America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  The car was not safe to drive at night, but we did it anyway. Having no battery and taking your lights from a generator, you had to go very fast to get enough light to see by, but then you were going too fast to avoid anything you saw, having no brakes.

  I think I loved that car more than any I have ever had. It understood me. It had an intelligence not exactly malicious, but it did love a practical joke. It knew, for instance, exactly how long it could keep me spinning the crank and cursing it before I would start kicking its radiator in. It ran perfectly when I was in blue jeans, but let me put on my best suit and a white shirt, and maybe a girl beside me, and that car invariably broke down in the greasiest possible manner.

  I never gave it a name. I called it IT.

  The problem of starting the motor of the Model T was complicated. I have dealt with it in another work. But once the motor was started, you came in contact with the Model T Ford transmission, called the planetary system.

  There were always emergencies in the gearbox of the planetary system. Let’s say you had a date, fifty cents and three quarts of gasoline. This would be the time when the high-low band wore through to the metal. Your problem then was to move the reverse band to the low-high section and get along without a reverse for the time being. The process of change was invariable. You removed the top plate and took off the bands. The metal was not only very oily but very springy, and the forks were held together by curious wedge-shaped bolts and nuts. Now, just when you had the forks pinched close and were trying to get the bolt back in place, you dropped the nut. It fell into the black oil pool beneath the assembly where no hand could reach it. So you got a piece of wire out of the back seat and bent one end of it to make a fishhook. Sometimes it took two or three hours to locate the fallen nut by the touch system, to get the hook through it and to lift it out. It was a most delicate operation and it should have developed some great safecrackers.

  There were certain standard practices in the repair of the Model T. For instance, if the radiator sprung a leak, you dropped a handful of corn or oatmeal into the water. The heat of the water cooked the mush which coated the tubes and sealed the leak. Once, years later, I had a car of another make of great age and dignity. My mother was coming to visit me and I was to meet her at the railroad station. My radiator was leaking pretty badly, so, automatically, I put in a handful of oatmeal, forgetting that times had changed. You see, the Model T circulated its water by a principle, part magic, part accident, and part physics, but this other car had a water pump—a needless and stupid innovation. This car ran so cool that it took a long time for the mush to cook. I got to the station, installed my dignified mother in the front seat and started home. Naturally there was no radiator cap; we considered such things a nuisance, since we were always losing them anyway. Suddenly there was a sloppy explosion and a Bikini mushroom of oatmeal rose into the air. Part of it splashed on the windshield, but the larger part on my mother’s beflowered hat.

  We drove through downtown Los Angeles erupting mush, my mother scraping it out of her eyes. I never saw so much mush. I never saw my mother so mad. It goes to show the kind of habits you got into from driving the Model T.

  The attitude of girls toward IT was supercilious, but realistic. They would have preferred to go in something else, but mainly they wanted to go. I think they must have known that a swain’s attention was split; he might be saying with a kind of worldliness, “I think you’re pretty,” but in his mind it was “I wonder what that sound is? Lord God, has she kicked out another bearing?” A girl starting out in a Model T never knew whether love or mechanics would be the result, and if it happened to be both, well, crankcase oil looks very bad on a white dress. The Model T was as important to romance as the girl was. We never quite eliminated her.

  The American restlessness took on new force. No one was satisfied with where he was; he was on his way someplace else; just as soon as he got that timer adjusted. No doorbell dry cells were ever safe. And all of these things were important, but most important of all was the spiritual association of kids and motors.

  When I consider how much time it took to keep IT running, I wonder if there was time for anything else, and maybe there wasn’t. The Model T was not a car as we know them now—it was a person—crotchety and mean, frolicsome and full of jokes—just when you were ready to kill yourself, it would run five miles with no gasoline whatever. I understood IT, but as I said before, IT understood me, too. It magnified some of my faults, corrected others. It worked on the sin of impatience; it destroyed the sin of vanity. And it helped to establish an almost Oriental philosophy of acceptance.

  In the years I had IT, no mechanic ever touched it, no shadow of a garage ever passed over it. I do not recall any new part ever being bought for it. It’s a sentimental memory with me. I know, of course, that things do not cease to exist in some form. Metal may change its composition through rust or blast furnace, but all of its atoms remain somewhere, and I have wondered sadly about IT. Maybe its essence was blasted gloriously in a bomb or a shell. Perhaps it lies humbly on the cross-ties while streamlined trains roll over it. It might be a girder of a bridge, or even something to support a tiny piece of the UN building in New York. And just perhaps, in the corner of some field, the grass and the yellow mustard may grow taller and greener than elsewhere and, if you were to dig down, you might find the red of rust under the roots, and that might be IT, enriching the soil, going home to its mother, the earth.

  IV.

