Word: steinbeck
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...London's Savoy Hotel, John Steinbeck overheard a Chicago Tribune man snort: "Capa, you have absolutely no integrity!" That wartime remark, says Steinbeck, "intrigued me-I was fascinated that anybody could get so low that a Chicago Tribune man could say such a thing. I investigated Capa, and I found out it was perfectly true." Photographer Robert Capa and Author Steinbeck became great friends...
Waifs from the West. The Soviets admitted them-with some misgivings about Capa (who, in any country, talks and looks like an enemy alien) and his cameras. "The camera is one of the most frightening of modern weapons," says Steinbeck, "and a man with a camera is suspected and watched." To a polite, but suspicious young man at VOKS, the cultural relations office in Moscow, they tried to explain their mission...
...Your own most recent work," the Russian told the hulking, hearty Steinbeck, "seems to us cynical." Steinbeck explained the job of a writer was to set down his time as he understood it. He tried to make clear the unofficial standing of writers in America : "They are considered just below acrobats and just above seals." Eventually, Capa & Steinbeck were given an interpreter and approval to go to the Ukraine, Stalingrad and Georgia, where the interpreter himself needed an interpreter. They went by air, always in U.S.-built C-47s, and never found a stewardess who did anything but carry pink...
Energy from Hope. Amid the ruins of Kiev, they found German prisoners helping clear up the rubble. "One of the few justices in the world," wrote Steinbeck. "And the Ukrainian people do not look at them. They turn away. . . ." At the museum there were crowds staring wistfully at plaster models of the future Kiev. "In Russia it is always the future that is thought of. It is the crops next year . . . the clothes that will be made very soon. If ever a people took energy from hope...." In the fields around shell-pocked Shevchenko, they found cheerful bands of women...
...Yale, Kenyon or Sewanee Review, but it was at least gaining weight. The fifth quarterly issue went to 8,000 buyers, a gain of 3,000 from the first. To win them (at $3.50 a year), Spectator had turned an appraising gaze on Western writers, from Saroyan to Steinbeck. It had given two score pent-up regional intellectuals an outlet, and had ranged beyond the Pacific horizon to China (Lawrence Sears) and London (C. S. Forester...