A RUSSIAN JOURNAL.
John Steinbeck.
INTRODUCTION.
IN 1946, WINSTON CHURCHILL announced that an "Iron Curtain" had been drawn closed across Eastern Europe. In the winter of 1947, the cold war began in earnest. The Soviet Union, fierce ally of the United States in World War II, had become a menacing presence, a foe barely understood. "In the papers every day," John Steinbeck begins his text, "there were thousands of words about Russia," and yet, he continues, "there were some things that n.o.body wrote about Russia, and these were the things that interested us most of all." His quest, and that of photographer Robert Capa who accompanied him, was to discover the "great other side," the "private life of the Russian people." Steinbeck and Capa"s modest book about the lives of Russians, A Russian Journal, published in 1948, attempts only "honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn"t know sufficiently."
In many ways, that is what John Steinbeck had been doing quite successfully for twenty years, writing books about ordinary people: paisanos, Oklahoma migrants, enlisted men in World War II, Mexican peasants. A Russian Journal does not sound the epic chords of The Grapes of Wrath, certainly, but it has some of that book"s empathy and humanity. Indeed, one explanation for the appeal of A Russian Journal is that this book, unlike so many other accounts of Russia published at the time, engages and informs in Steinbeck"s most characteristic manner: expressing empathy and understanding for working people; capturing with a journalist"s eye the telling detail; seeing "nonteleologically," recording merely what is witnessed; and finally leavening the narrative with a wry humor absent in many more ponderous contemporary accounts of travel through Soviet-approved locales. If not the most erudite or wide-ranging book about postwar Russia, Steinbeck and Capa"s is just what they claimed for it: "It is not the Russian story, but simply a Russian story."
The collaboration between Capa and Steinbeck was, in fact, serendipitous. The two had met in London in 1943, and renewed their friendship in New York in March 1947, planning to leave for Russia as soon as possible, until, on May 14, Steinbeck took a nasty fall from a window of his apartment, shattered his knee, and spent a few weeks recovering (the knee, however, would give him problems throughout the trip). Each restless and independent, neither Capa nor Steinbeck, in fact, particularly cared for collaborative ventures. As early as 1936, when writer John O"Hara pa.s.sed through Pacific Grove, eager to meet and then work with John Steinbeck on a stage adaptation of the recently published In Dubious Battle, Steinbeck declared that he "liked him and his att.i.tude. . . . I think we could get along well. I do not believe in collaboration." Yet despite his protest to the contrary, collaboration came easily to Steinbeck; he initiated or was drawn into several joint projects, many completed-as was his 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with marine biologist Edward Ricketts (Sea of Cortez, 1941)-some aborted, as was the one with O"Hara. In particular, Steinbeck gravitated toward visual artists, filmmakers, and photographers. Robert Capa, famed war photojournalist, formed with Steinbeck perhaps the happiest of Steinbeck"s alliances with an artist in another medium.
Capa, whose celebrated war photos had frozen individual human torment and exuberance, shared Steinbeck"s compa.s.sion and curiosity. Born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1913, Capa possessed the qualities of exuberance, tolerance, and a humanitarian spirit that captivated Steinbeck. As biographer Richard Whelan notes, Capa"s political philosophy, similar to Steinbeck"s own, was formed when Capa was a rebellious teen: "democratic, egalitarian, pacifistic, semi-collectivist, pro-labor, anti-authoritarian, and anti-fascist, with a strong emphasis on the dignity of man and the rights of the individual." Forced to leave Budapest in 1931, he had been in exile most of his life, wandering the world as witness to the ravages of war, sometimes shooting photos for Time, Life, and Fortune, always focusing on the human drama, the ordinary in the extraordinary. Capa photographed people, not events, aiming his camera, notes Whelan, on the "edge of things . . . studies of people under extreme stress."
