America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Free

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:
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    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)
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    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:
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    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