America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (41 page)

The story now splits seven ways from breakfast. Some say the local hangman refused to do the job and then got sick when he was ordered to do it, that one after another refused the duty so that Burke himself had to do the hanging. Others hold that one of the informers against Daly, knowing his life was in short demand, agreed to do it.

The gallows was at Seefin's hill, a high point in the country and about a mile from where I sit now at St. Cleran's. To make the occasion particularly bitter, a coffin was placed in Daly's own cart, pulled by his own horse, and he was paraded about the neighborhood surrounded by soldiers to prevent the gathering Irish from rescuing him. And, last, he was taken to St. Cleran's so the ladies could have a shuddering last look at him. One story is that a special window had been knocked in the house wall facing Seefin's hill so that the ladies could watch the hanging through their spyglasses, that afterwards the window was bricked up again. And whether or not it proves anything, when several years ago John Huston was repairing this house, he came on a bricked-up window facing the direction of Seefin's hill.

To give the whole ceremony added meaning, it was carried out on Good Friday of 1820 and if that was an early Easter and the leaves were not on the trees, the ladies could have seen the hanging.

But the nature of the story makes me jump back and forth. When the cart was drawn through one of the stone and iron gates of St. Cleran's, Daly rose up and struck his manacles on the iron to try to break free. But the manacles held and his hand, impaled on an iron spike, splashed blood on the stone gate post. And Daly, looking at the blood, cried out, “When I am dead, draw my blood and put it on the Dunsandle gate as well, so no peace may ever enter this house.”

There are many stories of the progress—how the people gathered to rescue him and were persuaded that it was hopeless by the attending priest. How, at one time, with a changing guard, Daly was left alone with the hangman for half an hour. In this version the hangman is the informer. At a public house, the colonel halted the escort and took Daly from the cart and bought him a drink, and Daly satirically bought the hangman a drink and offered his horse in payment.

After hours of slow progress, they came at last to Seefin's hill where the gallows was set up. There was no drop. The cart was backed under the rope and Daly was intended to strangle slowly for the instruction of the onlookers.

Now the colonel approached and said, “I am empowered to save your life if you will give me the names of your fellow conspirators.” Then Daly's mother cried out, “Anthony, my son, you were born a man.” And Daly shouted, “And I will die a man.”

The story is full of strange twists and quirks, and so it should be. All hope of reprieve being gone, the colonel asked if the prisoner had any last request. And Daly said, “I have. I used of old times to come to Seefin's hill to practice my broad jump. I want to jump once more before I die.”

And this did not seem strange because Daly was famous as a jumper. He was helped down from the cart and the irons removed from his wrists and ankles, but he was so cramped that he had to rub up the circulation. Then with the soldiers standing alert, he took his run and made a tremendous broad jump, and, having done so, indicated that he was ready. His pregnant wife was brought forward and he kissed her, saying, “If we have a son, I charge him as a sacred duty to avenge his father,” and, with that, he leaped into the cart, his wrists were manacled and the rope was put about his neck. Suddenly he aimed a kick at the hangman, knocking him off the cart. Then Daly took two steps and leaped and his neck snapped and he was dead.

And Blind Rafftery was among the watchers and he made a poem about Daly that is still sung and part of it carved in this memorial on Seefin's hill.

You can see the quality of the man whose ghost is said to haunt this Grey Room where a turf fire is burning now.

But that's not all. They cut him down and drew his blood and splashed it on the gates of the manor. And his pregnant wife put a widow's curse on the place and that's as hard a curse as there is. The grass would never grow where the gallows stood, she said. And I've seen the holes and no grass is there. The rooks would never roost nor rest in St. Cleran's wood—and they do not. They will not ever fly over it. And she said, no Burke would ever die in bed in the manor nor, living, know any peace. And this also seems to be true. They died in other places and, before very long, they moved away and left the house vacant, and it was half ruinous when John Huston bought it and restored it, until now it is perhaps the most beautiful Georgian house anywhere.

There is the story and, as I promised you early in, Alicia, every part of it but the last will be argued over and refuted and added to in any public house in Galway on any Saturday night.

I've waited this week to see Daly in the Grey Room. Two nights ago I thought I felt him, but it is more likely that the frosting breeze through the open window did it.

