In the past I have been soundly spanked by some of our talmudic critics for failure to pick out one ant-hill and stay with it. It is a permanent failing. Thirteenth-century manuscripts and modern automobiles are separately but equally interesting to me. I love processes and am perhaps the world’s greatest pushover as an audience.
A girl in a department store demonstrating a tool for carving roses from radishes has got me and gone with me. Let a man open a suitcase on the pavement and begin his pitch “Tell you what I’m gonna do!” and I will be there until he closes. (Daily Mail, 7 Jan. 1966)
Highly representative of Steinbeck’s “scattered” and “unorthodox” interests is “Then My Arm Glassed Up,” an article written for Sports Illustrated in response to the magazine’s request for an article about sports. It’s an epistolary piece, addressed to senior editor Ray Cave. Passionate correspondent, keeper of journals, Steinbeck loved to address his prose to a particular audience—usually a friend—whether he was composing a book, a play, or, quite often, an essay. A letter gave him free rein to range from idea to idea, as here, where the writer begins with a memory from Salinas days; cites a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary (the most essential book he owned); notes the sporting habits of hunters and fishermen and baseball players (fishing was a favorite escape, as the Le Figaro piece “On Fishing” suggests); gives a brief historical context, followed by a fanciful, decidedly silly suggestion for competitive seed growing; and concludes seriously, thoughtfully, on bullfighting, from which he draws insights about the meaning of courage. That’s Steinbeck’s range, serious to silly, historical to moral, reflective to didactic. And beneath it all there may be another, altogether typical, Steinbeckian “level.” Asked to write for a sporting magazine, Steinbeck takes on the consummate writer-sportsman and playfully spars with Ernest Hemingway, bullfight aficionado, hunter and fisher, and Steinbeck’s artistic rival, in a way, since the early 1930s.
No subject was off limits. In 1954, at the request of Henry Ringling North, who had been with Steinbeck and Navy Task Group 80.6 off the Italian coast during World War II, Steinbeck wrote a winsome piece for the Barnum and Bailey Circus program. Indeed, with great frequency and ferocity, he defended his artistic freedom to write about whatever caught his fancy, as did the subject of dogs; or snared his intellect, as did the march of history; or sparked his passion for improvement, as did any kind of project to improve something.
He wrote frequently, affectionately, often whimsically about dogs—Pirate’s loyal band in Tortilla Flat; the Joads’ dog, killed on the road; the stately walks of the banker’s dog, Red Baker, in The Winter of Our Discontent, “who moved with slow dignity, pausing occasionally to sniff the passenger list on the elm trunks.” And of course Charley. There’s something endearing about Steinbeck’s taking notice of dogs of “ambiguous breed” belonging to bomber crews in World War II. Or about his devoting one of the “Letters to Alicia” to the topic of guard dogs and scout dogs working the Saigon airport (19 January 1967). His best writing about dogs, however, is grounded—like so much that he wrote—in personal anecdote, sprinkled throughout letters and his journalism. In 1935, for example, he wrote Wilbur Needham, a friend, describing a particular Mexican dog he’d been watching, vintage Steinbeck:
In the village of Tamazunchale there was a dog lying on a doorstep. In his family there were two pigs and four chickens. And all up and down the cobbled street lived other pigs and other dogs and other chickens. Now our dog whom we shall call Corazón del San Pedro Martín de Gonzáles y Montalba was content when his own pigs ate garbage in the street in front of his house, but let any outland pig, say from next door, come into his zone, and out charged Corazón etc. and bit that pig. There would be screams and a scuffle and in a moment Corazón would trot back to his doorway, having satisfied his sense of propriety and private ownership. But one morning when I sat in one doorway and Corazón sat in his—a completely foreign pig from a half a block down trespassed on half a rotten cabbage. And this was a very big old pig. Up jumped Corazón del San Pedro Martín de Gonzáles y Montalba. He made a slash at that pig’s buttocks but that pig turned and took off a piece of Corazón’s ear. Corazón, after one howl, walked sheepishly back to his doorway. He glanced over to see whether I had noticed, and when he saw that I had, he bit hell out of one of his own chickens. (Benson 322)
Toby, the English setter described in “Random Thoughts on Random Dogs,” could be equally fierce, generate equally playful prose. In 1936 when Steinbeck was working on Of Mice and Men, the puppy Toby, “left alone one night, made confetti of about half my mss book. Two months’ work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically” (Benson 327). And his last dog, Angel, “just about perfect of his breed,” was an English bull terrier. He came to Steinbeck as a puppy in 1965 and sat quietly through “a run-through of Frank Loesser’s new musical, the only dog who ever saw a run-through” (SLL 814-15).
