America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction Read Free Page A

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:
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    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)
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    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).
    Furthermore, he reveled in the odd angle, the small incident, the ordinary person, topics not often considered by most journalists to be “stories.” Once again trying to explain his penchant for journalism, he stated in a 1965 open letter to writer Max Lerner why he “succumbed to the fatal itch and joined the gaggle of columnists”:
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    Maybe it’s like this, Max—you know how, when you are working on a long and ordered piece, all sorts of bright and lovely ideas and images intrude. They have no place in what you are writing, and so if you are young, you write them in a notebook for future use. And you never use them because they are