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Aitäh, Koolibri, raamatu eest!

John Dos Passos "USA triloogia II: 1919" oli teine raamat, mis minuga Ameerikas ringi seikles. Sarja avaosa "USA triloogia I: 42. laiuskraad" (loe blogipostitust) andis aimu suurriigist sajandivahetusel ja mulle meeldis väga, et see enne reisi loetud sai. Järjega alustasin küll alles lennukis tagasiteel Eestisse.

20. sajandi algus, USA ja Euroopa. Joe, Dick, Eveline ja Anne on ameeriklased, kes erineval moel leiavad oma koha Esimeses maailmasõjas. Igaühel on oma roll, kes on eesliinil, kes tagalas, kes seilab merd kaubalaevastikus. Nende kodumaal kogub endiselt hoogu töölisliikumine, kuigi selle juhte karistatakse karmilt, samuti nagu patsifiste. Ben on ameeriklane, kes ei sõida üle Atlandi ookeani, vaid vaimustub revolutsioonijuttudest ning võtab aktiivselt meeleavaldustest osa.

"USA triloogia II: 1919" jätkab sealt, kus eelmine osa pooleli jäi - algab I maailmasõda. Eeldasin millegipärast, et rohkem on juttu sellest, kuidas see mõjutab elu Ameerikas, aga põhitegevus viis hoopis Euroopasse, Pariisi ja Rooma. Kui eelmises raamatus olid tegelased üle Ameerika laiali, siis siin on nad rohkem koos, lubades nende lugudel omavahel põimuda. Euroopasse jõuavad ka juba tuttavad Janey, Ward ja Eleanor, aga nende toimetusi näeb ainult teiste tegelaste pilgu läbi.

Üllatav oli ka see, et sõjategevusele endale teos ei keskendu. See on lihtsalt taustaks. Rindel käib peategelastest vaid üks ja temagi ei lähe sinna sõdima. Rohkem saab lugeda sellest, kuidas ameeriklased rahulepingu allkirjastamist ootavad, kõvasti pidu panevad, armuvalus piinlevad, satuvad sekeldustesse ja rabelevad neist välja. Mul ei tekkinud ühtki lemmikut, kellele ma väga kaasa oleks elanud, aga endiselt oli huvitav lugeda, kuidas erinevad tegelased läbi elu kulgesid. Veidi küll tekitas tülgastust, kui palju oli juttu igaühega voodisse heitmisest, suguhaigustest ja rasedate hülgamisest.

Stiililt on triloogia teine osa täpselt samasugune nagu esimene ehk vahelduvad eri tüüpi peatükid. Mulle küll tundus, et oli rohkem romaaniosa ja vähem pealkirjade, uudisekatkete ja lauluridade ning mõttejoru virrvarri, sekka parajalt ülevaateid tuntud inimeste elulugudest. Kui jutustavad peatükid jälgivad peategelasi Euroopas, siis kontrastiks on pilguheidud töölisliikumisele Ameerikas, kus pea iga punane aktivist trellide taha saadetakse. Toonilt on raamat eelmisest süngem - taustaks olev sõda, jõhkrad kokkupõrked töölisliikumise ja selle vastaste vahel ning mitu peategelast leiavad õudse lõpu.

This book is the second part of the USA trilogy, and the comments I made in my review of the first book, The 42nd Parallel, pretty much apply to this book as well. The author continues to use those four narrative modes which provide a wide sweep, but shallow depth, of early 20th century life.

The book may be shallow in its treatment of what's normally considered to be history. But the narrative goes into exhaustive detail with regard to the carnal thoughts and actions of the featured fictional characters. Inconvenient pregnancies continue to be a concern, and one in particular is solved by having the woman be in an airplane when its wing falls off. Only authors of novels have the ability to solve problems in such exotic ways. It's interesting to note that the man responsible for this pregnancy is the fictional character most similar to the author. The story reminds the reader that the people of the early 20th century had human frailties.

The book features multiple examples of the suppression of internal dissent during and immediately after WWI. Once again the book gives ample coverage to members of the Industrial Workers of the World (Wobblies). Most of these individuals considered the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the Czar as the beginning of a new glorious chapter in world history. Some of them assumed the that spread of Communism was inevitable. One of these Wobblies is lynched near the end of this book. Which reminds the reader of a reoccurring ironic question. Why would a mob made up of working class people lynch a union organizer who advocates for better wages and working conditions for the working class?

This book concludes with an elegiac biography of the body selected to be the "unknown soldier."

