote for The New Masses during the 1920's. He became

involved in the Sacco-Vanzetti case, wrote articles about thatphenomenon, and stood on picket lines in Boston. Also during

the L92O's, he was involved with John Howard Lawson's New

Playwrights' Theater. He had published a successful war novel,

Three So1diers, in L92L and Manhattan Transfer in L925, but

most of his literary output in the 1920's consisted of

journalism and plays he wrote for the New Plalrwrights'

Theater. You wilI recal1 that he had studied architecture inSpain after graduating from Harvard. He also was a painter.

For a time after writing Three Soldiers he thought his future

might Iie in art. He designed sets for the theater, and in

fact that was his chief interest in the theater

His radical political activity continued into the 1930's,

when he went with Theodore Dreiser and others to investigate

conditions among the coal miners in HarIan County, Kentucky.

He infuriated some Communist Party leaders when he refused to

stand trial for his actions in Harlan County to become a

martyr. One of his final projects was to be a movie about the

Spanish Civil War on behalf of the Madrid government. He broke

with Hemingway, who was also involved in that project, because

he was unwilling to sacrifice truth to propaganda and because

he saw the Spanish cause becoming a pawn to Stalinist politics.

The foremost significant influences on Dos Passos were his

coming to grips with the actualities of life in the United

States, the experiences of World War T, his involvement in

radical politics, and the influence of European naturalism and

realism, which flourished in this country in this century. I

already have touched on the first three influences, and I move

now to the influence of European literature. European

literature had been influenced by realists and naturalists for

half a century. Writers in the United States and England had

been slower to follow this movement. After World War I a whole

generation of experimenters and plain speakers appeared -Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, e.e.

cummings, and Scott Fitzgerald. Dos Passos had known cummings

at Harvard and in France. Flaubert was a special favorite of

Dos Passos' , and Dos Passos also was influenced by the Spanish

writers he met during his post-graduation travels. Theodore

Dreiser, who was older than the authors in this new group, was

perhaps Dos Passos' most important American influence. Of him

Dos Passos wrote:

It was the ponderous battering ram of his novelsthat opened the way through the genteel reticences ofAmerican nineteenth century fiction for what seemedto me to be a truthful depiction of people's lives.Without Dreiser's treading out a path for naturalismnone of us would have had a chance to publish even.

Dos Passos was never a member of the "lost generation"

group in Paris, although he passed through occasionally. You

will remember that he had begun traveling to Europe before

this expatriation and that his travels continued after the

others were repatriated. His aloofness from trends and

coteries also set him apart from this group.

He probably first met Hemingway during their service in

ambulance corps in lta1y in 1918. They met again in Paris

and had become close friends by L924. Dos Passos was not

present for the running of the bulls in Pamplona that

Hemingway immortalized in The Sun Also Rises, but he was

there the next year. He skiied with the Hemingways in

Austria and hunted with Ernest in Montana. His future wife

had grown up with the Hemingways, and they were present at

Hemingway's struggle with a tuna that provided the basis for

The OId Man And The Sea. Their friendship gradually ended as

Hemingway became more overbearing. I already have recounted

his disagreement with Hemingway about the making of a

documentary film about the Spanish Civil War.

Dos Passos' attitude about the literary acquaintances of

his youth exemplifies his independent-mindedness. In his

autobiography he observed, "In the private universe I was

arranging for myself, Iiterary people generally, and

particularly Greenwich Village and Paris exiles, were among

the excommunicated categories. Their attitude toward life

made we want to throw up. But as soon as r got to be friends

with one of them he or she became the exception, unique and

unassailable." This same attitude in the political arena

caused former comrades to believe that he had abandoned

doctrinaire beliefs that he probably had never held, dt least

not as unquestioningly as they had. When he returned to the

United States in 1922 he roomed for a time in the same house

as Hart Crane. He associated with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald

and recalled an afternoon when the three of them and Sherwood

Anderson drove to Great Neck, which was to be the setting of

The Great Gatsby. He came to know Edmund Wilson, Donald

Ogden Stewart, and even Whitaker Chambers, "then a spooky

littIe guy on hush-hush missions as a Communist Party courier

In later years he became more a reporter of his times,

writing several books of history. He toured the European and

Pacific theaters during World War II. He attended the

Nuremberg trials. His first marriage came to an untimely end

in 1947, when his wife was killed in an automobile accident.

He lost an eye in the same accident. He remarried in L949,

and a daughter of that marriage was born in 1950.

With a part of his vast fortune, Dos Passos' father had

bought an estate in Westmoreland County, Virginia. His

father }ost that estate, but Dos Passos regained a portion of

it in L94O. He settled there permanently in L946. He became

obsessed with a study of Jefferson and the other founding

fathers. He continued to be a caustic, careful observer of

contemporary life and continued to travel and to write to the

extent that his health permitted. He died in L970.

