America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  Now and then in a group the question arises, Does Stevenson write his own speeches? I don’t know, but as a writer I know that only one man writes those speeches. There may be people working on ideas and organization and so forth, but I am sure that either Stevenson writes every word of the speeches or some other one man writes every word of them. Individuality is in every line. I don’t think it could be imitated.

  I have dwelt only on Mr. Stevenson’s speeches because that is all I know about the man. There are only four approaches in knowing a man. What does he look like? What has he done? What does he say—in other words think—and, last and most important, as a conditioner—what has he done to or for me?

  I know Mr. Stevenson only from pictures of him, from reading his history and from his speeches. I was for Eisenhower, knew about him and liked him. I did not switch to Stevenson because of physical appearance, surely. Neither candidate is any great shucks in that department. I could not have changed on a basis of past achievements because Eisenhower’s contribution is second to none in the world and certainly overshadows the record of the Governor of Illinois, no matter how good it may have been. I have switched entirely because of the speeches.

  A man cannot think muddled and write clear. Day by day it has seemed to me that Eisenhower’s speeches have become more formless and mixed up and uncertain. I don’t know why this is. Maybe he is being worried and mauled by too many dissident advisers who in fighting each other are destroying their candidate. Eisenhower seems like a punch-drunk fighter who comes out of his corner on wavery legs and throws his first punch at the referee. Again, Eisenhower seems to have lost the ability to take any kind of stand on any subject. We’re pretty sure that he still favors children or dogs but that maybe he would like the states to take them over, too—anything to avoid making a decision. He is rather firm on those issues which are still handled by the Deity and he has a sense of relief that this is so.

  Stevenson, on the other hand, has touched no political, economic, or moral subject on which he has not taken a clear and open stand even to the point of bearding selfish groups to their faces.

  I do not know, but I can imagine the pressures on candidates for the Presidency. They must be dreadful, but they must be equally dreadful for both candidates. With equal pressures we have seen in a pitiful few months the Eisenhower mind crumble into uncertainty, retire into generalities, fumble with friendships and juggle alliances. At the same time Stevenson has moved serenely on, clarifying his position, holding to his line and never being drawn nor driven from his nongeneralized ideals.

  And if the pressures on a candidate are powerful, how much more so must they be on a President? I find I am for the man I think can take the pressures best and can handle them without split loyalties, expedient friendships or dead animals—cats or albatrosses. In a word I think Stevenson is more durable, socially, politically and morally. Neither candidate has or is likely to do anything to or for me personally. And I can’t hurt or help either of them. As a writer I love the clear, clean writing of Stevenson. As a man I like his intelligent, humorous, logical, civilized mind. And I strongly suspect what we can’t possibly know until November. Americans are real mean when they go behind that voting-booth curtain. But I suspect there are millions just like me who have switched to Stevenson as the greater man and as potentially the greater President.

  Henry Fonda

  AFTER I SO BLITHELY agreed to write a piece about Hank Fonda, and after it was too late to withdraw, I realized, with a certain chagrin, that I don’t know any of the things expected in such a piece—the personal, insulting, warm and malicious material columnists thrive on and readers have grown to expect. What I know about Fonda anyone can know simply by hearing and seeing him on stage or on film.

  Certainly I have heard the gossip by which people reassure themselves that if not better than the subject, they are at least no worse. I have heard that he is moody, introspective, difficult and brooding. But, hell! I’ve heard the same things about myself and I know for a fact that I am easygoing, open, kindly and perhaps a little beautiful, so why should I believe things about Hank I know to be false about myself?

  I know Henry Fonda as an actor, a devoted, hardworking, responsible one with a harsh urge toward perfection. Not long ago a friend loaned me a sixteen-millimeter print of the film The Grapes of Wrath, made well over twenty years ago. I was greatly reluctant to look at it. Times pass: we change; the urgency departs, and this is called “dating.” But I did thread the thing on my home projector and sat back to weather it out. Then a lean, stringy, dark-faced piece of electricity walked out on the screen, and he had me. I believed my own story again. It was fresh and happening and good. Hank can do that. He carries with him that excitement which cannot be learned—as many an actor has found to his sorrow—but he backs up his gift with grueling, conscientious work and agony of self-doubt.

  Another thing about Fonda that should be obvious is the care he has exercised to keep from being typed. When his name is on the playbill, you have no way of knowing what it will be about. He could go without apparent effort from The Grapes of Wrath to Mister Roberts to Point of No Return. I said apparent effort by design because I know the enormous effort and care and study that go into his easy and relaxed performances.

  Once I was working on a short, to me amusing little novel designed to be translated to the stage. I discussed it with Hank, and he said he would like to play it. “But it’s a musical and I can’t sing,” he said. “Never mind, I’ll take singing lessons.” And he did, for a year. Meanwhile, I was praying that he might not learn to sing too well, because I remembered that Walter Huston, who couldn’t sing, did “September Song” better than anyone has ever done it since. And Harrison couldn’t sing in My Fair Lady either.

