A Russian Journal

by John Steinbeck

  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 narrat
ive, 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, participating 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 photojournalist?” 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.”

  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 Association 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 cucumber 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 assumed 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 unobtainable. 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 analysis, 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 Saturday 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 attitude 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 analysis, 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 assessments, 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 ignoble 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 entitled “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.