America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  One thing I could truly say and know it isn’t wishfulness. The lilac buds were indeed swelling and getting a glossy milky look. If you squeeze them they run sticky juice. It’s good to have one true and provable thing on a morning in the sun, a golden quiet time, no loud music for the moment.

  With our first rising we had gone out to look at the trap. No muskrat. The parsnips were untasted and a little withered.

  A beastly clamor broke out near the kitchen steps. An old lady mallard nests regularly in our reed bed. She has a game leg she uses for show. Now she came limping to the house for bread crusts, complaining bitterly about how attractive she is to drakes and what a burden it is to her.

  “Here comes Gimpy,” said The Fly. “Don’t you know people like her? And there’s that big old bull-bitch of a rabbit at the carnations again. I thought you trapped her and took her halfway to East Hampton.”

  “I did,” I replied. “She came back.”

  The theory that kids wake up bright as buttons is nonsense. Mine wake up as though they were coming out of ether.

  “Do you remember my lecture last night?” I asked.

  “Sure do.”

  “Well, I meant it. But just as a matter of discussion, Fly, what was your difficulty with the master that caused so much fuss?”

  “Well, he—” and then he grinned. “I don’t remember how it started. But I’d do something and then he’d do something until we were so far out we couldn’t get together anymore. We just didn’t like each other.”

  “I understand that very well. I’m not suggesting it but simply stating a fact. If you were to say that last sentence to him, you might make a good and lasting friend.”

  “I couldn’t,” he said. “I don’t think I could.”

  “Bothered you, didn’t it?”

  “Sure.” The Fly has moments of devastating honesty. “It got so I blamed him for things I didn’t do.”

  “I know how it is. I remember—you may not believe it but I really do remember. One of you turn on the radio for the news.”

  The report was a detailed account of Eisenhower’s tremendous success in Europe and India—millions of people, millions of children waving flags.

  “He sure is popular,” I said.

  Fly said cynically, “You give me a half holiday and a flag and I’ll wave at King Kong. Who’s going to walk away from a parade?”

  “What a monster I have spawned,” I said. “Tingler, sometimes in the morning you are a kindly and a loving child. Exude some honey, will you?”

  “I’ve got a friend at school that his father is on Madison Avenue.”

  “I wish you had a friend who speaks good English.”

  “You ought to hear him,” Tingler said enthusiastically. “That boy can speak pure Madison Avenue. Can’t understand a word of it.”

  “I’ve read some of it in John Crosby’s column. What shall we do today? We could put the catamaran in the water and see whether our invention works.”

  “We’ll freeze our twinks, but I’m game. We can wear that Navy storm stuff you got war-surplus.”

  Launching the new-type catamaran which will make our fortune was not easy. We edged it out on the ice and then inched it along toward the tide channel and every moment we expected to plunge through into the icy water. The old, refrozen holes of the eel fishermen were all about it. They cut holes in the ice and probe the bottom with many-tined spears until they jam into a big eel. Out in the channel a few small outboard boats were anchored, for the spring flounder were beginning to pay attention. The men crouched in the boats were bundled up like feather beds, hooded and helmeted so that nothing but their noses and eyes could be seen. This early in the season the flounder are sleepy and sluggish with cold. The fishermen drag a piece of iron or an old bedspring back and forth along the bottom a few times to stir the lazy things awake. Then before they settle back to rest, they will sometimes take a bait. It is just one of the fishing theories and it works.

  As we neared the open water, the ice became more mushy and treacherous so that we put most of our weight on the pontoons of the catamaran and pushed it along with one foot like boys pushing a scooter. I broke through once and half filled a boot with water. Finally we were afloat in the wind-rippled open with a strong tide running. We set our motor where we thought it should be and started it and the craft jumped like a horse and nearly reared over backward. Fortunately we stalled the motor in time and changed its position, giving it a very generous safety factor.

  I freely admit that most of our inventions are dogs, but not this one. A couple of adjustments and we went skittering along like a blinking bobsled. I don’t know what speed we made. We got so cold bouncing into the wind that we couldn’t feel our fingers at all even with gloves on. Even my worldly sons were impressed. They admire anything that goes very fast or very high or very deep, and I must say I do, too, but we began to realize we were slowly freezing to death and we had to turn about and run in. Kids are all alike.

