John Dos Passos - The Best Times

The Best Times

An Informal Memoir

John Dos Passos

Contents

By Way of Introduction

We were sitting around one evening at Moskowitzs down on the Lower East Side in New York. It must have been during Prohibition days because we were drinking turnip wine.

An intense looking pale black haired young fellow comes over from another table, plunks himself down in the seat opposite, and announces that he is a high school senior. He gives me a black look through his glasses.

Ive been watching you all evening.

God forbid.

What I want to know is why dont you act like a writer?

How ought a writer to act?

You know just as well as I do how a writer ought to act.

I tried to ease him off. Suppose I did know, I answered as mildly as I could, how do you know Id want to act like a writer?

He glared at me through his glasses. He was groping for words. He got to his feet. Let me tell you one thing, he spluttered all out of breath, meeting you sure is a disappointment.

CHAPTER 1

The Commodore

For years a wooden box full of my fathers letters has stood on my mantel at Spences Point. It is a box I made in a manual training course when I was eleven or twelve maybe. Its not too bad a job; Im sure I couldnt do anything of the sort now. Its made of pine with bevelled corners, neatly squared and varnished. It even has a little brass latch. I havent the faintest idea how the box has managed to survive. Time and again I have started reading the letters, but each time it has been as if a great fist squeezed my heart. I just couldnt go on.

These are letters my father wrote me during the last seven or eight years of his life.

Now that I have reached the age he had reached when he wrote them maybe I can summon the fortitude to copy out enough from them to make his figure stand up out of the shades.

As I remember him he was a short broad shouldered man, very bald, with gray mustaches that bristled like the horns of a fighting bull. His skin was so transparent the blue veins stood out on his forehead. When he went out he carried a cherry cane and walked with a springy almost truculent step. There was a happy defiance in the way the curled points of his mustaches bristled. They responded to his mood. The few times I saw them droop I felt sick with dismay.

He got up at six or earlier and charged into each new day like a bull charging into the arena. First he did a half hour of vigorous setting-up exercises. Then he plunged into whatever cold salt water was to be had. Out on his boat on the Potomac he would go overboard. At his house in New York he would put ice cream salt in his tub.

How the smells cling in your memory! Even today his image is associated in my mind with the smell of melons. There lingers somewhere in the back of my head an infantile memory of a table with a white cloth in a sunny windowsunlight through lace curtainsand the sun flashing on his bald head as he leaned over to slice a huge yellow melon. I must have been very small, in a high chair probably, because in the picture everything is very large. The melon is enormous. He was nearsighted and had a way of taking off his pincenez to see something close to. He is leaning over the slices of melon to flick the seeds off. I can see the red places where the pincenez have cut into the skin on either side of his nose. Hes laughing about something. Breakfast was a favorite meal. He loved to hold forth at breakfast. The memory is full of good humor.

My mother suffered a series of minor strokes and was a helpless invalid during the last years of her life. A year before she died John R.s mind must have suddenly filled with thoughts of his own death because he wrote out his instructions, in his bold hand that showed both points of the steel pen in the broad strokes, to his executors as to how he wanted to be buried. The paper only came into my hands after my half brother Louis death. The envelope was addressed to Joe Schmidt, my fathers secretary, who worked for him with enthusiastic devotion for many years. There is a notation on the envelope in my cousin Cyrils hand, not opened until after the funeral, which explains why John R. was buried in New York. As soon as I glanced at it I tucked it away in the wooden box.

To my Executors it reads. He does not want to be buried in New York, but wants his body to be buried where he buried my mother a year later, in the churchyard of old Yeocomico Church at Tucker Hill near our place in Virginia.

As I look upon death to be but an epoch in a perpetual journey and as I am sure to enter into a better and happier life I wish no mourning to be worn by my family. On the contrary I desire them to hail the event with joy and, instead of solemnity, to celebrate it with hilarity and mirth. Man is the meanest thing on earth, the lowest in the scale of animal or vegetable life. He who dies therefore is bound to find something better in the next life. The degree or state which he will occupy in his new existence will depend upon his intellectual and moral culture. I accordingly do not dread death but look upon Him as a fortunate and welcome visitor. If the weather permits I wish to have a funeral festival held at Sandy Point with beer, punch and the eating auxiliaries served. And let those who enjoy the festivities remember that I do not envy them. On the contrary I tender them my sympathies.

New York, June 19, 1914

John R. Dos Passos

He loved to play the lavish host. Westmoreland County, where he had bought what turned out to be the family farm, was a remote and rural area then. One of his delights was to invite all the neighbors, white and colored alike, to a Christmas barbecue at Sandy Point, or to a foxhunt on his land. Sometimes a steer was roasted whole in a pit. There was an endless supply of oysters shucked out of the barrel or roasted on an iron sheet. Kegs of beer had come down on the boat from Washington or Baltimore. There was punch for the gentry. These were the festivities he was projecting for his funeral.

I was born late in both my fathers and my mothers lives. Each had a son some eighteen years older than I was. My mothers people were Marylanders who had chosen the Confederate side in the Civil War. As a little girl Mother went through the siege of Petersburg. Though there was some dispute in the Sprigg family as to which of the children it was, I firmly believed when I was small that it was my mother General Lee had taken up on his white horse, Traveller.

My father was a fervent abolitionist and ran off as a boy to serve in the northern army. I came to know himthrough the turbulence of conflicting currents of love and hate that mark so many mens feeling for their fathersat the end of his lusty climb to wealth and influence.

John R. was born in Philadelphia in 1844. His father, Manoel dos Passos, was an immigrant from the town of Punta do Sol on the island of Madeira, and his mother, Lucy Catell, came from a family of South Jersey Quakers. My father remembered her as attending the Methodist Church.

Manoel dos Passoss baptismal certificate reads 1812. He was born in Punta do Sol, a tiny town buried in a deep gash in the mountain a few miles east of Funchal, which is the capital of Madeira. Fishing boats are hauled up on the shingle beach below and on the slopes above are the vineyards and irrigated and terraced croplands that support the population. While I was growing up I thought of my fathers people as tillers of the soil, but they actually seem to have been men of the counting house and the pen, notaries, minor officials. There were priests in the collateral branches. On the central square a solid-looking residence with the seven stars of the Great Bear engraved over the door is still known as the Vila Passos.