Roving Writer

JOURNEYS BETWEEN WARS--John Dos Passos--Harcourt, Brace ($3).

In 1922 John Dos Passos published a book on Spain, Rosinante to the Road Again, followed it five years later with one on his travels in the Near East, Orient Express. These random recollections of unconventional journeys were written in a glancing, impressionistic style, with characterizations of fellow travelers blending with offhand comments on politics and tag lines from overheard conversations.

The high point of Dos Passos' journey in Spain was not in adventures, but in a quiet talk with a seasoned native. The high point of his Far Eastern trip was a 37-day caravan ride from Romadi to Damascus, on which there were occasional fights with bandits, and on which the novelist came to the conclusion that the "little black men with the camel colts are the finest people in the world."

In Journeys Between Wars, Dos Passos has taken selections from these two books, brought them up to date with a section on the civil war in Spain, and with the inclusion of accounts of trips to Mexico and Russia, made the book a unified volume of 394 pages covering his travels over 20 years. It is spattered with characteristic Dos Passos splashes of color, like his description of his first glimpse of Toledo: "Against the grey and ochrestreaked theatre of the Cigarrales were piled masses of buttressed wall that caught the orange sunset light on many tall plane surfaces rising into crenellations and square towers and domes and slatecapped spires. . . ." But in general it is laconic: "Here we are sitting on our tails again," he wrote, when the caravan was delayed by bandits. "This ibn Haremis gang is a rare one. . . . Such a set of walleyed, crooknosed, squinting, oneeyed, scarfaced cutthroats and slit-purses I have never seen. ... I imagine they'd be very good fellows if you got to know them."

Dos Passos saw famine and typhus in the Near East, talked over Bolshevik atrocities with Russian refugees, Turkish atrocities with Greeks and Armenians, English duplicity with Arabs. In Spain he was startled to hear a mountain peasant exclaim, "America is the world of the future." In Arabia a native told him owlishly that the English "were united and used their guns only to shoot strangers, while the Arabs were always squabbling among themselves and were very nice to strangers." Hating high-flown sentiments in all forms (he read Juvenal on the way to Damascus, did not like it because "I smell rhetoric"), he grows eloquent only about the Spanish civil war. After seeing Madrid under siege, feeling uncomfortable talking to soldiers because he could remember how he felt when journalists visited the front during the War, Dos Passes left Spain profoundly depressed: "How can they win? . . . How can the new world full of confusion and crosspurposes and illusions and dazzled by the mirage of idealistic phrases win against the iron combination of men accustomed to run things who have only one idea binding them together, to hold on to what they've got?"

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