Books: Unmaking of an American

MOST LIKELY TO SUCCEED (310 pp.)—John Dos Passos—Prentice-HalI ($3.SO).

“. . . It was the wildest summer. I came back first class with a lady tennis player from Santa Barbara just to study the decadent bourgeoisie. I engaged in a Dada manifestation and helped put on a Stravinski ballet. I interviewed Abd-el-Krim in Morocco and wrote a play called Shall Be the Human Race but there’s nothing worth seeing in Europe except the Ballet Russe and the révolution mondiale.”

It was 1926, and Jed Morris was in his 20s when he gave this account. The world was a rather large oyster for a lad without money to swallow, but Jed was the kind who would swallow it whole even if he choked. He splashed on the Marxist ketchup, and washed it all down with huge gulps of sex. Every night, after a furious day on the intellectual make, “he was in a hurry to go to sleep so that he would wake up and it would be tomorrow.”

Jed is the hero of John Dos Passos’ new novel, and in his person, it seems, the author sees all the fierce young social spirits who came roaring out of the ’20s got soft and successful in the ’30s, dangled guiltily between big money and little treason, and have recently been hitting the sawdust trail in congressional committees.

Going Absolutely Gorky. In 1926, Jed rushed straight from the dock to the organization meeting of a new proletarian stage enterprise, reminiscent of the famous Group Theater. “Human society is suffering and drying up for lack of a creed,” he soon found himself saying. “The theater will take the place of the church . . . That’s what I learned working with the Russians last summer. We’ve got to go further than they went. Abolish the proscenium arch.”

Jed and his fellow playwrights went absolutely Gorky (“Dawn over Mexico, and the lone voice of a heartbroken whore singing in a cribhouse”), but one production after another lost money. “It’s the goddam critics’ fault,” Jed sneered. When the theater folded. Jed went to hack in a hell called Hollywood: “His heart jumped in his chest. For the first time it occurred to him that now he was going to be rich.” He got rid of his first wife (“a peasant”) and married his second (who gave his life a “Brahmin note”).

But the more Jed indulged his material appetites, the more hush money he had to pay to his social conscience. After he bought a Cadillac, he told a party agent: “I think I am ready now to base my work on scientific socialism.” When the Communists blandly agreed to let him have the best of both worlds, Jed gratefully accepted a party card.

Go-to-Press Clatter. Most Likely to Succeed is perhaps the most savage satire against the gulliberal so far produced by an American. Dos Passos is angry, but he shifts his anger into a high gear of farce, at least for the first 200 pages. Dos Passos writes with a giddy, go-to-press clatter that has not been heard in his books since the ’20s, and the mood of Village radicalism in those days is brilliantly laid on.

But as the story goes on and on and Jed doesn’t change but only gets more so, readers may begin to wish that the angry author were less so. As a man who once journeyed a long way with the Communists, but decisively broke with the comrades’ ideals earlier than most reformed fellow-travelers, Author Dos Passos, now 58, at length starts to sound less like a social critic than a disappointed lover.