64
PARTISAN REVIEW
notes like water-colors-Dos Passos' water-colors-have been put to–
gether as in a gallery to make
Journeys Between Wars.
The book contains what it probably Dos Passos' finest writing tech–
nically. He has cut, and illumined, and discovered rhythms and words.
Stylistic elegance as of a Frenchman, lucid and "musical language reclaim
the trite and flamboyant subjects for literature-to-be-read-aloud. One
need not mind about sequence. A page, a passage or maybe one sketch
at a time is how this book is be enjoyed. Try to take it from cover to
cover and it goes dull.
Why? Because there is no development. There is no story of chang–
ing facts. The scenery changes, the facts are the same, and they are,
unbelievably always, "the old and the new" cliches.
If
in twenty years
the facts remain the same (historically they don't, but the same human
problems appear and reappear, and this may be what Dos Passos is
getting at) that sameness is not dramatic except against some change.
There are three points of reference in his material: mass events, indivi–
dual stories, and the author 'himself. All three are handled as static
"characters." So that when you have read one sketch, whatever its date
or people or geography, you have read them all. The music varies but
the intellectual and emotional content is the same, expressed at the same
level of sub-intensity.
One keeps on expecting some shift of emphasis or depth or inter–
pretation, because after all this is an honest and sensitive man writing,
who in the beginning of the book has suggested himself propelled into
the Spanish landscape
after
something: counterposing, in mind and
in conversation, industrial life against peasant agrarian (the old and the
new). In this part of the book he is himself an actor with the others he
describes. Very shortly he drops the role (a kind of pilgrim character)
and becomes the uninvolved observer of conventional newspaper re–
porting. What he writes then turns into travelogue, very fine of course
but travelogue just the same.
There is a clue here, maybe, to the lack of impact of his trilogy
. characters: the author's set relation as spectator, sympathetic and
shrewd, but carefully impersonal. He doesn't get inside the skins of
any of the people
~ith
whom he has lived on his travels; their con–
cerns are their concerns. · It is the Orient, or the U.S.S.R., or what–
ever, (including Spain at war) unrolling before him distressfully, but
affecting his own trajectory not more than would a movie. Can it be
Dos Passos the artist has been taken in by the pseudo-scientific conven–
tion that neutrality is the necessary position for getting at life?
ANITA BRENNER
