America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (20 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck,Susan Shillinglaw

Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Classics, #Writing, #History, #Travel

BOOK: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction

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It is a contraption which bolts to the side of a golfmobileâa set of arms to which are fixed various woods and irons. It has vacuum tubes and a presetting device. All you do is to feed into Univac or one of the larger IBM calculating machines your medical history, blood count, psychiatric report, clubs, and college degrees, domestic difficulties, most recent blood pressure and incidence of anger plus your police record and cheating standard.

On the report of Univac you preset your Golfomation, start the golfmobile and go back to the deep chair and shallow lady. And the darned thing plays your game for you, slices when you would slice, hooks just as you would hook, lies about the number of strokes getting out of the rough, and even in simulated rage breaks the clubs against the fenders of the golfmobile.

Then it brings you your score and its engine shuts off until you want to play again. It is push-button golf at its very best. (17 Apr. 1957)

Steinbeck was often simply having fun writing, a notion many find troublesome. Why didn't this lionized writer more carefully guard his reputation, corral his little essays, offer up only the very best? Ever the westerner, Steinbeck claimed the right to range over what intellectual turf he discovered.

He was also a tinkerer, lover of things mechanical like cars and weapons. “Give me a box of odds and ends of metal and wood and I can build dam [sic] near anything,” he wrote in 1951 (Benson 674). Inventions for his house fell into that category. “Someone once said of me that if I bought the Washington Monument, I would start covering it with leather” (“Letters to Alicia,” 11 Dec. 1965). He carved wood and planned to do an article on the artisans of Florence. Steinbeck was ever drawn to men who knew machines, like Al Joad, who is “one with his engine” and keeps the “ancient overloaded Hudson” running; or Gay, “the little mechanic of god, the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and explode,” who repairs the Model T in Cannery Row. The “Hansen Sea Cow,” demonic engine in Sea of Cortez, is a major character. Grace notes throughout this journalism make reference to Steinbeck's cars, usually bestowing the inanimate with very human quirks. A rented Land Rover is “a heavy, ugly, high standing truck-like creature with four-wheel traction and a will toward immortality” (Daily Mail, 7 Jan. 1966:6). A CitroÃ«n is “sturdy, intelligent, cheap, a truly French automobile. It has great dash, until it comes to a hill, and it has individuality” (“Duel Without Pistols,” reprinted in Part II). And an old Rolls-Royce is “of sneering gentility, a little younger than Stonehenge and in a little better condition” (Benson 728). That affection for cars is clearly in evidence in “A Model T Named âIt.' ”

Throughout his nonfiction, a sense of fun and humor is displayed pervasively; even in his most “serious” fiction, one can find comic moments as well as elements of wit, humor, and parody.

For decades, largely because of his humor, Mark Twain was not taken seriously. Steinbeck mentions Twain so often that it is almost certain the older writer was something of a model for the younger. They both were essentially westerners who spent the last years of their lives in the East but kept a western sense of irreverence throughout. During their lives, both were often dismissed as “popular” writers, which is to say they deliberately tried to communicate with the ordinary reader and succeededâeach wrote many books that sold very well. As a result of their success, they became national figures who, by laughter and lament, brought conscience to bear on corruption, irrationality, and bigotry. While moralists, both were iconoclasts who liked to poke fun at the rich and powerful, and particularly at those who took themselves too seriously. They opposed conventional morality, which they found to be too rigid, humorless, and often self-righteous. They wrote, frequently humorously, about the “rascal” figure, the person like Huck Finn or Mack in Cannery Row, who defies society and operates by a moral code of his own that is more humane and reasonable. And both Twain and Steinbeck could stand back and make fun of themselves, something that endears them to us.

