John
Steinbeck was
born in Sainas, California on 27th February, 1902. He studied marine
biology at Stanford University and worked as a agricultural labourer
while writing novels
and in 1929 published Cup of Gold.
This was followed by a collection of short stories portraying the
people in a farm community, The Pastures
of Heaven (1932) and a novel about a farmer, To
a God Unknown (1933).
Tortilla
Flat (1935), a novel about Monterey, brought him national
recognition and this was followed by In Dubious
Battle (1935), Of Mice and Men
(1937), The Long Valley (1938)
and his best-known novel, The Grapes of Wrath
(1939). This novel of a family fleeing from the dust bowl of Oklahoma
won him the Pulitzer
Prize
in 1940.
During
the Second World War Steinbeck went to Europe
where he reported the war for the New
York Tribune. He also published The
Moon is Down (1942), a novel about the resistance in Norway
to the Nazi occupation.
Other
books by Steinbeck include Cannery Row
(1945), The Pearl (1947), A
Russian Journal (1948), Burning
Bright (1950), East of Eden
(1952), Sweet Thursday (1954),
The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957)
and a selection of his writings as a war correspondent, Once
There Was a War (1958) and Winter
of our Discount (1961). John Steinbeck,
who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, died in 1966.
(1)
John Steinbeck, Death in the Dust (1936)
Here, 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. This man has tried to make a toilet by digging a hole
in the ground near his house and surrounding it with an old piece
of burlap. But he will only do things like that this year. He is a
newcomer and his spirit and his decency and his sense of his own dignity
have not been quite wiped out. Next year he will be like his next-door
neighbour.
This is a family of six;
a man, his wife and four children. They live in a tent the colour
of the ground. Rot has set in on the canvas so that the flaps and
the sides hang in tatters and are held together with bits of rusty
bailing wire. There is one bed in the family and that is a big tick
lying on the ground inside the tent. They have one quilt and a piece
of canvas for bedding. The sleeping arrangement is clever. Mother
and father lie down together and two children lie between them. Then,
heading the other way, the other two children lie, the littler ones.
If the mother and father
sleep with their legs spread wide, there is room for the legs of the
children. And this father will not be able to make a maximum of $400
a year anymore because he is no longer alert; he isn't quick at piecework,
and he is not able to fight clear of the dullness that has settled
on him.
The dullness shows in the
faces of this family, and in addition there is a sullenness that makes
them taciturn. Sometimes they still start the older children off to
school, but the ragged little things will not go; they hide themselves
in ditches or wander off by themselves until it is time to go back
to the tent, because they are scorned in the school. The better-dressed
children shout and jeer, the teachers are quite often impatient with
these additions to their duties, and the parents of the "nice"
children do not want to have disease carriers in the schools.
The father of this family
once had a little grocery store and his family lived in back of it
so that even the children could wait on the counter. When the drought
set in there was no trade for the store anymore. This is the middle
class of the squatters' camp. In a few months this family will slip
down to the lower class. Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned
to sullen anger before it dies.
(2)
John Steinbeck covered the landings at Salerno in Italy.
One of his reports appeared in the New
York Tribune on
9th September 1943.
There are little bushes on the sand dunes at Red Beach south of the
Sele River, and in a hole in the sand buttressed by sand bags a soldier
sat with a leather-covered steel telephone beside him. His shirt was
off and his back was dark with sunburn. His helmet lay in the bottom
of the hole and his rifle was on a little pile of brush to keep the
sand out of it. He had staked a shelter half on a pole to shade him
from the sun, and he had spread bushes on top of that to camouflage
it. Beside him was a water can and an empty "C" ration can
to drink out of.
The soldier said. "Sure
you can have a drink. Here, I'll pour it for you." He tilted
the water can over the tin cup. "I hate to tell you what it tastes
like," he said, I took a drink. "Well, doesn't it?"
he said. "It sure does," I said. Up in the hills the 88s
were popping and the little bursts threw sand about where they hit,
and off to the seaward our cruisers were popping away at the 88s in
the hills.
The soldier slapped at
a sand fly on his shoulder and then scratched the place where it had
bitten him. His face was dirty and streaked where the sweat had run
down through the dirt, and his hair and his eyebrows were sunburned
almost white. But there was a kind of gayety about him. His telephone
buzzed and he answered
it, and said, "Hasn't come through yet. Sir, no sir. I'll tell
him." He clicked off the phone.
"When'd you come ashore?"
he asked. And then without waiting for an answer he went on. "I
came in just before dawn
yesterday. I wasn't with the very first, but right in the second."
He seemed to be very glad about it. "It was hell," he said,
"it was bloody hell." He seemed to be gratified at the hell
it was, and that was right. The great question had been solved for
him. He had been under fire. He knew now what he would do under fire.
He would never have to go through that uncertainty again. "I
got pretty near up to there," he said, and pointed to two beautiful
Greek temples about a mile away. "And then I got sent back here
for beach communications. When did you say you got ashore?" and
again he didn't wait for an answer.
"It was dark as hell,"
he said, "and we were just waiting out there." He pointed
to the sea where the mass of the invasion fleet rested. "If we
thought we were going to sneak ashore we were nuts," he said.
"They were waiting for us all fixed up. Why, I heard they had
been here two weeks waiting for us. They knew just where we were going
to land. They had machine guns in the sand dunes and 88s on the hills.
