News from America is rather two edged. At the same time as we seem to be shutting ourselves out for ever from the esteem of civilized people—if there are any—by the recrudescence of the Inquisition and by acts of the filthiest barbarity, there seems to be growing a realization…of what is going on. At least the period of tame acquiescence seems to be coming to an end.
—JOHN DOS PASSOS, Letter to Rumsey Marvin (Madrid, 1919)
If we could inject some of the virus of [Pío Baroja’s] intense sense of reality into American writers it would be worth giving up all these stale conquests of form we inherited from Poe and O. Henry.
—JOHN DOS PASSOS, Rosinante to the Road Again (1922)
AS A BRASH, REBELLIOUS YOUNG WRITER OF THE AMERICAN left with a freshly minted degree from Harvard, John Dos Passos experienced a symbolically momentous day on October 14, 1916, when his first nationally published article, “Against American Literature,” appeared in the New Republic. This essay was a linchpin in Dos Passos’s burgeoning theories of why modern capitalism and creative freedom were fundamentally incompatible. On that same day, Dos Passos boarded a ship for Spain, which became a vital site through which he elaborated and developed his internationalist, often Leninist critique of capitalism—specifically, its manifestations in contemporary imperialism—just as he was embarking uncertainly on a career as a journalist, translator, poet, political agitator, and more.1 This conjunction, furthermore, was the starting point of a quarter-century-long arc of Dos Passos’s career in which his radical revaluations of U.S. literature and his politicized readings of Spanish literary and cultural history were promulgated together. Indeed, especially in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Dos Passos offered portraits and translations of Spanish writing that simultaneously advanced the aims of the modernists of New York’s Greenwich Village left, all while he attempted to find a model of social realism adequate to the revolution that he saw coming in the United States and around the world. In the process, he not only countered yellow-journalistic portraits of Spain and his own father’s celebrations of empire but also worked to overturn the influence of a leading authority on the U.S. novel, realism, and Spanish literature: William Dean Howells.
For Dos Passos, at stake was a troubling circumstance embodied in Howells’s writings, despite his compatriot’s anti-imperialist and socialist politics: the U.S. novel and the U.S. empire were expanding hand-in-glove, especially after 1898, even as “American literature” remained for Dos Passos a vacuous cultural formation. The “stale conquests of form” that he sees in Poe and O. Henry are symptoms of U.S. literature’s growth during its ill-gotten “conquest” of the North American continent—a conquest that had now continued overseas and had elevated a banal, commercialized brand of U.S. writing globally by invading foreign markets. Dos Passos read 1898 as the marker of a new geopolitical-literary era, as he would confirm most famously in the opening pages of his U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936), but his specific provocation is to suggest that the collapse of Spain’s empire was a good thing—and that U.S. fiction finally would blossom were its empire to suffer the same fate.2 That is, for Dos Passos, Spain came to life literarily when its empire died, and he offers in his comparative readings of U.S. and Spanish literature a theory of empire’s effects on literary aesthetics through which he aims to reduce and ultimately unravel “American literature.” Dos Passos, in his broad, semiprofessional work as a Hispanist, was intervening in a longstanding debate on U.S. literary culture, its imbrication in empire, and its relation to Spanish writing. Washington Irving, William Prescott, George Ticknor, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had been crucial voices here before Howells. Where Pound was butting heads with medieval philologists, Dos Passos—with a similar disdain for U.S. academies and for German Kultur—was engaging the overlapping but distinct branch of public intellectualism that Howells now represented, attacking the Spanish novelists Howells championed and praising those overlooked by or unknown to him.
In what became a protracted battle for cultural authority and for new aesthetic paradigms that even pitted Dos Passos against his fellow traveler Waldo Frank, Dos Passos restaged the War of 1898 and reversed its presumed cultural effects. He thereby idealized Spain as a space that resisted capitalism, homogeneity, centralized nationality, and the devastation of modern war, all of which he saw as ingrained in American culture. Dos Passos saw Spanish literature as a diverse assemblage of styles and ideas rooted in preindustrial artisanship rather than factory-driven commodification. He profiled writers of the left from the country’s coastal provinces (the Basque Country, Catalonia, Valencia, Andalusia) and not those from the dying metropolitan capital, Madrid. Dos Passos sketched Spain, in its moment of great instability and potential revolution, as a federation of autonomous, decentralized provinces of workers’ states poeticized by a new generation of writers who scorned Madrid. “Great art is possible only,” he remarked in 1917, “where individuals are full, consciously or not, of great longing, great discontent.”3 He argued that the Disaster in fact “fired a fresh crop of young men with a determination to renovate their country at any cost…[with] hopes for education, for social justice,” and for much more.4 Dos Passos met several writers who had just been grouped together in 1913 as Spain’s Generation of ’98, including the poet Antonio Machado, and he provided for U.S. readers some of the earliest and most important translations and accounts of their literary politics. Dos Passos took part in this rebirth and globalization of Spanish culture in the United States by romanticizing the country’s old, sputtering, underdeveloped economy and its pueblos even more than some of the writers he profiled did. He politicizes Spanish writing, sometimes tendentiously and anxiously, and pushes to harness the country’s leftist foment in ways that his predecessors would not touch. He essentially agrees with the nationalist line within Spain that ’98 is an exceptional generation, but—bringing out a central dialectic in hispanista thought—he does so for politically opposed reasons.
In this way, in a formative moment in the development of international modernism, Dos Passos desired to break apart the United States’ reigning practices and to reconceive national literatures for a late- and possibly postcapitalist sphere. To recover and recontextualize Dos Passos, his interlocutors, and his peers is to rethink the unexceptional emergence of U.S. modernism, whose domestic and often nativist components in the 1910s—from the founding of Poetry to the Paterson Strike Pageant to the Armory Show—also helped fashion the new aesthetics of an international left. Amid many competing voices and visions of the modern, whether feminist, ethnic, materialist, regionalist, avant-garde, or otherwise, Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, and others of New York’s Lyrical Left saw in Spain the blueprint for an imperial collapse and a revolution that would lay the groundwork for a new literary organicism that would express “America” democratically. Paradoxically, and with a mixture of optimism and pessimism from Dos Passos, American literature could only become coherent by being fragmented: yet, if national arts flourish when empires decline, both the writer and critic can find inspiration in the fact that now “there are many Spains” linked together by geography as an anarchistic network of literary styles.5 Dos Passos’s series of magazine articles on these topics were collected, revised, and published as Rosinante to the Road Again (1922), his “revealing little travel book,” as Alfred Kazin called this complex fusion of travelogue, literary criticism, translation, autobiography, fiction, propaganda, and sociohistorical commentary.6 This loose rewriting of Don Quixote’s journeys across Spain imagines a historical and contemporary depth unseen in what he called “our blessed Benighted States,” where literature was produced in cities with similar, often uniform characters, leaving artists such as himself a “stale” and paltry cultural legacy.7 A usable past could only be created out of materials such as those Spain offered.
Dos Passos therefore collapses and rewrites Spain’s cultural history into a political formation that, rather than abutting and enriching the United States, becomes all the more powerful when viewed in a paratactic balance with the culture of his native country. He extends Pound’s skepticism about the greatness of the Golden Age not by digging back to the medieval period but by understanding that greatness as premised on the faulty grounds of empire and conquest. Cervantes and Jorge Manrique now become, for Dos Passos, prompts for exploring the voices and crafts of Spain’s contemporary peasants, whom he wants to channel. And if translation and poetry were one endeavor for Pound, they remain distinct but interconnected for Dos Passos, who instead issued his own portraits of Spanish life in his only collection of poems, A Pushcart at the Curb (1922), which he published alongside Rosinante. In his aspiration to translate Spain and to become a central figure in the movements that he saw internationally, Dos Passos attempts to imitate Machado and replicate the effects of the Spaniard’s poems. (Indeed, he tried to have Rosinante printed with the Spanish words in plain type rather than in italics, hoping they would blend with his English prose.) He continued this work through to the decentered, disaggregating style of his novel Manhattan Transfer (1925) and his U.S.A. trilogy; the final of these, critics have argued, shows clear lines of Baroja’s influence.8 The high modernism of Manhattan Transfer, therefore, is not only an interpretation and critique of American capitalism; it is also a rewriting of texts such as Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) and a grafting of Spain—especially Madrid in decay—onto New York.
