408 Making It New: 1900–1945romantic egotist, this time a Hollywood producer, The Last Tycoon. The Last Tycoon
was unfinished when Fitzgerald died suddenly of a heart attack. It was published in
its incomplete form a year after his death; and the stories about Pat Hobby did
not appear until 1962. At the time of his death, his reputation had just about reached
its nadir. He was generally dismissed as a writer of the “lost decade” of the 1920s (to
use Fitzgerald’s own phrase), who had become irrelevant with its passing. What was
not realized then, but is now, is that Fitzgerald was, certainly, the poet laureate of
the Jazz Age but that his way of writing about that age, and its aftermath, laid bare
fundamental issues about American and modern society and how “we” define
ourselves as human beings. He was, certainly, a romantic but a romantic with a firm
grip on reality, a cold, knowing eye. For Fitzgerald, the personal was the political; he
saw the quality of private experience as a gauge of society, a way of understanding
history. That is why his fiction is an intimate disclosure of its author and his
times and of ourselves, the “we” of his audience, as well.
“Christ, Man,” wrote John Dos Passos (1896–1971) to Fitzgerald, after he had read
“The Crack-Up,” “how do you find time in the middle of the general conflagration
to worry about all that stuff? ” Dos Passos was clearly baffled by Fitzgerald’s preoc-
cupation “with all that stuff ” about the meaning of his personal experience. For
him, what mattered was the “general conflagration,” the crisis of capitalism, in the
1930s; and he directed all his energies and his skills as a modernist innovator
to depicting that conflagration in his greatest work, U.S.A. (1930–1936). Prior to
writing the three books that constitute the U.S.A. trilogy, The 42nd Parallel (1930),
1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936), Dos Passos had written several novels,
essays, and poems. His first two novels, One Man’s Initiation: 1917 (1920) and Three
Soldiers (1921), are typical of their time, in that, like so many works reflecting
postwar disillusionment, they reveal the horror with which sensitive and idealistic
young men confront war and an alien society. Three Soldiers, in particular, anticipates
Dos Passos’s later work. Describing the related careers of three American soldiers
during World War I, it deploys what was to become its author’s habitual strategy: the
characters are not so much individuals as representative moral types. Not only that,
it explores his habitual theme, the subject that dominates nearly all his work: the
conflict between man and system, between a consciousness struggling to maintain
its autonomy and the crushing, reductive power of a social machine – sometimes
identified as the army, sometimes called the law, the corporation, or the city, but
always identified with the impersonal mechanisms of the modern world. The
narrative form of Three Soldiers is, however, relatively conventional. Its modernism
is a matter of theme – its preoccupation with social exile, alienation – rather than
technique. With Manhattan Transfer (1925) all that changed. By now, Dos Passos
believed that, if he was to recreate the new, urban America in prose he would have to
pursue a new mode of apprehension, a new form of fiction that was as far removed
from the old as the city was from the farm. Set, as its title implies, in the city of
New York, Manhattan Transfer moves rapidly between numerous characters who
have in common only their status as New Yorkers. They come together, if at all, only
by chance and impersonally; sometimes they simply pass each other in the streetGGray_c04.indd 408ray_c 04 .indd 408 8 8/1/2011 7:53:55 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 53 : 55 AM