The Short Reign of Pippin IV (4 page)

The genuine leader for Steinbeck is not one who seeks or seizes power but one who represents the community. This is the sort of leadership that Emiliano Zapata acquires in Steinbeck's screenplay
Viva Zapata!
in which Zapata tells the campesinos shortly before his death, “About leaders. You've looked for leaders. For strong men without faults. There aren't any. There are only men like yourselves. . . . There's no leader but yourselves.” Like Pippin, Zapata has not sought leadership and resists having it thrust upon him, but he cannot resist taking action when he encounters episodes of cruelty and oppression and thus, against his will, becomes a leader of the Mexican revolution. When he resigns from high office, rather than become dictatorial, he is betrayed and assassinated. Leadership of various sorts is also an issue in Steinbeck's screenplay
Lifeboat, Cannery Row,
and
The Wayward Bus.

The Steinbeck novel immediately preceding
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
is
Sweet Thursday,
a comparatively short and lightweight sequel to
Cannery Row.
Among the boisterous bums who pal around with Doc is a lovable simpleton named Hazel, who is dumbfounded when Fauna, the new madam of the Bear Flag brothel, reads his horoscope and proclaims that he will become president of the United States. He no more wants to be president than Pippin Héristal wants to be king. “If there had been any avenue of escape he would have taken it but his horoscope closed all doors.”
⁴⁸
Pippin, a well-educated man and amateur scientist, in addition to having royal lineage, is well qualified to be king, despite his reluctance, but Hazel is an ignorant lunkhead, who nevertheless takes the horoscope seriously, and being condemned to accept his duty and his fate, is sick with anxiety and loneliness. “The dignity of his position was greater than himself. He could not let his future down.”
⁴⁹
The entire situation is ridiculous, but Hazel rises to the occasion, which he thinks requires him to break one of Doc's arms in order to end the estrangement between Doc and the woman he loves. Despite his success as a matchmaker, Hazel pleads to be freed from the doom of becoming president, so Fauna lets him off the hook by telling him she made a mistake in reading his horoscope. Though this narrative is ludicrous, it has a sort of lopsided logic and may have pointed Steinbeck in the direction of Pippin Héristal's reluctant reign as king of France.

Pippin's reign comes to its end when, after months of thoughtful preparation, he presides over a new constitutional convention and presents his “Code Pippin.” It is benevolent, idealistic, humanitarian, befitting the “sense of mission, of divinity of purpose”
⁵⁰
that he has said he needs. Denouncing the greedy oligarchy of wealth that he says is destroying the nation, he proposes to bring back a more equitable distribution of wealth by lowering taxes and closing loopholes, by raising wages, controlling prices, streamlining government, strengthening pensions and public health insurance, and breaking up great land holdings. He proposes adding “Opportunity” to the motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity.” When both the Right and Left are dumbfounded, he speaks out in cold anger, telling them, “I didn't ask to be king. . . . I begged not to be king. And you didn't want a king. You wanted a patsy. . . . But you elected a king, and by God you've got a king—or a gigantic joke.”
⁵¹

Unfortunately, Steinbeck settles for the gigantic joke. Implausibly, the king is dressed in a marshal's uniform rented from a theatrical costumer that is grotesquely too large, the sagging, baggy pants held up with safety pins, which rip apart as he leaves the stage, exposing him to ridicule and howls of laughter. The king's finest hour ends in a pratfall. And his mildly liberal proposal so outrages the vested interests of Right and Left that they incite a riot, and Sister Hyacinthe urges the king to flee for his life. But while he is disappointed in France's reversion to its turbulent chaos, he does not believe the people are so far gone that they will resurrect the Reign of Terror. Instead of fleeing across the border, he goes home, like Candide, to cultivate his own garden. As for France, the Fourth Republic did collapse a year later, and was replaced by a Fifth Republic, to be headed not by a descendant of Charlemagne, but by another “grand Charles,” Charles De Gaulle.

As the publication date for
Pippin
approached, Viking became increasingly apprehensive. Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis, “There's a great unease about it at Viking, but there's an unease all over and maybe one thing transmits to another.”
⁵²
According to Steinbeck's biographer, Jackson Benson, “Marshall Best recalls that there were seven different readings of the manuscript and that it was the only book that Viking tried to persuade John not to publish. In large part because there was so much opposition to it—both Elizabeth and Pat had come to hate it—the book took a place close to his heart.”
⁵³
Apparently, Viking feared that a book so different from what readers had come to expect from Steinbeck would drive them away, and that a lightweight comedy from the author of
The Grapes of Wrath
would further damage his reputation that the anti-Steinbeck claque of the literary establishment, like Maxwell Geismar, had been attacking.

