America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  “Positano,” about the Italian coastal village, is one of his finest travel articles and is Steinbeck’s most characteristic brew—a bit of solid description of coast, hotel, and convent; a tale or two from the town’s “remarkable past”; a couple of Steinbeckian eccentrics, Signor Bassano, the exuberant “Experienced Guide,” and the mayor of Positano, who “dresses in tired slacks, a sweatshirt and sandals”; concluding with the irresistible vignette that can’t quite be, often certainly isn’t, true. In the whole of Steinbeck’s creative nonfiction, there are several of these little fantasies: two or three ghost stories, a couple of accounts of disappearing buildings, a report of an elf who visited his hotel room in Algiers. Indeed, even in a daylight mood, Steinbeck was a bit of the Irish storyteller, weaving fancy into narratives. Could the McKnights’ Thanksgiving turkey, given Grand Marnier to steady it before the slaughter, have given a “hiccuping gobble” and “screaming triumphantly” flown to sea from their Positano garden? Perhaps. As both writer of fiction and nonfiction, Steinbeck richly enjoyed tugging the reader’s leg a bit. Sometimes the journalistic soufflé fell, but often air kept it aloft. His breezy travel series on Italy, France, and England for the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1956 (following the success of his popular 1956 series on the conventions) included liberal dollops of froth and whimsy, “reports on Europe comprised of lies, inaccuracies and whoppers” (14 Apr. 1957). Included here is “Florence: The Explosion of the Chariot.”

  Accounts of a 1965-66 trip to England, Ireland, and Israel were published in the Long Island newspaper Newsday as “Letters to Alicia.” A second series in 1966-67 covered his and Elaine’s trip to Vietnam. His association with the paper actually began a decade earlier when he met publishers Alicia Patterson and Harry F. Guggenheim at the Kentucky Derby, where both had been invited by the editor of the Courier-Journal, Mark Ethridge. Steinbeck’s first piece for Newsday was published in May 1956, a description of the author’s first Derby, and in the next four years, he would write only a handful of articles for Newsday. The publisher, Alicia Patterson, liked to have important writers published in her paper—Aldous Huxley on the dangers of subliminal advertising (“Tyranny over the Mind,” 1958) and Erskine Caldwell (“U.S.A. Today,” an account of a cross-country tour in the early 1960s). When her husband took over editorship of the paper after her death in 1963, he continued the practice, hiring John O’Hara to write a weekly column. In 1965 Guggenheim asked Steinbeck to write a weekly column; the writer was initially reluctant to accept Guggenheim’s request, but when the publisher insisted and gave Steinbeck the freedom to write “things . . . of any length” that “could have the casualness of letters,” he began “Letters to Alicia,” seventy-seven published letters. Each was addressed “Dear Alicia,” because he had greatly admired Alicia Patterson to whom he had once “sold” an article for the “verbally agreed price of one red rose a year in perpetuity,” as he wrote to her husband. As he explained to Guggenheim, having a deceased woman as his audience

  is not mawkish or sentimental. The letters would not be to someone who is dead but rather to a living mind and a huge curiosity. That is why she was such a great newspaper woman. She wanted to know everything. But she also had respect for her readers. . . . If I write these letters intending to amuse, inform and illuminate (Plato?) Alicia they will do the same to great numbers of people. There should be in them (the letters) everything there is—truth insofar as I can see it, hatred, love and a great deal of quiet laughter. . . . The last reason for writing these to Alicia is that it gives me a focal point, a person to address. I can’t write to everybody. You end up writing to nobody. (14 Aug. 1965)

  He felt called upon, then and later, however, to defend his choice of audience. Some staff members of the paper found Steinbeck’s references to Alicia “mawkish” and “cumbersome”; many papers syndicating the column simply left the salutation off. But Steinbeck, with Guggenheim’s full support, kept Alicia as his muse—although he suggested to Guggenheim that papers objecting strongly might omit her name or substitute the name of the local editor. “The fact of a letter changes the whole style of any writing, makes it intimate and very different from the essay. I think it also arouses the peeping Tom in many people. They love to read other people’s mail . . .” (17 Nov. 1965).

