Mavi Boncuk |
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John Roderigo Dos Passos Jr. was born in Chicago in 1896, (d. September 28, 1970) the son of a prominent attorney and the grandson of a Portuguese immigrant. Born out of wedlock but later legitimized, he was a bright boy who showed promise. His strong-willed father saw that he received a classical education, and his high-school years were spent at the exclusive Choate School in Connecticut. At 15, he passed the entrance examinations for Harvard University.
Dos Passos's interest in the Middle East can be traced back to his youth. A voracious reader, he was aware of the region's connections with Western civilization, and was intrigued by its differences. As a teenager, he once said, he was a romantic who dreamed of running off to sea and visiting foreign cities like Carcassonne, Marrakesh and Isfahan.
Dos Passos's first encounter with the Middle East occurred when he was 15. Before starting college at Harvard, his father thought, he should spend some months traveling in Europe and the Near East, to give context to his education and teach him something about the world. In November 1911, Dos Passos was sent abroad in the company of a tutor on what he called "the Grand Tour": England, France, Italy, Greece and Egypt. "Having already traveled extensively throughout Europe, which held little sense of mystery for him, Jack longed for the exotic sounds, sights, and culture of northern Africa and the Middle East," wrote biographer Virginia Spencer Carr. "He wanted to view ancient Islamic civilizations, Egypt and the Nile Valley...." A four-day visit to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, was added to the tour at Dos Passos's request: He was eager to sample life in the fabled city of the Ottomans, a centuries-old dynasty that would soon fall victim to the relentless forces of modernization and the Great War. A decade later, Dos Passos began dreaming again of journeying to the Middle East. Behind him were his Harvard years, and harrowing experiences as a ambulance driver on the battlefronts of France in World War I. "Dos," as he was known to his friends, was now living in New York City. He had just sold his second book—an antiwar novel called Three Soldiers, based on his wartime experiences—and was impatiently awaiting publication. In those days he spent many hours with E.E. Cummings, who was the center of a literary circle in Greenwich Village.
Cummings and Dos Passos went to Paris in the spring of 1921. But Dos Passos stayed only a short while. He had received a cash advance on Three Soldiers and was eager to travel on. "My preoccupation was finding ways and means of getting to the Near East," he wrote forty years later in The Best Times. "It was the only region still highly colored enough to suit my craving for new sights."
He boarded the Orient Express for Istanbul, where he hoped to find work with the Red Cross that would enable him to travel as far as Persia. The job fell through, but he pressed on by Black Sea freighter to the new Soviet republic of Georgia, then inland by train to its capital, Tiflis, and by a succession of boxcars across a grim postwar landscape—through Armenia, "where everyone was dying of cholera and typhus and starvation," to Tabriz and Tehran. In the Persian capital, he contracted malaria.
He took massive doses of quinine to bring the disease under control. "Dos Passos was glad he had traveled into Persia, he reminded himself when he was not miserable with malaria, but he discovered that he was not a journalist at heart," wrote another of his biographers, Townsend Ludington. "Journalism was not his forte, and the sooner he got home and settled down to writing, the better."
The Iraq that Dos Passos entered in the fall of 1921 had recently been subjected to a British mandate, just as Syria had fallen under French control. The Arabs of both countries regarded the foreign rule as a betrayal of their revolt against the Turks, which had helped speed Allied victory in the Great War.
When Dos Passos reached Baghdad, "the great goggle-eyed banshee of malaria" flared again. He spent three weeks recovering at the Hotel Maude, a shabby inn that housed British junior officers.
Although his family had deep pockets, Dos Passos was traveling on limited funds. He couldn't afford a steamship ticket from Basra to Marseilles. The British were willing to fly him by military plane to Damascus, but the young writer decided to cross the Syrian Desert by camel caravan—a journey few Westerners, and apparently no Americans, had ever attempted.
The US consul in Baghdad introduced Dos Passos to Gertrude Bell, the celebrated archeologist, Arabist and now chief of British intelligence for Mesopotamia. This small, plain Englishwoman was "incredibly learned in the languages of the middle Orient," Dos Passos said. "She knew all the dialects. She had the tribal histories and the family histories of the Bedawi at the tip of her tongue."
When the young writer explained his plans, a British officer on Bell's staff told him he was crazy. The Arab tribes were angry with Britain and France, and any European who tried to cross the desert would be in grave danger.
