America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

by John Steinbeck

  Having a genuine miser of our own had a great impact on me and on the three other little boys I ran with. The dark and gloomy orchard and the little unpainted house, mossy with dampness, drew us. I remember being out at night a good deal and I can’t for the life of me remember how I got out or back into my own house again. The four of us chicken-necked kids hid in the black shadow of the cypress hedge and looked at the lighted window glowing among the trees, and eventually, by boasting and daring one another, we overcame our cowardice and moved quietly into the orchard and crept with held breaths toward the uncurtained window. Mr. Kirk’s face and his right hand and forearm seemed to hang in the air, yellow-lighted by the butterfly flame of a kerosene barn lantern. He was writing feverishly in a big old ledger with red leather corners, his face twisted and contorted with concentration. Now and then his upper teeth clamped on his lower lip. Suddenly he looked up, I presume in thought, but in our timid state we thought he looked right into our peering faces. All of us jumped back, but one boy’s foot slipped and fetched a heavy kick on the wall of the house.

  Mr. Kirk leaped to his feet, and we froze in the darkness. He did not look at the window; he addressed a presence to his left so that his profile stood against the lantern. Through the closed window we could hear his voice; he cried out on Satan, on the Devil, on Beelzebub. He argued, pleaded, threatened, and after a few moments collapsed into his chair by the table and put his head down on his arms while we trembled in fear and ecstasy. Nothing there is in nature as thoughtlessly cruel as a small boy, unless it be a small girl. As we hid in the deep shadows, our terror abated and we felt that our entertainer had let us down. Then one of us, and I don’t know which of us it was, crept back to the house and struck the wall three great, portentous raps. Instantly Mr. Kirk was on his feet again, fighting his brave and hopeless combat against Satan, while we glowed with excitement and a sense of power. Again he collapsed, and again we roused him, until finally he fell to the floor and did not get up. Now I am horrified at our wantonness, but I cannot remember that we felt any pity whatever.

  In the ensuing weeks we ranged the darkness of the orchard every night, so that our parents wondered at our sluggishness in the daytime and put it down to what was called “growing pains.” Since Mr. Kirk was a known miser, we began to dig about the roots of the fruit trees, searching for his golden hoard, while, to keep him busy, one of us would crouch under his window and with measured knockings employ him at his job against Satan.

  We found no gold, but we were making a horrid mask of paper mounted on a stick to stimulate our victim to new heights of despair, when Mr. Kirk disappeared. No light glowed in his window, and a strange, sweet sickliness hung over the night orchard. Two weeks later we heard that Mr. Kirk had not gone away. He had died in his house, probably helped on by us, and he was in very bad shape when the sheriff and the coroner took him out and splashed the house with creosote.

  We could hardly wait for the darkness to fall; we invaded through a window, our pockets full of candles. Every cranny we inspected for his gold; we dug up the earthen floor of his cellar, knocked on walls, searching for hidden hiding places, and we found nothing but his big ledgers. I took one away and read it: gibberish; words and word sounds repeated, “read, reed, wrote, rotten, Robert,” or, “sea, sky, sin, sister, soon.” I know now that these were symptoms of his sickness.

  In the end we were fortunate, but it was long before we knew it to be good fortune. We found no gold, but when Kirk’s distant cousins took over their inheritance and prepared to sell off the orchard for building lots, they found a canvas bag wedged in a U-pipe of the sink trap, and in the bag were gold pieces—over five thousand dollars’ worth. If we had found them, we would have tried to spend them and—well, it’s better we were unlucky.

  This was our eccentric; every town must have one or more—strange, hidden, frightened, half-mad people are always with us. Only when they hurt someone or die do we discover them.

  The Pursuit of Happiness

  IN NOTHING are the Americans so strange and set apart from the rest of the world as in their attitudes toward the treatment of their children. In most Americans this is more than a symptom—it is a syndrome which often becomes trauma; and it is not surprising that even Americans are often frightened by their child-raising activities, and even more by the products. Indeed, in America paedotrophy has caused what amounts to a national sickness which might be called paedosis. Americans did not always fear, hate, and adore their children; in our early days a child spent its helpless and pre-procreative days as a child, and then moved naturally into adulthood. This was true across the world. I have studied the children in many countries—Mexico, France, England, Italy, and others—and I find nothing to approximate the American sickness. Where could it have started, and is it a disease of the children or of the parents? One thing we know: children seem to be able to get over it; parents rarely.

  Maybe it might be this way—for the X millions of years of our existence as a species, the odds against a child’s surviving to adulthood were very great. Germs, malnutrition, accidents, infections made the bringing up of a child to manhood or womanhood a kind of triumph in itself. My own grandparents thought themselves lucky to save half the children they bore. In parts of Mexico it was true that until recently the infant mortality was five to one. Miscarriages caused by overwork and too little food were far more numerous than they are now, while the plagues of smallpox, diphtheria, scarlet fever, cholera and finally colic were not unknown. It is possible but not provable that this screening for manhood and womanhood weeded out the weaklings, the whiners, the chronic failures, the neurotic, the violent, and the accident-prone; but we know from history that these factors did not eliminate all the stupid. Anyway, before American paedosis appeared, parents were delighted to have children at all and content that they might grow up to be exactly like themselves. The children also seem to have had no quarrel with this. Soldier begat soldier’s son, farm boys grew to farmers, housewives trained their daughters to be housewives. Population explosion was taken care of by wars, plagues, and starvation.

