John Dos Passos

September 24, 2008

I’m trying to blog more regularly– even if it’s just short snippets.

And, you may notice that in the blog i’m trying to focus on writing (and my writing) more often– in the hopes that it will spur me on to finish this draft of my book. Not that I won’t still muse about T-shirts and movies and gardening and food and postcards…

Right now i’m reading 1919 by John Dos Passos.

Ted introduced me to it. It’s an historical novel about the years right after WWI. 1919 was the second book of a three part series called the U.S.A. Trilogy.

I was not familiar with Dos Passos at all until Ted told me about him. The book is fascinating, if rather dense. Dos Passos was called “A Witness To Our Times,” because his books, specifically the U.S.A. Trilogy, contain fragments of popular songs, news headlines, stream-of-consciousness monologues, and naturalistic fragments from the lives of a horde of unrelated characters. This book was written in 1932.

Here’s what one scholar has to say about Dos Passos’ Trilogy:

In the brilliantly-crafted and powerful U.S.A. one can see Dos Passos’ vision and his talent at their finest level of creation. At first glance the trilogy appears to be a series of fragmented sections. There are four elements which intertwine: the narratives of twelve fictional characters, brief biographical sketches of contemporary Americans, “newsreel” headlines, and the “camera’s eye” autobiography. In this last element, Dos Passos renders his own coming of age in America as he struggles to comprehend a nation which seems so at odds with the vision of its founders.

Soon the reader realizes that these four disparate elements are united by the author’s central vision of a society in decline, with little prospect for its rescue. Yet there remains a sense of outrage, of betrayal, which suggests the author’s own hope that a concerned citizenry, through some collective action, might yet find a way to redeem the country.

I’m trying to do something similar with the book i’m working on. And it’s not easy, let me tell you.

Still, the book is intriguing, and enlightening about the years after WWI, and it’s made up of some amazing passages and descriptions, such as this one:

All kinds of things got him terribly agitated so that i was hard not to show it. The wabble of the waitresses’ hips and breasts while they were serving meals, girls’ underwear in store windows, the smell of the bathhouses and the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit and the tanned skin of fellows and girls in bathingsuits lying out in the sun on the beach.

I love that line: …the salty tingle of a wet bathingsuit…