America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (35 page)

“Positano,” about the Italian coastal village, is one of his finest travel articles and is Steinbeck's most characteristic brew—a bit of solid description of coast, hotel, and convent; a tale or two from the town's “remarkable past”; a couple of Steinbeckian eccentrics, Signor Bassano, the exuberant “Experienced Guide,” and the mayor of Positano, who “dresses in tired slacks, a sweatshirt and sandals”; concluding with the irresistible vignette that can't quite be, often certainly isn't, true. In the whole of Steinbeck's creative nonfiction, there are several of these little fantasies: two or three ghost stories, a couple of accounts of disappearing buildings, a report of an elf who visited his hotel room in Algiers. Indeed, even in a daylight mood, Steinbeck was a bit of the Irish storyteller, weaving fancy into narratives. Could the McKnights' Thanksgiving turkey, given Grand Marnier to steady it before the slaughter, have given a “hiccuping gobble” and “screaming triumphantly” flown to sea from their Positano garden? Perhaps. As both writer of fiction and nonfiction, Steinbeck richly enjoyed tugging the reader's leg a bit. Sometimes the journalistic soufflé fell, but often air kept it aloft. His breezy travel series on Italy, France, and England for the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1956 (following the success of his popular 1956 series on the conventions) included liberal dollops of froth and whimsy, “reports on Europe comprised of lies, inaccuracies and whoppers” (14 Apr. 1957). Included here is “Florence: The Explosion of the Chariot.”

Accounts of a 1965-66 trip to England, Ireland, and Israel were published in the Long Island newspaper Newsday as “Letters to Alicia.” A second series in 1966-67 covered his and Elaine's trip to Vietnam. His association with the paper actually began a decade earlier when he met publishers Alicia Patterson and Harry F. Guggenheim at the Kentucky Derby, where both had been invited by the editor of the Courier-Journal, Mark Ethridge. Steinbeck's first piece for Newsday was published in May 1956, a description of the author's first Derby, and in the next four years, he would write only a handful of articles for Newsday. The publisher, Alicia Patterson, liked to have important writers published in her paper—Aldous Huxley on the dangers of subliminal advertising (“Tyranny over the Mind,” 1958) and Erskine Caldwell (“U.S.A. Today,” an account of a cross-country tour in the early 1960s). When her husband took over editorship of the paper after her death in 1963, he continued the practice, hiring John O'Hara to write a weekly column. In 1965 Guggenheim asked Steinbeck to write a weekly column; the writer was initially reluctant to accept Guggenheim's request, but when the publisher insisted and gave Steinbeck the freedom to write “things . . . of any length” that “could have the casualness of letters,” he began “Letters to Alicia,” seventy-seven published letters. Each was addressed “Dear Alicia,” because he had greatly admired Alicia Patterson to whom he had once “sold” an article for the “verbally agreed price of one red rose a year in perpetuity,” as he wrote to her husband. As he explained to Guggenheim, having a deceased woman as his audience

 

He felt called upon, then and later, however, to defend his choice of audience. Some staff members of the paper found Steinbeck's references to Alicia “mawkish” and “cumbersome”; many papers syndicating the column simply left the salutation off. But Steinbeck, with Guggenheim's full support, kept Alicia as his muse—although he suggested to Guggenheim that papers objecting strongly might omit her name or substitute the name of the local editor. “The fact of a letter changes the whole style of any writing, makes it intimate and very different from the essay. I think it also arouses the peeping Tom in many people. They love to read other people's mail . . .” (17 Nov. 1965).

In the first series of “Letters to Alicia,” Steinbeck tells about the Christmas of 1965 with John Huston at his house at St. Cleran's, Ireland: “We did this last year and I fell in love with the west of Ireland,” he had written to Guggenheim while planning the trip, “perhaps because a part of my own blood line comes from thereabouts. While there last year I came upon a piece of local folk lore which fascinated me. I plan to write it in a new technique and on the spot and John Huston plans to make a film of it in the place where it happened” (Sept. 1965). Such is the genesis of one of Steinbeck's best pieces in the first series, “The Ghost of Anthony Daly.” It is more winsome than his earlier piece on Ireland, “I Go Back to Ireland,” but both capture his fondness for a country that was his mother's ancestral home: “. . . nearly all the Irish I know are pretty much like my uncles in complexion and character—talented, contentious and lonely,” he wrote in one letter to Guggenheim. “I feel related in Ireland” (12 Feb. 1966).

AN AMERICAN politician, running for reelection, reads the newspapers, cons the columnists, meets with his party organization—and then, if he is intelligent, goes into the country and listens to what the farmers are saying. The newspapers are not enough; if a candidate heeds them alone, he is likely to be very badly fooled.

French newspapers are more distant from the people than our own, if that is possible. One day of reading the Paris journals can bring on a state of confusion that may last for weeks.

I do not know what the people of France are thinking, but I do know to a certain extent what the farmers, winegrowers, teachers and kids of the little village of Poligny are thinking and talking about. This seems important to me. People like these are the soul and guts of France. They continued to fight the Germans after their government and armies were gone. It should not be surprising that they are as tough and individualistic as our own farmers. I believe that the future of Europe will be decided by people such as these. I think that it is a good thing to hear what they have to say.

Poligny is in the Jura, the rich, rising lap of the great mountains which separate France from Switzerland. Some of the best wines of France come from this district.

The people are hardy and hardworking. During the war, a good number of the men were wounded in their unrelenting war against the occupation forces, and lots of them bear the marks of the concentration camps. They were not broken. They remain incorrigible individuals, no two holding opinions exactly alike.

