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With 1919 , the second volume of his U.S.A . trilogy, John Dos Passos continues his "vigorous and sweeping panorama of twentieth-century America" ( Forum ), lauded on publication of the first volume not only for its scope, but also for its groundbreaking style.
Again, employing a host of experimental devices that would inspire a whole new generation of writers to follow, Dos Passos captures the many textures, flavors, and background noises of modern life with a cinematic touch and unparalleled nerve.
1919 opens to find America and the world at war, and Dos Passos's characters, many of whom we met in the first volume, are thrown into the snarl. We follow the daughter of a Chicago minister, a wide-eyed Texas girl, a young poet, a radical Jew, and we glimpse Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Unknown Soldier. 1919 provides an incomparable portrait of America from the turn of the century to the Depression of 1929.
Again, employing a host of experimental devices that would inspire a whole new generation of writers to follow, Dos Passos captures the many textures, flavors, and background noises of modern life with a cinematic touch and unparalleled nerve.
1919 opens to find America and the world at war, and Dos Passos's characters, many of whom we met in the first volume, are thrown into the snarl. We follow the daughter of a Chicago minister, a wide-eyed Texas girl, a young poet, a radical Jew, and we glimpse Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, and the Unknown Soldier. 1919 provides an incomparable portrait of America from the turn of the century to the Depression of 1929.
464 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
About the author
John Dos Passos
146 books521 followersJohn Roderigo Dos Passos, son of John Randolph Dos Passos, was an American novelist and artist.
He received a first-class education at The Choate School, in Connecticut, in 1907, under the name John Roderigo Madison. Later, he traveled with his tutor on a tour through France, England, Italy, Greece and the Middle East to study classical art, architecture and literature.
In 1912 he attended Harvard University and, after graduating in 1916, he traveled to Spain to continue his studies. In 1917 he volunteered for the Sanitary Squad Unit 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Edward Estlin Cummings and Robert Hillyer.
By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel and, at the same time, he had to report for duty in the United States Army Medical Corps, in Pennsylvania.
When the war was over, he stayed in Paris, where the United States Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.
Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, titled One Man's Initiation: 1917, followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer was a success.
In 1937 he returned to Spain with Hemingway, but the views he had on the Communist movement had already begun to change, which sentenced the end of his friendship with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews.
In 1930 he published the first book of the U.S.A. trilogy, considered one of the most important of his works.
Only thirty years later would John Dos Passos be recognized for his significant contribution in the literary field when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize.
Between 1942 and 1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering World War II and, in 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tragedy struck when an automobile accident killed his wife, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. He remarried to Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge in 1949, with whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Dos Passos, born in 1950.
Over his long and successful carreer, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays and plays, and created more than four hundred pieces of art.
The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University. The prize seeks to recognize "American creative writers who have produced a substantial body of significant publication that displays characteristics of John Dos Passos' writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences."
As an artist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris. He died in Baltimore, Maryland. Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
He received a first-class education at The Choate School, in Connecticut, in 1907, under the name John Roderigo Madison. Later, he traveled with his tutor on a tour through France, England, Italy, Greece and the Middle East to study classical art, architecture and literature.
In 1912 he attended Harvard University and, after graduating in 1916, he traveled to Spain to continue his studies. In 1917 he volunteered for the Sanitary Squad Unit 60 of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, along with Edward Estlin Cummings and Robert Hillyer.
By the late summer of 1918, he had completed a draft of his first novel and, at the same time, he had to report for duty in the United States Army Medical Corps, in Pennsylvania.
When the war was over, he stayed in Paris, where the United States Army Overseas Education Commission allowed him to study anthropology at the Sorbonne.
Considered one of the Lost Generation writers, Dos Passos published his first novel in 1920, titled One Man's Initiation: 1917, followed by an antiwar story, Three Soldiers, which brought him considerable recognition. His 1925 novel about life in New York City, titled Manhattan Transfer was a success.
In 1937 he returned to Spain with Hemingway, but the views he had on the Communist movement had already begun to change, which sentenced the end of his friendship with Hemingway and Herbert Matthews.
In 1930 he published the first book of the U.S.A. trilogy, considered one of the most important of his works.
Only thirty years later would John Dos Passos be recognized for his significant contribution in the literary field when, in 1967, he was invited to Rome to accept the prestigious Antonio Feltrinelli Prize.
Between 1942 and 1945, Dos Passos worked as a journalist covering World War II and, in 1947, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Tragedy struck when an automobile accident killed his wife, Katharine Smith, and cost him the sight in one eye. He remarried to Elizabeth Hamlyn Holdridge in 1949, with whom he had an only daughter, Lucy Dos Passos, born in 1950.
Over his long and successful carreer, Dos Passos wrote forty-two novels, as well as poems, essays and plays, and created more than four hundred pieces of art.
