Mostly jaunty dispatches intended to be part of war effort
Written: Feb 27 '01 (Updated Mar 22 '03)
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Pros: Brisk style, wry sense of humor
Cons: Mostly about waiting and occupying rather than making war
The Bottom Line: Well-written, often pointed impressions of Americans poised to land in Europe as the tide of war was turning
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| Stephen_Murray's Full Review: John Steinbeck - Once There Was a War |
I prefer short bursts of John Steinbeck's writing to his self-conscious big novels, and I think that his nonfiction is better than much of his fiction. His dispatches from England, Algeria, Italy, and PT-boats in the Mediterranean are often insightful, and frequently funny, especially the essay on souvenirs, and the one on the impracticality of amaryllises as flowers with which to hail parading soldiers, and, in the finale, a multi-part account of tricking a garrison into surrendering.
Steinbeck was very clear that he did not capture the essence of battle. Indeed, he wrote very clearly about the self-protective amnesia that descends after traumatic experiences (198-200).
What should have been the most important part of the book collecting his 1942-43 reporting, the introduction, seems to have been skipped by some readers. “We were all a part of the War Effort,” Steinbeck recalled in 1958. “We went along with it, and not only that, we abetted it. Gradually it became a part of all of us that the truth about anything was automatically secret and that to trifle with it was to interfere with the War Effort. By this I don’t mean that the correspondents were liars. They were not. In the pieces in this book everything set down happened. It is in the things not mentioned that the truth lies” Whether he was fully aware that he was producing propaganda when he filed the dispatches (which were censored as well as self-censored), Steinbeck was candid: “We edited ourselves much more than we were edited. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles. . . . Yes, we wrote only a part of the war, but at the time we believed, fervently believed, that it was the best thing to do. And perhaps that is why, when the war was over, novels and stories by ex-soldiers, like The Naked and the Dead, proved so shocking to a public which had been carefully protected from contact with the crazy hysterical mess”. It is particularly unfortunate that Steinbeck's friend LBJ did not study these pages.
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Other epinions in the Steinbeck 99th Birthday Writeoff are:
The National Steinbeck Center
http://www.epinions.com/content_45336530564
©Stephen O. Murray, 2001. All rights other than web posting in epinions reserved by the author.
Recommended:
Yes
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