The second novel in his USA trilogy. A very realistic, gritty, unhopeful look at American life in the titular year. Not really a fun read, but an enlightening one. In this world, men treated women as sex objects, fit only for throwing away when they'd used them once or twice. In other words, not so very different from today. The women seemed surprisingly modern, too. Many of them wanted careers, they wanted to do things other than have children and marry the first man who made them pregnant, but whom they didn't necessarily want to settle down with. The characters seem alive and flawed.
The labor movement's another major theme. Folks are always joining a union or starting a strike, and in those days that meant you might get shot at. I think what I'm trying to say is that people didn't automatically assume that because the boss owned the business, he deserved all the profits, an idea that seems to have fallen by the wayside today. A dangerous idea, I suppose.
If you read this great novel, don't get this edition. It has too many typos, more than I've seen in any book I've read in a long time. Very bad proofreading.

I can't give this one star, because it's not quite as bad as some of the really reprehensible trash I've read in the past. I will say, however, that I am glad that Mr. Dos Passos is not still alive, or I'd be compelled to sock him in the mouth. It takes a real miserable son of a bitch to write such miserable sonsabitches as exist in these books. And it takes a worse one to relentlessly kill off any character that shows the least bit of hope, selflessness, or true love. George RR Martin is a total softy compared to this guy, nay, a poseur. Dos Passos kills off anything that smacks of hope, anything that even tries to do good, and any relationships are the very definition of dysfunctional. Oh, don't even try to blame it on the era and the other writers of his group-- sure, Hemingway had some miserable endings and hopeless situations, but at least his characters knew how to love and actually attempted to find happiness. Dos Passos doesn't just kill off the girls, force them into abortions, and abandon them en masse, he even kills the damn parakeet. To say I hate these books is an understatement.

Despite the title, all of this book takes place during WWI except the last two dozen or so pages which are post war. The construction of this novel is the same as its predecessor, The 42nd Parallel. These novels comprise a series, and should definitely be read in order.

Some of the characters are those from "42nd" and some are introduced in this one. I think the sections with the character headings could be likened to short stories. In some instances these "short stories" were inter-connected, that one character would have a cameo appearance or even a supporting role in another. I believe one of the characters was somewhat autobiographical.

I found Dos Passos leftist politics more prevalent here. Many times I thought he wrote with bitterness and cynicism. For me, this made for hard reading. For enjoyment, I'm hard put to give this more than 3-stars, but because there is more to this series than a relaxing read, I'm willing to find another star. I don't anticipate the next installment will be much easier, but I fully intend to complete the series soon.

It’s basically, sorta, like this:

“She makes me so unsure of myself
Standing there but never ever talking sense
Just a visitor you see
So much wanting to be seen
She'd open up the doors and vaguely carry us away

It's the customary thing to say or do
To a disappointed proud man in his grief
And on Fridays she'd be there
But on Mondays not at all
Just casually appearing from the clock across the hall

You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I'm the church and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

The Continent's just fallen in disgrace
William William William Rogers put it in its place
Blood and tears from old Japan
Caravans and lots of jam and maids of honor
Singing crying singing tediously

You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
Yes, you're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I'm the bishop and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

Efficiency efficiency they say
Get to know the date and tell the time of day
As the crowds begin complaining
How the Beaujolais is raining
Down on darkened meetings on the Champs Elysées

You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
And I'm the church and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la

You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
You're a ghost la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la
I'm the church and I've come
To claim you with my iron drum
La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la”

I'll start by saying how much I love the U.S.A. Trilogy. There's nothing like it in American letters, which is too bad, nothing of the pumping, forward-throttle of lives splayed over the massive events of their day. The first volume is electric, for the most part, showing the often frenetic, restless movements of its characters against a backdrop of a nation that was only just figuring out what it was, post-Civil War, during expansion, industrialization, and coming into its own. In this volume, we see how America reacts to World War I, equating war-lust with patriotism, and to the Russian Revolution, dropping itself like a ton of bricks on labor organizers and various pinks and reds.

This second novel, however, lacks some of the former's vitality. The way the characters keep bumping into each other feels constricted (one might prefer them to never cross paths). While Dos Passos performs admirably with his female characters, especially in terms of their sexuality, there's a ton of overlap in identity. There's not much difference between Eleanor Stoddard and Eveline Hutchins -- Janey Williams, in the first book, is more appealing -- and here we get Daughter, who is traced from admirably delineated Texas cloth, but is more of the same.

It's too much to ask Dos Passos to look at black characters, Hispanic characters, I suppose; he's writing within his wheelhouse, but there's too much interest in these higher society types. Essentially, the issue with the last quarter (or so) of the first novel erupts here. The Mac-surrogate from the first novel is Joe Williams, a lunkheaded, brutish seafarer: he occupies much of the beginning, and almost endlessly. The middle is occupied by those adjacent to the war in Europe. We're treated to drinking and wandering and screwing and it gets a bit mindless, too. Meanwhile, the sorta-sage eminence from the first, J. Ward Morehouse, shows up to a bit too much narrative admiration, in my opinion.