  The great change seems to have set in toward the end of the last century; perhaps it came with the large numbers of poor and bewildered immigrants suddenly faced with hope of plenty and liberty of development beyond their dreams. Our child sickness has developed very rapidly in the last sixty years and it runs parallel, it would seem, with increasing material plenty and the medical conquest of child-killing diseases. No longer was it even acceptable that the child should be like his parents and live as they did; he must be better, live better, know more, dress more richly, and if possible change from his father’s trade to a profession. This dream became touchingly national. Since it was demanded of the child that he or she be better than his parents, he must be gaited, guided, pushed, admired, disciplined, flattered, and forced. But since the parents were and are no better than they are, the rules they propounded were based not on their experience but on their wishes and hopes.

  If the hope was not fulfilled, and it rarely was, the parents went into a tailspin of guilt, blaming themselves for having done something wrong or at least something not right. They had played the wrong ground rules. This feeling of self-recrimination on the part of the parents was happily seized upon by the children, for it allowed them to be failures through no fault of their own. Laziness, sloppiness, indiscipline, selfishness, and general piggery, which are the natural talents of children and were once slapped out of them, if they lived, now became either crimes of the parents or sickness in the children, who would far rather be sick than disciplined.

  In this confusion the experts entered, and troubled American parents put their difficulties and their children in the hands of the professionals—doctors, educators, psychologists, neurologists, even psychoanalysts. The only trouble was and is that few of the professionals agreed with one another except in one thing: it was the consensus that the child should be the center of attention—an attitude which had the full suppo
rt of the children.

  For the last half-century we have changed our approach about every ten years, from extreme permissiveness to extreme discipline, back and forth. We have thought of children as uncalculated risks, and they have responded. There has even been one school of thought which held that children are born good and are spoiled only by association with unworthy adults. Another school, observing that the first word a child learns is “no” and the second is “mine,” believes that the process of growing up is one of reform.

  While all this was on an emotional level, it was bad enough; but when it was discovered by advertising groups that children and adolescents could be used, first, as a market for clothes, foods, cosmetics, and second, as selling agents to the parents, then it became really dangerous. Since the parents are scared to death of youth, they become the victims of any kind of nonsense planted in the children by the agents of the sellers. One evening of television commercials shows the horrid results. Children dictate what foods are served, what clothes are worn. There is a child on the television screen selling noodles, soups, and soft drinks. A little child draws the father’s attention to the fact that he has dandruff or any number of uglier, smellier, disgusting tendencies, thereby losing contracts and other valuable considerations. Once the delinquent parent takes the child’s advice about shampoos or deodorants, everything goes well and happiness ensues.

  Now since children and adolescents are bribed with allowances, they have money to spend and are therefore a market in themselves. Campaigns, even whole publications, are addressed to teen-agers; their ideas and suggestions are courted, even though it becomes quickly apparent that the ideas are far from original and the suggestions invariably take the form of complaints of a lack of understanding when not allowed to do anything they wish.

  Meanwhile, the laws fumble along trying to keep up with the confusion of the times. Teenagers cannot be punished on the same basis as adults for the same crimes. Blame for the misdeeds of the young falls on the parents and the schools. Little or no effort has been made to teach children responsibility for their acts, for this is supposed to come automatically on the stroke of twenty-one. The fact that it doesn’t is a matter of perpetual surprise to us. The reign of terror, which is actually a paedarchy, increases every day, and the open warfare between adults and teenagers becomes constantly more bitter. It doesn’t occur to the adult that he has allowed the rules of warfare to be rigged against him; that he has permitted himself to be bound, defanged, and emasculated. I do not blame the youth; no one has ever told him that his tricks are obvious, his thoughts puerile, his goals uncooperative and selfish, his art ridiculous. Psychoanalysts constantly remind their little patients that they must find the real “me.” The real “me” invariably turns out to be a savage, self-seeking little beast. Indeed, if the experts expected to be paid by the patient, rather than by the harassed parents, the couches would be empty.

  The foregoing is not a diatribe; it is an exact description of what has been happening to Americans, and it doesn’t work in that it does not create adults. Actually, the whole American approach to the young has extended adolescence far into the future, so that very many Americans have never and can never become adults. What has caused this?

  If it is indeed the result of the parent’s dissatisfaction with his own life, of his passionate desire to give his children something better or at least different, it is doubly apparent that he has failed at both. Very recently, studies of Little League baseball, for example, have shown that many parents so want or demand that their children become publicized athletes that they have caused definite mental and physical strain on their children, to the detriment of their health. We do not permit them to be children and insist that they become adults. Then, when they are approaching adulthood, we insist that they be children—with the result that there is a warping effect on the whole American personality.