Writing about his friend a few months after Steinbeck's death, Nathaniel Benchley articulates, perhaps better than anyone, the quality of Steinbeck's quirky humor:

Reading through his obituaries, I found a good deal of analytical writing about his work, and one rewrite man ventured the personal note that he was considered shy, but nowhere did I see a word about one of the most glorious facets of his character, which was his humor. All good humor defies analysis (E. B. White likened it to a frog, which dies under dissection) and John's defied it more than most, because it was not gag-type humor but was the result of his wildly imaginative mind, his remarkable store of knowledge, and his precision with words. This respect for and precision with words led him to avoid almost every form of profanity; where most people would let their rage spill out the threadbare obscenities, he would concoct some diatribe that let off the steam and was at the same time mildly diverting. One example should suffice: At Easter about three years ago we were visiting the Steinbecks at Sag Harbor, and John and I arose before the ladies to make breakfast. He hummed and puttered about the kitchen with the air of a man who was inventing a new form of toaster, and suddenly the coffeepot boiled over, sending torrents of coffee grounds over the stove and clouds of vapor into the air. John leaped for the switch, shouting, “Nuts! No wonder I'm a failure! No wonder nobody ever asks for my hand in marriage! Nuts!” By that time both he and the coffee had simmered down, and he started a new pot. I think that this was the day he stoutly denied having a hangover, and after a moment of reflection added, “Of course, I do have a headache that starts at the base of my spine. . . .” He spent the rest of the morning painting an Easter egg black, as a protest. (Paris Review 164)

Then My Arm Glassed Up

Dear Ray Cave:

I HAVE your letter of August 29, and it pleased me to know that you think of me as a sportsman, albeit perhaps an unorthodox one. As you must know, I get many requests for articles, such as, “You got to rite my term paper for my second yer english or they wun't leave me play on the teem.” Here is a crisis. If I don't rite his term paper I may set sports back irreparably. On the other hand, I don't think I am a good enough writer to rite his term paper in his stile well enough to get by his teacher. I remember one time when a professor in one of our sports-oriented colleges had in his English composition class a football player whose excellence on the playing field exhausted his capabilities, and yet a tyrannical scholasticism demanded that he write an essay. Well, he did, and the professor, who was a friend of mine, was utterly charmed by it. It was one of Emerson's best, and such was the purity of approach on the part of the football player that he had even spelled the words correctly. And he was astounded that the professor could tell that it was not all his own work.

Early on I had a shattering experience in ghostwriting that has left its mark on me. In the fourth grade in Salinas, Calif., my best friend was a boy named Pickles Moffet. He was an almost perfect little boy, for he could throw rocks harder and more accurately than anyone, he was brave beyond belief in stealing apples or raiding the cake section in the basement of the Episcopal church, a gifted boy at marbles and tops and sublimely endowed at infighting. Pickles had only one worm in him. The writing of a simple English sentence could put him in a state of shock very like that condition which we now call battle fatigue. Imagine to yourself, as the French say, a burgeoning spring in Salinas, the streets glorious with puddles, grass and wildflowers and toadstools in full chorus, and the dense adobe mud of just the proper consistency to be molded into balls and flung against white wallsâan activity at which Pickles Moffet excelled. It was a time of ecstasy, like the birth of a sweet and sinless world.

And just at this time our fourth-grade teacher hurled the lightning. She assigned us our homework. We were to write a quatrain in iambic pentameter with an a b a b rhyme scheme.

Well, I thought Pickles was done for. His eyes rolled up. His palms grew sweaty, and a series of jerky spasms went through his rigid body. I soothed him and gentled him, but to show you the state Pickles was inâhe threw a mud ball at Mrs. Warnock's newly painted white residence. And he missed the whole house.

I think I saved Pickles' life. I promised to write two quatrains and give one to him. I'm sure there is a moral in this story somewhere, but where? The verse I gave to Pickles got him an A while the one I turned in for myself brought a C.

You will understand that the injustice of this bugged me pretty badly. Neither poem was any great shucks, but at least they were equally bad. And I guess my sense of injustice outweighed my caution, for I went to the teacher and complained: “How come Pickles got an A and I only got a C?”

Her answer has stayed with me all my life. She said, “What Pickles wrote was remarkable for Pickles. What you wrote was inferior for you.” You see? Sports get into everything, even into verse-writing, and I tell this story to myself every time I think I am getting away with something.