Steinbeck read history and science more voraciously than many twentieth-century writers—a fact made clear in the constant references to historical figures and episodes throughout his nonfiction. In the late 1940s and 1950s, in particular, he was drawn to historical topics, and he thought of working on films or plays about compelling figures, admonitory pieces focused on heroic or exemplary lives. In 1946, finishing work with Elia Kazan on the film Viva Zapata! he mentioned a wish to do “one more film—the life of Christ from the four Gospels” (SLL 343), a film never completed; nor was a 1946 synopsis for a picture called “The Witches of Salem” brought to fruition; nor did a play about Columbus or one about the Vikings (a revision of an early Ibsen play, “The Vikings at Helgoland”) ever make it to the boards. An aborted manuscript called “The Last Joan,” as Burgess Meredith described it, had “to do with witchcraft. And that in a modern sense we better heed what the present Joan tells us of the atom bomb, because it’s the last time that we’ll have a Joan to tell us what to do” (Benson 588). Joan of Arc’s story, in particular, fascinated him—as is clear from “The Joan in All of Us” (first written in 1954 for Le Figaro)—because from her life he could tease out something significant about his own will to believe. Indeed, Steinbeck couldn’t shake a fundamental respect for conscience, wherever he found it: Tom and Ma Joad, “Doc,” the Chinese Lee in East of Eden, or Sam Hamilton, “one of those pillars of fire by whom little and frightened men are guided through the darkness,” Steinbeck writes in Journal of a Novel. “The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough. But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not . . . the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul, and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. . . . It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage” (JN 115). Joan’s life as soldier, politician, theologian was, quite simply, one of those beacons he sought in history, a “miracle” that, Steinbeck concludes, might live “in all of us.” Rather like the Puritans poring over the Old Testament to seek parallels with the New, Steinbeck sought “types” in history to adumbrate contemporary issues. This penchant for typology explains much about his interest in the Arthurian tales late in his life; their stories contained our own.
And like a latter-day Ben Franklin, Steinbeck offered up a number of proposals and projects in his nonfiction and in letters, some serious, many whimsical. Inventions are charming, especially several he described to Mrs. Richard Rodgers, also an inventor: a “plastic jar made like an hour glass” (SLL 489), into which went water, scented soap, and women’s undergarments, to be shaken “like a cocktail shaker” (SLL 489) (an idea later adapted for washing clothes in his trailer while crossing the country in Travels with Charley), or he invented “silk slip covers for the lapels of a dark suit to make it a dinner jacket,” or “stirrups for long night-gowns to keep them from climbing” (SLL 493). Golfomation was proposed in an article for the Louisville Couri
er-Journal, Steinbeck at his silliest:
It is a contraption which bolts to the side of a golfmobile—a set of arms to which are fixed various woods and irons. It has vacuum tubes and a presetting device. All you do is to feed into Univac or one of the larger IBM calculating machines your medical history, blood count, psychiatric report, clubs, and college degrees, domestic difficulties, most recent blood pressure and incidence of anger plus your police record and cheating standard.
On the report of Univac you preset your Golfomation, start the golfmobile and go back to the deep chair and shallow lady. And the darned thing plays your game for you, slices when you would slice, hooks just as you would hook, lies about the number of strokes getting out of the rough, and even in simulated rage breaks the clubs against the fenders of the golfmobile.
