America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (19 page)

And then, as the snow piled deeper and deeper and movement became impossible and then ridiculous—people changed. A kind of hell-for-leather gaiety invaded the city. Tragedy became a holiday. Even Republicans who had seen in the weather Divine wrath at a Democratic victory began to have fun.

Our blessings held. The cocktail parties to which we were assigned were all in easy walking distance.

The morning was like the Christmas song—“where the snow lay all about, deep and soft and even.” And the sun turned it glittering. In the night the Army had been out plowing the main thoroughfares. And true to form, I got us to our seats below the rostrum at the Capitol long before the ceremony, so long before that we nearly froze. Mark Twain defined women as lovely creatures with a backache. I wonder how he omitted the only other safe generality—goddesses with cold feet. A warm-footed woman would be a monstrosity.

I think I was the only man there who heard the inauguration while holding his wife's feet in his lap, rubbing vigorously. With every sentence of the interminable prayers, I rubbed. And the prayers were interesting, if long. One sounded like general orders to the deity issued in a parade-ground voice. One prayer brought God up to date on current events with a view to their revision. In the midst of one prayer, smoke issued from the lectern and I thought we had gone too far but it turned out to be a short circuit.

How startling then to hear the simple stark oath of office offered and accepted. How moving. How deeply moving. I had never seen the ceremony before and it was good and I was glad.

Only one episode remains to be told and then my travels with Charley are finished. And we have never admitted this scene although we haven't out and out lied about it. Remember when you have visited some foreign area and some other traveler has asked, “Did you see such and such?” If you say no he screams, “What? Why that was the best. Don't see why you went at all if you didn't see such and such.” We have learned to reply to the question, “Wonderful.” Or “Remarkable!” That doesn't say we did or didn't see it and saves the argument.

Well, we were invited to the Inaugural Ball, the biggest and most desirable one where thousands of people would gather, where all the new dresses and satin shoes and hairdos would be. In the house of our hostess, other guests were ready, fingers moving restlessly in filmy cloth or tucking in hair that had never escaped, and every mirror was a place for side-long glances. Dress ties were patted reassuringly every few seconds. The radio said that traffic conditions were impossible. Mobs of people, beautifully dressed, were floundering through snowdrifts and the great black official cars chugged through streets clanking chains. We drank together a last glass of champagne. And then everyone was gone and the house was quiet and the low lights were soft and the room a cushion of warm comfort. It was automatic. We didn't plan it. We drank another glass of wine looking out at the mountains of snow and then we crept up to our room and put on dressing gowns. In the kitchen we made sandwiches and arranged trays. Then I stood the great and important tickets of invitation to the ball on top of the television and turned on the set. We saw the President and his lady right up close and we saw the packed thousands below in crushed and snow-dabbled ball gowns. We nibbled our sandwiches and had a tall drink. And afterwards, when asked how we liked the Inaugural Ball, we have said, “Loved it. Remarkable. Wonderful!” And so it was. And we saw much more of it than the ones who were there. I guess it was the best ball I was ever invited to, and I enjoyed it the most, too.

And in the morning the snow was past and so was the journey.

I do know this—the big and mysterious America is bigger than I thought. And more mysterious.

III.

OCCASIONAL PIECES

JOHN STEINBECK was willing, indeed eager, to write on nearly any subject—and that is both an engaging and a highly revealing fact of his career. As a writer of fiction he experimented ceaselessly. Although he's seldom mentioned in the same breath as the high modernists, Steinbeck shared their restless need to “make it new,” to experiment with form, to mine mythic contexts, to chart the contours of modern times. Born too late to be an expatriate—six years after F. Scott Fitzgerald, three after Ernest Hemingway—and to see action in World War I, Steinbeck was, as he muses in “The Golden Handcuff” (reprinted in Part I), a part of “the Unfortunate Generation, because we didn't have a Generation nor the sense to invent one. The Lost Generation, which preceded us, had become solvent and was no longer lost. The Beat Generation was far in the future.” He playfully notes that he was born on liminal turf, and that terrain would, in fact, define him. Realist, naturalist, symbolist, fabulist. Dramatist, novelist, journalist. Writer of hard-hitting realism and musical comedy. Steinbeck refuses to be pigeonholed. Of Mice and Men, The Moon Is Down, and Burning Bright are all “play-novelettes,” a form he invented. The Grapes of Wrath mimics documentary films with its sweeping interchapters and focused Joad narrative. The self-reflective quality of East of Eden, as recent critics have noted, anticipates metafiction. Steinbeck, self-declared citizen of the “Unfortunate Generation,” used that kind of artistic indeterminacy to his advantage. In his fiction he insisted repeatedly on his right to experiment; in his nonfiction he claimed the right to explore any subject that caught his fancy, as he notes in “Letters to Alicia”:

 

Highly representative of Steinbeck's “scattered” and “unorthodox” interests is “Then My Arm Glassed Up,” an article written for Sports Illustrated in response to the magazine's request for an article about sports. It's an epistolary piece, addressed to senior editor Ray Cave. Passionate correspondent, keeper of journals, Steinbeck loved to address his prose to a particular audience—usually a friend—whether he was composing a book, a play, or, quite often, an essay. A letter gave him free rein to range from idea to idea, as here, where the writer begins with a memory from Salinas days; cites a definition from the Oxford English Dictionary (the most essential book he owned); notes the sporting habits of hunters and fishermen and baseball players (fishing was a favorite escape, as the Le Figaro piece “On Fishing” suggests); gives a brief historical context, followed by a fanciful, decidedly silly suggestion for competitive seed growing; and concludes seriously, thoughtfully, on bullfighting, from which he draws insights about the meaning of courage. That's Steinbeck's range, serious to silly, historical to moral, reflective to didactic. And beneath it all there may be another, altogether typical, Steinbeckian “level.” Asked to write for a sporting magazine, Steinbeck takes on the consummate writer-sportsman and playfully spars with Ernest Hemingway, bullfight aficionado, hunter and fisher, and Steinbeck's artistic rival, in a way, since the early 1930s.