The John Dos Passos Prize is a literary award given annually by the Department of English and Modern Languages at Longwood University. The prize seeks to recognize "American creative writers who have produced a substantial body of significant publication that displays characteristics of John Dos Passos' writing: an intense and original exploration of specifically American themes, an experimental approach to form, and an interest in a wide range of human experiences."
As an artist, Dos Passos created his own cover art for his books, influenced by modernism in 1920s Paris. He died in Baltimore, Maryland. Spence's Point, his Virginia estate, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1971.
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February 6, 2023
The second part of the Dos Passos, USA trilogy begins with an approximation. 1919, such as its title, is not a question of it. The characters embody how Americans got involved in the Great War and incorporated them into the Red Cross, the merchant navy, the front, and the rear. The novel had marked by the narrative technique used in 42nd Parallel: fictionalized history, the method of collage of headlines, local chronicles, popular songs, biographies of figures in American history, and autobiographical flashes. Despite the gravity of the historical background, the work takes place on a piano rhythm, less hectic than the first, reflecting a country's incomplete fermentation. The novel is no longer American in that it no longer takes place mainly in the New World; it is the meeting of all these destinies with the Old Continent, its culture, and its art of living. Its main interest lies in the personal confrontation of individuals with France, Italy, and especially Paris. Some will develop an unfailing love for our country. Some will get lost in it, and others will return, not quite the same, to a country that has changed—dominated by economic forces, trusts, and big business, where the 'We now hunt for pacifists, for reds that we call yellows. This opus is the story of what was called the Lost Generation. We inevitably think of Ernest Hemingway and Francis Scott Fitzgerald; it is also the sublimated experience of the author himself. So lost, we are also a bit lost in front of the proliferation of beings that it is difficult to follow from time to time and whose destinies intersect: this opus is the midpoint of a titanic, original work, which requires a reading diligent, at the risk of getting lost in all this novelistic corpus, of seeing his involvement, his interest, and his understanding weaken significantly—a demanding read.
October 18, 2016
The war dictates its own rules… And these rules make a man really 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 again.
“…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 again.
July 16, 2021
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 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."
July 19, 2021
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.
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.
April 5, 2023
”If they thought the war was lousy, wait till they see the peace!“
The middle section of Dos Passos’s epic USA trilogy, 1919, ironically is mainly staged outside of America. It opens with America at war in Europe, and most of the book’s action happens overseas.
Focus is shifted to a new set of Everyman protagonists, though they often closely interact with those already introduced in The 42nd Parallel. The impact of the Great War and the convoluted peace process that followed it are the major themes. Despite this focus on the war, it’s not really a war novel. Dos Passos’s focus is on non-combatants — Red Cross workers, Ambulance Corp, merchant marine, and back line officers. Ironically, the place where he mostly shows vicious violence is back in the USA where government and business allied to murderously exterminate the Wobblies and hopes and rights of labor.
1919 isn’t a stand alone work, of course. It’s the continuation of Dos Passos’s epic collage-novel. As in The 42nd Parallel, the narrative is constantly broken up with Newsreels, with the author’s stream of consciousness Camera’s Eye, and with the mini bios of prominent figures. (Jack Reed, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, J.P. Morgan, and Joe Hill are covered here, as is The Unknown Soldier.) Once again, audiobook is the ideal medium to fully appreciate this experimental style.
The middle section of Dos Passos’s epic USA trilogy, 1919, ironically is mainly staged outside of America. It opens with America at war in Europe, and most of the book’s action happens overseas.
Focus is shifted to a new set of Everyman protagonists, though they often closely interact with those already introduced in The 42nd Parallel. The impact of the Great War and the convoluted peace process that followed it are the major themes. Despite this focus on the war, it’s not really a war novel. Dos Passos’s focus is on non-combatants — Red Cross workers, Ambulance Corp, merchant marine, and back line officers. Ironically, the place where he mostly shows vicious violence is back in the USA where government and business allied to murderously exterminate the Wobblies and hopes and rights of labor.
1919 isn’t a stand alone work, of course. It’s the continuation of Dos Passos’s epic collage-novel. As in The 42nd Parallel, the narrative is constantly broken up with Newsreels, with the author’s stream of consciousness Camera’s Eye, and with the mini bios of prominent figures. (Jack Reed, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, J.P. Morgan, and Joe Hill are covered here, as is The Unknown Soldier.) Once again, audiobook is the ideal medium to fully appreciate this experimental style.
March 31, 2021
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.
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.
September 11, 2020
I'm not sure that the essences of each individual novel are worth anything, but rather, the "novel" as a whole, by that I mean, as a trilogy. My review of the trilogy is here.
January 19, 2014
I'm not really interested in "reviewing" a classic novel but two things stand out for me: the closing chapter on the selection and internment of the Unknown Soldier, which sums up much of the cold anger of the entire book; and how relevant so much of the book remains to today, nearly 100 years later.
