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,