THE AMERICA OF DOS PASSOS
29
think
that Dos Passos has falsified. The idea of class is not simple
but complex. Socially it is extremely difficult to determine.
It
cannot
be determined, for instance, by asking individuals to what class they
belong; nor is it easy to convince them that they belong to one class
or another. We may, to be sure, demonstrate the idea of class at
income-extremes or function-extremes, but when we leave these we
must fall back upon the criterion of "interest"-by which we must
mean
real
interest ("real will" in the Rousseauian sense) and not
what people say or think they want. Even the criterion of action will
not determine completely the class to which people belong. Class,
then, is a useful but often undetermined category of political and
social thought. The political leader and the political theorist will
make use of it in ways different from those of the novelist. For the
former the important thing is people's perception that they are of one
class or another and their resultant action. For the latter the interest–
ing and suggestive things are likely to be the moral paradoxes that
result from the conflict between real and apparent interest. And the
''midway people" of Dos Passos represent this moral-paradoxical
aspect of class. They are a great fact in American life. It is they who
show the symptoms of cultural change. Their movement from social
group to social group-from class to class, if you will- makes for the
uncertainty of their moral codes, their confusion, their indecision.
Almost more than the people of ·fixed class, they are at the mercy
of the social stream because their interests cannot be clear to them
and give them direction.
If
Dos Passos has omitted the class struggle,
as Mr. Whipple and Mr. Cowley complain, it is only the external
class struggle he has left out; within his characters the class struggle
is
going on constantly.
This, perhaps, is another way of saying that Dos Passos is
primarily concerned with morality, with personal morality. The na–
tional, collective, social elements of his trilogy should be seen not
as a bid for completeness but rather as a great setting, brilliantly delin–
eated, for his moral interest. In his novels, as in actual life, "con–
ditions" supply the opportunity for personal moral action. But if Dos
Passos
is
a social historian, as he is so frequently said to be, he is that
in order to be a more complete moralist.
It
is of the greatest signific–
ance that for him the barometer of social breakdown is not suffering
through economic deprivation but always moral degeneration through
moral choice.
This must be said in the face of Mr. Whipple's description of
Dos Passos' people as "devoid of will or purpose, helplessly impelled
hither and yon by the circumstances of the moment. They have no
strength of resistance. They are weak at the very core of personality,