Glad I kept this on my list of "assigned college reading I skipped or skimmed but want to finish before I die."
Glad I kept this on my list of "assigned college reading I skipped or skimmed but want to finish before I die."
December 29, 2019
I have a piece IN THE GODDAMN NEW YORKER today about this book and Dos Passos's relevance to today: https://www.newyorker.com/books/secon...
September 6, 2021
Well worth the time and the effort. Recommended.
September 23, 2014
This volume covers up to and through the WWI years. How most folks were gung ho, how the socialists types were against the war, and how oppressive the government can be against those who try to speak against the war.
What I wrote on the style for the Trilogy:
Must admit, don't think I ever heard of Dos Passos until I started reading this trilogy for the ML100, but glad I did. Easy reading format, historical context, and I do like history, about the interesting early part of the century in of course, the USA.
Each chapter is titled with a character's name and each evolves, through their own eyes, and when paths cross, through others. Most characters are carried onto the other books. Supposedly the books can be read on their own, but I think you would always wonder what you missed. For me the stories were compelling and I couldn't stop reading about them.
Between chapters DP sometimes has a couple pages about a famous person of the era. Some stood the test of history & we know them today, Edison, but some are more obscure and those to me were the more interesting ones.
Another item between chapters are bits of text from newsreels of the day. They give the setting of the times
and to me show how the news is totally unrelated to every day life.
Yet another item is the Camera Eye, which shows some activity that is going on with a person, but to me is out of context so doesn't add much to the story.
December 21, 2018
2nd Reading.
November 1, 2023
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”
“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”
April 22, 2023
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.
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.
June 17, 2020
I hope this isn’t one of those trilogies where each book is a little worse than the one before it. Once again I have done the audible listening. And I did think that the second volume was a little less impressive than the first volume. Maybe that was because I had already gotten the point. I know the third volume and final volume of the trilogy is next in line.
I would have to say that this book is mostly about WW1. With a little bit of IWW thrown in. Most of the IWW was at the very end. But the most compelling story in this book was one of the fictional narratives about a romance between one of our main male characters and a somewhat fascinating woman from Texas. You kind of have to like her but he is a cad. But a cad who is like an awful lot of men in these books. He loves her and dumps her and she of course gets pregnant. Women in these books suffer dependably simply because they are women. They don’t always deserve it.
I would have to say that this book is mostly about WW1. With a little bit of IWW thrown in. Most of the IWW was at the very end. But the most compelling story in this book was one of the fictional narratives about a romance between one of our main male characters and a somewhat fascinating woman from Texas. You kind of have to like her but he is a cad. But a cad who is like an awful lot of men in these books. He loves her and dumps her and she of course gets pregnant. Women in these books suffer dependably simply because they are women. They don’t always deserve it.
March 29, 2012
I would have eagerly given this book four stars if the individual stories that comprise the framework weren't so damn repetitive. Passos' voice is unique, seductive, hilarious, stark and powerful. What interested me most was the motif of sexuality in the text. It rules and guides all of the main characters yet (brilliantly?) somehow manages to seem subtle.
I can't help but wonder if Foer gleaned some of his literary style and Cubist text formation from Passos.
I can't help but wonder if Foer gleaned some of his literary style and Cubist text formation from Passos.
August 11, 2022
http://www.hyperebaaktiivne.ee/2022/0...
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.
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.
November 24, 2023
Πολύ καλό και το δεύτερο μέρος της τριλογίας USA, επικεντρωμένο στο μεγαλύτερο μέρος του σε ιστορίες που αφορούν τον Μεγάλο Πόλεμο, και φυσικά στους αγώνες της εργατικής τάξης. Πολλές ιστορίες προσώπων συνδέονται ή αποτελούν συνέχεια ιστοριών του πρώτου βιβλίου, και βλέπουμε έτσι την εξέλιξη διαφόρων χαρακτήρων, πράγμα που βρήκα πολύ ενδιαφέρον.
Βαθμολογία: 4/5
Βαθμολογία: 4/5
February 3, 2021
this book was a pain in my ass (I only cared for Daughter)
August 10, 2020
Bir o karakter bir bu karakter derken içimi şişiren kitap.
Okuma hızım Haziran'da çok iyiydi. Bu kitap halletti sağolsun. Tıkandım kaldım. Game of Thrones'un son sezonu gibi herkesin ışınlanmasına ise diyecek söz bulamıyorum. Tek bir sayfada bir karakter New York, Paris, Viyana gibi bir yolu kat edebiliyor. Ne bir paragraf, ne bir ayrım var. Tam o karakterin konumuna, hikayesine ayak uyduruyoruz ki hop! Başka bir karakteri doğumundan itibaren anlatmaya başlıyor. Bir 50-60 sayfa sonra geri ilk karaktere dön. Hatırlamaya çalış falan. Bu metod bir kitabın başlangıç bölümünde kullanılabilecek yenilikçi ve yaratıcı bir metod olabilir bunu kabul ediyorum ama sistemi bu şekilde kurunca kopuk kopuk bir hikaye kalıyor elimize işte.