Then it brings you your score and its engine shuts off until you want to play again. It is push-button golf at its very best. (17 Apr. 1957)
Steinbeck was often simply having fun writing, a notion many find troublesome. Why didn’t this lionized writer more carefully guard his reputation, corral his little essays, offer up only the very best? Ever the westerner, Steinbeck claimed the right to range over what intellectual turf he discovered.
He was also a tinkerer, lover of things mechanical like cars and weapons. “Give me a box of odds and ends of metal and wood and I can build dam [sic] near anything,” he wrote in 1951 (Benson 674). Inventions for his house fell into that category. “Someone once said of me that if I bought the Washington Monument, I would start covering it with leather” (“Letters to Alicia,” 11 Dec. 1965). He carved wood and planned to do an article on the artisans of Florence. Steinbeck was ever drawn to men who knew machines, like Al Joad, who is “one with his engine” and keeps the “ancient overloaded Hudson” running; or Gay, “the little mechanic of god, the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and explode,” who repairs the Model T in Cannery Row. The “Hansen Sea Cow,” demonic engine in Sea of Cortez, is a major character. Grace notes throughout this journalism make reference to Steinbeck’s cars, usually bestowing the inanimate with very human quirks. A rented Land Rover is “a heavy, ugly, high standing truck-like creature with four-wheel traction and a will toward immortality” (Daily Mail, 7 Jan. 1966:6). A Citroën is “sturdy, intelligent, cheap, a truly French automobile. It has great dash, until it comes to a hill, and it has individuality” (“Duel Without Pistols,” reprinted in Part II). And an old Rolls-Royce is “of sneering gentility, a little younger than Stonehenge and in a little better condition” (Benson 728). That affection for cars is clearly in evidence in “A Model T Named ‘It.’ ”
Throughout his nonfiction, a sense of fun and humor is displayed pervasively; even in his most “serious” fiction, one can find comic moments as well as elements of wit, humor, and parody.
For decades, largely because of his humor, Mark Twain was not taken seriously. Steinbeck mentions Twain so often that it is almost certain the older writer was something of a model for the younger. They both were essentially westerners who spent the last years of their lives in the East but kept a western sense of irreverence throughout. During their lives, both were often dismissed as “popular” writers, which is to say they deliberately tried to communicate with the ordinary reader and succeeded—each wrote many books that sold very well. As a result of their success, they became national figures who, by laughter and lament, brought conscience to bear on corruption, irrationality, and bigotry. While moralists, both were iconoclasts who liked to poke fun at the rich and powerful, and particularly at those who took themselves too seriously. They opposed conventional morality, which they found to be too rigid, humorless, and often self-righteous. They wrote, frequently humorously, about the “rascal” figure, the person like Huck Finn or Mack in Cannery Row, who defies society and operates by a moral code of his own that is more humane and reasonable. And both Twain and Steinbeck could stand back and make fun of themselves, something that endears them to us.
