112
PARTISAN REVIEW
solutions differ. For Glenn Spotswood, the Dos Passos character, all
that
remains is to go out and die in Loyalist Spain, and to die with the full
knowledge that his life is being laid down, not for the working class, but
for nothing, for a democracy that exists only as a recruiting slogan in the
Party press, for a revolution that has already been aborted by the Party
hierarchy. Waldo Frank's novel, on the other hand, ends on what is called
a note of hope: Mary Donald is brought to recognize that she must con·
tinue to dedicate herself to the Party, whatever her criticisms of it, that to
believe and to see clearly at the same time, to work and to doubt together,
is the harder but more glorious part.
The outcome of Dos Passos's novel, which is naturalistic, demands
only belief. The conclusion of Frank's novel, which is mystical and horta·
tive, demands adherence. Though the last and longest section of
AdventureJ
of a Young Man
is labeled "The Moment of Choice", actually the work
runs on the rails of determinism. To Glenn Spotswood all the avenues of
choice, except the one taken, are in reality closed, and Dos Passos's sole
task is to convince the reader that this is so. He must demonstrate that
capitulation, either to the status quo of the American System, or to the
status quo of the Third International, is, for his stubborn, honest, ascetic
hero, out of the question; that, further, for this American who has lived
in action, waited for Results and warmed himself with solidarity, opposi·
tionism, with its loneliness, its absorption in theory, has been, and would
always be, unbearable.
In Dos Passos, then, the outcome is presented as inevitable, but not
particularly desirable; in Frank the conclusion is seen as desirable but not
inevitable. That is, in
The Bridegroom Cometh,
while everything that hap·
pens to Mary Donald up to the final apocalypse is predicated by what has
gone before (though even here, even on these steps along the road, the illu·
sion of free choice, the will-she-go-to-college, will-she-stay-married-to-that–
richm:m, is much better kept up than in Dos Passos), the conclusion itself
is a very happy accident. This is more natural than one would think, since
the real story Waldo Frank is telling, which he has got thoroughly mixed
up with the political case-history, is a love story, and in a love story it
is
only the miraculous appearance of the Right Man that can solve the
heroine's difficulties. Here it is David Markand, the hero of Frank's pre·
vious novel, who unexpectedly materializes when everything looks dark·
est, to give Mary Donald the correct mystico-poltical mimdate and, at the
same time, to make that mandate more attractive, both to her and to the
reader, by offering her the Fulfilment in bed that she has been coveting for
six hundred and twenty-eight pages. The advent of the Bridegroom brings
with it such a sense of relief that the political problem seems to dissolve
in the personal felicity. Actually, the political problem has been arbitrarily
joined to the sexual one (for political dissatisfaction and sexual frustra–
tion are not necessarily concomitant), and it remains, when the book is
over, disparate and angrily insoluble. Waldo Frank's prescription is, in
the end, inadequate, at least for general use, for the Message, as he him·
