America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  The very word “sport” is interesting. It is a shortening of “disport” (OED: “disportare, to carry away, hence to amuse or to entertain”). From earliest times people played lightly at the deadly and serious things so that they could stand them at all—all, that is, except the Greeks, who in their competitions were offering the gift of their endurance, their strength and their spirits to the gods. Perhaps our values and our gods have changed.

  My own participation in sports has been completely undistinguished. I once threw the javelin rather promisingly until my arm glassed up. Once I was fairly good at boxing, mainly because I hated it and wanted to get it over with and to get out. This is not boxing but fighting.

  My feeling about hunting has made me pretty unpopular. I have nothing against the killing of animals if there is any need. I did, can and always will kill anything I need or want to eat, including relatives. But the killing of large animals just to prove we can does not indicate to me that we are superior to animals but arouses a kind of deep-down feeling that we are not. A room full of stuffed and glass-eyed heads always gives me a feeling of sadness for the man so unsure of himself that he has constantly to prove himself and to keep the evidence for others to see. What I do admire and respect is our memory of a time when hunting was a large part of our economy. We preserve this memory intact even though we now have a larger mortality in hunters than in game.

  I must admit that I have enjoyed two stuffed specimens on public display. They were in Moscow in Red Square and thousands of people went by to see them. Since then the more dangerous of the two has been removed from public view, but for the wrong reason.

  I find the so-called blood sports like fox hunting charming and sometimes ravishingly beautiful. Besides, fox hunting serves the useful purpose of preventing population explosion in the gentry and increasing the number of fine horses. The fox population doesn’t seem affected one way or another.

  I love a certain kind of fishing above all other so-called sports. It is almost the last remaining way for a man to be alone without being suspected of some secret sin. By fishing without bait it is even possible to avoid being disturbed by fish. I am surprised that the dour brotherhood of psychoanalysts has not attacked fishing, since it seems to me it is in competition. Two hours with a fishing rod is worth ten hours on the couch and very much less expensive.

  My passion for fishing does not extend to big-game fishing. While I admire the strength, skill and endurance of the men who do it well, I have found that after a time the cranking in of sea monsters becomes damned hard work. And many a man who would resist to the death carrying a bucket of coal up to a second-floor fireplace will break his heart struggling with a fish he is going to kill, photograph and throw away. I have studied fish both zoologically and ecologically, and once long ago I worked for the California Fish and Game Commission, where I helped at the birth and raising of a good many millions of trout. At that time I learned to admire them but not greatly to respect their intelligence. And it has seemed to me that a man who can outthink fish may have a great future, but it will be limited to fish. His acquired knowledge will do him little good at a Sunday-school picnic or a board meeting.

  Nearly all sports as we know them seem to be memories and in a way ceremonial reenactments of situations that were once of paramount importance to our survival. For example, jousting in the sixteenth century was an expensive and mannered playback of the tactics of the heavy armed cavalry of the late Roman Empire. Our own once-noble cavalry, which was eliminated by the machine gun and the armored car, became the tank corps. It is interesting how symbols persist. Tank officers, at least until a few years ago, still wore spurs with their dress uniforms.

  Not only are our former triumphs remembered in sports, but some of our ancient fears. The hatred and terror of sharks familiar to all sailors in history have made shark hunting very popular. There is almost a feeling of glory and sacrificial punishment in the shark hunter. He kills these great and interesting animals not only with glee but with a sense of administering justice to a cruel and hated enemy. The carcasses are usually thrown away after photographing. There is utterly no understanding that sharks may well be factors in an intricate ecological balance. Edible sharks, such as the leopards, the whites and the makos, are rarely eaten, and it is never considered that the increase in the shark population has not to do with a shark dynamism but rather that we are dumping more and more shark-edible garbage at sea.

  You see, my interest in sports is catholic but cool. I don’t expect you will believe that I once sent for a mail order course in alligator wrestling complete with a practice alligator, so I will not tell you this.

  Yes, my interest in sports is quiet but deep. I am particularly drawn to the game of rounders, which we call baseball. I would be wrong to call it a sport. I don’t think the players have a real sporting attitude toward it. Mostly they want to win because if they win they get more money. In baseball I like the audience almost better than the game. I guess that is why I am a Met fan. But for many years our household was torn to pieces emotionally every year. My wife was a Dodger fan born and bred in Fort Worth, which is, or was, a Dodger farm. Every year, she went through the fervency, the hope, the prayer, the shining eyes and the loud and raucous voice and, finally, after the season the dark and deadly gloom and despair that lasted clear into spring-training time. I guess our family devoted more pure spiritual energy to the Dodgers than to any other religious organization. This, of course, was before they defected to the West. Any kind of skulduggery and ineptness my wife could forgive and even defend, but treason she could not take. She is a Met fan now, and our house is whole again.