Joyce benzeri anlatım tercih edilmiş olan "sine-göz" kısımlarını da maalesef beğenmedim. Bunda çevirinin de payı var mı bilemiyorum ama sadece "karışık kuruşuk iç ses cümleleri yazayım da sanat desinler" olmuş. Ben sizin yerinize okudum. Siz okumadan da geçebilirsiniz. Haber-film denilen kısımlar fena değil. Anlatılan dönemin gazete manşetlerinden bir potpori diyebilirim. Oraya da yazar şiir benzeri ilaveler yaparak James Joyce'a selam çakmış.
Bilmiyorum ya..
Amerika'lı olsam belki az da olsa bir şeylet ifade ederdi kitap benim için ama bu haliyle yerel bir eser olmaktan öteye geçemez bana göre.
Çeviriden kaynaklı çok büyük bir sorun daha var. Bazı özel yer adları türkçeye çevrilmiş. Çevrilmemesi gereken şeyler. Çok tuhaf olmul. Örneğin Rio de Jenario demiyor da, Jenario nehri diyor. Daha normal görünen diğer bir örnek ise Maddison Alanı. Allah'tan Yeni York diye bir şey okumadım. Bu kadar özel isim çevirmeye meraklı bir metin okuyunca bu durumun zıttı olmaz diye düşündüm evet. Onda da yanılmışım. Bu kez de "yol boyunca les miserables'ı okudu" gibi cümlelerle karşılaştım. Dip not yok. Sefiller yazmayacak kadar aslına sadık kalınmış bu noktada. Bu nasıl çeviri, nasıl tutarsızlık, nasıl editörlük anlamıyorum. Modern Klasikler serisinde hiç alışık olmadığım bir özensizlik bu.
Her şeyiyle üvey evlat bu seri. Son kitabını basmamaları isabet olmuş. En baştan toparlanması gerekiyor bu metinlerin. Yoksa oldukça başarısız. Ben şimdilik son kitabını okumayı düşünmüyorum. Karakterler zaten karıştı. Yani unuturum diye bir endişem yok. Bir ara belki okurum.
İyi gömdüm farkındayım ama 2020 itibariyle baakısı olmayan, sahaf eline düşmüş bu seriyi çok fazla merak eden olduğunu bildiğim için bu kadar keskin yazdım. Merak etmeyin, bulamadıysanız da fazla bir şey kaybetmiyorsunuz.
Okuma hızım Haziran'da çok iyiydi. Bu kitap halletti sağolsun. Tıkandım kaldım. Game of Thrones'un son sezonu gibi herkesin ışınlanmasına ise diyecek söz bulamıyorum. Tek bir sayfada bir karakter New York, Paris, Viyana gibi bir yolu kat edebiliyor. Ne bir paragraf, ne bir ayrım var. Tam o karakterin konumuna, hikayesine ayak uyduruyoruz ki hop! Başka bir karakteri doğumundan itibaren anlatmaya başlıyor. Bir 50-60 sayfa sonra geri ilk karaktere dön. Hatırlamaya çalış falan. Bu metod bir kitabın başlangıç bölümünde kullanılabilecek yenilikçi ve yaratıcı bir metod olabilir bunu kabul ediyorum ama sistemi bu şekilde kurunca kopuk kopuk bir hikaye kalıyor elimize işte.
Joyce benzeri anlatım tercih edilmiş olan "sine-göz" kısımlarını da maalesef beğenmedim. Bunda çevirinin de payı var mı bilemiyorum ama sadece "karışık kuruşuk iç ses cümleleri yazayım da sanat desinler" olmuş. Ben sizin yerinize okudum. Siz okumadan da geçebilirsiniz. Haber-film denilen kısımlar fena değil. Anlatılan dönemin gazete manşetlerinden bir potpori diyebilirim. Oraya da yazar şiir benzeri ilaveler yaparak James Joyce'a selam çakmış.
Bilmiyorum ya..
Amerika'lı olsam belki az da olsa bir şeylet ifade ederdi kitap benim için ama bu haliyle yerel bir eser olmaktan öteye geçemez bana göre.
Çeviriden kaynaklı çok büyük bir sorun daha var. Bazı özel yer adları türkçeye çevrilmiş. Çevrilmemesi gereken şeyler. Çok tuhaf olmul. Örneğin Rio de Jenario demiyor da, Jenario nehri diyor. Daha normal görünen diğer bir örnek ise Maddison Alanı. Allah'tan Yeni York diye bir şey okumadım. Bu kadar özel isim çevirmeye meraklı bir metin okuyunca bu durumun zıttı olmaz diye düşündüm evet. Onda da yanılmışım. Bu kez de "yol boyunca les miserables'ı okudu" gibi cümlelerle karşılaştım. Dip not yok. Sefiller yazmayacak kadar aslına sadık kalınmış bu noktada. Bu nasıl çeviri, nasıl tutarsızlık, nasıl editörlük anlamıyorum. Modern Klasikler serisinde hiç alışık olmadığım bir özensizlik bu.
