The Big Money by John Dos Passos

The haves and have-nots in 1920s America

First published in 1936, The Big Money is the third novel in the U.S.A. trilogy by author John Dos Passos. Like the two previous books in the series, The 42nd Parallel and 1919, The Big Money is written in an experimental format merging fictional narrative with biographical sketches of historical figures, interludes of stream-of-consciousness prose, and verbal collages of newspaper headlines and journalistic snippets. These elements combine to form a vivid panorama of American society in the 1920s.

Dos Passos saved the best for last. The Big Money is not only the final installment of the trilogy but also its best. This is largely due to the three very intriguing characters that serve as the novel’s protagonists: Charley Anderson, a war veteran hoping to strike it rich in the aircraft manufacturing industry; Margo Dowling, an attractive young woman who pursues a career in show business; and Mary French, a social worker who selflessly devotes her life to labor activism. The two former characters exemplify the commercialism and depravity of the capitalist rat race, while the latter presents a melancholy portrait of martyrdom to the cause of socialism. The supporting cast includes several characters who were featured in the two previous books. Though the narratives of all three novels are rather open-ended, here Dos Passos does to some extent draw the intertwined lives of his ensemble cast together into some degree of closure.

The chapters entitled “The Camera Eye”—vignettes written in a stream-of-consciousness style bordering on prose poetry—are the least successful element in the trilogy. Dos Passos backs off on these a bit in The Big Money, making those passages fewer and farther between, which is to the book’s benefit. Instead, he devotes more pages to the biographical sketches, which really do enlarge the narrative by providing valuable historical context that is interestingly told through the author’s leftist perspective. Among those whom Dos Passos profiles in this novel are the Wright Brothers, William Randolph Hearst, Rudolph Valentino, and Isadora Duncan. The “Newsreels” chapters also seem less random in this book and more pointedly directed at showcasing societal ills, most notably labor abuse and the class struggle but also murders and corruption.

The anticapitalist message of the book is more subtly presented here than in the more blatantly propagandistic works of socialist writers like Upton Sinclair and Jack London. Dos Passos spends most of the novel showing us characters struggling to survive and thrive within the capitalist system, chasing the brass ring and the almighty dollar. All the men seem to be alcoholics; all the women unfaithful gold-diggers, yet Dos Passos is not unsympathetic to these characters. These are regular people leading realistic lives in an oppressive system that drives them towards competition and exploitation. Only from the Mary French perspective does the reader ever get overt discussion of labor issues like miners in Pennsylvania and Colorado being gunned down for striking. The depiction of socialism is not entirely positive either, however, as Dos Passos often points out the greed and pettiness of those Mary French encounters within the movement.

The Big Money is a literary time capsule of an era in which America was rampant with income disparity, monopolistic trusts, and government corruption, yet somehow much of it feels uncomfortably familiar to the 21st century reader. What’s changed is that the labor movement and American socialism are neither as loud and visible nor as hopeful for change as they were a century ago. The societal problems that Dos Passos addresses appear to be unfortunately timeless, which will doubtless ensure the relevance of this exceptional novel for many years to come.
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Men of Maize by Miguel Ángel Asturias

Mayan myth for modern times

Miguel Ángel Asturias of Guatemala was the first Latin American novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1974. His novel Men of Maize, originally published in 1949, was extremely influential to the succeeding generation of authors who became prominent in the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s. Though not overtly specified, the setting of the novel seems to be in Guatemala from roughly the 1890s to the 1940s. The story heavily references Mayan beliefs and literature, and most of the characters are at least partially Native Mesoamerican Indians.

The novel is divided into six parts with different protagonists. On the surface these sections seem unconnected, but they constantly make reference to each other in a secret grand overall scheme. In the novel’s opening chapter, an Indian warrior named Gaspar Ilóm wages a rebellion against the Ladinos (Guatemalan Mestizos) who have encroached upon his ancestral lands to turn forests into cornfields. The ramifications of this battle echo through the rest of the book as generations of characters face karmic retribution for sins perpetrated against nature and the Native race. In Asturias’s view of Central American history, the formerly sacred practice of growing maize became profaned when man chose to grow the crop for profit, thus driving a wedge between mankind and holy nature akin to the expulsion from Eden in the Christian mythos. The farther man departs from his natural origins the more he succumbs to evil, discontent, and dehumanization. Another frequent theme in the book is that of women fleeing their abusive husbands, which further symbolizes the destruction of the family and the subjugation suffered by women in modern society.

