John Dos Passos by Maine Barry;

Author:Maine, Barry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 169645
Publisher: Routledge

36.

Unsigned review, Times Literary Supplement

24 October 1936, vol. xxxv, 859

With The Big Money Mr. Dos Passos completes his trilogy of which The Forty-Second Parallel and Nineteen-Nineteen were the first two volumes. The special technical devices of the first volumes are continued in the third—the turning from one narrative to another and back again, the brief ‘newsreels’ breaking in to document the popular preoccupations of the passing moment, the biographical portraits of representative real persons, the ‘camera eye’ ever and again projecting the author himself full into the front of the picture as though to prove his living participation. On the whole both the handling of the material and the actual writing seem better—firmer, brisker, more masterly—in this third volume than in either of the others, the improvement being general, if perhaps most noticeable, in the biographies, which are of Henry Ford, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Wilbur and Orville Wright, Samuel Insull, W.R.Hearst, the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, and F.W. Taylor, pioneer of ‘scientific management’ in industry.

The main fictional figures—no less of their times for being imagined rather than actual—are Charley Anderson, one-time motor mechanic, who returns from France a prominent aviator and goes into the aeroplane business, spending his money faster than he makes it till drink and women bring him to a final, fatal crash; Mary French, social worker and Socialist, mixing kisses with agitation; Margo Dowling, whose varied affairs are also incidental to her transition from vaudeville dancer to film star; and Richard Ellsworth Savage, once poet and then ambulance driver, now both imitative assistant to J. Ward Moorehouse, financial magnate, and very like Anderson in his pastimes.

All the narratives move forward rapidly and easily, each character being shown in his course and against his special background with a fine particularity. As a panorama of modern American life the vision has breadth and brilliance, immediacy and fullness. Conception, observation, arrangement, presentation are all professionally competent to the last degree. Three things alone detract from the achievement. One is the puppetnature of the characters, causing them to seem automatons impelled by outer circumstance more than by any inner individuality. Another is a distinct narrowness in the individual response and action; the point is not that almost everyone lives mainly from bar to bed, but that one intoxication or loving is so greyly like all the rest. Mr. Dos Passos evidently intends to display a corrupt society, but even corruption has more psychological variety than this. There is also the matter of form. Granted that the ‘newsreel’ and other interpolations derive from the intention to evoke a fuller social and national background than the ordinary novel attempts, still this sectional presentation must be regarded as a failure, not a triumph, of synthesis. Nevertheless, The Big Money in itself, and the trilogy as a whole, must be recognized and acclaimed as an outstanding contribution to modern American fiction.

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