America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  We clattered and smoked along eighteen miles from Londonderry, past thatched cottages and hedged little fields where the black bundles of the flax lay waiting to be taken in. The countryside was rolling and lovely and the blackness of the city went out of us. The Donegal hills were remote and sunny across the broad water of the lough.

  We drove right through Ballykelly without knowing it was there, but at Limavady they turned us back. I guess I had thought of Ballykelly as a town; it isn’t—it’s what they call in Texas a wide place in the road. Except for two churches, it wasn’t different from the cottage-lined highway we had been driving on. An old man stood in front of one of the churches. “Mulkeraugh?” he said. “Second turning to the left—a quarter of a mile.”

  “Do you know any Hamiltons there?” I asked.

  “They’re all dead,” he said. “Miss Elizabeth died two years ago. You’ll find Mr. Richey, her cousin, on the hill, though.”

  Mulkeraugh isn’t a place at all. It’s a hill and three or four farms near about. Mr. Richey came to the door of the house on the hill and he looked like some of our breed—the pink cheeks, the light blue sparkling eyes.

  He said, “The Hamilton place is sold, sold to the ground. You can find out about it at the lawyer’s office in Limavady.”

  I said, “I’m the grandson of Samuel; he left here a long time ago.”

  “I have heard there was a brother,” he said; “went away to America. But wasn’t his name Joseph?”

  It was the same everywhere we asked—my grandfather did not exist. So far as Ireland was concerned, there was no Samuel Hamilton. Why should they remember? The tree of our culture had no roots. Maybe I’d known that unconsciously, and that was why I had been reluctant to go back. My grandfather’s brother, he who stayed, that was different. And his children, they were different. And how much land they had, that was different. And how improved it was and how much it brought when it was sold. These were immediate things, and who could remember an old, old fact like my grandfather?

  Everyone knew the three children of my grandfather’s brother, Miss Katherine, Miss Elizabeth and Mr. Tom. It was a good farm they had—about two hundred acres—and a good house of two stories. These children never married, the two sisters and the brother; why? No one knew why. They were well-endowed, well-educated people, and they had more land than most. They had silver spoons and fine china and little coffee cups, so thin you could see through them, and all the collected things of the family for hundreds of years, pictures and books and records and furniture, to make them envied all over the countryside. But they never married. They were well known, well liked. They grew old together.

  Miss Katherine was the efficient one, almost like Tommy’s mother, and Tommy did just what she said about the farm. He plowed when she said and he sowed when she said and he harvested when she said.

  Miss Elizabeth was more for reading and writing things, and she had a rose garden. She spent a great deal of her time cultivating her flowers. Tommy was a silent man, but good, and well liked everywhere. The three grew older on the farm and they never married.

  Then, about twelve years ago, Miss Katherine died. The directing head was gone. The farm went to pieces little by little and month by month, so slowly that it was hardly noticeable. Tommy, with no one to tell him what to do, when to plow and when to sow, began to neglect the land, and he sold some of the cows and didn’t replace them. When the roof leaked, he didn’t mend it. The hedges began to creep into the fields. When his friends remonstrated, he smiled and agreed that he should keep up the land, but the directing head was gone and there was no one to tell him.

  Elizabeth, the neighbors said, had her head in a book. She tended the roses and she and Tommy grew ever closer together. And then, about seven years ago, Tommy died. He got a scratch on his side from a nail and did nothing about it, because nobody told him to, and he died of blood poisoning.

  People who told us about what happened next did so reluctantly, as though they didn’t want to be gossiping. Miss Elizabeth, they said, grew strange after Tommy died—“strange” was the word they used. She’d be smart and clever as always, but there’d be things like this: she would be talking to a neighbor and at the same time listening to something far away. And right in the middle of a perfectly normal conversation, she would say, “Tom is going to take out that tree stump in the lane. We need a new tree there.”

  And when neighbor women were having tea with her from those thin little cups you could almost see through, Elizabeth would say, “I’ll have to ask you to excuse me now, Tom’s coming in and he’ll be very tired.” And she would usher them out of the house.