The story frequently wavers back and forth between passages of modern realism and supernatural myth. In fact, one of the main themes in the novel is the creation of legends and how they compete with history. While much of the plot takes place in a lifelike representation of 20th century Guatemala, it is not unusual to witness a man transforming into an animal or vanishing into thin air. Much of part five is devoted to two Indians traveling with a hefty load of liquor in an absurdly protracted comedic sequence reminiscent of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, while part six morphs into a sort of Dante’s Inferno built upon Mayan myths of the underworld rather than on Christian biblical visions of Hell.

Those looking for an English translation of Men of Maize may find the 1993 edition published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in association with Collección Archivos, Paris. Translator and editor Gerald Martin has tried to make this the definitive English edition by heavily annotating the text. The notes are sometimes helpful in pointing out parallels between the novel and ancient Mayan myths like the Popol Vuh and the Books of Chilam Balam. More often than not, however, Martin’s notes are merely expressions of his own opinions and worse, they often spoil the plot. Far more helpful for understanding Asturias’s cryptic novel is the critical essay by Argentine-Chilean novelist Ariel Dorfman, who does a fine job of clarifying the plot details that Asturias himself goes to such great lengths to obscure.

When the Old and New Worlds met in 1492, the initial contact of two alien cultures must have been similar to an encounter between beings from separate planets. The White Western reader gets a sense of that disconnect from reading Men of Maize, which is built more upon the religion and philosophy of the Maya than on the Western Judeo-Christian literary tradition. The disorienting atmosphere makes for a unique and fascinating reading experience, one that will appeal especially to those interested in Latin American history and Mesoamerican culture.
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The Technique of the Color Wood-Cut by Walter J. Phillips

Old-school secrets of Japanese artistry from a Canadian master

Color woodcuts has been around for almost two thousand years, but the art from is generally considered to have reached its apex of technical development with the work of Japanese artists beginning in the 17th century. In the late 19th century, European, American, and Canadian artists began to study the Japanese methods of printmaking and bring their techniques to the Western art world. Among these Western practitioners, one of the true masters of the color woodcut was Canadian artist Walter J. Phillips, a printmaker, painter, teacher, and author active in Western Canada from 1915 through the 1940s.

All woodcuts involve carving a design into a block of wood, which is then used to print ink onto paper. Multiple blocks are employed for multiple colors. What sets the classic Japanese style apart from typical woodcuts is the use of semitransparent watercolor inks, applied with brush in a painterly fashion and printed on wet paper. This method allows for very subtle and beautiful color effects, but it is a very exacting process requiring much technical skill and presenting many opportunities for error. Phillips was renowned for his craftsmanship and his sublime renderings of the Canadian landscape. As an expert on the subject and an arts educator, Phillips wrote The Technique of the Color Wood-Cut, published in 1926, to extol the virtues of this challenging art form and impart its secrets to aspiring printmakers.

If you have no prior experience with color woodcuts and you want to learn how to make them, this would not be the best instructional manual to consult. For one thing, it’s very brief. For another, Phillips expects some prior knowledge of the process from his readers. He repeatedly refers to recent books on the subject like Frank Morley Fletcher’s Wood Block Printing (1916) and Allen W. Seaby’s Color Printing with Linoleum and Wood Blocks (1925) as if he assumes the reader has already read them. Rather than attempting to write a comprehensive manual of the color woodcut, what Phillips provides in this book is essentially his personal techniques and variations on the textbook process outlined in the guides of Fletcher and Seaby. Because this was written almost a century ago, Phillips does everything from scratch: mixing his own inks, planing his own boards, sizing his own paper. It is hard to say how useful such information is now that most artists just by their wood, inks, and papers ready-made from a printmaking supplier like McClain’s. On the other hand, there probably are some diehard purists of the Japanese woodcut art form that choose to do all that work the old-school way, but likely very few. Nowadays the primary audience for this book is simply fans of Phillips’s art who are curious about how he created his beautiful prints.

