PARTISAN REV lEW
48 1
became something of an authority on the culLure of modernism, as much from
his friends among the brilliant group of writers who went to Harvard just
before World War I as from his reading. He also picked up a few aestheticist
affectations-"The odor of lavender from the garden is simply maddening."
But the slogans in his letters are more often ones like "Originality before
everything else" and "You always have to look out for wornout words." From
Edward Nagel and E. E. Cummings he learned that "in the arts everything was
abolished. Everything must be reinvented from scratch." Especially everything
American was abolished, or about to be. On the day in October 1916 that he
sailed for France, where in a few months he would join the Norton -Harjes
volunteer ambulance unit, his first publication for money came out, an essay
entitled "Against American Literature."
His experiences during the war stripped away his last gauds of aesthetic–
ism. "The night I particularly remember it was my job to carry off buckets full
of amputated arms and hands and legs from an operating room." He became
"absorbed in the problem of how to write clearly," rather than in the problem
of how to write beautifully. He began to read his beloved Flaubert in a new
way. "I caught his obsession for the
mot juste,
"
he tells us in
The Best Times.
But in the very next paragraph Dos Passos also tells us that "I was in a passion
to put down everything, immediately it happened, exactly as I saw it." The
exact word, however, is seldom the immediate word, and it took Dos Passos
some time to learn how to put down what he really was looking for, the
American word, "good Yankee dialect."
It was only while Dos Passos was writing
U.S.A .,
betweeen 1930 and 1938,
that he discovered his proper subject in the " native lingo," the American
word. In a letter of 1936 to Edmund Wilson he made a kind of minimum claim
for the writer's work:
" It
sure does pay to put down what happens just as it
does happen-I'm not at all sure that it isn ' t all anybody can do of any perma–
nent use in a literary way." And in a letter to Roben Cantwell from a year
earlier he had wrillen, " I can 't think of good writing in any other way than as
reality , though I'd hate to define what I mean by the term." Good writing, in
short, is not so much a report of reality, as the thing itself, which resides in the
spoken word . The spoken word well written preserves the present and shapes
the future:
The mind of a generation is its speech. A writer makes aspects of that
speech permanent by putting them in print. He whittles at the words and
phrases of today and makes forms for the minds of later generations.
That's history . A writer who writes straight is an architect of history.
So Dos Passos wrote in "The Workman and His Tools," an essay of 1936.
Two years later, in a preface written especially for the publication in a single
volume of the three novels that make up
U.S.A.,
he recorded his final full
awareness of what reality it is that an American writer puts down to be of
