Fallen Eagle

THE GREAT DAYS (312 pp.)--John Dos Passes--Sagamore Press ($4.50).

Ro (for Roland) Lancaster is an elderly, gangling man with a "raddled old face." Elsa is an untidy drifter of 28, thirty years his junior and fond of reminding him of it. Ro wants to while away the day talking about the years when he was a famous U.S. newspaperman; Elsa wants to spout her own grievances, including how she meant to write a novel but had twins by a bandleader instead. Ro and Elsa have come to Havana to make love, with a view to marriage, but when he touches her, she starts to protest: "Not yet . . . It's got to be right ..." Frigid Elsa drinks one Daiquiri after another and does not stop talking until she is unconscious, so Ro lets her drone on and tells his life story to himself and the reader.

The Great Days is John Dos Passos' saddest, sorriest novel. Lancaster's vigorous young prime was under the reign of F.D.R.'s Blue Eagle. Then he had a beautiful wife and enthusiastic, high-placed friends who confided their problems to him and in return got the feel of the country from his shrewd, perceptive articles. When World War II begins, Ro goes right along with it, from blitzed London to the Pacific to the Nurnberg trials. He comes home still carrying in his heart the words spoken to him by H. G. Wells: "If you Americans can't find some way of carrying the burden of Empire, we are sunk!"

But to Ro Lancaster the postwar U.S. is a broken Samson. Old New Dealing pals turn against him when he warns of the rising Communist menace. His best friend, ex-U.S. Defense Secretary Roger Thurloe (a fictional double of the late James Forrestal), exhausted and embittered by the spectacle of U.S. fumbling in the face of Communism, jumps to death from a hospital window. Ro's wife dies of cancer; their two sons mature into selfish little parasites. And Lancaster is left trying to recapture his lost youth with a paltry redhead.

In his own great days (Manhattan Transfer, U. S. A.)Author Dos Passos, whatever his prejudices, could be literarily convincing, but in this book little of that gift shows itself. As a writer who has come a long way, from left-wing radicalism to earnest antiCommunism, Dos Passos makes clear Ro Lancaster's political displacement but not his personal disintegration. Sketches of Washington days that were both bracing and silly, a caricature of a monumentally pompous pundit, are apt yet perfunctory. Fortunately, time has not weakened Author Dos Passes' power to describe places and incidents. The Great Days has fine sketches of World War II and a sharply drawn portrait of the fallen Ro wandering the streets of Havana and maundering of the days when "there were all the fish in the sea to catch, all the whisky in all the pubs to drink, all the grand guys in the world to be friends with." There is a certain poignancy, however vague, about Ro, a man out of step with his time and himself, reduced to dropping yesterday's names.

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