America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  The same impulse sent him frequently overseas. Although Steinbeck is known through his fiction as a Western writer who evoked a strong sense of place, it is equally true that he was compelled to travel abroad. After frequent trips to Mexico and the war reporting of the 1940s, he went on in the 1950s and 1960s to take several trips to France, Italy, England, and Ireland and to report on the state of Israel and on the war in Vietnam during his final assignments, supporting months-long journeys by writing for popular magazines such as Collier’s, Holiday, and Esquire. He agreed to write travel series for the Courier-Journal and Newsday. While in Europe, he wrote for Punch in England and Le Figaro in France, the latter an assignment that began with a typical measure of enthusiasm:

  Here in France I get interviewed all the time. I spend hours with journalists helping them to make some kind of a story and then when it comes out it is garbled and slanted and lousy. I wondered why I did not write my own interviews and charge for those hours of time and have it come out my way. . . . [It might be] called something like an American in Paris—observations, essay, questions, but unmistakably American. (SLL 480)

  His willingness to write for Le Figaro, however, was strained by the fact that his work would have to be translated into French. With his usual fretting over every piece of writing, the addition of the translation process caused him considerable anxiety. He wanted each piece, no matter how small, to be good. His secretary, Marlene Gray, tried several translators, including several that were suggested by Le Figaro, but she felt in each case that the results were inadequate. She finally found another writer, rather than a professional translator, to do it, someone who could reproduce the spirit rather than just the letter of what was written. She had realized that it was the way he saw things and the way he wrote about what he saw that was “Steinbeck.” Indeed, the “Steinbeck” tone and “unmistakably American” approach could be the stamp on all his writing, whether about growing up in a California small town or about French fishing habits in Paris—it was American in spirit.

  Through much of Steinbeck’s writing, but particularly in Cannery Row and Sea of Cortez, seeing fully was set out as his primary task, while finding connections among discrete ways of seeing was a major motif. At the heart of both books is the all-important matter of perspective. One can see with one’s heart as well as with the head. At the beginning of Sea of Cortez, for example, he writes:

  We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. (2)

  Steinbeck acknowledges—here and elsewhere—that anything he wrote was far from “objective,” for it was necessarily colored, “warped,” by his perceptions and his times. It was “a” Russian Journal, not “the” definitive viewpoint on the Soviet Union; it was what Paris looked like to the average American, a “tourist’s” report; it was Steinbeck watching a bomber crew prepare for combat. Long before Charles Kuralt, Steinbeck more or less invented On the Road. He differed from the usual journalist in his lack of detachment—he simply could not keep his feelings out of his reporting, but that, whether in his fiction or nonfiction, is what endears him to us.

  Some twenty-five years after he published Sea of Cortez, during his first visit to Israel and on his penultimate trip abroad, he is still mulling over the problem of how and what an observer sees in “Letters to Alicia,” a long passage but worth quoting in full:

  It occurs to me to wonder and to ask how much I see or am capable of seeing. It goes without saying that our observation is conditioned by our background and experience, but do we ever observe anything objectively, do we ever see anything whole and as it is? I have always fancied myself as a fairly objective looker, but I’m beginning to wonder whether I do not miss whole categories of things. Let me give you an example of what I mean, Alicia. Some years ago the U.S. Information Service paid the expenses of a famous and fine Italian photographer to go to America and to take pictures of our country. It was thought that pictures by an Italian would be valuable to Italians because they would be of things of interest to Italy. I was living in Florence at the time and I saw the portfolio as soon as the pictures were printed. The man had traveled everywhere in America, and do you know what his pictures were? Italy, in every American city he had unconsciously sought and found Italy. The portraits—Italians; the countryside—Tuscany and the Po Valley and the Abruzzi. His eye looked for what was familiar to him and found it. . . . This man did not see the America which is not like Italy, and there is very much that isn’t. And I wonder what I have missed in the wonderful trip to the south that I have just completed. Did I see only America? I confess I caught myself at it. Traveling over those breathtaking mountains and looking down at the shimmering deserts . . . I found myself saying or agreeing—yes, that’s like the Texas panhandle— that could be Nevada, and that might be Death Valley. . . . [B]y identifying them with something I knew, was I not cutting myself off completely from the things I did not know, not seeing, not even recognizing, because I did not have the easy bridge of recognition . . . the shadings, the nuance, how many of those I must not have seen. (Newsday, 2 Apr. 1966)

  Steinbeck’s journalism is the record of a man who wanted to get it right, who wanted to see clearly and accurately, without superciliousness—and without ever claiming that his was the definitive, or even a fully accurate, view. He always tried for the human perspective, as much as possible without prejudice, reporting from the street level rather than from the platform or penthouse. The “greatest human excitement,” Steinbeck wrote in his foreword to Ed Ricketts’s handbook Between Pacific Tides, is “that of observation to speculation to hypothesis. This is a creative process, probably the highest and most satisfactory we know” (vi).

