THE
AMERICA OF DOS PASSOS
27
Nor is
U. S. A .
as all-embracing as its admirers claim. True,
Dos
Passos not oniy represents a great national scene but he embodies,
as I have said, the cultural tradition of the intellectual Left. But he
does not encompass-does not pretend to encompass in this book-–
all of either. Despite his title, he is consciously selective of his Amer–
ica and he is, as I shall try to show, consciously corrective of the
cultural tradition from which he sterns.
Briefly and crudely, this cultural tradition may be said to con–
sist of the following beliefs, which are not so much formulations of
theory or principles of action as they are emotional tendencies: that
the collective aspects of life may be distinguished from the individual
aspects; that the collective aspects are basically important and are
good; that the individual aspects are, or should be, of small interest
and that they contain a destructive principle; that the fate of the
individual is determined by social forces; that the social forces now
dominant are evil; that there is a conflict between the dominant
social forces and other, better, rising forces; that it is certain or very
likely that the rising forces will overcome the now dominant ones.
U. S. A.
conforms to some but not to all of these assumptions. The
lack of any protagonists in the trilogy, the equal attention given to
many people, have generally been taken to represent Dos Passos' re- ·
cognition of the importance of the collective idea. The book's his–
torical apparatus indicates the author's belief in social determination.
And there can be no slightest doubt of Dos Passos' attitude to the
dominant forces of our time: he hates them.
But Dos Passos modifies the tradition in three important respects.
Despite the collective elements of his trilogy, he puts a peculiar im–
portance upon the individual. Again, he avoids propounding any
sharp conflict between the dominant forces of evil and the rising
forces of good; more specifically, he does not write of a class strug–
gle, nor is he much concerned with the notion of class in the political
sense. Finally, he is not at all assured of the eventual triumph of
good; he pins no faith on any force or party- indeed he is almost
alone of the novelists of the Left (Silane is the only other one that
comes to mind) in saying that the creeds and idealisms of the Left
may bring corruption quite as well as the greeds and cynicisms of the
established order; he has refused to cry "Allons! the road lies before
us," and, in short, his novel issues in despair.-And it is this despair
of Dos Passos' book which has made
his
two ablest critics, Malcolm
Cowley and T. K. Whipple, seriously temper their admiration. Mr.
Cowley says: "They [the novels comprising
U.S.
A.] give us an ex–
traordinarily diversified picture of contemporary life, but they fail
to include at least one side of it- the will to struggle ahead, the
