Montana labor news., 1939-08-31

felt about the country as a whole. I
have yet to meet a reader who didn't
feel at home in this book.
And along with putting people in
tune with their age, Dos Passos was
doing things with the novel form
that were making a lot of us open
our eyes and think there was life
in it yet. We felt that here was a
man who had looked a long way into
the secrets of the modern world,
and would be telling us more and
more about it.
It is well to remember those
things when trying to evaluate "Ad-
ventures of a Young Man" For the
CONSERVATION of the professional
critics has kicked up such a storm
that one is likely to lose sight of
the fact that it is a novel he is con-
sidering and not an international
scandal. Malcolm Cowley devoted
the most of a long article to telling
how it was that Dos Passos had seen
the wrong things in Spain. He
scarcely mentioned the novel. "The
New Masses boiled over in two
lengthy reviews-and this concern
ing a book which the first article
had defined as worthy of no serious
consideration. Other critics behaved
similarly. A person reading only
the reviews would have concluded
that Dos Passos had performed some
indecent act and that one should
never speak of him again.
AS a matter of fact, he has written
what, coming from any other pen,
would be considered an important
minor-scale novel. 1t is the story
of an American radical of middle
class background who goes through
a variety of experiences as labor
organizer and party agitator, and
finally dies in Spain fighting for the
Loyalists. He is represented as a
sincere, even if not brilliant, radical
one who is primarily interested in
fighting for the working class. He
splits with his party presumably
the official Communist party, dis
covering that the party leadership
is more interested in following
orders from Moscow than in the
working class struggle. Discredited
and thwarted in his work in Amer
lea, he goes to Spain, hoping to be
able to do something to help the
Spanish workers, but finds the same
party leadership in control there,
and is arrested as a spy. He is
finally released in an emergency and
shortly killed in battle.
1t is easy to see why the critics
howled, but they missed the point.
When a man has given us so much,
we expect constantly more. Many
of us had been hoping Dos Passos
would carry his story of U. S. A..
on through the depression years; the
confusion and drama of those years
would give his versatile style and
his deep understanding of the times
a chance to bear richer fruit than
ever before. There were many forces
in those years that contributed to
a newly awakening radical move
ment; many Illustrations, both per-
sonal and social, that sent people
into the melodrama of the Commu-
mist party. We miss the sense of
American society as a whole into
which the story Of Glenn Spottswood
can fit-the sense of a nations des-
tiny that can make it ring true-and
we miss the portraits of the others
that complement and supplement
Spottswood. Given all these, no
critic could have charged that Dos
Passes was blinded by some political
theory that destroyed his perspective.
Such charges, coming from the COM
munists, are ironic. They assume
Dos Passos has written nothing but
a political tract.
The novel can stand as a novel.
The characters are real and con-
vincing; the proportioning is good;
the progression and character builo-
ing are so smooth that they are
almost unnoticeable. The reader
should stop to realize that Dos Passes
has made political and theological
rivalries live and take on familiar
shape in terms of immediate human
experience. There are none of the
long, windy polemics that mar most
books which undertake to describe
such rivalries. In many other ways
of the novelist's craft the book isl
good-so good as to seem effortless.
1t is only when we remember what
Dos Passes promised in ~. S. A."
that Adventures of a Young Man"
seems slight and pale and inadequate,
and we feel cheated of what we
might have had. How did it happen?
The best we can say is that writers
do strange things. We may be sure,
however, that it wasn't because he
deviated from the Communist party
line. Dos Passos will yet fulfill his
promise-and promise more.