  Furthermore, he reveled in the odd angle, the small incident, the ordinary person, topics not often considered by most journalists to be “stories.” Once again trying to explain his penchant for journalism, he stated in a 1965 open letter to writer Max Lerner why he “succumbed to the fatal itch and joined the gaggle of columnists”:

  Maybe it’s like this, Max—you know how, when you are working on a long and ordered piece, all sorts of bright and lovely ideas and images intrude. They have no place in what you are writing, and so if you are young, you write them in a notebook for future use. And you never use them because they are sparkling and alive like colored pebbles on a wave-washed shore. It’s impossible not to fill your pockets with them. But when you get home, they are dry and colorless. I’d like to pin down a few while they are still wet. (Newsday, 4 Dec. 1965)

  Finally, there is an urgency about many of his social pieces—particularly, of course, America and Americans, his last work of nonfiction. He didn’t preach, but he cared. Behind reporting things as he saw them, focusing on the small but telling experiences in life, he was also a moralist and idealist. All his life he was essentially an idealist; that is, he searched to find the essence of things, the meanings or patterns behind what he observed. That’s what he was doing as his life came to an end—interpreting America.

  Perhaps it was his experience in California’s Central Valley during the 1930s, working out of his old bread truck so as to not draw attention to himself, mingling with the migrants, that set the pattern for a lifetime of reporting. He looked away from himself, observing the commonplace and the common people in order to see the whole picture as a democratic vista as accurately as he could. This is precisely Casy’s stated mission in The Grapes of Wrath as he joins up with the Joads for the trip to California. Steinbeck lived that
mission throughout his career—to see the whole as clearly as possible and to see it with his heart as well as with his head.

  I.

  PLACES OF THE HEART

  EXTRAORDINARILY SENSITIVE to his environment, John Steinbeck “brings together the human heart and the land,” to borrow a phrase from environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez (Lopez 71). Like Lopez, Steinbeck urges his readers to consider two primal landscapes: external landscapes—our relations to the land, to oaks, to the whir of night frogs—and interior landscapes, often shaped by the places where we reside. Some of Steinbeck’s best nonfiction considers the writer’s internal landscapes, places he lived and loved: Salinas, California, where he was born in 1902 and lived until age eighteen; San Francisco, where he resided briefly during the 1920s; the Monterey Peninsula, where he wrote his early fiction from 1930 to 1936; and the East Coast—New York City and Sag Harbor—where he spent the last eighteen years of his life.

  His reflections on these places are sometimes meditative and serious, as in “A Primer on the ’30s” and in that marvelous piece “Conversation at Sag Harbor.” But more often his view is colored with humor, a humor that is sometimes impish, sometimes touched with irony. Always we sense the connection of the writer to the places he lived. To a certain extent these pieces form a kind of autobiography, and considering how badly he was treated by some people in both Salinas and Monterey (where the landlord of an office building wouldn’t rent him space after he returned to live on the peninsula in 1944) and how terrible was his struggle during his first experience in New York, they are remarkably free of bitterness.

  The Salinas valley, twenty miles inland, and the Monterey Peninsula, where his parents had a beach cottage, have become “Steinbeck Country” because so much of his fiction is located there or nearby. Few writers have put such an indelible imprint on a region. Tourists often visit the area to see it not for what it is but for what Steinbeck made of it. But as is clear from “Always Something to Do in Salinas,” the author had mixed emotions about his hometown. Although it was a fine place for a boy to roam the countryside on his pony, the community’s conservatism chafed. As he got older, the town’s puritanical respectability and antilabor biases grated increasingly—although he could in retrospect treat the rigidity of the Salinas burghers with some levity. In opposition to Salinas, he set up Monterey as more relaxed and diverse, a place more tolerant of both bohemians and ne’er-do-wells. The whole peninsula, he wrote in the mid- 1940s, “has a soul which is lacking in the east” (SLL 28). In particular, he loved Monterey’s Cannery Row, a street of fish canneries, warehouses, bordellos, groceries, and fishermen’s shacks—a place throbbing with life. Surprisingly, when asked in 1957 to write about redevelopment of the abandoned canneries and warehouses—the sardine industry had collapsed in 1948—he did not endorse nostalgia. He recommended that “young and fearless and creative architects” be hired “to design something new in the world, but something that will add to the exciting beauty” of the Pacific coastline. Steinbeck would later mourn changes in his native turf, but he was realistic about the need for evolutionary growth (Monterey Peninsula Herald, 8 Mar. 1957).

