GoodReads meta-data is 256 pages, rated 3.91 by 2213 litizens.
Genre: Journalism.
Verdict: Bring on the Nobel Prize.
Steinbeck was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 Great Life program in which were made references to this collection, so I acquired it. Compelling, compassionate, generous, critical, angry, confused, proud, moving, irritating, insightful, clinical, banal, and more, the dispatches appeared in New York Herald Tribune when it was the best newspaper in Gotham. I suggest a reader save the front matter for last, including Steinbeck’s own forward, and just savour his sharp insights and prose scalpel as he carves to the bone. He delivered copy daily to a deadline and some of the pieces show that necessity, but others are clearly more deeply etched and more deeply felt.
The subjects are fear, loss, loneliness, pain, humour, endurance, incompetence, and more, including death and crippling injuries. Few punches are pulled save to comply with Army censorship of the time. There is also an arresting and wonderful chapter on Bob Hope entertaining troops. For me that was the high point of the book. I kept thinking George and Lenny might be in one of those hospitals. (You either get the reference or you don’t, Mortimer.)
The tension in Steinbeck’s report on a British minesweeper patrol nearly cracked the Kindle screen. See for yourself. There are items from England, Algeria, Sicily, Salerno, and more.
Steinbeck was forty-one at the time, trundling around the countryside, clabbering down cargo nets on and off ships, taking cover from strafing attacks, cowering in trenches when the bombs fell, glad for and yet repelled by the rations on the line, wearing the same clothes for weeks at a time, forgetting what hot water felt like…. It may seem strange in this age of Ego over All, sanctified by the media school term Subjective Journalism, but he says nothing about his own experiences in these dispatches. This information comes from subsequent biographers.
I have neither forgotten nor forgiven the disparaging piece in the New York Times the day after Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1962. This is the same organ that on a like occasion in 1950 dismissed William Faulkner as a regional writer. Believe it or not, Ripley. The New York Times opinionators who passed those judgements have long since been come to dust.
By the way, there is that expression ‘Give ‘em the whole nine yards,’ and I now know its origin. It has nothing to do with sports. The nine yards was the length of an ammunition belt for the wing guns of US fighter aircraft, and to expend the whole length of the belt is to ‘give ‘em the whole nine years.’ Pub trivia ready!