John Dos Passos - The Third Way

 Americans have a Manichean idea of how writers as supposed to be: Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Certainly, Americans of my age older have this idea.

Hemingway: drinking hard, hunting hard, fishing hard, dropping in on wars and bullfights; a lean, masculine prose.

Fitzgerald: drinking hard, living in the city in a high style, sensitive instead of macho, a more lush prose.

The Hemingway writers, as I think them: Norman Mailer, Robert Stone, Cormac McCarthy.

The Fitzgerald writers: Jack Kerouac, Richard Ford, Paul Auster

Yes, most have drank themselves to death, thankfully.

But there was a third great writer of the Twenties and Thirties who provides a third way of being a writer.

Like Fitzgerald, he graduated an Ivy League school.

Like Hemingway, he was an ambulance driver in World War One.

Unlike either, he had a variable style and was concerned with ideas and big strokes.

He managed to outlive both Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

That is John Dos Passos. I have written quite a bit about him, since I found myself looking for a different way to write a novel.

The foregoing came to me today after reading John Dos Passos Coggin's The World at the End of a Line in The American Scholar, particularly the following:

Dos Passos loved and extolled the sea every bit as much as his friend Hemingway. From 1928 to 1935, before their friendship frayed under the strain of the Spanish civil war, the two men often fished the waters near Key West together, catching tarpon, sailfish, marlin, wahoo, mahi-mahi, and tuna. The tropics were also the doctor’s prescription for Dos Passos’s recurring bouts of rheumatic fever. They usually brought along a couple of bottles of champagne, but by custom these remained untouched until the first fish was caught. Everyone on Hemingway’s boat received a nickname: “Dos” or “Muttonfish” for Dos Passos, “Hem” or the “Old Master” for Hemingway, “Old Bread” for the boat’s engineer, and “Saca Ham” for the cook. Conversation on these expeditions remained light. “It was a delight to be able to chatter amiably on all sorts of topics without tripping over that damn Party line,” wrote Dos Passos in his 1966 memoir, The Best Times. Hemingway was as competitive at fishing as he was with everything, but nobody got too sore. “Hem was the greatest fellow in the world to go around with when everything went right,” Dos Passos wrote. Hemingway once invited Arnold Gingrich, the editor and cofounder of Esquire, to go fishing with the gang. “The man was in a trance,” Dos Passos remembered. “It was a world he’d never dreamed of. He was mosquito bitten, half seasick, scorched with sunburn, astonished, half scared, half pleased. It was as much fun to see Ernest play an editor as to see him play a marlin.”

Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” Likewise when it came to fishing, Hemingway and Dos Passos had different motives. Dos Passos fished “for the pot”—to catch lunch or dinner. For that reason, he disliked fishing for tarpon, which figured among Hemingway’s favorite quarry, no matter the theatrics involved in fighting them. “I hated to see the great silver monsters lying in the dust on the wharf,” he wrote. “They aren’t fit to eat. About the only use is for mounting. Some people make knicknacks out of the dried scales. Sheer vanity catching tarpon.” Dos Passos looked to the sea as a salve for his spirit. It was in 1924, during a break from writing one of his best novels, Manhattan Transfer, that he discovered Key West. He understood that islands in general—and by extension, the sea—tended to refill his cup of inspiration. He called his happy affliction “islomania.”

I do not always know what to do with myths. I think my natural inclination is to knock the hot air out of them; certainly to give them a jaundiced viewing. Thank you, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dos Passos kicks in the myth of how an American writer should behave and how he should write. More to the point, he offers an alternative for the American novel that created by the myths of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

I will shoot my mouth one more time before closing, saying that Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s Raintree County and Don DeLillo's Underworld strike me as Dos Passos novels.

sch 4/28