I do not want to leave the impression that USA is his

only fictional work. It was not. Three So1diers, published

in L92L, received critical acclaim, as did Manhattan

Transfer. He wrote eight novels after USA. Several of those

are of interest chiefly to biographers of Dos Passos. Three

were grouped together as the District of Columbia trilogy -Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (L943) , and The

Grand Desiqn (1949) - but they do not have the cohesiveness

of USA.

I am not as familiar with the work of Dos passos as Iwas with the work of other authors r have presented to the

c1ub, so f have relied in my background comments to a great

extent on interpretations and biographical information that Iwas not especially famitiar with before I started thisstudy. Perhaps as a corrective to that reliance on the work

of others, in my presentation of the book itserf, r will reryalmost who11y on my own analysis.

The most striking things about rhe 42nd parallel are Dos

Passos' attempt to dear in a serious way with the history ofthis country in the twentieth century up to the time of itsentry into worrd war r and the devices he uses to achieve

that goal. r do not mean to impry that Dos passos tried towrite a comprehensive history of an American epoch. He didnot. But he did attempt to convey, in this inventive novel,

what to him were some important rearities about the historyof that period. Although Alfred Kazin was wrong in his

introduction to our edition of this book when he said thatDos Passos' father was a lltcKinrey Repubrican, he was rightwhen he cited Dos Passos' view of history as something thatalienates him from contemporary readers. Dos passos believedthat it was possibre to decipher what realry had happened, dn

estimable chore, and arso to make some sense out of thatknowledge.

The 42nd Paralte1 was published in 1930. The other

volumes in the USA trilogy were published later in the

1930's. The Big Money ends in L927 with the efforts of Mary

French to save Sacco and Vanzetti. Although Dos Passos did

not deal with the Depression or the beginnings of the New

Dea], those events must have been of concern to him when he

wrote this book. I believe that his confining his trilogy to

the years that led up to the Depression marks him as a

serious student of history. Serious students know just how

much the history of one epoch is determined by prior events.

In his three-volume work, The Age of Roosevelt, Arthur

Schlesinger , Jt. , managed to get through only the first

couple of years of Roosevelt's first administration. In the

first volume, The Crisis of The Otd Order, Schlesinger

addresses himself to the years between 1919 and 1933, but in

fact he goes back to the turn of the century to explore the

roots of the movements and ideas of that time. Similarly,

and merely by way of example, Dos Passos' own involvement,,

however idiosyncratic, in radical politics in the 1920's is

reflected in his treatment of radical politics and working

class people during the previous two decades.

I am sure what is most memorable to readers of USA is

the form of the book. The newsreels, the camera eye

segments, the biographical sketches, and the narrative all

serve their own functions.

IO

rn the camera eye sections, Dos passos lets us grimpse

his recollections of his own experiences during the years

covered by the narrative. One critic, and I do not believeit was Kazin, compared the style of these short pieces to the

styre of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a young Man, which

we read recently. I think the comparison is apt.

The newsreer sections serve several functions. First,the newsreel was an important popular art form for readers ofDos Passos' generation. Evoking that form evokes the d9e,

even if the use of the newsreer in the earriest years issomething of an anachronism. second, for younger readers thenewsreel form evokes something we have seen of that era thefilm of action in World War I, of Teddy Roosevelt, of Woodrow

wilson, of Jack Johnson taking a dive to Jess wirrard, and ofa hundred other images. Third, everything in the newsreel

section - the stories of news events long forgotten, thestories of events that will never be forgotten, and thepopular songs of the time - places the action of the

narrative sections in context. Just how much readers of my

age grean from the newsreel sections depends on theirknowledge of history, especially popular history, of thattime, but everyone will find something in each section torocate the action of the nover. A word shourd be said about

Dos Passos' great ear for the voice of American popular

culture. He picks the apt popular song. He chooses the

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correct trivial incident or earth-shattering event to capture

the spirit of the d9€, and he records these events in the

vernacular of Lhe newsreel.

The biographical sketches also provide a context for the

events of the novel. The words and lives of some of the

historical figures - Debs and Hay^rood and LaFollette are

echoed in the action of the narrative and the attitudes of

the characters. Those sections also give Dos Passos an

opportunity to comment directly on the history of that time

by showing us how he feels about some of the notable people

of that time. He writes admiringty and movingly of his

heroes Debs, Halrwood, Burbank, Edison, and LaFollette. He

savages Bryan, Minor Keith, and Carnegie and pitiessteinmetz. rt is no accident that he admires those he sees

as independent thinkers, even if, as with Debs and Halrwood,

they are identified as belonging to a movement. He pities

Steinmetz because of his lack of independence.