  There are exceptions. For the first time, numbers of American college students are beginning to take an active interest in politics; the movements toward improvement in racial understanding are engaging the effective interest of more and more young people; and the applicants for the Peace Corps far exceed the number who can be accepted. If the parents are harassed, so are the children, and all the harassment may be for the wrong reasons.

  It may well turn out that modern medicine is saving handicapped children whom natural selection would have eliminated. But this is only one aspect of the inroads science is making on the laws of natural balance. Just as we are keeping more children alive who in other times would have died, we have prolonged life in many millions of people for whom we have no use or place—and this also is having a profound effect on America. We remember all too well how, in the past, the old were revered and admired. Certain ancients from other centuries are remembered for no other reason than that they were old; but with medical breakthroughs life expectancy has leaped. Once the main body of humans consisted of effective adults—say from twenty to fifty. At one end there were enough children for replacements and at the other a few old people as ornaments. But at present, children and old people outnumber the more effective middle group, and we have not yet found use for either. We keep the children young and retire the old to make room for replacements. It is true that we give such retired humans honorable titles such as “senior citizens” and “oldsters,” but we have yet to find a place for them. Quite often we retire a man at sixty-five when his mental powers are at their peak, and replace him with an inferior who happens to be younger. As a result, we have a great burden of unhappy, unused, unfulfilled people; far from looking forward to age, the American dreads it—and his children dread it even more.

  When America was being settled, the burdens of work, exposure, and infection were much greater on women than on men. Many of the old graveyards carry a record in one tombstone of a husband surrounded by several wives who predeceased him. Present-day American life has reversed this process. Once a man married a woman younger than himself because her term of life, due to work and childbearing, was shorter than his. Present-day pressures of American life, particularly on men in the business world, make it almost the rule that the husband dies first, usually of those difficulties which are the result of strain, pressure, and perhaps indulgence in fats, alcohol, and so forth. The result is a great oversupply of widows, mostly reluctant or too old to remarry. In many cases they are able to live minimal lives on the insurance or investments which were a part of the pressures which killed their husbands, for it is a bit of the American man’s duty to live and act in the almost certain knowledge that his wife will survive him. And perhaps this very expectation has something to do with his demise. People do tend to act as they are expected to act. And again, we have found no use for this great supply of aging women.

  Some, of course, try to find work; but age places a bar in that path. Of course I know that there are great numbers of useful and fulfilled women without men. Many apply themselves to social, political, or charitable duties, self-imposed; but by far the greater part find only a low-keyed social life without much pleasure or satisfaction—and that with other women exactly like themselves. Dorothy Parker wrote a wonderful play about these women—a heartbreaking play. I see them in New York, in the delicatessens buying a quarter of a pound of sausage, a small dab of cheese, a minuscule plate of potato salad for their suppers. But luncheon seems to be the widow’s meal, and they congregate in restaurants—the rich ones in the fine restaurants, and the poor ones in the little places, sometimes vegetarian—where they talk together and look around brightly for acquaintances and for something to do.

  Many a hopeless widow is better endowed socially as well as sexually than the illiterate child-women, all hair and false bosoms, who so excite the American man. Indeed, the cult of sexual excitement over undeveloped females seems one more evidence of the American preservation of adolescence beyond its normal span. And one of the curious and revealing symptoms of immaturity in many American men lies in their erotic preoccupation wi
th the female breast. They catalogue women by the measurements of breast, waist, and hips—42-38-43, for example—completely overlooking the more obvious and healthier target. An overdeveloped bosom can arouse these men-children to heights of enthusiasm. I have often thought that when another species inherits the earth, if it should develop sufficient curiosity about extinct man to dig archaeologically among our records and artifacts, the scholarly ants or cockroaches would come to the justifiable conclusion that Homo sapiens americanus was born from the mammary gland.

  How did this curious fixation arise? The female bosom is a lovely thing which should arouse warm and comforting memories of food and love and protection. It should, and it once did; but male titillation by the breast has caused our females to place great pride in these precious possessions. Employing them for their designed purpose of suckling babies has a tendency to cause bosoms to sag a little, a condition repulsive to men and women alike. This has been solved by bottle feeding, freeing the breasts from their ancient duties and conferring on them a purely ornamental and erotic function, while removing from human experience the association with the breast as a center of food and security.

  Some years ago I ended a novel with an ancient symbolic act. I did not invent it; the symbol existed for thousands of years. In my book I had my heroine, who had lost her baby, give her breast to a starving man. I was astonished at the reaction. The scene was denounced as “dirty,” “erotic,” “filthy.” As a baby I was nursed by my mother, and the breast had no such significance to me. As a matter of shocked curiosity, I began questioning those people who had found my scene erotic, and I discovered that the ones who were upset by my scene had invariably been bottle-fed. Such was the effect of a lack of mammary association, and I wonder what the effect on our women may be of retiring from its function a complicated part of their equipment.