Most critics agree that Manhattan Transfer registers a fervent denunciation of a society that subsumes and crushes the individual. And yet Dos Passos’s method may be almost too mimetic of the disease he portrays, his condemnation so complete that it is difficult for the reader to insert a wedge of judgement. The rapid-transit, discontinuous narrative brilliantly captures the pace of the city, the sense of brief, promiscuous contact with other lives. The metallically impersonal narrative voice carries the hard-edged din of the city at the same time that it keeps us at a distance from the residents; though it may swoop down from the smoky Manhattan skies from time to time to inhabit one of the characters, we are never long in the presence of a sympathetic consciousness. The danger with this method is that the victims of oppression are damned along with their chains.
Two characters in the novel seem to function vaguely as representatives of an authorial point of view, and bearers of a normative vision of nay-saying personal freedom. Stan Emery is a well-born rake who decides to destroy himself spectacularly with liquor rather than follow his father into a soul-killing business career. Against the dreadful conformity of the religion of success he posits a separate church: ‘Why the hell does everybody want to succeed? I’d like to meet somebody who wanted to fail. That’s the only sublime thing.’ Jimmy Herf, the downwardly mobile newspaper reporter with artistic ambitions who escapes the city at the end of the book, hitting the open road, is the only character to find an alternative to the grim determinism of the collective fate. The lone traveler on the open road is the other great archetype of American consciousness and literature - from the ‘Leatherstocking’ tales through Huckleberry Finn and the work of Jack Kerouac. It is the renegade version of the Horatio Alger ideal of success. In this novel, Dos Passos does not explore it. It is merely indicated – a possible route to freedom.
One of Dos Passos’s contemporaries, the conservative critic Paul Elmer More, described Manhattan Transfer as ‘an explosion in a cesspool’. Sinclair Lewis hailed it as ‘a novel of the very first importance… which the literary analyst must take as possibly inaugurating, at long last, the vast and blazing dawn we have awaited.’ Recent critics have tended to assess the novel more temperately, often treating it as a warm-up, technically and thematically, for the USA trilogy. Although he seemed in the thirties to be the mentor of a new literature of social realism, Dos Passos today is more talked about than read, and seldom talked about in the same breath as his contemporaries Hemingway and Fitzgerald. His influence is visible in the work of Norman Mailer, among others, but his is at present a somewhat lonely place in American letters, which may indicate a deficiency in our vision as much as in Dos Passos’s. Our literary canon and current American practice reflect the legacy of New Critical notions of the self-contained art object, the well-wrought urn; the exploration of the individual psyche in a relatively domestic context is the predominant mode of our fiction. Dos Passos sought to record the history of his times, and even, perhaps, to affect it. Manhattan Transfer is an excellent introduction to his work, an intriguing narrative experiment, and a fascinating portrait of the great American city in the early years of the century.
FIRST SECTION
1 Ferryslip
Three gulls wheel above the broken boxes, orangerinds, spoiled cabbage heads that heave between the splintered plank walls, the green waves spume under the round bow as the ferry, skidding on the tide, crashes, gulps the broken water, slides, settles slowly into the slip. Handwinches whirl with jingle of chains. Gates fold upwards, feet step out across the crack, men and women press through the manuresmelling wooden tunnel of the ferry-house, crushed and jostling like apples fed down a chute into a press.
The nurse, holding the basket at arm’s length as if it were a bedpan, opened the door to a big dry hot room with greenish distempered walls where in the air tinctured with smells of alcohol and iodoform hung writhing a faint sourish squalling from other baskets along the wall. As she set her basket down she glanced into it with pursed-up lips. The newborn baby squirmed in the cottonwool feebly like a knot of earthworms.
On the ferry there was an old man playing the violin. He had a monkey’s face puckered up in one corner and kept time with the toe of a cracked patent-leather shoe. Bud Korpenning sat on the rail watching him, his back to the river. The breeze made the hair stir round the tight line of his cap and dried the sweat on his temples. His feet were blistered, he was leadentired, but when the ferry moved out of the slip, bucking the little slapping scalloped waves of the river he felt something warm and tingling shoot suddenly through all his veins. ‘Say, friend, how fur is it into the city from where this ferry lands?’ he asked a young man in a straw hat wearing a blue and white striped necktie who stood beside him.
The young man’s glance moved up from Bud’s road-swelled shoes to the red wrist that stuck out from the frayed sleeves of his coat, past the skinny turkey’s throat and slid up cockily into the intent eyes under the broken-visored cap.
‘That depends where you want to get to.’
‘How do I get to Broadway?…I want to get to the center of things.’
‘Walk east a block and turn down Broadway and you’ll find the center of things if you walk far enough.’
‘Thank you sir. I’ll do that.’
The violinist was going through the crowd with his hat held out, the wind ruffling the wisps of gray hair on his shabby bald head. Bud found the face tilted up at him, the crushed eyes like two black pins looking into his. ‘Nothin,’ he said gruffly and turned away to look at the expanse of river bright as knifeblades. The plank walls of the slip closed in, cracked as the ferry lurched against them; there was rattling of chains, and Bud was pushed forward among the crowd through the ferryhouse. He walked between two coal wagons and out over a dusty expanse of street towards yellow streetcars. A trembling took hold of his knees. He thrust his hands deep in his pockets.
EAT on a lunchwagon halfway down the block. He slid stiffly onto a revolving stool and looked for a long while at the pricelist.
‘Fried eggs and a cup o coffee.’
‘Want ’em turned over?’ asked the redhaired man behind the counter who was wiping off his beefy freckled forearms with his apron. Bud Korpenning sat up with a start.
‘What?’
‘The eggs? Want em turned over or sunny side up?’
‘Oh sure, turn ’em over.’ Bud slouched over the counter again with his head between his hands.
‘You look all in, feller,’ the man said as he broke the eggs into the sizzling grease of the frying pan.
‘Came down from upstate. I walked fifteen miles this mornin.’
The man made a whistling sound through his eyeteeth. ‘Comin to the big city to look for a job, eh?’
Bud nodded. The man flopped the eggs sizzling and netted with brown out onto the plate and pushed it towards Bud with some bread and butter on the edge of it. ‘I’m going to slip you a bit of advice, feller, and it won’t cost you nutten. You go an git a shave and a haircut and brush the hayseeds out o yer suit a bit before you start lookin. You’ll be more likely to git somthin. It’s looks that count in this city.’