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Besides these principal pegs on which Author Dos Passos hangs his narrative, scores of other characters appear, reappear and fade away. Eveline Hutchins, the Chicago Jazz-age girl, attains a Manhattan salon only to end her career with an overdose of sleeping powder. G. H. Barrow, labor-faker, gets a paunch and a fur overcoat by "settling" strikes. Ben Compton, a Brooklyn Jew turned radical and one of Mary French's lovers, finds his life ruined when he is read out of the Party for being a "disrupting influence." All of them — in politics, manufacturing, advertising, Wall Street, the cinema — are swimming for their lives in the stream of the Big Money, fighting desperately against the current, sucked under or bobbing successfully along with the descending river.
The Manner. Two unique fictional devices, in addition to the biographies of famed individuals, interrupt the stories of these people in their rapid rises and catastrophic falls. One is the Newsreel, an effective muddle of headlines, fragments of speeches, news stories, popular songs. Each about a page long, they serve to fix the time of the action as well as to suggest the general moral and intellectual climate of the U. S. during the period. Thus the Newsreel that follows a chapter telling of Margo Dowling's miserable marriage includes a song that was popular at the moment, headline reference to topics that were then being discussed : . . . the kind of a girl that men forget
Just a toy to enjoy for awhile
Coolidge Pictures Nation Prosperous
Under His Policies
PIGWOMAN SAW SLAYING
Saw a Woman Resembling Mrs. Hall
Berating Couple Near Murder
Scene, New Witness Says
SHEIK SINKING
Rudolph Valentino, noted screen star, collapsed suddenly yesterday in his apartment at the Hotel Ambassador. Several hours later he underwent. . . .
Last and most perplexing of Dos Passos' innovations is The Camera Eye. Purpose of these autobiographical prose poems is to suggest the shifting point of view of the author as he turns his imagination on the characters who fill his book and the combination of influences that have made him the individual he is and given him the point of view he holds. Like fragmentary warnings scattered through the volumes, they constantly remind the reader of the author's bias, warn him that Dos Passes' picture of reality has been colored by his personal experiences. After the chapter in The Big Money describing Charley Anderson's return to the U. S., The Camera Eye relates memories of Dos Passes' own homesick return after the War: spine stiffens with the remembered chill of the offshore Atlantic and the jag of framehouses in the west above the invisible land and spiderweb rollercoasters and the chewinggum towers of Coney and the freighters with their stacks way aft and the blur beyond Sandy Hook
Then the ordeal of looking for a job in the post-War Depression:
the pastyfaced young man wearing somebody else's readymade business opportunity is most assuredly not the holder of any of the positions for which he made application at the employment agency