JAMES T. FARRELL
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Randolph Bourne . He was a little hunchback, but in his writing,
in his attitude toward life , he was very normal. Bourne wrote
three essays on the liberals in the war and argued that the notion
that the war could be fought to achieve their aims was illusory. He
also wrote that war is the " health" of the state, meaning that
through war the state becomes stronger, more powerful, and
potentially, ifnot actually, more oppressive. That idea of Bourne's
runs through all of Dos Passos's work, but it is emphasized in
Three Soldiers,
which is the story of three soldiers who were ground
up, as it were, in the war machine. Others followed his lead
throughout the twenties, of course-Hemingway and Faulkner,
for instance.
Interviewer:
Aside from the war novel, did American writing reflect
this sense of sadness and outrage you speak of?
Farrell:
I would speak of
An American Tragedy
as an example. Dreiser's
book would be a tragedy even if Roberta Alden didn't die. It is a
tragedy in values. Clyde Griffiths's life is abnormal socially. He
moves from place to place; his parents are sincere, itinerant street
creatures . On the first page, Dreiser writes that they were seeking
to dent the path of life (they were far less successful than the
Reverend Moon, of course) . Clyde Griffiths's first experience
outside of this rather simplified religiosity is in a hotel. You can
almost say that there developed through this century in America a
kind of subculture called hotel culture. A hotel is where busi–
nessmen go when they don ' t want their wives to know what they
are doing. A hotel is where anybody can be admitted-even a
poet, if he has the fare. It' s a place where people let down their
hair and other things. It's a "halfway house to hell," among other
things. Clyde experiences this example of cheap gaudiness and
sees the role of wealth . He gets a sense of what he considers to be
the "good life, " the life he wants to lead. That ' s his first
education in life. When he is taken to Lycurgus, New York, by his
rich uncle, he wants to live the same kind of trivial life lived by the
rich boys and girls whose families built the town. He deserts. He
is ready to kill a very decent character, Roberta Alden, one of the
best-drawn and most humanly sympathetic of Dreiser's women,
for a trivial rich girl who was using him as an object of competi–
tion and envy with his rich cousin, Sondra Finchley. That is a
tragedy of the sense of values . Values fundamentally come back to
