Talk by the Road

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
From John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941

Interesting Links

Video: Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, and World War I: Steve Paul and James McGrath Morris discuss Hemingway and Dos Passos, both of whom served in the American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps during World War I (CSPAN)

“The Hotel Childhood of John Dos Passos” (Townsend Ludington, VQR)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “The Donkey Boy,” John Dos Passos
• “The Legend of the Two Discreet Statues,” Washington Irving

Buy the book
John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941
Rosinante to the Road Again | Orient Express | In All Countries | A Pushcart at the Curb | essays, letters, diaries | 8 full-color plates of watercolors by Dos Passos

Detail from Vista de Toledo [View of Toledo], ca. 1599–1600, oil on canvas by El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos). Click on image to see entire painting. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which includes this description on its website: “The painting belongs to the tradition of emblematic city views, rather than a faithful documentary description. The view of the eastern section of Toledo from the north would have excluded the cathedral, which the artist therefore imaginatively moved to the left of the Alcázar (the royal palace). Other buildings represented in the painting include the ancient Alcántara Bridge, and on the other side of the river Tagus, the Castle of San Servando.”

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By the time he was twenty-five years old, John Dos Passos had traveled twice to Spain: he first stayed for five months in 1916–17, before the American entry into World War I, and he returned for another eight months after the war, in 1919–20. In the years between, he managed the family’s debt-ridden estate after his father died, served as a volunteer ambulance driver in France and Italy during the war, returned to the United States after he was accused of disloyalty and forced to resign, and enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps—only to find out the war had ended the day before he left for Europe.

After his first trip to Spain, Dos Passos—whose grandfather was a Portuguese immigrant—became obsessed with the Iberian peninsula and began using its people and culture as inspirations for his early writings and paintings. During his war service, when he learned that one of his Harvard classmates would be traveling in Spain, he dashed off a letter:

By the way on your wanderings take note of any small cheap cottages you see that might at some future not very remote be inhabited by a band of outcasts, fugitives from injustice, pariahs, a cottage where one could live of olla & huevos [eggs] and follow one's natural avocations of making an ass of oneself on paper and on canvas, in ink, in pencil, in oils, in pastel in print.

This pivotal five-year period—his war adventures bookended by his two trips through Spain—provided Dos Passos with material for his first four books. One Man’s Initiation: 1917 and Three Soldiers, published in 1920 and 1921, are blunt, realistic novels about the war. His only book of poetry, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), includes depictions of street scenes in Madrid and other Spanish towns. The same year, he extensively reworked the travel writings about Spain he had written for various magazines and published them as Rosinante to the Road Again, which took its title from the name of Don Quixote’s horse. (For more about this period of Dos Passos’s life, see the introduction to “Donkey Boy,” a previous Story of the Week selection.)

Interspersed among Rosinante’s impressionistic essays on contemporary Spanish culture, literature, and politics are eight fictional sketches, six of them with the title “Talk by the Road.” Together, the sketches make up an episodic narrative describing two young travelers walking from Madrid to Toledo, or (in literary critic Donald Pizer’s words) “from the contemporary commercial capital of Spain to its ancient spiritual center.” The two youths, named Telemachus and Lyaeus (another name for Dionysus), discuss and debate the influence on Spanish culture of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, the two main characters of Cervantes’s great novel. As Dos Passos himself puts it elsewhere:

And predominant in the Iberian mind is the thought La vida es sueño: “Life is a dream.” Only the individual, or that part of life which is in the firm grasp of the individual, is real. The supreme expression of this lies in the two great figures that typify Spain for all time: Don Quixote and Sancho Panza; Don Quixote, the individualist who believed in the power of man’s soul over all things, whose desire included the whole world in himself; Sancho, the individualist to whom all the world was food for his belly.

In Dos Passos’s writings, Quixote represents “the ecstatic figures for whom the power of the individual soul has no limits,” while Sancho represents “the jovial materialists.”

We present as our Story of the Week selection, Rosinante’s first “Talk by the Road” episode, in which Telemachus and Lyaeus encounter on the road two men, one riding on a donkey and the other on a horse, who turn out to be central to the theme of their journey.

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Telemachus and Lyaeus had walked all night. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

The Donkey Boy

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
From John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941

Interesting Links
“Dos Passos and Spain” (Eulalia Piñero Gil, JohnDosPassos.com)

“How Ambulance Drivers Hemingway and Dos Passos Rerouted the Course of American Literature” (James McGrath Morris, The Daily Beast)

Previous Story of the Week selections by John Dos Passos
• “Views of Washington”
• “Paul Bunyan”

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John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941
Rosinante to the Road Again • Orient Express • much more • 8 full-color plates • 810 pages
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Palma de Majorca, c. 1920, watercolor by John Dos Passos.

In October 1916, a few months after graduating from Harvard, John Dos Passos traveled to Spain, ostensibly because the trip would help prepare him for a possible career in architecture. He spent the first couple of months in Madrid and visited several towns in the surrounding countryside. Shortly after Christmas he made a trip that included stops in Cartagena, Tarragona, and Alicante. His wanderings sparked a fascination with a country he would often visit and feature in his writing. “Spain was the most important factor among many in shaping Dos Passos’s ideas and forming the way he saw the world,” writes biographer Townsend Ludington.

Like many young writers and artists of the era, Dos Passos was disenchanted by American industrialism and especially by a lack of depth in the nation’s cultural life. “We find ourselves foundering without rudder or compass, in the sea of modern life,” he complained in an early essay, “Against American Literature.” What Dos Passos admired about Spain was the splendor of its past—and the preservation of its heritage. “The wonderful thing about Spain,” he wrote in a letter, “is that it is a sort of temple of anachronisms. I’ve never been anywhere where you so felt the strata of civilization—Celt-Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors, and French have each passed through Spain and left something there—alive.”

During this first stay in Spain, Dos Passos received news of his father’s death and he returned to the United States in February 1917, only to discover that his family’s estate was mired in debt. In April the United States entered the war in Europe and the twenty-one-year-old joined other Harvard graduates as members of the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps, a volunteer organization run by the American Red Cross. At the Verdun front in August, he endured German shelling and poison gas—an experience that increased his disenchantment with modernity. “The war is utter damn nonsense,” he wrote to a friend from the front, “a vast cancer fed by lies and self seeking malignity on the part of those who don’t do the fighting.” His criticisms in one intercepted letter—and his unruly behavior—provoked Red Cross authorities to accuse him of disloyalty, so he returned to the United States in August 1918 and enlisted in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. His unit set sail for Europe on November 12—and then found out that the war had ended the day before their departure.

Dos Passos returned to Spain in August 1919 and stayed for eight months. Over the next two years he published a series of essays on Spanish society and culture in various literary and political magazines. George Doran, who had already agreed to publish Dos Passos’s first novel, Three Soldiers, also accepted his proposal for a collection of writings about Spain. Dos Passos rearranged and heavily revised the various magazine pieces into the sixteen chapters of Rosinante to the Road Again—Rocinante being the name of Don Quixote’s horse. Half of the book relates the journey from Madrid to Toledo by two young travelers, whose Quixote-inspired adventures are interspersed with eight stand-alone essays providing a kaleidoscopic and impressionistic portrait of contemporary Spanish culture, literature, and politics.

The first of the interspersed essays, “The Donkey Boy,” melds two of the original magazine essays (“America and the Pursuit of Happiness” and “Andalusian Ethics”) into a storylike narrative featuring an American tourist who encounters and then travels with a young arriero (muleteer). A passage omitted in Dos Passos’s revision for Rosinante claimed that “the consensus of opinion of the working people of Spain who had been to the United States seemed to be that the people didn’t enjoy life there, that money was easy, that there were many policemen, and that elevators and automatic lunchrooms and electric sky signs were marvels surpassing all things.” This tension—between the alluring innovations created by American enterprise and the perception that Americans don’t do anything but work—still forms the center of “The Donkey Boy.” Or, as literary scholar Donald Pizer summarizes, “There appear, in a kind of debate, both frequent references to the continuing presence of the spirits of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in present-day Arcadian Spain and, in contrast, various modern-day Spaniards who urge that Spain emulate the commercial success and efficiency of contemporary Europe and America.”

Notes: The Mermaid (mentioned on page 16) was a London tavern frequented in the early seventeenth century by Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, and John Donne.

Most of the Spanish phrases and passages in the story will be clear from context, or from explication later in the selection, or from Dos Passos’s parenthetical translations. For convenience, we’ve listed a number of items below, in the order of appearance.

Qué burro la Guerra – How stupid war is.
En América no se divierte – In America they don’t have fun.
Ca, en América no se hase na’a que trabahar y de’cansar – Sure, in America they don’t do anything but work and then sleep so they can work again.
La juventud – The young
The song on page 15 – What did King Don Juan do? / The princes of Aragon / What did they do? / What did they do with such gallantry, / What did they do with such invention, / How did they bring it?
¡Qué incultura! ¡Qué pueblo indecente! – How uncultured, how indecent.
Hija de puta – Vulgar expression; literally: daughter of a whore

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The path zigzagged down through the olive trees between thin chortling glitter of irrigation ditches that occasionally widened into green pools, reed-fringed, froggy, about which bristled scrub oleanders. . . . If you don't see the full selection below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.

Views of Washington

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
From John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941

Interesting Links

The 1932 “Bonus Army” encampment in Washington, D.C. (Reader’s Almanac)

“Marching on History” (Paul Dickson and Thomas B. Allen, Smithsonian Magazine)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “Paul Bunyan,” John Dos Passos
• “An Experiment in Misery,” Stephen Crane
• “The Apostate,” Jack London

Buy the book
John Dos Passos: Travel Books & Other Writings 1916–1941
Rosinante to the Road Again | Orient Express | much more | 8 full-color plates | 810 pages

Shacks put up by the Bonus Army on the Anacostia flats burning after the battle with the military, with the Capitol in the background. Taken by a Signal Corps photographer, July 28, 1932. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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As banks failed, unemployment worsened, and desperation deepened during the early years of the Great Depression, marches and protests became commonplace. John Dos Passos covered several of them for The New Republic, and his 1934 collection In All Countries gathers some of the accounts as “Views of Washington.” In these impressionistic sketches, he describes the Hunger March outside the Capitol in December 1931, political machinations in the halls of power during the winter and spring, and the “Bonus Army” phenomenon the following summer.

Officially calling itself the Bonus Expeditionary Force, the Bonus Army was composed primarily of World War I veterans and their families. In 1924 Congress had passed a bill to compensate combat veterans, most of whom received certificates redeemable upon their deaths or in 1945, whichever came first. By 1932, unemployed veterans could no longer wait for their “Tombstone Bonus,” and Walter W. Waters, a former Army sergeant in Portland, Oregon, led a group of men who hopped freight trains to the nation’s capital. By the time they reached Washington in May, word of the protest had spread and tens of thousands of supporters camped in Anacostia Flats and other areas in the northeast quadrant of the city.

Dos Passos reports on events and the politics leading up to that summer, but he filed his final piece before the shocking finale. After legislation to release the bonuses to veterans failed in the Senate, upwards of twenty thousand marchers stayed in the city—and Hoover first called out the police to have them removed and then, as things started to get violent, he brought in the army, led by General Douglas MacArthur. Paul Dickson and Thomas Allen describe the July 28 confrontation for Smithsonian Magazine:

What happened next is etched in the American memory: for the first time in the nation’s history, tanks rolled through the streets of the capital. MacArthur ordered his men to clear the downtown of veterans, their numbers estimated at around 8,000, and spectators who had been drawn to the scene by radio reports. At 4:30 p.m., nearly 200 mounted cavalry, sabers drawn and pennants flying, wheeled out of the Ellipse. At the head of this contingent rode their executive officer, George S. Patton, followed by five tanks and about 300 helmeted infantrymen, brandishing loaded rifles with fixed bayonets. The cavalry drove most pedestrians—curious onlookers, civil servants and members of the Bonus Army, many with wives and children—off the streets. Infantrymen wearing gas masks hurled hundreds of tear-gas grenades at the dispersing crowd. The detonated grenades set off dozens of fires: the flimsy shelters veterans had erected near the armory went up in flames. Black clouds mingled with tear gas.

As historian David M. Kennedy concludes, the event “marked the lowest ebb of Hoover’s political fortunes. . . . He was already a beaten man.” The episode was the final blow for the incumbent president’s reelection campaign, and it undoubtedly contributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s landslide victory in November, in which Hoover carried only six states.

Notes: Dos Passos’s account contains several references to political events and politicians of the early 1930s. Charles Curtis (p. 396) was the Vice President under Herbert Hoover. The mention of two contested seats on page 397 refers to two contested Senate elections in North Carolina and Alabama. In Alabama, J. Thomas Heflin, first elected as a Democrat in 1918, was defeated in 1930 when he ran as an independent, and the Senate ultimately rejected his election challenge. John Nance Garner was elected Speaker of the House in 1931 and would be Vice President for the first two terms of the Roosevelt administration. The W.C.T.U. (p. 398) is the Woman's Christian Temperance Union. The A. F. of L. is the American Federation of Labor; William Green was its president from 1924 to 1952. Brigadier-General Pelham D. Glassford (p. 399) was the District of Columbia police chief. William Weinstone was a leader of the Communist Party of America. Passages at the top of page 401 mention how in 1931 Hoover arranged a one-year moratorium on the payment of international debts, while Congress established the R.F.C. (Reconstruction Finance Corporation) to make loans to financial institutions and railroads. CC pills (p. 402) are compound cathartic pills, used for digestive ailments.

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Washington has a drowsy look in the early December sunlight. The Greco-Roman porticoes loom among the bare trees, as vaguely portentous as phrases about democracy in the mouth of a southern senator. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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To photocopy and distribute this selection for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center.

Paul Bunyan

John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
From John Dos Passos: U.S.A.

Interesting Links

The Centralia Massacre (University of Washington Libraries)


Previous Story of the Week selection
• ”Mon Amie,“ Randolph Bourne

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John Dos Passos: U.S.A.
The 42nd Parallel | 1919 | The Big Money | 1,288 pages
List price: $45.00
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Almost a century ago, about a hundred miles south of Seattle, the logging town of Centralia was home to a series of tense standoffs between the recently arrived Wobblies (members of the Industrial Workers of the World) and local business interests, particularly members of the American Legion. When the I.W.W. hall was raided and destroyed in 1918, with its members attacked and driven out of town, the organization regrouped, returned, and moved to a new hall the following year. By early November rumors swirled that a repeat of the previous year’s raid was imminent, and seven armed men were stationed in the hall to defend it during the Armistice Day parade, when an attack seemed most likely. What happened that day is summarized in an essay hosted on the University of Washington Libraries website:

There is little doubt, from later testimony, most notably that of Dr. Frank Bickford who admitted leading the raid, that the Legionnaires initiated the conflict. It is less clear who fired first, but it seems likely that the Wobblies fired first. In any event, shots soon came from all vantage points.

The details of this incident, with its shockingly grisly conclusion, form the basis of “Paul Bunyan,” one of the biographical vignettes in John Dos Passos’s 1919 (the second book in his U.S.A. trilogy).