There's a sense of exhaustion here, as if JDP wasn't quite as electrified as he was for most of The 42nd Parallel. We don't see much of the war -- which is fine; I'd expect his readers were well-aware of it -- and perhaps the fresh anger at the war (for whomever bore it) is hard to grasp now, the jumpy energy of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and new ideals. But the capsule portraits of major figures lack the poetry of the previous volume, a few going on too long, Joe Hill's (frex) barely a whisper and too short, and we don't quite, in my opinion, grasp the ideas shuttling around in the distance as they infect, or don't, these characters. Late, with Ben Compton, do we get that old electricity: Dos Passos wakes up when he's talking about labor and these poor, befuddled, doomed street philosophers.

The whole novel isn't entirely successful. But not quite there, for Dos Passos, and at least in this trilogy, is still terrific. As leaden and long as some parts are, as a bit lost to history as other parts are (he didn't think to fully translate 1919 to us a century later!), so much of this is very good. In his prelude to the entire set, he says U.S.A. is the speech of the people and boy can you feel and hear it. When he's really working, his prose is exceptional, enlivened by vertiginous drops into close third / free-indirect discourse, and his knack for impressionistically setting a scene, commanding characters' emotional content, hitting nervy, expressive detail, before whisking away in time using barely a sentence, is tremendous.

So, perhaps not a sum of its parts, but just an amazing achievement, still. There's a sickening, enlivening thing (both) that happens when we see these characters strive and flail and not really go anywhere, or have any huge impact (that is) on the events around them. They come and go -- Janey Williams, so effective in the last book, is nowhere to be seen, here. Mac is long gone. There's something amazing about this, even if the author didn't quite make it narratively pungent, although I suspect the impossibility in this regard. Only late, frex, do things get jumpy with labor strikes and Ben Compton, as well as the drama around Daughter's eventually miserable situation.

The middle volume of USA takes us into the European theater of WWI with many of the characters from 42nd Parallel and some new ones. The cynicism of the ambulance drivers and the corridors of the peace discussions reminded me of the way that Heller and Pynchon described WWII in Europe. The echos of anti-Semitism sadly presage the catastrophies that will arrive later in the 20s and 30s as the Nazis rise to power. It is interesting to note that Dos Passos was himself and ambulance driver during this period of the war, and that The Camera Eye sections are usually his own autobiographical memoirs.
I am a bit mystified as to why this book did not win the 1932 Pulitzer given the relatively obscurity of winner Stribling's The Store.

This book read like a blog of Dos Passos' experiences (or that of his characters) for the later months of WWI. The reader is placed right in front of the stage for an experience worthy almost of theater, probably because a narrator was found who could actually sing well enough for putting one in the timeframe of the story. Some of the language is clearly NOT PC, but that's probably some of what makes it as good as it is.

1919, #2 in the U.S.A. trilogy by John Dos Passos is a curious mix of literary devices, some of which were fairly experimental when the book first appeared but can now seem rather tiresome.



By the author's own admission, the novel is a collage of styles & approaches to capturing the 2nd decade of the 20th Century, including journal-like entries, quirky observations & listed "newsreels" that serve to introduce chapters. Beyond that, there are occasional lyrics & other passages in French (Dos Passos' first language) & German that go untranslated, a curious use of adjectives and irregular punctuation, some of which may offer a hint of E.E. Cummings, perhaps not surprising since they were close friends while students at Harvard, often traveled together after graduation and remained lifelong friends.

John Dos Passos began life as Jack Madison, his mother having been the mistress of a rich & very well-connected lawyer & financier of Madeiran-Portuguese descent but when his father's wife died, as did his mother's husband, he took refuge as a part of his father's family, while never feeling very close to & often fighting against his father's lifestyle and identifying with the underclass.



Unlike George Orwell for example. Dos Passos did so largely in an intellectual manner & at something of a distance from the poor & dispirited, perhaps owing to his family wealth and his elite education at Choate Academy & at Harvard but identified with the poor nonetheless, railing against what Dos Passos saw as social indifference during the Gilded Age. This shift in personal identity when young seems telling in the life of Dos Passos, someone who frequently viewed himself as an outsider.