  In the first series of “Letters to Alicia,” Steinbeck tells about the Christmas of 1965 with John Huston at his house at St. Cleran’s, Ireland: “We did this last year and I fell in love with the west of Ireland,” he had written to Guggenheim while planning the trip, “perhaps because a part of my own blood line comes from thereabouts. While there last year I came upon a piece of local folk lore which fascinated me. I plan to write it in a new technique and on the spot and John Huston plans to make a film of it in the place where it happened” (Sept. 1965). Such is the genesis of one of Steinbeck’s best pieces in the first series, “The Ghost of Anthony Daly.” It is more winsome than his earlier piece on Ireland, “I Go Back to Ireland,” but both capture his fondness for a country that was his mother’s ancestral home: “. . . nearly all the Irish I know are pretty much like my uncles in complexion and character—talented, contentious and lonely,” he wrote in one letter to Guggenheim. “I feel related in Ireland” (12 Feb. 1966).

  The Soul and Guts of France

  AN AMERICAN politician, running for reelection, reads the newspapers, cons the columnists, meets with his party organization—and then, if he is intelligent, goes into the country and listens to what the farmers are saying. The newspapers are not enough; if a candidate heeds them alone, he is likely to be very badly fooled.

  French newspapers are more distant from the people than our own, if that is possible. One day of reading the Paris journals can bring on a state of confusion that may last for weeks.

  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. They continued to fight the Germans after their government and armies were gone. It should not be surprising that they are as tough and individualistic as our own farmers. I believe that the future of Europe will be decided by people such as these. I think that it is a good thing to hear what they have to say.

  Poligny is in the Jura, the rich, rising lap of the great mountains which separate France from Switzerland. Some of the best wines of France come from this district.

  The people are hardy and hardworking. During the war, a good number of the men were wounded in their unrelenting war against the occupation forces, and lots of them bear the marks of the concentration camps. They were not broken. They remain incorrigible individuals, no two holding opinions exactly alike.

  We were invited to visit by Louis Gibey, a teacher who raises grapes. Louis and his wife and his three little daughters live in a very old house on a dirt street in Poligny. His neighbors are the peasant farmers of the district. The street swarms with children, with dogs, and, morning and evening, with cows strolling to and from their pasturage. A hundred yards away, the vineyards begin their climb up the hills. The village lies in the pass that leads upward to Switzerland. It is a town of great age. Probably it was here when the Romans came. A tower and part of a city wall recall the Middle Ages, and its churches date from the twelfth century.

  Louis’ house is innocent of plumbing, but he does have a hand pump in the kitchen, a wonderful luxury. Most of the houses in the street get their water from the municipal fountain. With the Gibey family live one white rabbit, one Siamese cat with a crooked tail, known as Tail-tail, a lady hound-dog called Diane to indicate her hunting ability, and a reasonable facsimile of a basset hound, named Miro, also a great hunter, who can open doors. This remarkable dog can also slip up beside you, as you sit at table, and get your dinner from under your raised fork.

  The peasants of the street love to hunt. Every family owns at least one hunting dog, and one do
g named Ticot is so famous that the birth of his son, which occurred while we were there, aroused the whole street. The men hunt rabbits, hares, small deer, foxes and several kinds of game birds. They are crack shots, a characteristic which gave the occupying Germans no comfort.

  By our standards, the peasant houses are not immaculate, and there is little physical luxury, but the food is good and plentiful, the wine superb.

  We were given the best room in the house, newly plastered by our host. The children had new shoes for the occasion, but the shoes had been bought for glory rather than comfort and hurt the little girls’ feet. Mostly the shoes were left off but kept on display, thus preserving both grandeur and comfort.