This particular selection was recommended for Story of the Week by, coincidentally, two readers. Charles Saydah, of Nanuet, New York, notes that “U.S.A.’s twenty-six capsule biographies of early twentieth-century America’s most notable people are among the most compelling and moving sections of this remarkable novel” and that “each of the biographies can stand on its own as a separate story.” Ken Yellis, of Newport, Rhode Island, agrees, observing “Paul Bunyan” is one of the sections “that stand out in memory, partly because the techniques seemed so fresh and exciting and exerted so much influence on other writers.”

Notes: A century ago, many laborers were paid in scrip (p. 747), a currency that could often be redeemed only in stores owned or managed by the employer. The Big Four (p. 747) refers to the leaders of the United State, Britain, Italy, and France, who met at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. O.D. (p. 748) was a common abbreviation for olive drab.

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When Wesley Everest came home from overseas and got his discharge from the army he went back to his old job of logging. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

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Mon Amie

Randolph Bourne (1886–1918)
From Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

Interesting Link
Randolph Bourne, a brief summary of his life and writings (HiLoBrow)

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Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology
Hardcover | 613 pages
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“It is impossible to speak of Randolph Bourne,” eulogized Floyd Dell in The New Republic soon after Bourne’s death at the age of thirty-two during the influenza epidemic of 1918, “without paying some tribute to the magnificent will which until the end triumphed over his physical frailty.” Bourne was, to use his own word, handicapped and he wrote about his experiences in a landmark essay, “The Handicapped—By One of Them," published in Atlantic Monthly in 1911. At birth, his face was badly disfigured by a doctor’s forceps; at the age of four, he contracted spinal tuberculosis, which left him a hunchback; as an adult, he was five feet tall.

A young rebel of sorts, he infamously wore a black cape around the streets of New York, and Theodore Dreiser referred to him as “that frightening dwarf.” Yet by all accounts he was a genius, and he commanded the respect of the ablest minds of his age, from his teacher (and eventual political enemy) John Dewey to the novelist John Dos Passos, who included an homage in the 1919 section of his U.S.A. trilogy:

      Randolph Bourne
      came as an inhabitant of this earth
      without the pleasure of choosing his dwelling or his career.
      He was a hunchback, grandson of a congregational minister, born in 1886 in Bloomfield, New Jersey; there he attended grammarschool and highschool. . . .

      This little sparrowlike man,
      tiny twisted bit of flesh in a black cape,
      always in pain and ailing,
      put a pebble in his sling
      and hit Goliath square in the forehead with it.

      War, he wrote, is the health of the state.

      Half musician, half educational theorist (weak health and being poor and twisted in body and on bad terms with his people hadn't spoiled the world for Randolph Bourne; he was a happy man, loved die Meistersinger and playing Bach with his long hands that stretched so easily over the keys and pretty girls and good food and evenings of talk. When he was dying of pneumonia a friend brought him an eggnog; Look at the yellow, it’s beautiful, he kept saying as his life ebbed into delirium and fever. He was a happy man.) . . .

After he graduated from Columbia University—and before he became a furious opponent of America’s entry into the First World War—Bourne traveled through Europe. While in France, he met a nineteen-year-old French woman (he was twenty-seven) after posting a note at the Sorbonne—the Edwardian-era equivalent of a personal ad. During their friendship, the pair walked through Parisian parks and museums and talked about family and religion and her “brimming idealism.” Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, Bourne had cause to wonder where she might be, which inspired him to write and publish the following little valentine recalling this mysterious girl, his “intellectual flirtation” in Paris.

Notes: In the first paragraph: the fictional characters Jean-Christophe and Olivier can be found in Jean-Christophe (1903–12), a ten-volume cycle of novels by Romain Rolland. Elsewhere: devoir means duty; malhonnête, dishonest. Other French terms are either translated by Bourne in the text or should be clear from the context.

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She was French from the crown of her head to the soles of her feet, but she was of that France which few Americans, I think, know or imagine. . . . If you don't see the full story below, click here (PDF) or click here (Google Docs) to read it—free!

This selection may be photocopied and distributed for classroom or educational use.