  Once we made the ice, they would have run for shelter, leaving me to bring back the boat, if I had not used the kitchen-chair-and-whip method on them.

  “Poor little pitiful blue-fingered waifs,” I said. “I could put you out on the streets selling matches and I would make my fortune.”

  “While you sit in front of the fire and count the money?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  Tingler said, “Quote ‘there must be easier ways of making a living’ unquote. I want to go inside the house and look out at it. I’m cold.”

  We built an enormous fire in the fireplace and hung our icicled garments over the screen to drip dismally on the hearth. It’s an odd fact that you really get to shivering when you hit warm air. Fly figured that if his lip wasn’t ruined for all time, with the shakes he had, he could blow a vibrato you could throw a dog through.

  It was my night to cook. I served corned-beef hash, ancien chameau, the parsnips the muskrats had sneered at and cherries carnivale. The boys weren’t enthusiastic but they ate it. They would have eaten each other. I dug out some old jam-session records and wiped the dust from them—Eddie Condon, Peewee Russell, Wild Bill Davison, Bobby Hackett—and it was pretty nice sitting there with the smell of roasting clothes in the air, and two charming children doing a lousy job on the dishes, while the ghosts of the old Chicago hyperharmonic boys ripped the walls out and broke water tumblers. After that the silence sounded like a rushing wind. The sunset was green-gold, almost the way it is in the tropics.

  “What’s that you’re drawing?” Tingler asked.

  “I am inventing a self-filling bird feeder made with an overturned flower pot suspended over a dish. You see, the pot is suspended by this knot in the rope and it releases the seeds into the dish as they are needed. They will hang in the trees and be painted in lovely colors like bells. Pretty, aren’t they? It will probably make our fortune.”

  The Fly said, “We make our fortune every day and we’re still broke.”

  “Bad luck. Say, when I was in school a thousand years ago, we used to have bull sessions—I guess that’s a corny term now.”

  “Sure is.”

  “Do they still go on?”

  “Sure, couple of bottles of bootleg Coke.”

  “Well, what are the subjects of discussion outside of girls?”

  “You name it and we discuss it.”

  “Any big dramatic subjects?”

  Automatically they clammed up, as they ought to. Never trust an adult. That’s the first rule. And then I could almost hear them remember they were free, and it was a kind of a shocking thought.

  Tingler said, “Biggest we had started with Dick Clark.”

  “Did you?” Fly asked. “So did we.”

  “Are disk jockeys that important to our civilization? Don’t answer that! I remember when Rudy Vallee was.”

  “It only started with Dick Clark.”

  “But it went on—”

  “You going to tell or am I?”

  “You mean the sam
e discussion went on in two schools two hundred miles apart?”

  “Sure—Fly and I talked about it.”

  “Look, fair children, unless you can tell in unison, I suggest that you take turns.”

  “Yes, sir, fair father,” said Tingler. “You see, in chapel and assembly we get all this honesty-is-the-best-policy jazz.”

  “And all the time the payola goes on right to the top.”

  They were breaking in on each other.

  “Some of the kids say what good is it? You stay honest—you stay broke. Now—do you think that’s important?”

  “I sure do. How do the boys know all this?”

  “They read the papers. New York Times is required reading.”

  “Doesn’t anybody stand up for honesty?”

  “Well, it’s kind of hard to argue when you read who’s been taking it. If it was only mugs and cops, but it’s not.”

  “Give us an argument, fair father. We need one.”

  “You’ve got to live with yourself.”

  Fly said. “That’s crazy. I’ve got to live with everybody.”

  “There have always been crooks.”

  “In high office? I’d love to have an argument to take back.”

  “You mean even in school the ranks of virtue are thinned?”

  “No—but you can see when chapel and assembly don’t tell the same story as the papers, it’s pretty confusing.”

  “I agree. It’s never been easy. There are millions of honest citizens.”

  “Yes, and where does it get them?”

  “Is that your stand?”

  “I’m just telling you the arguments. It’s confusing.”