Much as I sought in the last chapter not to make Pound’s Cantos the only possible site of meaningful rethinking of modernist literary history, I offer not a reading of Manhattan Transfer or U.S.A. as culminating points in Dos Passos’s career but instead a narrative of the author’s overarching critical program. This program, into which his novels fit, was grounded in his sustained translational efforts at comparing the U.S. and Spanish empires. Reassembling a diffuse and diverse array of Dos Passos’s translations, political commentaries, literary histories, letters, fiction, and more, I show that what became his signature modernist techniques were crafted in his work as a public Hispanist, comparatist, and nonscholarly translator. Later, Dos Passos’s shifting politics took their most significant turn during the Spanish Civil War in 1937, when he would finally repudiate his leftism and launch a new vision of conservative U.S. nationalism, once again routed through his understanding of Spain. Here, after years of failed attempts to “infuse” a disastrous but enlivening foreign energy into U.S. writing, all while watching the U.S. empire grow over time, Dos Passos would return to the aggressively nationalistic ideals of his father, completing his destruction and reconstruction of the sense of “American literature” that Spain’s modern history clarified for him.
Spain and the Anglo-Saxon World System
Dos Passos’s writings on Spain are inseparable from those of his father, who still towered over his life in the mid-1910s. Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of the high-profile Wall Street lawyer and man of letters John Randolph Dos Passos, who was the son of a Quaker mother and a father who immigrated to the United States from Madeira, an island in the north Atlantic colonized by Portugal. John R. Dos Passos was a staunch corporate industrialist and advocate of imperialism in his adult life. Excited by his country’s triumph in broadening its empire overseas in 1898, he published a book, The Anglo-Saxon Century and the Unification of the English-Speaking People (1903), which argued fiercely for this “unification” by “steps natural and effective.” Committed to an ideal of Anglo-American homogeneity and supremacy and echoing Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Charles Lea, and a number of popular figures of the moment, the senior Dos Passos proposed a plan of “common, interchangeable, citizenship between all English-speaking Nations and Colonies”—a union of the long-reigning British Empire and the expanding American empire that had just defeated Spain.9 Britain and America must move beyond their adversarial moments of the last two centuries, he felt, and Canada should join this confederation, which would be based in Anglo-Saxon principles of individual liberties and laissez-faire government. According to Dos Passos Sr., this would enable the future “anglicisation of the world,” where English will be the “universal dialect of mankind” (AS xi). His construction here—a universal dialect rather than a standardized language imposed by domination—strives furthermore to naturalize U.S. empire as organic, indeed somehow autochthonous, as authorities ranging from Henry Cabot Lodge to Brander Matthews to a new class of scholars of Old English and Anglo-Saxon texts would insist.10
John R. Dos Passos’s book, which implicitly rewrites 1776 and thus the foundational myths of Americanness, was also prompted by the British Empire’s winning of the Second Boer War. The “Anglo-Saxon” victories in these two conflicts were a signal, in a new racial fiction that appealed to Dos Passos Sr., that the world’s two strongest empires, the United States and the United Kingdom, were prepared to join forces. To the “great race” of Anglo-Saxons was now “entrusted the civilisation and christianisation of the world,” he argues (AS 3). The Spanish-American War revealed that the United States was “the leading power of the world,” a center of “wonderful development, progress, and marvelous wealth” that “evolved out of a confluence of natural conditions”—the allegedly invisible forces of markets—rather than a belligerent aggression, as in the case of German expansion (AS 3, 4). In Dos Passos Sr.’s plan for Anglo-Saxon dominance, Spain is his stereotypical negative example, a country now “shrunken” and playing only “a subordinate rôle in continental politics.” The elder Dos Passos writes that he “know[s] of no sadder picture in modern history” than the fall of Spain from its “greatness” and its position as the “first of powers,” and that Spain’s loss to the United States mattered little to the rest of Europe at this point in its decline (AS 34). “Her possessions, rights, and powers have been wantonly squandered,” he argues, “a result of policies and acts which are utterly unreconcilable with rational principles of true government” (AS 34–35). The Spaniards and Portuguese are, he believes, “hardy rovers and adventurous colonists” like the Anglo-Saxons, but they are
utterly deficient in the capacity of holding and uniting [their colonies] into a great and permanent empire. Individually, they possess all the qualities which excite admiration and respect; aggregately, they seem to lack those elements which so strongly typify the Anglo-Saxon people, whose glory and solidarity now completely overshadow them…. The dismemberment and decline of the Spanish has been in an inverse ratio to the progress of the Anglo-Saxons.
(AS 35)
This notion of an “inverse ratio” was common among American and English nationalists alike after 1898, when numerous historians and cultural critics attempted to explain the “decadence of Spain,” and Dos Passos Sr. follows with his own account of the political, economic, and social decline of Spain. Monarchism and clericism, predictably, are the chief culprits. He urges the fractured nations of the Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) to unify and then to unify their former republics in the New World. But he finally concedes that this will not happen; Spain and Portugal are too “disintegrated, without unity of thought, action, or association” (AS 34).
John R. Dos Passos then turns personal. He confesses,
I find it difficult, in discussing this subject, to separate my feelings from my judgment. Sentiment, and some national pride (for I am half Portuguese), struggle hard to impel me to paint a glowing and radiant picture of the future of this race; but the cold, hard facts of history confront me at every step, and it is idle to attempt to distort or juggle with them.
(AS 34)
Furthermore, in his domestic politics, the senior Dos Passos became increasingly antidemocratic. He spoke out against allowing immigrants the right to vote or, later, to become full citizens of the United States. Even more controversially, he argued that Southern blacks were unfit for citizenship: his remedy was “temporarily to deprive them of suffrage, to put them upon probation, to quarantine them, until such time as they demonstrate an ability to intelligently and honestly cast a vote.”11 The ironies of Dos Passos Sr.’s positions are multiple: for one, his own family never would have become citizens by his logic. But beyond that, his racism selectively incorporated and defied long-held stereotypes of Spaniards and Portuguese as black, partially imbued with Moorish blood, and thus unfit for modernity. The elder Dos Passos saw himself as having erased whatever hint of “blackness” might have been in his genealogy and cleansed it with a supremacist’s version of Anglo-Saxon ideology.
