By 
John Gardner, perhaps the greatest creative writing teacher 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 quirky spellings in dialogue (‘feller’ for ‘mate’, for example). In this I believe that John Dos Passos, in what may be his best book, Manhattan transferHe unknowingly proves that Gardner is right, since the novel’s greatest weakness lies precisely in these efforts to imitate speech with funny spellings. They do not work. They simply distract the reader out of that “fictional dream” state, Gardner says, which is the essential hypnotic state of mind required for novels to function in the human brain.
In fact, all dialogue in all novels is an imitation of speech, not actual speech (those who doubt this only have to transcribe the conversation of two highly intelligent speakers: the overwhelming number of umms and awws and circumlocations and tangents will surprise you. and they will paralyze – if novelists ever tried to use real speech instead of copycat speech in their fiction, they would soon turn us all permanently into non-fiction (or television game shows).
Having said this, Manhattan transfer, a novel I first read when I was 16 or 17 in the 1960s, is magnificent precisely because of the enormous risks Dos Passos takes with language. Consider this short passage, which I quote from page 10 of my copy of Houghton Mifflin’s Sentry paperback, published in 1953:
“A small, bearded man with band legs and wearing a derby, walked down Allen Street, up the sun-streaked tunnel adorned with sky blue, smoked salmon and mustard yellow duvets, covered in bread-colored second-hand furniture. He walked with his cold hands intertwined on the tail of his frock coat, weaving his way between packing boxes and children scampering. He kept biting his lips and clenching and releasing his hands. annihilator of the L trains at the top nor the stale and sweet smell of the crowded dwellings.
At a yellow-painted pharmacy on the corner of Canal, he stopped and gazed absently at a face on a green billboard. It was a distinguished face, clean-shaven, with arched eyebrows and a bushy, neatly trimmed mustache, the face of a man with money in the bank, serenely prosperous on a flawless winged collar and a wide dark tie. Beneath it, in the writing of a notebook, was the signature King C. Gillette. Above his head floated the motto DO NOT PICK, DO NOT POLISH. The little bearded man brushed the derby away from his sweaty brow and stared long into the proud eyes of King C. Gillette’s dollar. Then he clenched his fists, threw his shoulders back, and went into the pharmacy. “
In the next paragraph, Dos Passos invents the neologism “dollarbland” to oppose (and also to 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 now become commonplace, and more, like “smoked salmon” (referring to a color) that rarely seen. And my two favorites “dollarproud” and “dollarbland” which, to my knowledge, have never been used before or since. Dos Passos sums up in a single word what a social critic would need two or three paragraphs to express.
It was not necessary for me to know, when I first read those words as a teenager, that King C. Gillette was the founder of the Gillette razor company and that he had made his fortune with giving away expensive razors on the theory that it would be the weekly sale of replacement blades that he would make his fortune, not the razors themselves, which soon propelled him into the ranks of America’s richest men (he was right, and the formula has often been copied since then, most recently by Kindle, which sells its Kindle readers for far less than it costs to make them based on the theory, again correct, that Amazon is really in the book business, not in 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).
Do you have something else to tell us Dos Passos? His magical verbal inventiveness, almost gymnastic-like, does all the work, making it clear that King C. Gillette is not a friend of bearded, wide-legged men.
Dos Passos writes direct narrative in Manhattan transferBut it has a poetic quality that few later writers have been able to come close to, much less equal. I still read Manhattan transfer partly just to wind strings of words on my tongue, sometimes to read them aloud, just to feel and hear them, much as I do for the plot (there are actually multiple stories, much like in a later and equally engaging novel by New York, Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities). Even without the genius of Dos Passos for what I will call, perhaps in a contradictory way, poetic narrative, the plot of the story alone would have made this book, and still does, readable and gripping as a story.
For those who don’t know, Dos Passos’ political and economic philosophy was probably somewhat to the left of Dennis Kucinich, as Anti-Ayn Rand as one can go back to in the mid-1920s. He wrote Manhattan transfer before the Great Depression, which he, with great foresight, 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. The proud dollar eyes of King C. Gillette 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 myself am very partial to Tom Wolfe), it is quite possible that Lawrence’s assessment is still true in 2013.