  ON WRITING

  BEING A WRITER WAS, for Steinbeck, not just an occupation; it was his passion, his life, his joy. Although he often worried about his work and suffered misgivings, he was happiest when he was writing. “My basic rationale might be that I like to write,” he said in “Rationale.” “I feel good when I am doing it—better than when I am not. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythms of words and sentences.” Indeed, his relation to his writing at times approached a kind of reverent fascination: “Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. It is like a woman trying to remember what childbirth is like. She never can” (SLL 360).

  He commonly used journal entries and letters in the morning to warm up to his work, and in extensive journals (two have been published, Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters [1969] and Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath” [1989]) he speaks in a variety of voices, confessional to notational; muses on the processes and problems of writing; reflects on what he wrote the previous day and will write on the day to come; and notes his physical and emotional state in connection with whatever he was working on. While working on The Grapes of Wrath, he recorded both the exhilaration and despair of writing: “This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. And I can do it. I feel very strong to do it. Today for instance into the picture is the evening and the cooking of the rabbits . . .” (WD 25). His imagination was strongly visual, and when writing at his most concentrated, he wrote in a tiny scrawl, sometimes in pen, later in pencil, seldom deleting words, caught up in the intensity of his craft. Writing also drained him, filled him with self-doubt: “This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy,” he wrote later in his Grapes journal. “And I’m frightened that I’m losing this book in the welter of other things” (WD 76, 77). But there are many more passages in both the journals and his voluminous letters that are contemplative and philosophical, insisting again and again on the significance of the written word.

  Perhaps because he was always working at the impossible, always modest about his accomplishments, forever nursing his own insecurities, he was extremely sensitive to criticism, even buffering himself by anticipating negative critical responses. “The critics will scream shame at me . . .” he wrote in his
notebook after receiving galleys for an early book, To a God Unknown. One problem for Steinbeck throughout his career was that he was an experimenter, and he doubted that critics would appreciate what he was doing. “My experience in writing has followed an almost invariable pattern,” he observes in “Critics, Critics, Burning Bright.” “Since by the process of writing a book I have outgrown that book, and since I like to write, I have not written two books alike.” This “endless experiment with his medium,” as he calls it, conflicted with the tendency—which he complained about frequently—of critics to pigeonhole authors and to continue always to judge them on that basis. The straitjacket that The Grapes of Wrath forced him into was that of a social and political activist. Six years after the publication of Grapes, he published Cannery Row (1945), and critics like Edmund Wilson were disappointed that it wasn’t serious enough: “When this watcher of life should exalt us to the vision of art, he simply sings ‘Mother Machree’ ” (McElrath 278). Orville Prescott in the New York Times concurred: “Ever since his triumph with The Grapes of Wrath Mr. Steinbeck has been coasting. He still is” (McElrath 277).

  In 1950, five years after Cannery Row, reviewers came down hard on him for the play Burning Bright, which was probably the most experimental piece of writing he ever attempted. By this time he was fed up by the unwillingness of the critics to examine this new thing with any objectivity, and in response he wrote “Critics, Critics Burning Bright,” a fairly levelheaded response to what he believed were wrongheaded reactions to his play. Then in 1955 Pascal Covici gave Steinbeck a scrapbook “of all or nearly all the criticisms of a volume of mine” (“Critics—from a Writer’s Viewpoint” 20), and he was prompted to reflect, once again, on criticism and critics in general. Steinbeck’s sensitivity to criticism did not lead him very often to react to specific critics and their attacks—probably a wiser course to take, as his wife Elaine always advised him. But when he did respond, it was in part out of anger, in part out of fun. “There was a time, a lustier time, when critics were answered and everyone had fun.” Besides, he added, “I like a good fight. I find it healthy” (quoted in Benson 814). The truth of the matter is that most of Steinbeck’s novels received largely positive reviews, and even the least popular books had their champions. And on the rare occasion when Steinbeck himself wrote criticism, he did so with fairness and verve.

  One thing that Steinbeck was particularly proud of was his invention of the play-novelette form, which he used on three occasions: Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, and Burning Bright. “The work I am doing now,” he wrote to his agents in April 1936 as he was composing Of Mice and Men, “is neither a novel nor a play but it is a kind of playable novel. Written in novel form but so scened and set that it can be played as it stands. It wouldn’t be like other plays since it does not follow the formal acts but uses chapter for curtains. . . . Plays are hard to read so this will make both a novel and play as it stands” (Shillinglaw xv-xvi). He expanded on the virtues of this form twice, in 1938 for Stage magazine (in a piece originally titled “The Novel Might Benefit . . . ,” reprinted here as “The Play-Novelette”) and again in his “Author’s Foreword” to the novelette publication of Burning Bright.

