"On a Hot August Night When the Dry-Flies Shrilled"

April 27, 2023 3:48 PM

Unlike Hemingway, Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution. The friends operated at different speeds: Hemingway raced; Dos Passos cruised. Take, for example, the annual running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Dos Passos enjoyed the experience primarily for the spectacle, the food, and the drink. Hemingway saw it as a test of manhood. There “were too many exhibitionistic personalities in the group to suit me,” Dos Passos wrote. “The sight of a crowd of young men trying to prove how hombre they were got on my nerves.” from The World at the End of a Line by John Dos Passos Coggin
posted by chavenet (11 comments total)

I’m embarassed… Hemingway fan but dunno Passos. Now I’ll take a look, thanks!
posted by BlunderingArtist at 5:47 PM on April 27, 2023 [2 favorites]

I’ve tried Dos Passos a couple times and found him hard going, I like the ideas he’s trying to express better than the way he expresses them. Didn’t know anything about his life, now I want to find a good biography.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:29 PM on April 27, 2023 [1 favorite]

Dos Passos practiced moderation in most things and valued ideological nuance and evolution.

That's a funny way of saying "He started his adulthood as an ardent Socialist and a IWW supporter, but his experience with Stalinism pushed him so far right that he became a Libertarian, later supporting Goldwater and Nixon."
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:50 PM on April 27, 2023 [8 favorites]

If you like Dos Passos check out Three Soldiers, great book, even Mencken liked it.
posted by oldnumberseven at 1:17 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Hey Manhattan Transfer is a great way to start your tour of John Dos Passos’ work.
posted by notyou at 4:38 AM on April 28, 2023 [1 favorite]

I read the 42nd Parallel, the first book in the USA trilogy, and I really liked all the stuff around the main story, the newspaper articles, stream of consciousness stuff, and so on, but the main story was very forgettable. Sometime later I was going to start the second, but couldn’t remember a damn thing that had happened to the main protagonist, and I just couldn’t be bothered to go back and refresh my memory, so I never did. I’ve heard good things about Manhattan Transfer, so I suppose I should go there next.
posted by Kattullus at 5:36 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Seconding Kattallus about the easily forgettable main story in 42nd Parallel, and also The Pluto Gangsta: he ended up as a reactionary crank and his books, taken as a whole, are just not that big a deal, though some are enjoyable on their own.

For me, the lesson has been to be very, very careful about the people you choose to admire—for any reason.
posted by ivanthenotsoterrible at 6:29 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Stand on Zanzibar, a science fiction novel by John Bruner, essentially took the form of the 42nd Parallel and used it to tell a better story. I don’t know if it holds up now, but it’s worth looking at.
posted by Kattullus at 7:11 AM on April 28, 2023 [3 favorites]

I didn't say he was a crank. Unlike the modern stereotype of the "college liberal" who becomes GOP once they move to the suburbs, Dos Passos politics shifted because he saw the worst parts of the revolution firsthand. He went to the Spanish Civil War to support leftist groups by writing and reporting to the U.S., and reached a breaking point when he got an up-close look at how Stalin was transforming the Communist Party into a personality cult with secret police and spy networks.

Imagine traveling to Russia in the 1920s to learn about Socialism, only to spend the next decade watching as your classmates and teachers (including Trotsky himself) get exiled or executed once Iron Joe took over the movement from within. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he came to value civil liberties, and support anyone who promised (truthfully or falsely) to defend them from government overreach.

Hemingway went to the war because he thought it would be a grand personal adventure, so that's what it became in all his stories. Dos Passos went because he thought it would be a world-changing event, and it crushed his idealism and his belief that "big government" could ever do anything good.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 7:41 AM on April 28, 2023 [6 favorites]

That was a lovely piece of writing. I was not surprised to find out in the author tag that his grandson is also a poet. I kind of wish that he writes a similar piece on Charlie Mayo, who seems like an interesting person in his own right.
posted by KingEdRa at 9:32 AM on April 28, 2023 [2 favorites]

Stand on Zanzibar is remarkably faithful to it's source, more enjoyable (I found) but ultimately also a teeny-weeny bit ... I don't know where I put it down but I'd swear it was in the living room. Or the bedroom. It was a couple years ago, so forgive me. I do remember putting it down though, of that I am certain.
posted by From Bklyn at 11:59 AM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]