The two artists" forty-day trip to the Soviet Union in 1947 was, like Steinbeck"s 1940 trip to the Sea of Cortez with Edward Ricketts, an expedition of the curious. Like Ricketts and Steinbeck on the earlier journey, Capa and Steinbeck also "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." If the structure of Sea of Cortez melds two approaches, the "conventionally scientific" and the experiential, this travel narrative opts for the single lens: "We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn"t know sufficiently." Theirs was a journal, a photo essay. The structure they chose for their book-indeed, the dominant metaphor of A Russian Journal-is the Soviet Union as a framed portrait.
I.
With the onset of the 1940s, the world had altered its step. "Things are very bad in the world, aren"t they," Steinbeck wrote to his editor Pascal Covici in 1940. "Everything seems to be going to pot, everything as conceived before I mean. Maybe out of the fighting and the struggle there will come some kind of new conceptions. I don"t know." Throughout the 1940s, John Steinbeck sought "new conceptions" for his own work. He began the decade composing a scientific travelog, ended it working on his most personal and experimental novel, East of Eden. A Russian Journal is part of his ongoing effort to discover fresh material, to forge new literary forms, to rekindle in his writing, as he wrote in his journal during a dark moment in 1946, "the glory that shadows everything else and that makes me seem like a grey and grizzled animal now. . . . So long since I"ve done the old kind of work-so long."
In the late 1930s, John Steinbeck had found that glory while writing his masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). For a decade prior, he had been perfecting his craft and publishing in quick succession the works most often a.s.sociated with John Steinbeck, social historian: the short stories in The Long Valley (written in the early 1930s, collected in 1938); the comic tour de force, Tortilla Flat (1935), and the labor trilogy, In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and The Grapes of Wrath. By the end of the Depression John Steinbeck, novelist of the people, was a "household name," noted the promotional material for the 1940 John Ford film The Grapes of Wrath. That name, however, became something of a burden for the author who had fiercely declared in letters his need for anonymity in order to write. The world"s gaze was upon him in the 1940s, expecting high sentiments from this chronicler of the poor. Critics and reviewers waited for the familiar voice of the proletarian writer to return to the gritty themes of the 1930s. He resisted. "I must make a new start," he wrote his college roommate, Carlton Sheffield, in November 1939. "I"ve worked the novel . . . as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it-a clumsy vehicle at best. And I don"t know the form of the new but I know there is a new thing which will be adequate and shaped by the new thinking." At the cusp of the new decade, his initial course was scientific and ecological, "things more lasting," he remarked to Sheffield. John Steinbeck, novelist, transformed himself into John Steinbeck, marine biologist, as he set out in March 1940 with friend, biologist, and intellectual soul mate Ed Ricketts to explore the littoral of the Sea of Cortez; the 1941 account of that trip, Sea of Cortez, is one of Steinbeck"s neglected masterpieces, a rich brew of scientific observation, philosophical musing, and humorous anecdotes capped by Ricketts"s catalog of specimens discovered on the trip.
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 illogic there I need," he went to Mexico several times throughout the decade. In 1941, at the urging of doc.u.mentary 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 1948 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 n.a.z.i 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 a.s.signment 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 Hitchc.o.c.k"s famous movie about survivors from a torpedoed freighter cast adrift at sea, Lifeboat. Finally, in mid-1943, he was given the a.s.signment 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 circ.u.mscribed.
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 doc.u.mentary. 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 compa.s.sion 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 gla.s.s," says one man, "the sound in the morning of the broken gla.s.s 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 sc.r.a.pbook 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 doc.u.mentary 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 n.o.bility 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 s.p.a.ce, 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. G.o.d 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, partic.i.p.ating 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 j.a.panese conflict, finding himself at the end of that year a celebrated international photographer. That he remained. "Far from being an impa.s.sive 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 photojournalist?" asks a reporter covering a 1998 retrospective of his work. "We see his own appet.i.te for life, his mix of urgency with compa.s.sion . . . 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."
