John Dos Passos
From Philosopedia
Dos Passos, John Roderigo (14 January 1896 - 28 September 1970)
Dos Passos was the Chicago-born illegitimate son of a prominent American attorney. For the first sixteen years of his life, he could not claim his father's surname, because such a scandal about a successful corporate lawyer would not have been good business. While a student at Choate in Connecticut, however, his parents married and he received his father's last name. Many at the time did not know that his mother when 16 had married Ryland Randolph Madison, an alcoholic and a fourth-generation nephew of President James Madison.
It is likely Dos Passos's mother had become sexually involved with John R. Dos Passos in 1883, when she was 27. He was the son of an immigrant cobbler from the island of Madeira and an atheist. She became became a copyist in his office and fell in love with the cocky Shakespeare-quoting Anglophile with a bushy waxed mustache. He had maintained Lucy as his mistress for a quarter of a century until his wife died, during which time she had helped look after his bastard son, Louis.
Dos Passos was raised in Virginia by his mother, lived for a time in France, then attended Harvard University, graduating in 1916. Before the United States entered World War I, he volunteered and served in France and Italy as an ambulance driver. One Man's Initiation (1920), which is about an ambulance drive, drew upon his experiences. He was an activist fighting the growth of fascism in Europe, joining other literary figures such as Dashiell Hammett, Clifford Odets, Lillian Hellman, and Ernest Hemingway.
A novelist, he had his first success, Three Soldiers (1921), which was followed by another, Manhattan Transfer (1925). In a trilogy, U.S.A. (1937), he developed a kaleidoscopic technique to portray life, one which combined narration, stream of consciousness, biographies, and quotations from newspapers and magazines. His early left-wing views gave way to a conservatism evident in his less power later novels, such as his second trilogy, District of Columbia (1952).
In Paris, he met Ernest Hemingway in 1924 and the two became friends. Dos Passos defended immigrants Sacco and Vanzetti in Orient Express (1927). He studied the socialist view in Russia in 1928. In 1929 he married Katharine Smith, who in 1947 was killed in a car accident and he lost sight in one eye. In 1949 he married Elizabeth Holdridge, and their daughter Lucy Hamlin Dos Passos was born in 1949.
Kenneth S. Lynn, reviewing Virginia Spencer Carr's His Torments Shaped His Politics (The New York Times, 23 September 1984), surveys the various experiences Dos Passos and his various family members had and gives much credit to Katharine Smith for her guidance, despite knowing of his various romances, including relationships with men in Tangier. Of interest is that their marriage license lists her age as 34 (although she was two months shy of 38) whereas he truthfully stated his age as 33. Carr suggests that Katharine might have been one of Hemingway's lovers, even though he was about to become engaged to Hadley Richards, one of her best friends.
Contents |
The Conversation With Theodore Dreiser
Dos Passos after World War I was something of an independent-radical seeker. During the 1920s his radicalism simmered, heating up considerably between 1927 and 1932. He never joined the Communist Party but supported it during his fellow-traveling stage. His friend Edmund Wilson questioned if his hatred of capitalist society had not become a distaste for all the beings who compose it.
his published "Conversation" with Theodore Dreiser, surely one of the oddest and wooliest political discussions ever carried on between two distinguished novelists, must have seemed even stranger.
It took place in Dreiser's apartment, December 17, 1937. From a rather uncertain exchange on the political situation in New York City, the conversation veered to Upton Sinclair, Quakerism, and W.P.A. writers to the subject of Russia:
- Dos Passos: Five years ago, a great many Americans pretended to be very hopeful about Russia. I think now because of this terrific terror, because of the fact that the terror has to keep on, and keeps going on, people feel that something is not working there.
- Dreiser: Well, I was strong for Russia and for Stalin and the whole program, but in the last year, I have begun to think that maybe it won't be any better than anything else.
- Dos Passos: Well, though, look at the achievements of the French Revolution, a great many survived through the period following Napoleon. I think a great many of its achievements are still going on.