  Early on, to save arguments, I became an Oriole fan and even bought a little stock in that club. If you were for anyone else you got an argument, but if you said you were an Oriole fan people just laughed and let you alone. I thought I had a guarantee that they would stay on the bottom, but now they have doublecrossed me by climbing up. I nearly went to the Senators, because there is a federal law which forbids them to win. Then the Mets happened, and I was stuck.

  Baseball brings out a kind of pugnacious frustration in foreigners. Once as guests of a very old and dear friend in London, we were at Lord’s watching a sedate and important cricket match. When a player let a fast ball go by, my wife yelled, “Git it! What ya got, lead in ya pants?” A deathly silence fell on the section around us, and it was apparent that our host would have to resign from all his clubs. Afterward he lectured her gently. “My dear,” he said, “we don’t do it.”

  “Peewee Reese would of got it,” said my elegant moglie.

  “Don’t tell me about baseball,” said our host. “It’s only rounders, and I know all about it. Don’t forget, I, too, have been to Egbert’s Field.” There is no way to explain that baseball is not a sport or a game or a contest. It is a state of mind, and you can’t learn it.

  You will be aware by now of my reasons for not being able to write a piece about sports for Sports Illustrated. My interests are too scattered and too unorthodox. But I do find the American cult of youth, violence and coronaries a little unreasonable. It does seem to me that “as life’s shadows lengthen” our so-called senior citizens should have competitive sports, but that the pace should be reduced. Turtle racing won’t do, because it is dull. But, being lazy, I invented some years ago a sport which satisfied my ego and my sense of competition and matched my inclination. It is called vine racing. Each contestant plants a seed beside a pole of specified height, and the first vine to reach the top wins. There are, however, some furious vines which have been known to grow ten inches a day—which might in some owner-managers raise the blood pressure. For those passionate ones, among whom am I, I have laid out the ground rules for an even more sedate and healthful contest. This is oak-tree racing. Each of the eager players plants an acorn. The obvious advantage of this contest is that, depending on the agreed finishing height, it may go on for generations. At the cry “They’re off!” the fancy could enjoy all
semblance of growth and renewal until the checkered flag came down three hundred years later. By that time the original contestants should be represented by large numbers of descendants, for tree racing allows one the leisure to indulge in other sports, the darlings.

  I should like to mention one more activity which only the Anglo-Saxons consider a sport and hate and attend in droves. That is bullfighting. In this I have gone full course, read, studied, watched and shared. From the first horror I went to the mortal beauty, the form and exquisite-ness from Verónica to faena. I have seen a great many bullfights (it is only called a fight in English). I even saw Manolete fight a number of times, which is more than Ernest Hemingway did. And I have seen a few great and beautiful things in the bullring. There are only a few, and you must see very many fights to see the great one. But I suppose there are very few great anythings in the world. How many great sonnets are there? How many great plays? For that matter, how many great vines?

  I think I have been through most of the possible feelings about tauromachy, rising eventually to the sublime conception that the incomparable bravery of the matador somehow doled out courage to the audience. Oh! this was not blind and ignorant celebration. I hung around the rings. I knew about the underweight bulls, the sandbags on the kidneys, the shaved horns and sometimes the needle of barbiturate in the shoulder as the gate swung open. But there was also that moment of what they call truth, a sublimity, a halo of the invincible human spirit and unspeakable, beautiful courage.

  And then doubt began to creep in. The matadors I knew had souls of Toledo steel for the bull, but they were terrified of their impresarios, pulp in the hands of their critics and avaricious beyond belief. Perhaps they gave the audience a little courage of a certain kind, but not the kind the audience and the world needed and needs. I have yet to hear of a bull-fighter who has taken a dangerous political stand, who has fought a moral battle unless its horns were shaved. It began to seem to me that his superb courage could be put to better uses than the ritual slaughter of bulls in the afternoon. One Ed Murrow standing up to take the charge of an enraged McCarthy, one little chicken-necked Negro going into a voting booth in Alabama, one Dag Hammarskjold flying to his death and knowing it—this is the kind of courage we need, because in the end it is not the bulls that will defeat us, I am afraid, but our own miserable, craven and covetous selves.

  So you see, Ray Cave, it was a mistake to ask me to write an essay about sports. Hell, I don’t even know the batting average of Eddie Kranepool.

  John Steinbeck

  On Fishing

  I AM ONE of the world’s foremost observers of other people’s fishing. I believe that certain national characteristics emerge in fishing and attitudes toward fishing. With this in view I have for many years studied the relationship of fisherman to fish. It is therefore natural that I am drawn to the Oise on a Sunday afternoon in the summer where one may observe Parisian fishing at its very best.

  Perhaps I should set down some American and British attitudes and methods in order that my conclusions about French fishing may stand out by contrast.

  Fishing in America has several faces, of which I shall only mention two. First, all Americans believe that they are born fishermen. For a man to admit a distaste for fishing would be like denouncing mother love or hating moonlight.