  Like all writers, Steinbeck was fond of books, “one of the very few authentic magics our species has created.” He did not think that the book would disappear, be replaced by “the quick, cheap, easy forms of entertainment,” for as he says in “Some Random and Randy Thoughts on Books,” “No television show is a friend as a book is a friend. And no other form, save . . . music, invites the participation of the receiver as a book does.” He was not, however, a collector of books for their physical selves. “I have never asked for nor wanted an autographed book.” Indeed, he marveled at those willing to pay premiums for rare books or special editions, a willingness that seemed to have little to do with their contents. Pascal Covici, his editor, loved the physical book, and on several occasions during Steinbeck’s career he talked the author into letting him publish special editions. In a letter to librarian-critic Lawrence Clark Powell, Steinbeck noted:

  I was expecting a howl about the price of The Red Pony. I wouldn’t pay ten dollars for a Gutenberg Bible. In this case, I look at it this way. Covici loves beautiful books. These are old stories reprinted and they don’t amount to much anyway, so if he wants to make a pretty book, why not? The funny thing is that they’re oversubscribed, about five hundred. I didn’t know there were that many damn fools in the world—with 10 bucks, I mean. I don’t let Covici dictate one word about how I write and I try never to make a suggestion about publishing to him. (SLL 139)

  Steinbeck comes out squarely for the cheap paperback, the “twenty-five-cent book.”

  The Play-Novelette

  THE BOOK Of Mice and Men was an experiment and, in what it set out to do, it was a failure. The purpose of this article is to set forth the nature of the experiment and to consider whether it might not, with greater care and experience, succeed.

  Simply stated, Of Mice and Men was an attempt to write a novel that could be played from the lines, or a play that could be read. The reading of plays is a specialized kind of reading, and the technique of reading plays must be acquired with some difficulty. The tools are a visual imagination and an unconscious awareness of dramatic symbols so complete that the reaction to them is automatic. These two implements are not very widely possessed; or, if they are developable, are not widely developed. The small distribution of plays intended to be read indicates the almost aversion most people have for reading them.

  A play written in the physical technique of the novel would have a number of advantages. Being more persuasive than the play form, it would go a great way toward making the play easy to read for people who cannot and will not learn to absorb the play symbols. It is much easier for the average reader to absorb without difficulty the easy “he said” manner of the novel than the “character, colon, parenthesis, adverb, close parenthesis, dialogue” manner of the play.

  In the second place the novel’s ability to describe scene and people in detail would not only make for a better visual picture to the reader, but would be of value to director, stage designer, and actor, for these latter would know more about the set and characters. More than this, it would be possible for the playwright by this method to set his tone much more powerfully than he can in the limited time, place, scene method of the play. And this tone is vastly important. Shaw, to a certain extent, uses the introduction for this purpose. But the novel form would integrate tone and play in one entity, would allow the reader, whether actor, director or lay reader, a sense of the whole much more complete than he can get from the present play form.

  So much for the value of such a method for the drama. But the novel itself would be interfered with by such a method in only one way, and that is that it would be short. Actually the discipline, the necessity of sticking to the theme (in fact of knowing what the theme is), the brevity and necessity of holding an audience could influence the novel only for the better. In a play, sloppy writing is impossible, for an audience will not sit through it. Wandering, discussion, and essay are impossible because an audience becomes restless. It must not be supposed that I am advocating this method for the whole field of the novel. I am not. The novel of contemplation, of characterization through analysis, of philosophic discussion is not affected at all by this form.

  The problem is rendered very easy of approach at the present time. For some years the novel has increasingly taken on the attributes of the drama. Thus the hard-finish, objective form which is the direction of the modern novel not only points in the direction of the drama, but seems unconsciously to have aimed at it. To read an objective novel is to see a little play in your head. All right, why not make it so you can see it on a stage? This experiment, then, is really only a conclusion toward which the novel has been unconsciously heading for some time.

  The final argument in favor of such a form is a little more difficult to state. For whatever reason, and to s
tate a reason would be to start an argument, the recent tendency of writers has been to deal in those themes and those scenes which are best understood and appreciated by groups of people. There are many experiences which cannot be understood in solitude. War cannot be understood by an individual, nor can many forms of religious experience. A mob cannot be understood by a person sitting alone in an armchair, but it can be understood by that same person in the mob. You rarely see a man listening to a radio broadcast of a prizefight jump yelling to his feet, but he would be doing just that if he were at the prizefight. All the sounds are there, but the thing that is missing is the close, almost physical contact with the other people at the prizefight. A man alone under a reading light simply cannot experience Waiting for Lefty on anywhere near the same plane as he can when the whole audience around him is caught in the force of that play. I remember seeing the Theatre Union in San Francisco improvising. To have read the thing would have been absurd, for it would have consisted of grunts, little cries, and half sentences; but to see it, with other people about you seeing it too, was to feel your skin crawl, and to feel yourself drawn into the group that was playing.

  Now if it is true, and I believe it is, that the preoccupation of the modern novelist lies in these themes which are most poignantly understood by a group, that novelist limits the possibility of being understood by making it impossible for groups to be exposed to his work. In the reading of a novel there are involved only the author, the novel, and the reader; but in the seeing of a play there are the author, the play, the players, and the whole audience, and each one of these contributes a vital part to the whole effect.