Customer Reviews

The Big Money: Volume Three of the U.S.A. Trilogy

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

So says John Dos Passos in `The Big Money", Volume III of his USA Trilogy. Just as Benjamin Disraeli saw two nations in mid-19th century Britain ("who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws...the rich and the poor"), John Dos Passos saw two nations in the United States in the roaring 1920s.

Dos Passos is one of the (sadly lesser known literary giants of the 20th-century. At the height of his fame in the 1930s he found himself on the same pedestal as Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. The first two volumes of the USA Trilogy (42nd Parallel and 1919) were enormous successes. By the time "The Big Money" was released in 1936, Jean-Paul Sartre hailed him as "the greatest writer of our time". Edmund Wilson's review went so far as to claim that Dos Passos was "the first of our writers, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who has successfully used colloquial American for a novel of the highest artistic seriousness." Dos Passos' literary reputation began to change during the Spanish Civil War. Dos Passos, along with Hemingway and many other literary figures including George Orwell made his way to Spain to assist in the Republican cause. Like Orwell, Dos Passos was deeply affected by the brutal infighting amongst Republican supporters. In the case of Dos Passos he was deeply distressed by murder of a friend (anarchist and Johns Hopkins Professor Jose Robles) apparently executed by Stalinist cadres for his nonconforming radicalism. Hemingway mocked Dos Passos for his unmanly concern for his friend. Hemingway's friends and most of the hard left literary community joined in. It is no surprise that Dos Passos' next book was criticized severely. The New Masses magazine referred to it as a "crude piece of Trotskyist agit-prop". Dos Passos never reclaimed the popularity he had achieved with the USA Trilogy. Unlike Orwell, whose fame and reputation survived and grew after his Spanish Civil War experience, Dos Passos slowly fell out of the public eye. That fate is a shame when one considers the enormous energy and creativity that went into the USA Trilogy.

The idea of two paralel nations, one for the rich and their minions and one for the huddled masses, provides substance to Dos Passos' unique multi-media structure. In addition to the stories of these fictional characters, The Big Money is interspersed with mini-biographies of real people, newsreel clippings that place the story in a social a political context, and a series of autobiographical sketches (The Camera Eye) in which Dos Passos steps out from the story and provides his own personal context to the times.

The key fictional characters in "The Big Money" are Charley Anderson, Mary French, Margo Dowling, and Richard Ellsworth Savage. The "Great War" is over and the USA has, in the words of Warren G. Harding, returned to normalcy. The roaring 20s is in full swing". In one America the characters experience the world of prohibition and speakeasies; stock speculation by millions of Americans are buy and selling shares on profit and margins that are as ephemeral as they are risky. In the `other' America the characters see labor at war with management. Union busting and red baiting is the rule not the exception and urban workers; particularly immigrants are seen as Bolshevik threats. Charley Anderson crashes and burns after a meteoric rise. Mary French is absorbed in the workers' battles of the 1920s and Margo Dowling sleeps her way to fame and fortune in Hollywood.

The biographies cover the same two nation ground with min-biographies of Henry Ford, the Wright Brothers, Thorstein Veblen, Isadora Duncan, Rudolf Valentino, and William Randolph Hearst amongst them. Dos Passos' personal Camera Eye observations reach their emotional climax as the story reaches the execution of anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. It is here where Dos Passos makes his two nations observation.

The Big Money is a worthy finale to The USA Trilogy. After re-reading the entire trilogy, thirty years or so after my first exposure to it in High School, I think it safe to say that it has still holds up under perhaps more mature observation.

The USA Trilogy remains one of the major literary works of the (U.S.) twentieth century and remains a work that should be read and read again. Highly recommended.

Stacked up against other Lost Generation contemporaries like Hemingway or Fitzgerald, Dos Passos strikes a more minor key. His characters are unmemorable, his prose flat to the point of journalese, and his stabs at experiment, like the "Newsreels" interleafed between chapters, are so much chrome on some otherwise pretty conventional novelistic fenders.

But I think that limited scope is also a strength in his masterpiece, the USA Trilogy. With singleminded determination Dos Passos hammers together, scene by scene and newsreel by newsreel, a stark portrait of the Twenties as an era of greed, confusion, and above all a kind of free floating moral emptiness, a big, powerful, rudderless America cruising blithely on the froth of events. He shows you how the small guys get crushed without wallowing in a lot of sentiment about it, and how the fat cats alternately sleeken or decline into a sea of booze and betrayed ideals without resorting to cartoon stereotypes of `the Man'. You feel sorry for almost everyone on some level in this story, though Dos Passos keeps his lens distant enough to avoid pity, or the tragic glamour of a Jay Gatsby, in order to focus on the larger outlines of the postwar, post-Puritan world his specimens move in.