Dedicated to the telling pose and psychological truth, Robert Capa was John Steinbeck"s artistic soul mate. As Steinbeck wrote in a tribute to Capa after the photographer"s untimely death in 1954: "He could photograph motion and gaiety and heartbreak. He could photograph thought. He made a world and it was Capa"s world. Note how he captures the endlessness of the Russian landscape with one long road and one single human. See how his lens could peer through the eyes into the mind of a man."
The collaboration between these two restless and creative men, notes Robert Capa, began this way: at the beginning of a newly invented war which was named the cold war . . . no one knew where the battlefields were. While I was figuring what to do I met Mr. Steinbeck, who had his own problems. He was struggling with a reluctant play, and the cold war gave him the same shivers it gave me. To make it short, we became a cold-war team. It seemed to us that behind phrases like "Iron Curtain" "cold war" and "preventive war" people and thought and humor had fully disappeared. We decided to make an old-fashioned Don Quixote and Sancho Panza quest-to ride behind the "iron curtain" and pit our lances and pens against the windmills of today.
Capa"s whimsical statement of purpose reveals, in fact, something about why A Russian Journal is in many ways superior to more ambitious, even more informative contemporary accounts of postwar Russia. Typical is an apologist for the Soviet experiment, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, dean of Canterbury (Soviet Russia Since the War, 1947), who intones that it is "our responsibility to understand Russia," and offers a smorgasbord of topics: "A Young Woman of Aristocratic Birth," "Soviet Women Lead the World," "Childhood in Soviet Land," "Planned Industry." Steinbeck and Capa"s aim was far more modest; and, unlike Johnson, they had no political agenda.
Other less biased writers articulated intentions that often echo that of Steinbeck and Capa-to understand the people of Russia-but nets are cast far more widely. Edward Crankshaw, in Russia and the Russians (1948), sought "to produce a picture of the Russian people, their culture, and their political ideas, against the background of the unchanging conditions of their landscape and their climate." Descriptions of the great Russian plain and detailed synopses of Russian history absorb many pages of his tome, but the "living image of a distant people" emerges only as a series of statistics: twenty-five years ago, he reminds his readers, four-fifths of the Russian population was composed of peasants, while in 1948 only half are peasants. In Just tell the truth: The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain (1947), journalist and president of the American Agricultural Editors a.s.sociation John L. Strohn had a similarly ambitious agenda: "To see and talk with people of the Soviet Union, so I can introduce them through stories and broadcasts to the people of America. . . . What I"m interested in are the common people." Visiting collective farms, he observes the damage caused by war, the absent men, and concludes-as does Steinbeck-that "it is the women who are the real heroes of the farm front-women who did practically all of the farm work during the war, who are doing even now 80 per cent of the work on collective farms today."
But the Russian women of Steinbeck and Capa, not absorbed in statistics and generalizations, strike more convincing poses: the village wit at the first communal farm who shakes a cuc.u.mber at Capa"s camera. Or Mamuchka, renowned cook, owner of a new cow, Lubka, who hasn"t the personality of her beloved former cow, Katushka. Capa"s photos, like Steinbeck"s prose, avoid the panoramic in favor of the portrait. Their joint commitment to record only what they could witness-based not on research or speculation but on visual record-is their full story. Paradoxically, their approach-to frame only what is seen-more accurately reflects Stalin"s Soviet Union, where visitors saw only scenes carefully orchestrated by Soviet officials. Journalists traced the same path Steinbeck and Capa did, the so-called Vodka Circuit, because Westerners were typically taken to Moscow, Kiev, and Tiflis, showplace cities all.
Reading several of these midcentury accounts undoubtedly supplements and enhances Steinbeck"s text. Journalist Marshall Mac-Duffie, in The Red Carpet: 10,000 Miles Through Russia on a Visa From Khrushchev, writes about a 1953 trip, with reflections on his earlier experience in Russia in 1946. Puzzling on why Russians fed visitors so lavishly, he writes about his 1946 visit: We were members of an accredited diplomatic UN mission. Possibly they thought they had to entertain us. Secondly, there was a shortage of food. So, in a curious way, the giving of a formal dinner or putting on a spread a.s.sumed a special significance, as a gesture. Third, I often suspected that our visit was an excuse for local officials to throw one of their rare parties on the old expense account and get a little rich food otherwise un.o.btainable. Lastly, it has been long a Russian custom to entertain foreign visitors in such fashion. . . . Wherever our mission went, we encountered these relatively elaborate meals with the inevitable succession of numerous toasts.