No subject was off limits. In 1954, at the request of Henry Ringling North, who had been with Steinbeck and Navy Task Group 80.6 off the Italian coast during World War II, Steinbeck wrote a winsome piece for the Barnum and Bailey Circus program. Indeed, with great frequency and ferocity, he defended his artistic freedom to write about whatever caught his fancy, as did the subject of dogs; or snared his intellect, as did the march of history; or sparked his passion for improvement, as did any kind of project to improve something.

He wrote frequently, affectionately, often whimsically about dogs—Pirate's loyal band in Tortilla Flat; the Joads' dog, killed on the road; the stately walks of the banker's dog, Red Baker, in The Winter of Our Discontent, “who moved with slow dignity, pausing occasionally to sniff the passenger list on the elm trunks.” And of course Charley. There's something endearing about Steinbeck's taking notice of dogs of “ambiguous breed” belonging to bomber crews in World War II. Or about his devoting one of the “Letters to Alicia” to the topic of guard dogs and scout dogs working the Saigon airport (19 January 1967). His best writing about dogs, however, is grounded—like so much that he wrote—in personal anecdote, sprinkled throughout letters and his journalism. In 1935, for example, he wrote Wilbur Needham, a friend, describing a particular Mexican dog he'd been watching, vintage Steinbeck:

 

Toby, the English setter described in “Random Thoughts on Random Dogs,” could be equally fierce, generate equally playful prose. In 1936 when Steinbeck was working on Of Mice and Men, the puppy Toby, “left alone one night, made confetti of about half my mss book. Two months' work to do over again. It sets me back. There was no other draft. I was pretty mad but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically” (Benson 327). And his last dog, Angel, “just about perfect of his breed,” was an English bull terrier. He came to Steinbeck as a puppy in 1965 and sat quietly through “a run-through of Frank Loesser's new musical, the only dog who ever saw a run-through” (SLL 814-15).

Steinbeck read history and science more voraciously than many twentieth-century writers—a fact made clear in the constant references to historical figures and episodes throughout his nonfiction. In the late 1940s and 1950s, in particular, he was drawn to historical topics, and he thought of working on films or plays about compelling figures, admonitory pieces focused on heroic or exemplary lives. In 1946, finishing work with Elia Kazan on the film Viva Zapata! he mentioned a wish to do “one more film—the life of Christ from the four Gospels” (SLL 343), a film never completed; nor was a 1946 synopsis for a picture called “The Witches of Salem” brought to fruition; nor did a play about Columbus or one about the Vikings (a revision of an early Ibsen play, “The Vikings at Helgoland”) ever make it to the boards. An aborted manuscript called “The Last Joan,” as Burgess Meredith described it, had “to do with witchcraft. And that in a modern sense we better heed what the present Joan tells us of the atom bomb, because it's the last time that we'll have a Joan to tell us what to do” (Benson 588). Joan of Arc's story, in particular, fascinated him—as is clear from “The Joan in All of Us” (first written in 1954 for Le Figaro)—because from her life he could tease out something significant about his own will to believe. Indeed, Steinbeck couldn't shake a fundamental respect for conscience, wherever he found it: Tom and Ma Joad, “Doc,” the Chinese Lee in East of Eden, or Sam Hamilton, “one of those pillars of fire by whom little and frightened men are guided through the darkness,” Steinbeck writes in Journal of a Novel. “The writers of today, even I, have a tendency to celebrate the destruction of the spirit and god knows it is destroyed often enough. But the beacon thing is that sometimes it is not . . . the great ones, Plato, Lao Tze, Buddha, Christ, Paul, and the great Hebrew prophets are not remembered for negation or denial. . . . It is the duty of the writer to lift up, to extend, to encourage” (
JN
115). Joan's life as soldier, politician, theologian was, quite simply, one of those beacons he sought in history, a “miracle” that, Steinbeck concludes, might live “in all of us.” Rather like the Puritans poring over the Old Testament to seek parallels with the New, Steinbeck sought “types” in history to adumbrate contemporary issues. This penchant for typology explains much about his interest in the Arthurian tales late in his life; their stories contained our own.

And like a latter-day Ben Franklin, Steinbeck offered up a number of proposals and projects in his nonfiction and in letters, some serious, many whimsical. Inventions are charming, especially several he described to Mrs. Richard Rodgers, also an inventor: a “plastic jar made like an hour glass” (SLL 489), into which went water, scented soap, and women's undergarments, to be shaken “like a cocktail shaker” (SLL 489) (an idea later adapted for washing clothes in his trailer while crossing the country in Travels with Charley), or he invented “silk slip covers for the lapels of a dark suit to make it a dinner jacket,” or “stirrups for long night-gowns to keep them from climbing” (SLL 493). Golfomation was proposed in an article for the Louisville Courier-Journal, Steinbeck at his silliest: