A Darkling Whitman

"History," he wrote years ago, "is a mass-invention, the day dream of a race." It was the American day dream that especially fascinated John Dos Passos. Like a darkling Walt Whitman, he sang of a sprawling, intricate, in many ways desolate, industrial America. Dos Passos had to invent his own form to contain his vision. U.S.A. was a montage of deft biographies, Joycean interior monologues, narrative fictions and fascinating oddments, headlines and snatches of popular songs. His prose-poetry was as varied and fragmented as his pluralistic America.

Dos Passos, who died last week of a heart attack at 74, was the last major survivor of the literary generation that included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Faulkner. His work has been slighted in recent years. Politics--the central theme and passion of much of his writing--helped to undermine his reputation. Read today, Dos Passes' earlier works often seem as archaic as the rhetoric of Wobblies. But there are also passages that seem eerily prescient: "All right we are two nations. America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have bought the laws and fenced off the meadows and cut down the woods for pulp and turned our pleasant cities into slums . . ."

If the language of 1936 sounds like the outcry of dissent today, Dos Passos would have none of it now. In fairly familiar disenchantment, Dos Passos turned against Communism in the 1930s. By the '60s, he was voting for Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater. To Dos Passos, big labor and centralized Government had replaced "the big-money boys" as the American villains. But the most consistent theme in his life was a vaguely anarchic impulse, a craving for individuality which no ideology could permanently satisfy.

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