Steinbeck and Capa were, of course, similarly feted, but Steinbeck eschews generalizations and a.n.a.lysis, opting for humor instead-particularly when seated at yet another dinner table: one Georgian banquet was the "only meal or dinner we ever attended where fried chicken was an hors d"oeuvre, and where each hors d"oeuvre was half a chicken." It"s this humorous eye that skewers Soviet excess, and the quick sympathy for the generosity behind it all-vintage Steinbeck material-that account for this book"s appeal.
A Russian Journal, the record of their forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947, was published in April 1948, after parts had been serialized in the New York Herald Tribune (beginning on January 14, 1948, and running on page 3 of the paper until January 31) and in the Ladies" Home Journal (published in February). Like most of Steinbeck"s work after The Grapes of Wrath, it received decidedly mixed reviews. Writing for the Sat.u.r.day Review, Louis Fischer panned it-excepting Capa"s "marvelous photographs." Some felt that the text trivialized a profound topic, or added little to the readers" knowledge of Russia, or rehashed what had already been written. "As books about Russia go," wrote Orville Prescott for the New York Times, ""A Russian Journal" is a lot better written than most, but it is more superficial than many." Sterling North concurred: "The question arises: how superficial can books about Russia become. . . . It could have been otherwise if the collaborators" knowledge of Russia, their interest in Russia and their att.i.tude toward Russia had been above the level of eating, drinking and observing pleasant surface impressions." Steinbeck deliberately and consciously, of course, avoids historical context, political posturing, and in-depth a.n.a.lysis, as he reminds his readers throughout. And Capa reported later that, in fact, "on any occasion where questions were asked us about our feelings toward the policy of the United States Government we always stated emphatically that even if we were to disagree with some of its aspects, we would refuse to criticize it outside of the United States." Writing one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic a.s.sessments, however, Victor Bernstein mused: "I am not at all certain that this abnegation of the interpreter"s role is justified merely because it is deliberate. It is an old, old fight in the theory and practice of journalism. How much of the unseen must go into a story to make it understandable, to get at its roots, to put it into perspective? How much of the unseen should Steinbeck put into his book to make it truly objective and not merely superficial?"
It was superficial, of course, only in light of what a few knew and more suspected was occurring in Stalin"s Soviet Union. The United States" views of postwar Russia were, in fact, profoundly troubled. As Arthur Miller observed in his autobiography, Timebends, by 1947 "the Germans clearly were to be our new friends, and the savior-Russians the enemy, an ign.o.ble thing it seemed to me. . . . this wrenching shift, this ripping off of Good and Evil labels from one nation and pasting them onto another, had done something to wither the very notion of a world even theoretically moral." In these liminal years, the Soviet Union was a place few comprehended. A 1948 response to the book by a Ukrainian professor, then living in Munich, is ent.i.tled "Why Did You Not Want to See, Mr. Steinbeck?" What more could Steinbeck have seen is perhaps a better question. He knew more than he says, certainly-he"d been in the Soviet Union before, although he never commented on his and Carol"s 1937 trip. But in 1947 he writes only what he sees-and he sees with a great deal of emotion and understanding-because those are the artistic parameters he set. And, once again, he saw only what the Russians permitted him or any other visitors to see, an updated version of the Potemkin village.
