America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

  It requires a self-esteem to receive—not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

  Once Ed said to me, “For a very long time I didn’t like myself.” It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. “It was a very difficult time,” he said, “and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually,” he said, “I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people did like me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right.”

  This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person “Ed” as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking. They cannot see themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.

  Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by any of the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad.

  Ed’s gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and gave him information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.

  In conversation you found yourself telling him things—thoughts, conjectures, hypotheses—and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.

  Then Ed would say, “Yes, that’s so. That’s the way it might be and besides—” and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.

  Although his creativeness lay in receiving, that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his—it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position toward you. For this reason no one was ever cut off from him. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.

  I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt one another just to keep our ego-chins above water.

  There it is. That’s all I can set down about Ed Ricketts. I don’t know whether any clear picture has emerged. Thinking back and remembering has not done what I hoped it might. It has not laid the ghost.

  The picture that remains is a haunting one. It is the time just before dusk. I can see Ed finishing his work in the laboratory. He covers his instruments and puts his papers away. He rolls down the sleeves of his wool shirt and puts on his old brown coat. I see him go out and get in his beat-up old car and slowly drive away in the evening.

  I guess I’ll have that with me all my life.

  Ernie Pyle

  IT’S A HARD THING to write about a dead man who doesn’t seem dead to you. Ernie Pyle didn’t want to go back to the war. When he left France, he set down his disgust and fear and weariness. He thought he could rest a little, but he couldn’t. People told him what to do and what he should do. He could have overcome that but he couldn’t overcome his own sense of responsibility. He had become identified with every soldier in the army. Ernie died every time a man was killed, and his little body shriveled every time a man was wounded. He’d done it so often, it is probable that his own death was just a repetition. In Africa he said, “The percentage is pulling down on me. You stand in the line of fire long enough and you’re going to get hit. It’s in the figures.” And after that he went through Italy and France. And his percentage grew smaller and smaller. In San Francisco before he went to the Pacific he seemed a little numb. The rest hadn’t rested him. His eyes were deep and tired and restless. He sat with a glass of whiskey in his hand and his jaw muscles were tight. He looked sick. The phone rang all the time. He must speak, he must write this and this. And he was utterly weary. “I don’t know why I have to go back but I do,” he said. “It’s my business.” He was wearing a new uniform and cap. “These are a waste of money,” he said, “I won’t need them.” His percentage had disappeared and he knew it. And he didn’t resent it. He had done everything else with the soldiers except this last thing. “I don’t know whether I can write anymore,” he said. “I thought I’d get rested but I didn’t. Anyway, it will be warm in the Philippines.” He had made his usual neat arrangements—old friends, written to or telephoned. Gifts sent or delivered. He was always like that. When he got back from France, he came in excitedly with a scarf. “A real French silk handkerchief. I bought it in Paris right after the city was taken.” The scarf was bad rayon. The French salesman had started early. “It’s beautiful, Ernie.”

  “There was a soldier with only one leg, on the hospital ship,” Ernie said. “He was hopping about like a cricket—up and down stairs. It was wonderful. I can’t stand hurt men,” he said. “I’m going to Albuquerque and forget the whole damn thing. There’s nothing to write about. It’s the same thing over and over. I’m through. Maybe I’ll start going around the country the way I used to.

  “It’s just piled up dead men,” he said, “millions of them. And it’s crazy because the war is over. They can’t win. All they can do is kill more people. Jesus I’m tired.” Then he saw the President and Stevenson and Forrestal and lots of congressmen. Everyone expected him to go back. Everyone except Ernie thought Ernie was imperishable. But he knew his time was up. It’s in his letters and in his last articles. He was so tired and disgusted that he almost welcomed it. In the San Francisco Hotel he poured himself a good stiff drink. “Got to go now,” he said. “They’re going to give me some new shots. I’m half blood and half serum already.” He went out of the hotel and a woman shouted—“There’s Ernie Pyle!” A crowd collected about him and he worked his way slowly through the milling group—a tired little man with his percentage all run out—going to toss his carcass on the great heap.

  Tom Collins

  THE FIRST TIME I saw Windsor Drake it was evening, and it was raining. I drove into the migrant camp, the wheels of my car throwing muddy water. The lines of sodden, dripping tents stretched away from me in the darkness. The temporary office was crowded with damp men and women, just standing under a roof, and sitting at a littered table was Windsor Drake, a little man in a damp, frayed white suit. The crowding people looked at him all the time. Just stood and looked at him. He had a small moustache, his graying, black hair stood up on his head like the quills of a frightened porcupine, and his large, dark eyes, tired beyond sleepiness, the kind of tired that won’t let you sleep even if you have the time and a bed.

