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PARTISAN REVIEW
FICTION CHRONICLE: DEAR UNCLE JAMES
Dear King James:
No one of the well-known ways of writing a fiction chronicle
is entirely or invariably satisfactory. I've decided to try what is, for me, a
new way: by writing you a letter, just as we have written to each other
from time to time during the past fourteen years about the books we
have been reading. Moreover, a chronicle should be like a letter from
a capital, and fiction is, in a way, a famous city, more famous and more
populous than Paris, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, Moscow and New York.
John Dos Passos' new novel,
Chosen Country/
is the natural
counterpart to the best of his books,
U.S.A.
In that book, he was saying
"I hate America"; in this new book, he says "I love America." And the
lesson or conclusion I can't avoid is that both absolute acceptance and
absolute rejection resemble each other very much: love is blind and
hatred is one-sided. There are profound reasons for Dos Passos' change
of heart. He has been everywhere and he has seen everything and he
has kept awake and aware of all that has been happening to Western
civilization since 1919 and 1929 and 1939. His detestation of America,
which was inspired by what America seemed to
him
to be in 1919
and 1929, showed itself fully in
U.S.A.,
and especially in that part of
the book which was named 1919. But when Dos Passos saw what
was occurring in Spain in 1935, 1936 and 1937, when after the Moscow
trials he recognized how illusory his image of Russia was, he began
to look with a different emotion at the America he had condemned in
the writing of
U.S.A.
Like that book,
Chosen Country
is a panoramic
novel, and Dos Passos uses some of the same techniques in both books.
How then can both books be successful? The techniques with which
one expresses hatred can hardly succeed in helping one to make love
or to express infatuation.
Chosen Country
concludes with the happy
ending of the honeymoon of the hero (how many times have we seen
precisely this happy ending on a beautiful night at the moon pictures?),
just as
U.S.A.'s
last pages contain the ironic contrast of a vagabond who
has not eaten for several days trying to bum a ride on the highway,
while a plane passes overhead, carrying the rich, one of whom
"sickens and vomits into the cardboard container the steak and the mush–
rooms he ate in New York."
U.S.A.,
despite its defects of form and bias
(and despite the hysterical character of such contrasts as the one I've
just mentioned) is a masterpiece, perhaps because Dos Passos' dominant
1.
Houghton, Mifflin, $4.00.