Dos Passos and the Depth of Spain
The younger Dos Passos, of course, rejected his father’s celebratory faith in the new U.S. empire and his monolingual English vision. He was not only a product of both Portuguese and Anglo-Saxon blood but also one of uncertain parentage: because he was conceived out of wedlock, his father did not acknowledge him until he was sixteen. He led a peripatetic life in hotels across Europe until he was eleven years old, followed by stays in what he considered the artificial elite worlds of Choate and Harvard—the latter indicted in 1908 as “the factory of American imperialism” by Van Wyck Brooks—upon his settling in the United States.12 He published several pieces in the Harvard Monthly, including a sketch, “The Evangelist and the Volcano” (1915), in which he argued that “we Americans are a great people. We have wealth, industry, splendid sanitation, and a will…to reform the earth. We are a sort of epitome of the Anglo-Saxon spirit.” His faint praise quickly turns to condemnation: we have “the completest inability to see anyone else’s point of view. That is probably why the Anglo-Saxons conquered the world; and why America and American business methods were well on the way to conquer it” before the Great War interrupted. Dos Passos’s belief that the “Nineteenth Century has collapsed” points again to the influence of his father’s thought on his, even as they stand diametrically opposed in their judgments.13 The following year, consonant with Brooks’s America’s Coming of Age (1915), he wrote in “A Humble Protest” of the “ponderous suicidal machine civilization” embodied by wartime Germany, which was driving the world to “immolate” itself “before a new Moloch.”14
In 1916, Dos Passos had wanted to join the ambulance corps on the side of the Allies in World War I, but he bowed to his father’s wishes and went instead to a safer, neutral Spain for what became a transformative experience. His parting shot to the United States was the audacious article “Against American Literature.” Here, he laments and critiques the prevailing trend of “gentle satire” in his native country, saying that this trait is the only one that stands out as distinctly (and sadly) American amid “the mass of foreign-inspired writing in this country.” Edgar Lee Masters and Edith Wharton represent its “modern—and bitter—form.” American writers are derivative on the whole, and the United States has not thought collectively about its “national soul[,]…leaving that sort of thing to introspective and decadent nations overseas.” Its literature is therefore bland and “unstimulating”; like American cities, he adds, “our books…are all the same.”15 In other words, the purported shift from Boston to New York City as the literary capital of the United States was meaningless to Dos Passos. If anything, it only ensured that U.S. literary production would be dominated by the mass-market publishers now housed in New York. Dos Passos’s remedy for assembly line–style American literature is to “give it body—like apple jack—by a stiff infusion of a stronger product. As a result of this constant need to draw on foreign sources, our literature has become a hybrid which, like the mule, is barren and must be produced afresh each time by the crossing of other strains” (A 587). Exhibiting a familiar preoccupation and tension in American modernism between nativist and internationalist aspirations, he paradoxically wants a literature that is genuine, refreshed originally by its own resources, not by capital—yet also able to absorb nonnative sources. What the United States lacks, he says, is the accretion of the “moulding fabric of old dead civilizations,” the “artistic stimulus, fervid with primitive savageries, redolent with old cults of earth and harvest, smoked and mellowed by time, [that] is the main inheritance of civilizations” (A 588). (In other words, a version of what Eliot would produce just a few years later, in England and through European history.) It also needs fairy tales and stories of terror, spirits, ghosts, and sacred lands, none of which are incorporated in the writing he surveys. Beyond his metaphors of “barren[ness],” Dos Passos misogynistically links this banal American writing specifically to women writers, too, deploring their “niceness” and “affectation,” which he says pales in comparison to the Russian novels (all by male writers) that are now in vogue in the United States.16 And his prognosis is grim, for “an all-enveloping industrialism, a new mode of life preparing, has broken down the old bridges leading to the past” in the United States, leaving only capital and commerce, which can sponsor or own the art of the world but cannot produce it—or can only produce a flattened, forgettable form of it (A 590). The vision of “America” that he implies here is white, Christian, and located mostly in New England; whether the oversight of minority and indigenous cultures is a fault he finds in modern literature or is his own blindness remains unclear (though the latter is more likely).
Dos Passos’s theory and its faith in a renovated, denaturalized mode of Whitmanian writing bespeak the paradox that Susan Hegeman has pointed out in the thought of Waldo Frank: “it took some kind of collective to change society, but of course, the absence of that kind of integrated collective was the problem to begin with. The only way out of this bind was either a ‘faith’ that was deeply pessimistic at its core, or a search for some collective outside of modern alienation itself…[for] ‘buried cultures.’ ”17 Spain and its writers, he believed, might provide the antithetical and inspirational model, and this belief was the impulse behind the articles that eventually became Rosinante to the Road Again. He wanted to see a European revolution in the making, and he thought Spain—still reeling from the Disaster and rife with violent separatist conflicts, labor strife, neocolonial debacles, and political turmoil—could lead the movement while the continent was engaged in internecine war. With introductory letters from his father’s friend Juan Riaño, the diplomat who helped negotiate the peace between the United States and Spain after 1898 and the first Spanish ambassador to the United States in 1915, he met influential figures and gained access to prestigious institutions.18 He first enrolled in Spanish language and literature classes in Madrid at the Centro de Estudios Históricos (Center for Historical Studies), the famous academy headed by Ramón Menéndez Pidal. His classes there with the esteemed linguist and phonetician Tomás Navarro Tomás, who later would teach in exile at Columbia University, helped train Dos Passos’s “un-Iberian ears,” and he understood spoken Spanish in almost no time.19 He also worked out an exchange with a local sociologist in which he received Spanish lessons for helping him translate John Dewey.20 Dos Passos then spent time at the Residencia de Estudiantes; both the Centro and the Residencia had been founded in 1910 in a moment of liberal educational reform in Spain, and Dos Passos was eager to absorb their zeitgeist as a representation of the energies of a dynamic, new Spain. Yet the impulse of national regeneration and the influx of foreign investment behind them would also discomfit him; so would the many pro-U.S. and pro-Wilson signs he saw across Madrid.21
These experiences and their institutional contexts led Dos Passos to explore the ways in which the sedimented layers of Spanish history manifested themselves, whether aesthetically or in daily life, in unique modes that global capital could not assimilate. “Do you know the wonderful feel of old old roads which have been worn to a sort of velvet softness by the feet of generations and generations and generations?” he asked Rumsey Marvin. “And at night,” he continued, “they all seem to get up and follow you in a crowd—the Romans and the Carthaginians and the Moors and the mitred bishops going towards Toledo, and the mule drivers with skins of wine from the south.”22 Writing in tones similar to the many travelogues on Spain that he read, Dos Passos noted that “the wonderful thing about Spain is that it is a sort of temple of anachronisms…. Roman Italy is a sepulcher—Roman Spain is living—actuality—in the way a peasant wears his manta, in the queer wooden plows they use, in the way they sacrifice to the dead,” with Greek, Semitic, “Phoenician Moorish,” and even modern French, American, and German elements blended “all in a tangle together!”23 Dos Passos is captivated by what he sees as a transhistorical precapitalist Spain: the habits of peasants, their handmade tools and pottery, their ancient multicultural heritage, dances, and rituals from “protohistoric Iberian…and Magdalenian” times were all alive in the present.24 His language becomes repetitive and almost incantatory as he describes this culture whose layers are visible and differentiated, not commodified and mass produced. Fascinated by the “strata of civilization—Celt-Iberians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Moors and French have each passed through Spain and left something there—alive,” Dos Passos reads the “wonderful jumble” of Spain’s fragmented, multilayered history alongside its contemporaneous debates within Spain about whether the country’s future lay in an industrialized, Americanized modernity.25 Ancient history cannot be manufactured in the present, and for Dos Passos, Spain’s history—as he collapses and reprojects it—evinces everything that America’s does not, and it can produce the continually thriving art that he wished for in “Against American Literature.”
Dos Passos believed that Cervantes’s Don Quixote was the first text to bring all of this together, and the novel colored Dos Passos’s perceptions of Spain from the start. “I jabber Spanish a little & read it a little,” he wrote to Marvin, “have read Don Quixote vol 1 & 2 in original and I intend to study it violently in the near future…. I’ve always been mad to know a lot of languages—it’s so humanizing.”26 He read the novel again and again in the following months. And because of it, he preferred the countryside of Castile (Spain’s central province) to the urban environs of its hub Madrid, but he nevertheless believed that “I am quite settled in Madrid now, feel as if I’d lived here all my life.”27 All along, he wrote many florid letters describing the landscape and tried his hand at some poetic sketches of it. He had tea with Jiménez and, later, Machado, and he made two important friends: José Giner Pantoja and José Robles. The former, a member of the distinguished family of liberal education reformers in Spain, was his guide through Spain.28 The latter, a leftist activist and later professor at Johns Hopkins, would become Dos Passos’s first Spanish translator (Manhattan Transfer, in 1929). But this trip to Spain ended abruptly in 1917, when Dos Passos had to return to the United States because of his father’s death.