  His time in San Francisco was relatively short. As his memoir recalls, “The City,” as most northern Californians referred to it, was the place where, when he was young, his mother took him for culture—the opera, museums, the theater. His nostalgic memories of his bohemian life in the city as an adult are based on the nearly two years he spent there in the late 1920s, when he relocated to be near his future wife, Carol, who worked as a secretary for the Schilling spice company. His nights on the town with her were idyllic, but he fails to mention his long hours of muscling bales of hemp in a bayfront warehouse. He would never fully embrace urban life. Yet his appreciation of the other great city where he lived for a number of years, New York, suggests that he could adapt and become attached to nearly any environment: “When you really live in New York,” he writes to his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, “it is more rural than country. Your district is a village and you go to Times Square as once you went to San Francisco” (SLL 456). Settled there, first in the early 1940s, permanently from 1950 on, he sometimes embraced it wholeheartedly. “New York is everything,” he wrote for a radio broadcast in 1955. “It is tireless, and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than any place else” (The Saturday Review, 26 Nov. 1955).

  But city life, no matter how enthusiastic his boosterism, was not fully satisfying to a man who needed space, contact with the land, access to the sea. In particular he missed the ocean, the smell of it, the seabirds, and the people who ran boats out to fish. “We have an urban civilization,” remarked Arthur Miller, “and John was not an urban man. He liked to think he was sometimes. . . . He was trying to find a community in the United States that would feed him, toward which he could react in a feeling way, rather than merely as an observer or a commentator. And I don’t know if there is such a place left in the world” (Benson 701-2). With his third wife, Elaine, Steinbeck found in the old whaling village of Sag Harbor on Long Island a place reminiscent of Monterey, a place he could respond to “in a feeling way.” In 1954 they bought a small cottage located on a point overlooking a cove of the bay. They weatherized it so that it could be used in the winter, and it became more than a summer home. They made friends, and Steinbeck could wear his old clothes and his sailor’s cap, and could walk to town for morning coffee. He bought a boat—several boats in time—and would fish, or pretend to fish, with his two boys, agent Shirley Fisher, and guests to the cottage. In Sag Harbor, Steinbeck could shed his fame, talk to the locals, read, spend endless hours inventing small innovations, sail on the bay, and, of course, write in the tiny octagonal study that he had built for himself on the point, “Joyous Garde.” “Out here,” he wrote his editor at Viking, Pascal Covici, “I get the old sense of peace and wholeness” (Benson 784).

  Steinbeck’s essays on the places he cared about serve as a kind of memoir, testimony to one of the most endearing qualities of Steinbeck’s prose, his attachment to place.

  Always Something to Do in Salinas

  EARLY MEMORIES of Salinas are so confused in my mind that I don’t know, actually, what I remember and what I was told I remembered. I am fairly clear on the earthquake of 1906. My father took me down Main Street and I remember brick buildings, spilled outward. Our own wooden house was not injured, but the chimney had completely turned around without falling. And my sharpest memory is that a phonograph we had obtained by subscribing to the San Francisco Call for two years—our first talking machine—leaped from a shelf and destroyed itself. There were two thousand five hundred people in Salinas then, but boosters confidently predicted that it would someday be a metropolis of five thousand.

  Tradition was strong in Salinas and my town never forgot nor forgave an injury. For example, in the Fourth of July hosecart race in 1900, run against Watsonville, the Salinas team ran out its hose smartly and with a substantial lead, then found to its horror that the threads of the coupling had been filed smooth. They could not couple up and get water and so lost the race. Watsonville had obviously cheated. For a decade after, a man could get a fight in a bar at any time simply by bringing up the subject. I thought of Watsonvillians as foreigners and cheats. I wouldn’t have thought of trusting them.

  The old Camino Real, the royal road that threaded California together, moved up the valley and did not come near Salinas for a very good reason. The place that was to become Salinas was a series of tulegrown swamps, which toward the end of the summer dried and left a white deposit of alkali. It was this appearance of salt that gave the place its name. The stagecoaches on the royal road stopped at Natividad, a pleasant little town on the higher ground of the Gabilan foothills, free of fog and swamp and mosquitoes, protected from the fierce daily winds which funneled up the valley center. Natividad had a small college, perhaps the first in California.

  There is no understanding the impul
ses of humans. Someone built a blacksmith shop in the swamp and houses clustered around it: Main Street went in, and little bridges were built over the dark and noisome swamps. On this least likely site, Salinas grew while Natividad died. The adobe college lost roof and windows. The royal road became a country lane. By the time I came along much of the swamp had been filled in, but there was plenty left so that the night roared with frogs. I was pretty big before I learned that silence was not made up of a wall of frog song.

  Salinas was never a pretty town. It took a darkness from the swamps. The high gray fog hung over it and the ceaseless wind blew up the valley, cold and with a kind of desolate monotony. The mountains on both sides of the valley were beautiful, but Salinas was not and we knew it. Perhaps that is why a kind of violent assertiveness, an energy like the compensation for sin grew up in the town. The town motto, given it by a reporter ahead of his time, was: “Salinas is.” I don’t know what that means, but there is no doubt of its compelling tone.