(See front cover) Old history is in books and new on front pages. Yet neither tells the whole story of a people, a period, a place. Behind the extraordinary news in the papers, the decisive events described by historians, lies a mass of anonymous, miscellaneous human happenings, comprising the routine stuff of daily living. This is private history and, though it rarely gets into public history, it outweighs soldiers and statesmen, battles and booms, in the final balance of time.
To relate these minutiae of contemporary experience to the broad sweep of historical developments has been the task, for the past ten years, of a novelist named John Roderigo Dos Passes. Last week Author Dos Passos, 40, offered readers a novel called The Big Money* that stood midway between history and fiction, the last of a series of three books that constitute a private, unofficial history of the U. S. from 1900 to 1929.
The Method. With The Big Money John Dos Passos brought to a close one of the most ambitious projects that any U. S. novelist has undertaken. The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money run to 1,449 pages, detail the careers of some 13 major characters and a host of minor ones, picture such widely separated locales as pre-War Harvard, Wartime Paris, Miami during the Florida boom, Hollywood, Greenwich Village, Detroit. This trilogy also includes 27 brief biographies of such representative public figures as Steinmetz, Luther Burbank, Henry Ford, Sam Insull, Hearst, Isadora Duncan, Rudolph Valentino, artfully spaced throughout the three volumes. The author provides, in addition, a shorthand autobiography in the form of 51 poetic interludes, called The Camera Eye, which show his own attitude toward the events in which his characters are involved. Like most works of fiction that are written in tandem, each novel in Dos Passos' series makes sense in its own right, gains in cumulative intensity if read in its place in the whole impressive scheme.
Appearing complicated to the point of bewilderment at first glance, this narrative method emerges in The Big Money as ingeniously simple. Basis of the book is the life stories of a few men and women whose careers converge or parallel each other. Some, like the promising but spineless Harvard intellectual, Dick Savage, have figured prominently in the previous volumes. Red-faced, hard-drinking Charley Anderson barely appeared in The 42nd Parallel; Margo Dowling, dissolute and disillusioned cinema queen, makes her debut in The Big Money. Dos Passos' method is to follow one of his characters through some meaningful experience or period in his life, then shift to another. Between chapters he inserts the short biography of some real public figure whose career forms an oblique commentary on the imaginary character just described.