The book is illustrated with a few color reproductions of prints by Phillips and other artists (Seaby, William Giles, Yoshijiro Urushibara, and others). There is also the usual demonstration of color separations showing the multiple blocks that go into making a print. In addition, Phillips has created a few black and white instructional illustrations of cutting tools, brushes, and such but nothing absolutely essential for anyone attempting a woodcut. The main attraction here is the text in which Phillips outlines his process, and there’s only about 36 pages of it. Nevertheless, Phillips is a good writer, and fans of his will enjoy reading what he has to say about art. Those fans would be better off, however, reading Phillips in Print: The Selected Writings of Walter J. Phillips on Canadian Nature and Art, edited by Maria Tippett and Douglas L. Cole, which can be found online with a Google search and downloaded for free in pdf format.

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Instructional illustrations by Phillips

Color frontispiece by Phillips

The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, edited by H. P. Biggar

Captain’s logs from Canada’s Columbus

Jacques Cartier

French explorer Jacques Cartier made three expeditions to Canada in 1534, 1535-1536, and 1541-1542. While Europeans had been visiting Newfoundland for at least half a millennium, and perhaps a few fisherman or trappers had ventured further West, Cartier was the first White mariner to purposefully explore and map the Gulf of St. Lawrence and the St. Lawrence River. In that sense Cartier was the first European to discover “Canada,” which was the name by which the Natives referred to a region in what is now Québec. Cartier travelled as far upriver as the Native village of Hochelaga, which he renamed Montréal. Shortly after returning from his voyages, Cartier published accounts of his travels and discoveries in France.

The 1924 edition of The Voyages of Jacques Cartier, edited by H. P. Biggar and published by the Public Archives of Canada in Ottawa, was intended to be the definitive volume on Cartier’s expeditions. Not only does the book reproduce Cartier’s accounts of his voyages, it also contains copious footnotes that compare and contrast discrepancies in previous editions and clarify the modern names of geographic locations. The volume also includes several appendices of related material, such as accounts of Canadian expeditions by Richard Hore (1536) and Jean François de la Roque de Roberval (1542), as well as ethnographic information on the Huron Indians of the region. Not surprisingly for a Canadian publication, Cartier’s narratives are printed both in French (at the top of the page) and English (at the bottom of the page). Consequently, though the book is about 350 pages long, each page often bears only one small paragraph of text in the reader’s language of choice.

Cartier’s chronicles of his journeys are surprisingly brief. His accounts leave much to be desired compared to the more detailed travelogues of later explorers, but the paucity of data is made up for by the excitement of first discoveries in previously unexplored territory, such as the French explorers’ first glimpse of smoking, first sighting of a walrus, and their initial meetings with the locals. On his first journey Cartier merely explored the coast of Newfoundland and ventured into the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The bulk of the book focuses on his second journey, in which he discovered the mouth of the St. Lawrence and ventured up the river to interact with the Natives. His account of the third voyage is also quite brief, as he mainly revisited regions he had previously explored. Much of Cartier’s narrative deals with the geographic position of islands, the location of good harbors, and other information intended for future navigators. Of more interest to today’s readers, however, are the accounts of his dealings with the Native American or First Nations inhabitants.

For anyone interested in the history of Canada or the French colonial presence in North America, Cartier’s accounts are a must-read, and Biggar’s 1924 edition is as comprehensive a volume on the subject as one is likely to find in the public domain. Canadian patriots and anticolonialists alike can benefit from reading the explorer’s original accounts and drawing their own conclusions from the primary sources. One gets a fleeting glimpse of “pre-Cartierian” civilization in the North. Cartier was a kinder, friendlier conquistador than his Spanish counterparts in the South, but his imperialistic hutzpah is still very much evident. On the one hand this is a heroic story of intrepidity, valor, and perseverance. On the other hand one can see the beginning of a troublesome relationship between two cultures that foreshadows centuries of Canadian history to follow.
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1919 by John Dos Passos

The U.S.A. trilogy goes to war in Europe

The novel entitled 1919, published in 1932, is the second book in John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, following the The 42nd Parallel. Like its predecessor, 1919 is written in a modernist experimental format combining narratives of its characters’ lives with verbal collages (called “Newsreels”) of headlines and snippets from news stories, stream-of-consciousness vignettes (“The Camera Eye”), and biographical sketches of historical figures such as Theodore Roosevelt, John Reed, and J. P. Morgan. With these components Dos Passos constructs a sweeping yet intimate vision of American society, with this particular novel focusing on the World War I era.