Her şeyiyle üvey evlat bu seri. Son kitabını basmamaları isabet olmuş. En baştan toparlanması gerekiyor bu metinlerin. Yoksa oldukça başarısız. Ben şimdilik son kitabını okumayı düşünmüyorum. Karakterler zaten karıştı. Yani unuturum diye bir endişem yok. Bir ara belki okurum.
İyi gömdüm farkındayım ama 2020 itibariyle baakısı olmayan, sahaf eline düşmüş bu seriyi çok fazla merak eden olduğunu bildiğim için bu kadar keskin yazdım. Merak etmeyin, bulamadıysanız da fazla bir şey kaybetmiyorsunuz.
August 15, 2022
More American lives. WW1 is a strangely bloodless interlude in the rise of corporations and organized labor.
August 5, 2019
Long short stories or short novellas with newspaper headlines, song lyrics, and verbal newsreels in between.
July 16, 2022
The only problem with 1919, the second installment in John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy is that I had already read The 42nd Parallel, so the literary structure and devices that had blown me away on first having encountered the singular literary style of Dos Passos no longer had the same effect. Stylistically 1919 is a continuation of its predecessor, with interweaving fictional narratives, stream of conscious autobiographical snippets, biographical snapshots of key figures of the day and newsreel sections that read like newspaper headlines and clippings or like the newsreels that would play before a film.
So too in terms of the narrative 1919 in many ways picks up where The 42nd Parallel left off, as we travel with many of the same characters from here to "over there", where the Great War is gaining steam. New characters are also introduced and they find themselves caught up in affairs much bigger than themselves. At home pacifists and other anti-war leftists are thrown in jail without just cause. The labor problem is pushed to the background by focusing on the war. The masses find themselves caught up in a bloody event that is promised to "end all wars" to "make the world safe for democracy."
Much as Gertrude Stein used repetition in Three Women or as Kurosawa would later employ it in Rashomon, Dos Passos makes use of repetition to show us events from the fly on the wall perspective of another character's life. In one fictional narrative the war is over by the end, talks of peace already under way. Then in the next fictional section the war is just getting started. Perhaps the most interesting thing through it all is that the war, or at least the front, is hardly of interest at all. We, as readers, know there is a war on. Americans are in Europe working in public relations, being of service driving ambulances or in the offices of the Red Cross, but combat and death are scarcely mentioned. We're concerned with the lives of the Americans over there, their love lives, their hopes and dreams, the tangled webs they weave while war rages in the background. The characters we follow are affected by the war to be sure, but are not so much its victims. One character, Daughter, loses a brother in aviation training before being sent overseas, but she picks up the pieces and moves on.
The war, like all wars, undoubtedly benefits some - namely bankers and weapons manufacturers - though other ordinary men and women see their stars rise, profiting in some ways from the misery of others. As the peace comes many find that the war was a dream, the peace for them a nightmare. Though for some of modest means, postwar Europe is a cushy place to be. The world made safe for democracy is a world that has opened up new markets for exploitation (which will presumably be the main focus of the third part of the USA Trilogy, The Big Money). And with the crumbling of European economies, the dollar is strong and one can live comfortably abroad.
While the fictional narratives are concerned with the inner lives and future plans of our cast of characters, the headlines and occasional chitter make us aware of the horrors of war, of the death, destruction and devastation which are all around. To the politicians, happy to have quelled the fear of revolution and to have softened their domestic labor problems, the war was a lifesaver. In the States, the agitators, like Eugene Debs, were rounded up and jailed indefinitely; and many a young man who might have been a labor problem at home was sent abroad to risk his life. Many died. Many more were injured. And when all was said and done, the men who sent them to their deaths had many fine things to say about liberty, freedom, service and of making the world safe for democracy. Families were destroyed, economies ruined, cities bombed. Boys died. Many boys died well before their time. And they were acknowledged with flowery speeches and memorials. And "Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies."
So too in terms of the narrative 1919 in many ways picks up where The 42nd Parallel left off, as we travel with many of the same characters from here to "over there", where the Great War is gaining steam. New characters are also introduced and they find themselves caught up in affairs much bigger than themselves. At home pacifists and other anti-war leftists are thrown in jail without just cause. The labor problem is pushed to the background by focusing on the war. The masses find themselves caught up in a bloody event that is promised to "end all wars" to "make the world safe for democracy."
