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Authors: John Steinbeck,Susan Shillinglaw

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

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BOOK: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
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Journalism was seldom effortless in large part because Steinbeck was always the novelist, shaping, arranging, creating characters and scenes and conversations, occasionally drifting into the fanciful or mining the fantastic. His work in both nonfiction and literary journalism always teases the border between fiction and nonfiction, between the fanciful and factual. If his “migrant material” of the 1930s swings toward the documentary and reportorial, his work of the 1950s and 1960s freely mixes moods, narrative approaches, and fictional techniques. Some of this may have been temperament—he was, in fact, fired from a reporting job in 1925 on the New York American because his news stories drifted from the facts—but some he may have picked up from muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens, who lived near Steinbeck in the 1930s. Steffens was undoubtedly Steinbeck's political mentor; it was he who, in 1935, urged the writer to interview strike organizers hiding out on the Monterey Peninsula. Abandoning his initial notion to write a biography of an organizer, Steinbeck published In Dubious Battle (1936), the first of three labor novels. But Steffens, whose New York Commercial Advertiser had run a “new kind of journalism” that was, as his biographer observes, “personal, literary, immediate,” may also have schooled Steinbeck in his concept of “descriptive narrative” (Kaplan 82). A good news story should contain “only life.” Steffens taught not only New York reporters at the turn of the century but also scores of Stanford journalism students making pilgrimages to his Carmel home in the 1930s—and John Steinbeck by 1935. When Steinbeck wrote his first feature series in 1936, “The Harvest Gypsies,” he knew how to “see” things as they are, in line with Steffens's advice to reporters.
From 1936 on, Steinbeck published his articles in more than three dozen different newspapers and magazines. Many pieces were reprinted, and many were syndicated and ran in a number of newspapers throughout the country. Four series—or parts thereof—were collected and published separately: Their Blood Is Strong in 1938 (originally “The Harvest Gypsies,” which ran in the San Francisco News in 1936), Once There Was a War in 1958 (originally war dispatches that ran in the New York Herald Tribune in 1943), A Russian Journal in 1948 (parts of which ran in the Herald Tribune in January 1948), and Un Américain à New-York et à Paris in 1956 (seventeen of the pieces written for Le Figaro Littéraire in 1954). America and Americans was written as a book, Steinbeck's last, and then published as a series in Long Island's Newsday. Other newspaper series have never been collected. His Le Figaro articles were collected only in a French edition, although a few of the pieces were published separately in American and English magazines. Two lively series for the Louisville Courier-Journal are scarcely known: one was Steinbeck's coverage of the 1956 political conventions, and the other a series on his European travels a year later. And the 1966 and 1967 series called “Letters to Alicia,” his last and most controversial newspaper work, written for Newsday, is difficult to locate. Selections from all these series, with the exception of A Russian Journal, are included here.
He often wrote longer pieces for magazines. During the time that he wrote for them, from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, magazines were an important source of family entertainment. General-interest magazines, like Collier's, published articles, short stories, and serialized novels, often with accompanying photographs or illustrations, as well as cartoons and editorials. After the war, such popular magazines gradually decreased the amount of fiction they published and eagerly sought essays. Holiday, a glossy pictorial magazine that published descriptions of possible vacation sites and travel narratives, ran several of Steinbeck's essays, among them two of his most personal and incisive, “Always Something to Do in Salinas” and “Conversation at Sag Harbor.” With their circulations in the millions, Collier's and Holiday and The Saturday Evening Post aimed at the ordinary American, providing Steinbeck a perfect platform for the expression of his ideas. While he was not in the strictest sense an intellectual, he was a man of ideas who responded thoughtfully, often passionately, to the problems he saw around him.
Steinbeck had the advantage not only of fame but also of competent agents in the United States and abroad who were willing to undertake the extra labor of finding placement for his literary journalism. Although many of his assignments were arranged by them, he set up a surprising number through friends: Mark Ethridge, staunch liberal and editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal; Alicia Patterson and Harry Guggenheim, owners of Long Island's Newsday; Lewis Gannett, book editor of the New York Herald Tribune; and Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review. Steinbeck and Cousins, for example, were both liberals and shared a firm support for the United Nations. In the mid-1950s, Cousins wanted Steinbeck to write a weekly column: “It would have been an important triumph for SR to have been able to publish him in every issue,” Cousins asserted (Benson 775), but it was an honor that the author declined, reluctant to take on journalism full time. His eventual role as “Editor-at-Large” allowed him to contribute when he could, an agreement that he struck with newspapers and magazines whenever he could from the 1950s on. Although he was capable of turning out copy regularly, as he did when he first went to London as a correspondent during World War II, normally he hated to meet weekly deadlines and preferred to sign agreements for occasional articles, writing about whatever struck him as significant. He became a contributor to Newsday in 1965 because Harry Guggenheim told him to “write when the spirit moves you and send the copy on. . . . If you don't feel like writing don't write” (3 Sept. 1965).
 
