28
PARTISAN REVIEW
comradeship in struggle, the consciousness of new men and new
forces continually rising." And Mr. Whipple: "Dos Passos has reduced
what ought to be a tale of full-bodied conflicts to an epic of disin–
tegration."
These critics are saying that Dos Passos has not truly observed
the political situation. Whether he has or not, whether his despair
is objectively justifiable, cannot, with the best political will in the
world, be settled on paper. We hope he has seen incorrectly; he him–
self must hope so. But there is also an implicit meaning in the objec–
tions which, if the writers themselves did not intend it, many readers
will derive, and if not from Mr. Whipple and Mr. Cowley then from
the book itself: that the emotion in which
U. S. A.
issues is negative
to the point of being politically harmful.
But to discover a political negativism in the despair of
U. S. A.
is to subscribe to a naive conception of human emotion and of the
literary experience. It is to assert that the despair of a literary work
must inevitably engender despair in the reader. Actually, of course,
it need do nothing of the sort. To rework the old Aristotlean insight,
it may bring about a catharsis of an already existing despair. But
more important: the word "despair" all by itself (or any other such
general word or phrase) can never characterize the emotion the artist
is dealing with. There are many kinds of despair and what is really
important is what goes along with the general emotion denoted by the
word. Despair with its wits about it is very different from despair
that is stupid; despair that is an abandonment of illusion is very
different from despair which generates tender new cynicisms. The
"heartbreak" of
Heartbreak House,
for example, is the beginning of
new courage and I can think of no more useful
political
job for the
literary man today than, by the representation of despair, to cauterize
the exposed soft tissue of too-easy hope.
Even more than the despair, what has disturbed the radical
admirers of Dos Passos' work is his appearance of indifference to
the idea of the class struggle. Mr. Whipple correctly points out that
the characters of
U. S. A.
are all "midway people in somewhat am–
biguous positions." Thus, there are no bankers or industrialists (except
incidentally) but only
J.
Ward Morehouse, their servant; there are
no factory workers (except, again, incidentally), no farmers, but
only itinerant workers, individualistic mechanics, actresses, interior
decorators.
This, surely, is a limitation in a book that has had claimed
for it a complete national picture.. But when we say limitation we
may mean just that or we may mean falsification, and I do not