  And then in the night they’d hear Miss Elizabeth walking in the lanes between the hedgerows and she’d be calling her brother, telling him it was late and his supper was waiting. And several times she was seen in the night, searching through the fields. She was in a nightgown and her feet were bare, but she wasn’t sleepwalking, they said—she wasn’t asleep at all. She’d just turned strange, they said.

  It wasn’t as though she was crazy. Except for that, she talked as good sense as anybody, but she just could not bring herself to believe that her brother was dead. And she did another strange thing that was unlike her, they said. She got herself a cause. She joined the party which resisted with all its strength the joining of the northern counties to Eire. She worked for her cause and she made a will in which she ordered everything she possessed sold on her death and every penny turned over to the party that resisted the joining of Ulster to Eire, and then she died.

  The neighbors said it was a sorrow to see the house torn apart. It was well known that the Hamiltons had beautiful things. On the day of the auction, the automobiles and the carriages came by the hundred, and people bought pictures just for the frames: and the beautiful silver went, and the fine china, and the books, bought for the binding only—and all by strangers. Strangers bought the farmhouse. It was a sorrow, the neighbors said.

  I went to see the house and there was nothing of us there. The rose garden was overgrown with weeds and only the whips of the rosebushes showed above the grass, with haws still on from the last year. The ivy had nearly covered the stone paths. The new owners were kind. But they were strangers, and, what was even worse, we were strangers.

  The sexton of the church at Ballykelly is an old, old man, lean and dry, and his speech is like my grandfather’s speech.

  I asked, “Did you know the Hamiltons?”

  “Hamiltons?” he said. “I ought to—I dug their graves. I buried them, all of them. Miss Elizabeth was the last, two years ago. She was a bright one.”

  We looked at the graves, with the new cement coping around the plot. “Miss Elizabeth put it in her will about coping,” the sexton said. He didn’t ask, but we felt that he wanted to know. I said, “My grandfather was William’s brother.” He nodded slowly. “I’ve heard,” he said. “Went away—I forget where.”

  “California,” I said.

  “What was his name again?” the sexton asked.

  The rain was beginning to fall. He left us for a moment and came back, carrying a full-blown red rose. “Would you like to have it?” he asked.

  I took it. And that’s the seat of my culture and the origin of my being and the soil of my background, the one full-blown evidence of a thousand years of family. I have it pressed in a book.

  The Ghost of Anthony Daly

  Galway, Ireland

  Dear Alicia:

  I’VE EDGED OFF from writing you about the ghost of Anthony Daly, not because it is a complicated story, but because every sentence I write can and will be challenged by any number, who will swear it wasn’t that way at all. I have heard a half-dozen versions and there must be more. Meanwhile, I am sleeping and working in the Grey Room at St. Cleran’s and that’s the room Daly haunts. He has been often seen and felt and heard in this room, but so far unfortunately not by me, although he would be welcome. But maybe I’m not the kind he likes to haunt. And I do feel slig
hted because the ghost of Daly has walked this house and especially this room for 146 years, and he has every right to, as you shall hear.

  In 1820 this house and the surrounding countryside was owned by the Burkes, once Burgos. They came to England with William the Conqueror and later held large parts of Ireland by English grant and English military power, to the hatred and pain of the Irish, who, like the American Indians, thought they had a right to the land because they were here first, a long time first.

  One evening in the spring of 1820, James Hardiman Burke was returning to this house from the holdings at Laughrea when he was fired at from the bushes beside the road. He put spurs to his horse and escaped and immediately called for the military commander of the district, because shooting at a landlord was not regarded kindly by landlords. The soldiery combed the neighborhood and came up with a candidate for vengeance, a young and handsome and athletic Irishman named Anthony Daly, who was known to be a troublemaker and an organizer of rebellious attitudes among the subject Irish. There are some that say he had also found romantic congress with one or more of the St. Cleran’s ladies, which, if true, put two handles on his coffin.

