America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  A man in a ragged hat spoke—thickly, because his front teeth had been knocked out. “It is very confusing,” he said. “But sometimes we think it might be better if you left us alone.”

  “You mean you do not want ECA money?”

  Gibey said, “It is badly done. You don’t know what happened. The money is given only to big companies. They use it to drive small companies out of business. The big companies are growing and the little ones are disappearing. It is very dangerous. The politicians are in it. We don’t trust politicians.”

  I said, “I don’t know the details, but it occurs to me the little companies cannot build heavier military equipment unless they get together. Have your little companies done that?”

  “We think most of the money goes to the rich,” Gibey said.

  “And yet you say that you are getting on your feet. Don’t you think our help had anything to do with that? We don’t believe all politicians are bad.”

  The young man in the airborne pants said, “You have had your scandals. We read about them.”

  “Sure we have. And also we have our thousands of honest men, and they are the ones who matter in the long run. The proof is that we function. The American government is not about to fall to pieces.”

  “We are cynical about politicians,” Gibey said. “We remember what the politicians did during the last war.”

  There was a stir at the door. A woman came in, saying, “Ticot’s son is crying.”

  The argument stopped instantly. Everyone got up from the table. We walked rapidly down the street among the homecoming cows, then up a flight of stairs and into a peasant kitchen. Beside the stove in a big wooden box was chained a nondescript bitch, snarling with fear and rage. From under her heavy body came a thin squealing. Three men grabbed the snapping bitch and held her down, while a fourth reached under her and brought out a tiny white pup with brown markings. Its face was deeply wrinkled, and its eyes were navy blue and sightless.

  They carried the pup to the light while it cried and sneezed. An end of straw stuck out of one nostril. The man who held Ticot’s son pulled a long straw out of the puppy’s nose. Ticot’s son yawned widely and went to sleep in his hand. The circle of men admired the little sleeping puppy.

  “He is indeed Ticot’s son,” they said. “See the brown triangle between the eyes. Ticot has the same mark. See those two round spots on the back. Ticot has them, and Ticot is the greatest—the greatest hunter in the whole Jura.”

  “Where is Ticot now?” I asked.

  “Oh, you see, no one has hunted for a week. Ticot became disgusted. He has gone hunting by himself.”

  One man said excitedly: “I can tell by the sound of Ticot’s voice whether he is hunting rabbits or hares or deer. He has a different voice for each.”

  “Who owns Ticot?” I asked.

  “Why, everyone. Everyone who goes hunting. Ticot is of this street. He is a free dog.”

  “And Ticot’s wife?”

  “Oh! That one!” they said, and dropped the subject so quickly that I understood Ticot’s wife was not above reproach.

  The puppy was dropped back into the box, and Mrs. Ticot gently licked him all over without awakening him.

  “Now we must go to the cave,” the white-haired man said. “You will want to see where the beautiful wine is made.”

  Our party tromped down the stairs and into the ancient street. In a narrow, grass-grown road that was well traveled when the Romans came, Daniele and Lena Gibey had dressed their little sister Jenny in trailing vines and had put a crown of wild flowers on her head.

  Little Jenny was pulling the petals from a white daisy, reciting as she did:

  “I love you (petal), I love you a little (petal), I love you passionately (petal), I love you not too much (petal), I love you to the point of insanity (petal), I love you not at all (petal).” The last petal fell, and as Jenny looked up in triumph at her sisters, the flower crown fell rakishly over one hoyden eye.

  The wine cave turned out to be a twelfth-century church of the purest Gothic architecture. It was attacked and despoiled during the French Revolution. Church authorities look at it now and then, but it would take many millions of francs to restore it, and no one has them. The round place where the rose window once was is bricked up. Inside, the triple columns rise cleanly to the groined ceiling. Under the pointed arches at the sides, the great wine barrels lay; they did not seem out of place in the cool, dusky church.