Other American reviewers found the book highly satisfying, "objective, impartial" and "readable because [Steinbeck] loves real people and because he has a sense of humor that never lets him down." "This is one of the best books about Russia since Maurice Baring wrote his "Puppet Show of Memory" in 1922," effused the reviewer for the New York Sun. Steinbeck "has a most observant eye, a deadpan humor and a command of the English language unsurpa.s.sed by any American of our time. The Steinbeck style is one of the marvels of the age. It is entirely unpretentious. . . ." Bernstein, among others, praised Capa"s lens, which "suits the prose which surrounds it, lean and restrictive, without the furbelows of the self-conscious artist, and yet full of sensitivity and attention to detail." And supportive reviewers acknowledged that Steinbeck and Capa"s book would help the West better "understand the Russians emotionally," a real contribution. Again, one of the most sensitive reviews posed a tough question: What were the political implications of such a book? Joseph Henry Jackson, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, notes that the text would please no political faction-as the author himself admitted in his final paragraph. "A good deal here," notes Jackson, "will probably annoy the devout Left, for the two Americans, visiting with the best will in the world, were often irritated by the way things were done in Russia, by the miles of red tape that had to be unwound whatever they wanted to do. . . ." He continues, "On the other hand, the case-hardened Right will also be irritated by the book, on the ground that n.o.body"s got any right to be saying a good word on behalf of any kind of Russian excepting a dead Russian."
Indeed, this trip to Russia brought back for both Steinbeck and Capa the specter of their own political agendas. The suspicion that The Grapes of Wrath, with its magnificent endors.e.m.e.nt of "we" over "I," was communist propaganda lingered in the minds of some, certainly the FBI, who had maintained a file on Steinbeck since 1943. The truth was that Steinbeck had long despised the communist agenda: In Dubious Battle, a novel about striking workers in California, shows the communist organizers to be self-serving, willing to sacrifice the people"s needs for the party"s. When writing The Grapes of Wrath, with its emphasis on fair treatment for the working man, Steinbeck insisted that the lyrics for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed on the endpapers so that there would be no doubt about his patriotism. "The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary," he wrote his publisher. "They will try to give it the communist angle. However, the Battle Hymn is American and intensely so . . . if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning."
In spite of his protestations, however, muted accusations that Steinbeck was "Red" lingered into the 1950s. In 1939, as The Grapes of Wrath was about to be published, he was convinced that the FBI was investigating him-in Monterey a local bookstore owner reported being questioned by Hoover"s men and in Los Gatos his name had been turned into the local sheriff"s office. FBI files on Steinbeck uncategorically deny that he was under investigation in the late 1930s, but they do detail a full investigation made of the writer in 1943 "to determine his suitability to hold a commission in the U.S. Army," a commission denied because of suspected communist sympathies. "a.s.sociates and friends," the FBI report notes, said that although he "exercised poor discretion during his early days of writing by a.s.sociating with some elements of the Communist Party, he was not interested in advancing the cause of the Party but in gathering material for his writings on certain social conditions existing in the US at that time." In fact, evidence of communist leanings is decidedly thin: in 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck published two articles in the liberal Carmel magazine owned by Ella Winter and Lincoln Steffens, the Pacific Weekly; in 1936, he also lent his support to and possibly attended the Western Writers Conference, later labeled a "communist front" according to the committee on Un-American Activities; in 1938, he gave his 1936 San Francisco News accounts to the Simon Lubin Society, allegedly "a Communist front for California agrarian penetration"; in 1938, "the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers was organized under Steinbeck"s leadership"; in 1946, he was invited to a reception in New York for three visiting Soviet literary figures. That was it. John Steinbeck was no communist, but he was very curious about communism"s effect on the average man.
Nor was Robert Capa a communist, although his pa.s.sport was confiscated in Paris in 1953 on allegations of communist sympathies; the evidence in his FBI file as thin as that in Steinbeck"s. According to Whelan, Capa"s dossier records only trivial a.s.sociations with communism: "he had sold photographs to Regards during the Spanish Civia War; some of his pictures had appeared in a magazine published by Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; he had been either a member or an honorary member of the "Radical anti-fascist" Photo League; he had gone to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck; the Daily Worker had reported his Herald Tribune Forum speech with approval. In 1950 it was added that he had spoken out against jailing the Hollywood Ten." Both men, according to Capa, "stated very clearly before and during our trip that we were not Communists or Communist-sympathizers." For their careful stance, however, they were reviled by the Soviet press after the book"s publication, described as "gangsters" and "hyenas."
