America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (16 page)

A man in Florence explained to me that antiquities are just about the best product a country can have. He made sense. First, you don't have a shipping problem; tourists come to you. Second, the tourists don't take them away—at least if you watch them. Third, your product just keeps getting antiquer all the time. You just sit in the sun and take the profits. That gives you plenty of time to complain about so many tourists spoiling the country. It's a nice business.

Neither my wife nor I can speak Italian. But we took up tourist sign language, which consists of one gesture. If you are explaining something in English to a man who understands only Italian, you speak very loudly and slowly, grimacing as you speak. At the same time, you put your forefinger and thumb together and make a gentle, downward, pulling motion as though you were milking a mouse into the palm of your hand. I don't know what this signifies, but everybody does it.

We drove from Florence to Rome in a Citroën—sturdy, intelligent, cheap, a truly French automobile. It has great power and dash, until it comes to a hill, and it has individuality. Sometimes it smokes, sometimes it speeds up when I haven't touched the throttle and sometimes it just refuses to run at all. There's no good then in tinkering with it or even with swearing at it. You must just walk away and ignore it. In a little while it starts running again.

Rome is a confusing city, and I am an easily confused man. When we got into the outskirts, those two confusions got together, and we really had something. I can't rightly say I got lost, because I didn't have any place to get lost from. I never knew where I was. It was late on a hot afternoon, and the Roman traffic was a feebly squirming mess of motor scooters, bicycles, automobiles, pedestrians and horse-drawn carriages. At street intersections, beautiful policemen stood on boxes and executed ballet movements which had no effect on the traffic, except to slow it down a little.

When we finally found out where our hotel was, it took us more than an hour to get there. I didn't have to turn off the ignition key; the car groaned and stopped, and later they had to push it away to a garage. I think it had a nervous breakdown. The bill was 50,000 lire, and I can't see that anything was done to it, except maybe to soothe it.

Our nerves were shattered, too. We were cuffing weakly at each other with tired ill temper. I dripped out of the car and flowed like syrup into the hotel to find a bellboy. As I came out, a photographer was asking my wife if he could take a picture of me. “At this point, I think he'd kill you,” she said. He took the picture anyway. I was too tired to kill him.

The square in front of the hotel was crawling with soldiers of many nations, all heavily armed. And it was while we were trying to find out the reason for the soldiers that we finally learned what had caused the traffic. General Ridgway, in Europe to take command of the NATO military forces, had just arrived in Rome. The Communists had prepared a riot in his honor; it did not come off, but everybody in Italy had gathered to watch, just in case it did.

Furthermore, General and Mrs. Ridgway were staying at our hotel. My wife (in Italy, a wife is known as a moglie, and in some of the newspapers mine has been referred to as my elegant moglie, which seems to please her for some reason) lost no time in making social contact with Mrs. Ridgway. They went down in the elevator together. Mrs. Ridgway said wearily, “Hello.”

“Hi!” said my moglie.

“Hot, isn't it?” said the general's moglie.

“Sure is,” said my moglie, and at that moment the elevator grounded.

My wife reported, “She's very nice, and she's very pretty, and she looked cool.” This was a good trick, because nobody else was looking cool that day.

I am a great window-looker-outer, and we had a window right over the square. I took my post there with a glass of beer, and there I stayed the rest of the day. The hotel was surrounded by layers and layers of soldiers, mostly Italians assigned to protect General Ridgway from being shot at by Communists. I have never felt safer in my life. It was like walking in a downpour, surreptitiously sharing an umbrella with a person ahead of you.

I stuck to my post until late in the night, and I guess there must have been some American soldiers among the troops, because very late I heard as horrible a rendition of “Down by the Old Mill Stream” as it is possible to imagine. The tenor should be shot.

At about four o'clock in the morning, there was an explosion in the square. I leaped from my bed to the window in time to see fourteen Italian soldiers begin to change a tire.

