[lit-ideas] Re: Travels with Charley and later novels

  • From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2008 16:56:12 -0500

Damnit, damnit, damnit -- again I stayed too long.  Let Lawrence sucker me in: 
>>And he's [Steinbeck] become that unfashionable and embarrassing thing, a 
>>patriot. "I believe," he wrote at the end of his life, that out of the whole 
>>body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, our many interests 
>>and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique in the world: 
>>America-complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, 
>>unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.<<



What a crock of shit.  If it's patriotic to champion the murder of 3 million 
innocent people then I insist you count me a subversive.  Jesus Christ in 
heaven, are there still such lost souls who believe that our war in Vietnam had 
any moral justification whatsoever?  I was well aware that John Steinbeck, once 
a compassionate human being, had turned hawk, knew it back then when he did, 
but that he lost his humanity is his tragedy -- mourn that, don't celebrate it 
for Christ's sake.  And I do mean for Christ's sake -- really, especially if 
you're a Christian.  I'm not, but I still agree with Christ quite often.  I 
also consider myself a super patriot, meaning I am super serious about the 
values that I was raised to believe America embodies.  Apparently others have 
other ideas what America is all about -- such as killing anyone who gets in our 
way, especially our economic way.  And most especially if they don't have 
atomic weapons.  Get atomic weapons, World.  That's my advice to the world.  Or 
hope and pray that Obama wins and brings America back to being America.



Mike Geary

Memphis   





  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Lawrence Helm 
  To: Lit-Ideas 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 02, 2008 3:20 PM
  Subject: [lit-ideas] Travels with Charley and later novels


  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21264

   

  Robert Gottlieb has written a review of the The Library of America's Travels 
with Charley and Later Novels, 1947-1962 by John Steinbeck.   In earlier years 
I tried to like Steinbeck's novels but never quite managed.  I read this review 
thinking that maybe Gottlieb would convince me that I was wrong and that 
certain of Steinbeck's novels were masterpieces, but Gottlieb's view of 
Steinbeck is like mine, albeit more comprehensively so.

   

  But the review is interesting.   I was especially interested in the end of 
the where Gottlieb writes, 

   

  'During the Sixties he had become a kind of cultural ambassador for the 
United States, close to people like Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Dag Hammarsjköld. 
He had always been less radical than people thought he was-the outrage over 
injustice and poverty in The Grapes of Wrath and In Dubious Battle was 
personal, not ideological. He was, in fact, a liberal, middle-of-the-road 
Democrat-passionate about FDR, an ardent campaigner for Adlai Stevenson, and 
eventually close to Lyndon Johnson, whom he liked and vigorously supported, 
particularly on the Vietnam War.

  This position did nothing to improve his standing with intellectuals, but it 
was sincere. He believed the Viet Cong were murderers, despised the draft-card 
burners back home, and admired the American troops he encountered as a war 
reporter on a trip to Southeast Asia in 1966, only two years before his death. 
Young John was in Vietnam, and Stein-beck managed to get himself helicoptered 
to an exposed hill outpost where John was fighting. In a surreal moment, the 
mutually antagonistic father and son found themselves under fire together. The 
son was to write, "I saw my father behind some sandbags overlooking my position 
with his M-60 at the ready.... I mean, who, in God's name, was producing this 
movie?"

  Steinbeck's final work years were spent on journalism, and his subject was 
almost inevitably America. A collection of think pieces and nostalgia called 
America and Americans (1966) reveals him at his most characteristic. He's 
moralizing, he's didactic, he's searching for big answers to big questions. 
He's generous and vulnerable and touchy. And he's more and more dismayed by 
what he sees around him: "I have named the destroyers of nations: comfort, 
plenty, and security-out of which grow a bored and slothful cynicism." You 
could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant 
prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.

  And he's become that unfashionable and embarrassing thing, a patriot. "I 
believe," he wrote at the end of his life,

  that out of the whole body of our past, out of our differences, our quarrels, 
our many interests and directions, something has emerged that is itself unique 
in the world: America-complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, 
boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.

  Somewhere along the way, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" had turned into 
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee."'

   

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