“Young Spain” and the American Left
Back home and energized by his time in Spain, Dos Passos grew more radicalized by the moment, and he wrote to Marvin that “my only amusement has been going to anarchist and pacifists meetings and riots—Emma Goldman etc. Lots of fun I assure you. I am thinking of becoming a revolutionist!”29 He quickly found an ideal outlet for translating his impressions of Spain: the short-lived magazine Seven Arts (1916–1917). Brooks, Frank, Randolph Bourne, James Oppenheim, and others used the journal to disseminate the newest and best “expression[s] of our American life” in their country’s imagined “renascent period” and, characteristically, to link Anglo-Saxon assimilationism and U.S. imperialism in essays opposing U.S. entry into the Great War.30 Anglo-Saxonism at this moment was shifting, in pro-war arguments, from a theory of race and nationalism to a theory of democracy and, in accordance, the necessity of interventionism.31 The Seven Arts writers, generally speaking, instead celebrated the fact that New York’s immigrant population was composed to a large degree of castoffs or victims of European nationalist movements and revolutions—leftists and peasants who could not be assimilated into the consolidating xenophobic empires warring across the Old World. Their shared ideal was, in effect, to return the United States to its pre–Industrial Revolution immigrant heterogeneity.32
Brooks sketched out in his essay “Young America” (1916) a politicized utopianism that the magazine worked both to domesticate and to internationalize with a series of articles profiling the young minds and spirits globally.33 The writer Seichi Naruse described “Young Japan,” Padraic Colum offered “Youngest Ireland,” and Dos Passos followed with “Young Spain.”34 Other notices from Germany, Italy, Turkey, China, Spanish America, and India shored up these assertions.35 Dos Passos, with his opposition to the war growing more fervent, held out hope that in Spain and in Russia, “the conquest is not quite complete,” and he feared that (as he explained to Giner) in “my own poor country…the day of triumph for plutocracy has arrived.”36 Thus, in “Young Spain,” he presents a portrait of Spain and those Spanish whom he saw as engaged in the early stages of a revolutionary political transformation. Appearing in an issue headlined by Bourne’s and John Reed’s antiwar articles, “Young Spain” actually glorifies a country in “atrophy,” full of corruption, infighting, and separatism, all of which have accelerated since 1898. Stark divisions have emerged between the pro-German and pro-Allies groups: the former includes “reactionaries, the clergy, and the ignorant priest-ridden classes—the high aristocracy and the lowest peasantry”; the latter has “the most connection with the modern world” and includes “liberals of all colors, the intelligenzia, and the munitions manufacturers, who have been growing very wealthy in the North.”37 More important, however, because of the war, class tensions are high, and “under the surface the moment comes nearer and nearer when the tension will snap. Famine is the mother of revolutions” (YS 481–482). Dos Passos reorients his father’s reading of Spain’s decline by attributing it to exploitation and then revaluing it as laying the foundation for revolution; he notes, too, in a subtle rebuff to his father, the strong familial ties among Spaniards. Spain has resisted countless invasions and revolutions over time, he writes, and will continue to do so with a mystical, irrational, anarchistic, indomitable individualism—one that tends in the opposite direction as the individualism celebrated by Dos Passos’s father—that makes it, in spirit, “the most democratic country in Europe” (YS 480).
The anticapitalist revolution Dos Passos envisioned would come from Spain’s outlying provinces, which he profiles through their distinct languages (“Gallego-Portuguese,” Basque, and Catalan), all of which have “strong literary tradition[s]” (YS 477). “There seems no solution,” he believes, “to the problem of a nation in which the centralized power and the separate communities work only to nullify each other” and where the latter cannot have simple calls for peace, bread, and autonomy honored (YS 481). “On every side” of Spain, Dos Passos writes,
in thought if not in fact, the ice of national stagnation is breaking. The war of ’98, which to us was merely an occasion for a display of the school history-book style of patriotism, combined with an amazing skill in sanitation, was to the Spanish people a great spiritual crisis. It was the first thorough unmasking of the hopeless atrophy of their political life. From ’98 indeed has sprung the present generation[, which tends]…toward anarchism, toward a searing criticism of the modern world in general and Spain in particular, [toward]…piecing together the tattered shreds of national consciousness. Not national consciousness wholly in the present capitalistic-patriotic sense, however, but something more fruitful, more local.
(YS 482)
This is Dos Passos’s vision of Spain: a federation of autonomous communities united by the bonds of labor, in provinces with strong connections between the people and the land. Where his father has seen “dismemberment” and “decline” in Spain, Dos Passos saw a “spiritual crisis” that had paved the way for anarchist collectivism in a country where “unity of population is hardly to be expected” (YS 478). This rereading of Spaniards and this revaluing of the “disintegration” his father lamented allows him to idealize their incipient process of “piecing together” the remnants of a broken nation. What seemed like a triumph to Americans was merely an occasion for vacuous manifestations of commercialized nationalism; what seemed like a defeat to Spaniards was a revelation that their “national consciousness” could not be reformed through a capitalistic patriotism but would only come about through alliances of “local” interconnectivity.
Dos Passos then profiles three writers from the country’s provinces who embody the spirit of this “younger generation” that the American wished to see; these writers were over two decades older than he, but their embodiment of “youth” superseded chronological time. The first is the Basque Pío Baroja, whose novelistic trilogy La lucha por la vida (The struggle for life, 1904) he had just read. Baroja resembles Henry James at first blush, Dos Passos argues, but in reality, there is “no comparison between them. The Spaniard has a sense of life, a buoyancy, a power to tell a story that make sickly beside them the pale artifices of the Anglo-American novelist. Far different, too, from James’s quiet dissent from ideas American is Baroja’s burning criticism of his country’s inaction” (YS 482–483). But Baroja’s politics, which were shifting from a youthful anarchism toward an antihumanist nihilism, fail to satisfy Dos Passos at this time. He argues—again returning to his father’s worldview—that through Baroja, “Nietzsche has reached the present generation,” as has “a worship of things Anglo-Saxon, of the efficient Roosevelt virtues, which sounds strangely in the ears of Americans used to reacting in the opposite direction from their red-blooded national ethics” (YS 484). Dos Passos then half-heartedly and briefly lauds the Valencian socialist writer Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, mostly for his radical politics, not for his writing, and for his opinions against the “Anglo-mania” that is becoming pervasive in Spain (YS 483). Dos Passos respects above all the Andalusian Antonio Machado, who, along with Baroja and Blasco Ibáñez, will receive extended treatment in Rosinante. Furthermore, he praises Rubén Darío’s “call to the Spanish peoples to unite, to build a new ideal of life that would defeat what he called the Yanki ideal of dollars and steel,” and Jiménez’s ability to represent “his province [Andalusia],…his pueblo” to Madrid (YS 483, 484). Together, these writers all prove that “in literature the triumph of the commune over Madrid is near at hand” (YS 484). Connecting these politics to those of his compatriots, Dos Passos quotes a Spaniard who told him, “It is you in America…to whom the future belongs; you are so vigorous and vulgar and uncultured” (YS 487).
For Dos Passos, Spain is being almost geographically pulled apart from the margins, and thus the country cannot be reduced to its primary metropolis and national seat. As he later wrote to John Howard Lawson, “I am in a state—Spain is delectable, preposterous, decorative, everything—but in Spain is Madrid. It seems impossible to be in Spain without being in Madrid. I am bored with Madrid. I abominate Madrid…. I have been, am and shall be in Madrid.”38 Madrid represented the former Spanish Empire, the last vestiges of the Castilian plan to consolidate the disparate early modern republics of the Iberian peninsula into a single Catholic state, as Ferdinand and Isabella had named it. It was the collapsed center of the Spain that Dos Passos wanted to see diffused and refracted, and it was also full of connections to Euro-American capital and similarities to New York, the heart of what he called his “type-ridden country” and its culture that was “bunk” and “not so amusing.”39
Howells, Spanish Writing, and the Literary Politics of Empire
In circulating these works, Dos Passos was contesting the power and legacy of William Dean Howells, whose essays published in the intervening years between “Young Spain” and Rosinante would force Dos Passos to recast his critiques, much as the end of the Great War would. Howells, one of the most influential critics in the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s, had championed certain Spanish authors and their modes of realism, encouraging U.S. writers to follow their model treatments of the picaresque, among others. In his Familiar Spanish Travels (1913), he recalls his infatuation with Don Quixote as a young boy, which led to his lifelong romanticization of Spain’s literary history and indeed its empire. As the book’s title indicates, Howells reads Spain sympathetically as different yet knowable, similar to the Ohio of his youth in many ways. At the end of the text, he concedes, “If the reader asks how with this gentleness, this civility and integrity” Spaniards have earned such “repute for cruelty, treachery, mendacity, and every atrocity…I answer frankly, I do not know.” In the closing line he adds, “I do not know how the Americans are reputed good and just and law-abiding, although they often shoot one another, and upon mere suspicion rather often burn negroes alive.”40 In a stark reversal, Spain’s intimate goodness is, for Howells, to be set against the evils of U.S. society.
