America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (23 page)

The story of Joan could not possibly have happened—and did. This is the miracle, the worrisome nagging fact. Joan is a fairy tale so improbable that, without the most complete historical record and evidence, it could not be believed. If a writer were to make it up the story would be howled down as an insult to credulity. No reasonable man would waste time on such an outrageous, sentimental romance, every moment of which is contrived, unnatural, and untrue.

Critics of the story would have no difficulty with the voices. Many sensitive children hear voices in their daydreaming—but from there on the historical nonsense begins.

A peasant girl of Joan's time was considered little more than an animal. She could not have got a hearing from the most obscure of local gentry. Politics was not a field open to people of her class; indeed only the highest in the social scale had access to political ideas. And the ideas she advanced were simple. How could they be valid to men who had spent their lives in the subtleties of the power drives of Europe?

This girl, illiterate and of a class which politically did not exist, went up through a kind of chain of command to a Dauphin torn with subtleties and indecisions and convinced him in spite of all the knowledge and experience of his professional advisers. This is ridiculous, but it happened.

But this is only the first miracle. Military science as practiced in her day was the most jealously select of activities. To command at all required not only an accepted bloodline, but training from childhood. A soldier began to learn his trade when he left the cradle. Look at the suits of armor for boys who could barely walk. War was as carefully systematized and formal as ballet. Assault and defense were known movements set and invariable. War was no business for amateurs. Command was no business for peasants. A girl leading an army, directing its movements, putting forward revolutionary tactics, is not the least improbable part of the story—a girl whose experience was limited to commanding a small herd of sheep.

But having taken the command, and having set the tactics—she won. She anticipated the change of wind, pushed aside military prejudices, and won her victory. What consternation must have arisen in the minds of commanders . . . so it might have been if a Parisian laundress had suggested that Ardennes was unprotected, and a general staff had listened to her. So it would be now if a farm girl bringing a barrow of carrots to Les Halles left her cart, went to the National Assembly and persuaded the professionals their partisanship should take a secondary place in their minds. It could not happen now any more than then.

The end of Joan is perhaps the most incredible part of all. It was not enough that without training she should be soldier and politician—she must also become theologian with her own life as the wager and sainthood as the hidden prize. Who then could have conceived that this troublesome, tiresome child would become the dream and the miracle?

Here I think is the reason writers are drawn to Joan, although their sense of reality is outraged by her story. We know what can and must happen, given the ingredients of life. But there is not one among us who does not dream that the rules may sometime be set aside—and the dream come true. We have the traditions of many miracles—but usually the witnesses were few, the records sparse and uncertain, and the truth obscured by time and the wishful recording of “after the fact.” But to the miracle of Joan the witnesses were legion, the records exact, and the fact established. This is a miracle that did happen, and rules that were set aside. There is in our minds, because of Joan, the conviction that if it could happen then—it can happen again.

This is perhaps the greatest miracle of all—the little bit of Joan living in all of us.

GUESS MODEL TS would run forever, if you would let them. I was well gone in adolescence before I came by one at a price I could afford to pay—fifty dollars. It was almost as old as I was, and it had been around a helluva lot more than I had and was probably smarter to begin with. Its gear and brake pedals were polished like silver and the oaken floorboards had deep grooves made by the heels of former owners, and they must have been legion.

There was no coil box cover on it. It was known as a touring car and it could not even remember when it had had a top. The seats were pretty well gone, but four or five gunnysacks laid down not only kept the seat springs from corkscrewing into you but also covered up the incontrovertible evidence that generations of chickens had roosted on the steering column. It had a lovely odor—I still remember it—a smell of oil-soaked wood and sunbaked paint, of gasoline, of exhaust gases and ozone from the coil box.

The car was not safe to drive at night, but we did it anyway. Having no battery and taking your lights from a generator, you had to go very fast to get enough light to see by, but then you were going too fast to avoid anything you saw, having no brakes.

I think I loved that car more than any I have ever had. It understood me. It had an intelligence not exactly malicious, but it did love a practical joke. It knew, for instance, exactly how long it could keep me spinning the crank and cursing it before I would start kicking its radiator in. It ran perfectly when I was in blue jeans, but let me put on my best suit and a white shirt, and maybe a girl beside me, and that car invariably broke down in the greasiest possible manner.

I never gave it a name. I called it IT.

The problem of starting the motor of the Model T was complicated. I have dealt with it in another work. But once the motor was started, you came in contact with the Model T Ford transmission, called the planetary system.

There were always emergencies in the gearbox of the planetary system. Let's say you had a date, fifty cents and three quarts of gasoline. This would be the time when the high-low band wore through to the metal. Your problem then was to move the reverse band to the low-high section and get along without a reverse for the time being. The process of change was invariable. You removed the top plate and took off the bands. The metal was not only very oily but very springy, and the forks were held together by curious wedge-shaped bolts and nuts. Now, just when you had the forks pinched close and were trying to get the bolt back in place, you dropped the nut. It fell into the black oil pool beneath the assembly where no hand could reach it. So you got a piece of wire out of the back seat and bent one end of it to make a fishhook. Sometimes it took two or three hours to locate the fallen nut by the touch system, to get the hook through it and to lift it out. It was a most delicate operation and it should have developed some great safecrackers.