Much as Gertrude Stein used repetition in Three Women or as Kurosawa would later employ it in Rashomon, Dos Passos makes use of repetition to show us events from the fly on the wall perspective of another character's life. In one fictional narrative the war is over by the end, talks of peace already under way. Then in the next fictional section the war is just getting started. Perhaps the most interesting thing through it all is that the war, or at least the front, is hardly of interest at all. We, as readers, know there is a war on. Americans are in Europe working in public relations, being of service driving ambulances or in the offices of the Red Cross, but combat and death are scarcely mentioned. We're concerned with the lives of the Americans over there, their love lives, their hopes and dreams, the tangled webs they weave while war rages in the background. The characters we follow are affected by the war to be sure, but are not so much its victims. One character, Daughter, loses a brother in aviation training before being sent overseas, but she picks up the pieces and moves on.
The war, like all wars, undoubtedly benefits some - namely bankers and weapons manufacturers - though other ordinary men and women see their stars rise, profiting in some ways from the misery of others. As the peace comes many find that the war was a dream, the peace for them a nightmare. Though for some of modest means, postwar Europe is a cushy place to be. The world made safe for democracy is a world that has opened up new markets for exploitation (which will presumably be the main focus of the third part of the USA Trilogy, The Big Money). And with the crumbling of European economies, the dollar is strong and one can live comfortably abroad.
While the fictional narratives are concerned with the inner lives and future plans of our cast of characters, the headlines and occasional chitter make us aware of the horrors of war, of the death, destruction and devastation which are all around. To the politicians, happy to have quelled the fear of revolution and to have softened their domestic labor problems, the war was a lifesaver. In the States, the agitators, like Eugene Debs, were rounded up and jailed indefinitely; and many a young man who might have been a labor problem at home was sent abroad to risk his life. Many died. Many more were injured. And when all was said and done, the men who sent them to their deaths had many fine things to say about liberty, freedom, service and of making the world safe for democracy. Families were destroyed, economies ruined, cities bombed. Boys died. Many boys died well before their time. And they were acknowledged with flowery speeches and memorials. And "Woodrow Wilson brought a bouquet of poppies."
July 4, 2021
1919, The Second Part in the Trilogy U.S.A. by John Dos Passos, one of the 100 Best Novels on The Modern Library List https://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100... and on The Realini List
10 out of 10
You could read the chef d’oeuvre U.S.A. more or less for ever - granted, there is still The Big Money to start and finish, Insha’Allah – because, well, it is so long, the stories that intertwine are so mesmerizing, captivating, and on another level, you tend to forget who Eleanor Stoddrad is, what is her connection with Eveline and just as you looked at your notes or on the internet to see what you forgot from some chapters ago, you come across the new figure of Daughter, the Texas Belle that catches your imagination and makes you forget the other personages that have moved fast, separated by news reels, the entrance of real historical personages like Woodrow Wilson, with his plans to end all wars, Thomas Edison…
The latter is known among other things for his invention of the light bulb…When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times", Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times…The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps…Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe"…this is used in the positive psychology lectures of Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar - available on YouTube and the most popular in the history of Harvard – a professor that has a leit motif, he repeats the notion that ‘Learn to Fail or Fail to Learn’…and this is what he wishes for his students, that they fail more…
We meet in 1919 some of the characters from the first part, The 42nd Parallel http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/t... and one of them is Joe, the one that has been on the run and he is having trouble with the law again, albeit this time it does not seem to be his fault, when he is suspected of being a German spy and arrested in Britain, where he is put through the motions we are quite familiar with now, an inspection of the body and humiliation…someone from the consulate comes to see the prisoner, and complains about his missed golf match – incidentally, there is a joke that looks at the way we spend our lives, wherein a man is thinking of golf when at work, then of sex on the golf course and when having sex, he thinks of work…maybe not in that order
The message being that we need to be living in the present and be ‘in control’, in order to reach Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/02/f... and not always absent and missing the moment – Carpe Diem as in Dead Poets Society – as for Joe, he is released from jail, he even asks about something to eat, addressing the embassy employee with ‘mister Consul’, and applying thus one of the rules of How to Win Friends and Influence People and having to hear the young golfer protest that they do not have funds for charity and there is only the boat going back, but eventually giving Joe a shilling…
Joe helps save half the men from the ship he works on and he is praised for this by the captain, after they are lost and their vessel had been sunk, and the captain insists that Joe is special and he has the material, character required for an officer and seeing that there are many required, he should study and become one…Joe marries, but eventually, this bond will not last, indeed, one critic has observed that the characters in the Trilogy do not forge stable relationships and they fail, only that happens in so many real life scenarios…furthermore, critics have been enthusiastic, including the one who wanted more success stories, or at least one..