Howells assiduously studied the accounts of Spanish literature by Irving, Ticknor, and Longfellow, and in his essays, he attempted to characterize himself tentatively as an heir to their authority on both Spain and the United States. While searching the international literary landscape for a realism that was “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,” Howells looked to Benito Pérez Galdós, Emilia Pardo Bazán, and Armando Palacio Valdés to provide models for his own compatriots (indeed, he was discussing Palacio Valdés when he gave this famous definition of realism).41 He praised these three and attempted to capture a Spanish literary scene in which realism triumphed with novels that “are intense and deep, and not spacious,” and he even tried to translate some Spanish texts.42 “No French writer,” he wrote in a moment when either the French or Russian realists appeared to many Americans to be the greatest, “has moved me so much as the Spanish.”43 In counterpoint, in his writings on the novel in the United States, Howells claimed that he could
not believe that the novel of the United States ever will be, or even can be, written, or that it would be worth reading if it were written. In fiction, first the provincial, then the national, then the universal; but the parochial is better and more to be desired than either of the others. Next to the Italians and the Spaniards the Americans are the most decentralized people in the world, and just as there can never be a national Italian fiction, or national Spanish fiction, there can be no national American fiction, but only provincial, only parochial fictions evermore.44
This version of provincialism from which “the national” and “then the universal” may expand struck the younger generation of U.S. writers to which Dos Passos belonged as simultaneously promising in its disavowal of nationality and hopelessly narrow in its conception of localism.
In an imagined conversation in one of his “Editor’s Easy Chair” columns for Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in November 1915, Howells argued against the need for a German-style “solidification” of immigrant groups in the United States in order to lay the foundation for great fiction, instead praising Spain’s internal diversity (“the Basques, the Galicians, the Catalans, the Aragonese, the Castilians, and the Andalusians”) with a benign naturalization of imperial histories. Howells adds that the United States is still undergoing its “solidification,” which takes centuries, and thus, despite insisting elsewhere that realism sprang up universally, he holds that “in four or five hundred years we shall have simmered down sufficiently to produce a national novel of the quantity and quality of the great Russian, English, and Spanish novels.”45 He continues by reviewing the exemplary career and successes of Blasco Ibáñez, whose ability to capture “the likeness of the thing as it is” is, for Howells, unequalled anywhere in contemporary fiction, now that Tolstoy has died.46
The politics that underlay Howells’s criticism were deeply and intimately, if sometimes unconsciously, connected to U.S. imperialism. When the Spanish-American War broke out, Henry James wrote to Howells that “I hate & loathe the war & have an ineradicable pity & tenderness for poor old proud, plucky, ruined Spain—so harmless & decorous, so convenient & romantic in Europe, with all her ruin & her interest…so continentally appealing & irresistible. I wish we had waited to pitch in to some one of our size.”47 Howells, who had been active in the Anti-Imperialist League, also attempted to dissociate himself from the ugliness of the U.S. actions that vaulted its writers into the same conversations as those from Old World empires. He believed that “our war for humanity [in Cuba] has unmasked itself as a war for coaling stations, and we are going to keep our booty to punish Spain for putting us to the trouble of using violence in robbing her.”48 But he also believed that this “stupid and causeless war” was nonetheless carried out by a “kindly and sensible nation,” an apology for an empire that the young left could not stomach.49 James, furthermore, confessed that “I have hated, I have almost loathed [the war]; and yet I can’t help plucking some food for fancy out of its results—some vision of how the much bigger complexity we are landed in, the bigger world-contacts, may help to educate us and force us to produce people of capacity greater than a less pressure demands.”50 After the war, Howells wrote that if the United States “by any effect of advancing civility could have treated with Spain for…[those] three novelists [Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Palacio Valdés]…I, for one American, should have been much more content than I am with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.”51 Sharing with James a belief in the connection between the war and its possible benefits for average Americans, Howells’s substitution here articulates the links between the rising U.S. empire and the increasingly international scope and presence of the U.S. novel that Jonathan Arac has demonstrated.52 As the novel achieved a new global dominance in this moment, Howells praised its universality and saw the similarities among U.S. writers, Spaniards, and masters such as Zola, Balzac, Turgenev, and Verga as actualizing an international cultural movement in novelistic realism. And Howells finally saw U.S. writing in this moment reaching the European bar in a way that his peer and interlocutor in England, Arnold Bennett, had come to acknowledge in 1912: “a few years ago the English author dictated the terms to the American publisher as a conqueror dictates terms to the defeated host”; now the U.S. novel “has acquired a future, a gem of brilliant water whose rays have dazzled the eyes of England.”53
Howells conceded that he was “not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak nor write the language,” only read it.54 (Indeed, when he met Palacio Valdés in Spain, the two spoke Italian.) He was committed to Spain and to Spanish novels in a manner that was outmoded and apolitical—no doubt undermined by his incomplete fluency in the language—by the terms Dos Passos sets forth. Galdós, for example, was an author who had become commercially popular in the United States by the 1910s, related often in middlebrow and popular media to Sir Walter Scott. (Pound, who had praised Galdós previously, defended him faintly by this point, and the New Age did not hesitate in 1910 to call him “old and rather stupid.”)55 Dos Passos will condemn viciously the nationalism and national iconography, and the easy adaptability to the U.S. markets, of Galdós’s and Blasco Ibáñez’s novels.
Dos Passos’s Claims to Spain
Both politicizing Howells’s localism and rewriting his familiar yet abstract portraits of Spain—along with those that circulated popularly in the United States—were key aims of Dos Passos’s next journey. While new critics such as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis were working to dismantle Howells’s authority on different terms, Dos Passos—whose politics were closer to Howells’s than either of those two—was actually continuing in the line of Howells’s Hispanophilia as a means to assert his own new authority. A brief stint in the Red Cross in France and Italy, where he met Hemingway, ingrained for Dos Passos the condemnations of the Great War as an imperialist debacle that he would depict in Three Soldiers. He then returned to Spain in August 1919 with his Harvard friends Arthur McComb and Dudley Poore. He immersed himself further in Spanish culture during this trip and contributed dispatches to a socialist paper in London. The journey resulted in some of his most profound and personal writings on the country—and on Portugal, which he also visited this time. Further investigating racial typologies, he wrote to Stewart Mitchell from Lisbon,
Here I sit upon the soil of my ancestors…. The Portuguese, I find, are a good people, somewhat dirty, somewhat thievish, somewhat humble, lacking that superb haughtiness which seems to be the heritage of the Arabs to Spain, but a people full of goodness. Their main vice is their language, of which I disapprove entirely.56
Dos Passos both embraces and rejects his Portuguese heritage, and he overlooks its Arab history by restricting that—and the “superb haughtiness” he ascribes to it—to Spain. While in Portugal, he also found hope for his leftist ideals, writing that “the giant stirs in his sleep”: against a fading monarchy, communists have proclaimed a new republic in a rural province, railroad workers have been on strike, and the Young Syndicalists have organized.57
Dos Passos’s writings from this trip would eventually appear, alongside many of the articles he had published on Spain in the Liberator, the Freeman, and the Dial, as Rosinante to the Road Again in 1922. The title evinces the effect Don Quixote still had on his journeys—Rocinante [sic] is Don Quixote’s horse—and Dos Passos’s fictional traveling companions Telemachus and Lyaeus embody (and discuss) Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, respectively. But they are also two sides of Dos Passos himself: one was the wandering son in search of his father (Telemachus, whose name means “far-fighter”); the other was an epithet for Bacchus, who releases humans from worries and anxieties (Lyaeus, a traveling bard and troubadour, whose name comes from a Greek word meaning “to loosen” or “to ease”). He uses these two figures in interchapters to expound impressionistically, and with a version of aesthetic fragmentation that he will push further in Manhattan Transfer, upon the themes he discusses in the descriptive and narrative sections of the text: Spain’s multilingual and palimpsestic history, its landscape, its conviction of the absurdity of the Great War, the left’s rise, and the possibility of a Spanish Arcadia.58 Telemachus and Lyaeus meet a businessman who wants to become as wealthy as a Rockefeller or a Carnegie, and they meet villagers who echo Thorstein Veblen’s readings of U.S. labor and consumption. Spaniards manage to ventriloquize and critique the contradictions of U.S. capitalism from afar.
