A Russian Journal Read Free Page B

space, even toying with the idea-as he notes in a diary he kept for the year-of writing in a completely dark room. In nuanced phrases, he voices his suspicions that Gwyn was having an affair. And with characteristic force, he blasts the world outside his study:
    Our leaders seem to be nuts. If ever a nation was being dragged over the edge of folly into destruction this is it. God help us! … [Times are] growing more complicated to the point which a man can't even see his own life let alone control it. What a time. What a time. We will have our nice house put in to get it bombed. But so will everyone else. So I go on writing an unimportant novel that carefully avoids anything timely….
    Throughout this dark time, the novelist at odds with both wife and world toiled sporadically on other projects, interrupting the slow progress on "The Bus." His writing took on an increasingly insistent moral edge as he attempted to come to terms with the irrationality and complexity of postwar America. On October 15, 1946, he sketched a piece called "The Witches of Salem," a synopsis of an idea for a motion picture "intended to be a film treatise on public hysteria and injustice." From that aborted project came another, "The Last Joan," a play that "has to do with witchcraft. And that in a modern sense we better heed what the present Joan tells us of the atom bomb, because it's the last time that we'll have a Joan to tell us what to do." Behind all of these projects and voiced dissatisfaction with contemporary life was, undoubtedly, the urge to escape-his country, his unhappy home situation. In 1945, he'd turned down a request to cover the war trials in Europe. A trip to the Soviet Union, sponsored by the
New York Herald Tribune,
promised relief. He'd been there once briefly in the summer of 1937 with his first wife, Carol (not 1936, as he notes in the book), and he wanted to see how the country had been transformed by war.
    But the trip promised more, the chance to experiment as a writer. As he was completing
The Wayward Bus
Steinbeck wrote in his journal: "I have finally worked out what I could do in Russia. I could make a detailed account of a journey. A travel diary. Such a thing has not been done. And it is one of the things people are interested in. And it is the thing I could do and perhaps do well and it might be a contribution." At this juncture, when his novels and play synopses were not bearing fruit-novels seemed insignificant, outlines for plays heavily allegorical-journalism promised discipline, relevance, and a guaranteed audience for the forty-five-year-old writer. And a "journal" offered an opportunity to experiment with prose honed to photographic integrity.
    In 1947, the acclaimed war photographer Robert Capa, age thirty-three, was also at loose ends, although "very happy to become an unemployed war photographer." Early that year he had finished preparing for press a collection of war photographs with personal narrative,
Slightly Out of Focus.
He needed a new photographic challenge in a world ostensibly at peace, and he had long wished to visit the Soviet Union. Ever since 1935 when the Hungarian-born Endre Friedmann had invented himself as Robert Capa, a rich American photographer covering Paris, the irrepressible Capa had famously recorded images of several wars, participat-ing in the Normandy invasion for
Life
in 1944: "… for a war correspondent to miss an invasion," he said, "is like refusing a date with Lana Turner after completing a five-year stretch at Sing Sing." His reputation was made during the Spanish Civil War with a riveting shot of a soldier falling before Fascist machine-gun fire. In 1938, mourning the death of his beloved companion, Gerda, who had died in the battle of Brunete, he went to China to witness the Chinese and Japanese conflict, finding himself at the end of that year a celebrated international photographer. That he remained. "Far from being an impassive voyeur who merely observed from a safe