  “It is cool in here,” the men said. “It is better not to waste such a good place. When the church wants it, it is here, and meanwhile we keep the roof in repair.”

  The walls and columns were black with the dirt of centuries, and the sweet smell of working wine made an incense in the air.

  Parachute Pants said, “The floor fell in over there and underneath we found nearly two hundred skeletons. In some of the skulls were the arrowheads that had killed them. Soldiers, they must have been, from some old time.”

  An electric pump was moving wine from one great cask to another so that the sediment could be cleared.

  The white-haired man said, “How can you be sure that germs were not used in Korea?”

  I said, “Because we are not like that. If we wished only to kill, we could do it better with other weapons. But we have not used those weapons. We would be stupid to use germs.”

  “But you dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.”

  “Yes, we did, and we believe that millions of lives were saved at the cost of thousands.”

  The white-haired man said, “It is so hard to know.” And he went outside.

  The man with the cummerbund said, kindly, “You see, he is a Communist. He finds it very hard to change.”

  “You mean he is a member of the party?”

  “I don’t think so. The leaders are members of the party. He is not a leader. Most of us have changed here in Poligny, but he finds it very hard to change. He is an idealist.”

  “Tell me about the change in the rest of you.”

  “Well, when the Germans were here, the Communists had the best and most effective resistance. So most of us joined them, and we thought of ourselves as Communists. We were fighting to liberate France. We even thought of the Communist Party as a French party. Then the war was over, and the leaders made a very bad mistake. Maybe you remember it. They told us we must swear never to fight against the Red Army. Then we knew it was not a French party at all, and we left it. You see, we are Frenchmen, and we would fight against any army that invaded us, Red or Blue or Green. It was a very bad mistake the leaders made.”

  “And the white-haired man?” I asked.

  “It was his dream that men would be kind to one another and would share their goods and their work. It was a kind of heaven to him, and the Communists promised they would bring that about. He finds it very hard to give up his dream of heaven.” The man smiled. “But I’m afraid he is weakening. The leaders of the Communists are making too many mistakes. When they are trained in Moscow, they forget what Frenchmen are like. They forget that first of all they are Frenchmen. The leaders are so full of hatred. They preach nothing but hatred. And our friend there has no hatred for anyone. It is a sadness to him.”

  “If what you say is true all over France, how do you account for the large Communist vote?”

  Gibey said, “I think that millions of Frenchmen vote Communist as a way of protesting against the government. We think we should always protest against government. I think your own Thomas Jefferson advocated this as a way to keep governments from forgetting their purpose.”

  The wine pump gagged and gasped and had to be primed. Then we drew little glasses of wine from some of the older casks and sipped the unfinished wine, not perfect but aging into excellence.

  An old man with a fine, fierce, bristling mustache said, “Maybe you Americans don’t understand the French, either. You must learn that first of all we are French. That is the basic thing to remember. We will not be anybody’s colony, even America’s.�
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  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Our government says ‘We are for America. Vote for us or you will get no American money.’ That is a pressure, and we resent it. It makes us feel that our government is under the thumb of the Americans and that we have become an American colony. Frenchmen do not like this. Many vote for the Communists because of this. I do myself.”

  I said, “Perhaps you are caught between two historical forces, and you must choose between them. Maybe there isn’t any third way. But consider this: We do not tell you how to plant your land, what to read or not read, whom to vote for. Your borders are not closed. You can travel in France or even leave France. You are not drafted for labor. Your crops are not taken away. There are no concentration camps, no secret executions, no secret police to listen in on your talk. You do not disappear in the night. Is Poland so lucky, or Romania or Czechoslovakia or Bulgaria? How long is it since you have seen a Hungarian tourist? All of these countries protested by letting the Communists in. But once in, the Communists do not listen to protests. You must think about this.”

  The man with the missing front teeth said passionately, “All we want is peace. We have peace now, and we want to keep it. We do not want to do anything—and we do not want you to do anything for us—that will lead to war. We are tired of war! We are bitterly tired of war! That’s all we think about.”

  “Do you think that is the attitude of all Frenchmen?”

  “I think so. Of course, I am not sure.”

  “Can you tell us the attitude of the Americans?” Louis Gibey asked.

  “Not on many things, because we have as many ideas as we are people, but in some general things I think I can. We don’t want war any more than you do. But America has no America to protect it. We want to keep our institutions. If they are to change, we want to change them ourselves and in our own time and by our own methods. We think the rest of the free world feels the same, but by an accident in time and economics it has fallen to us, whether we want it or not, to lead, to prod, to organize and to direct the opposition to the forces which would reduce all of us. If we do not do it, who will? Will you? Will the British? Will Italy or Scandinavia?

  “Sure, you would defend yourselves. And the enemy would like nothing better than to pick off one at a time the ripe fruits of dissension and national pride.

  “Do you think we really like to spend most of our income on weapons when that same money could build dams, plant parks, build symphony orchestras, set up schools such as the world has never known? Do you think we like to defraud ourselves of these things? We could do it, too. Don’t think we couldn’t. We could retire into our hemisphere and close our eyes to the rest of the world.

  “And then, little by little, Europe would stagger and fall. And one day we would be faced with war, and do you know who would do the fighting against us? Your sons, drilled and lied to, figures moving and fighting on the end of a string manipulated from the Kremlin.

  “Just remember that leadership is not chosen by a people. It is forced on them. We don’t want it, but we have it. And thank Heaven we are not too tired nor too confused nor too cynical to use it. When you are grousing about our help, just think a little of that. Our farmers don’t want it, either, but we will not go down without trying. That’s my speech.”

  The wine peasants of Poligny sipped from their glasses, and their eyes had the French look, cynical and critical and humorous and contentious and very tough and individual. I couldn’t tell whether I had got through or not.

  Louis Gibey said, “I want to tell you about a paradox. You see, we have always thought of the Catholic Church as the symbol of reaction—the arm of the extreme right. But do you know, there is a whole crop of young priests in France now working for the social changes which are supposed to be the projects of the extreme left. Yes, it is a paradox. The Communists have become the reactionaries, rigid, formalistic, unchanging and unchangeable. It is the clergy now that leads to the left; maybe not the archbishops and cardinals, but the young, tough priests.”

  The hard-handed peasants of Poligny sipped their wine and chuck-led. They love a paradox.

  Through the open door came the shrill voice of Jenny chanting monotonously, “I love you, I love you a little, I love you passionately.”

  And I remembered reading in Albert Guérard’s beautiful little history of France the poem:

  She alone has received the conquered into her bosom.

  She alone has tended all mankind under a common name;

  A mother rather than a queen, she has turned her subjects into citizens;

  She binds together the remotest lands by ties of pious reverence.

  Thanks to her yoke of peace, the stranger believes himself in his own country;

  We have become a single people.

  It sounds like a hymn to America, but it was written by Rutilius Namatianus, a Gaul, in the fifth century A.D. And he wrote it about Rome. And Rome was falling.

  Then Guérard quotes Virgil’s great call to Rome four centuries earlier—“Thy fate it is to rule nations.” If you change the word “rule” to “lead,” it might be said of America today.

  It was cool and peaceful in the ancient church and the battered faces of the peasants showed dimly in the semidarkness.

  From far up on the mountain behind the town came the belling of a hound on track.

  “Ticot,” said Parachute Pants softly.

  “I love you to insanity,” shrieked Jenny in the road outside the church.

