The Hidden Artist

THE BEST TIMES by John Dos Passos. 229 pages. New American Library. $5.

WORLD IN A GLASS, Selections from John Dos Passos. 440 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $6.95.

John Dos Passos, a literary Lazarus at 70, is being revived from the dead during his own lifetime.

Esteemed in the '20s, famous in the '30s, Dos Passos in the '40s almost underwent extinction of reputation such as befell Britain's John Galsworthy or America's Joseph Hergesheimer -- two popular near-contemporaries who, as far as today's public is concerned, might just as well have written in Sumerian cuneiform.

The Quiet One. Several elements serve to explain Dos Passes' eclipse. A change in literary fashion left him beached with the wreckage of the realistic novel. A change in intellectual-political fashion, moreover, left his best work tainted by identification with the social-protest or even "proletarian" production of the Red Decade. This offense was compounded by the fact that his later work gave aid and comfort to the right, just as his earlier books had succored the left. The three novels that constitute District of Columbia (1952) have been unfairly dismissed as the rightist tracts of an embittered man. Yet there was no falling-off in the plain power of his prose. His role in the clash of generations showed an honest man's bad timing, not bad faith or bad judgment; for his literary reputation, though, it was certainly bad luck.

A third factor has fixed his position as low man on the totem pole of literary fashion. In an age of publicity, puff and promotion, John Dos Passos never developed an exploitable personality. He never became a Great White Hunter, or a symbol of doomed gilded youth, or a pornographer, or a public crackpot or private monster, or even a member of the pansy international, any of which roles might have given him an identifiable and saleable personality. He never even wrote the kind of novels in which some character would turn up again and aeain and enable the reader to say, "There he goes," as in the case of a Lieut. Henry, a Jake Barnes or a Robert Jordan, who shed a romantic backward luster on the author.

A Low Voice. Now comes this mod est revival. U.S.A. (1938), District of Columbia and Most Likely to Succeed (1954) have been reissued. World in a Glass, a shrewdly selected anthology from all the novels, with an essay by Kenneth S. Lynn, has just been published coincidentally with The Best Times, a compilation of new sketches described as "an informal memoir" --which is probably the closest thing to an autobiography that can be expected this modest man.

Thirty years ago, when Dos Passos wrote The Big Money, the second novel of the U.S.A. trilogy, a TIME cover story (Aug. 10, 1936) saw him mainly as a valuable contemporary historian, a journalist of genius rather than a novelist--the composer, as Dos Passos puts it now, of "a narrative panorama to which I saw no end." These judgments pertain today, though it is also true that the work that stood "midway between history and fiction" was fiction all along. Dos Passes' bare, flat non-style, in which events--tragical, comical, pastoral or historical--were impersonally told in the same tone of voice, can now be seen as a deliberate esthetic contrivance. The object? To convey by a massive weight of incident the feebleness of the individual within the com plex web of modern industrial society, technologically sophisticated but barbarous in human terms, its impersonality the enemy of the person. Jean-Paul Sartre, one of the few leftist intellectuals to take any interest in the later Dos Passos, once said of his work: "I know of none--not even Kafka's or Faulkner's--in which the art is greater or better hidden. I know of none that is more precious, more touching, and closer to us. That is because he takes his material from our world."

Influential Style. That hidden art was often overshadowed by Dos Passes' obtrusive style. He devised what he called The Camera Eye--poetically subjective inlays in the raw plain-deal prose, where the novelist had his metrical fling out of earshot of his characters. Another invention was the impressionist profile of contemporary figures, of which the most famous had the echoing refrain: "Wars, machine-gun fire and arson--good growing weather for the House of Morgan." These sketches--of Henry Ford and Big Bill Haywood the Wobbly leader, of Rudolph Valentino and Isadora Duncan--were brilliant in themselves and had great influence on the style of journalism.

Dos Passos also interpolated his narrative with the Newsreel, an impressionistic montage of headlines and boldfaced journalism that sharpened the ironic barb of his deadpan stories. The three inventions--with the waning of Dos Passos' reputation--have been dismissed as fashionable quirks of the experimental '30s, like that of e e cummings' renunciation of the capital letter or Dos Passes' own abhorrence of the hyphen. It can now be seen that they were more than razzmatazz.

An Era Preserved. It would be oversimplifying to see Dos Passos as one who has taken two paces to the left and three to the right. There is a core of consistency in his work that reconciles the "left" tone of U.S.A. with the "rightist" color of District of Columbia. Big Business was the enemy in U.S.A. In District, the focus of power shifted: the first novel in that trilogy dealt with the power of Communism to corrupt innocent idealism; the second was a primer on political demagoguery; the third a parable directed against the emotional debaucheries of the New Deal in its Popular Front war phase. Most Likely to Succeed, his latest novel, repeats that theme.

An enormous noise of silence has followed the ideological clamor of the '30s. But Dos Passos can now be regarded as an essential historian of an era--not a great novelist but a greater taker of notes playing the unwelcome role of a man who repeats things that others have said and would rather forget. It may seem old hat today, but it is a hat that many Americans have worn. Dos Passos may well claim to have been consistent in the oldfashioned, cranky Yankee way of distrusting all ideologies, of resisting all managerial systems that claim to improve man's lot at the price of any particle of his freedom.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.