Anthony Daly is welcome if he wants to come haunting, but maybe that very welcome will give his poor soul leave to rest. I don't think I'll see him. Maybe no one will again.

You can see from all this that Ireland is still Ireland, and you don't have to dig down for it, either.

 

Yours,

John Steinbeck

VII.

WAR CORRESPONDENT

EVEN BEFORE America declared war in 1941, John Steinbeck was attuned to German aggression. While filming The Forgotten Village in Mexico during the summer of 1940, he wrote a worried letter to his uncle in Washington, D.C.: “... the life of an Indian village is tied up with the life of the Republic. The Germans have absolutely outclassed the allies in propaganda. If it continues, they will completely win Central and South America away from the United States” (SLL 205). A few days later he wrote to request an audience with President Roosevelt and, granted twenty minutes, flew to Washington to propose to him that “a propaganda office be set up which, through radio and motion pictures, attempts to get this side of the world together. Its method would be to make for understanding rather than friction” (SLL 207). That gesture explains much about Steinbeck's involvement in war, both World War II and, some twenty years later, the Vietnam War. He wanted to be involved, to offer advice, and to cultivate what was, for him, the highest calling of the artist—helping people understand one another. All his subsequent involvement with the Office of War Information in World War II, as well as his own publications about both wars, was directed toward those ends.

Although he lent his services to write propaganda immediately after the United States entered World War II, what John Steinbeck really craved was action at the battlefront. “I want a job with a big reactionary paper like the Herald-Tribune because I think I could get places that way I couldn't otherwise” (Benson 512). With the help of the Herald Tribune's literary critic, Lewis Gannett, Steinbeck got a job as overseas correspondent for what was a conservative but highly respected newspaper. He sailed from New York about June 3, 1943—only two months after his second marriage. Posted first in England, he was to “see the war through the eyes of the Common Man,” as London's Daily Express reported (Simmonds 172). His first dispatches about the troopship crossing delighted his Tribune editor, who wrote in a private memorandum that the articles were “even better than we had hoped. In fact, I haven't read anything better about the war—anything to equal them in graphic description or in beauty of writing” (Simmonds 173).

These and later dispatches from England tell about things correspondents had, for the most part, overlooked: waiting bomber crews whose “care of the guns is slow and tender, almost motherly” (New York Herald Tribune, 30 June 1943). And “girls” who watched for German planes on the south coast of England, “girls” who have been “bombed and strafed, who have shot enemies out of the sky and then gone back to mending socks” (OWW 55-56). And he records the conversations of enlisted men in pubs; of people in a bus queue on Piccadilly, talking of Mussolini's resignation; of a maimed pilot in a restaurant, face collapsed, hands reduced to two fingers, scheming about how to fly missions again. Steinbeck wrote about the ordinariness of life on the edge of the war: the “complicated and carefully tended vegetable gardens” (OWW 71) or the “quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed” (OWW 47). To some extent, the rhythm of these dispatches mirrors that of The Grapes of Wrath, as Steinbeck records the intimacies of conversation and then pans to the broader vision of the war effort in England—bomber crews preparing to fly or London recovering from the siege or the cultural impact of Bob Hope. He wrote well. And, for the most part, he wrote quickly, sending dispatches to New York nearly every day.

Half of these dispatches are sent from his two months in England. By late August, Steinbeck was in North Africa, where he found little to engage him—a hapless congressman who posed woodenly in a cemetery, himself never having seen combat; a deserter named Slog getting home to Brooklyn amid Italian prisoners. With the invasion of Italy, Steinbeck finally witnessed action at the front; he was assigned to a force commanded by Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and with that unit went to Palermo, Sicily, and, on September 9, to capture the small island of Ventotene off the Italian coast. Here and at Red Beach near Salerno he participated in the action he craved, and he did not flinch: “I do know those things about myself that I had to know,” he tells his wife, Gwyn. “I know that I can take it as well as most and better than some and that is a reassuring thing to know. And there is no way of knowing it until it happens” (18 Sept. 1943). His dispatches about the Italian invasion are among the best he wrote.

