Here we should remember D. H. Lawrence’s warning not to trust the writer but the book. As with Dos Passos’s self-effacement, his objectivity, which is the literary form of self-effacement, masks an imperial intelligence, an acerbic wit, a great anger, and, above all, the audacity to write a novel that breathes in the excitements of all the revolutionary art of the early twentieth century — whether Joyce’s compound word streams or Rivera’s proletarian murals or D. W. Griffith’s and Sergei Eisenstein’s film montages.
The stature of U.S.A. was immediately recognized by the critics of the day. By the time of its publication as a completed one-volume trilogy in 1938, the novel was generally regarded as a major achievement, although displaying the characteristics of a highly controlled vision. Malcolm Cowley thought of it as a “collectivist novel” perversely lacking the celebrations of common humanity that would be expected from a collectivist novel. Edmund Wilson wondered why every one of the ordinary characters of the book went down to failure, why nobody took root, raised a family, established a worthwhile career, or found any of the satisfactions that were undeniably visible in actual middle-class American life. Others objected to the characters’ lack of ideas, Dos Passos’s refusal to give them any consequential thought or reflection not connected with their appetites. And it is true these are beings occupied almost entirely with their sensations and plagued by their longings, given mightily to drinking and fornication while their flimsy thought provides no anchor against the drift of their lives.
But for Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in 1938, it was exactly in the novel’s refusal to redeem its characters that he found its greatness. Their lives are reported, their feelings and utterances put forth, says Sartre, in the style of a “statement to the Press.” And we the readers accumulate endless catalogues of individual sensory adventures, from the outside, right up to the moment the character disappears or dies — and is dissolved in the collective consciousness. And to what purpose all those feelings, all that adventure? What is the individual life against history? “The pressure exerted by a gas on the walls of its container does not depend upon the individual histories of the molecules composing it,” says the French existentialist philosopher.
But U.S.A. is an American novel after all, and we recognize the Americanness of the characters. They really do have a national specificity. In fact, the reader now, half a century further along, cannot help remark how current Dos Passos’s characters are — how we could run into Margo Dowling or Ward Moorehouse or Charley Anderson today and recognize any one of them, and how they would fit right in without any trouble. How they do. U.S.A. is a useful book to us because it is far-seeing. It seems angrier and at the same time more hopeful than it might have seemed in 1938. A moral demand is implicit in its pages. Dos Passos says in his prologue that above all, “U.S.A. is the speech of the people.” He heard our voice and recorded it, and we play it now for our solemn contemplation.
Charley Anderson
Charley Anderson lay in his bunk in a glary red buzz. Oh, Titine, damn that tune last night. He lay flat with his eyes hot; the tongue in his mouth was thick warm sour felt. He dragged his feet out from under the blanket and hung them over the edge of the bunk, big white feet with pink knobs on the toes; he let them drop to the red carpet and hauled himself shakily to the porthole. He stuck his head out.
Instead of the dock, fog, little greygreen waves slapping against the steamer’s scaling side. At anchor. A gull screamed above him hidden in the fog. He shivered and pulled his head in.
At the basin he splashed cold water on his face and neck. Where the cold water hit him his skin flushed pink.
He began to feel cold and sick and got back into his bunk and pulled the stillwarm covers up to his chin. Home. Damn that tune.
He jumped up. His head and stomach throbbed in time now. He pulled out the chamberpot and leaned over it. He gagged; a little green bile came. No, I don’t want to puke. He got into his underclothes and the whipcord pants of his uniform and lathered his face to shave. Shaving made him feel blue. What I need’s a… He rang for the steward. “Bonjour, m’sieur.” “Say, Billy, let’s have a double cognac tootsuite.”
He buttoned his shirt carefully and put on his tunic; looking at himself in the glass, his eyes had red rims and his face looked green under the sunburn. Suddenly he began to feel sick again; a sour gagging was welling up from his stomach to his throat. God, these French boats stink. A knock, the steward’s frog smile and “Voila, m’sieur,” the white plate slopped with a thin amber spilling out of the glass. “When do we dock?” The steward shrugged and growled, “La brume.”
Green spots were still dancing in front of his eyes as he went up the linoleumsmelling companionway. Up on deck the wet fog squeezed wet against his face. He stuck his hands in his pockets and leaned into it. Nobody on deck, a few trunks, steamerchairs folded and stacked. To windward everything was wet. Drops trickled down the brass-rimmed windows of the smokingroom. Nothing in any direction but fog.
Next time around he met Joe Askew. Joe looked fine. His little mustache spread neat under his thin nose. His eyes were clear.
“Isn’t this the damnedest note, Charley? Fog.”
“Rotten”
“Got a head?”
“You look topnotch, Joe.”
“Sure, why not? I got the fidgets, been up since six o’clock. Damn this fog, we may be here all day.”
“It’s fog all right.”
They took a couple of turns round the deck.
“Notice how the boat stinks, Joe?”
“It’s being at anchor, and the fog stimulates your smellers, I guess. How about breakfast?” Charley didn’t say anything for a moment, then he took a deep breath and said, “All right, let’s try it.”
The diningsaloon smelt of onions and brasspolish The Johnsons were already at the table. Mrs. Johnson looked pale and cool. She had on a little grey hat Charley hadn’t seen before, all ready to land. Paul gave Charley a sickly kind of smile when he said hello. Charley noticed how Paul’s hand was shaking when he lifted the glass of orangejuice. His lips were white.
“Anybody seen Ollie Taylor?” asked Charley.
“The major’s feelin’ pretty bad, I bet,” said Paul, giggling.
“And how are you, Charley?” Mrs. Johnson intoned sweetly.
“Oh, I’m… I’m in the pink.”
“Liar,” said Joe Askew.
“Oh, I can’t imagine,” Mrs. Johnson was saying, “what kept you boys up so late last night.”
“We did some singing,” said Joe Askew.
“Somebody I know,” said Mrs. Johnson, “went to bed in his clothes.” Her eye caught Charley’s.
Paul was changing the subject: “Well, we’re back in God’s country.”
“Oh, I can’t imagine,” cried Mrs. Johnson, “what America’s going to be like.”