(2 of 2)
With his second wife, Gwyn, whom he married in 1943, Steinbeck went in for Manhattan town houses, and New York literati like John O'Hara and Nathaniel Benchley were favorite guests. As he approached 50, Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, moved to Sag Harbor, a resort and fishing village on the eastern end of Long Island. All along, his life was like a badly made play; none of the people or places quite seemed to fit the man, any more than did the costume he sometimes affected: black cape, cane and broad-brimmed hat.
It was as a writer that he became finally and truly lost. In almost all of his 17 novels he exhibited a fatal temptation to play the philosopher, to make a large statement. He described his 1950 drama Burning Bright, which closed on Broadway after only 13 performances, as "a morality play, completely timeless and placeless." He translated and retold Arthurian legend and once proposed collaborating with Director Elia Kazan in staging modern versions of Greek tragedy.
He hungered for the epic yet ended up producing journalism. It was work he took up partly out of perversity. "I can, if I wish," he wrote a friend, "throw a punch or two at the critical semaphores who direct the traffic of literature and who sit in their warm blinds and blast me regularly like a sitting duck, which I am. Now this is going to be one duck with brass knuckles." After serving as a World War II correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune, he wrote columns for Figaro Litteraire, Punch, the Daily Mail of London and any number of American newspapers to finance the restless trips that took over his life. He covered everything from political conventions to the Viet Nam War, which he supported nearly to the bitter end. By then his oddly incompatible circle of friends came to include both Jazz Guitarist Eddie Condon and Lyndon Johnson. When, nearly 60 and plagued by circulatory ailments, he climbed into a camper and spent three months chugging across the U.S. with his dog, the hit-or-miss quest could have symbolized his life. "I don't belong anywhere," he confessed to a friend.
In fact, the result—Travels with Charley—was a charming little book. Benson might well have made his strongest case for Steinbeck as a rambling raconteur, or as a superb short-story writer. 77?^ Red Pony and The Leader of the People live on as classics for the loving precision with which they portray a young boy's painful need to grow up and an old man's passion to recall his youth. If only Steinbeck, an innately modest man, had been more modest as a writer, he might not have been destined to whipsaw himself between the pretentious and the trivial. It was his bad luck that he happened to be one of the last writers to dream, in all innocence, of writing the Great American Novel.
—By Melvin Maddocks