- Dreiser: Yes, and a great many achievements of the Russian Revolution are right here with us. We're indebted to them for a lot of things - 40 hour week, W.P.A. - I mean for public works - the dole, because they had the dole over there from the first. Wages and laws, control of farming. This bill that's up now. That would never come in this country except for Russia in 1917, at least not in our day.
- Dos Passos: No, I think all the great achievements of the Russian Revolution have been made, and that's absorbed into history. And I still don't understand what's happening there. It sounds like . . .
- Dreiser: And damned if I do. They claim that they give the Russians a liberal education, you know, a technical education from farming and dairying up. They also give them training in the arts, pertaining to the theatre, the libraries, and gymnastics, health, diet -- all that's supposed to go with being a Russian. But what seems to be lacking is the question of ideology, of what they are to think. And they are to think that any other form of government is insane and that everybody outside Russia is worse off than they are, that they are less miserable than anybody else. I know that to be a fact. Still, that may be a temporary condition, an attempt to achieve cohesion and unity. It has been how many years now? Twenty years, and they have done that much, but it's just a question in my mind whether they'll do more, or whether Russia will be liberalized. Maybe they do want to have a little religion, or greater class differences, or a little more money - less standardization in life, you know.
- Dos Passos: Yes.
Humanisms
In 1949 Warren Allen Smith, knowing of his changing views in politics from near-communism to near-capitalism, wrote to Dos Passos, asking if any of seven connotations of humanism [[1]] described his philosophic outlook. Dos Passos responded,
- Lord, I’m afraid I don’t know how to answer. I’ve spent my life trying to escape these classifications and am entirely ignorant of the philosophical vocabulary. What kind of humanists were Erasmus and Rabelais and Montaigne and Sir Thomas More? They lived in a period of violent ideological warfare that bears some relation to our own unhappy age. I don’t pretend to have attained that lofty eminence, but some such attitude as theirs is the attitude I think a man of letters should strive for.
In 1951, he added,
- I don’t see that classical humanism was incompatible with science. The scientific approach grew out of it. Frankly, it’s rank nonsense to attribute anti-scientific views to Erasmus, etc., which may be alleged by some - there’s evidently more confusion in the use of this term. When I speak of humanism I use the word in the standard historical sense as applying to the general Renaissance, scholarly outlook. I can’t see that that was anti-scientific. The general “platonic” attitude could, I imagine, be spoken of as anti-scientific, in distinction with the Aristotelian, but the Aristotelian was also a priori.
In 1956, he elaborated on his earlier views:
- A definition of humanism is certainly in order, but I find it hard to find any single phrase sharp enough to give outline to a bedraggled word. Having spent my whole life trying to avoid classifications of this sort, I’m certainly not going to submit to one of the seven categories at this late date. I can find no valid objection to be included [as being in agreement with] the categories of ancient humanism and classical humanism. The names of the classical philosophers set all my sympathetic strings to humming. They taught us how to examine our world. Theistic humanism doesn’t seem quite as limiting as atheistic humanism. Communistic humanism would seem to me to mean exactly the opposite of any of the various conceivable brands. Naturalistic humanism would seem to have as many varied meanings as a political platform; who will remember them after election? This leaves us exactly where we started. Humanism, though the word is as banal as a coin worn smooth of date and inscription, still connotes something. To me it connotes a frame of mind I would call vaguely good. It suggests freedom rather than slavery, fertility rather than sterility. the development of varied individualities in men rather than regimentation, the stimulation of charity and fellow feeling rather than of envy, hatred, and malice. Let’s have more of it.
Final Years
Although his early years showed him to be left-of-center, he turned conservative in his final years. He became disillusioned because of the failed hopes of post-war intellectuals, who seemed to him to have become too materialistic. A non-fictional work, Midcentury (1961), expressed his view that an earlier faith in individualism had now changed and celebrated free enterprise.
He died of heart failure while in Baltimore. Dos Passos wanted and received a Protestant burial service, complete with church language, which was held in Baltimore at Trinity Church.
Miscellaneous
Following is correspondence Dos Passos had with Warren Allen Smith:
{WAS, 1 April 1949, 15 February 1951, 27 October 1956}
