Dear diary,
I’ve always wanted to read the trilogy of novels called U.S.A. by John Dos Passos; and now I finally began. The first volume is called The 42nd Parallel — I didn’t expect to love it as much as I did. I fell head-over-heels for that book. It did for me something similar to Gore Vidal’s Narratives of Empire series: By way of storytelling that centers on individual people rather than intellectual abstractions, these works illuminate a part of U.S. history that today is lost and unknown to us average United Statesians. (I think that it’s lost and unknown for a sly reason: this benefits the foxes who profit off the populace’s ignorance.) Heavy focus on the working class versus the owner/ruler class.
Immediately after finishing the first part of Dos Passos’ trilogy, I checked out the second, titled 1919. This was every bit as rewarding as that initial book. When only halfway thru it, I put in a library request for the final volume, called The Big Money — and, just this morning, I received a notice saying that the book has arrived and is ready to be devoured.
I’m enough of an admirer of the American poet Hart Crane to have acquired copies of his complete poems and his collected letters. I also have Paul Mariani’s biography of Crane, called The Broken Tower. Now, recalling that Crane was a contemporary of John Dos Passos and that the two actually had met and knew each other, I was curious to review whether Crane had read Dos Passos’ masterwork. It turns out that he had — at least two thirds of it: for he died before the final volume was published. Here’s a quote from Mariani’s bio:
Back in Chagrin Falls [in 1931], Crane had plowed through the first novel [The 42nd Parallel] and found it good, though finally unsatisfying because Dos Passos had failed to create a full portrait of anyone. But 1919 he could not put down, even to eat or sleep, so engrossing did he find it. A great book, he told Grunberg, writing Lorna Dietz that same day that it was “certainly the best book” Dos had ever written. The “same technique as the 42nd Parallel,” but this time “developed and perfected finally into an almost perfect instrument.” So the guy had done it, broken through into the sun. A great read, but also Crane’s last. For suddenly, unexpectedly, everything began unraveling.
So as I myself record this quote in my journal here, I’m at the exact same place in life that Hart Crane was, before he died: the last book each of us has read is Dos Passos’ 1919. For my own part, if God permits, I will be picking up the next & final volume in the trilogy at my library today; but, in Crane’s case, before being able to do so, he ended up drowning in the ocean:
Here’s one more passage from Mariani’s bio (note that the quoted portions are direct testimony from a letter written by an eyewitness—Vogt—who was a fellow passenger on the steamship Orizaba)…
Gertrude Vogt was sitting on a deck chair by the stern, waiting to hear the results of the ship’s pool, which would be announced at noon. She looked up to see a man walking toward her… She watched as that man [Hart Crane], in coat and pajamas, walked up to the railing, took off his coat, and folded it over the railing. Then he “placed both hands on the railing, raised himself on his toes, and…dropped back again. We all fell silent and watched him, wondering what in the world he was up to. Then, suddenly, he vaulted over the railing and jumped into the sea. For what seemed like five minutes, but was more like five seconds, no one was able to move; then cries of ‘man overboard’ went up. Just once I saw Crane, swimming strongly, but never again.”
For me, this recalls a passage from “The Sleepers” by Walt Whitman:
I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer
swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head,
he strikes out with courageous arms,
he urges himself with his legs,
I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
I hate the swift-running eddies that would
dash him head-foremost on the rocks.
What are you doing
you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
Will you kill the courageous giant?
will you kill him in the prime
of his middle-age?
[Crane died just 3 months before he turned 33.]
Steady and long he struggles,
He is baffled, bang’d, bruis’d,
he holds out while his strength holds out,
The slapping eddies are spotted with
his blood, they bear him away,
they roll him, swing him, turn him,
His beautiful body is borne in the
circling eddies, it is continually
bruis’d on rocks,
Swiftly and out of sight is borne the brave corpse.
Now here’s the last stanza of Hart Crane’s “At Melville’s Tomb” — the poem is a eulogy for the creator of our greatest American epic Moby-Dick; but now it seems just as well to be a prophetic elegy for its very own author:
Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides . . . High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.
It would make me feel bad if I were the captain of a ship and one of my passengers fell overboard into the deep. I would use the intercom to announce to all my seafarers & crewmates that we will be halting our journey (I imagine that, up to this point, our ship would have been bound for New York City) in order to search around the area of the wine-dark sea where our missing person was last caught sight of — either waving or drowning. And I would circle the ship for hours, without any luck. Days would pass & turn into months. Then, after we’d scoured the Gulf of Mexico for twenty years or more, I would need to make the difficult call to terminate our Poet-Rescue Mission. “That’s it,” I would shout into my loudspeaker. “We must admit, we’re never going to find him. Let’s give up and go home.” Then we’d all mute our hope and navigate back to our apartments and eat ham.
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