The Body of an American

The blood ran into the ground.

The service record dropped out of the filing cabinet when the quartermaster sergeant got blotto that time they had to pack up and leave the billets in a hurry.

The identification tag was in the bottom of the Marne.

The blood ran into the ground, the brains oozed out of the cracked skull and were licked up by the trenchrats, the belly swelled and raised a generation of blue-bottle flies.

and the incorruptible skeleton,

and the scraps of dried viscera and skin bundled in khaki

they took to Chalons-sur-Marne

and laid it out neat in a pine coffin

and took it home to God’s Country on a battleship

and buried in a sarcophagus in the Memorial Amphitheatre in the Arlington National Cemetery

and draped the Old Glory over it

and the bugler played taps

and Mr. Harding prayed to God and the diplomats and the generals and the admirals and the brasshats and the politicians and the handsomely dressed ladies out of the society column of the Washington Post stood up solemn

and thought how beautiful sad Old Glory God’s Country it was go have the bugler play taps and the three volleys made their ears ring.

Where his chest ought to have been they pinned

the Congressional Medal, the D.S.C., the Medaille Militaire, the Belgian Croix de Guerre, the Italian gold medal, the Vitutea Militara sent by Queen Marie of Rumania, the Czechoslovak war cross, the Virtuti Militari of the Poles, a wreath sent by Hamilton Fish, Jr., of New York, . . . . All the Washingtonians brought flowers.

Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies.

DNF at ~160/400

This book was an endless succession of meaningless events happening to characters with no color or interest or sympathy, run-on sentences and months and weeks occurring in mere paragraphs mostly given any kind of color by allusions to geographical locations (not in the USA) without any real descriptive heft or intrigue. I figured what the hell I'd read the whole trilogy because I so enjoyed the socialist angle of the first book but after realizing that I could simply skim it and lose nothing because most of the events feel somehow like they've already happened and leave no impact, I remembered that I'm allowed to not.

Somewhere in the supremely boring descriptions of WWI revelry and warfare, I realized that Dos Passos didn't have any kind of plan here beyond a wish to describe "the times." What's really jarring about this book is that so little of it takes place in the USA. The big thematic development that starts in the first book, a look into the early development of modern capitalism, recedes into the background. It becomes much more about fucking and fighting, and good Christ I just couldn't be bothered.

You can't tell me this book was ahead of its time when Faulkner was going insaneo-style on the literary world in the same time period.

Hayatımda atlayarak okuduğum ikinci kitaptı (ilki de bu serinin ilk kitabı olan ABD 42. Enlem

A largely forgotten novel, it seems, an astounding blend of classic narrative, stream of consciousness, and journalism that captures a significant period of American history. An operatic number of characters move through history, some connected and some not, and through their lives we witness a personal engagement with epic historic events. Largely concerned with labor politics, socialism, and even women's rights, Dos Passos' novel is essential reading that provides a deeper understanding of those times. Take your time reading it. Enjoy the strange sections of poetic narrative between the more traditionally-written chapters. Steel yourself against the repetition of personal foibles and tragedies that seem endless, affecting every class of citizen portrayed in this amazing novel. Embrace its encyclopedic scope and learn from it. You won't be disappointed.

The war dictates its own rules… And these rules make a man so small…

…saw the German troops goose-stepping through Brussels, saw Poincaré visiting the long doomed galleries of Verdun between ranks of bitter half-mutinous soldiers in blue, saw the gangrened wounds, the cholera, the typhus, the little children with their bellies swollen with famine, the maggoty corpses of the Serbian retreat, drunk Allied officers chasing sick naked girls upstairs in the brothels in Saloniki, soldiers looting stores and churches, French and British sailors fighting with beer bottles in the bars…

Such is the fate of the fighters:
“Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die.” Alfred Tennyson – The Charge of the Light Brigade.

The guys from Chicago said they’d been working in a munitions factory themselves but they were through, goddam it, and that if the working stiffs made a few easy dollars it meant that the war profiteers were making easy millions. They said the Russians had the right idea, make a revolution and shoot the goddam profiteers and that ud happen in this country if they didn’t watch out and a damn good thing too.

And war is a bliss for those who make money on the blood of the fighters: “…you couldn’t do anything without making other people miserable.”
As soon as one becomes happy, the others start feeding on one’s happiness and they keep doing it until one turns unhappy once again.

I am surprised Dos Passos isn't better well-known. Although complete fiction, the picture he paints of the era is very compelling and is another, higher level of "historical fiction".

