John Gardner, perhaps the best teacher of creative writing America has produced since World War II, warns young writers (in his The art of fiction) refrain from trying to imitate regional accents by adopting fancy spellings in dialogue (‘feller’ for ‘fellow’, for example). This is what I think of John Dos Passos, in what may be his best book, Transfer to Manhattanunwittingly agrees with Gardner, since the novel’s greatest weakness lies precisely in such efforts to mimic speech with funny spelling. They do not work. They simply distract the reader from that “fictitious dream” state that Gardner claims is the essential, hypnotic state of mind required for novels to work in human brains.
In fact, all the dialogue in all the novels is an imitation of speech, not real speech (those who doubt this need only transcribe the conversation of two very clever speakers – the overwhelming number of umms and awws and circumlocations and tangents will surprise you). and it will cripple you, if novelists ever tried to use real speech instead of imitation speech in their fiction, they would soon turn us all permanently into non-fiction, or TV shows).
Having said this, Transfer to Manhattan, a novel I first read when I was 16 or 17 in the 1960s, is magnificent precisely because of the stupendous risks Dos Passos takes with language. Consider this brief passage, which I quote from page 10 of my copy of Houghton Mifflin’s Sentry paperback edition, published in 1953:
A little bearded, crook-legged man in a bowler hat walked down Allen Street, through the sun-striped tunnel adorned with sky blue and smoked salmon and mustard yellow quilts, filled with gingerbread-colored second-hand furniture. He walked with his cold hands clasped on the tails of his frock coat, pushing his way past packing boxes and scurrying children. He kept biting his lip and clenching his hands together and letting go. He walked without hearing the screams of children or the annihilating rattle of the L trains or the stale, sweet smell of crowded dwellings. .
At a yellow-painted pharmacy on the corner of Canal, he stopped and stared blankly at a face on a green billboard. It was a distinguished, bushy-browed, clean-shaven face with arched eyebrows and a bushy, well-trimmed moustache, the face of a man who had money in the bank, set comfortably on a starched collar and a wide dark tie. Beneath it, in notebook script, was the signature King C. Gillette. Above his head floated the slogan NO STROPPING NO HING. The little bearded man removed his bowler hat from his sweaty forehead and gazed a long time into the proud eyes of the King C. Gillette dollar. He then he clenched his fists, threw his shoulders back and walked into the pharmacy.”
In the next paragraph, Dos Passos invents the neologism “dollarbland” to oppose (and also emphasize) his earlier invention of “dollarproud.” Look at all the other new words in those two short paragraphs, including words like “mustard yellow” that dos Passos may have invented and that have become common today, and more, like “smoked salmon” (referring to a color) that one rare. once go And my two favorites “dollarproud” and “dollarbland” which to my knowledge have never been used before or since. Dos Passos summarizes in a single word what a social critic would take two or three paragraphs to express.
I didn’t need to know, when I first read those words as a teenager, that King C. Gillette was the founder of the Gillette razor company and had made his fortune giving away expensive razors on the theory that his fortune would be based on the weekly sale of replacement blades, not the razors themselves, soon propelling him into the ranks of America’s richest men (he was right, and the formula has often been repeated). copied ever since, most recently by Kindle, which sells its Kindle readers for much less than they cost to make on the theory, again correct, that Amazon is really in the book business, not the Kindle business, and that By making cheap Kindles available to multitudes of humanity, Amazon will more easily achieve its true goal, which is to sell millions and millions of texts, not hardware).
Does Dos Passos need to tell us anything else? His magical, almost gymnastic-like verbal inventiveness does all the work, making it clear that King C. Gillette is no friend to bearded, bow-legged men.
Dos Passos writes a direct narrative in Transfer to Manhattan, but it has a poetic quality that few later writers have been able to approach, much less match. i still read Transfer to Manhattan partly just to roll strings of words across my tongue, sometimes to read them aloud, just to feel and hear them, as much as I do for the plot (actually there are multiple plots, as in a later and equally compelling City novel). New York, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities). Even without Dos Passos’s genius for what I will call, perhaps oxymoronically, poetic storytelling, the plot of the story alone would have made this book, and continues to make this book, readable and gripping as a story.
For those who don’t know, Dos Passos’ political and economic philosophy was probably a bit to the left of Dennis Kucinich, about as anti-Ayn Rand as one can get in the mid-twenties. he wrote Transfer to Manhattan before the Great Depression, which he wisely anticipated. An encyclopedia of literature tells me that “the book attacks the consumerism and social indifference of contemporary life, portraying a Manhattan that is ruthless but full of energy and restlessness.” Amen. King C. Gillette’s proud dollar eyes do nothing to inspire warmth or friendship in John Dos Passos.
And yet, I think John Dos Passos is a forgotten American writer. As we emerge today from one of the most devastating recessions the country has faced since the Great Depression before all but the oldest of us were born, this book may well resonate with modern readers. DH Lawrence called it “the best modern book on New York,” and though many would suggest half a dozen new candidates (I’m a big Tom Wolfe fan myself), Lawrence’s assessment may well still hold true in 2013.