Rediscovering the Masters

Literary reputations can be a fickle thing. Over the past six months, I've been revisiting or discovering several American authors from the 1920s and 1930s that had either floated below my radar or been damned through faint praise by academic canon-compilers. John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis and John Steinbeck were all, at one point or another, considered among the top literary voices in American literature, with critical reception and general readership largely positive, if not worshipful. Lewis was awarded both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize (although he would only accept the latter), Steinbeck won both the Nobel Prize and the United States Medal of Freedom, while Dos Passos was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was cited by Jean-Paul Sartre as the greatest writer of his time.

Somewhere along the line, things changed. I suspect much of it had to do with the steady encroachment of Steinbeck into middle and high-school reading lists, the decline of regionalism as a viable literary genre, and Dos Passos' own shift towards right-wing politics. At the same time, all three writers produced works that were explicitly leftist, critical of capitalist structure and profoundly sympathetic towards organized labor. By the 1980s, such attitudes were severely out of step with the national mood, and by the time I hit college, the preceding decade's conservatism and the current mode of irony-at-all-costs meant that the rather earnest efforts of Dos Passos, Lewis and Steinbeck were viewed as too distastefully engaged. Finally, in the onward push for greater multicultural diversity in American letters, several white men needed to be moved along to make way for equally worthy voices to be heard. Unfortunately, in the battles that followed, Dos Passos and Lewis, especially, seemed relegated to the sidelines, with Steinbeck shuttled off to high school along with Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman and Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea.

There are plenty of similarities between Steinbeck and something like Death of a Salesman, and a heavy-handed approach to symbolism is one of them. The reason why Of Mice and Men and the travails of Willy Loman work so well in a high school classroom setting is that students needn't wrinkle their foreheads strenuously to determine what the crushed mouse means or why Willy Loman is literally a Low-Man. These obvious and sometimes clunky techniques cause much eye-rolling among academics, but offer precocious students their first feedback after taking apart the strands of a narrative. For me, the jury's still out on Steinbeck, although my wife recently re-read The Grapes of Wrath and found it moving, and our recent trip to the Sea of Cortez has made me curious to explore Steinbeck's non-fiction work on the subject.


But in regards to Sinclair Lewis - an author I'd long neglected and unfairly dismissed - I have found a type of kindred soul. His novels may be broadly drawn and his characters burdened with nearly cartoonishly satirical names (such as T. Cholmondeley "Chum" Frink and Vergil Gunch), but as his humor and wrath are directed at targets such as boosterism and advertising (Babbitt, 1922), the hijacking of science for corporate and investment return (Arrowsmith, 1925), and the hypocrisy of the clergy and religious hysteria (Elmer Gantry, 1926), I can't much complain.

Having just finished Arrowsmith, the chronicle of a driven and idealistic young physician repelled by the hyper-commercialized world of patent medicine and the status-driven goals of institutional research, I find I'm still relatively amazed at how accurately Lewis predicted the ways in which American medicine would continue to be held in the hands of drug companies and large conglomerates - and how snake-oil salesmen would move up the corporate ladder and into the boardroom. One needn't look too far from the inane ditties and horrible poetry composed by Dr. Arrowsmith's nemesis, the tiresome small-town booster Dr. Almus Pickerbaugh (sample snatch of verse: You can't get health/ By a pussyfoot stealth,/ So let's every health-booster/ Crow just like a rooster) to the self-help inanities blathered by Dr. Phil or the mail-in video discs of Richard Simmons sweating to the oldies. Lewis predicted an ongoing struggle between the science behind medicine and the Yankee desire to make a fast buck, and I was struck by how often his observations, made nearly 85 years ago, seemed as up-to-date as the evening news.

Of John Dos Passos and his U.S.A. Trilogy, which I spent much of the month of January devouring, what can I say other than the three books are a masterpiece of American literature and that anybody still searching for the mythical "Great American Novel" had better set aside some time to absorb the 1,151 pages that make up The 42nd Parallel, 1919 and The Big Money. Wildly experimental, yet deeply character-driven, they chronicle lives caught up in the surge of history with both a dispassionate eye and a true concern for the working classes. If Sartre praised Dos Passos' ability to present the lives of Mac McCreary, J. Ward Moorehouse, Eleanor Stoddard, Richard Ellsworth Savage and many others without any attempt at redemption, others were dazzled by Dos Passos' numerous "newsreels" placed throughout the novels - short bursts of headlines ripped out of context, song lyrics pasted from broadsheets, advertising notices and real-estate bromides tacked up on billboards. The newsreels were avant-garde yet hilarious, collages putting the insanity and speed of American culture up on display.

And yet for me, both the most extraordinary and the most profound of Dos Passos' many literary devices in the trilogy are his short histories or biographies of contemporary Americans, from scientists and politicians to writers and agitators. In these poetic and staggered accounts, Dos Passos laid bare the lies of American myth making and history-telling, dragging the legendary through the mud and elevating the scorned to the pedestal. These radical short pieces are far more effective than books such as James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, yet offer the same result. Thorstein Veblen's entry will make you weep, Paxton Hibben's will cause you to conduct a Google search, J.P. Morgan's will have you rushing about for torches to burn down Wall Street. And while it technically lies outside the biographical sketches, when the aftermath of the Sacco and Vanzetti affair is detailed in a blistering stream of consciousness chapter, Dos Passos delivers a single line, delivered in confusion, rage and hopelessness, that may be the finest line he ever wrote - all right, we are two nations.

These words still have the power to sting, and heal. I'm deeply chastened to have taken so long to approach them.