There are several concurrent short stories of people in the period, during WW1. Great revelation to a modern reader of how these people saw that they were in the "War to End All Wars". In retrospect, I do think WW1 may have had some finalty for that type of war and its causes. For fun, these stories do cross over and it is fascinating to get each person's motivations. Dos Passos gets you into each story so deeply that you root for the main character, forgetting that in the previous story you may have been rooting for this character's rival in the exact same situation.

The book also is sprinkled with strema-of-conscious memeories of Passos himself in teat period as well as chapters which just give series of news clippings from that period. This book is like read an extraordinary piece of painted art.

His intellectual life is interesting, growing from an extreme leftest position to extreme right from the 1920's through the 1960's.

The writing was probably edgy and experimental for the time but it didn't age well. Too many characters. As soon as a character starts having too good of a time, they get sick, move away, or fall on hard financial times and then it's on to the next character. It seems formulaic like a sine wave.

There's nothing to stitch it all together other than Dos Passos's cold hard view of the American working class at war in Europe. Oh yeah, except most of the characters are wealthy and at the fringe working for the Red Cross or as foreign correspondents but still calling themselves laborers. It's hundreds of pages of a silver-spoon trust fund baby trying to convince you how hard it is for the American working-man soldier.

If The 42nd Parallel roams all over the States (and North America writ large) as characters enter the 20th century in search of meaning, 1919 contends with the focal point of WWI, which characters variously disdain, patriotically support, capitalistically exploit, and hope will bring out the global revolution. The first book wryly established the lack of focus in characters becoming increasingly radicalized by labor conditions, while this shows people squandering the opportunity for real solidarity. That's not only true of the failure to build on the Bolshevik Revolution in the West but of lingering prejudices that blunt true unions. Immigrants and blacks are spoken of, never speaking for themselves, but even the reddest socialist here reveals inner distrust of non-whites. And Dos Passos regularly calls attention to the ways that women who attempt to live the same loose, unbound lives as the men are punished, scorned and abandoned, usually when in the family way. U.S.A. definitely has the scope and ambitious technique to be aiming for Great American Novel status, yet in its grandeur it always feels like a black comic study of the struggle to overcome not merely capital in America, but the selfish, irresponsible individualism seemingly bred into its citizens.

I thought it was pretty good, the characters and their stories that John Dos Passos creates are very well done. Always start off with a sort of person that has usually given up in life and is trying to succeed to achieve that American dream. It's kind of sad when he switches characters because it's always right when I'm really enjoying the previous character. The drawings between pages describing a scene are always very unique and help depict the characters a little bit more. Each character never have anything similar which I think is very impressive, and they all have so much to them. These books are always very different from most and I think this author deserves a lot of credit for his style.

Between everyone being a socialist and everyone else avoiding the fighting in WWI Europe, OH and every boy sleeps with a girl knocks her up and says "I believe in free love" after promising to marry her and runs out on her, I am not exactly sure I will make it through the next book. The writing is original and is one of the first books to experiment with multiple main characters, and the breaks between chapters and this book does those very well. The Big Money better be worth it...

Today, John Dos Passos is the sort of writer that you get second hand. He influenced a whole generation of (mostly American) writers who name checked him in essays and interviews. He has fallen out of fashion and is rarely discussed today in the common literary circuits. He worked in the age of ‘modernism’, but in contrast to the ‘high’ modernism of Woolf or Joyce, Dos Passos might be called (and not inaccurately) a ‘low modernist’. ‘1919’ at least is filled with the sort of enfilade of common voices and street level information that would not become terribly popular or common until much later books like ‘J R’, ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’ or ‘Life: A User’s Manual’. To say nothing of their methods or brilliance the philosophical viewpoint and references of a Stephen Dedalus or aristocratic party planning of Mrs. Dalloway could not be further from the day to day grime and toil of Dos Passos’s characters. We get little snippets of lives, lives which tend to the common, tedious, banal.

tDos Passos’s writing is unabashedly of its time. All too often (though with some notable exceptions, such as Eleanor or Daughter) women are reduced to the giggling or nagging love interests of the male leads. They exist solely for the pleasure of men, and when men are not using them they fade into the background. Races other than whites are always at the fringes, side characters made exotic in well known and tired ways. The only exception here is Benny Compton, the agitating socialist intellectual New York Jew, a lesser known but just as overt stereotype. Just short of overt racism Dos Passos may just be able to get a pass for ‘writing from the view of his time’ today. Needless to say, his views of race, and how they are conveyed have aged poorly.