The book is framed by its opening presentation of a moment that remained in Dos Passos’s mind for decades: he interlaces the verses of the fifteenth-century poet Jorge Manrique’s “Coplas por la muerte de su padre don Rodrigo” (Verses on the death of his father Don Rodrigo) with a flamenco dance performed by the renowned dancer Pastora Imperio. The former, cast in an old, popular style, was topical for Dos Passos because his father had just died and because his own middle name was Roderigo; the latter embodied all that made Spain stereotypically un-European, weird, strange, and impure. But more important, the poem and the dance captured what now enabled great art in Spain, in Dos Passos’s mind: a deep, layered history of foreign cultures, such as the gypsy origins of the flamenco. Together, this transhistorical song and dance prompt Telemachus and Lyaeus’s journey from Madrid to Toledo, the city where Spain’s Islamic, Jewish, and Christian pasts are woven together in medieval architecture and arts.
In his book, Dos Passos expands several sections of “Young Spain” into a new chapter, “The Baker of Almorox” (a small village west of Toledo). The unnamed narrator studies the baker and writes, “in him I seemed to see the generations wax and wane…. Everywhere roots striking into the infinite past” (R 48). In the baker—in the many histories and peoples that he channels—Dos Passos sees in an Orientalist vision a “changeless Iberian mind” in the face of countless invasions and conquests. Evincing that Spain’s balance of labor and leisure is better than the wealth-driven model of the United States, the baker embodies Spain’s “strong anarchistic reliance on the individual man” that has persisted for centuries to become both “the strength and the weakness of Spain” (R 25). Dos Passos, after rendering several lines of Spanish speech phonetically in order to capture dialects, concludes that “in trying to hammer some sort of unified impression out of the scattered pictures of Spain in my mind, one of the first things I realize is that there are many Spains” (R 25). These many Spains, evoked in the music and painting that he treats too, show that a single Spain as “a modern centralized nation is an illusion.” Many languages and dialects are spoken “in this country where an hour’s train ride will take you from Siberian snow into African desert”—where even the landscapes and climates cannot unify (R 26). Spain’s politics since the days of Ferdinand and Isabella’s forced unification of the country have “corroded into futility all the buoyant energies of the country. I mean the persistent attempt to centralize in thought, in art, in government, in religion, a nation whose very energy lies in the other direction” (R 28). Now, Spain has nothing but “a deadlock, and the ensuing rust and numbing of all life and thought, so that a century of revolution seems to have brought Spain no nearer a solution of its problems” (R 28–29).
At this point, Dos Passos inserts several revisions of his earlier article, rethinking Spain much as Pound did. “Young Spain” had addressed the effect of the Great War on the country; Rosinante moves instead to a discussion of ancient Spain, the crafts of sculpture and watch making, and a multitude of “traditions: the tradition of Catholic Spain, the tradition of military grandeur, the tradition of fighting the Moors, of suspecting the foreigner, of hospitality, of truculence, of sobriety, of chivalry, of Don Quixote and [Don Juan] Tenorio” (R 30). Rewriting his earlier claims, Dos Passos now sees that
the Spanish-American war, to the United States merely an opportunity for a patriotic-capitalist demonstration of sanitary engineering, heroism and canned-meat scandals, was to Spain the first whispered word that many among the traditions were false. The young men of that time called themselves the generation of ninety-eight. According to temperament they rejected all or part of the museum of traditions they had been taught to believe was the real Spain; each took up a separate road in search of a Spain which should suit his yearnings for beauty, gentleness, humaneness, or else vigor, force, modernity…. The problem of our day is whether Spaniards evolving locally, anarchically, without centralization in anything but repression, will work out new ways of life for themselves, or whether they will be drawn into the festering tumult of a Europe where the system that is dying is only strong enough to kill in its death-throes all new growth in which there was hope for the future. The Pyrenees are high.
(R 30)
The Disaster, that is, gave the lie to Spain’s “museum of traditions.” It spawned a generation of writers who reject the legacy of Spain’s national icons of the nineteenth century and are steering the country away from the fate of the ruined continent. What had been presented as “the real Spain” was a tool of centralized oppression, Dos Passos now notes in the wake of the Great War.
Dos Passos is optimistic that a current workers’ strike represents, in metaphors often used in Spain at the time, the coming of an anti-European “New Spain, a prophecy, rather than a fact,” but he cautions that “Old Spain is still all-powerful” (R 32). A local man tells Telemachus and Lyaeus that after the eras of “Torquemada, Loyola, Jorge Manrique, Cortés, Santa Teresa,” and others, the youth of Spain are “working to bury with infinite tenderness the gorgeously dressed corpse of the old Spain” (R 37). He sees in his travels across Spain and in his studies of elections in Andalusia a country on the brink of agrarian revolts in its outer provinces, where the people suffer from malnutrition and starvation. A syndicalist summarizes for him, “we are being buried under industrialism like the rest of Europe. Our people, our comrades even, are fast getting the bourgeois mentality…. It is a race as to whether this peninsula will be captured by communism or capitalism. It is still neither one nor the other, in its soul” (R 122).
Translating Spain’s Writers and Prospects
In this comparative and often estranging reading of modern Spanish literary history, the writers who had prophesied the New Spain were those whom Dos Passos had met and read and whose politics he admired. His translations of parts of their works were often new to English, too. He profiles Baroja at greater length in Rosinante, describing the Spaniard’s literary world as “dismal, ironic, the streets of towns where industrial life sits heavy on the neck of a race as little adapted to it as any in Europe. No one has ever described better the shaggy badlands and cabbage-patches round the edges of a city, where the debris of civilization piles up ramshackle suburbs in which starve and scheme all manner of human detritus” (R 41). Comparing him to Maxim Gorki, Dos Passos claims that “outside of Russia there has never been a novelist so taken up with all that society and respectability reject” (R 42). Baroja, furthermore, “refuses to be called a Spaniard. He is a Basque,” a part of an alternative “Spain” that was unwillingly engulfed by Castile during the industrializing wave after the Carlist Wars (R 39). Dos Passos offers translations of several paragraphs from Baroja’s trilogy as evidence of his style, focusing on a passage in which the protagonist of Baroja’s La lucha por la vida, the orphan Manuel, admits to being an anarchist; “Spain is the classic home of the anarchist,” Dos Passos adds (R 44).59 Manuel represents that revolutionary “spirit that, for good or evil, is stirring throughout Europe to-day, among the poor and the hungry and the oppressed and the outcast, a new affirmation of the rights and duties of men” (R 46). The Basque Baroja then went to live in and study Madrid, “febrile capital full of the artificial scurry of government,” in order to undermine it (R 40). Returning to the ideals of “Against American Literature,” Dos Passos declares that Baroja’s writing is the cure—seen as a “virus,” a threat—for the diseases of U.S. literature. These diseases follow a pattern of taming rogue aesthetics first put in place, he argues, by George Eliot. Where Mencken contemporaneously saw U.S. literature as being enriched and indeed consolidated around the contributions of foreign tongues and contact-zone dialects, Dos Passos wants the destabilizing effects of Baroja’s writing to disaggregate the very notion of “America” at the core of such theories.
Returning to Blasco Ibáñez, Dos Passos notes that his naturalist novels, previously known only in Spain, now have a “European reputation,” and his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1916) has “capture[d] the Allied world” (R 63). This is a worrisome phenomenon for Dos Passos. Blasco Ibáñez was a political radical, an antimonarchic and anticolonial Republican who was imprisoned and exiled on multiple occasions. In his life in translation, however, he is the prime exemplar of American consumer culture’s ability to defang politics and repackage them as banal melodrama and popular romance, especially in Hollywood adaptations. This, for Dos Passos, is a condemnation of both his writing and American tastes: “it is unfortunate too that Blasco Ibáñez and the United States should have discovered each other at this moment. They will do each other no good” (R 63). Instead of this “inverted Midas” who does not put sufficient thought and labor into his writing—he is just “one more popular novelist”—Dos Passos tells his American readers to look for Baroja, Miguel de Unamuno, Azorín, Ramón del Valle-Inclán, and above all, Machado (R 62, 63).