The second book in the U.S.A. Trilogy is not quite as impressive as the first. The 42nd Parallel felt like it was building up to something big, but 1919 feels like the saga has taken a step backward, sometimes literally. In this novel, the major players of The 42nd Parallel are relegated to supporting roles while the background extras from the first book—Janey Williams’s brother Joe, Eleanor Stoddard’s roommate Eveline Hutchins—are elevated to starring roles. This involves going back in time not only to tell these new characters’ back stories but also to offer different perspectives of the events and relationships depicted in the first novel.

Though this may be the U.S.A. trilogy, 1919 takes place almost entirely in Europe as it chronicles its ensemble cast’s experiences during World War I. The roles they play in that conflict are hardly typical, however. None of the main characters is a soldier in the traditional sense. Almost everyone in the book finds jobs with the Red Cross or the ambulance service, and little if any combat factors into the plot of the novel. Everyone just seems to drift through France from town to town, dining and drinking. Of the latter activity, Dos Passos seems obsessed. Hardly a paragraph goes by that doesn’t include a reference to a specific beverage, alcoholic or not, as if citing the name of a liquid were enough to create instant atmosphere. Despite the fact that Dos Passos is quite skilled at sketching realistic lives and relationships, the endless imbibing gets annoying and monotonous after a while. The story also gets bogged down in its romances at the expense of history and politics. Towards the end of the book, the chapter on Ben Compton, a Jewish radical activist, is a step in the right direction. Too bad more ink wasn’t devoted to that character’s compelling story. Dos Passos closes the novel with a prose poem about an unknown soldier killed in the war. This brief piece is a bit pretentious in execution, but it does bring up aspects of the wartime experience that one wishes would have been covered more explicitly in the rest of the novel.

Dos Passos was a radical leftist when he wrote the trilogy, and he definitely takes a “people’s history” approach to the war, but he deliberately stops short of penning an overtly political screed like Upton Sinclair might have written. The book could have benefited, however, from more of Ben Compton’s experiences with socialism and the I.W.W. and less of the wine-sipping romance of PR man J. Ward Moorehouse and his employees. The most vivid historical impressions in the novel are those of the rampant jingoism and xenophobia of the World War I era. Anyone who expressed pacifist, socialist, or vaguely “un-American” views was in danger of being persecuted, imprisoned, or killed—a valuable cautionary tale for these divisive times in which we live.

1919 isn’t perfect but it certainly isn’t boring. If you’ve already read The 42nd Parallel then by all means proceed through the trilogy. It’s all just really one big novel anyway. As a whole, the three books comprise one great work of American literature. I look forward to following the story back to America in the third and final installment, The Big Money.
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A Honeymoon in Space by George Griffith

Underwhelming Victorian pleasure trip through the solar system

George Griffith was a popular and prolific British science fiction writer, active from the 1890s up to World War I, who never really cemented his place in literary history like H. G. Wells or Jules Verne. Although his books were imaginative and pioneering works of science fiction for their time, Griffith didn’t really have the literary talent of either of his more famous contemporaries. Nevertheless, his works had a notable influence on their genre. Griffith’s best-known novel is his 1893 debut The Angel of the Revolution. His novel A Honeymoon in Space, comprised of a series of short stories first appearing in Pearson’s Magazine, was published in 1901.

A Honeymoon in Space does not take place in a future when spaceflight is common. Rather, it is the story of the first-ever spaceflight. In fact, since it was written before the Wright Brothers’ first flight, it tells the story of the first non-inflatable powered aircraft. This aircraft, the Astronef, causes quite a stir when it appears in the skies over the Atlantic. Lord Redgrave, a British earl, is the financier of the project and its daring pilot, but the brains behind the operation is a recently deceased scientist, Professor Rennick. Redgrave is in love with Rennick’s daughter, Zaidie, so he basically kidnaps her from an ocean liner (with a spinster chaperone, of course), even though she is betrothed to another. Zaidie welcomes the abduction, however, and agrees to marry Redgrave. Throwing caution to the wind as no groom has ever done before, Redgrave decides to take his bride on a perilous tour of the unexplored solar system.

