A Russian Journal Read Free

doggedly on the text of
Bombs Away, The Story of a Bomber Team
(1942), writing to his college friend Webster Street: "I get farther and farther away from the old realities and more and more immersed in this dreamlike war. When it is over I'm not going to be able to remember what it was like." Other war-related projects followed: with childhood friend Jack Wagner, Steinbeck wrote a "sample script" for a film,
A Medal for Benny,
about a small town's reception of their war hero, a ne'er-do-well from the wrong side of town. Early in 1943 he wrote a novella for Hitchcock's famous movie about survivors from a torpedoed freighter cast adrift at sea,
Lifeboat.
Finally, in mid-1943, he was given the assignment that used his talents most successfully: that summer, he was sent overseas by the
New York Herald Tribune
as a war correspondent to England, West Africa, and ultimately to cover a diversionary mission off the coast of Italy.
    In many ways
A Russian Journal
is the final chapter of this war journalism. When in Stalingrad, "an expanse of ruin," Steinbeck writes that "Our windows looked out on acres of rubble, broken brick and concrete and pulverized plaster, and in the wreckage the strange dark weeds that always seem to grow in destroyed places." In that terrain, "there was a little hummock, like the entrance to a gopher hole. And every morning, early, out of this hole a young girl crawled." In this one vignette about a hounded, dazed child, Steinbeck captures the agony of besieged Stalingrad. Framed by a window, the verbal composition is crafted to accompany Capa's photos. Indeed, one of the most remarkable qualities of
A Russian Journal
is the way that
    Steinbeck's reporting and Capa's photojournalism intersect. Steinbeck's method seems purely photographic, as if the project itself-collaboration with a photographer-dictated style and approach. As he insistently notes in the first chapter of
A Russian Journal,
the writer and photographer intend to record only what is seen, nothing more. The photograph is an apt metaphor for visiting the Soviet Union in 1947, where visitors were shown so very little of Stalin's domain, always circumscribed.
     
    II
    "John was actually a missionary. He was essentially a journalist… I think he could see things going on…. I mean journalist in the power of observation."-Toby Street
     
    The role of literary journalist was not, in 1943, a new one for John Steinbeck. His missionary zeal had found an outlet in the late 1930s, when the heretofore apolitical writer turned his gaze to the contemporary scene in California. The urgent realism of
In Dubious Battle
and
Of Mice and Men
has a journalistic thrust. The impetus behind
The Grapes of Wrath
was more essentially documentary. In August 1936, Steinbeck was sent by the
San Francisco News,
a decidedly liberal newspaper, to write a series on migrants in California; those seven articles, published as "The Harvest Gypsies," were Steinbeck's first journalistic triumph, a foray into literary witness that conveyed, through the author's fidelity to truth, the emotional context of the migrants' sorrow. With searing prose, he etched the plight of migrant families: "… in the faces of the husband and his wife, you begin to see an expression you will notice on every face; not worry, but absolute terror of the starvation that crowds in against the borders of the camp." He described migrants clinging to respectability: "The house is about 10 feet by 10 feet, and it is built completely of corrugated paper…. With the first rain the carefully built house will slop down into a brown, pulpy mush…." Witness to social upheaval, Steinbeck's eye reported the conditions endured and the dignity maintained by people on the edge.
    Seven years later, sent to cover World War II, he brought the same compassion and sharp eye for detail to the neglected aspects of the war-helmeted men on a troop ship looking "like long rows of mushrooms"; bomber crews dressing for combat, getting