"Fiddlesticks," Bell retorted. "They won't hurt an American." She knew some Arabs who would take him across the desert. "They aren't all quite on our side," she said, "but they are quite reliable."
SOURCE ARTICLE BY Robert Lebling
Dos Passos's interest in the Middle East can be traced back to his youth. A voracious reader, he was aware of the region's connections with Western civilization, and was intrigued by its differences. As a teenager, he once said, he was a romantic who dreamed of running off to sea and visiting foreign cities like Carcassonne, Marrakesh and Isfahan.
Dos Passos's first encounter with the Middle East occurred when he was 15. Before starting college at Harvard, his father thought, he should spend some months traveling in Europe and the Near East, to give context to his education and teach him something about the world. In November 1911, Dos Passos was sent abroad in the company of a tutor on what he called "the Grand Tour": England, France, Italy, Greece and Egypt. "Having already traveled extensively throughout Europe, which held little sense of mystery for him, Jack longed for the exotic sounds, sights, and culture of northern Africa and the Middle East," wrote biographer Virginia Spencer Carr. "He wanted to view ancient Islamic civilizations, Egypt and the Nile Valley...." A four-day visit to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, was added to the tour at Dos Passos's request: He was eager to sample life in the fabled city of the Ottomans, a centuries-old dynasty that would soon fall victim to the relentless forces of modernization and the Great War. A decade later, Dos Passos began dreaming again of journeying to the Middle East. Behind him were his Harvard years, and harrowing experiences as a ambulance driver on the battlefronts of France in World War I. "Dos," as he was known to his friends, was now living in New York City. He had just sold his second book—an antiwar novel called Three Soldiers, based on his wartime experiences—and was impatiently awaiting publication. In those days he spent many hours with E.E. Cummings, who was the center of a literary circle in Greenwich Village.
Cummings and Dos Passos went to Paris in the spring of 1921. But Dos Passos stayed only a short while. He had received a cash advance on Three Soldiers and was eager to travel on. "My preoccupation was finding ways and means of getting to the Near East," he wrote forty years later in The Best Times. "It was the only region still highly colored enough to suit my craving for new sights."
He boarded the Orient Express for Istanbul, where he hoped to find work with the Red Cross that would enable him to travel as far as Persia. The job fell through, but he pressed on by Black Sea freighter to the new Soviet republic of Georgia, then inland by train to its capital, Tiflis, and by a succession of boxcars across a grim postwar landscape—through Armenia, "where everyone was dying of cholera and typhus and starvation," to Tabriz and Tehran. In the Persian capital, he contracted malaria.
He took massive doses of quinine to bring the disease under control. "Dos Passos was glad he had traveled into Persia, he reminded himself when he was not miserable with malaria, but he discovered that he was not a journalist at heart," wrote another of his biographers, Townsend Ludington. "Journalism was not his forte, and the sooner he got home and settled down to writing, the better."
The Iraq that Dos Passos entered in the fall of 1921 had recently been subjected to a British mandate, just as Syria had fallen under French control. The Arabs of both countries regarded the foreign rule as a betrayal of their revolt against the Turks, which had helped speed Allied victory in the Great War.
When Dos Passos reached Baghdad, "the great goggle-eyed banshee of malaria" flared again. He spent three weeks recovering at the Hotel Maude, a shabby inn that housed British junior officers.
Although his family had deep pockets, Dos Passos was traveling on limited funds. He couldn't afford a steamship ticket from Basra to Marseilles. The British were willing to fly him by military plane to Damascus, but the young writer decided to cross the Syrian Desert by camel caravan—a journey few Westerners, and apparently no Americans, had ever attempted.
The US consul in Baghdad introduced Dos Passos to Gertrude Bell, the celebrated archeologist, Arabist and now chief of British intelligence for Mesopotamia. This small, plain Englishwoman was "incredibly learned in the languages of the middle Orient," Dos Passos said. "She knew all the dialects. She had the tribal histories and the family histories of the Bedawi at the tip of her tongue."
When the young writer explained his plans, a British officer on Bell's staff told him he was crazy. The Arab tribes were angry with Britain and France, and any European who tried to cross the desert would be in grave danger.
"Fiddlesticks," Bell retorted. "They won't hurt an American." She knew some Arabs who would take him across the desert. "They aren't all quite on our side," she said, "but they are quite reliable."
SOURCE ARTICLE BY Robert Lebling