This collection of Steinbeck's nonfiction and literary journalism is organized not chronologically but thematically, to highlight the diversity of Steinbeck's concerns. Each topic is briefly introduced. Throughout, however, a few trenchant points about Steinbeck's nonfiction need to be kept in mind: the urgency of his desire to witness and judge for himself; his lifelong fascination as to what reporting with objectivity meant; his determined focus on the commonplace, the ordinary, the neglected detail; and, finally, his idealism, the urge to set things right somehow.
Steinbeck's career in journalism began in 1936, when he wrote a series of seven exposés about migrant labor for the liberal San Francisco News. In 1943, eager to contribute to the war effort, he went overseas for a few months as a war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, and after the war he did a series on Russia for the Tribune, published in 1948. These three series, all collected as books, reveal the essence of Steinbeck's journalistic impulse—his need to observe firsthand people, locales, and events and to represent them as honestly as possible in all their dimensions. His best work emerges from his perspective as eyewitness, as the one who strives to see fully and place in perspective. That is true of every assignment he accepted, whether travel articles, war journalism, or his breezy series on the 1956 conventions. To snag the latter assignment, he wrote to Mark Ethridge, publisher of the Louisville Courier-Journal, and, as Ethridge recalled, “confessed an ambition to cover the conventions.” “I have never been to a National Convention,” he announced in a letter to the Syndicated Newspaper Editors. “That is my main reason for wanting to go” (SLL 525).
The same impulse sent him frequently overseas. Although Steinbeck is known through his fiction as a Western writer who evoked a strong sense of place, it is equally true that he was compelled to travel abroad. After frequent trips to Mexico and the war reporting of the 1940s, he went on in the 1950s and 1960s to take several trips to France, Italy, England, and Ireland and to report on the state of Israel and on the war in Vietnam during his final assignments, supporting months-long journeys by writing for popular magazines such as Collier's, Holiday, and Esquire. He agreed to write travel series for the Courier-Journal and Newsday. While in Europe, he wrote for Punch in England and Le Figaro in France, the latter an assignment that began with a typical measure of enthusiasm:
 
Here in France I get interviewed all the time. I spend hours with journalists helping them to make some kind of a story and then when it comes out it is garbled and slanted and lousy. I wondered why I did not write my own interviews and charge for those hours of time and have it come out my way. . . . [It might be] called something like an American in Paris—observations, essay, questions, but unmistakably American. (SLL 480)
 
His willingness to write for Le Figaro, however, was strained by the fact that his work would have to be translated into French. With his usual fretting over every piece of writing, the addition of the translation process caused him considerable anxiety. He wanted each piece, no matter how small, to be good. His secretary, Marlene Gray, tried several translators, including several that were suggested by Le Figaro, but she felt in each case that the results were inadequate. She finally found another writer, rather than a professional translator, to do it, someone who could reproduce the spirit rather than just the letter of what was written. She had realized that it was the way he saw things and the way he wrote about what he saw that was “Steinbeck.” Indeed, the “Steinbeck” tone and “unmistakably American” approach could be the stamp on all his writing, whether about growing up in a California small town or about French fishing habits in Paris—it was American in spirit.
Through much of Steinbeck's writing, but particularly in Cannery Row and Sea of Cortez, seeing fully was set out as his primary task, while finding connections among discrete ways of seeing was a major motif. At the heart of both books is the all-important matter of perspective. One can see with one's heart as well as with the head. At the beginning of Sea of Cortez, for example, he writes:
 
We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes—we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. The oneness of these two might take its contribution from both. (2)
Steinbeck acknowledges—here and elsewhere—that anything he wrote was far from “objective,” for it was necessarily colored, “warped,” by his perceptions and his times. It was “a” Russian Journal, not “the” definitive viewpoint on the Soviet Union; it was what Paris looked like to the average American, a “tourist's” report; it was Steinbeck watching a bomber crew prepare for combat. Long before Charles Kuralt, Steinbeck more or less invented On the Road. He differed from the usual journalist in his lack of detachment—he simply could not keep his feelings out of his reporting, but that, whether in his fiction or nonfiction, is what endears him to us.
Some twenty-five years after he published Sea of Cortez, during his first visit to Israel and on his penultimate trip abroad, he is still mulling over the problem of how and what an observer sees in “Letters to Alicia,” a long passage but worth quoting in full:
 
It occurs to me to wonder and to ask how much I see or am capable of seeing. It goes without saying that our observation is conditioned by our background and experience, but do we ever observe anything objectively, do we ever see anything whole and as it is? I have always fancied myself as a fairly objective looker, but I'm beginning to wonder whether I do not miss whole categories of things. Let me give you an example of what I mean, Alicia. Some years ago the U.S. Information Service paid the expenses of a famous and fine Italian photographer to go to America and to take pictures of our country. It was thought that pictures by an Italian would be valuable to Italians because they would be of things of interest to Italy. I was living in Florence at the time and I saw the portfolio as soon as the pictures were printed. The man had traveled everywhere in America, and do you know what his pictures were? Italy, in every American city he had unconsciously sought and found Italy. The portraits—Italians; the countryside—Tuscany and the Po Valley and the Abruzzi. His eye looked for what was familiar to him and found it. . . . This man did not see the America which is not like Italy, and there is very much that isn't. And I wonder what I have missed in the wonderful trip to the south that I have just completed. Did I see only America? I confess I caught myself at it. Traveling over those breathtaking mountains and looking down at the shimmering deserts . . . I found myself saying or agreeing—yes, that's like the Texas panhandle— that could be Nevada, and that might be Death Valley. . . . [B]y identifying them with something I knew, was I not cutting myself off completely from the things I did not know, not seeing, not even recognizing, because I did not have the easy bridge of recognition . . . the shadings, the nuance, how many of those I must not have seen. (Newsday, 2 Apr. 1966)
 
Steinbeck's journalism is the record of a man who wanted to get it right, who wanted to see clearly and accurately, without superciliousness—and without ever claiming that his was the definitive, or even a fully accurate, view. He always tried for the human perspective, as much as possible without prejudice, reporting from the street level rather than from the platform or penthouse. The “greatest human excitement,” Steinbeck wrote in his foreword to Ed Ricketts's handbook Between Pacific Tides, is “that of observation to speculation to hypothesis. This is a creative process, probably the highest and most satisfactory we know” (vi).
BOOK: America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction
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