Toward a Modernist Style by Pizer Donald;

Author:Pizer, Donald;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

I

The general texture of Dos Passos’s early life as depicted by the camera eye in The 42nd Parallel is of constant physical movement within the social world of the upper middle class. In carriages and on trains and boats, in Holland and England and in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and Virginia, we encounter Dos Passos in a world of servants, boarding schools and Harvard, luxurious travel, country estates, yachting, and edifying visits. Within this world, Dos Passos’s mother and father (the “He” and “She” of the camera eye consciousness) play conventional parental roles. The mother is a figure who initially expresses accepted class attitudes (“Workingmen and people like that laborers travailleurs greasers”)6 and a feminine aversion to violence and conflict (as in the first camera eye, when she and Dos Passos take refuge under a shop counter) and who later fades into a debilitating illness (“He was very gay and She was feeling well for once”) (42P, 173). The father, the “strong athletic man . . . immensely energetic,” described by Ludington,7 is powerfully masculine in thought and action. Willing to state and act on unpopular opinions (“What would you do Lucy if I were to invite one of them [a Negro] to my table?” and “Why Lucy if it were necessary for the cause of humanity I would walk out and be shot any day”) (42P, 13), he is also a man who carries his flask wherever he goes, recites Othello in cabs, and enjoys swimming and yachting.

Early in the camera eye, Dos Passos begins to associate his upper-class experience with his mother’s feminine conventionality and lack of strength and the lower-class world, which he occasionally encounters, with his father’s masculinity, both because of the greater vigor of this world and because of its more openly expressed sexuality. This pattern of association is probably indebted to Dos Passos’s awareness of his father’s Portuguese immigrant background and his mother’s roots in a socially prominent Maryland family. But it is also, and more fully, a product of the sexual conventions of Dos Passos’s youth, in which a Victorian gentility still masked the expression of sex in upper middle-class life, while working-class experience was assumed to be more openly and aggressively sexual. Initially, this association is communicated largely by images and brief incidents in which the boyish Dos Passos is fearful during moments when a masculine sexuality is linked to his father or to the working class. Traveling by train at night with his mother through an industrial landscape, he peeks “out of the window into the black rumbling dark suddenly ranked with squat chimneys and you’re scared of the black smoke and the puffs of flame that flare and fade out of the squat chimneys” (42P, 25). And when challenged at school about his political opinions (opinions which are also his father’s), he can only reply “all trembly” (42P, 58).

Camera Eye (7), which describes Dos Passos on an ice skating pond during the period he was attending Choate, brings to the surface his permanent association of class and sexual roles.

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