From Rebellion to Doubt

THE GRAND DESIGN (440 pp.)--John Dos Passos--Houghton Mifflln ($3.50).

The Grand Design is one of those books that can be read by itself, as a slow movement of a symphony can be played by itself, but will be best understood by those who know what went on before it. With The Grand Design, Dos Passes returns to a series of novels he began ten years ago.

He was then a first-rank U.S. literary hero. Leftish intellectuals and young people distressed by the depression saw his massive and radical trilogy, U.S.A., as a powerful plea for America's underprivileged. Written at a time when social novelists were likely to have more anger than talent, U.S.A. was a major literary achievement. Perhaps for the first time, an American novelist chose society as a whole as his central figure and used individual characters as mere illustrations for his thesis that America had been skidding downhill, socially and morally, since World War I.

The Break. Three weeks after U.S.A. was hailed by the fellow-traveling League of American Writers in 1937, Dos Passes lost his appeal for Communists when he attacked "the intricate and bloody machinery of Kremlin policy." He began a new series of novels that were to be as full of the liberal's soul-searching doubts as U.S.A. had been of the radical's passionate certainties.

In 1939 the first novel in this new series, Adventures of a Young Man, told the raw, resentful story of middle-class Radical Glenn Spotswood who became a Red organizer, was forced to leave his striking worker comrades in the lurch after a twist of party line, was expelled from the party for "deviations," and then died a lonely death in Spain at the hands of his ex-comrades.

Four years later, in Number One, Dos Passos picked up the story of Glenn's brother, Tyler, who lost his soul through power-hungry cynicism. After working as political handyman for a hillbilly demagogue, Tyler found himself as defeated in America as Glenn had been in Spain.

Having repudiated the two totalitarian extremes, Dos Passos faced the tough job of making the next novel in his series a defense of his liberal values. Next week, after delays caused by Dos Passos' war reporting and a highway accident which took his wife's life and cost him an eye, that novel will come out. The Grand Design contains the expected defense of liberalism, but it speaks in a worried, hesitant, uncertain voice in which there is little of the power of U.S.A.

Harried Capital. As brisk, top-of-the-mind journalism, The Grand Design is fun. Dos Passos has fixed his sights on New Deal Washington, located its telltale landmarks: harried officials, their minds cross-grained with idealism and opportunism; ascetic lunches, reflecting the prevalence of ulcers; gaps of hollow loneliness between lunges of ambition; and pure-souled efforts of some men to serve their country without profit.

But as a novel, The Grand Design seldom clicks. Characters wander in & out of its pages, drifting on the political tide. A few, easily recognizable, will cause gossip, but not many are vivid enough to arouse much interest. Some of the leading ones:

>Walker Watson, a vain, humorless Cabinet member who dabbles in occult lore while thirsting for the vice presidency. He hates to be left alone with his empty self, loves to reminisce about his "poor little mother." Self-proclaimed friend of the common man, he buckles in a crisis and betrays his liberal subordinates.

>Paul Graves, one of the betrayed subordinates, an agricultural expert whose salty efficiency and low-charged idealism make him more attractive than most Washingtonians.

>Herbert Spotswood, fire-eating broadcaster who discovers fame's sweetness in old age, exploits the memory of his son Glenn at a fellow-traveling meeting to gain applause, and neglects his other son, Tyler, now a broken-down rummy.

>Joe Yerkes, a loutish radical with "red ears sticking out like the handles of a sugarbowl," who mouths party-line phrases while hanging on to his soft union job.

>Jane Sparling, Communist leader, who snares Washington innocents to pump them for secret information.

The Preacher. Unfortunately, Dos Passos makes the radicals in The Grand Design seem so silly and so over-ridiculed that it is difficult to accept, on his evidence, that they are also dangerous; his liberals are too ineffectual to be the heroes Dos Passos hoped they might be. Dos Passos has lost much of his old objectivity about his characters; he now tends to preach to them and to the reader.

Most serious of all, his new novel lacks the unifying passion which in U.S.A. made a collection of vignettes a coherent novel. U.S.A., too, risked being a sprawling anthology of fragments, but Dos Passos' anger held it together. His bewilderment cannot do the work which anger once did.

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