Writing about his friend a few months after Steinbeck’s death, Nathaniel Benchley articulates, perhaps better than anyone, the quality of Steinbeck’s quirky humor:
Reading through his obituaries, I found a good deal of analytical writing about his work, and one rewrite man ventured the personal note that he was considered shy, but nowhere did I see a word about one of the most glorious facets of his character, which was his humor. All good humor defies analysis (E. B. White likened it to a frog, which dies under dissection) and John’s defied it more than most, because it was not gag-type humor but was the result of his wildly imaginative mind, his remarkable store of knowledge, and his precision with words. This respect for and precision with words led him to avoid almost every form of profanity; where most people would let their rage spill out the threadbare obscenities, he would concoct some diatribe that let off the steam and was at the same time mildly diverting. One example should suffice: At Easter about three years ago we were visiting the Steinbecks at Sag Harbor, and John and I arose before the ladies to make breakfast. He hummed and puttered about the kitchen with the air of a man who was inventing a new form of toaster, and suddenly the coffeepot boiled over, sending torrents of coffee grounds over the stove and clouds of vapor into the air. John leaped for the switch, shouting, “Nuts! No wonder I’m a failure! No wonder nobody ever asks for my hand in marriage! Nuts!” By that time both he and the coffee had simmered down, and he started a new pot. I think that this was the day he stoutly denied having a hangover, and after a moment of reflection added, “Of course, I do have a headache that starts at the base of my spine. . . .” He spent the rest of the morning painting an Easter egg black, as a protest. (Paris Review 164)
Then My Arm Glassed Up
Dear Ray Cave:
I HAVE your letter of August 29, and it pleased me to know that you think of me as a sportsman, albeit perhaps an unorthodox one. As you must know, I get many requests for articles, such as, “You got to rite my term paper for my second yer english or they wun’t leave me play on the teem.” Here is a crisis. If I don’t rite his term paper I may set sports back irreparably. On the other hand, I don’t think I am a good enough writer to rite his term paper in his stile well enough to get by his teacher. I remember one time when a professor in one of our sports-oriented colleges had in his English composition class a football player whose excellence on the playing field exhausted his capabilities, and yet a tyrannical scholasticism demanded that he write an essay. Well, he did, and the professor, who was a friend of mine, was utterly charmed by it. It was one of Emerson’s best, and such was the purity of approach on the part of the football player that he had even spelled the words correctly. And he was astounded that the professor could tell that it was not all his own work.
Early on I had a shattering experience in ghostwriting that has left its mark on me. In the fourth grade in Salinas, Calif., my best friend was a boy named Pickles Moffet. He was an almost perfect little boy, for he could throw rocks harder and more accurately than anyone, he was brave beyond belief in stealing apples or raiding the cake section in the basement of the Episcopal church, a gifted boy at marbles and tops and sublimely endowed at infighting. Pickles had only one worm in him. The writing of a simple English sentence could put him in a state of shock very like that condition which we now call battle fatigue. Imagine to yourself, as the French say, a burgeoning spring in Salinas, the streets glorious with puddles, grass and wildflowers and toadstools in full chorus, and the dense adobe mud of just the proper consistency to be molded into balls and flung against white walls—an activity at which Pickles Moffet excelled. It was a time of ecstasy, like the birth of a sweet and sinless world.
And just at this time our fourth-grade teacher hurled the lightning. She assigned us our homework. We were to write a quatrain in iambic pentameter with an a b a b rhyme scheme.
Well, I thought Pickles was done for. His eyes rolled up. His palms grew sweaty, and a series of jerky spasms went through his rigid body. I soothed him and gent
led him, but to show you the state Pickles was in—he threw a mud ball at Mrs. Warnock’s newly painted white residence. And he missed the whole house.
I think I saved Pickles’ life. I promised to write two quatrains and give one to him. I’m sure there is a moral in this story somewhere, but where? The verse I gave to Pickles got him an A while the one I turned in for myself brought a C.
You will understand that the injustice of this bugged me pretty badly. Neither poem was any great shucks, but at least they were equally bad. And I guess my sense of injustice outweighed my caution, for I went to the teacher and complained: “How come Pickles got an A and I only got a C?”
Her answer has stayed with me all my life. She said, “What Pickles wrote was remarkable for Pickles. What you wrote was inferior for you.” You see? Sports get into everything, even into verse-writing, and I tell this story to myself every time I think I am getting away with something.
As I started to say, I get many requests for articles, and sometimes the letter of refusal is longer than the article would have been.
I have always been interested in sports, but more as an observer than as a participant. It seems to me that any sport is a kind of practice, perhaps unconscious, for the life-and-death struggle for survival. Our team sports simulate war, with its strategy, tactics, logistics, heroism and/or cowardice. Individual competition of all kinds has surely ingredients of single combat, which was for millions of years the means of going on living. The Greeks, who invented realism and pretty much cornered the market, began the training of a soldier by teaching him dancing. The rhythm, precision and coordination of the dance made the hoplite one hell of a lot better trooper. In this connection, it is interesting that the hill men of Crete in their all-male dancing go through the motions of using shield and spear, of defense and dodge and parry, of attack, thrust and retreat. I don’t imagine they know this, but it is what they do.
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Page 15