  At the end of a year of singing lessons, Hank auditioned for the part and was turned down by the composer, who was understandably interested in the music. The show flopped dismally and we will never know whether the Fonda kind of magic would have brought it to life. One thing I do know. It would certainly have been believable and consequently better.

  I suppose one human never really knows much about another. My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict.

  Woody Guthrie

  THE SONGS of the working people have always been their sharpest statement and the one statement which cannot be destroyed. You can burn books, buy newspapers, you can guard against handbills and pamphlets, but you cannot prevent singing.

  For some reason it has always been lightly thought that singing people are happy people. Nothing could be more untrue. The greatest and most enduring folk songs are wrung from unhappy people—the spirituals of the slaves which say, in effect, “It is hopeless here, maybe in heaven it will be nicer.” We have the grunting songs of the weight-lifting stevedores which tell of a little pleasure on Saturday night. The cowboy songs are wails of loneliness.

  Working people sing of their hopes and of their troubles, but the rhythms have the beat of work—the long and short bawls of the sea shanties with tempos of capstan or sheets, the lifting rhythms, the swinging rhythms and the slow, rolling songs of the Southwest built on the hoofbeats of a walking horse. The work is the song and the song is the people.

  There is great relief in saying a thing that hurts—I remember a very little boy who was going to the barber for his first time. He was terrified and his eyes were filled with tears. He stood very stiffly on the curb and sang—

  “They think I will be scared,

  They all think I will be scared,

  But I will not,

  But I will not cry,

  Oh! No! I will not cry.”

  Songs are the statements of a people. You can learn more about people by lis
tening to their songs than in any other way, for into the songs go all the hopes and hurts, the angers, fears, the wants and aspirations.

  A few years ago when I sat in the camps of the people from the Dust Bowl when hunger was everywhere, I heard the singing and I knew that this was a great race, for, while there was loneliness and trouble in their singing, there was also fierceness and the will to fight. A man might sing “Goin’ down this road a-feelin’ bad,” but his next line was “Cause I aint gonna be treated that-a-way.”

  In a cotton strike a woman spoke and her voice chanted a song—

  “My man is in jail for striking—

  It aint agin’ th’ law,

  My boy is in jail for striking—

  It aint agin’ th’ law.

  I say—Plead Not Guilty!

  An’ rot they dam jails down!”

  And that for a statement of survival has not often been equaled.

  It would be a good idea to listen very closely to these songs, to listen for the rhythms of work, and over them, the words of anger and survival.

  Woody is just Woody. Thousands of people do not know he has any other name. He is just a voice and a guitar. He sings the songs of a people and I suspect that he is, in a way, that people. Harsh-voiced and nasal, his guitar hanging like a tire iron on a rusty rim, there is nothing sweet about Woody, and there is nothing sweet about the songs he sings. But there is something more important for those who will listen. There is the will of a people to endure and fight against oppression. I think we call this the American Spirit.

  VI.

  JOURNALIST ABROAD

  JOHN STEINBECK was a restless man long before he traveled with Charley. Growing up, he did not identify with his stolid hometown of Salinas, but rode forth on his pony, Jill, to explore the hills surrounding the gray little town of 2,500. At eighteen he left for Stanford University, returning home only for brief family visits. Never intending to complete degree requirements, he dropped in and out of the university, at one point attempting to sail to China on a merchant sailing ship. In 1925, he left Stanford for good and sailed to New York City and freedom, only to return to California broke a few months later. The first time he made real money on a book, Tortilla Flat, he and his first wife, Carol, took off for Mexico, a country he came to love and visit with some regularity: “There’s an illogic there I need,” he insisted in an unpublished letter to Monterey friends, the Lovejoys. Two years after their first trip—establishing a pattern he would maintain for decades, a long trip about every other year—the couple went to Scandinavia and Russia. In the 1940s, he traveled with greater frequency—to the Sea of Cortez; overseas as a war correspondent; to Mexico to film The Pearl and then to research Emiliano Zapata’s life; to postwar Russia with photographer Robert Capa. When, in December 1950, he married his third wife, the plucky, intelligent, and equally peripatetic Elaine Steinbeck, he spent months in Europe, England, the Caribbean, Asia. Indeed from the mid-1940s to 1967—his final trip abroad—John Steinbeck was, in truth, a citizen of the world, both because his books were read in nearly every country and because he spent about as much time out of the United States as in it. “You said that this [Pacific Grove cottage] was my home but I have thought about it deeply,” he wrote to Elaine in 1949, months before the two married. “I think I have no ‘place’ home. Home is people and where you work well.

  I have homes everywhere and many I have not even seen yet. That is perhaps why I am restless. I haven’t seen all of my homes” (SLL 382).