  I had a letter to Windsor Drake. It was passed on to him by the crowding people, since moving through them was out of the question. He read the letter, stood up and said, “Let’s go to my shack and make some coffee.”

  The crowd parted and let him through, and we walked through the rain to his little shack. The coffee got made all right, but never quite drunk, for reports began coming in from the dripping tents. There was an epidemic in
the camp,—in the muddy, flooded camp. In that camp of two thousand souls, every kind of winter disease had developed; measles and whooping cough; mumps; pneumonia and throat infections. And this little man was trying to do everything. He had to. There was no one else but the people in the camp. Even if they wanted to help they couldn’t for want of knowledge.

  We tried to drink the coffee. A man ran up. Riot in the sewing room. Over we splashed. The sewing room was the measles room. Forty speckled children lying on blankets on the floor. Cloth tacked over the windows to protect children’s eyes from the daylight. In the doorway, a huge, bare-armed woman stood, while a little assault developed in the mud in front of her. She had instructions from Windsor to keep uninfected visitors out and she was doing it to the outrage of families and neighbors who always visited with sick people. The riot was settled, infections explained. We went back to our coffee, reheated it, poured the cups full. But hell broke loose in a sanitary unit. A new-come woman, contrary to regulations, was standing on the toilet seat besieged by a furious group of women who only recently learned not to stand on the seats. And Windsor Drake settled that.

  We went back to our coffee, heated it again. And all evening it went on. A man beat his wife. New children came down with the measles and had to be separated from their parents and taken to the sewing room. Nerves were on edge in the pouring rain. Fights started out of nothing and sometimes ended bloodily. And Windsor Drake trotted back and forth explaining, coaxing, now and then threatening, trying to keep peace in the miserable, wet slum until daylight should come. His white trousers were splashed mud to the knees, and his big eyes had that burning tiredness beyond sleep. Near midnight the camp gradually quieted out of sheer exhaustion. Then Windsor put a battered skillet on the little stove and dropped some bacon in it.

  I dropped to sleep in my chair. A baby’s crying near at hand awakened me. Windsor was gone. He came back in a few moments and stood turning the burnt bacon.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Baby lost the breast. Mother was too tired to wake up.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Found the breast and gave it back to the baby.”

  “Didn’t the mother wake up then?”

  “No—too tired. Been working all day in the rain.”

  Later in the year Windsor and I traveled together, sat in the ditches with the migrant workers, lived and ate with them. We heard a thousand miseries and a thousand jokes. We ate fried dough and sow belly, worked with the sick and the hungry, listened to complaints and little triumphs.

  But when I think of Windsor Drake, I remembered first the tired eyes, and I think of the baby that lost the breast in the night, and the mother too tired to wake up.

  Robert Capa

  I KNOW NOTHING about photography. What I have to say about Capa’s work is strictly from the point of view of a layman, and the specialists must bear with me. It does seem to me that Capa has proved beyond all doubt that the camera need not be a cold mechanical device. Like the pen, it is as good as the man who uses it. It can be the extension of mind and heart.

  Capa’s pictures were made in his brain—the camera only completed them. You can no more mistake his work than you can the canvas of a fine painter. Capa knew what to look for and what to do with it when he found it. He knew, for example, that you cannot photograph war because it is largely an emotion. But he did photograph that emotion by shooting beside it. He could show the horror of a whole people in the face of a child. His camera caught and held emotion.

  Capa’s work is itself the picture of a great heart and an overwhelming compassion. No one can take his place. No one can take the place of any fine artist, but we are fortunate to have in his pictures the quality of the man.

  I worked and traveled with Capa a great deal. He may have had closer friends but he had none who loved him more. It was his pleasure to seem casual and careless about his work. He was not. His pictures are not accidents. The emotion in them did not come by chance. He could photograph motion and gaiety and heartbreak. He could photograph thought. He made a world and it was Capa’s world. Note how he captures the endlessness of the Russian landscape with one long road and one single human. See how his lens could peer through the eyes into the mind of a man.

  Capa for all his casualness was a worrier. In Russia he had to send his film to be developed by the Soviet Government. He fidgeted and fried until the negatives came back. And then nothing was right. They were over- or underdeveloped. The grain was wrong. He would clasp his brow and yell with anguish. He cared all right. He cared very much.