  “Why not warm up your trumpet?”

  “That’s a good idea,” said The Fly. “You can’t fake good jazz.”

  “Maybe we should take a turn around Dog Island. Is the moon up?”

  Tingler cupped his hands against the window and looked out. “It’s overcast,” he said. “The wind’s up too.”

  “Tell me this—do you ever discuss the juvenile-delinquency problem?”

  Fly asked, “Do you mean gangs and rumbles or one kid going sour?”

  “I’d be interested to know what’s said.”

  “Well, the kids got to believe in something. They don’t believe in cops and government so they make their own. May not be good but it’s all they’ve got.”

  “And how about the lone kid?”

  “I know what I think,” said The Tingler. “I think they’re confused. When you get confused, you get scared and then you get mad.”

  “You’re telling me,” I said. “And what’s your cure, professor?”

  “Stick to something they can believe in without being dopes.”

  “I think you’ve got something.”

  “I’m going to make some chocolate,” said The Tingler. “You want some, fair father?”

  “No, but if you’d open me a can of beer, I’d thank you kindly.”

  And then there came a sharp ticking on the windows.

  “Snow,” they shouted. “Maybe we won’t have to go to town tomorrow. Maybe we’ll be snowed in.”

  We snapped on the outside floodlights. Ghosts and winding sheets of small hard flakes came wind-driven over the Point, frozen snow that did not stick to the trees but blew along the ground like white dust. On the edge of the reed bed we saw Poor Harry, the heron, standing on one leg. He was all scrunched down, his beak buried in his breast feathers and his back to the snowy wind.

  “I wonder what muskrats do like?” said The Fly.

  II.

  ENGAGED ARTIST

  JOHN STEINBECK stood witness to some of the most significant upheavals of the twentieth century—the Depression of the 1930s, World War II, the McCarthy hearings, the Cold War, Vietnam. A man of compassion and intelligence, he developed into a writer who was constantly engaged with the manners, morals, and controversies of the world around him. He had the journalist’s urge to participate, to see for himself. And he had the moralist’s urge to comment, evaluate, and find solutions. As a Stanford University friend, Toby Street, noted in an interview, “John was actually a missionary. He was essentially a journalist, you know, that is, I think he could see things going on. . . . I mean journalist in the power of observation. I think some of his so-called tendencies toward you might say the ‘left wing’ were motivated by this strong missionary urge to set things right.” His passionate resistance to tyranny and his equally heartfelt empathy for the marginalized and lonely, the disillusioned seekers and restless idealists, were wellsprings of his fiction as well as his nonfiction. He was ever the champion of the common person, so often caught in crosscurrents of politics and social unrest.

  Both outrage and compassion are evident in his earliest journalism, represented here by three articles Steinbeck wrote before beginning the final draft of The Grapes of Wrath in May 1938. His first important essay appeared in the liberal national weekly The Nation only six months after the same magazine ran Mary McCarthy’s searing indictment of In Dubious Battle as an “academic, wooden, inert” novel (11 Mar. 1936). With sweeping strokes, Steinbeck’s “Dubious Battle in California” sets the record straight and, in addition, sets the writer’s course for the next two years—the piece surveys the history of California’s migrant problem. In the late summer of 1936, Steinbeck witnessed the migrants’ suffering firsthand when he traveled to Arvin, near Bakersfield, to talk and tour camps with Tom Collins, manager of the Arvin government camp. Out of this trip came the far grittier and more detailed exposé of the migrant situation “The Harvest Gypsies,” a series of seven articles published in October 1936 in the San Francisco News, a Scripps-Howard paper committed to a workingman readership. Reprinted as Their Blood Is Strong in 1938, the series was introduced by novelist and journalist John Barry: “Steinbeck is a unique figure. He has come forward at a time when revolutionary changes are going on in the world. He will be a factor in those changes” (WD 147). Indeed, that was Steinbeck’s mission. His third piece of migrant nonfiction, “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” is his most incendiary, one that Life magazine, having commissioned a photo-text with photographer Horace Bristol, refused. Published in the small Monterey Trader in April 1938, the essay adumbrates the most explosive section in The Grapes of Wrath, Chapter 25: “Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges. . . . A million people hungry, needing the fruit—and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains.” These three forays into nonfiction chart Steinbeck’s approach in The Grapes of Wrath itself: general overview, muckraking indictment, editorial wrath. Majestically symbolic, epic in scope, The Grapes of Wrath is at the same time insistently journalistic in its fidelity to the way people spoke, the land they crossed, the conditions they endured. This novel’s roots—like those of much of what Steinbeck wrote—are in reportorial prose.