We were invited to visit by Louis Gibey, a teacher who raises grapes. Louis and his wife and his three little daughters live in a very old house on a dirt street in Poligny. His neighbors are the peasant farmers of the district. The street swarms with children, with dogs, and, morning and evening, with cows strolling to and from their pasturage. A hundred yards away, the vineyards begin their climb up the hills. The village lies in the pass that leads upward to Switzerland. It is a town of great age. Probably it was here when the Romans came. A tower and part of a city wall recall the Middle Ages, and its churches date from the twelfth century.

Louis' house is innocent of plumbing, but he does have a hand pump in the kitchen, a wonderful luxury. Most of the houses in the street get their water from the municipal fountain. With the Gibey family live one white rabbit, one Siamese cat with a crooked tail, known as Tail-tail, a lady hound-dog called Diane to indicate her hunting ability, and a reasonable facsimile of a basset hound, named Miro, also a great hunter, who can open doors. This remarkable dog can also slip up beside you, as you sit at table, and get your dinner from under your raised fork.

The peasants of the street love to hunt. Every family owns at least one hunting dog, and one dog named Ticot is so famous that the birth of his son, which occurred while we were there, aroused the whole street. The men hunt rabbits, hares, small deer, foxes and several kinds of game birds. They are crack shots, a characteristic which gave the occupying Germans no comfort.

By our standards, the peasant houses are not immaculate, and there is little physical luxury, but the food is good and plentiful, the wine superb.

We were given the best room in the house, newly plastered by our host. The children had new shoes for the occasion, but the shoes had been bought for glory rather than comfort and hurt the little girls' feet. Mostly the shoes were left off but kept on display, thus preserving both grandeur and comfort.

Once settled in Poligny, we promptly became involved in the three important activities of the Rue de Charcigny—and, indeed, the whole town: wine, hunting and politics.

Wine is by far the most important of these matters to the townspeople. Each man has his own cellar, besides belonging to the cooperative which ferments, bottles and markets his grapes.

You visit a man in his house, and he brings a crusty bottle up from below ground. His wife rushes wonderful cheese to the table. A little girl lugs in a loaf of bread approximately as big as she is. The bread has a fine crisp crust and the sour taste of great French bread. Now you are ready for business.

Your host handles the dusty bottle as tenderly as he might move a flask of nitroglycerin. A silence falls on the room as he slowly twists the corkscrew in. There is a tiny squeak as the cork comes out. Your host looks at the cork, turns it over, smells it and then passes it to his guests. The quality of the cork is the first clue to the quality of the wine. This bottle is of the year 1947, one of the greatest years the district has ever known.

The host pours off a few drops, to get rid of the bits of cork. Then he fills the glasses. Now all glasses are clicked together and each man drinks. There is silence for a moment, and then the host says, “I detect a little harshness.”

A neighbor sitting on his left is staring at the amber wine. “Have you forgotten the season?” he asks. “The vines are in flower.”

“Of course they are,” says the host and he explains to us.

In the spring, when the flowers are on the vines and before the new grapes are set, the wine in barrels and in bottles remembers the time of its own flowering. Then there is a little stir in the wine and a small amount of refermentation takes place. The flavor changes a little; it has a restless taste. And then after the flowering, the wine settles down again. But whatever the reason for it, be it memory, or the warming spring air, or pure magic—it is literally true that the wine does grow uneasy and a little harsh during the vines' flowering.

Now the glasses are refilled and perhaps a neighbor slips out and returns with a dusty bottle from his own cellar. And the talk is of wine. For perhaps a thousand years, the ancestors of these men have raised their vines on the slopes behind the town, and the slow knowledge, or feeling, or instinct, has accumulated. Wine is the greatest single thing in their lives.

They are like all country people. They boast that their wine is the finest in France and yet they find fault with every bottle they open. This bottle is corky, this one is not cool enough, this one too cool. This bottle was shaken while being carried to the table. It is exactly like my Aunt Mamie, who is a great cook. She serves a wonderful dinner, perfect in every detail, and she complains the whole time—the oven wasn't right, the eggs not fresh enough, the chicken too tough, the yeast in the high, lovely biscuits was a traitor. I guess it is a quality all perfectionists have, never to admit their work is perfect.

We sat long at the table, eating the hunks of bread and nibbling the soft country cheese and slicing the firm Gruyère, which we call domestic Swiss cheese. A dairyman tasted the cheese with the same application the wine makers have devoted to the wine.

“In some places in the world,” he said, “I have heard that people think the best cheese should have large holes. This is not true. The very best cheese has few holes and those very small and perfectly round.”

“Remark the bread,” our host said. “See, it is not white. This is a sadness. It is late in the season. French flour is getting low, and at the bottom of the barrel the flour is not white.”

Do not think that this process of eating and tasting has been eventless in other directions. Children have rushed in and out, carrying bread and cheese, sipping wine from their fathers' glasses. A minor dogfight has started and been settled. Our hostess is on her knees ironing clothes on a blanket on the floor. A cow has looked in and then withdrawn to chew and ponder. A mother duck has strolled through, followed by five yellow ducklings. Miro, the great hunter, has been licking the white rabbit all over from head to foot. Diane has been tromped, has howled and has gone away to feminine brooding. Three little girls have arrived with gifts, one a basket of fresh-picked cherries, one an apronful of tiny wild strawberries hardly bigger than beans and very sweet, and the third with a garland of wild flowers intricately braided together to make a kind of crown.

And now the time has come, by general consent, for politics, a game the French play with their own ground rules.

During the wine tasting we had gradually increased in numbers. A fierce, good-looking young man stood in the doorway. He had been a great maquis fighter against the Germans. I remarked that the trousers he wore looked like those worn by our airborne soldiers.