tThe pace is quick, especially with characters like Joe, who hop from boat to boat, crossing the Atlantic without a thought, getting struck by a German mine or torpedo without so much as a thought. Weeks or months may pass without so much as a note. The stories come off somewhat like the nostalgic tales of old timers: the details forgotten, only the jist coming through. Life passes by and we are left with just the lingering sensation.

tAmusingly, a piece of Teddy Roosevelt, encompassing his whole life, from his childhood to his death and only a few pages long, is dropped in between the portraits of the Rabble. The portrayal of T.R. straddles the line between hagiography and the work-a-day style of portraiture in which the rest of the characters are portrayed. The man of greatness is dropped in and, instead of being given a great dose of time, is mostly sketched out with a great deal of his section spent on his somewhat sad and faltering end. Teddy’s section over we drop back into the lives of the other.

tThe narrative vignettes are broken up by ‘Newsreels’ and ‘The Camera’s Eye’: brief, cut up pieces which flicker before us, setting the tone and laying out the cultural set pieces in which these character’s lives take place. In ‘1919’ the dominant theme is the war, and it is seen in all its jingoistic glory, with the zeal for protection quickly making way for paranoia, fear and self-destruction. We see pacifists fearing for their freedom, officers on shore leave strutting around in their uniforms. Regardless, as war has always been for Americans, except for those characters who seek it out (whether in the Merchant Marine or driving an army ambulance) the fighting is almost entirely an abstraction. Buying war bonds and dealing with shortages. Reading the papers anxiously and waiting for boys to come home. As the novel comes to a close the focus shifts away from the war and toward the labor struggle, the unions and their violent repression.

tPerhaps unusual for the time the novel discusses, in not totally veiled terms, the homoerotic. There are the not unexpected gay panics as John is approached by a cruisey American at a Caribbean resort who offers Joe fifty dollars to ‘do the handsome thing’. Burly, pugnacious Joe of course runs off in disgust and horror at this thin, drunk man. But then there is Dick Savage who frankly describes his crush on the captain of his baseball team as a youth, his days spent together with ‘dreamy’ foppish Blake and their wanderings around Cambridge which, on a drunken election night, sees Blake disappear with drunken sailor and friend. Dick frets all night, ostensibly worried that Blake has been rolled by the toughs, but he feels some kind of deeper sadness and longing. Blake comes home the next morning beaming and mentions in an oblique way that they had visited the Turkish baths, ‘a most curious place’.

tTo an American these stories seem all too familiar, even through the lens of time, though feasibly to a non-American these stories might hold a Mythical weight like that of Scheherazade, building up the US as can only be seen by an American. The day to day banality of each character’s detracts nothing of course, and that is how Dos Passos wrote them. Dos Passos cannot be charged entirely with writing domestic realism. There is something else, a grander vision, at work. Story arcs are there, but they seem secondary at times, even invisible. But there is something else present which grips the reader. Very much like a choral work it is not the individual at the fore, but how all the individuals come together to form a whole. We are never waiting for two of the disparate characters to meet, for their storylines to intersect, for the plot to resolve into something more ‘coherent’. No, the characters very well may never meet, their storylines will likely never touch, any more than the notes of the bass and the contralto will suddenly converge. That is not the point. Rather it is the resonances, the tension and the harmonies of the lives as seen from a distance that take the fore. The fluctuating poverty of Joe, who never feels terribly poor, against the wealth of Eveline who, traveling Europe on a Petit Tour is surprised to find herself being lumped in with ‘the rich girls’. The struggles of one character pale in comparison to the struggles of another, their disparate joys, concerns and relationships. To show the daily lives of Americans, and the beauty that can occur not just on the level of the individual, but in the great strange machine that is this country.

My full review of Nineteen Nineteen is up now on Keeping Up With The Penguins.

In the end, I really felt nothing for this book. I could appreciate that Dos Passos was being really very clever and experimental and all of that, but perhaps just too much so for me to actually enjoy reading. I read later that Nineteen Nineteen has been adapted a number of times for radio and stage – don’t ask me how, holy Oprah, but I won’t be seeking them out. I’m a firm believer, as I’ve said before, that loving a book simply means that you’ve come to it at the right time in your reading life; maybe if I’d come to Nineteen Nineteen at some other time, I’d feel differently about it. As it stands, right now, I’m a bit sick of enduring 500+ pages of old white men telling me that war and capitalism are bad. Sorry, Dos Passos (if it’s any consolation, I wasn’t that big on your frenemies Fitzgerald and Hemingway, either).