PARTISAN REVIEW
477
prominent member o f th e Sacco and Vanzetti Defense Committee and of
Dreiser 's Na tional Committee to Aid Striking Miners Fighting Starvation, the
staff writer for the
New Masses
and the New Pl aywrjghts Thea tre, the con–
tribu tor to the
Dai ly Worker
and o ther left-wing publica tions, the champion
of the I.W.W. who once described himself as "red, radica l, and revolutionary,"
had deve loped a dislike for Communism as intense as his dislike for Fascism.
T he ground was the same-the necessity of preserving or extending individual
freedom ; and that necessi ty remain ed the ground o f Dos Passos's political writ–
ings, even during the last few years of his life, when he h ad moved far to the
Right and was writing fo r the
Na tional R eview.
His reputa tion has so de–
clined since 1939 tha t one reca lls w ith surprise how only two years earlier Dos
Passos had p ublished the last volume of
U.S.A.,
wh ich if it is considered as a
sing le work is probably one o f the dozen or so best novels written by an Ameri–
ca n in th is centu ry u p to tha t time, a novel tha t would do a number of our
young writers much good to discover. Had Dos Passos died in 1950 we might
consider him an American version of George Orwell. In man y crucia l respects,
but not in respect of the honor paid to him by his countrymen , his relation to
America n letters was like O rwell 's to English letters.
He was like O rwe ll during hi s bes t years in that he strove toward a prose
washed clean o f persona lity, sifted of everything but its subject-and, perhaps,
the grain o f na tiona l idiom . H e was like Orwell in having a genius for prose so
p ure tha t his many a ttempts a t poetry remained obstina tely prosa ic, although
he was unlike Orwell in knowing as much :
My verse is no upho lstered chariot,
Gliding oil-smooth on oiled w hee ls.
No swift and sh ining limousine
But a pushcart, rather.
. ..
He was like O rwell in hi s impa tience with "esthetes littera teurs poet-taster–
gen teel dog-, p icture-, life-fanciers," with those who made a career of ex–
pressing "a vague dissent from the inelegance of life today," with writers who
strained to produce only "a ta lented and daintily-scented turd." He was like
Orwell in having
I
ived among the down and out and like him in the refl ections
tha t accompanied his menia lla bors- "As I swept I kept whispering to myself,
'organiza ti on is death.' " He was like Orwell in his reaction to the Spanish
civil war, in hi s cla im tha t the Communists had betrayed their allies, in his
pa trio tic a ttemp t during the Second World War to unearth the roots of his
own na ti onal institutions, in his sharpening hatred for totalita rianism, re–
li giou s or po litica l, from the left or from the right, in his conclusion tha t " the
one hope for the futu re of the type of western civiliza tion which furni shes the
frame of our lives is tha t the system of popular government based on individ–
ua l liberty be no t a llowed to break down." He was like Orwell in that his
