Here, John Dos Passos writes Arthur K. McComb, his close friend from Harvard, who would go on to become a professor of art history at the university. Dos Passos writes from Bordeaux, during his post-graduation tour of Europe. He was hesitant to return to the United States to deal with the death of his father, which he’d learned about by cable in late January. In the summer of 1917, he returned to Europe to volunteer for the Ambulance Corps, where he served alongside another friend, E.E. Cummings.
Café Cardinal, Bordeaux
10 février [191]7
Arthur! Bordeaux always reminds me of you—I mean; it has the same elegant gloved commercialism, a faint perfume of the romance of traffic with the sandal-scented Indies, and, in addition, the yearning towards the Ancien Régime; —the names of the street, Cours de L’Intendance, Allées de Tourny, Allées d’Orleans, and the streets themselves betray it—grey streets of simple graceful houses full of the fastidious gout of the French Renaissance, houses where people ought live dressed like portraits by Mengs and drink chocolate out of pink Sèvres.
I am trying to get home to America, most unwillingly—as I dread the black gloved relations and the discreet shuffle of imitation parchment—wills and all abominations—that will greet me the moment I land in New York.
If death wasn’t such a very simple humdrum thing, even death would become ridiculous by the tinsel griefs, the red eyes and black crape and all the silliness of people making themselves miserable because they think they ought to be.
I arrived here last night to find that there is no boat this Saturday—the submarines must be rather numerous—so I have to wait about for a week.
You can imagine me, through misty winter days, chugging in tiny steamers up the brown sleek river watching the ghosts of poplars glide past in a changing lacework.
As soon as I have settled matters in American I shall go back to Spain for a few months to round out my ideas of it.
Excuse a dull letter—
Au revoir—Dos
I’ll probably get up to Boston, if I get across the submariny ocean—
Have you a couch?—
From John Dos Passos’ Correspondence with Arthur K. McComb, Or, “Learn to Sing the Carmagnole”. Dos Passos, John, Melvin Landsberg, and Arthur K. McComb. Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado, 1991.