In typical Victorian fashion, it takes a while to get the adventure started. Several chapters go by in which Griffith reveals his political inclinations, including his views on the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, which was so much more overtly trumpeted in The Angel of the Revolution. Supposedly Griffith was a Socialist, but he really seems to idolize the British nobility in the Prince Charming character of Redgrave, and of course the earl couldn’t make the trip without a faithful servant, Murgatroyd. Zaidie is depicted as a spunky American woman, perhaps a stronger heroine than one will find in most Victorian genre fiction, but still her most pressing duty is to make coffee for her man.

Before the age of spaceflight little was known about the celestial bodies in our solar system. Scientists could speculate on their gravity, climate, and terrain, and from this Griffith bases his fictional visions of the various worlds. The happy couple visits all the planets from Venus to Saturn, as well as a few moons and asteroids. Not surprisingly, many are inhabited by life, in some cases intelligent life, otherwise it wouldn’t make much of a story. Griffith is a believer in Darwin’s theory of evolution, so he uses the planets as illustrations of what life on Earth might have been like millions of years ago, or what it might be like millions of years from now. Some lapses in scientific realism can be attributed to the antiquity of the novel, while others are just silly. The story opens with a bunch of sailors staring directly into the sun through binoculars. Redgrave’s method of testing the atmosphere on the various worlds he visits is to crack his helmet open and take a whiff, heedless of whatever poisonous vapors might be present.

Such absurdities would be forgivable if the novel were more fun, but this journey through space is actually rather underwhelming. I can only recall one instance of danger that was moderately exciting. This book will appeal mostly to aficionados of vintage science fiction who can appreciate Griffith’s place in the history of the genre and admire his speculations as precocious for their time.
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Bookplates by Frank Brangwyn

Small wonders from a master illustrator

Bookplates are largely a thing of the past but were once very popular among the literate and well-to-do who took pride in their personal libraries. A bookplate is a printed label that book owners would affix inside the front cover of all the volumes they owned. Since each bookplate had a unique design, often commissioned by a professional illustrator, the bookplate served essentially the same function as a cattle brand. Bookplate designs often incorporate the Latin phrase “ex libris” (from the library of) and the name of the book’s owner. Centuries ago bookplates were often designed with the armorial bearings of the books’ owner, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries illustrators and printmakers turned the bookplate into an unbounded medium of artistic expression. The bookplate design served as a symbol—sort of a logo—of the owner, ideally representing his or her values and personality.

No doubt any book lover would have been honored to have a bookplate designed by Welsh artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956). This master painter and printmaker was renowned for his book illustrations and mural paintings, which he executed in a bold, romantic, and decorative style falling somewhere between William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement and Art Nouveau. The book simply entitled Bookplates, published in 1920, reproduces 69 of Brangwyn’s bookplates. The volume opens with nine pages of text that comment briefly Brangwyn’s work and the history of the bookplate. The remainder of the book is filled with Brangwyn’s beautiful artwork, with one bookplate featured per page. At least half of the designs incorporate color and are reproduced in color. A full-color digital copy of this book can be downloaded for free from HathiTrust or the Internet Archive.

The bookplates pictured in this book appear to be about half pen and ink drawings and half wood engravings, plus a few etchings. The subject matter depicted covers a wide variety of figures, animals, trees, architecture, and ships. A family of birds sits in a nest atop a gargoyle overlooking a Spanish galleon sailing into the sunset. A monk shepherds a boar through a copse of trees. A laborer gazes out at a cityscape of factory chimneys spewing clouds of smoke. Two naked nymphs play flutes in a flowery wood. Brangwyn’s illustrations have a more aggressive, gestural quality than the more finicky line work of America’s great illustrator Rockwell Kent (also a designer of bookplates). While Kent’s work looks as if it were drawn with a fine calligrapher’s nib, Brangwyn’s art more overtly displays the feverish marks of brush and chisel.

I first became aware of Frank Brangwyn from his murals in the rotunda of the Missouri State Capitol and have since come to admire his work as an illustrator and printmaker. Those who appreciate classic book illustration of the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries will find much to enjoy in this showcase of Brangwyn’s estimable talent. Any artist who enjoys working in pen and ink, woodcut, or linocut will find this book a source of interesting ideas for small prints and drawings. It’s a shame bookplates are no longer commonplace, but this portfolio of Brangwyn’s work offers a nice nostalgic look back at the height of the art form.

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