You don't need to read the preceding books in the Trilogy to enjoy The Big Money. It picks up the characters from the other two volumes, but the novel isn't really so much about these people as it is about the busts and bubbles that push them through history. It'll be hard to look at the Twenties as the colorful era of flappers, speakeasies, and the Charleston again after reading The Big Money; Dos Passos exposes the postwar malaise behind the excess in a way that brought to mind parallels with our own post 9/11 USA. I wonder who's our Dos Passos today? Maybe a filmmaker?

I initially read the entire trilogy, U. S. A. by John Dos Passos, as a soldier in Vietnam, in June and July of 1969. Reading the two earlier volumes on America's lofty aims and actual experiences in World War One and the economic boom which followed it in the United States helped me try to imagine what my life would be like, as I faced growing old in a country which increasingly depended upon its global dominance for its style of life. Volume 3, THE BIG MONEY, ended this gigantic series with a political point of view that stuck with me more than any of the fictional parts of this novel. A look at the Contents in the sample pages gives some indication of the other tidbits in this trilogy, Newsreels, popular songs, and short bioographies, which make the composition of this trilogy unique.

Of the biographies, I would consider "The Bitter Drink" on Veblen the most intellectual item in THE BIG MONEY, and my best introduction to how Socrates ended up drinking the hemlock. Most biographies were about people who were so famous that they might still be remembered. "Tin Lizzie" is a life of Henry Ford. "Poor Little Rich Boy" was William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper owner whose father died in Washington, a senator, but who was only elected to the House of Representatives, where he justified his politics with, "you know where I stand on personal fortunes, but isn't it better that I should represent in this country the dissatisfied than have somebody else do it who might not have the same real property relations that I have?" However familiar this might sound today, Dos Passos wrote that "his affairs were in such a scramble he had trouble borrowing a million dollars, and politically he was ratpoison." The biography of Hearst is at page 375 in the paperback which is currently available, a few pages after "The Camera Eye (50) they have clubbed us off the streets" (p. 371) which says:

America our nation has been beaten by strangers who have turned our language inside out who have taken the clean words our fathers spoke and made them slimy and foul

their hired men sit on the judge's bench they sit back with their feet on the tables under the dome of the State House they are ignorant of our beliefs they have the dollars the guns the armed forces the powerplants

they have built the electricchair and hired the executioner to throw the switch

The final nonfiction biography in THE BIG MONEY is called "Power Superpower" on page 420. Samuel Insull had been learning shorthand "and jotting down the speeches in PARLIAMENT for the papers" before he came to American in 1881 to be Edison's personal secretary. As president of Chicago Edison Company after 1892, "If anybody didn't like what Samuel Insull did he was a traitor." The part I liked best was after the stockmarket crash, when there were accounting problems involving a number of companies. "He held directorates in eightyfive companies, he was chairman of sixtyfive, president of eleven: it took him three hours to sign his resignations." When "Revolt against the moneymanipulators was in the air," he ran off and extradition proceedings involved at least four countries to bring him back to Chicago for a trial. So, "With voices choked with emotion headliners of Chicago business told from the witnessstand how much Insull had done for business in Chicago. There wasn't a dry eye in the jury." The result was different from the trial of Socrates in Athens a few thousand years earlier, and I think Insull had a better retirement than Socrates asked his friends to provide if they had to pay a fine for him. Maybe we are better off than some people. Read this book anyway.

The Big Money is a very interesting and compelling novel that I'm glad to have read. It's actually the third book in the "USA Trilogy" following American culture through the first 3 decades of the 20th century (each novel covering one decade). The Big Money takes us through the 1920s.

The style is experimental and at times a little odd because of that. Had I not been reading this as part of a class or with some notes to help guide me, I'm certain I would have missed a lot of the nuances.