As I started to say, I get many requests for articles, and sometimes the letter of refusal is longer than the article would have been.

I have always been interested in sports, but more as an observer than as a participant. It seems to me that any sport is a kind of practice, perhaps unconscious, for the life-and-death struggle for survival. Our team sports simulate war, with its strategy, tactics, logistics, heroism and/or cowardice. Individual competition of all kinds has surely ingredients of single combat, which was for millions of years the means of going on living. The Greeks, who invented realism and pretty much cornered the market, began the training of a soldier by teaching him dancing. The rhythm, precision and coordination of the dance made the hoplite one hell of a lot better trooper. In this connection, it is interesting that the hill men of Crete in their all-male dancing go through the motions of using shield and spear, of defense and dodge and parry, of attack, thrust and retreat. I don't imagine they know this, but it is what they do.

The very word “sport” is interesting. It is a shortening of “disport” (OED: “disportare, to carry away, hence to amuse or to entertain”). From earliest times people played lightly at the deadly and serious things so that they could stand them at allâall, that is, except the Greeks, who in their competitions were offering the gift of their endurance, their strength and their spirits to the gods. Perhaps our values and our gods have changed.

My own participation in sports has been completely undistinguished. I once threw the javelin rather promisingly until my arm glassed up. Once I was fairly good at boxing, mainly because I hated it and wanted to get it over with and to get out. This is not boxing but fighting.

My feeling about hunting has made me pretty unpopular. I have nothing against the killing of animals if there is any need. I did, can and always will kill anything I need or want to eat, including relatives. But the killing of large animals just to prove we can does not indicate to me that we are superior to animals but arouses a kind of deep-down feeling that we are not. A room full of stuffed and glass-eyed heads always gives me a feeling of sadness for the man so unsure of himself that he has constantly to prove himself and to keep the evidence for others to see. What I do admire and respect is our memory of a time when hunting was a large part of our economy. We preserve this memory intact even though we now have a larger mortality in hunters than in game.

I must admit that I have enjoyed two stuffed specimens on public display. They were in Moscow in Red Square and thousands of people went by to see them. Since then the more dangerous of the two has been removed from public view, but for the wrong reason.

I find the so-called blood sports like fox hunting charming and sometimes ravishingly beautiful. Besides, fox hunting serves the useful purpose of preventing population explosion in the gentry and increasing the number of fine horses. The fox population doesn't seem affected one way or another.

I love a certain kind of fishing above all other so-called sports. It is almost the last remaining way for a man to be alone without being suspected of some secret sin. By fishing without bait it is even possible to avoid being disturbed by fish. I am surprised that the dour brotherhood of psychoanalysts has not attacked fishing, since it seems to me it is in competition. Two hours with a fishing rod is worth ten hours on the couch and very much less expensive.

My passion for fishing does not extend to big-game fishing. While I admire the strength, skill and endurance of the men who do it well, I have found that after a time the cranking in of sea monsters becomes damned hard work. And many a man who would resist to the death carrying a bucket of coal up to a second-floor fireplace will break his heart struggling with a fish he is going to kill, photograph and throw away. I have studied fish both zoologically and ecologically, and once long ago I worked for the California Fish and Game Commission, where I helped at the birth and raising of a good many millions of trout. At that time I learned to admire them but not greatly to respect their intelligence. And it has seemed to me that a man who can outthink fish may have a great future, but it will be limited to fish. His acquired knowledge will do him little good at a Sunday-school picnic or a board meeting.

Nearly all sports as we know them seem to be memories and in a way ceremonial reenactments of situations that were once of paramount importance to our survival. For example, jousting in the sixteenth century was an expensive and mannered playback of the tactics of the heavy armed cavalry of the late Roman Empire. Our own once-noble cavalry, which was eliminated by the machine gun and the armored car, became the tank corps. It is interesting how symbols persist. Tank officers, at least until a few years ago, still wore spurs with their dress uniforms.

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