BOOKS
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self tacitly admits, is unacceptable without the Man, and the Man, as he
himself assures us, is one in a million.
Nevertheless,
The Bridegroom Cometh
has its virtues, which are insep·
arable from its faults. It is good for the same reasons that it is goofy.
There is in it a capacity for taking life seriously that is associated with
an incapacity for recognizing life's humors. The seriousness shows itself
in
the respect and skill with which the different intellectual positons of
the characters are brought forth and analyzed; the humorlessness obtrudes
in
the pomposity and unconscious ribaldry of the title, in a hundred acci–
dental double-entendres, in the alacrity with which a comic or prosaic
image is pressed into company with a "beautiful" or moving idea, in the
introduction, at a critical point, of Waldo Frank himself to deliver a lec–
ture which gives the heroine the strength to go on. In addition to the
intellectual seriousness, there is a great emotional push behind the book
that sends the story, good and bad elements together, plunging heavily
along. Yet this emotion, which is the motive power, works regularly tQ
parody and to debase the book it carries. It is crude in quality; it is
almost always in excess of the situation that touches it off; above all, it
allows the author to form intimacies with characters whom he has not seen
clearly enough to recognize in the artistic sense. There is in fact through–
out the book a kind of embarrassing snuggling-up to the strangers who are
its people that reminds one of the advice to the lovelorn columns in the
paper, or of the novels of such a writer as Fannie Hurst. And the boy–
meets-girl theme, of course, makes the echoes resound.
Dos Passos does not indulge
in
hasty familiarities. At first glance, his
novel appears to be written from inside the hero, but the modified stream–
of-consciousness style is misleading. What the book really gives is a series
of close-ups of the hero himself and of everything that comes within the
hero's field of vision. Dos Passos has rigorously kept his distance, con–
fined himself to observable data. What expeditions are made into the
hero's mind bring to light, not the tangle of feelings, wishes, ideas, mem–
ories, that exists in consciousness, but those unspoken sentences we frame
to ourselves that could (almost) be overheard. Dos Passos has used this
method before, and he handles it with suppleness and precision. The ques–
tion that arises, however, is: is it adequate to the theme? In the
U. S. A.
trilogy, the author clearly felt it to be insufficient, since he wove
in
with
those empirical narratives the newsreels, camera-eyes, and biographies that
gave the work perspective, depth, scope, and a certain spiritual altitude
that it would otherwise have lacked. But where
U. S. A.
is a piece of
architecture,
Adventures of a Young Man
is done in the flat, and, in spite
of its honesty, its courage, its intellectual clarity, its passages of fine writ–
ing, it is an unsatisfactory book.
From the point of view of the ordinary reader the book is bewildering
because the author stood too close to his material. For general compre–
hension the tortuous politics of the left should have been viewed from
without as well as from within; the method excluded this. From another
