The Short Reign of Pippin IV (2 page)

By July, the Steinbecks were back in Paris, in time for Bastille Day on July 14, which they celebrated with a dinner at the Eiffel Tower restaurant with John Huston, José Ferrer, and some of the cast of
Moulin Rouge,
which Huston was then filming. They enjoyed the fireworks and afterward a sprawling street party.
¹³
On July 24, they proceeded to London, then to Ireland, and arrived home on August 31, barely in time for the publication of
East of Eden
.
¹⁴

After a year and a half in the States, during which Steinbeck wrote
Sweet Thursday,
the Steinbecks returned to Europe in the spring of 1954, first to Portugal and Spain and then “following the spring,” north to France and on to Scandinavia. In Paris, the Steinbecks stayed in a spectacular rental at Number One Avenue de Marigny, next door to the Rothschild mansion and across a courtyard from the President's palace. Steinbeck noted that it had been “the Paris headquarters of Knights of St. John,”
¹⁵
otherwise known as the Hospitallers, a noble order founded in the Middle Ages to provide charity and care for the infirm and poor. It was to become Pippin Héristal's home in the novel Steinbeck wrote two years later, where its origins would symbolize his idealism and concern for the well-being of his countrymen.

As always in France, Steinbeck was greeted with warmth and admiration. His French publishers hosted an enormous reception for the publication of
East of Eden,
at which he was surrounded by “at least five hundred influential people and twenty cameras and radio microphones.”
¹⁶
As Graham Greene put it, “When you ask a Frenchman about American writers, they invariably put Steinbeck at the top of the list. He has exerted a strong pull on the French mind. And they do not discriminate between the early and the late Steinbeck—that's just a critical fetish that seems quite inadequate in this case. They like all of it.”
¹⁷

They liked it so much that the weekly
Figaro Littéraire
asked him to write a weekly article on Paris, which he enjoyed doing. In his opening contribution, Steinbeck stated, “I will offer you Paris, perhaps not as it is, but as I see it.”
¹⁸
Delighted with his account of the city, the French Academy honored him with a formal dinner, and French writers, critics, and journalists came calling. Steinbeck was especially charmed when he was invited to serve at the writers' booth at the Kermesse aux Etoiles, an outdoor charity fair in the Tuileries, where hundreds of people lined up for him to sign
East of Eden,
the profits of which went to charity. When André Maurois advised him to slow down, Steinbeck began engaging the purchasers in conversation, learning about each individual.
¹⁹
The Steinbecks spent the fall wandering around Europe and were back in New York in time for Christmas.

The charm of Paris lingered with them, though in actuality, at the time before and during Steinbeck's writing
Pippin,
the French political scene was almost as chaotic as Steinbeck's fictional one. After its retreat from Dien Bien Phu in May 1954, France withdrew from a war in French Indochina against a nationalist-communist movement led by the Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh, a war that the United States subsequently renewed with tragic results. France granted independence to Morocco and Tunisia but became disastrously involved in a war against independence for Algeria. It was this war that finally brought down the Fourth Republic. When Steinbeck wrote
The Short Reign of Pippin IV,
the Fourth Republic had not yet fallen, but it was tottering.

In the United States, with the Cold War raging, McCarthy-ism exploited a dangerous paranoia to create a witch hunt against suspected Communists that Steinbeck called “a climate of fear and suspicion”
²⁰
that crippled or ruined the careers and sometimes caused the suicides of people not only in the government but also in the arts. Steinbeck, who had been attacked himself as un-American for writing
The Grapes of Wrath,
was enraged. By the time Steinbeck was writing
Pippin IV,
Senator Joseph McCarthy was in disgrace as a liar, an unprincipled character assassin, and had been censured by the Senate. He died of alcoholism in 1957, the year that
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
was published. But that same year, the House Un-American Committee (H.U.A.C.), which was still in business, ordered Arthur Miller to testify, and when he refused, Miller was put on trial for contempt of Congress. Steinbeck was the only author who wrote on his behalf, publishing in
Esquire
a blistering attack on the witch-hunting of H.U.A. C.
²¹

