IV. The Historical Fiction of John Dos Passos

For that matter, the writers who fail to gain wide fame and favor with the public in any given period have much to tell us about that period, too. John Dos Passos, eleven years younger than Kenneth Roberts, is a case in point. While Roberts was settling into the newspaper trade in Boston, Dos Passos, born in Chicago, was growing up in a series of European hotels and in boarding schools in England, New England, and Washington, D.C. While Roberts was signing up with U.S. Army intelligence, Dos Passos, a newly minted Harvard graduate, was taking "lessons in driving, automobile maintenance, and medical techniques as preparation for volunteer service" with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver in World War I France.⁷² In the '20s, while Roberts was traveling through Europe and the United States filing articles for the Saturday Evening Post, Dos Passos was publishing "essays, poems, and reviews in The Dial, The Nation, and The Freeman" and writing Three Soldiers— along with E. E. Cummings's The Enormous Room and Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, one of the best known antiwar novels to come out of the American experience of World War I.⁷³

For Dos Passos was one of those "disillusioned" liberals of whom James J. Martin wrote—those liberals who "repudiated" their previously "warm support" of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy and became "bulwarks" of the peace and disarmament movements. "When Woodrow Wilson led the country into the European war," Dos Passos wrote nearly forty years later, "however little we approved this reversal of American tradition, most of us just out of college were crazy to see what war was like. We experienced to the full the intoxication of the great conflagration [...]."⁷⁴ But when Dos Passos reached the front, he did not find exactly what he had expected. During 1917, in the first year of his ambulance corps service in France, he wrote to a friend that "[t]he war is utter damn nonsense—a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don't do the fighting.none of the poor devils whose mangled dirty bodies I take to the hospital in my ambulance really give a damn about any of the aims of this ridiculous affair." A year later, he was "[a]ccused of disloyalty by Red Cross authorities," not only because of his "insubordinate attitude" but also because of his "criticism of 'stupidities' of modern war expressed in an intercepted letter."⁷⁵ War, Dos Passos found, was a "[w]aste of time, waste of money, waste of lives, waste of youth." Those of his generation who had eagerly marched off to war "came home with the horrors."⁷⁶

And this attitude toward the war found its way into Dos Passos's fiction—not only Three Soldiers but also the U.S.A. trilogy, his major work of the 1930s: The 42^nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The BigMoney (1936). U.S.A. was a fictionalized history of the war years and the years of disillusion that followed. It was composed in a new, patchwork style which Dos Passos had developed, placing tightly written fictional scenes in quick juxtapostion with collages of newspaper headlines (both real and invented), popular songs, radio commercials, and short prose poems on real people (Woodrow Wilson, Randolph Bourne, Sacco and Vanzetti) and events of the years during which the story unfolded. Dos Passos thought of "novels as history, history presented more accurately and more deeply than conventional history," Linda W. Wagner explains. As he saw it, "a few great novels," the ones he sought to emulate, "drew much of their force from their mixture of history with fictional narrative and character." In such novels as War and Peace and Vanity Fair, Dos Passos argued, "the story is the skeleton on which some slice of history is brought back to life." Or, as Wagner puts it, in novels of the sort Dos Passos himself wrote, "characters and their adventures exist not because they are of interest in themselves but because they illustrate the ways in which society has developed."⁷⁷

World War I soured Dos Passos on war for good. His newfound pacifism and distrust of centralized authority found expression, not just in Three Soldiers and U.S.A. but in everything he wrote thereafter. In 1950, looking back on Dos Passos's career up to that point, Granville Hicks wrote that "[n]othing is deeper in the man than his fear of power." Unless, of course, it was his hatred and fear of war. "As for war," Hicks wrote, "Dos Passos hated it in and for itself and because it inevitably resulted in the piling of power upon power." So it was that, as Wagner notes, "[m]aterials used in 1919 [...] and in Mr. Wilson's War" the nonfic-tion work which Dos Passos published in 1962, "are frequently similar and might also have appeared in [...] Three Soldiers."⁷⁸