  While Steinbeck sympathized with the migrants and, to some extent, with unionization, he opposed communism—although he was often labeled a Communist after publication of The Grapes of Wrath. His stance is clearly outlined in “I Am a Revolutionary,” first published in Le Figaro’s magazine in 1954.Throughout his career, Steinbeck tried to maintain his position as a liberal, supportive of workers and organizing, but antagonistic to communism. That middle position was often misunderstood. Responding to a question sent to several writers in 1938, “Are you for or are you against the legal government and the people of Republican Spain,” Steinbeck concludes his remarks: “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups.” He supported the rebels against the tyranny of Franco; the Joads against the tyranny of the Associated Farmers; the people of Russia against the tyranny of Stalin; and the South Vietnamese against what he saw as the tyranny of the Chinese-inspired North Vietnamese att
acks. Several articles here—as well as comments punctuating A Russian Journal and “Letters to Alicia”—give testimony to his dislike of the ways in which communism dampened individual creativity, stifled initiative, fostered lies to achieve ends. In “Duel Without Pistols,” he recounts an episode that occurred during a visit to Rome in 1952 when he was greeted by a critical “Open Letter to John Steinbeck” published in the Italian Communist paper L’Unità. He responded in print to Ezio Taddei’s attack as he would respond in 1966 to Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem chastizing Steinbeck for supporting the war in Vietnam, a poem first published in the Moscow newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta and translated for the New York Times as “Letter to John Steinbeck” (see “An Open Letter to Poet Yevtushenko” in Part VII). In both cases, Steinbeck publicly outlined his anti-Communist stance and defended self, America, and the democratic process; he also invited Yevtushenko to accompany him on a proposed tour of both North and South Vietnam, a trip that never materialized. As was so often the case, Steinbeck channeled anger and outrage into words, most often a carefully crafted position. Other pieces here set forth his objections to McCarthy’s tactics on the House Un-American Activities Committee; racial inequality; and, in a more relaxed tone, his responses to the Presidential inauguration—a final chapter omitted from Travels with Charley. He was a staunch advocate of democracy and fair play, and when they were threatened, he wrote passionately in their defense.

  From 1955 to 1966, Steinbeck published extensively in The Saturday Review, where he was an “Editor-at-Large,” submitting pieces on a wide range of topics. His name on the banner was a coup for a magazine whose aim was broad treatment of ideas and the arts. Norman Cousins, who took over the editorship of the popular literary magazine in 1940, said of Steinbeck, “I found him genuinely shy, extremely reluctant to get into public debate but deeply concerned and even agitated over public issues” (Cousins 195). Steinbeck’s friend and fellow writer John Hersey concurred: “John was highly opinionated, but his opinions were thoughtful and clear. He apparently liked to write in the short, essayistic form, and the results were often quite fine. There was a large and admiring readership for these opinion pieces” (Parini 383), like “Atque Vale,” reprinted here. An article like “Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency” (not included here) is highly representative of much of Steinbeck’s social commentary: he muses on a problem, gives it historical context (his passion for history is evident throughout his nonfiction), and links it to a well-thought-out moral or philosophical position. In this piece, Steinbeck concludes that “man is a double thing—a group animal and at the same time an individual. And it occurs to me that he cannot successfully be the second until he has fulfilled the first”(22). This remark goes a long way toward clearing up critical controversy concerning Steinbeck’s supposed shift in perspective from his 1930s interest in group behavior to his subsequent focus on individual moral responsibility—as in East of Eden. The two strands are not, for Steinbeck, to be severed. Mutual and individual responsibilities are inseparable, he asserts, and “units,” like individuals, engage in actions that must be read contextually.