America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (46 page)

And only last week lying in the bunker with a boy who said, “Five more days—no, four days and thirteen hours, and I'll be going home. I thought the time would never come.” And it didn't. He was killed on the next patrol.

I was cold all over and trembling maybe somewhat from the grinding of the guns. And already we were landing and the mission was done and we were back early.

I got to the hotel at a little before ten and of course Elaine was not back from dinner. So I went around the corner to the restaurant. She and Johnny Floyd were sitting quietly and when they saw me come in they both jumped up. “How was it?” Elaine asked.

We have our privacies but not in big things.

I said, “I was scared.”

“So was I. I had three martinis and they didn't help.”

And Johnny Floyd said, “I kept telling her you were all right, but I guess I oversold it. Because I was scared too.”

Isn't that funny and strange the way the mind works? But that's the way it works.

And soon we will be in Bangkok and it will be very different.

 

Yours,

John

My dear friend Genya:

 

I HAVE JUST NOW read those parts of your poem printed in the New York Times. I have no way of knowing how good the translation is, but I am pleased and flattered by your devotion.

In your poem, you ask me to speak out against the war in Vietnam. You know well how I detest all war, but for this one I have a particular and personal hatred. I am against this Chinese-inspired war. I don't know a single American who is for it. But, my beloved friend, you asked me to denounce half a war, our half. I appeal to you to join me in denouncing the whole war.

Surely you don't believe that our “pilots fly to bomb children,” that we send bombs and heavy equipment against innocent civilians? This is not East Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956, nor Tibet in 1959.

You know as well as I do, Genya, that we are bombing oil storage, transport and the heavy and sophisticated weapons they carry to kill our sons. And where that oil and those weapons come from, you probably know better than I. They are marked in pictograph and in Cyrilic characters.

I hope you also know that if those weapons were not being sent, we would not be in Vietnam at all. If this were a disagreement between Vietnamese people, we surely would not be there, but it is not, and since I have never found you to be naive you must be aware that it is not.

This war is the work of Chairman Mao, designed and generaled by him in absentia, advised by Peking and cynically supplied with brutal weapons by foreigners who set it up. Let us denounce this also, my friend, but even more, let us together undertake a program more effective than denunciation.

I beg you to use your very considerable influence on your people, your government, and on those who look to the Soviet Union for direction, to stop sending the murderous merchandise through North Vietnam to be used against the South.

For my part, I will devote every resource I have to persuade my government to withdraw troops and weapons from the South, leaving only money and help for rebuilding. And, do you know, Genya, if you could accomplish your part, my part would follow immediately and automatically.

But even this is not necessary to stop the war. If you could persuade North Vietnam to agree in good faith to negotiate, the bombing would stop instantly. The guns would fall silent and our dear sons could come home. It is as simple as that, my friend, as simple as that, I promise you. I hope to see you and your lovely wife Galya soon.

 

With all respect and affection,

John Steinbeck

VIII.

AMERICA AND AMERICANS

JOHN STEINBECK'S stature as a writer was solidified in the 1930s by three searing books about California migrants; his career closed with an equally stringent trilogy, books not about marginalized Americans but about mainstream America: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Travels with Charley (1962), and America and Americans (1966). In the decade since publication of East of Eden in 1952, Steinbeck had declared with some regularity that he wanted to leave the past behind, to write about something other than his California childhood or his apprenticeship on Monterey's Cannery Row. He had not been entirely successful, since Sweet Thursday carried him back, as did a projected short-story cycle, never completed, about his Salinas boyhood. But with increasing insistence, he declared that the past was the “disease of modern writers.” “If this is a time of confusion, then that should be the subject of a good writer if he is to set down his time” (Benson 759). If confusion is the subject, however, a form to contain confusion is not easily found. He was drawn to the “hard discipline of play,” the drama's “iron discipline of form,” and throughout the 1950s he started a number of plays, all aborted. The more relaxed form of the letter served, as in “Letters to Alicia,” for he could move from subject to subject. Brief journalistic pieces recorded impressions. But the longer works—a travel narrative, a novel capturing America's converging voices of past and present, and a collection of essays—most clearly indicate Steinbeck's struggle to contain the present.

It's not true that Steinbeck failed to understand America after World War II; it's not true that he swerved to the right politically; but it may be true that in trying to locate the source of American malaise, he could not find an adequate form or a convincing tone to contain his discontent. “The better tone for a book such as [America and Americans],” observes Warren French, “is one that shares unique experiences rather than universalizing one's own” (110). Indeed, the essays in America and Americans, lacking Charley, lack a certain humor and charm; not fiction, they lack plot and character and setting. But they are impassioned pleas from a man who cared deeply about his country. They are jeremiads, exhorting America to take heed.

The writing of America and Americans came to him almost by accident. He was discouraged by his failure to make progress in his ten-year project of transforming Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur into modern English. He wrote to his agent that “the words sound pretentious and sour and unreal. It just makes me sick. Maybe the fire has gone out” (23 July 1964). He was rescued from despondency by an offer from his publisher. Viking's Thomas H. Guinzburg came to him with a collection of photographs that he had commissioned to be taken all over the country and suggested that the author write an introduction to the collection. Guinzburg's idea was to present the American spirit, to show Americans at work and play, in every corner of the country.