  The greatness of Capa is twofold. We have his pictures, a true and vital record of our time—ugly and beautiful, set down by the mind of an artist. But Capa had another work which may be even more important. He gathered young men about him, encouraged, instructed, even fed and clothed them, but best he taught them respect for their art and integrity in its performance. He proved to them that a man can live by this medium and still be true to himself. And never once did he try to get them to take his kind of picture. Thus the effect of Capa will be found in the men who worked with him. They will carry a little part of Capa all their lives and perhaps hand him on to their young men.

  It is very hard to think of being without Capa. I don’t think I have accepted that fact yet. But I suppose we should be thankful that there is so much of him with us still.

  Adlai Stevenson

  WHEN I FIRST MET Mr. Roosevelt he had been President for some time. I said, “Mr. President, I’m one American who doesn’t want a Government job.”

  He laughed and said, “In my experience, you’re the only one.”

  Mr. Stevenson, I still don’t want a Government job.

  A year and a half ago, I had never heard of Mr. Stevenson. A year ago I knew his name and only remembered it because of the unusual first name. Until the convention I had never heard nor read a Stevensonian word. And now we hurry through dinner to hear him on radio or to see him on television. We fight over the morning paper with the “full text.” And I can’t remember ever reading a political speech with pleasure—sometimes with admiration, yes, but never with pleasure.

  I was in Europe at convention time. Europe was, as nearly as we could tell, pretty solidly behind Eisenhower. So was I, as solid as possible. Then gradually the newspapers in France and England and Italy began to print remarks by a man named Stevenson, first a phrase, then a sentence, then a paragraph. When I left England very recently nearly every newspaper was printing a daily Stevenson box on the front page. Europe has switched to Stevenson. So have I. And I have been drawn only by his speeches. They are unique in my experience and from the reaction of the audiences—and I have only seen them on television—the speeches are a new experience to everyone. The listeners set up no hullabaloo. The speaker is never canceled out by emotional roars of inattentive applause. People seem to resent applause because in the noise they might miss something. I’ve read that the meetings are quiet because the audiences are not moved. Then I’ve watched them leaning forward, their eyes never leaving the speaker’s face and turning irritably toward any distraction. They’re listening, all right, listening as an audience does to fine theater or fine music or fine thinking.

  It is one of our less admirable traits that we always underrate the intelligence of the “people.” The speaker never includes himself as one of the “people.” It is always those others. The story is told of a movie producer who argued that people would not understand a part of a film he was previewing. His nine-year-old boy spoke up, saying, “Dad, I understand it.”

  The producer whirled on him and shouted, “We are not making pictures for nine-year-old boys.”

  Now I read in the opposition press that Stevenson is talking over the heads of the people. I have read the speeches not once but several times. The words are small and direct, the ideas are clear. I can understand them and I don’t think I am more intelligent than the so-called “people.” I have come to the conclusion that the fear in St
evenson’s opponents is not that the people don’t understand him, but that they do.

  Throughout our whole history we have been in favor of humor. To be against humor was like being against mother love. But I read now that humor has been made an official sin. Anything effective is a sin to your opponent. Traditionally, political humor has followed a pattern. The speaker made a joke which had been carefully inspected to see that it had nothing whatever to do with the subject he intended to discuss. The flat little joke got a titter of laughter and the speaker knew that his audience was warmed up. He flopped without transition into the body of his speech, hoping that for a few sentences his listeners would still be listening for another joke. Audiences are pretty clever, though, and they rarely fall for this method.

  Stevenson has changed the technique. He draws his humor from his subject. His jokes, far from obscuring his message, enlighten it. This makes him doubly dangerous to an opponent, for his listeners not only listen, they remember and they repeat. I don’t recall any other speeches that have made people unsatisfied with a digest. We want the thing in the man’s own words.

  Being a writer, I have had a bit of trouble here and there, and it has been my experience that when I have been accused of some particularly gaudy sin, my accuser has felt some kind of knife and is striking back. I can understand why the opposition hates Mr. Stevenson’s humor. They are very busy licking their wounds. In our whole political history I can recall only one man who used humor effectively. That was Abraham Lincoln and he, too, was excoriated by his opponents. In his time also humor was a sin.

  There is a further devastating effect of the Stevensonian speech, which his opponents cannot admit. He makes their efforts sound so ill-conceived, clumsily thought-out and dull. The weighty sarcasms, moral indignations, the flaggy patriotisms and dingy platitudes which have been perfectly good in other elections are covered with gray dust in this year. It is very hard to follow a great act with a Minsky blackout.