None of these political issues is referred to in
The Short Reign of Pippin IV,
which served Steinbeck as a sort of escape, but Steinbeck's disillusionment with the politics of the decade, which dominate his next and final novel,
The Winter of Our Discontent,
contribute to the cynicism that flows through
Pippin.
During the 1952 and 1956 presidential campaigns, Steinbeck was such an ardent supporter of Adlai Stevenson that he wrote speeches on his behalf, one of them read by Henry Fonda.
²²
During the 1956 campaign, while he was writing
Pippin,
Steinbeck covered the national conventions for the
Louisville Courier-Journal
and about forty other papers
²³
and the experience may have influenced his satire on the debates in the French National Assembly.

Though grim things were happening on both sides of the Atlantic, Steinbeck's satiric fable is generally genial and benevolent escapism. He does not mention the wars in Vietnam and Algeria but instead focuses on the wobbly nature of the French government after the end of World War II.

As the novel opens, the French government is in a state of chaos, splintered into a plethora of factions with cumbersome and conflicting titles, including literally dozens of political parties, with which Steinbeck has great fun coming up with such absurdities as the The Christian Atheists, The Christian Christians, The Christian Communists and three other kinds of Communists, the Conservative Radicals, and the Radical Conservatives. As the factions, headed by people with such ludicrous names as M. Rumorgue, M. Deuxcloches (Two Clocks), M. Douxpied (A Dozen Feet), struggle against each other, the only workable solution seems to be a return to the monarchy. After exhausting arguments in which every other option is eliminated, the members of the National Assembly decided to return to a branch of the monarchy sufficiently ancient and venerated that all can agree. These are the Merovingians, and their last legitimate descendant is Pippin Héristal, named for Pepin Héristal (680-714), the great-grandfather of Charlemagne. When informed of their choice, Pippin is horrified; he would much rather remain in obscurity, enjoying his collection of progressive jazz and practicing his hobby, astronomy, focused upon the heavens rather than on the earth. But when persuaded that France finds him indispensable to return stability and prosperity to the nation, he reluctantly consents.

The situation offered Steinbeck many opportunities for satire, comic and serious, both at the expense of France and of the United States. To Pascal Covici he wrote, “As for its excellence, I cannot give you an idea. . . . I'm pretty sure a lot of it is funny as hell and I think a lot of it is essentially true, but what its overall value is—I don't know. . . . I think I have said many things that must be said that should be said and that haven't been said. The spiritual father of this book is Candide and while I do not write as well as Voltaire I think I write much funnier.”
²⁴

But Covici was not happy with Steinbeck's choice of a subject for his new novel. To his agent, Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck wrote, “I am sure he doesn't like this kind of book but I'm pretty sure he was parroting Marshall [Best, managing editor at Viking] about how many copies it would sell. Hell, there is no surety that any of my books will sell and a lot of them haven't. . . . I know that he simply wants me to write the
Grapes of Wrath
over and over.”
²⁵
Actually, Covici proposed “a sequel to
The Pastures of Heaven.
I was to repeat it as of this generation. And that is a lovely idea except that the people who used to live in the Valley don't anymore. New people moved in.” Steinbeck did not want to use “a vague memory of Monterey County of my childhood.”
²⁶
It was no longer his country.

Covici remained unenthusiastic about Steinbeck's satire on the return of royalty to France and objected that its historical background was too obscure for American readers. In response, Steinbeck wrote, “I do not and will not agree with Pat that the historical date [data] must come out because someone may not understand it. If the reader doesn't know what a Merovingian is, let him find out or buy some other book.”
²⁷
Since the reader has already bought this book, a brief account of the Merovingians is in order.

As the Dark Ages began to evolve into the Middle Ages, the Merovingian dynasty of shadowy, forgotten kings (who claimed a descent from mythological deities) with names like Chlodomire, Childéric, Childibert, Chlotar, the spectacularly evil Chilperic, Guntramn, and Dagobert, which for several centuries had ruled the Franks and Gaul in parts of what were to become France, faded away and was replaced by the Carolingian dynasty.

