Happy Birthday, John

I learn from Garrison Keillor that today is John Dos Passos’ birthday—he would be 111 (link). I’d been hyping Dos Passos’ USA just yesterday, so I’m in a mood to give him another salute. Okay, maybe it’s not the greatest novel. I suspect Mrs. Buce might vote for Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! My learned literary adviser Taxmom might say Portrait of a Lady. I get the point in each case. I’ve read a lot of Faulkner with great enjoyment, but Absalom always struck me as a bit overwrought (if I had to name one Faulkner piece that comes near perfection, it might be Spotted Horses, surely the funniest piece of fiction in American history, and perhaps undervalued for that very reason--but see infra). With James, I guess I would say I admire Portrait of a Lady (for my money it is, at least, the best James novel, but see infra)—the scene where Isabel recognizes that she has made a bad decision and is stuck with it, is surely one of the great bravura set-pieces—but on the whole, I’ve never quite made up my mind about Henry James: suffice to say, I suspect that he isn’t quite as wonderful as he thinks he is, but that is true of all of us.

[With both James and Faulkner, maybe the problem is packaging: I suspect James’ natural habitat is the novella—I can’t think of anything I like better than The Jolly Corner. With Faulkner, the problem is almost the opposite: he didn’t write “novels,” but rather “one big novel” of which the individual components are just mosaic chips. That would be why the best introduction to Faulkner is still Malcolm Cowley’s Viking Portable Faulkner, which gives you a feel for the whole oeuvre, start to finish.—But I digress.]

What I will say is I can’t think of any American novel that ever delighted me more. I read it at white hot speed and it stayed in my mind for months, perhaps years—in a sense, I suppose, always. I haven’t reread it for a generation now. Partly, I suppose I fear it won’t seem as good. Partly, it is so fixed in my mind that I don’t need to.

Wiki says that USA is "deeply pessimistic." I guess I can see what they're driving at, but I confess, it never occurred to me. This may be in part Walker Percy's "alienated novel" paradox--you can write a novel about alienation, but you can't write a successful "alienated novel," because the very fact of literary connection denies alienation. So also, Dos Passos may have been in some sense "pessimistic," but I took heart from its energy and craft.

Dos Passos veered to the right later in his political life and it is perhaps fashionable to say that he is underrated because the lefties never forgave him. Maybe, but that seems to me an easy out. I read some of the later Dos Passos with enjoyment, but the bald truth is, he really didn’t have it for a second act. No matter: a hundred writers, a thousand, thousands, would be proud to do what he did. I see that the Library of America now has USA in a convenient single volume; maybe it’s time to give it another shot.

Fn.: I learn from Wiki that Sartre was a big Dos Passos fan, which is no surprise. I learn also that USA is an "influence" on Sartre's Age of Reason trilogy. Uh, huh, I guess I see. I read and enjoyed Age of Reason (a few years after I read USA). It never once occurred to me that the former was an influence on the latter. Maybe I was just being slack, but I think the real point is that, however enjoyable Age of Reason is, still USA is just a whole lot better.

The Law School Casebook as Work of Art (aka Remembering Casner & Leach)

A lot of law students profess to hate law school. Maybe they mean it; maybe they just think it is the thing to say. At any rate, I was not one. I thought law school was one of the most entertaining things I ever did in my life.

Partly, this was just personal: I was 28, in a career that seemed to be going nowhere, and this was my ticket out. But it was not just that. As my friend Ellen said: every day is a little story.

Exactly. One thing Ellen and I had in common was that we had worked for daily newspapers. So perhaps we were attuned to the possibilities of story. Anyway, I found the reading of law school cases to be high entertainment.

I remembered law school, and Ellen, and little stories, the other day as I was throwing out some old papers and I found this, which I had laboriously tapped out on my old (even then!) Underwood in the fall of ’63. It comes from the first edition of Casner and Leach Property, one of the old war-horses of the law school classroom. The piece is called “Homily on Minimum Pain and Maximum Profit in Reading Cases.” C&L (it reads like Leach) are discussing the case of one Cobb who had sued a railroad. They make my point better than I could make it myself:

The flavor of the case—the dogged persistence of the litigious Cobb, the railroad trying to wear him down, the red-faced Supreme Court having to eat its first opinion, reversing itself on the grounds of ‘excessive damages,’ and having another jury (of Cobb’s neighbors) slap the case right back at them at substantially the same figure. … The winning party and his lawyer will regale their friends with details of the triumph for years; the losers will say as little about it as possible. If you sense the humanity and drama of the conflict, while still focusing principal attention on the matters of legal significance, you will enjoy it more and, for that reason, get more out of it. … Each case should be to you an item of vicarious experience. If you could only live long enough, you would find the apprentice system the best method of learning law. … Next best is vicarious experience—and this is what the reading of cases offers you.

A. James Casner and W. Barton Leach, Property (1951)

I admit, I had embarked on the law school path with a good deal of trepidation: if this doesn’t work, what will? I can still feel the sense of recognition and relief that overtook me when I read—and grasped the point of—this passage.

To cleanse my mind while hacking through the jungle of case law, in those days I was always reading John Dos Passos’ USA trilogy about America in the decade after World War I. For all kinds of reasons, I think USA may truly be the great American novel (just a few days ago, guest-blogging for CreditSlips, I excerpted a Dos Passos bit about Henry Ford). But—as I guess I dimly recognized even back then—there is a more than trivial overlap between Dos Passos (on the one hand) and Casner & Leach. Dos Passos more or less invented the “kaleidoscope” or “jump-cut” novel—half a dozen interweaving stories, interspersed with “newsreels,” and vignettes of more-or-less-accurate history, to paint a full-bodied three-dimensional picture of the world. Note to self, write an essay on the casebook as work of art. Or maybe this is it.

Fn.: Apparently C&L is still in print, but Cobb and the railroad have gone on to the great casebook in the sky. For the next edition, the editors might want to rethink that decision.

How Henry Made it Somebody Else's Problem

(Cross-posted from CreditSlips)

Since we are (I am) on the subject of literary bankruptcy, I can’t resist a reprint of a passage from John Dos Passos’ USA, which, for my money, really is the great American novel. Dos Passos interweaves his fictional trilogy with semi-documentary historical vignettes. Here, in “Tin Lizzie,” from 1919 (the second volume), he tells how Henry Ford survived the collapse that followed World War I:

…In 1918 [Ford] had borrowed on notes to buy out his minority stockholders for the picayune sum of seventyfive million dollars.

In February, 1920, he needed cash to pay off some of those notes that were coming due. A banker is supposed to have called him and offered him every facility if the bankers’ representative could be made a member of the board of directors. Henry Ford handed the banker his hat, and went about raising money his own way:

he shipped every car and part he had in his plant to his dealers and demanded immediate cash payment. Let the other fellow do the borrowing had always been a cardinal principle. He shut down production and canceled all orders from the supplyfirms. Many dealers were ruined, many supplyfirms failed, but when he reopened his plant, he owned it absolutely, the way a man owns an unmortgaged farm with the taxes paid up.

…in 1922 Henry Ford had sold one million three hundred and thirty-two thousand two hundred and nine tin lizzies; he was the richest man in the world.

My dad managed credit bureaus back in the 30s and 40s, when it was still a small-town drugstore counter kind of business. I remember him telling me the story of how Henry solved his own problem by making it somebody else’s problem. I don’t think my dad ever read Dos Passos; maybe he saw it at first hand.