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John Dos Passos and the Visual Arts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Michael Spindler
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Extract

The remarkable originality of Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925) has been long recognized. From Sinclair Lewis's early appreciative essay onwards, the novel's significant advance over Dos Passos's three previous novels, its break with constricting convention, and its technical boldness have been repeatedly noted. Dos Passos's broad concern remains that of the traditional realist–the heavily itemized portraiture of urban social life–but in Manhattan Transfer that portraiture is energized and given fresh impact by new modes of description and new principles of narrative structure. These innovations have customarily been traced to the influence of modernist experimentation in the novel, and Dos Passos's debts to James Joyce, Gertrude Stein and Marcel Proust have been established. Yet an explanation of Dos Passos's conception of form which confines itself to literary modernism alone must be regarded as incomplete. Dos Passos's heightened visual sense and the marked painterly and cinematic qualities of his work indicate that it is to the twentieth-century pioneers in the visual arts, as well as to the pioneers in fiction, that we must look for formative influences.

Dos Passos enjoyed a lifelong interest in the visual arts. After Harvard he went to Spain to study architecture, and at one time as a young man he was unsure whether to choose fine art or literature as his main avenue of creative expression.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , December 1981 , pp. 391 - 405
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

Michael Spindler lectures in English at the University of Fez, Morocco. He presented an earlier version of this essay at the 1980 Annual Conference of the British Association for American Studies.

1 “Manhattan at Last!” Saturday Review of Literature, 2 (1925), 361Google Scholar; Beach, Joseph Warren, in The Twentieth-Century Novel: Studies in Technique (New York: The Century Company, 1932), p. 437Google Scholar, called it “one of the most brilliant and original novels of the century.”

2 Wade, See Mason, “Novelist of America: John Dos Passos,” North American Review, 244 (1937). 349–67Google Scholar, and Colley, Iain, Dos Passos and the Fiction of Despair (London: Macmillan, 1978), p. 60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who adds Carl Sandburg, Dreiser, Hemingway and John Reed to the list of literary influences.

3 The Fourteenth Chronicle: Letters and Diaries of John Dos Passos, edited and with a biographical narrative by Ludington, Townsend (London: André Deutsch, 1974), pp. 10, 342Google Scholar; Dos Passos, John, The Best Times (London: André Deutsch, 1967), p. 130Google Scholar.

4 Knox, George, “Dos Passos and Painting,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 6 (1964), 22–38Google Scholar.

5 Dos Passos, John, Three Soldiers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), p. 275Google Scholar.

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7 Knox, p. 33.

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8 Gelfant, Blanche, The American City Novel (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1954), p. 133Google Scholar.

10 Reprinted in Camera Work, 42–43 (04–07 1913), p. 18Google Scholar, and quoted by Dijkstra, Bram in Cubism, Stieglitz and the Early Poetry of William Carlos Williams (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 157–58Google Scholar.

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17 Mumford, Lewis, Sticks and Stones: A Study of American Architecture and Civilization (New York: Dover, 1955), p. 188Google Scholar. First published in 1924.

18 Collected in McDonald, Edward D. (ed.), Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (London: Heinemann, 1936), p. 364Google Scholar. Wade and Colley have also remarked upon the cinematic qualities of the novel and its successors in U.S.A.

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24 See Eisenstein, Serge, The Film Sense, translated and edited by Leyda, Jay (London: Faber and Faber, 1968)Google Scholar, Appendix I, “The Work of Eisenstein,” and the Bibliography; Jacobs, p. 312. Michael Gold paid a visit to Russia in 1924 and with his passionate interest in revolutionary art could well have brought news of Eisenstein's experiments back to radical circles in New York. See Aaron, Daniel, Writers on the Left (Oxford and New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977 edition), p. 144Google Scholar.

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28 Cochran, T. C., A Basic History of American Business (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968), p. 83Google Scholar; Plimpton, p. 77.

29 Eisenstein, p. 19.