  One American in Paris

  (fourth piece)

  IT WOULD BE ridiculous for me to try to write anything new or original about Paris. In all the world no city has been so loved and so celebrated. Indeed the traveler comes soon to feel that he is received into the arms of this city which is so much more than a city. I imagine that many Americans come to Paris for its restaurants, its gaiety, its beauty. For myself, when I come back to Paris I feel always that I am coming home. I love the good food too and the beauty but I invariably find myself drawn to the Ile de la Cité, that stone ship of the Seine whose cargo has gone to the whole world. I love this island, I love the music in stone which is Notre Dame. I rejoice in the little streets and houses which are material memories of another time. But the relationship goes farther than this. The Ile is holy ground. Here the thinking of the Western world was born—the brave thinking arduously rising out of the noble ruins of Rome and Greece. Here the great ones sorted over the pieces of the past, chose the valid, cast aside the gross, added their own new ingredient and drew a cold world to warm itself at the new fire. And surely the Ile spilled over to the banks and coursed out, but here, right here, physically under my feet, the miracle happened—not quickly but with the incredible labor of birth and growth. I have read of the French Gothic that it draws the eyes to heaven, that it defies or seems to the laws of weight, and the limitations of stone. It seems to me that Notre Dame and its brothers are the symbols of that exuberant thought.

  But the great churches are only one symbol—my own thinking, my own conceptions, are no less the products of this tiny island, when the fabric of man’s relation to man was picked apart and rewoven with the new thread of responsibility. Here the conception of liberty was born—not only political liberty but the enormous conception that the individual mind of man had not only the right but the duty to rove the world and dig into the heavens. This island raised the heavy sky and kicked out the close horizons. This is indeed holy ground.

  My sons are too little for abstractions but I can take them to the Ile and raise for their delight the lovely ghosts. Here where you stand Caesar stood; here Richard of the Lion Heart trotted his heavy charger over the cobbles. Right here Francis the First walked with perhaps Leonardo at his side and here Abelard pushed back his hood and raised his voice. My boys love this pageantry. And later we walk down to the river and sit on the stone and let our feet dangle over the water. We wait patiently for some of the many fishermen to catch a fish and when some tiny thing is
hooked we run to examine and to congratulate. This minnow is a triumph beyond which the big game fisherman cannot rise. Kicking our heels against the stone we watch the barges moving by, the laundry drying on the deck and the seeming sweet, slow life of the barge men. Sometimes we can smell the soup cooking in the galley and through a window see the sturdy wife, her sleeves rolled up, stirring the pot. Then there is excitement, another fisherman has landed a fierce fish as big as his little finger.

  Sitting there I had a horrid thought, a mean and malicious thought, and I told it to a French friend.

  “What would happen,” I asked, “if I should go to an aquarium and buy alive a trout of thirty centimeters—then bring it concealed to the embankment, put a hook in its mouth and throw it living in the river. I would then play it with courage and finally land the beauty.”

  “Oh! my friend,” my companion cried. “Put this thought from your mind. Promise you will never do it.”

  “But what would happen?”

  My friend said seriously, “Fifty fishermen, the flower of Seine fishermen, men of integrity and seriousness, would commit suicide.”

  We walk past the bird market. We are always just about to buy a bird—only our inability to decide which bird deters us. We want them all. . . .

  How this island, this magic ship, calls to me when I am away from it. How it reassures me that the world is not about to disappear, and that men and ideas are eternal. And this island set in its timeless river proves to me that I am small but reassures me that I am important.

  And I will not catch the trout.

  One American in Paris

  (thirteenth piece)

  NOW I HAVE more than passed the halfway mark in these little pieces for Figaro Littéraire. I have enjoyed the writing of them and also I have enjoyed the generous response to them from the readers. I began the series with timidity because I did not know the fabric of the French mind, I was too ignorant of recent French history. I felt a kind of shyness about writing to Parisians. This shyness has now disappeared because of the generosity of the reception. I knew historically the French genius for fairness and receptiveness but it is quite a different thing to have it proved to me personally. I have even received letters which say I write in the French manner. This cannot be true. I write in my own manner, but the letters further prove that the French, who are renowned throughout the world as the greatest of individualists, have maintained that diagnostic of the individual: tolerance.