A Russian Journal (2 page)

As a travel narrative, collaborative project, and structural experiment,
Sea of Cortez
is paradigmatic of Steinbeck's work throughout the restless 1940s, culminating with
A Russian Journal
at the end of the decade. "He tried to enter the great world, so to speak," remarked Arthur Miller. His search for inspiration sparked a kind of frenetic decade of experimentation; he wrote film scripts, journalism, travel diaries, plays, novellas. Indeed, travel became a kind of panacea for Steinbeck during the 1940s. Claiming that "there's an il-logic there I need," he went to Mexico several times throughout the decade. In 1941, at the urging of documentary filmmaker Herbert Kline, he wrote a script about health problems in a remote Mexican village,
The Forgotten Village.
After the war, he repeatedly returned to write and then film
The Pearl,
and in 1-948 he went again to Mexico to work on a film treatment of Emiliano Zapata's life for Elia Kazan's great film
Viva Zapata!

Steinbeck's contributions to the United States' involvement in World War II also shattered his self-containment of the 1930s and carried him far from his native California-first to Washington, D.C., in 1941, where he was interviewed by a newly formed information and propaganda agency, the Foreign Information Service; then to New York City, where he settled with Gwyn Conger, the woman who would become his second wife. There he wrote his first contribution to the war effort,
The Moon Is Down
(1942), a play-novelette about an occupied Scandinavian country that won wide approval in Europe among underground groups resisting Nazi oppression. In America, Steinbeck's novel-and the play and film of the work that followed in quick succession-received a less enthusiastic response, for the country was not prepared to see invaders, clearly Germans, as human. Disappointed, Steinbeck went on to other war-related projects: he wrote radio scripts for the FSI early in 1942; later, he was asked to write a text about training air force bombing crews, an assignment that called for Steinbeck and photographer John Swope to visit training sites around the United States.

Once again settled on the East Coast, he worked 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 "bigger and bigger as layer on layer of equipment is put on. They walk stiffly, like artificial men"; the people of Dover who are "incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed" with German might and muscle. And in one of the most emblematic pieces, Steinbeck writes about London under seige:

People who try to tell you what the blitz was like in London start with fire and explosion and then almost invariably end up with some very tiny detail which crept in and set and became the symbol of the whole thing for them. . . . "It's the glass," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken glass being swept up, the vicious, flat tinkle." … An old woman was selling little miserable sprays of sweet lavender. The city was rocking under the bombs and the light of burning buildings made it like day. . . . And in one little hole in the roar her voice got in-a squeaky voice. "Lavender!" she said. "Buy Lavender for luck."

The bombing itself grows vague and dreamlike. The little pictures remain as sharp as they were when they were new.

Here, as in his best journalism, Steinbeck excelled at the little picture in the midst of cataclysmic events: in
A Russian Journal,
it is the girl in the Stalingrad rubble; or the bookkeeper proudly showing his scrapbook saved from war's destruction; or the photos of the lost soldiers on walls of little Ukrainian houses. Even in fiction, the Joads' misery is best captured in vignettes: Ma's colloquies with Rose of Sharon, the rollicking dance at the government camp, Uncle John's sending the dead baby down the river, images easily translated into film. Steinbeck's great strength as a writer was rarely the sustained narrative thrust. Few of his novels are highly plotted. In his best work Steinbeck's vision is scenic, highly influenced in the 1930s by documentary film, in the 1940s by a commitment to accuracy and the atypical yet also starkly ordinary angle. In addition, Steinbeck brought to war reporting, noted the famed war correspondent Ernie Pyle, whom Steinbeck met in North Africa,

a delicate sympathy for mortal man's transient nobility and beastliness that I believe no other writer possesses. Surely we have no other writer so likely to catch on paper the inner things that most people don't know about war-the pitiableness of bravery, the vulgarity, the grotesquely warped values, the childlike tenderness in all of us.

At its best, all of Steinbeck's journalism captures with unflagging empathy the commonplace yet telling angle or story. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the writer turned to journalism with greater and greater frequency, willing to finance trips abroad by writing articles, eager to see for himself what events absorbed the world. In the early 1950s he wrote most of his travel articles, some of the best of these on an American in Paris in 1954, published in
Le Figaro.
In 1966, a weary and unwell Steinbeck traveled to Vietnam to witness war once again. The record of this trip is sketched in a remarkable series, "Letters to Alicia." Steinbeck, argues biographer Jackson Benson, needed "to be on the scene, where things were going on-it was part of his

restlessness-which was similar to the compulsion, or perhaps addiction, that some journalists have to rush to the eye of the storm."

III

In 1946 and 1947, John Steinbeck experienced personal and professional anguish that mirrored the dark uncertainty of the emerging cold war face-off. As his newly purchased house on East Seventy-eighth Street in New York City was being remodeled around his "working cellar … gray concrete walls and cement floors and pipes overhead," his marriage was slowly crumbling. With bravado, he declared himself happy in his four-year union to Gwyn Conger, content with his status as a father to two young sons. But the truth of his situation was far less sanguine: he had difficulties sustaining interest in his new novel,
The Wayward Bus,
published in February 1947; he anxiously sought to create the perfect working 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 vantage point," notes his boigrapher, "he cared deeply about the outcome of the war against fascism and was always ready to risk his life to get great photographs." "What makes Capa a great photo journalist?" asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. "We see his own appetite for life, his mix of urgency with compassion . . . the artistic thrust of his photography always had more to do with its emotional pitch, which remained genuine and deeply felt." Or, in Capa's own words, a great picture "is a cut out of the whole event which will show more of the real truth of the affair to some one who was not there than the whole scene."