The very modern combination of stories, newspaper collages has stood the test of time very well – according to The New Yorker - and in the mix, we have Dick aka Richard Savage, who lives with his brother, Henry, and his mother in the house of their aunt Beatrice, where they pay for rent and still feel humiliated…he meets Hilda, the married woman, wife of a pastor, who pushes him to have intercourse with her and then rejects the boy, who is about sixteen now and not yet ready to suffer a romantic deception…Evelyn Hutchins has her own share of dejection when she becomes infatuated with a man that is self-obsessed…
He is so selfish and narcissistic that he declares his love for himself is above all else and besides, he is not the marrying kind…eventually, Evelyn falls again for the wrong man, a married painter called Pepe, who is seeing his lover twice a week, until his wife finds drawings and paintings that testify to what had been going on between her husband and the woman depicted in the images…Pepe declares that Evelyn could have his baby – for one may be coming – she has the manes, she is not poor and he will be proud, but his spouse has made him promise he will stop seeing his mistress and that is the end of it…
In the second part of the U.S.A. Trilogy we meet another intriguing character, the one called Daughter, a Belle from Austin, Texas, a very determined, courageous woman – indeed, most of the female personages, and the male ones admittedly, are brave fighters, many, if not most of them involved in the fight for the poor, leftist ideas – which the under signed rejects, because of that old ‘witticism’ which states that if one is not a commie when young, one has no heart, but if one is still a commie when older, one has no brain…it is hard to admit to aging, but let us just say that I realized at a tender age how benevolent, wondrous the commies were – and they are volunteering to serve as nurses, participate in strikes, take care of heroes of the proletariat – here we may think of the alleged quote from George Orwell who seems to have said ‘that middle-class socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich’ http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/05/n...
Daughter is wild for a period, albeit her arrest is not justified by some criminal activity, on the contrary, she is witness to a protest where the police is more than violent – they show in fact a contempt for the law that should have placed the authorities in prison – and some individuals beat and abuse a young woman and therefore force Daughter to act and try to defend the poor girl…her brother is killed in an airplane accident, that is not on the frontline and this is making Daughter mad – it would be conceivable for a tragedy to occur in the war, but when it takes place far away, because some traitor had not checked the airplane and failed at his job is outrageous, enraging for Daughter, who also fears for the life of their father, who could die too as a consequence of this trauma…probably the only qualms I have with this Magnum opus is the leftist views of most of the protagonists…
10 out of 10
You could read the chef d’oeuvre U.S.A. more or less for ever - granted, there is still The Big Money to start and finish, Insha’Allah – because, well, it is so long, the stories that intertwine are so mesmerizing, captivating, and on another level, you tend to forget who Eleanor Stoddrad is, what is her connection with Eveline and just as you looked at your notes or on the internet to see what you forgot from some chapters ago, you come across the new figure of Daughter, the Texas Belle that catches your imagination and makes you forget the other personages that have moved fast, separated by news reels, the entrance of real historical personages like Woodrow Wilson, with his plans to end all wars, Thomas Edison…
The latter is known among other things for his invention of the light bulb…When a reporter asked, "How did it feel to fail 1,000 times", Edison replied, "I didn't fail 1,000 times…The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps…Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe"…this is used in the positive psychology lectures of Harvard Professor Tal Ben Shahar - available on YouTube and the most popular in the history of Harvard – a professor that has a leit motif, he repeats the notion that ‘Learn to Fail or Fail to Learn’…and this is what he wishes for his students, that they fail more…
We meet in 1919 some of the characters from the first part, The 42nd Parallel http://realini.blogspot.com/2021/06/t... and one of them is Joe, the one that has been on the run and he is having trouble with the law again, albeit this time it does not seem to be his fault, when he is suspected of being a German spy and arrested in Britain, where he is put through the motions we are quite familiar with now, an inspection of the body and humiliation…someone from the consulate comes to see the prisoner, and complains about his missed golf match – incidentally, there is a joke that looks at the way we spend our lives, wherein a man is thinking of golf when at work, then of sex on the golf course and when having sex, he thinks of work…maybe not in that order
The message being that we need to be living in the present and be ‘in control’, in order to reach Flow http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/02/f... and not always absent and missing the moment – Carpe Diem as in Dead Poets Society – as for Joe, he is released from jail, he even asks about something to eat, addressing the embassy employee with ‘mister Consul’, and applying thus one of the rules of How to Win Friends and Influence People and having to hear the young golfer protest that they do not have funds for charity and there is only the boat going back, but eventually giving Joe a shilling…
Joe helps save half the men from the ship he works on and he is praised for this by the captain, after they are lost and their vessel had been sunk, and the captain insists that Joe is special and he has the material, character required for an officer and seeing that there are many required, he should study and become one…Joe marries, but eventually, this bond will not last, indeed, one critic has observed that the characters in the Trilogy do not forge stable relationships and they fail, only that happens in so many real life scenarios…furthermore, critics have been enthusiastic, including the one who wanted more success stories, or at least one..
