480
GEORGE STADE
The young man walks fast by himself through the crowd that thins into
the night streets; feet are tired from hours of walking; eyes greedy for
warm curve of faces, answering flicker of eyes, the set of a head, the lift of a
shoulder, the way l1ands spread and clutch; blood tingles with wants;
mind is a beehive of hopes buzzing af\d stinging; muscles ache for kl1owl–
edge of jobs, for the roadmender's pick and shovelwork, the fisherman's
knack with a hook when he hauls on the slithery net from the rail of the
lurching trawler, the swing of
brid~eman's
arm as he slings down the
whitehot rivet, the engineer's slow gnp wise on the throttle, the dirt-farm–
er's use of his whole body when, whoaing the mules, he yanks the plow
from the furrow. The young man walks by himself searching through
the crowd with greedy eyes, greedy ears taut to hear, by himself, alone.
There is something beyond observation in this passage, something beyond
mere imaginative participation: the young man's body is involved. His mus–
cles ache for the knowledge he proves he has by the detail work in the list of
what they ache for. He becomes what he sees, what he yearns for, what he is
not, as Whitman, the father of such passages, claimed he did. Once again, and
once again like Whitman, he is in and out of the game.
And as one might expect, Dos Passos read books as he wrote them and as
he walked through cities-with a yearning so intense it becomes its object. At
nineteen he wrote a friend that for him reading was "like diving out of every–
thing bothersome and plunging in a new comforting world where you have
adventures and drink canary sack, and live a dozen people's lives instead of
your own puny one. It must be like that to write books, only nicer." In one
marvelous passage from his diary, Dos Passos's writing reveals how vividly he
lived a dozen lives while reading the
Decameron,
every sense open and greedy:
Boccaccio-I've just finished the fifth day-It is wonderful what a pic–
ture he gives you of his time, of the life of the merchants riding forth from
the walled towns of Italy, of sea travel with its amusing interludes of Bar–
bary pirates-of the cultured, Saracen-leaning courts of Frederick, and the
Rogers in South Italy-heat and gardens and flowers, and lovely women
in Kiosks-escaping through shuttered windows into the silk clad arms of
their lovers while the shutter creaks in the scented night breeze and there
comes on the wind a sound of breakers-a swift galley is waiting on the
shore and the lovers lie naked in each others arms on piles of carp<,;ts in the
stern, cooled by the faint spray borne on the hot breathing night wind–
and the rowers row towards a dark orient city where they will land in
pomp and all magnificence, and wander and lose themselves in strange
streets, full of throat gripping odors, pale scents of flowers, cloying in–
cense smoke and smell of secret lives behind latticed balconies-There
they will have strange adventures with robbers and princes-and return in
the end to silken ease on some distant islands where they pass their last
contented years to the sound of flutes and fountains, or else
cbme
to vio–
lent gorgeous deaths, by flames or stabbing with an emerald handled
dagger-
In pursuit of such gorgeous lives and deaths, Dos Passos read and read. As
Thomas R. Edwards puts it, the letters "reflect a range of reading that, except
for Joyce, may be unmatched among novelists of this century." At Harvard he