  This restlessness may be the least understood, least appreciated aspect of Steinbeck’s career. Assuming Thoreau’s perspective, some readers wish that Steinbeck “traveled much in California” and cultivated always the land and people of his birthplace. But unlike William Faulkner, at home only in Mississippi, or Ernest Hemingway, at home wherever the stakes were high, Steinbeck was both rooted and rootless. Whimsical self-portraits capture that inner tension, as in his first letter to Elaine: “This has been my tragedy—with the soul to wear a scarlet-lined opera cape and small sword I have the physical misfortune always to be handed a hod” (SLL 357). His personal rubber stamp, used at the end of letters or in books he inscribed, was “Pigasus,” a winged pig, below which was written in Latin, “To the stars on the wings of a pig.” Steinbeck was ever the man in khaki, tinkering with a screwdriver, digging in the garden, his mind on St. Peter’s and the Peloponnesian War. “Your life sounds good to me,” he wrote to his reclusive, scholarly college roommate, Carlton Sheffield. “I have the indolence for it but have never been able to practice it. Too jittery and nervous. And yet every instinct aims toward just such a life. I guess I inherited from my mother the desire to do four things at once” (SLL 457). It may be that this California novelist had to reverse direction, and, like Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway, lay claim to a new frontier, the East Coast and beyond. Perhaps Steinbeck didn’t so much abandon his native state as reenact the “westerning” spirit he describes in his fiction—freedom and movement and self-determination. He may well be the quintessential Westerner, the maverick.

  In 1952, having written the book that gave closure to his California upbringing, East of Eden, he took Elaine on their first trip to Europe, she as photographer, he as writer. To help finance their six-month stay, he had his agents contact Collier’s, a popular magazine appealing to a middle-class audience. With the advent of television, Collier’s was struggling to retain its readership and welcomed the chance to run brief essays by a famous author. And Steinbeck, worried about paying alimony, child support, and his own expenses, welcomed the chance to write for pay. The work did not go well, however. After his first two pieces were rejected, he wrote to Elizabeth Otis in dismay: “. . . in writing for someone you must first, during and after, keep an invisible editor sitting on the typewriter shaking an admonitory finger in your face” (SLL 447). He had voiced the same frustration before—concern over meeting fixed deadlines that weren’t his own: “I was going to do some articles for the [Herald ] Tribune but just haven’t wanted to,” he had written Pascal Covici in 1944 during a trip to Mexico. “Can’t get coagulated. Newspaper work isn’t natural to me. And while I could turn out the wordage, it wouldn’t be worth printing, like so much of my work overseas” (Benson 534).

  For a man who wrote scores of articles for newspapers and magazines, it seems an odd position to take. In fact, writing to order sometimes came more readily—during the war he had met newspaper deadlines without complaint, and he did eventually submit three superb articles on Europe to Collier’s, “The Soul and Guts of France,” “Duel Without Pistols” (reprinted in Part II), and “I Go Back to Ireland.” And as he gradually found a more personal voice, the articles seemingly became less of a chore. In the late 1950s and 1960s he often wrote newspaper articles as letters, and that gave him even greater creative license. The writer who honed an objective stance throughout the 1930s and during the war, who never mentioned that his wife Carol accompanied the crew on the Sea of Cortez trip and said little about himself, would, with greater frequency, include references to his own actions and those of Elaine, his “elegant moglie” as an Italian paper described her. They were a team, as were he and Capa, as were he and Charley. Elaine’s actions and opinions, her charm and her flair—all noted with humor and affection—serve as a foil for his own reflections. Steinbeck’s journalism of the 1950s reflects his growing comfort with self in the world.

  Some of his best overseas nonfiction is about France—particularly Paris, where he spent the bulk of his time. Steinbeck’s little-known 1954 series of seventeen articles written for Le Figaro, a stylish morning paper featuring the arts, offered French readers a “tourist’s” perspective on the city: “I will offer you Paris perhaps not as it is, but as I see it,” he wrote in the manuscript for his first article of the series he called “One American in Paris,” translated into French for publication. The articles range freely over what he saw in the city, what he did with his two young sons, what happened to him, and what he though
t at the time. His was the “uninstructed eye,” he insists, “which sees things the expert doesn’t notice. . . . Mine is a completely naïve eye on Paris—but it is an eye of delight.” In fact, he had set forth his writerly terrain two years earlier when he wrote one of his most engaging travel articles, “The Soul and Guts of France”: “I do not know what the people of France are thinking, but I do know to a certain extent what the farmers, winegrowers, teachers and kids of the little village of Poligny are thinking and talking about. This seems important to me. People like these are the soul and guts of France.”

  Not only did Steinbeck write best about ordinary people and their daily lives, but he also wrote best when he narrowed his scope, found a slice of life that appealed. “I find I have to write about little things,” he wrote Covici in 1952. “I can’t write about big things. It never comes out good” (Benson 724). The Le Figaro series is, in fact, somewhat uneven, in part because he doesn’t always stick to the “little things” that appeal—his Paris neighborhood, fishing on the Ile de la Cité, sites that struck his fancy. Furthermore, he insists a bit too stridently, perhaps, that underneath it all, humans are the same. It’s a note he often struck in his travel writing: “the ends” that girded national identities are similar—generosity of spirit, courage, despair, and hope. The Joads and the Russian peasants and the French teacher in Poligny are, in fact, one in spirit. It’s Steinbeck’s perpetual message of hope and belief that “men and ideas are eternal.”