But though it is often hilarious, Steinbeck's satiric novel has serious undertones; and while he admitted that he wrote it almost entirely for his own amusement, he insisted, “It is more than just a clever idea I believe and should be given that dignity. . . . I find that I almost completely believe in it. . . . It certainly shows very little mercy to anyone. As a matter of fact I rather think the French will like it. It is the Americans who won't, but the Americans I am afraid have very little humor. This damn thing has almost a Kafka overtone but it is written as history which indeed it is.”
⁵⁴
To Viking's surprise and delight, when
Pippin
was published in the spring of 1957, it was picked as a Main Selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club with an enthusiastic report by Basil Davenport in the
Book-of-the-Month Club News
. Calling the oft-told story of a commoner turned temporarily into a king “one of the universal fantasies,” Davenport agrees with Steinbeck that along with the book's “high-spirited foolery,” in the “discussions about the nature of government the reader will decidedly find something to think about. . . . This is that rare find, a book of humor that is also a book of ideas.” Readers apparently thought so too, for despite Viking's fears, it sold extremely well. Steinbeck asked Covici to send copies of
Pippin
to Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, and Moss Hart (because he thought the book might be staged or screened).
⁵⁵
American critics gave
Pippin
mixed reviews. Elizabeth Janeway, in
The New York Times,
advised readers not to take it too seriously and to “enjoy the fabrication,” while B. R. Redman in the
Saturday Review
complained that it was “thin broth.” Daniel George in
Spectator
called it “delightful,” while
Time
responded with a yawn.
The Library Journal
found it “highly enjoyable”; H. T. Moore in
The New Republic
found it “superficially amusing.” William Hogan in
The New Yorker
called it “a very pleasant Steinbeckian surprise.”

Some academic critics enjoyed Steinbeck's
jeu d'esprit,
which Warren French considered “the most entertaining novel that Steinbeck had written since
Cannery Row
.”
⁵⁶
Others saw
Pippin
as a further sign of what they considered the author's decline. To Elizabeth Otis, Steinbeck responded that the reviews “follow exactly the old pattern I am so used to, celebrating old books which the same people raised hell with when they were printed.”
⁵⁷
Even some scholars specializing in Steinbeck treated
Pippin
with contempt. Peter Lisca, whose
The Wide World of John Steinbeck,
published just a year after
Pippin IV,
is one of the first major book-length studies of Steinbeck, helped set the tone of criticism that finds a continuing decline in Steinbeck's post-war work, a judgment that has subsequently been challenged successfully by John Disky, Louis Owens, and others. Lisca damned the novel not for what it was but for what it was not, claiming it lacked the substance and style of the early Steinbeck books.
⁵⁸
Joseph Fontenrose called it “tasteless” and Richard Astro termed it “sapless and languid.” Lester J. Marks faulted the book for not continuing the thematic designs of Steinbeck's earlier novels.
⁵⁹
But as one of Steinbeck's friends maintained, “John was not an institution with institutional responsibilities—why shouldn't he do what he wanted to do?”
⁶⁰

John Ditsky, who worked on rehabilitating the novels of the 1950s from critical disdain, examining Steinbeck's later works on their own terms and appreciating the author's ability to change, rather than faulting them for not being like his earlier works, argues that “Pippin is due for an overview of the critical attitudes it has inspired to date, and equally as much for some sort of new statement of its lasting significance.”
⁶¹

In the British Isles, reviews were almost entirely enthusiastic. The
Illustrated London News
called it “very funny and agreeable.” The
Sheffield Telegraph
found the novel “delicately worked out” and concluded that “the reader is rewarded by a brilliant exercise in satire.” The
Tablet
termed it “an altogether successful political joke about France today that is at once gay, lighthearted, and immensely shrewd . . . I can only recommend it as the best lighthearted novel I have come across in years.” The
Daily Telegraph
found “wisdom as well as wit in this Voltairean squib.” The
Irish Press
called
Pippin
“pure Steinbeck, as gentle and human and joyous as
Cannery Row
.” Wolf Mankowitz, writing in the
Tribune
that the novel was “great fun,” was glad to find that Steinbeck “has not lost that gift for indignation at social injustice which has made much of his work distinguished.” The
New Statesman
called it “both an engaging and a sensible jape, fun to read, and with all the exhilaration of a sober writer's holiday-piece.” The
Bookman
concluded that “if ever there was a book worth reading twice, this is it.”

In France, when the novel was serialized in
Figaro
prior to its hardcover publication, it received glowing reviews. When the Steinbecks returned to France in June 1957, Steinbeck's French publisher celebrated the novel with a party on the Seine, aboard a bateau done up as a royal barge and flying the banner of Charlemagne.
⁶²

The last word belongs to Steinbeck, who wrote to Pascal Covici after the novel's publication that

 

NOTES