Prominent in the twilight of the Merovingians was a series of rulers named Pepin (which Steinbeck anglicized to Pippin), who began to unify the Franks. Pepin I was not actually a king but was a great landlord who controlled the royal finances, commanded the army, and held the title “mayor of the palace” during the time of
les rois fainéants
(the idle or do-nothing kings), who lived in reclusive debauchery, leaving the mayors of the palace to run the government. Pepin's grandson Pepin II of Héristal (680-714), who spoke both French and German, further unified the Franks. When the Moors, having conquered Spain, tried to extend their conquest into Gaul, the illegitimate son of Pepin II, Charles, defeated them in a decisive battle at Tours in 732, drove them back over the Pyrenees, and permanently stopped their advance into France. For this victory, he earned the surname Carolus Martellus or Charles Martel (the Hammer).

Charles's son Pepin inherited the title of mayor of the palace but asked Pope Zachariah whether he could without sin depose the listless
roi fainéant
and make himself the actual king. The pope responded that the person who really wielded the power was more deserving of the crown than the idle king who did not. With this encouragement, in 751, Pepin called an assembly of nobles and bishops at Poisson, where they deposed Childeric III and unanimously elected Pepin king. “To us,” declared Pepin III, “the Lord hath entrusted the care of government.”
²⁸
In turn Pepin campaigned beyond the Alps on behalf of the Pope, to whom he gave some of his conquest, extending the Papal State with the Donation of Pepin. In 754, Pope Stephen II journeyed to St. Denis, where he anointed Pepin
rex Dei gratia,
“king by the grace of God.” Known as Pepin “the Short,” Pepin III further unified the Franks and helped create a rise in Frankish culture until his death in 768. He was the most effectual, epoch-making king before his son Charles, who earned the name Charles the Great, Carolus Magnus, or Charlemagne, and ushered in the Carolingian dynasty. Will Durant sums up Pepin as “a patient and far-seeing ruler, pious and practical, loving peace and invincible in war, and moral beyond any royal precedent in the Gaul of those centuries. All that Charlemagne accomplished was prepared by Pepin. . . .”
²⁹

Though Covici was unhappy with Steinbeck's work in progress, the author was enjoying himself immensely. His wife stated that, “I can't remember when John seemed to be having so much fun with a book”
³⁰
and that she could hear him “chuck-ling and laughing while he wrote.”
³¹
For him, it was a
jeu d'esprit.
Steinbeck himself called it “surely a self-indulgence,” though he added that “it is more than just a clever idea. . . . I find that I almost completely believe in it.”
³²

Having decided to write a satire about the restoration of the monarchy in France, Steinbeck next questioned what sort of things to satirize. One that offered lots of harmlessly amusing possibilities was the anachronistic trappings of royalty. While he was a grim realist in his proletarian fiction, as a lifelong admirer of Sir Thomas Malory's
Le Morte D'Arthur,
Steinbeck was also a romantic who collected swords, daggers, bows, and spears and spent most of a summer teaching his son Thom how to construct medieval weapons, including a catapult. Steinbeck liked ceremonial costumes and told Elaine, “I have the soul to wear a cape and plumes and carry a sword, but I have the physique to be always handed a hod.”
³³
In the 1950s, he liked to go to town wearing an opera cape and flourishing a broad swashbuckler's hat. When he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he asked the Academy to send him “any regalia, buttons, ribbons, small swords, etc., as are befitting to my academic grandeur,” and when he learned there were none except buttons, he expressed himself “disappointed at the lack of regalia. The French Academy meets dressed in cocked hats, embroidered vests, and small swords.”
³⁴

For his wife's birthday while they were in Paris in the summer of 1954, Steinbeck borrowed a large chateau on the outskirts of Paris that had belonged to Louis IV's finance minister. As Steinbeck's friends the Bucks recalled, the arriving guests found every window of the chateau lit by candles and were met by Steinbeck's sons carrying torches and dressed in livery, who escorted them into the candelabra-lit ballroom. “Truly,” said Joyce Buck, “you felt you were back in the eighteenth century.”
³⁵