There are 4 different writing threads throughout the novel:
* Lives (actual story arcs of fictional characters)
* Biographies (mini-biographies of notable characters such as Ford, Hearst, and others)
* Newsreels (snippets from newspaper, radio, pop culture and other elements...pieced together poetically to convey a thought or thread)
* Camera Eye (commentary on what's going on...a sort of personal context outside of the story)

The way the novel is pieced together is very intriguing and made for fun reading. It provides some very interesting insights into what social, political and cultural life was like during this timeframe. The size and content can certainly be daunting, but the presentation is in bite-sized chunks which makes it more manageable. Still, I would recommend you pay close attention and perhaps have a quick link to wikipedia or other reference material in order to get the full perspective.

****
4 out of 5 stars

The first three decades of the twentieth century in the United States were pivotal in defining what, eventually, the nation would become. At the turn of the century the country was just beginning to find its feet on the world geopolitical scene, ceding power to the colonial powers of Europe but maintaining a dogged independence. A mere thirty years later the United States had not only risen to share world power but dared become a leader on the world stage as the country's wealth, ingenuity, and exportable culture transformed this former isolated nation. This transformation was not lost on John Dos Passos; neither was the importance of history in defining those qualities that became amalgamated and distilled into what is commonly known as national character.

To underscore the importance of these three decades, Dos Passos spent over six years in researching and writing what was to become his materpiece, The USA Trilogy. In these three novels, the author experimented with various narrative techniques combining traditonal story telling; stream of consciousness writing (The Camera Eye sections); biographies of important contemporary persons; clippings from newspapers; snatches of popular songs; advertisements, etc., that created a well definied historical foundation for the events and characters of his novels. Overall, the author was successful in his effort: seldom has history been so well understood by a writer of fiction. The reader not only shares the lives of Dos Passsos' characters but is fully immersed in the politics, culture and economic upheavals of those eras.

Seen as a whole, the trilogy is powerful; however, when the three novels are examined separately as individual works, weaknesses that were camouflaged by the success of the overall scheme are made manifest. The Big Money is the last and worst of the three parts. It seems that the author began to weary as he reached the end of his effort. Dos Passos spends less attention to the Camera Eye sections and biographies (by far, the best two areas of the trilogy) and spends the majority of his attention on developing and bringing to a conclusion the lives of his characters, some of whom have been present in every novel of the trilogy. His attempts at characterization were not successful and his characters come across as wooden caricatures, blindly following the plot from one episode to another, never giving any insight into what motivates them (with the possible exception of the pathetic Mary French). The reader just doesn't care for or about them. Also, perhaps Dos Passos was going through a sort of political catharsis himself and perhaps this added to the malaise and hastiness that is evident in this final novel. The darling of the American left would eventually become an avid backer of Barry Goldwater for President in 1964. Four stars for the trilogy, three stars for The Big Money.

The Big Money is a great work that exposes the American Dream as a destructive race towards an explosive jumping off point. Whichever way we make the money, it will end in devouring the part of us that was never mercenary. I'm a big fan of John Dos Passos, but I have to admit that if you aren't the type of reader who likes to visualize written images, his writing would be pretty wasted on you.

With the parallel 42 and the first catastrophe -1919 - this novel constitutes a trilogy focusing the sentimental , political and economic panorama of USA.
The big money talks about the generation that bloomed after the WW1 ; the lost generation the maxim expression of a media class in advanced discomposure state The story of its pathetic failure, hidden under the veils of the apparent triumph , of many characters who walk through the harsh proof years toward an uncertain destiny .
This book will give you a vital information about the possible consequences of a war to the moral and economic factors of a nation .
Dos Passos was somehow the echo of those dark voices in the first years of the XX Century best known as the perverse poets , headed for Baudelaire and Verlaine , whose role was to expose the crude reality no matter how filthy was .

So.....

You're looking for a review of Dos Passos's _The Big Money_. I will assume that by this point, you have read the other two books in the trilogy. I will assume that you are familiar with the structure: a modernist collage of history of back-pocket biography, fictional stories, snatches of real-life events, and a bit of history. All of this is done with a pro-worker, left-wing bent.

There's not much I can say to you. If you liked the other two books, you will like this one too. They share the same strengths and weaknesses. If you like a character, you may be asked to spend time with another character. You may question the author's choices and just follow through with your commitment to read the book. It is mostly rewarded. He was a good storyteller on top of his stylistic flair, a trait that is often overlooked (I mean really, read Faulkner now without having to write a school report.)

The worst thing about this book is that it ends. It doesn't fit in some easy story-telling arc, but it is a blend with history. History refuses such narrative niceness outside the pages of a schoolbook. The story ever follows, the characters grow and change and die until they become us -- and we shall face the same fate.