There were certain standard practices in the repair of the Model T. For instance, if the radiator sprung a leak, you dropped a handful of corn or oatmeal into the water. The heat of the water cooked the mush which coated the tubes and sealed the leak. Once, years later, I had a car of another make of great age and dignity. My mother was coming to visit me and I was to meet her at the railroad station. My radiator was leaking pretty badly, so, automatically, I put in a handful of oatmeal, forgetting that times had changed. You see, the Model T circulated its water by a principle, part magic, part accident, and part physics, but this other car had a water pump—a needless and stupid innovation. This car ran so cool that it took a long time for the mush to cook. I got to the station, installed my dignified mother in the front seat and started home. Naturally there was no radiator cap; we considered such things a nuisance, since we were always losing them anyway. Suddenly there was a sloppy explosion and a Bikini mushroom of oatmeal rose into the air. Part of it splashed on the windshield, but the larger part on my mother's beflowered hat.

We drove through downtown Los Angeles erupting mush, my mother scraping it out of her eyes. I never saw so much mush. I never saw my mother so mad. It goes to show the kind of habits you got into from driving the Model T.

The attitude of girls toward IT was supercilious, but realistic. They would have preferred to go in something else, but mainly they wanted to go. I think they must have known that a swain's attention was split; he might be saying with a kind of worldliness, “I think you're pretty,” but in his mind it was “I wonder what that sound is? Lord God, has she kicked out another bearing?” A girl starting out in a Model T never knew whether love or mechanics would be the result, and if it happened to be both, well, crankcase oil looks very bad on a white dress. The Model T was as important to romance as the girl was. We never quite eliminated her.

The American restlessness took on new force. No one was satisfied with where he was; he was on his way someplace else; just as soon as he got that timer adjusted. No doorbell dry cells were ever safe. And all of these things were important, but most important of all was the spiritual association of kids and motors.

When I consider how much time it took to keep IT running, I wonder if there was time for anything else, and maybe there wasn't. The Model T was not a car as we know them now—it was a person—crotchety and mean, frolicsome and full of jokes—just when you were ready to kill yourself, it would run five miles with no gasoline whatever. I understood IT, but as I said before, IT understood me, too. It magnified some of my faults, corrected others. It worked on the sin of impatience; it destroyed the sin of vanity. And it helped to establish an almost Oriental philosophy of acceptance.

In the years I had IT, no mechanic ever touched it, no shadow of a garage ever passed over it. I do not recall any new part ever being bought for it. It's a sentimental memory with me. I know, of course, that things do not cease to exist in some form. Metal may change its composition through rust or blast furnace, but all of its atoms remain somewhere, and I have wondered sadly about IT. Maybe its essence was blasted gloriously in a bomb or a shell. Perhaps it lies humbly on the cross-ties while streamlined trains roll over it. It might be a girder of a bridge, or even something to support a tiny piece of the UN building in New York. And just perhaps, in the corner of some field, the grass and the yellow mustard may grow taller and greener than elsewhere and, if you were to dig down, you might find the red of rust under the roots, and that might be IT, enriching the soil, going home to its mother, the earth.

IV.

ON WRITING

BEING A WRITER WAS, for Steinbeck, not just an occupation; it was his passion, his life, his joy. Although he often worried about his work and suffered misgivings, he was happiest when he was writing. “My basic rationale might be that I like to write,” he said in “Rationale.” “I feel good when I am doing it—better than when I am not. I find joy in the texture and tone and rhythms of words and sentences.” Indeed, his relation to his writing at times approached a kind of reverent fascination: “Writing to me is a deeply personal, even a secret function and when the product is turned loose it is cut off from me and I have no sense of its being mine. It is like a woman trying to remember what childbirth is like. She never can” (SLL 360).

He commonly used journal entries and letters in the morning to warm up to his work, and in extensive journals (two have been published, Journal of a Novel: The “East of Eden” Letters [1969] and Working Days: The Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath” [1989]) he speaks in a variety of voices, confessional to notational; muses on the processes and problems of writing; reflects on what he wrote the previous day and will write on the day to come; and notes his physical and emotional state in connection with whatever he was working on. While working on The Grapes of Wrath, he recorded both the exhilaration and despair of writing: “This must be a good book. It simply must. I haven't any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges. And I can do it. I feel very strong to do it. Today for instance into the picture is the evening and the cooking of the rabbits . . .” (WD 25). His imagination was strongly visual, and when writing at his most concentrated, he wrote in a tiny scrawl, sometimes in pen, later in pencil, seldom deleting words, caught up in the intensity of his craft. Writing also drained him, filled him with self-doubt: “This book has become a misery to me because of my inadequacy,” he wrote later in his Grapes journal. “And I'm frightened that I'm losing this book in the welter of other things” (WD 76, 77). But there are many more passages in both the journals and his voluminous letters that are contemplative and philosophical, insisting again and again on the significance of the written word.

Perhaps because he was always working at the impossible, always modest about his accomplishments, forever nursing his own insecurities, he was extremely sensitive to criticism, even buffering himself by anticipating negative critical responses. “The critics will scream shame at me . . .” he wrote in his notebook after receiving galleys for an early book, To a God Unknown. One problem for Steinbeck throughout his career was that he was an experimenter, and he doubted that critics would appreciate what he was doing. “My experience in writing has followed an almost invariable pattern,” he observes in “Critics, Critics, Burning Bright.” “Since by the process of writing a book I have outgrown that book, and since I like to write, I have not written two books alike.” This “endless experiment with his medium,” as he calls it, conflicted with the tendency—which he complained about frequently—of critics to pigeonhole authors and to continue always to judge them on that basis. The straitjacket that The Grapes of Wrath forced him into was that of a social and political activist. Six years after the publication of Grapes, he published Cannery Row (1945), and critics like Edmund Wilson were disappointed that it wasn't serious enough: “When this watcher of life should exalt us to the vision of art, he simply sings ‘Mother Machree' ” (McElrath 278). Orville Prescott in the New York Times concurred: “Ever since his triumph with The Grapes of Wrath Mr. Steinbeck has been coasting. He still is” (McElrath 277).