  Daly was brought to trial for his life on evidence either bought with money or threats, while other evidence to the effect that he was other-where and probably equally untrue was rejected by the judge, who sat alone since the Irish did not rate jury trial by their peers because, if they had, there would not have been a conviction in a thousand years. Daly’s defense was clear and reasonable to everyone but the judge. He swore that he was a crack shot and that the proof of his innocence was that Burke was alive. This logic was rejected and Daly was condemned to death by hanging.

  It has always been the conviction of tyrants right down to our own time that terror is an effective weapon against a subject people. Daly’s hanging must be impressive enough to be remembered by any future malcontent who might take it into his head to shoot a landlord.

  The story now splits seven ways from breakfast. Some say the local hangman refused to do the job and then got sick when he was ordered to do it, that one after another refused the duty so that Burke himself had to do the hanging. Others hold that one of the informers against Daly, knowing his life was in short demand, agreed to do it.

  The gallows was at Seefin’s hill, a high point in the country and about a mile from where I sit now at St. Cleran’s. To make the occasion particularly bitter, a coffin was placed in Daly’s own cart, pulled by his own horse, and he was paraded about the neighborhood surrounded by soldiers to prevent the gathering Irish from rescuing him. And, last, he was taken to St. Cleran’s so the ladies could have a shuddering last look at him. One story is that a special window had been knocked in the house wall facing Seefin’s hill so that the ladies could watch the hanging through their spyglasses, that afterwards the window was bricked up again. And whether or not it proves anything, when several years ago John Huston was repairing this house, he came on a bricked-up window facing the direction of Seefin’s hill.

  To give the whole ceremony added meaning, it was carried out on Good Friday of 1820 and if that was an early Easter and the leaves were not on the trees, the ladies could have seen the hanging.

  But the nature of the story makes me jump back and forth. When the cart was drawn through one of the stone and iron gates of St. Cleran’s, Daly rose up and struck his manacles on the iron to try to break free. But the manacles held and his hand, impaled on an iron spike, splashed blood on the stone gate post. And Daly, looking at the blood, cried out, “When I am dead, draw my blood and put it on the Dunsandle gate as well, so no peace may ever enter this house.”

  There are many stories of the progress—how the people gathered to rescue him and were persuaded that it was hopeless by the attending priest. How, at one time, with a changing guard, Daly was left alone with the hangman for half an hour. In this version the hangman is the informer. At a public house, the colonel halted the escort and took Daly from the cart and bought him a drink, and Daly satirically bought the hangman a drink and offered his horse in payment.

  After hours of slow progress, they came at last to Seefin’s hill where the gallows was set up. There was no drop. The cart was backed under the rope and Daly was intended to strangle slowly for the instruction of the onlookers.

  Now the colonel approached and said, “I am empowered to save your life if you will give me the names of your fellow conspirators.” Then Daly’s mother cried out, “Anthony, my son, you were born a man.” And Daly shouted, “And I will die a man.”

  The story is full of strange twists and quirks, and so it should be. All hope of reprieve being gone, the colonel asked if the prisoner had any last request. And Daly said, “I have. I used of old times to come to Seefin’s hill to practice my broad jump. I want to jump once more before I die.”

  And this did not seem strange because Daly was famous as a jumper. He was helped down from the cart and the irons removed from his wrists and ankles, but he was so cramped that he had to rub up the circulation. Then with the soldiers standing alert, he took his run and made a tremendous broad jump, and, having done so, indicated that he was ready. His pregnant wife was brought forward and he kissed her, saying, “If we have a son, I charge him as a sacred duty to avenge his father,” and, with that, he leaped into the cart, his wrists were manacled and the rope was put about his neck. Suddenly he aimed a kick at the hangman, knocking him off the cart. Then Daly took two steps and leaped and his neck snapped and he was dead.

  And Blind Rafftery was among the watchers and he made a poem about Daly that is still sung and part of it carved in this memorial on Seefin’s hill.

  You can see the quality of the man whose ghost is said to haunt this Grey Room where a turf fire is burning now.