  Once settled in Poligny, we promptly became involved in the three important activities of the Rue de Charcigny—and, indeed, the whole town: wine, hunting and politics.

  Wine is by far the most important of these matters to the townspeople. Each man has his own cellar, besides belonging to the cooperative which ferments, bottles and markets his grapes.

  You visit a man in his house, and he brings a crusty bottle up from below ground. His wife rushes wonderful cheese to the table. A little girl lugs in a loaf of bread approximately as big as she is. The bread has a fine crisp crust and the sour taste of great French bread. Now you are ready for business.

  Your host handles the dusty bottle as tenderly as he might move a flask of nitroglycerin. A silence falls on the room as he slowly twists the corkscrew in. There is a tiny squeak as the cork comes out. Your host looks at the cork, turns it over, smells it and then passes it to his guests. The quality of the cork is the first clue to the quality of the wine. This bottle is of the year 1947, one of the greatest years the district has ever known.

  The host pours off a few drops, to get rid of the bits of cork. Then he fills the glasses. Now all glasses are clicked together and each man drinks. There is silence for a moment, and then the host says, “I detect a little harshness.”

  A neighbor sitting on his left is staring at the amber wine. “Have you forgotten the season?” he asks. “The vines are in flower.”

  “Of course they are,” says the host and he explains to us.

  In the spring, when the flowers are on the vines and before the new grapes are set, the wine in barrels and in bottles remembers the time of its own flowering. Then there is a little stir in the wine and a small amount of refermentation takes place. The flavor changes a little; it has a restless taste. And then after the flowering, the wine settles down again. But whatever the reason for it, be it memory, or the warming spring air, or pure magic—it is literally true that the wine does grow uneasy and a little harsh during the vines’ flowering.

  Now the glasses are refilled and perhaps a neighbor slips out and returns with a dusty bottle from his own cellar. And the talk is of wine. For perhaps a thousand years, the ancestors of these men have raised their vines on the slopes behind the town, and the slow knowledge, or feeling, or instinct, has accumulated. Wine is the greatest single thing in their lives.

  They are like all country people. They boast that their wine is the finest in France and yet they find fault with every bottle they open. This bottle is corky, this one is not cool enough, this one too cool. This bottle was shaken while being carried to the table. It is exactly like my Aunt Mamie, who is a great cook. She serves a wonderful dinner, perfect in every detail, and she complains the whole time—the oven wasn’t right, the eggs not fresh enough, the chicken too tough, the yeast in the high, lovely biscuits was a traitor. I guess it is a quality all perfectionists have, never to admit their work is perfect.

  We sat long at the table, eating the hunks of bread and nibbling the soft country cheese and slicing the firm Gruyère, which we call domestic Swiss cheese. A dairyman tasted the cheese with the same application the wine makers have devoted to the wine.

  “In some places in the world,” he said, “I have heard that people think the best cheese should have large holes. This is not true. The very best cheese has few holes and those very small and perfectly round.”

  “Remark the bread,” our host said. “See, it is not white. This is a sadness. It is late in the season. French flour is getting low, and at the bottom of the barrel the flour is not white.”

  Do not think that this process of eating and tasting has been eventless in other directions. Children have rushed in and out, carrying bread and cheese, sipping wine from their fathers’ glasses. A minor dogfight has started and been settled. Our hostess is on her knees ironing clothes on a blanket on the floor. A cow has looked in and then withdrawn to chew and ponder. A mother duck has strolled through, followed by five yellow ducklings. Miro, the great hunter, has been licking the white rabbit all over from head to foot. Diane has been tromped, has howled and has gone away to feminine brooding. Three little girls have arrived with gifts, one a basket of fresh-picked cherries, one an apronful of tiny wild strawberries hardly bigger than beans and very sweet, and the third with a garland of wild flowers intricately braided together to make a kind of crown.

  And now the time has come, by general consent, for politics, a game the French play with their own ground rules.