The very modern combination of stories, newspaper collages has stood the test of time very well – according to The New Yorker - and in the mix, we have Dick aka Richard Savage, who lives with his brother, Henry, and his mother in the house of their aunt Beatrice, where they pay for rent and still feel humiliated…he meets Hilda, the married woman, wife of a pastor, who pushes him to have intercourse with her and then rejects the boy, who is about sixteen now and not yet ready to suffer a romantic deception…Evelyn Hutchins has her own share of dejection when she becomes infatuated with a man that is self-obsessed…
He is so selfish and narcissistic that he declares his love for himself is above all else and besides, he is not the marrying kind…eventually, Evelyn falls again for the wrong man, a married painter called Pepe, who is seeing his lover twice a week, until his wife finds drawings and paintings that testify to what had been going on between her husband and the woman depicted in the images…Pepe declares that Evelyn could have his baby – for one may be coming – she has the manes, she is not poor and he will be proud, but his spouse has made him promise he will stop seeing his mistress and that is the end of it…
In the second part of the U.S.A. Trilogy we meet another intriguing character, the one called Daughter, a Belle from Austin, Texas, a very determined, courageous woman – indeed, most of the female personages, and the male ones admittedly, are brave fighters, many, if not most of them involved in the fight for the poor, leftist ideas – which the under signed rejects, because of that old ‘witticism’ which states that if one is not a commie when young, one has no heart, but if one is still a commie when older, one has no brain…it is hard to admit to aging, but let us just say that I realized at a tender age how benevolent, wondrous the commies were – and they are volunteering to serve as nurses, participate in strikes, take care of heroes of the proletariat – here we may think of the alleged quote from George Orwell who seems to have said ‘that middle-class socialists don't care about the poor, they just hate the rich’ http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/05/n...
Daughter is wild for a period, albeit her arrest is not justified by some criminal activity, on the contrary, she is witness to a protest where the police is more than violent – they show in fact a contempt for the law that should have placed the authorities in prison – and some individuals beat and abuse a young woman and therefore force Daughter to act and try to defend the poor girl…her brother is killed in an airplane accident, that is not on the frontline and this is making Daughter mad – it would be conceivable for a tragedy to occur in the war, but when it takes place far away, because some traitor had not checked the airplane and failed at his job is outrageous, enraging for Daughter, who also fears for the life of their father, who could die too as a consequence of this trauma…probably the only qualms I have with this Magnum opus is the leftist views of most of the protagonists…
June 7, 2020
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.
Dos 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.
The 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.
Amusingly, 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.
The 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.
Perhaps 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’.
To 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.
Dos 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.
The 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.
Amusingly, 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.
The 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.
Perhaps 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’.
To 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.
July 2, 2021
U.S.A. continues to frustrate. The Newsreel, Camera Eye, and biographical sections are all phenomenal work. The biographical pieces, were they to be collected in a single volume, would easily be a top-five book. But the whole thing is dragged down by Dos Passos’s characters. Their stories, though told in frictionless run-on prose, rarely rise above a state of Marxist soap opera, with broken hearts and unplanned pregnancies gumming up 1919’s otherwise compelling experimentalism. That said, this one outshines The 42nd Parallel by a decent margin. Here’s hoping the narratives in The Big Money bring a bit more to the table.
April 9, 2024
I would not like to live in 1919 that shit sounds awful
But solid book, not better than 42nd parallel or Manhattan transfer but I still enjoyed.
The camera eye and newsreel chapters are experimental and you can appreciate them for how ahead of their time they are but they do get a bit repetitive, especially camera eye which doesn’t have much relevance to plot or setting. Excited to finish the trilogy tho
But solid book, not better than 42nd parallel or Manhattan transfer but I still enjoyed.
The camera eye and newsreel chapters are experimental and you can appreciate them for how ahead of their time they are but they do get a bit repetitive, especially camera eye which doesn’t have much relevance to plot or setting. Excited to finish the trilogy tho
March 10, 2023
DNF - ugh. the first one was ok. i was gonna go through the second and third because the trilogy is supposedly an important classic but i just really dont like it at all.
June 30, 2022
Brilliant like the previous part of the series.
Yes, the characters mixed up sometimes in my head, but it didn't matter much, because to me (as to John Dos Passos) characters weren't the most important heroes.
In my opinion, Dos Passos told more and deeper than more popular contemporary to him authors.
David Drummond was a splendid narrator, his singing was priceless - reading those parts wouldn't have been the same.
Yes, the characters mixed up sometimes in my head, but it didn't matter much, because to me (as to John Dos Passos) characters weren't the most important heroes.
In my opinion, Dos Passos told more and deeper than more popular contemporary to him authors.
David Drummond was a splendid narrator, his singing was priceless - reading those parts wouldn't have been the same.
February 17, 2024
Very good book and more cohesive than the first volume in the trilogy. Ends with a sense of bitterness about America and American mythology that reminded me of Godfather II.
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