Prior to enrolling at Harvard, Dos Passos traveled through Europe + to Greece & Turkey with a tutor, a sort of "gap year" that his father's family fortune allowed for. Beyond that, the author became a fairly accomplished artist after formal training and later served with other Harvard pacifists in an ambulance corps during WWI, enduring gas attacks & frequent bombings on the frontlines between France & Germany. He was also a lifelong traveler, spending time in Paris with the likes of Hemingway & others, visiting Soviet Russia & making a hazardous journey by camel across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad in the 1920s.



1919 intersperses stories about folks like Joe Williams who goes AWOL in Buenos Aires, signing on to a cargo ship bound for Liverpool via Trinidad, a pacifist named Dick Norton (much like the author) who toils as an ambulance driver during WWI and a socialite from Texas who flees to New York & eventually to administrative work with a Methodist group in France, serving the Allied cause. There is much "boozing and wenching", a lingering celebration of things much less possible back home, especially during the prohibition era and several characters who "opt for sin & beauty" while abroad.

There is also a brief mention of Joe Hill's plight as a union organizer for the International Workers of the World later in the book, something that caused his execution but brought him a perpetual martyr's status and an account of the insertion of the assembled remains of the Unknown Soldier as a way of bolstering patriotism in America following the war. Teddy Roosevelt's "bully pulpit" is detailed, as is Woodrow Wilson's struggle to gain a lasting peace through the League of Nations but one senses that Dos Passos has no real sympathy for either man.

All in all, the characters are not extraneous to the period Dos Passos attempts to encapsulate but they form no unified whole and 1919 is not a novel in any particular sense. It is easy to be taken aback by the racist & ethnic slurs mouthed by the characters in this novel, though most likely they were not uncommon during the period Dos Passos portrays in 1919 & the other 2 volumes of his trilogy.



What seems to drive this book and the U.S.A. trilogy by Dos Passos is a sense of blazing new literary ground with phrasing and cadence and a mix of literary formats. If one were to take the author's surname as a charactonym and translate it somewhat loosely from the Portuguese, one has the words "back" & "steps", which isn't half bad because this book takes us to a time & place when the novel did break new ground.

However, while there are 8,000 reviews at this site for A Farewell to Arms and half that many for Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, there are just 100 for 1919 by Dos Passos, novels that are roughly contemporary & written by authors who were long-time friends prior to an eventual falling out over the death of a close friend of Dos Passos at the hands of a Communist faction during the Spanish Civil War. It would appear that excepting a literary revival for Dos Passos, his time as a popular American author has very much come & gone.



The library version of 1919 that I read included some wonderful sketches by Reginald Marsh, the painter who was a student of John Sloan of the "Ash Can School" & who, like John Dos Passos, identified with the underclass. That said, later in life, Dos Passos became increasingly conservative politically, embracing the likes of Barry Goldwater & Richard Nixon and writing for Wm.F. Buckley's arch-conservative journal.

A biography I read seems to indicate that John Dos Passos was forever changed by the execution of his close friend Jose Robles by fellow red army members as a part of Stalin's purges during the Spanish Civil War, at a time when Dos Passos & Hemingway ended up on opposite sides of a formerly shared struggle in Spain. This is a book with perhaps a somewhat limited appeal today but one I was glad to have spent time reading.

*Within my review are images of: the author, John Dos Passos; a self-portrait of the author reading; Dos Passos (at left) with Hemingway during Spanish Civil War; quote from the author; Reginald Marsh ("Ash Can School") painting.

Much like the previous book in this trilogy, 1919 functions as an impressive compendium of an alternative, leftist/pacifist/unionist side of American history in the early 20th century. Unlike the previous book, the characters Dos Passos chooses to write from the free indirect voiced-perspective of are less endearing. I appreciated the experiential breadth they provided, but that benefits the work as a comprehensive document more than the work as a successful, engaging novel.

Additionally, I found the experimental sections somehow weaker (though I had already been losing patience with them in the 42nd Parallel.) The biographies, as always, were phenomenal. Overall, I see this as a proverbially unwieldy middle entry, whose chaos befits the global war and far flung locations it attempts to capture. I look forward to reading the Big Money eventually, with the hope that it'll be a more singular and focused conclusion.

My interest waned quite a bit in this second installation. I far preferred the sections from women's perspectives (Eveline, Ann Elizabeth) despite the men continuously causing problems for them. Lack of birth control and the lifelong impact to women (but not men) of accidental pregnancy in this time period is both disturbing and infuriating. It's true to how things were at the time, which only makes it harder to read about.

I still enjoyed the scene-setting done through the Camera Eye and Newsreel sections, though not quite as much as in book one. I suppose the go-nowhere nature of some of these lives is starting to weigh on me, and the celebratory humor of these other elements is disconcerting.

The mini bios of famous people are still just as good. For the most part, they manage to tell the story of a life--a whole life--in just a few pages without being boring. It's impressive!