In the cold war climate of mutual distrust between the two countries, the most emblematic moment in A Russian Journal may well be Capa"s first photographs: Three huge double windows overlooked the street. As time went on, Capa posted himself in the windows more and more, photographing little incidents that happened under our windows. Across the street, on the second floor, there was a man who ran a kind of camera repair shop. He worked long hours on equipment. And we discovered late in the game that while we were photographing him, he was photographing us.
Indeed, KGB files indicate that Soviet authorities scrutinized movements of the pair throughout the fully orchestrated trip; instructions were precise: Steinbeck is a man of conservative conviction and, in addition, he has recently become more right-wing oriented. That"s why our approach to him should be especially cautious and we should avoid showing him something that can do us any harm.
The KGB report from Kiev was dutiful: The task that the UOKS set for itself was to primarily show the visitors how the national economy and cultural valuables of the Ukrainian SSR were destroyed during the war and the great efforts of our people in restoration and reconstruction of the country.
The bulk of the report summarizes events and speculates on the att.i.tude of Steinbeck and Capa toward what they saw: I was with Capa when he took all of his pictures. He had an opportunity to take pictures depicting beggars, queues, German prisoners of war, and secret sites (i.e. the construction of the gas pipe-line). He did not take photos of this kind and approached picture-taking without reporter imprudence. Of the photos which cannot be considered favorably, I can point to only two: in the Museum of Ukranian Art, he took a picture of an emaciated woman-visitor, and on our way to the kolkhoz, he took a picture of a kolkhoz family wearing shabby clothes. . . .
However, a close scrutiny of relations between Steinbeck and Capa also forces us to stipulate that Capa is more loyally and friendly disposed to us. Steinbeck in an underhand way gave Capa instructions to look for vulnerable, in his opinion, aspects of our life.
Steinbeck"s frequent silences made officials uncomfortable. Capa"s camera-he shot over four thousand photos-made them doubly uncomfortable.
A Russian Journal is an important book in the Steinbeck canon, much more so than has been acknowledged. Read for what it is, not for what it fails to do, Steinbeck"s text sensitively captures a moment in Soviet history, as he intended. Steinbeck"s carefully rendered vignettes, like Capa"s photos, replicate his emotional response to a country and a people flattened by war, fed on propaganda, denied free speech, and convinced of the truth of their programmed responses. But they are people, always people.
And the trip to Russia also marks a crucial stage in John Steinbeck"s gradual shift from his 1930s commitment to group man to his subsequent concern with individual consciousness. In Russia, the group had subsumed individual creativity, thought, and action. "Wherever we went, the questions asked us had a certain likeness, and we gradually discovered that the questions all grew from a single source. The intellectuals of the Ukraine based their questions, both political and literary, on articles they had read in Pravda . . . we knew the articles on which they were based almost by heart." Steinbeck"s fictional perspective was, in fact, shifting from the detached scientific viewpoint to the highly personal and moral stance given clear voice in his works after A Russian Journal. Immediately after his return he started thinking about his "long slow piece of work," the novel that would become East of Eden in five years, the study of individual moral choice. Traveling in Russia, he"d seen what a repressive regime could accomplish. In 1949, he wrote to John O"Hara: I think I believe one thing powerfully-that the only creative thing our species has is the individual lonely mind. Two people can create a child but I know of no other thing created by a group. The group ungoverned by individual thinking is a horrible destructive principle. The great change in the last 2,000 years was the Christian idea that the individual soul was very precious.
In A Russian Journal, Steinbeck and Capa captured a few of those individual Russian souls who endured in a system ready to smother all creativity: "The Russians have been doing such bad things lately with their art stultification and their silly attacks on musicians and the decree about no Russian being allowed to speak to foreigners that it makes me sad," Steinbeck wrote to a friend in February 1948. "And the small Russian people are such nice people." That"s what this book still reminds its readers, a goal not so far distant from his efforts, ten long years earlier, to give human ident.i.ty to the amorphous refugees from Oklahoma.