  The American conceives of fishing as more than a sport: it is his personal contest against nature. He buys mountains of equipment: reels, lines, rods, lures, all vastly expensive. Indeed the manufacture and sale of fishing equipment is one of America’s very large businesses. But equipment does not finish it. The fisherman must clothe himself for the fish with special and again expensive costumes. Then, if he can afford it, he buys or charters a boat as specialized for fishing as an operating theater is for surgery. He is now ready to challenge the forces of nature in their fishy manifestations.

  The fisherman prefers to travel many thousands of miles, to put himself through powerful disciplines, to learn a special vocabulary and to enter a kind of piscatorial religion all for the purpose of demonstrating his superiority over fish. He prefers the huge and powerful denizens of the sea which have great nuisance and little food value. Once fastened to his enemy, the fisherman subjects himself to physical torture while strapped into a chrome barber’s chair, and resists for hours having his arms torn off. But he has proved that he is better than fish. Or he may celebrate the fighting quality of the bone fish which has no value except for the photographs of the antagonists. The fisherman endows the fish with great intelligence and fabulous strength to the end that in defeating it he is even more intelligent and powerful.

  It has always been my private conviction that any man who pits his intelligence against a fish and loses has it coming, but this is a highly un-American thought. I hope I will not be denounced.

  A secondary but important place of fishing in America is political. No candidate would think of running for public office without first catching and being photographed with a fish. A nonfisherman could not be elected President. This may explain to my French readers why our politicians spend so much time on rivers and streams. Golf has nowhere near the political importance that fishing has, but maybe that is changing.

  The British fisherman has quite a different approach, one that brings out all the raw sentiment he can permit himself. The English passion for private property rises to its greatest glory in the ownership and negotiability of exclusive fishing rights in rivers and streams. The ideal British fishing story would go something like this. . . .

  Under a submerged log in a stream through a beautiful meadow lies an ancient and brilliant trout which for years has resisted and outwitted the best that can be brought against him. The whole countryside knows him. He even has a name. He is called Old George or Old Gwyndolyn, as the case may be. The fact that Old George has lived so long can be ascribed to the gentlemanly rules of conduct set up between trout and Englishmen. Under these rules, the fisherman must use improbable tackle and a bait Old George is known to find distasteful. Of course a small boy with a worm or anyone with a half stick of dynamite could do for Old George, but that would be as un-British as shooting a chicken-stealing fox instead of setting twenty-five horsemen and fifty socially eligible dogs after the fox, whom we will call Old Wilbur. The English use “Old” as a term of endearment verging on the sloppy. A British wife who truly loves her husband to distraction adds the word “poor” so that he becomes Poor Old Charley, but this is affection verging on the distasteful.

  In our ideal fish story, the fisherman rereads Izaak Walton to brush up his philosophic background, smokes many pipes, reduces all language to a series of grunts and finally sets out of an evening to have a go at Old George.

  He creeps near to the sunken log and drops his badly tied dry fly upstream of the log so that it will float practically into Old George’s mouth. This has been happening to Old George every evening for ten or fifteen years. But one evening perhaps Old George is sleeping with his mouth open or maybe he is bored. The hook gets entangled in his mouth. Then the fisherman, with tears streaming from his eyes, pulls Poor Old George out on the grassy bank. There with full military honors and a deep sense of sorrow from the whole community, Old George flops to his death. The fisherman eats George boiled with brussels sprouts, sews a black band on his arm and gains the power of speech sufficiently to bore the hell out of the local pub for years to come.

  Now consider the banks of the lovely Oise on a summer Sunday afternoon. This is very different fishing. Each man has his place and does not move from it, sometimes a boat permanently moored between poles, sometimes his little station on the bank allotted and loved. Since the fishermen do not move it is conceivable that neither do the fish. The status quo must be universal. I have seen a man in his niche on the bank, a great umbrella over him, a camp chair under him, a bottle of wine beside him and in front, the reeds clipped to a neat low hedge and a row of geraniums planted.

  The fishing equipment is simple but invariable. The pole is
of bamboo, not expensive but often adorned, painted blue or red or sometimes in stripes of many colors. The tackle is as delicate and transparent as a spiderweb. On a hook about the size of a pinhead is fixed a tiny bread pellet. The Parisian is now ready for the fishing.

  Here is no sentiment, no contest, no grandeur, no economics. Now and then a silly baby fish may be caught but most of the time there seems to be a courteous understanding by which fish and fishermen let each other strictly alone. Apparently there is also a rule about conversation. The fisherman’s eyes get a dreaming look and he turns inward on his own thoughts, inspecting himself and his world in quiet. Because he is fishing, he is safe from interruption. He can rest detached from the stresses and pressures of his life or anybody’s life. In America it is said that it takes three weeks to rest from the rigors of a two-week vacation. Not so on the Oise.

  I find that I approve very highly of Parisian fishing. From the sanctity of this occupation, a man may emerge refreshed and in control of his own soul. He is not idle. He is fishing.

  I can’t wait to buy a bamboo pole and a filament of line and a tube of bread crumbs. I want to participate in this practice which allows a man to be alone with himself in dignity and peace. It seems a very precious thing to me.