General Ridgway left that next day without a single riot. When he had got to Paris, earlier, there had been a big, successful riot in his honor, but the French government had acted in a surprising and brutal way. They not only put a lot of rioters in jail, but they put the bosses who had dreamed up the riot in jail, too. This was considered unorthodox and ungentlemanly. Ordinarily, only a lot of poor people and some policemen get hurt in a riot, and the leaders sit back and count up the score and take bows. The action of the French government had a chilling effect on the planned riots in Italy. The Communists just didn't riot, and they couldn't get anybody to riot for them. It was a great disappointment.

On the drive down from France, I had found that I was well known in Italy. By that I mean that my books have been translated and published and read by a great many people, and that the motion pictures made from my books were known to many more. I found the notice very pleasant. People were kind to me; I could get credit if I ran out of money; waiters and bellhops brought their copies of my books and asked me to sign them. It was a nice feeling.

Writers are taken seriously in Italy and are accorded the same respect that Lana Turner's legs get in our country. This is a shock at first, and I hope I don't grow to love it, because I certainly am not going to get it at home. I remember coming out of a club in New York one night. Two autograph-hunting kids were standing at the curb. One said, “Who's he?” and the other replied, “He ain't nobody. Gregory Peck's in there.” Come to think of it, I must say I like that too.

Anyway, the friendliness in Italy had made me feel good. There had been nice pieces about me and about my work in the newspapers in Venice and Florence; so I was not surprised in Rome when a friend brought in a newspaper named L'Unità and showed me a large piece in which my name occurred very often. I can't read Italian, but I could make out from the headline that it was An Open Letter to John Steinbeck. I felt pleased, and flattered that they should do this for me.

I said so to my friend, and he looked at me in amazement. “Are you kidding?” he said. “This is the biggest Red paper in Italy. And this is no compliment.” Then he translated the letter.

The letter writer, by name Ezio Taddei, addressed me as Dear Steinbeck and then proceeded to take me to pieces. Not only me, either. He used me to call General Ridgway a murderer, to bring up the moldy propaganda about germ warfare and to describe the degeneracy and brutality of American soldiers. He painted a picture of Korea as a place where our troops regularly use the bodies of little children as roadways for tanks. He told of American soldiers creeping out in the night to drop infected spiders and flies on the faces of Korean babies, and he ended up by telling me that if I didn't do something about it and denounce my own country, nobody was ever going to like me as a writer anymore.

“The news that has seeped through (about Korea),” he wrote, “has been enough to arouse the disgust and indignation of the whole civilized world. It is not a case of isolated crimes committed by a few individuals, in which case the responsibilities would be limited, but of organized crimes, ordered and directed by a general and commander in chief.”

Well, at first I was amused by the complete nonsense of this letter. I've never answered criticism in my life. That's a losing game. You can answer a columnist once, but he has a column every day. I was just about to decide not to dignify the letter with an answer when I found that I was getting mad. This Taddei had used my name not merely for an attack on me, but to get the attention of his readers for what I considered a foul purpose.

I made some inquiries and found that L'Unità has a circulation of 300,000. Taking into account what the newspapers and magazines call “secondary readers,” that circulation meant that roughly 1,000,000 people, and maybe more, would be reading Taddei's attack on America.

Then some other thoughts occurred to me. I've done some newspaper work. I know that the average reader does not read very closely. In a week, a good part of that million would believe I had said these things. If I did not answer, I was positive that the Reds would noisily claim either that I was afraid or that my silence indicated I agreed with them. It has been my experience that they are pretty dirty fighters.

I was getting madder and madder. My anger took the form of kindness and gentle treatment of my wife. This reaction startled her considerably. She thought I was crazy or sick. She alternately soothed me and offered me medicine.

I answered the open letter. The answer was not dictated by noble motives. I was simply sore at the guy for trying to use me for dirty politics. I wrote ten pages, in which I took Taddei's letter apart paragraph by paragraph; he had made the mistake of using misstatements of fact which were easy to refute by reference to public record.

“I wonder,” I wrote, “whether you believe your own accounts of children ground up under our tanks, of huts blown up and refugees machine-gunned. But perhaps you believe anything you are instructed to believe. And so I will ask your readers who are not instructed: Why, if we are so brutal to refugees, do they always come to us, never to the Communists? People in trouble do not run toward brutality. They run away from it.”