The characters whose lives he traces in this novel are

from the working crass. Dos passos was greatry infruenced by

naturalism, which allowed writers to deal with ordinarypeople but which typically condemned those people to decrine

because of forces beyond their understanding or control.Decline of Dos Passos' characters does not seem as inevitableas that of the characters in Dreiser's fiction, but r believeit is fair to say that Dos Passos was influenced by the

determinism of realism and naturalism.

L2

Dos Passos' meshing so many different elements into one

book and dealing with so many different characters who take

turns occupying the center of the stage prevent him from

developing any character fulIy. I am not sure that failingis simply a function of lack of space. Dos Passos seems to

stand off from the characters in the narrative. There is a

coldness to his treatment of everything about them. Perhaps

it is his direct, even journalistic, style that leaves that

feeling of coldness. None of the characters ever ceases to

fascinate, however.

The common thread in the decline of each character seems

to me to be the failure or inability of each to find any

nobler purpose to connect with, though I must confess that

that analysis is antithetical to determinism. Mac is drawn

to political action, but he is always ready to abandon his

current political activity for a joyless drunken night on the

town or a cushy living arrangement.

Some of Janey Williams' hopes died with the death of

Alec, her brother Joe's best friend and one of the characters

in the narratives with energy and an inkling of something

better. AS a girl, Janey is horrified by her father'sspanking iloe. As a young woman, she is embarrassed for her

friends to see Joe. Alec's death breaks one of the ties thatholds Joe to Washington. He joins the navy, deserts, and

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drops in on Janey from time to time as his wanderings bring

him back to Washington and later to New york.

J. Ward Moorehouse is in many ways the central character

of The 42nd Parallel. He is shalIow, bloodless, and almost

devoid of erementar human desires. Even sexual desire isawakened rerativery late and rather weakry. His relationshipwith Eleanor Stoddard threatens his economically advantageous

second marriage, but there is little hint of any passion

between him and Eleanor. He makes two marriages ofconvenience. His inability to find real joy in a sexual

relationship is a weakness he shares with other characters inthe narrative sections.

What we find most unappealing about Moorehouse is hisberief that what is most important is not what happens but

how events are portrayed. He would have been right at home

in a white House pubric relations operation that handles

minor and major disasters and faux pases by putting theproper "spin" on events. Moorehouse is the ultimate booster

but without the heartiness and gregariousness of Babbitt. He

believes what he says and suffers for it. He has ptunged

into some unwise investments and other business ventures and

is setting up dummy businesses to hide assets or in some

other nefarious way deal with his probrems. A lot of other

characters are taken in by the public rerations way of

dearing with thingsr ds is evidenced by the conviction,

L4

repeated by several people, that the Germans are cutting off

the hands of Belgian children.

Dos Passos conspires to bring his characters together

from time to time in ways that are not completely convincing

or even necessary. Moorehouse, G. H. Barrow, and Janey

Williams end up in Mexico at the same time Mac is there, and

there are contacts between them. Benny Compton and Charley

Anderson are in the same bar in New York just before Charley

ships out to France to join an ambulance corps. Janey

Williams had lived with Benny and his sister for a time, and

Benny's sister still works for Moorehouse. Benny quotes his

sister's knowledge of Moorehouse's activities as evidence

that the monied interests were behind the war. He also

quotes Debs.

This mixing of fact and fiction has been tried recently

by E.L. Doctorow in Raqtime.

Dos Passos' choice of the title of this book reveals

that he thought this coming together of his characters was

symbolic of forces that drew these disparate people to New

York in the same way that weather moves from west to east toNew York along the 42nd parallel. He spoke of " .

alternate areas of high and low pressure forming

slightly north of the Canadian border, frequently in the

vicinity of Medicine Hat . cyclonic disturbances

blizzards in winter sweeping east and south following a

weII-defined track approximatety along the 42nd. paraIlel."

15

USA was adapted, with the collaboration of Dos Passos,

for a stage presentation. The actors portray the characters

from the narrative. The newsreel segments are actually shown

on a screen on the stage. Sti1l photographs are flashed onto

the screen. The actors step out of their roles to recite the

biographical sketches.

Dos Passos did not end his work in USA with The 42nd

Parallel. Some of the characters appear in the next two

volumes. None has sections named after him in 1919, but Joe

Williams, Eveline Hutchins, and Ben Compton are central

characters in that book. Charley Anderson is a central

character in The Biq Money. Dos Passos drops his characters

from the stage as abruptly as he introduces them. The 42nd

Para1lel does not end. It just stops. USA does not end. Itjust stops. The same can be said for history and for this

review.

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