BOOKS
TWO IN
OUR TIME
ADVENTURES OF A YOUNG MAN. By John Dos Passos. Harcourt,
Brace.
$2.50.
THE
BRIDEGROOM COMETH. By Waldo Frank. Doubleday, Doran.
$2.75.
Here are two novels which for the most part run side by side, in time,
in social and spatial geography, but which, like good Euclidean parallels,
could never, not even in infinity, conceivably meet. Both deal with mem·
hers of a generation that was old enough to be aware of the War but too
young to participate in it, and, for both books, the War sounds the over·
lure, and the Communist movement the finale. Dos Passos's hero is the son
of a liberal preacher and teacher who lost his job for being a pacifist;
Frank's heroine is the daughter of a pillar of the Church of the Revela·
tionists, a sect that awaits in New England mill towns the Second Coming
of Christ; and though both of the young people react in the usual way
against their religious training, it is the stubborn Protestant impulse, the
ineradicable zeal for perfection, that first carries them into the labor move·
ment and then very nearly gets them run out of it.
The parallelism does not stop here. Both writers are tracing a gradual
estrangement from normal middle-class life, and for this estrangement
both offer similar psychological explanations. In each case, there was a
pretty, gentle mother who died young. There were more prosperous, half–
alienated uncles and aunts who were kind and patronizing, and elegant
girl cousins who looked down their noses. Then there was the big college
in
New York, where both were outsiders, working their way through,
mongrel protege-servants in the households of bright young faculty mem–
bers who talked about psychoanalysis and social problems, drank a good
deal, and committed adultery. There was the apprenticeship served to labor,
the girl as factory worker, the boy as itinerant farm hand. Finally, there
is the membership in the Communist party, which seems to provide a
substitute home, with a set of gods, a family life, and a fixed morality. But
here the estrangement is extended until it appears to be at last complete;
for both discover that they cannot really "belong" to a Party whose leader–
ship places less value on the lives and limbs of obscure individual workers
than on free publicity in the metropolitan press.
The dilemma for the two protagonists is thus the same: what is a
sincere radical to do when between him and the working class he is trying
to reach rises the bureaucratic opportunism of the Communist Party? The
Ill