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING.
Atkinson, Oriana. "John Steinbeck, and Robert Capa, Record a Russian Journey." New York Times Book Review (9 May 1948): 3.
Benson, Jackson. The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer. New York: Penguin, 1984.
Clancy, Charles J. "Steinbeck"s A Russian Journal." A Study Guide to Steinbeck, Part II. Ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1979.
Ditsky, John. "Between Acrobats and Seals: Steinbeck in the U.S.S.R." Steinbeck Quarterly 15 (1982): 23-29.
FBI File #100-106224 (subject: John Steinbeck).
Sherekh, Yuriy. "Why Did You Not Want to See, Mr. Steinbeck?" The Ukrainian Quarterly 4 (1948): 317-24.
Slater, John F. "America Past and Soviet Present." Steinbeck Quarterly 8 (1975): 95-104.
Steinbeck, John. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. Eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten. New York: Viking, 1975.
Steinbeck, John. "Robert Capa: An Appreciation." Photography (September 1954): 48-53.
Stojko, Wolodymyr, and Wolodymyr Serhiychuk. "John Steinbeck in Ukraine: What the Secret Soviet Archives Reveal." The Ukrainian Quarterly 51 (1995): 62-76.
Whelan, Richard. Robert Capa, a Biography. New York: Knopf, 1985.
CHAPTER 1.
IT WILL BE NECESSARY to say first how this story and how this trip started, and what its intention was. In late March, I, and the p.r.o.noun is used by special arrangement with John Gunther, was sitting in the bar of the Bedford Hotel on East Fortieth Street. A play I had written four times had melted and run out between my fingers. I sat on the bar stool wondering what to do next. At that moment Robert Capa came into the bar looking a little disconsolate. A poker game he had been nursing for several months had finally pa.s.sed away. His book had gone to press and he found himself with nothing to do. w.i.l.l.y, the bartender, who is always sympathetic, suggested a Suissesse, a drink which w.i.l.l.y makes better than anybody else in the world. We were depressed, not so much by the news but by the handling of it. For news is no longer news, at least that part of it which draws the most attention. News has become a matter of punditry. A man sitting at a desk in Washington or New York reads the cables and rearranges them to fit his own mental pattern and his by-line. What we often read as news now is not news at all but the opinion of one of half a dozen pundits as to what that news means.
w.i.l.l.y set the two pale green Suissesses in front of us and we began to discuss what there was left in the world that an honest and liberal man could do. In the papers every day there were thousands of words about Russia. What Stalin was thinking about, the plans of the Russian General Staff, the disposition of troops, experiments with atomic weapons and guided missiles, all of this by people who had not been there, and whose sources were not above reproach. And it occurred to us that there were some things that n.o.body wrote about Russia, and they were the things that interested us most of all. What do the people wear there? What do they serve at dinner? Do they have parties? What food is there? How do they make love, and how do they die? What do they talk about? Do they dance, and sing, and play? Do the children go to school? It seemed to us that it might be a good thing to find out these things, to photograph them, and to write about them. Russian politics are important just as ours are, but there must be the great other side there, just as there is here. There must be a private life of the Russian people, and that we could not read about because no one wrote about it, and no one photographed it.
w.i.l.l.y mixed another Suissesse, and he agreed with us that he might be interested in such things too, and that this was the kind of thing that he would like to read. And so we decided to try it-to do a simple reporting job backed up with photographs. We would work together. We would avoid politics and the larger issues. We would stay away from the Kremlin, from military men and from military plans. We wanted to get to the Russian people if we could. It must be admitted that we did not know whether we could or not, and when we spoke to friends about it they were quite sure we couldn"t.