"We were out there
all packed in an LCI and then the hell broke loose. The sky was full
of it and the star shells lighted it up and the tracers crisscrossed
and the noise - we saw the assault go in, and then one of them hit
a surf mine and went up, and in the light you could see them go flying
about. I could see the boats land and the guys go wiggling and running,
and then maybe there"d be a lot of white lines and some of them
would waddle about and collapse and some would hit the beach.
"It didn't seem like
men getting killed, more like a picture, like a moving picture. We
were pretty crowded up in there though, and then all of a sudden it
came on me that this wasn't a moving picture. Those were guys getting
the hell shot out of them, and then I got kind of scared, but what
I wanted to do mostly was move around. I didn't like being cooped
up there where you couldn't get away or get down close to the ground.
(3)
John
Steinbeck, Once There Was A War (1958)
28th June, 1943: The The
crew of the Mary Ruth ends up at a little pub, overcrowded
and noisy. They edge their way in to the bar, where the barmaids are
drawing beer as fast as they can. In a moment this crew has found
a table and they have the small glasses of pale yellow fluid in front
of them. It is curious beer. Most of the alcohol has been taken out
of it to make munitions. It is not cold. It is token beer - a gesture
rather than a drink.
The bomber crew is solemn.
Men who are alerted for operational missions are usually solemn, but
tonight there is some
burden on this crew. There is no way of knowing how these things start.
All at once a crew will feel fated. Then little things go wrong. Then
they are uneasy until they take off for their mission. When the uneasiness
is running it is the waiting
that hurts.
They sip the flat, tasteless
beer. One of them says, "I saw a paper from home at the Red Cross
in London." It is quiet. Theothers look at him across their glasses.
A mixed group of pilots and ATS girls at the other end of the pub
have started a song. It is astonishing how many of the songs are American.
"You'd Be So Nice to Come Home to," they sing. And the beat
of the song is subtly changed. It has become an English song.
The waist gunner raises
his voice to be heard over the singing. "It seems to me that
we are afraid to announce our losses.It seems almost as if the War
Department was afraid that the country couldn't take it. I never saw
anything the country couldn't
take."
(4)
John Steinbeck, Once There Was A War (1958)
6th July, 1943: Dover,
with its castle on the hill and its little crooked streets, its big,
ugly hotels and its secret and dangerous offensive power, is closest
of all to the enemy. Dover is full of the memory of Wellington and
of Napoleon, of the time when Napoleon came down to Calais and looked
across the Channel at England and knew that only this little stretch
of water interrupted his conquest of the world. And later the men
of Dunkerque dragged their weary feet off the little ships and struggled
through the streets of Dover.
Then Hitler came to the
hill above Calais and looked across at the cliffs, and again only
the little stretch of water stopped
the conquest of the world. It is a very little piece of water. On
the clear days you can see the hills about Calais, and with a
glass you can see the clock tower of Calais. When the guns of Calais
fire you can see the flash, while with the telescope you can see from
the castle the guns themselves, and even tanks deploying on the beach.
Dover feels very close
to the enemy. Three minutes in a fast airplane, three-quarters of
an hour in a fast boat. Every day or so a plane comes whipping through
and drops a bomb and takes a shot or so at the balloons that hang
in the air above the town, and every few days Jerry trains his big
guns on Dover and fires a few rounds of high explosive at the little
old town. Then a building is hit and collapses and sometimes a few
people are killed. It is a wanton, useless thing, serving no military,
naval, or morale business. It is almost as though the Germans fretted
about the little stretch of water that defeated them.
There is a quality in
the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German
disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German,
with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does
not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a
little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day
bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed.
(5)
John Steinbeck, Once There Was A War (1958)
8th July, 1943: The countryside
is quiet. The guns are silent. Suddenly the siren howls. Buildings
that are hidden in camouflage belch people, young men and women. They
pour out, running like mad. The siren has not been going for thirty
seconds when the run is over, the gun is manned, the target spotted.
In the control room under ground the instruments have found their
target. A girl has fixed it. The numbers have been transmitted and
the ugly barrels whirled. Above ground, in a concrete box, a girl
speaks into a telephone. "Fire," she says quietly. The hillside
rocks with the explosion of the battery. The field grass shakes, and
the red poppies shudder in the blast. New orders come up from below
and the girl says, "Fire."
The process is machine-like,
exact. There is no waste movement and no nonsense. These girls seem
to be natural soldiers. They are soldiers, too. They resent above
anything being treated like women when they are near the guns. Their
work is hard and constant. Sometimes they are alerted to the guns
thirty times in a day and a night. They may fire on a marauder ten
times in that period. They have been bombed and strafed, and there
is no record of any girl flinching.
The commander is very
proud of them. He is fiercely affectionate toward his battery. He
says a little bitterly, "All right, why don't you ask about the
problem of morals? Everyone wants to know about that. I'll tell you
- there is no problem."
He tells about the customs
that have come into being in this battery, a set of customs which
grew automatically. The men and the women sing together, dance together,
and, let any one of the women be insulted, and he has the whole battery
on his neck. But
when a girl walks out in the evening, it is not with one of the battery
men, nor do the men take the girls
to the movies. There have been no engagements and no marriages between
members of the battery. Some instinct among the people themselves
has told them trouble would result. These things are not a matter
of orders but of custom.
The girls like this work
and are proud of it. It is difficult to see how the housemaids will
be able to go back to dusting
furniture under querulous mistresses, how the farm girls will be able
to go back to the tiny farms of Scotland and the Midlands. This is
the great exciting time of their lives. They are very important, these
girls. The defense of the country in their area is in their hands.
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