I dealt at length with his germ-warfare charges, pointing out that the first mention of this weapon by any nation occurred during World War II, when Russia announced officially that it was fully prepared to “use bacteriological warfare in retaliation against any enemy.” Then I said:

“The germs the United Nations are dropping in Korea are little pamphlets. These papers contain the most dangerous and communicable germs in the world, the truth. This is the germ the Soviet fears more than any other single thing. . . . These truth germs we admit we are dropping in Korea. We are proud to drop them.”

Finally, in dealing with his scathing references to American soldiers, I abandoned the fact-versus-lie approach. It simply wasn't enough.

“Taddei,” I said, “do you know what American soldiers are? They are our sons, our beloved sons drawn from our hearts in the time of our nation's need. They are the dear children of our farmers and our miners, our factory workers, our tradesmen, bankers, writers, artists. I myself have two little sons of six and eight. When they are old enough, they will be American soldiers if my nation needs them.

“Now, if you, you personally, have meant to say or indicate or suggest that American soldiers are wicked, degenerate or brutish—you, Ezio Taddei, are a liar.”

Finally, I abandoned even this approach and simply called him a liar in so many words.

My wife began laying out bandages, being convinced that I would be challenged to a duel. By that time I was angry enough to welcome such an idea. (In this respect, my more reasonable—or, as some would call it, cowardly—nature was functioning very nicely. My thinking went like this: If he challenges me, I will naturally have the choice of weapons. And I remembered the story of how Abraham Lincoln was once challenged and chose cow manure at five paces. I decided to borrow this weapon, with full credit to Lincoln.)

At the end of my reply to Taddei I said that I was giving L'Unità the right to publish it—but that if they did not, or if they cut or tampered with it in any way, I would try to publish it elsewhere, and as widely as possible. I had my letter translated into Italian and sent it to L'Unità.

My wife and I spent the weekend churching and antiquitying. We looked over the Colosseum and brought our schoolbook memories to the Roman Forum. In Ciceronian tones and bad Latin, we denounced Catiline on the floor of the Roman senate. Also, we looked at bones; I guess next to broken marble and beheaded statues, bones constitute Rome's greatest single asset. We went to St. Peter's and the Sistine Chapel, too. We were getting to be such experts in churches and antiquities that we were able to break into bitter arguments about dates and events and materials. My sweetness disappeared, and my moglie was happy, reassured that I was neither crazy nor sick.

On Monday morning, the Unità people phoned, routing me out of bed. The conversation, both on their part and on mine, was carried on with gentility and hypocrisy.

They said they were glad to have my letter. I said I was glad they were glad. They said they wanted to publish it. I found that very pleasing. They said that due to space limitations they felt it might be necessary to make some cuts—but only because of its length, understand.

I found this attitude downright gentlemanly. But I assured them that I was not a verbose writer. I was heartbroken, but I could not accept their space limitations.

Did I, they asked, then intend to publish it elsewhere? I did.

On this note of false courtesy, we broke off. I went back to sleep. Half an hour later, they called again and said they would like to call on me. I assured them that nothing would gratify me more.

The moment I hung up, I began to worry about this meeting. If they followed the Russian technique, no one who came would speak English. Also, no one would come alone. As a result, everything would be done through an interpreter and I would never know what went on.

Then a welcome thought: Reynolds Packard was covering Rome for the New York Daily News. You can't get a sketch of Packard on a thumb-nail. He's big and quiet and Irish-looking, and he has what I always think of as an ominous calm and a dangerous innocence. As comrades in arms, we had fought the battle of the Aletti Hotel in Algiers during the war. We had stormed up beaches together under fire, and sometimes under water. We knew enough about each other so that we are likely to be mutually gentle and considerate for life. Packard is an American newspaperman in the best sense. And he speaks Italian well. I phoned him and asked if he would sit in. He said, “Yop!” which is a lot of talk from Packard.