John Gardner, perhaps the greatest teacher of creative writing America has produced since World War II, cautions young writers (in his The art of fiction) refrain from trying to imitate regional accents by adopting fancy spellings in dialogue (‘feller’ for ‘fellow’, for example). This is what John Dos Passos thinks about, in what may be his best book, Transfer to Manhattanunknowingly agrees with Gardner, as the novel’s greatest weakness lies precisely in such efforts to mimic funny-spelled speech. They do not work. They simply distract the reader from that “fictitious dream” state that Gardner claims is the essential, hypnotic state of mind required for novels to function in human brains.

In fact, all of the dialogue in all of the novels is imitation of speech, not actual speech (those who doubt this need only transcribe the conversation of two very clever speakers – the overwhelming number of umms and awws and circumlocations and tangents will surprise you). and it will cripple you, if novelists ever tried to use real speech instead of imitation speech in their fiction, they would soon turn us all permanently into nonfiction, or TV shows).

Having said this, Transfer to Manhattan, a novel I first read when I was 16 or 17 in the 1960s, is magnificent precisely because of the stupendous risks that Dos Passos takes with language. Consider this brief passage, which I quote from page 10 of my copy of Houghton Mifflin’s Sentry paperback, published in 1953:

A small, bearded, crooked-legged man in a bowler hat was walking up Allen Street, up the sun-streaked tunnel, covered in sky-blue, smoked-salmon, and mustard-yellow quilts, littered with bread-colored second-hand furniture. ginger. He walked with cold hands folded over the tails of his coat. picking her way past packing crates and scurrying children. He kept biting his lip and clasping his hands together. He walked without hearing the screams of children or the deadening rattle of L trains or the stale, sweet smell of crowded tenements. .

At a yellow-painted drugstore on the corner of Canal, he stopped and stared blankly at a face on a green advertising card. It was a distinguished, bushy-browed face, clean-shaven, with arched brows and a bushy, neatly trimmed mustache, the face of a man who had money in the bank, set prosperously on a starched collar and wide dark tie. Below, in notebook script, was the signature King C. Gillette. Over his head floated the motto NO STROPPING NO HING. The bearded little man removed his bowler hat from his sweaty forehead and stared into the proud dollar eyes of King C. Gillette for a long time. He then clenched his fists, threw his shoulders back, and entered the pharmacy.”

In the next paragraph, Dos Passos invents the neologism “dollarbland” to oppose (and also emphasize) his earlier invention of “dollarproud”. Look at all the other new words in those two short paragraphs, including words like “mustard yellow” that dos Passos may have invented and have become common today, and more, like “smoked salmon” (referring to a color) than a rare one. see. And my two favorites “dollarproud” and “dollarbland” which, to my knowledge, have never been used before or since. Dos Passos summarizes in a single word what a social critic would take two or three paragraphs to express.

I didn’t need to know, when I first read those words as a teenager, that King C. Gillette was the founder of the Gillette razor company and had made his fortune giving away expensive razors on the theory that his fortune would rest on the weekly sale of replacement blades, not the razors themselves, soon propelling him into the ranks of America’s richest men (he was right, and the formula has been repeated often). copied ever since, most recently by Kindle, which sells its Kindle readers for much less than it costs to make them on the theory, again correct, that Amazon is really in the book business, not the Kindle business, and that by making cheap Kindles available to multitudes of humanity, Amazon will more easily achieve its true goal, which is to sell millions and millions of texts, not hardware.)

Does Dos Passos need to tell us anything else? His almost gymnastic verbal inventiveness does all the work, making it clear that King C. Gillette is no friend to bearded and bowlegged men.

Dos Passos writes a direct narrative in Transfer to Manhattan, but it has a poetic quality that few subsequent writers have been able to approach, let alone match. I still read Transfer to Manhattan partly just to roll strings of words over my tongue, sometimes to read them aloud, just to feel and hear them, as much as I do for the plot (there are actually multiple plots, as in a later and equally compelling novel by City). New York, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities). Even without Dos Passos’ genius for what I will call, perhaps oxymoronically, poetic narrative, the plot of the story alone would have made this book, and continues to make this book, readable and gripping as a story.

For those who don’t know, Dos Passos’ political and economic philosophy was probably a bit to the left of Dennis Kucinich, about as anti-Ayn Rand as one can get in the mid-1920s. he wrote Transfer to Manhattan before the Great Depression, which he, with great prescience, anticipated. An encyclopedia of literature tells me that “the book attacks the consumerism and social indifference of contemporary life, portraying a ruthless Manhattan but full of energy and restlessness.” Amen. King C. Gillette’s proud dollar eyes do nothing to inspire warmth or friendship in John Dos Passos.

And yet I believe that John Dos Passos is a forgotten American writer. As we emerge today from one of the most devastating recessions the country has faced since the Great Depression before all but the oldest of us were born, this book may well resonate with modern readers. DH Lawrence called it “the best modern book on New York,” and while many would suggest half a dozen new candidates (I’m a big Tom Wolfe fan myself), Lawrence’s assessment may well still hold true in 2013.