Dos Passos: Travels Books and Other Writings

Dos Passos: Travel Books and Other Writings

by Dos Passos
review by E.A. Lombardi

Guide Rating -

As one of the latest additions to the American writers series, Library of America has published "Travel Books and Other Writings: 1916-1941," by John Dos Passos. As the publisher explains, "During the years of his emergence as a major American novelist, John Dos Passos traveled widely in Europe, the Middle East, Mexico, and the United States, witnessing many of the tumultuous political, social, and cultural events of the early 20th century and recording his changing response to them."

In this collection, Dos Passos mixes poetry and prose, intermingling eating and drinking with laughter and conversation. He was in many ways the voice of a generation, depicting the troubles, tragedies, and joys of existence in the early 20th century.

Dos Passos sees many of the countries of the world, but he also writes about the writers. Besides discussions of politics and revolutions, Dos Passos hears how people from around the world view America and its writers. One man says of American writing: "It is nothing... I have read Upton Sinclair. It has no soul. The soul of America is in the industrial technique."

Journeys in Spain with Rosinante

The tale of Don Quixote and his stead Rosinante is ever in the background of "Rosinante to the Road Again" (1922), a collection of essays on Spanish life, literature, and art. The vignettes detail the quest of two travelers as they set out from Madrid to Toledo in post-World War I Spain.

Spain is a place of laughter, singing, dancing, and long discussions; it's a place of revolution and great thought, but it's also a place of great writers. In this journey of discovery, Dos Passos discusses Spanish writer like Antonio Machado, Juan Maragall, Don Jacinto Benavente, and others. He weaves their stories into the politics and stories of the quest, as they are ingrained into substance of this work.

The land takes on an almost magical quality as he makes his way along the road. "The moon has begun to lose foothold," Dos Passos writes. "We are hurtling along the road at the top of a cliff; below the sea full of unexpected glitters, lace-edged, swishing like the silk dress of a dancer." Hear the music; smell the "rich wet fields," jasmine, heliotrope, and dry thyme; and see the unbelievable, in the "scattered pictures of Spain."

Dos Passos writes, "the memory came to me of the knight of the sorrowful countenance, Don Quixote, blundering trying to remould the world, pitifully sure of the power of his own ideal." Perhaps all an individual can hope for in life is to blunder along some road, alone, with a lance and helmet in an attempt to right wrongs or at least philosophize about it all.

Orient Express

"Orient Express" is a collection of Dos Passos essays about his travels to Constantinople, to Batum, and then through Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. He found himself on a train, destroyer, steamer, and beyond. At one railway station, he wrote in his journal, corpses were stacked like cordwood behind the store.

Dos Passos sees the children as "tiny wide-eyed skeletons with hideous swollen bellies," as they await the season of their deaths. Even amidst the horror of starvation and death, Dos Passos discovers a freedom in having "no watch and no money," feeling "no responsibility for events."

In All Countries & Other Works

In an essay in the "In Other Countries" collection, Dos Passos writes about "Some Sleety Nights Round Moscow," where he tells himself, "You're a reporter... You're gathering impressions?" Then, he says that writing should be "made of knowledge, feelings that have been trained into the muscles, sights, sounds, tastes, shudders that have been driven down into your bones by grim repetition, the modulations of the language you were raised to talk."

In the end, after all of the journeys around the world through essays, poetry, pictures, and imagery, we come back to the man, the writer: Dos Passos. And, there he is: "Huddled in a knot, hard and cold, pitched like a baseball round the world.... Until you meet yourself coming back and are sick into your old black hat." He seems to find bits about himself in the many revelations along the road. These writings are unforgettable.