Not surprisingly, in light of these views, Dos Passos was prominent among the liberals who counseled against U.S. involvement in World War II. Martin reports that in the summer of 1937 he was advising his fellow liberals "to avoid the involvement talk by fellow travelers, stay home, and concern themselves with domestic reform."⁷⁹ Later that year he warned that "[l]ashing ourselves up into a partisan fever will only make us the prey of whatever propaganda the warmongers want to put over on us" and that "[f]ascism thrives on the war spirit. Fanning the war spirit is preparing the ground for destruction of our own rights and liberties."⁸⁰

After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor late in 1941, Dos Passos abandoned his effort to talk Americans out of going to war, as did nearly all of his liberal colleagues. But he could never bring himself to fully accept the war, either, for, as he himself put it many years later, "For better or for worse the uselessness of war has been basic in my political thinking all my life."

District of Columbia, Dos Passos's second trilogy of novels on contemporary American history, applied the U.S.A. technique to the 1930s and early '40s, depicting the Great Depression, the rise of the American Communist Party, the Spanish Civil War, the New Deal, and World War II. Of the three volumes—Adventures of a Young Man (1939), Number One (1943), and The Grand Design (1949)—it is the final one that most succinctly conveys Dos Passos's by now familiar take on war:

At home we organized bloodbanks and civilian defense and imitated the rest of the world by setting up concentration camps (only we called them relocation centers) and stuffing into them

American citizens of Japanese ancestry (Pearl Harbor the date that will live in infamy) without benefit of habeas corpus [...].

The President of the United States

talked the sincere democrat and so did the members of Congress. In the Administration there were devout believers in civil liberty. 'Now we're busy fighting a war; we'll deploy all four freedoms later on,' they said.

[...]

War is a time of Caesars.

[...]

And the American People were supposed to say thank you for the century of the Common Man turned over for relocation behind barbed wire so help him God.

We learned. There were things we learned to do

but we have not yet learned, in spite of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the great debates at Richmond and Philadelphia

how to put power over the lives of men into the hands of one man

and to make him use it wisely.⁸¹

Dos Passos spent 1941-1946 as a correspondent for Harper's and Life magazines, filing stories from cities and towns all over America, and from Europe and the Far East as well. "A tour of the beaten-up cities of Europe six months after victory is a mighty sobering experience for anyone," he wrote in the January 7, 1946 issue of Life.

Europeans, friend and foe alike, look you accusingly in the face and tell you how bitterly they are disappointed in you as an American. They cite the evolution of the word "liberation." Before the Normandy landings it meant to be freed from the tyranny of the Nazis. Now it stands in the minds of the civilians for one thing, looting.

"Never has American prestige in Europe been lower," Dos Passos reported. "People never tire of telling you of the ignorance and rowdy-ism of American troops, of our misunderstanding of European conditions. They say that the theft and sale of Army supplies by our troops is the basis of their black market."

Worst of all, perhaps, was the destruction the war had brought.

The ruin this war has left in Europe can hardly be exaggerated. I can remember the years after the last war. Then, as soon as you got away from the military, all the little strands and pulleys that form the fabric of a society were still knitted together. Farmers took their crops to market. Money was a valid medium of exchange. Now the entire fabric of a million little routines has broken down. No one can think beyond food for today. Money is worthless. Cigarettes are used as a kind of lunatic travesty on a currency. [...] "Well, the Germans are to blame. Let them pay for it. It's their fault," you say. The trouble is that starving the Germans and throwing them out of their homes is only producing more areas of famine and collapse.

Had fighting the war been worth it? Dos Passos wasn't at all sure. "All we have brought to Europe so far," he wrote, "is confusion backed up by a drumhead regime of military courts. We have swept away Hit-lerism, but a great many Europeans feel that the cure has been worse than the disease."⁸²

In another 1946 dispatch, after a visit to Berlin, Dos Passos wrote:

The ruin of the city was so immense it took on the grandeur of a natural phenomenon like the Garden of the Gods or the Painted Desert... you drove in past the shattered university and the heaps that had been Friedrichstrasse and the empty spaces where a little of the shell of the Adlon still stood. The Brandenburg Gate was oddly intact. Through it you looked out over the waste, punctuated by a few stumps of trees and a few statues, that used to be the Tiergarten. At the further end of the Tiergarten were crowds of furtive people with bundles under their arms scattered in groups over a wide area that looked like an American city dump.⁸³