Dos Passos’s encounter with Machado affected him for some time, and here his translations are most extensive. He saw that Machado’s verse was, as he explains to his Anglo-American readers, “particularly original and personal. In fact, except for the verse of Juan Ramón Jiménez, it would be in America and England rather than in Spain, in [Richard] Aldington and Amy Lowell, that one would find analogous aims and methods” (R 71). Machado writes in ordinary speech, he incorporates folk ballads, and he paints poetic landscapes in a manner that “marks an epoch in Spanish poetry” (R 71). He achieved this by recasting his own Andalusian origins into a subtly ironic hyper-Castilianism that, like Baroja’s work, critiques Castile from within. Dos Passos then prints ten of his translations of Machado’s mostly bucolic poems. They are primarily about the rural landscapes of Soria in northeastern Spain, along with a moving poem on the burial of a friend and a tribute to an “Iberian god” who is also a “God of ruin” (R 77). But they also paint Castile as the site of a “Dead city of barons / and soldiers and huntsmen / whose portals bear the shields / of a hundred hidalgos,” a city “swarm[ed]” by “hungry greyhounds” (R 76). With this allusion to Don Quixote, Machado conjures a Spain that, as Dos Passos translates, “neither is the past dead, / nor is to-morrow, nor yesterday, written” (R 79). Dos Passos’s translations are very literal—at times awkwardly literal—with the exception of some small creative changes, such as his converting “casas denigradas” to “blackened houses” and his substitution of words such as “outlands” for specific place names (Extremadura) in Spain. Where Pound sought to recreate his own poetic voice and the Poema del Cid’s together, Dos Passos sees translation as a means of channeling bleak description as critique in Machado as in Baroja—something he will soon attempt to imitate.
Dos Passos’s panorama of literary Spain concludes with portraits of the poet Joan Maragall and the playwright Jacinto Benavente. Maragall, a language reformer and intellectual, was central to the rebirth of the Catalan language after its “nearly four centuries of subjection to Castile,” and Dos Passos believes that his verses make it hard to explain “how all our desires lay towards the completer and completer affirming of the individual, that we in Anglo-Saxon countries felt that the family was dead as a social unit, that new cohesions were in the making” (R 87). Benavente’s plays exude the pure essence of Castilianism known as casticismo, embodying an arrogant, elitist claim to represent “all that is acutely indigenous, Iberian, in the life of Castile,” a “refuge” from the country’s homogenizing industrialism (R 94). In the contrast that Dos Passos draws between Maragall and Benavente, it is clear which he prefers: the regional poet who took part in a provincial rebirth by reaching back to the “Langue d’Oc” is better than even the anti-industrialist playwright in Madrid. Here again, we see him implicitly rebutting Howells, for the novelists that Howells admired were also provincial—Galdós was born in the Canary Islands, Pardo Bazán was a Galician aristocrat, and Palacio Valdés was Asturian—but they had assimilated, in Dos Passos’s eyes, to a centralized national Spanish culture. Dos Passos’s regionalist writers aimed to disintegrate that culture from within it.
Dos Passos, who continues by describing the funeral in Madrid of Fernando Giner de los Ríos and by profiling Unamuno briefly, had stumbled upon one of the great ironies in critical elevation of the men (all men) of Spain’s Generation of ’98: the term was coined and most often circulated by writers with conservative or even protofascist convictions, yet the writers that it encircled, as often as not, ranged anywhere from radical leftism to liberal humanism. Four years later, Waldo Frank, who had outlined his own plan for U.S. regeneration in Our America (1919), would grapple with these same questions in his Virgin Spain (1926), which profiles many of the writers and intellectuals that Rosinante featured. Frank, who believed that the War of 1898 had given “birth to a new spirit in Spain, and to Imperialism in the United States,” offered more of a Blakean, prophetic, and mystical vision of Spain that largely accepted Spanish critics’ emblems of organic unity couched in sublime rhetoric.60 He treats politics very little, and when he does, he encourages Catalans, for example, not to separate from Castile: in the “Spanish drama of which the Catalans, even in their apartness, must be part,” he writes, “Spain has a dawning will to break from the unity which its will created: her atoms, anarchic but pregnant, stir to be loosed and to begin again…. Now [the] resistance of the Catalans, even if it disrupts, may serve to create Spain again.”61 Dos Passos refined and reinforced his own portrait of Spain in his objections to Frank’s, which he believed turned Spain into a “static elaborate monument.” Frank’s “psychological phraseology” was nothing but “mere ornamental verbiage” that reduces Spain to an ahistorical abstraction instead of conveying the “confused and confusing tragedy of the Spain of our day.” Instead, Dos Passos insisted, Frank should have discussed the “whole tangled welter of industrial and working class politics through which Spain…is being tricked, seduced perhaps, into the howling pandemonium of the new world” of Euro-American commercialism, along with the “bloody farce of the Moroccan war” and Spain’s divided internal politics.62 To defend his version of Spain’s fragmented wholeness was, for Dos Passos, to defend his self-crafted mantle as authoritative voice on Spanish literature and politics against Frank’s increasing respect as a leftist Hispanophile.
Spanish Fragmentation and the Reassembly of Dos Passos’s America
Dos Passos’s clearest creative attempt to channel his vision of Spain was his volume of poetry A Pushcart at the Curb, which appeared in 1922 as an unstated companion volume to Rosinante. Here, Machado’s influence, and to a lesser degree Baroja’s, is visible, and the book features a sequence called “Winter in Castile” that bears a number of similarities to Machado’s seminal collection Campos de Castilla (The Landscape of Castile, 1912).63 Dos Passos later reflected (and revised his own history), in a foreword to a volume of English translations of Machado’s poetry, that when he was learning Spanish, he “carried Machado’s Campos de Castilla with a dictionary around in my pocket for months. Even today [in 1957] when I try to dredge up some Spanish, it is Machado’s Castilian that I remember.”64 Machado’s portraits of Spain’s central, dominant province of Castile are brutal. He writes in “Along the Banks of the Duero River”:
Wretched Castile, once supreme,
now wrapped in rags, haughty in her ignorance….
Castile, no longer the generous state of old
when Rodrigo of Vivar, el Cid, rode triumphant.65
Across dozens of poems that depict the poverty of ordinary Spaniards and the betrayals of the peasantry by the government in Madrid, the Andalusian Machado (who himself was a translator of English literature) elevated the rural Castilian town of Soria, on the banks of the Duero, as a true center of human power and potential. He asks,
Vigorous Castile, austere land,
Castile which scorns luck,
Castile of grief and of war,
immortal land, Castile of death!…
Like you, Duero, will Castile,
perhaps, flow forever down toward the sea?66
The downfall of Castile is linked, for Machado, to the possibility of multiple Spains that Dos Passos carried further. In terms that would characterize early twentieth-century Spain for a generation of his compatriots, and that marked Dos Passos’s sense of Old and New Spain too, Machado writes:
Now there is a Spaniard who wants
to live and is beginning to live
between a Spain that is dying
and another Spain that is yawning.
May God keep you, little Spaniard,
just now born into the world.
One of these two Spains
will freeze your heart.67
Machado’s works, in effect, poeticize the internal ruptures and fragmentation of Spain that he witnessed, and they find their unity in a spiritualized, naturalistic power he sees in rural spaces. Through archetypal, folkloric, and biblical figures, he recounts a national history that becomes a universal leftist and populist critique. The dichotomies he sketches became personal when the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936: Machado was an icon of Republican culture, while his brother, the poet Manuel Machado, sided with the Nationalists.
With a similar spirit but without the stark language, Dos Passos’s poems in Pushcart are mostly brief portraits of scenes of rural Spanish life. The subjects include farmers, mule-boys, beggars, milkmen, plowmen, a “scissors grinder,” a sailor with “scarred brown cheeks,” and “women with market-baskets / stuffed with green vegetables, / men with blankets on their shoulders / and brown sunwrinkled faces.”68 Village plazas with music, sausages, and old women selling chestnuts populate the series of impressionistic scenes, and they are juxtaposed with descriptions of ceremonies, funerals, and age-old rituals. The poems have no narrative but rather function by emplacing these quotidian traditions in Spain’s history by way of allusions to the sites in Spain where, for example, “knights” fought the “darkskinned Moors” in language replete with Dos Passos’s signature compound words (P 47). Dos Passos recalls the “strata” of civilizations and the “layered ages” of Spain that fascinated him when he speaks of
the old strong towers that the Moors built
on the ruins of a Roman camp
have sprung into spreading boisterous foam
of daisies and alyssum flowers.