  During the wine tasting we had gradually increased in numbers. A fierce, good-looking young man stood in the doorway. He had been a great maquis fighter against the Germans. I remarked that the trousers he wore looked like those worn by our airborne soldiers.

  He laughed and said, “You know, your army sold many kinds of things after the war, clothes and blankets and pants like these. And then they were all sold, so we French are making them.” He gazed at his trousers. “I don’t think they are as good,” he said.

  A thin man with a pinched face took the ball then. He had been captured during the war and sent to Buchenwald. He still limped on the leg the Nazis had shattered with an iron bar. He said:

  “I should think you could have made a better choice than Ridgway to take Eisenhower’s place.”

  We had been in Paris during the Communist rioting over Ridgway’s arrival, and we were still a little sore about it. “Why?” I asked. “He’s a good man. He did a good job in the East. He’s a good soldier and a good administrator. And I should think you French would like him. He was the first big American general to land in France for the liberation. What have you got against him?”

  A white-haired man, vice-president of the wine cooperative, spoke. “Well, with all the talk about Korea—it makes a bad impression to send Ridgway.”

  “With all what talk?” I demanded. “Do you mean to say you seriously consider that we are using germs?”

  “One never knows,” the vice-president of the wine co-operative said gently. “There’s so much talk. How can we tell?”

  I found that I was getting angry—a tactical error—and I said, “Look! Suppose you were a Communist general and your men were really ignorant, and suppose your enemy was dropping propaganda leaflets that disturbed your men and made them ask questions. Wouldn’t you find it easy to tell your people the leaflets carried germs so they wouldn’t pick them up? And if you had some epidemics anyway, wouldn’t such a campaign do two things—excuse your bad medical service and also keep people from reading the propaganda?”

  “How do we know?” the white-haired man said. “We hear so many things.”

  “Whom do you hear them from? I can understand a half-literate, completely dominated people believing this germ story, but I can’t understand a modern Frenchman believing it.”

  Louis Gibey, the vintner-teacher, said nervously, “Who will be your next President?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Can Eisenhower be elected?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Do you like him?”

  An old peasant said, “We like him very much. He understands us. He said we must not rearm so fast that our living standard falls. We like that. We are just now beginning to get enough to eat.”

  “Suppose the time is too short.”

  The old man said, “We knew s
tarvation under the Germans. We are afraid of hunger. We don’t want to spend our little gains for guns.”

  “Well, if you had to choose between a little hunger and being taken over by the Kremlin, which would you choose?” I asked him.

  “We don’t think the danger is as great as you do. We don’t want to spend our little gains.”

  “I don’t either,” I said. “Have you thought that a good part of the taxes I pay and all Americans pay is going to help Europe rearm? Think of the howls of rage that would go up if part of your taxes had to go to us. Would you like it?”

  A jovial man, who wore a gigantic cummerbund of wool, smiled into his glass. “We wouldn’t like it. But surely you don’t think you are doing it for us. You are doing it for yourselves. You are using us to defend you.”

  “That is more or less true,” I said, “and as realistic Frenchmen who do not believe in pure charity, you should be reassured by that. And if we go down, can you survive?”

  “We don’t want war,” Cummerbund said. “I was wounded in 1916 and wounded again in 1943. No, we don’t want any war.”

  “You didn’t want it when Hitler came in—but not wanting it didn’t stop him. Do you think prayer will stop the Russians? You may not like us here, but if we hadn’t come you would still be under the Nazis.”

  “There were the Russians,” the white-haired man said. “The Russians fought very well.”

  “I’ve thought about this quite a bit,” I said. “I want you to imagine something. Suppose we had not come into the war, and suppose the British had not. Imagine that the Russians had beaten the Germans all alone. Do you really think you would have your free wine cooperative now, your elections, your schools, even your churches? Do you really believe you would? Or would you have been like Poland, like Romania, like East Germany? Do you know any time when the Russians have not taken over when they could? Just think about it. And where they have taken over, has any freedom remained?”