482
GEORGE STADE
permanent use, to become an architect of history. The turn in the preface coin–
cides with the young man's discovery tha t " only the ears busy to catch the
speech are not alone." He sums up three paragraphs of instances with the
remark tha t " it was the speech tha t clung to the ears, the link that tingled in
the blood ; U. S.A. " The exo rdium foll ows. lL is made up of a series of senten ces
beginning "U.S.A. is. ... " U .S.A. is a slice o f continent, a set o f bigmouthed
offi cia ls, the letters at the end of an address when you are away from home. And
then the fina l sentence: "But mos tly U. S.A. is the speech of the people." The
life of tha t sentence dances on an initial ambiguity as to whether by " U .S.A."
we are to understand a novel or piece o f reality; the novel's greatness lies in its
making good the cla im Dos Passos implies in his triple equa tion : "U.S.A. " is
the novel is the speech of the people is the rea lity of America.
The novel' s grea tness, in sho rt, lies in a prose tha t has no character of its
own . Dos Passos never developed a personal style tha t he might appl y to every
occasion . Hi s style, like his character, was receptive, ra ther than imposing.
The style of the narra tive episodes of
U.S.A.
is an Americanese tha t is silent
because it 'is the moda lity ra ther than the content o f o ur speech ; its accents
from passage to passage are those o f wha tever events, things, and characters it
in one sen se preserves and in ano ther sen se creates, as it makes u s consciou s of
them . It is no thing in itself, but it becomes precisely whatever it is taking in.
Its continuQu s irony is a product o f the continuou s di spa rity between the si–
lence of the modality and the thin , insistent noise o f individuality g iven off in
the va rious accents o f events, things, and characters.
U. S.A .
is the speech of
people who cannot hea r wha t they are say ing. We readers who, like Dos
Passos, stand a t once in and o ut o f the novel, can hear bo th the silence and
wha t the events, things, and cha racters are say ing to each o ther.
In 1937 Dos Passos wro te his " Farewell to Europe," in an a rticle for
Com–
mon Sense.
He had just come back from Spa in, where wha t he saw turned him
irrevocably aga inst the Communists. He had begun his wanderings twenty
years before when upo n g radua tion fro)TI Harvard he set off for Spa in to study
architecture. Within a few month s his fath er died ; he joined the Ambulance
Unit; immedia tely after the wa r he returned to Spa in a nd Portugal. The book
he wrote abo ut these travels,
R osinante to the R oad Again,
begins with this
sentence: "Telemachu s had wandered so fa r in search o f his fa ther he had quite
forgotten wha t he was looking for." Telemachus, the name Dos Passos gave
him self in that book, was looking for hi s fa ther's La tin pas t in Spa in and
Portuga l and for America's past in Europe. When afler twenty years of wan–
derings, physica l and imagina tive, Telemachus came home in 1937, he no t
onl y found Odysseus, he found th at he was Odysseu s himself.· His po litics
and hi s a tti tude to America became pretty much those of his fa the., who had
· For an expos itio n o f this idea, see J o hn H. Wrenn,
John Dos Passos
(New Haven :
Twaync Publisher's, 196 1), p p . 69-78.