We made our plans in this way: If we could do it, it would be good, and a good story. And if we couldn"t do it, we would have a story too, the story of not being able to do it. With this in mind we called George Cornish at the Herald Tribune, had lunch with him, and told him our project. He agreed that it would be a good thing to do and offered to help us in any way.
Together we decided on several things: We should not go in with chips on our shoulders and we should try to be neither critical nor favorable. We would try to do honest reporting, to set down what we saw and heard without editorial comment, without drawing conclusions about things we didn"t know sufficiently, and without becoming angry at the delays of bureaucracy. We knew there would be many things we couldn"t understand, many things we wouldn"t like, many things that would make us uncomfortable. This is always true of a foreign country. But we determined that if there should be criticism, it would be criticism of the thing after seeing it, not before.
In due time our application for visas went to Moscow, and within a reasonable time mine came through. I went over to the Russian Consulate in New York, and the Consul General said, "We agree that this is a good thing to do, but why do you have to take a cameraman? We have lots of cameramen in the Soviet Union."
And I replied, "But you have no Capas. If the thing is to be done at all, it must be done as a whole, as a collaboration."
There was some reluctance about letting a cameraman into the Soviet Union, and none about letting me in, and this seemed strange to us, for censorship can control film, but it cannot control the mind of an observer. Here we must explain something that we found to be true during our whole trip. The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons, particularly to people who have been in warfare, who have been bombed and sh.e.l.led, for at the back of a bombing run is invariably a photograph. In back of ruined towns, and cities, and factories, there is aerial mapping, or spy mapping, usually with a camera. Therefore the camera is a feared instrument, and a man with a camera is suspected and watched wherever he goes. And if you do not believe this, try to take your Brownie No. 4 anywhere near Oak Ridge, or the Panama Ca.n.a.l, or near any one of a hundred of our experimental areas. In the minds of most people today the camera is the forerunner of destruction, and it is suspected, and rightly so.
I don"t think Capa and I really ever thought that we would be able to do the job we wanted to do. That we were able to do it is as much a surprise to us as to anyone else. We were surprised when our visas came through, and we held a mild celebration with w.i.l.l.y behind the bar when they did. At that point I had an accident and broke my leg and was laid up for two months. But Capa went about a.s.sembling his equipment.
There had been no camera coverage of the Soviet Union by an American for many years, so Capa provided the very best of photographic equipment and duplicated all of it in case some of it might be lost. He took the Contax and Rolleiflex that he had used during the war, of course, but he took extras also. He took so many extras, and so much film, and so many lights, that his overweight charge on the overseas airline was something like three hundred dollars.
The moment it became known we were going to the Soviet Union we were bombarded with advice, with admonitions and with warnings, it must be said, mostly from people who had never been there.
An elderly woman told us in accents of dread, "Why, you"ll disappear, you"ll disappear as soon as you cross the border!"
And we replied, in the interest of accurate reporting, "Do you know anyone who has disappeared?"
"No," she said, "I don"t personally know anyone, but plenty of people have disappeared."
And we said, "That might very well be true, we don"t know, but can you give us the name of anyone who has disappeared? Do you know anyone who knows anyone who has disappeared?"
And she replied, "Thousands have disappeared."
And a man with knowing eyebrows and a quizzical look, the same man, in fact, who two years before had given the total battle plans for the invasion of Normandy in the Stork Club, said to us, "Well you must stand in pretty good with the Kremlin or they wouldn"t let you in. They must have bought you."
We said, "No, not as far as we know, they haven"t bought us. We just would like to do a job of reporting."
He raised his eyes and squinted at us. And he believes what he believes, and the man who knew Eisenhower"s mind two years ago knows Stalin"s mind now.
An elderly gentleman nodded his head at us and said, "They"ll torture you, that"s what they"ll do; they"ll just take you into a black prison and they"ll torture you. They"ll twist your arms and they"ll starve you until you"re ready to say anything they want you to say."
We asked, "Why? What for? What purpose could it serve?"
"They do that to everybody," he said. "Why I was reading a book the other day-"