BOOKS
55
of the before-the-World-War generations. Europeans happened to com.e
into an almost empty continent. This continent happened to be extra–
ordinarily rich in resources. European caJllital and advanced industrial
processes happened to be available together for an exploitation of these
resources, unexampled in human history, for its quickness and throughness.
Never before perhaps had sheer circumstance played so naked a part in a
world-influencing historical process. The circumstance, rather than the
man, seemed therefore all important. That was why American "men of
destiny," as they explained in the silly symposium called
Luck,
saw their
careers as dominated by chance.
It
would be an offense to Dos Passos to suggest that this
IS
his
belief. But, unconsciously, he has absorbed it
to
the point where
In
his
stories it is. chance, rather than man, who is the creative agent.
Airways
and
Fortllne Heights,
the important two of the
Three Plays,
each presents the American social dilemma, and in each the villain is leit
unclear. The villain is an abstraction which we may call Chance, although
the victimized heroes are very concrete, human and suHering people. Like
many squeamish writers, Dos Passos is moved by deep pity for the victims
of our system but avoiding hatred, he avoids any clear representation of
the men on the other side.
Compare these two plays with a play like
Ste'uedore,
and the dif–
ference between the realistic revolutionary attitude and the indecisive
sympathetic attitude becomes clear. In
Stevedore,
Walcott, the white boss,
is very humanly portrayed. We even see him in his own terms. But we
see him living out the cruel snobberies and persecutions of his class; we
see him sic the police on an innocent but "uppity" Negro, as a means of
crushing' a strike movement. We see it, and undersLand it
In
its' class
relations without the least harm to an excellent piece of characterization.
And at Walcott's side we see the bulls and the police captains, in solid
reality. In
Fortune Heights,
however, we see no capitalist, except the
ruined banker who shoots himself, who is himself represented as a victim
of chance. And instead of live bulls, we have a gang of. shadowy deputies
led by a romantic ex-detective writer who breaks down when he sees
shooting. In other words, the audience is asked to feel contemptuous pity
for a strike breaker, because in an obscure way, he. too is a victim of ·the
system.
In each of the two plays a fighting worker is killed, and in each that
is the end of the fight. The death is defeat not, as in
StC'vedore,
merely
one of the casualties of a battle with victory ahead. Because he hesitates
to see distinctly the realities of the class war, because he avoids being in–
volved in the bitterness of the struggle, there is a blur upon these Dos
Passos plays which keeps them not only from being revolutionary liter–
ature, but from being literature in the more general sense.
!sIDOR SCHNEIDER.
