Word: steinbeck
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...canny grasp of the changing world situation and Allied strategic necessities becomes more astonishing. His endless stream of memoranda to subordinates, to F.D.R., to Stalin, are magnificently informed, range from the gravest military decisions to a recommendation (to the Minister of Economic Warfare) to try a John Steinbeck novel. Reading them-and even a Churchill memo on cleaning destroyer-boilers is readable-it is possible to feel the urgency about things large & small that the man felt himself...
...best conjecture, it was not William Blake, as you say in your Oct. 30 issue, who suggested the title of Mr. Steinbeck's play, Burning Bright, about the child mothered by the wife but not fathered by the husband, with his lines...
...public. Millions feel that he can do no wrong. He has not only been clutched to the bosom of the masses but has been nominated as a genius by fragments of the intelligentsia. Britain's Princess Elizabeth is a "slobbering" Abner fan; so are Novelist John Steinbeck, Comedian Harpo Marx, Lawyer Morris Ernst and NSRB Boss W. Stuart Symington...
...result is a jumble of the interstellar and the folksy. Characters who are neither living people nor vivid symbols traffic in blown-up emotions and rouged-up words. Besides being high-pitched and mawkish, Burning Bright is frequently dull. Steinbeck might have done far better with a few people talking simple prose in a suburb, might have remembered that writers best achieve the universal through the particular. Blake, who gave him his title (Tyger, tyger, burning bright) could also have given him a good cue: To see the world in a grain of sand...
...Also published last week in book form. Steinbeck's theory: a short, meaty novel (e.g., Of Mice and Men) can be transformed into a play by simply treating descriptive passages as stage directions and dialogue as actors' lines...