  But that’s not all. They cut him down and drew his blood and splashed it on the gates of the manor. And his pregnant wife put a widow’s curse on the place and that’s as hard a curse as there is. The grass would never grow where the gallows stood, she said. And I’ve seen the holes and no grass is there. The rooks would never roost nor rest in St. Cleran’s wood—and they do not. They will not ever fly over it. And she said, no Burke would ever die in bed in the manor nor, living, know any peace. And this also seems to be true. They died in other places and, before very long, they moved away and left the house vacant, and it was half ruinous when John Huston bought it and restored it, until now it is perhaps the most beautiful Georgian house anywhere.

  There is the story and, as I promised you early in, Alicia, every part of it but the last will be argued over and refuted and added to in any public house in Galway on any Saturday night.

  I’ve waited this week to see Daly in the Grey Room. Two nights ago I thought I felt him, but it is more likely that the frosting breeze through the open window did it.

  Anthony Daly is welcome if he wants to come haunting, but maybe that very welcome will give his poor soul leave to rest. I don’t think I’ll see him. Maybe no one will again.

  You can see from all this that Ireland is still Ireland, and you don’t have to dig down for it, either.

  Yours,

  John Steinbeck

  VII.

  WAR CORRESPONDENT

  EVEN BEFORE America declared war in 1941, John Steinbeck was attuned to German aggression. While filming The Forgotten Village in Mexico during the summer of 1940, he wrote a worried letter to his uncle in Washington, D.C.: “... the life of an Indian village is tied up with the life of the Republic. The Germans have absolutely outclassed the allies in propaganda. If it continues, they will completely win Central and South America away from the United States” (SLL 205). A few days later he wrote to request an audience with President Roosevelt and, granted twenty minutes, flew to Washington to propose to him that “a propaganda office be set up which, through radio and motion pictures, attempts to get this side of the world together. Its method would be to make for understanding rather than friction” (SLL 207). That gesture explains much about Steinbeck�
�s involvement in war, both World War II and, some twenty years later, the Vietnam War. He wanted to be involved, to offer advice, and to cultivate what was, for him, the highest calling of the artist—helping people understand one another. All his subsequent involvement with the Office of War Information in World War II, as well as his own publications about both wars, was directed toward those ends.

  Although he lent his services to write propaganda immediately after the United States entered World War II, what John Steinbeck really craved was action at the battlefront. “I want a job with a big reactionary paper like the Herald-Tribune because I think I could get places that way I couldn’t otherwise” (Benson 512). With the help of the Herald Tribune’s literary critic, Lewis Gannett, Steinbeck got a job as overseas correspondent for what was a conservative but highly respected newspaper. He sailed from New York about June 3, 1943—only two months after his second marriage. Posted first in England, he was to “see the war through the eyes of the Common Man,” as London’s Daily Express reported (Simmonds 172). His first dispatches about the troopship crossing delighted his Tribune editor, who wrote in a private memorandum that the articles were “even better than we had hoped. In fact, I haven’t read anything better about the war—anything to equal them in graphic description or in beauty of writing” (Simmonds 173).

  These and later dispatches from England tell about things correspondents had, for the most part, overlooked: waiting bomber crews whose “care of the guns is slow and tender, almost motherly” (New York Herald Tribune, 30 June 1943). And “girls” who watched for German planes on the south coast of England, “girls” who have been “bombed and strafed, who have shot enemies out of the sky and then gone back to mending socks” (OWW 55-56). And he records the conversations of enlisted men in pubs; of people in a bus queue on Piccadilly, talking of Mussolini’s resignation; of a maimed pilot in a restaurant, face collapsed, hands reduced to two fingers, scheming about how to fly missions again. Steinbeck wrote about the ordinariness of life on the edge of the war: the “complicated and carefully tended vegetable gardens” (OWW 71) or the “quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed” (OWW 47). To some extent, the rhythm of these dispatches mirrors that of The Grapes of Wrath, as Steinbeck records the intimacies of conversation and then pans to the broader vision of the war effort in England—bomber crews preparing to fly or London recovering from the siege or the cultural impact of Bob Hope. He wrote well. And, for the most part, he wrote quickly, sending dispatches to New York nearly every day.