But what had started out as a thin volume of pictures was transformed into a collection of essays with the photos grouped together at various places in the text. The essays spring not from the photos, however, but from Steinbeck's recent tour of the country for Travels with Charley. He had a number of things he had wanted to say in that book which the form did not allow. The frustration of working on Le Morte d'Arthur pushed him forward to a more thoughtful and extensive job than he had originally agreed to, but also his thoughts about Arthur gave him a basis for developing his America and Americans essays.

A “cut version of the Caxton Morte d'Arthur” (Benson 21) had been his favorite book as a child, and he had used it as a framework for telling the story of the paisanos in Tortilla Flat. What attracted him as a child was its sense of mystery and adventure, but what attracted him as an adult was its sense of values—honor, duty, trustworthiness, and courage—as well as the sense of community as demonstrated by the knights of the roundtable. “The American,” he writes in the last of these essays, “has never been a perfect instrument, but at one time he had a reputation for gallantry, which, to my mind, is a sweet and priceless quality. It must still exist, but it is blotted out by the dust cloud of self-pity.” He would seem to have wanted to do the Arthur as a way of commenting indirectly on what he perceived was going wrong in American society, primarily its growing materialism and dishonesty. Frustrated with the translation, he took his concerns to express them in America and Americans, but he was led to go further, to discover just what the American was and how that person developed. He wrote to John Huston while the manuscript was in progress, “I may have to run for my life when it comes out. I am taking ‘the American' apart like a watch to see what makes him tick and some very curious things are emerging” (SLL 807).

Few had tried to identify the American in such a way since St. John de Crèvecoeur had done it in Letters from an American Farmer at the time of the American Revolution. “What, then, is the American, this new man?” (63) Crèvecoeur asks and goes on to idealize him as the yeoman farmer, industrious, community-minded, family-centered, and optimistic. He is a new breed, having “arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he had hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing” (63). Two centuries later, this was no longer a country that depended on the farmer and the opportunity to own land in order to ensure democracy, but John Steinbeck found it still inimitable and matchless: “I believe that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America—complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.”

At the same time both writers found much to criticize. For Crèvecoeur one of the central problems in eighteenth-century America was the wild man, the frontiersman who has left behind all civilizing restraints. Without rules, examples, or a sense of morality, these “men appear to be no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them, and when they are not able, they subsist on grain” (66). Two centuries later, Steinbeck saw a society that suffered from a similar lack of morality, but not because it was without resources out in the wilderness—just the opposite. Americans have food, shelter, transportation, and leisure, but have compromised values:

 

Crèvecoeur saw the wild man, his drunkenness and idleness, as being replaced by the settlers, who brought hard work, rules, and a sense of purpose to the frontier. Steinbeck envisioned a similar evolution in our nation, beginning with a biological necessity, the will to survive: “Every pursuit, no matter what its stated end, had as its foundation purpose, survival, growth, and renewal.” But after our survival would seem to be assured, we will lose our will to go on if we do not have faith and a sense of a larger purpose:

 

He wrote to Harry Guggenheim in January 1966: “Today I have spent the time correcting galley proofs on my new book. And it's a better book than I thought. It should raise some smoke. There's an argument in every sentence, or at least there will be if anyone reads it.”

IN TEXT and pictures,
²
this is a book of opinions, unashamed and individual. For centuries America and the Americans have been the target for opinions—Asian, African, and European—only these opinions have been called criticism, observation, or, God help us, evaluation. Unfortunately, Americans have allowed these foreign opinions the value set on them by their authors. For our own part, we have denounced, scolded, celebrated, and lied about facets and bits and pieces of our own country and countrymen; but I know of no native work of inspection of our whole nation and its citizens by a blowed-in-the-glass American, another opinion.

So long as our evaluators indulged in simple misconceptions and discourtesies, the game was harmless and sometimes interesting. But when, after 1918, systems arose which required a bête noire to balance their homegrown bête blanche, America as a powerful nation and a successful system became the natural patsy for those governments which were not doing so well. Since those same governments had closed their frontiers to their own people, they were free to make any generalizations they wished without the disadvantage of having to base them on observation.

This essay is not an attempt to answer or refute the sausage-like propaganda which is ground out in our disfavor. It cannot even pretend to be objective truth. Of course it is opinion, conjecture, and speculation. What else could it be? But at least it is informed by America, and inspired by curiosity, impatience, some anger, and a passionate love of America and the Americans. For I believe that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: America—complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.

If the text is opinionated, so are the pictures. The camera may record exactly, but it can set down only what its operator sees, and he sees what he wants to see—what he loves and hates and pities and is proud of. So that the pictures in this book, taken by photographers whose ancestral origins cover the whole world, whose backgrounds and experiences are as diversified as their styles and methods and camera techniques, are also opinions—American opinions. None of these pictures could have been taken anywhere but in America. A European, an African, or an Asian will not find in them an America that he has seen or would see here. But if he is open and sensitive he may learn of what our country is like to us, what we feel about it: our shame in its failures, our pride in its successes, our wonder at its size and diversity, and, above all, our passionate devotion to it—to all of it, the land, the idea, and the mystique.