There were worse things than physical destruction, however, Dos Passos found: "Once war has broken the fabric of human society, a chain reaction seems to set in, which keeps on after the fighting has stopped, tearing down the decencies and the inhibitions that hold civilization together."⁸⁴

For half a century John Dos Passos railed against war and the strong, centralized State in novels, essays, polemics, and works of history. Little wonder, then, that his historical fiction sold poorly during the same period in which Kenneth Roberts's novels were topping the bestseller lists and wowing Hollywood producers. Little wonder that in 1942 and 1943, while Roberts was happily building a spacious new home in Kennebunkport with the profits from his historical novels, Dos Pas-sos, "despite literary fame," found that his "finances continue[d] to be shaky."⁸⁵ Little wonder that his entire career was marked by what Linda W. Wagner bluntly calls a "lack of any real financial success."⁸⁶ He was swimming against the tide of popular opinion. He was not telling readers what they wanted to hear.

Gore Vidal, like Dos Passos, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and was educated in expensive private schools in and around Washington, D.C. Unlike Dos Passos, whose father was a wealthy corporate lawyer and world traveler, Vidal grew up around politics. His father was a high ranking official in the Franklin Roosevelt administration, the director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, the agency known today as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). His maternal grandfather, who lived in the Vidal family home, was the venerable, sightless U.S. Senator Thomas Pryor Gore (D-Oklahoma), and Vidal recalls the daily ritual of being

sent with car and driver to pick up my grandfather at the Capitol and bring him home. In those casual days [ca. 1935-1937], there were few guards at the Capitol—and, again, ["Washington was a small town where"] everyone knew everyone else. I would wander on to the floor of the Senate, sit on my grandfather's desk if he wasn't ready to go, experiment with the snuff that was ritually allotted each senator; then I would lead him off the floor.⁸⁷

In his thirties, after years as an author of modern mainstream novels, a scenarist for motion pictures and television, and an intellectual journalist, Vidal decided to try his hand at historical fiction. (Dos Passos had also been in his thirties when he sat down to begin The 42^nd Parallel.) Given his early political background, Vidal might well have been expected to focus his new historical fiction on the politics and diplomacy of the times he sought to depict. And that is precisely what he did. His first historical novel was Julian (1964), a portrait of the Roman emperor who attempted to reverse his nation's official adoption of Christianity as the state religion, in hopes of reverting to the long-discarded paganism of earlier days. His second historical novel, Washington, D.C. (1967), takes place in this nation's capital between 1937 and 1952 and depicts the major events of that time—the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Second World War, the death of FDR, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the beginning of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the McCarthy Era—as they might have been seen by politicians and journalists plying their crafts on the shores of the Potomac during those years. This second historical novel has its admirers, but it seems fair to say that its principal importance lies not in its text but rather in what it led to. For it was the first step in the creation of Vidal's American Chronicle, a series of historical novels whose phenomenal success makes it worthwhile to contemplate at some length. It may fairly be said, I believe, that no success on this scale has been enjoyed by any historical novelist writing with serious artistic and scholarly intent about America since... well, since the days of Kenneth Roberts.

Consider: The first of Vidal's American Chronicle novels (Burr) was the fifth biggest fiction bestseller of 1973⁸⁸; it was so successful that three years later the Book of the Month Club acquired its sequel, 1876, "sight unseen" and before the manuscript had even been completed; and the club's gamble paid off handsomely, for, upon publication, "1876 quickly went to the top of the bestseller list."⁸⁹ In 1984, when the third volume in the series, Lincoln, was published, Vidal found that he was faced with another "huge bestseller," another "critical success, reinforced by[...] immense sales."⁹⁰ Four years after its first publication, Lincoln was adapted as a made-for-TV movie. In the '90s all three of these novels (the first three in the series) were confirmed as modern classics by being reissued in Modern Library editions. The later volumes in the series enjoyed less spectacular sales than the first three, but all the novels have sold briskly, and the entire American Chronicle enterprise has been a profitable one, both for Vidal and for his publishers and producers.

But I get ahead of my story. Let us pause, then, and examine more closely this American Chronicle series of Vidal's.