The Ambulance Drivers by James McGrath Morris

Author:James McGrath Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2017-03-28T04:00:00+00:00

They are dead now

The black automatons have won.

They are burned up utterly

Their flesh has passed into the air of Massachusetts

their dreams have passed into the wind.

The horror of it all was such that Dos Passos renounced even the form of his response, closing the last stanza with,

Make a poem of that if you dare!

The execution of Sacco and Vanzetti pushed Dos Passos further to the political left and strengthened his resolve to use his writing as a tool of social change. It also painfully placed a wedge between him and his most cherished literary collaborator. It had been only a few years since he and Hemingway had plotted a radical new course for postwar fiction at a Paris café. But now his friend remained unmoved when Dos Passos urged him to also join the campaign to save the two anarchists. “So Papa Primo won’t let his little innocents hear about the atrocities in the U.S.A.,” Dos Passos caustically wrote. “I’m not sure he’s not right—Well it’s all over now and gone down in History—as far down as the public press can push it.”

A decade earlier, near the French front, Dos Passos and his friend Robert Hillyer had ambitiously begun work on the “G.N.,” referring in code to the “Great Novel” by its initials, like the Jewish prohibition of spelling the name of God. The time had come, Dos Passos decided, to resurrect that ambition and embark on an all-consuming attempt to write the Great American Novel in which he would put the United States on trial. Let Hemingway write about the meaningless life of expatriates, a symptom of a great societal sickness. He would take on the malady itself.

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