(P 47)
In Spain, he believes, Greek gods inhabit modern life next to beggars and prostitutes; the “bells of Castile” sound across millennia of cultural mixing that modern nationalism cannot contain (P 30). His portraits of Castile do not approach the critiques that Machado lodged; rather, they ambivalently acknowledge the state’s enduring symbolic power. Castile’s bells still sound strong, without a voice against them, from “unshakeable square towers,” while the towers built by the Moors whom Castile pushed out are “crumbled and doddering” (P 30, 47). Nor does Dos Passos’s poem on the Tagus River imbue it with the power of Machado’s Duero. Dos Passos does attempt, however, to compose briefly in Spanish in “Nochebuena” (referring to the night of Christmas Eve). This poem captures the cadences and frenzy of a festival in Madrid by repeating “Esta noche es noche buena / nadie piensa a dormir” (“Tonight is nochebuena / Nobody thinks of sleeping”) (P 45).
The effects of Dos Passos’s experiences in Spain on his prose were less straightforward and more diffuse. During his time abroad, Dos Passos revised his antiwar novel Three Soldiers (1920), whose controversially gritty, realistic, and antiromantic portrait of modern warfare, while not tied to Spain, evinces the military side of his critique.69 More famously, the narrative shape of Manhattan Transfer (1925) manifests what Dos Passos praised in the aesthetic practices of Spanish writers of the left. As Frank’s City Block (1922) undertook on a smaller scale, it disaggregates the metropolis of New York, rendering it in parts often inhabited by unassimilated immigrant laborers who relish their native cultures, languages, accents, and practices beneath the homogeneity of the city’s capitalist culture. Thus, while Manhattan Transfer continues the manner of social realism that Dos Passos had been crafting in his prose for nearly a decade, its form and structure owe something to—and bear distinct similarities to—both Rosinante and Pushcart, alongside its more frequently commented similarities to cinematic montage. The novel is full of characters who, like the golfos (rogues, scoundrels) of the Baroja trilogy that Dos Passos praised, are scarcely able to make a living, turn away from or are ruined by financial success, or, in the case of Jimmy Herf, ultimately leave New York. Dos Passos employs what became identified as a signature modernist fragmentation of plot and narrative alongside distorted dialogue and revolutionary politics, all in the hope of superseding the works of the previous generation of realists—in the United States, in Spain, and around the world—that Howells had characterized. Emblematically, when several characters discuss the Great War and cast it as a battle among plutocrats and their empires, Congo Jake, a nomadic peg-legged sailor, remarks that he “wont go” to fight for the United States because a “workingman has no country.” He explains, “I’m going to be American citizen. I was in the marine once but…Twentee tree. Moi je suis anarchiste vouz comprennez monsieur.” In a mixture of pidgin English and pidgin French, Congo Jake argues that “You know why they have this here war[:…] So that workingmen all over wont make big revolution…. Too busy fighting.”70 Bearing out a position that fuses Baroja’s politics with those of the Lyrical Left, Congo Jake both resists the homogenizing effects of New York City capitalism and, in the end, accepts them: he becomes wealthy as a bootlegger during Prohibition, changes his name to Armand Duval, and adopts a new life with a starlet wife.
As Dos Passos continued agitating and advocating for the international left, he returned, in scattered places, to the topics this chapter has addressed. After a trip to Mexico in which he met awkwardly with the country’s vanguard writers, for example, he briefly revived his work as a Spanish translator with a version of Manuel Maples Arce’s “Urbe: superpoema bolchevique en cinco cantos” (Urbe: super-Bolshevik poem in five cantos, 1924).71 Tying it to his own fiction, Dos Passos titled the translation “Metropolis” (the same as the title of part 2 of Manhattan Transfer).72 He felt little had changed in U.S. literature by 1931, when he translated and illustrated Blaise Cendrars’s Panama from the French; in his foreword, he noted that “in America…poetry…has, after Masters, Sandburg and the Imagists, subsided again into parlor entertainment for high-school English classes.”73 He answered a questionnaire the following year, “Whither the American Writer?”, by delineating a new genealogy of “proletarian literature in America” through Dreiser, Anderson, London, and even Walt Whitman, all of whom he cordoned off securely from the field of what he saw as increasingly oppressive Communist Party aesthetic dictates.74 Several years later, in “The Course of Empire,” the first scene of act 2 of Dos Passos’s play Fortune Heights (1933), a “bum” takes a historical-prophetic view that returns to Dos Passos’s earlier critiques: “We’re headed for collapse…. There was the Egyptians and the Babylonians, and then there was Greece and Rome…the cyclic depressions got ’em and they went under…. Look at Napoleon and the British Empire, now; and now we’re the greatest country in the world, but we’re goin’ under.”75 As an evolving answer to “Against American Literature,” and one that contains plenty of untranslated Spanish and contortions of both English and other tongues around one another, the U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936)—whose working title was Course of Empire—also contains conversations too numerous to detail among characters who believe that the United States is the new declining Roman Empire and not the heterogeneous Greek culture that Dos Passos idealized.76 But where Dos Passos saw hope in the fact that “there are many Spains,” his resigned, pithy comment on Sacco and Vanzetti—“all right we are two nations”—takes no solace in heterogeneity.77
Dos Passos, who loved to call himself “a man without a country” as he gained an international following, returned to Spain, with great optimism, in 1933 to observe the Second Republic, the liberal-leftist coalition government elected in 1931. His work had received a great deal of acclaim in Spain: in the much-debated issue of the leading journal La Gaceta Literaria in which Guillermo de Torre launched the debate on Madrid as the “intellectual meridian” of Spanish America, Manhattan Transfer was named “one of the best novels produced by the new North American literature [la nueva literatura norteamericana].”78 Robles’s translation of Manhattan Transfer was followed by Rosinante to the Road Again in Spanish in 1930, and the latter garnered its own notoriety; Dos Passos himself contributed a Spanish foreword to this printing.79 Julián Gorkin’s 10 novelistas americanos (1932) described Dos Passos as one of the preeminent writers of the rising U.S. left and “one of the most modern novelists” in the world.80 If he hoped that his own career would be part of the new version of “American literature” coming to life abroad, in politically charged and unfamiliar ways, Dos Passos had plenty of evidence to affirm that a new workers’ state in Spain was reading and absorbing his aesthetics and critiques.
But on this trip, in which he interviewed both the Republic’s first prime minister Manuel Azaña and Unamuno, Dos Passos did not find the inspiration he hoped for in the new Republic. Instead, in long articles that explored the history of socialism in Spain, he detailed the infighting and corruption that Stalin’s interference only exacerbated.81 His disillusion with the left, which had been festering for years, was finalized in 1937 when Robles, who was fighting for the Republican side, was murdered, allegedly by Stalin’s agents.82 Dos Passos backed out of his collaboration with Hemingway as a writer for Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth (1937), a propagandistic film about Spaniards’ suffering under Franco, and published an article, “Farewell to Europe!” (1937), in which he dismissed his earlier idealizations of Spain and placed his faith only in a conservative vision of America. He still believed, as he titled one of his dispatches from the civil war, that “The Villages Are the Heart of Spain,” but his new politics were cemented. His father’s ideals of Anglo-Saxon democracy are couched in slightly different terms here as Dos Passos, while arguing that the Communist Party betrayed the working class of Spain, sees the blueprint of a future of peace and individual liberty in “everything we have ever wanted since the first hard winters at Plymouth.”83 In other words, Spain’s failure to become an ideal, stable leftist republic condemns all of Europe for Dos Passos, who then rewrites his own political past. His experiences in Spain therefore solidified both the leftism of his youth and the turn to the right that would consume the rest of his life. As Jon Smith argues, Dos Passos, across his mutable ideologies, “ascribed both his chief hate, the injustice of Anglo-American imperialism and capitalism, and his chief loves, the English language and the Jeffersonian system of democracy, to what he saw as his own and his country’s Anglo-Saxon heritage and race destiny.”84 He never lost his conviction that the United States was an Anglo-Saxon empire—that this was more than a fiction of national mythology and that its exceptionalism was in some way legitimate—and he revaluated it against the course of Spanish political and literary history from the 1910s through the 1930s, in which Spain is alternately America’s unamalgamated, aspirational, and cautionary forebear.