Among seasoned war correspondents, there had initially been some resistance to a popular novelist in their midst. “To this hard-bitten bunch of professionals I arrived as a Johnny-come-lately, a sacred cow, a kind of tourist,” Steinbeck writes in his introduction to Once There Was a War. “I think they felt that I was muscling in on their hard-gained territory. When, however, they found that I was not duplicating their work, was not reporting straight news, they were very kind to me and went out of their way to help me and to instruct me in the things I didn't know. For example, it was [Robert] Capa who gave me the best combat advice I ever heard. It was ‘Stay where you are. If they haven't hit you, they haven't seen you' ” (OWW xvi). And he recalls the restrictions placed on the correspondent: “We edited ourselves much more than we were edited. We felt responsible to what was called the home front. There was a general feeling that unless the home front was carefully protected from the whole account of what war was like, it might panic. Also we felt we had to protect the armed services from criticism, or they might retire to their tents to sulk like Achilles” (OWW xvii).

In his four and a half months overseas, Steinbeck wrote eighty-six dispatches, published first in the Herald Tribune between 21 June and 15 December 1943; twenty-three were published simultaneously under different titles in London's Daily Express. The dispatches were also syndicated in more than forty leading newspapers, evidence of Steinbeck's status as a hugely popular writer; The Ladies' Home Journal and Reader's Digest also ran a few of the pieces in 1944. In 1958, Covici urged Steinbeck to publish his dispatches with an introduction, and the writer selected sixty-eight—omitting from the selection one on the importance of letters to soldiers:

 

Although Steinbeck's World War II journalism is written with complete anonymity, complete detachment, this dispatch suggests the agony Steinbeck himself felt while on assignment. Because he heard so infrequently and unsatisfactorily from his own young wife, he left Europe early and when offered an assignment in the Pacific turned it down. Battered by his near escape from a German bomb on Red Beach, both eardrums broken, he'd had enough of war.

Twenty-three years later, Steinbeck wrote about another war. The second series of “Letters to Alicia,” begun in December 1966, includes letters about Vietnam—a trip that Lyndon Johnson had earlier wanted Steinbeck and other writers to make and that, a year later, both Harry Guggenheim, publisher of Newsday, and Lyndon Johnson urged upon Steinbeck. The Vietnam pieces are, without a doubt, the most controversial writing of Steinbeck's career. They were so when published in 1966-67. They are so now. Covering a war that polarized America, John Steinbeck took a side not congenial with the politics of the left—or, many thought, with his own liberal perspective. “These newly come harbingers of peace say we don't belong in Vietnam and we can't win. Well, we do belong there and we never wanted to win. But I believe we intend to make sure that Peking doesn't win, either. That's why we belong there” (18 Dec. 1965). Suddenly the people's bard was mouthing hawkish sentiments, denouncing protesters, writing jingoistic prose in support of American policy in South Vietnam, and slathering on details about the machinery of war. Photos of a gun-toting Steinbeck in fatigues ran in many newspapers. Americans gagged on this new Steinbeck, seemingly a traitor to the downtrodden.

Protecting South Vietnam was a position taken by Lyndon Johnson's administration as the bombing began in earnest in 1965; and one backed, of course, by other prominent literary figures, among them Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike, Ralph Ellison, James T. Farrell, and John Dos Passos (Brinkley 27). But Steinbeck was perhaps the most vocal and most frequently denounced—and the one who went to Vietnam to see for himself. For a man who was sixty-four years old, not terribly fit, and in poor health, it was a courageous trip to take, and he spared himself no discomfort in his mission to witness this new kind of war, a “drifting phantasm of a war” (14 Jan. 1967), where you couldn't chart progress on a map, “a feeling war with no fronts and no rear” (14 Jan. 1967). A new kind of soldier was called for, Steinbeck asserts, one who “must think for himself, must exercise judgment to survive and often enough when casualties indicate, must assume command” (14 Jan. 1967). With these soldiers, he spent five weeks of his six-week stay “in the field.” He ventured into battle on a Huey chopper with the 10th Cavalry; he visited the 23rd Artillery Group guarding Saigon; he went on River Patrol Boat 37 covering the Bassac River; and with Elaine he was fired at while leaving the Delta hamlet of Tan An. At the end of it all, he wrote Guggenheim that he'd been in all but three of the American machines of war. All in order to report the facts as he saw them.