“Once There
Was a War”
and
Steinbeck’s Use of Fictional Modes
Dr. MASHKOOR ALI SYED
Hurriedly written war
reports from the European zone which were sent or telephoned by Steinbeck, as a
war correspondent, across the sea to appear as Immediacies in the New York Herald
Tribune in 1943 1 failed
to receive that much attention which it actually deserved and were treated less
seriously in critical studies. Even when they were finally published in book
form in 1958 as Once There Was a War, it was considered trivial and
unliterary simply for its originally being nothing more than a datewise
connected narrative of journalistic war dispatches based on the writer’s
wartime experiences on England, Africa and Italy war fronts.
True, it does not concern
war as much as Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, or Hemingway’s Farewell
to Arms, or Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead or Joseph Heller’s
Catch 22 does, although one often comes across many graphic and highly
fascinating descriptions of war incidents. Here, for example, is a vivid account
of German bombing attack on the theatre full of children:
While Veronica Lake, long
blond bair over one eye, sat in pajamas on a man’s bed and he worried for his
good and respectable name and the children crowed with delight – ten German fighter-bombers
whirled in over the coast. The spotters picked them up. The Spitfires took the
air. The anti-aircraft guns fired and two of the raiders were shot down. A
third crashed against a little hill. Then a crazy ragged chase started in the
grey cloud. Spitfires ranging and searching in the cloud. The raiders separated
and lunged on toward
Only one of the raiders
got through, twisting and dodging through the defenses. He came racing down out
of the cloud and right under him was the theater. He was very low when he
released his bombs. The top of the theater leaped into the air and then settled
back into a rubble. The screen went blank. The raider banked his plane, whipped
around, came back, and poured his guns into the wreck. Then he jerked his ship
into the grey clouds and ran for the coast. And he left behind him the
screaming of children in pain and fear.
(OTWW, p. 79)
One can, however, learn
many things about war from such passages. But there is no war theme as such one
often finds in Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny or Irwin Shaw’s The
Young Lions or James Gould Cogzens’ Guard of Honor. There is no
wartime bitterness, no portrayal of war horrors of the slaughter of Japanese
prisoners of The Naked and the Dead, no army stockade of Dos Passos’s Three
Soldiers or of James Jones’s From Here to Eternity of usual war
novels. Like most of the war novelists, Steinbeck was neither an ex-soldier nor
was he commissioned to write a propaganda war book he had done earlier in Bombs
Away (1942). Nor had he, like Norman Mailer, any strong political
convictions to offer a persuasive plea for, and nothing of his own earlier “celebration
of democracy” of The Moon is Down (1942). Instead, he is here more
concerned with “the human aspects”, with the soldiers’ fear of the repercussions
of the war, with their anxieties and the rage concerning the more serious
economic questions of inflation and of another post-war depression, the
security of their family and jobs, “The real homesickness, the real terror, and
the real ferocity of the war” (OTWW,
p. 19) rather than the enmity, killings, deaths, cruelty, horrors, victory and
defeat on the battlefield.
Nevertheless, in its presentation
of characters and situations and even in stylistic devices and use of language,
it has a conspicuous touch of fiction; it more or less resembles a story told
in the typical Steinbeck manner; it reminds one of Steinbeck’s fictional
stories and hence transcends the realm of sheer war reportage for newspaper
publication as critics have usually taken it for. It rather shows Steinbeck
more acutely alive to the use of his earlier fictional model of his The
Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, The Grapes of Wrath, In Dubious
Never does one come across
such a wide range of heterogeneous characters in a single book as Once
There was a War Alcoholic Goat, Private Big Train Mulligan, Bob Hope,
Eddie, Sligo, Luigi and other belongs to the long catalogue of Steinbeck’s
whimsical and grotesque beings: Tularecito and Johnny Bear of his early
stories, giant Lennie of Of Mice and Men. Noah Joad of The Grapes of
Wrath and Danny of The Winter of Our Discontent. Tottering about on
his long and knobby legs, the shambling Alcoholic Goat is not physically very
impressive:
He has a shabby, pinkish
fur and a cold, fishlike eye; his legs are not straight, in fact he is slightly
knock-kneed. He carries head high and his horns, painted in brilliant red and
blue, more than offset any physical address. (OTWW. p, 58)
And in his love for nice
food and beer and gluttonous eating he recalls paisanos of Tortilla Flat. He
eats nearly everything: he can eat two hundred sandwiches, three cakes and can
drink half a bowl of punch at a time. Beer he loves so much and consumes it so
much that even non-alcoholic English beer makes him tipsy.
Private Big Train
Mulligan, the Army Ford driver, is also equally interesting and delightful.
Fond of women, leisure, good food travel and companionship, he has almost
everything. Although not handsome, he is pleasant-looking, soft-spoken,
genuinely interested in and affectionately courteous to women. He is never without
a girl and knows everything about her. His talents, like paisanos in Tortilla
Flat, lie in devising a free dinner, meat, newly-laid eggs and fresh
vegetables for himself. He can rapidly eat while talking on all subjects
without letting others know about it.
In point of stylistic
devices Steinbeck seems rather more adept here in the use of similes, which,
besides lending his language the intended effect, makes it more picturesque and
entertaining. “The ground crew scurry about like rabbits” (p. 36); “Eddie
concealed his poke as modestly as a young woman adjusts the straps of an evening
gown that has no straps” (p. 114); “The four hundred lay on the blanket like a
large salad” (p. 115); “The pile of money was ten inches high now, and spilling
down like a loose haycock” (p. 115); the plane “flamed like a flower-pot at an
old-fashioned Fourth of July fireworks exhibit. Her traces spread like a
fountain” (p. 225); “The little woman danced more one foot to the other like a
child.” (p. 178).
Steinbeck’s early habit of
describing his characters in terms of animal imagery seems to be again at work
when he writes about the leader who “looked like a weary and petulant mouse”
(p. 174); the “naval men saw.....a tiny woman.....scrambling from under the
grapewines and climbed up the steps like a puppy” (p. 178). Comparisons with
mouse, puppy and dog are more recurrent in Once There Was a War as well
as in early Steinbeck. Mary Teller “sat as still as mouse”;2 Jelka “whined
softly like a cold puppy” (LV, p. 125); Mr. Pritchard’s face was “sharp like a
puppy’s face and his eyes were bright and questioning, like puppy’s eyes”.3
Samuel Hamilton loves his profession “the way a bitch loves her runty pup”.4
Norma “had become as intent as a setter pup watching a bug” (WB, p.4O) ;
Pimples “seemed to shake himself like a dog” (WB, p. 11); and Elisa “crouched
low like a fawning dog.” (LV, p. 8)
Nowhere such a rich
variety of spoken language is to be found than here. As the American army was
made up of men of different parts of the country, such a conglomeration of
people was naturally to have different sorts of dialects among themselves.
Steinbeck was a conscious writer whose attitude towards language is better
expressed in his In Dubious Battle in the words of Mac:
“Speech has a kind of feel
about it. I get the feel, and it comes out, perfectly naturally. I don’t try to
do it. I don’t think I could help doing it. You know, Doc. men are pretty
suspicious of a man who doesn’t talk their way. You can insult a man pretty
badly by using a word he doesn’t understand. May be he won’t say anything, but
he’ll hate you for it”.5
Steinbeck knows his
characters well and as he had done earlier in The Grapes of Wrath, In
Dubious
Other soldiers narrate the
war anecdotes, interludes, stories and their experiences in manual pidgin and
colloquial idiom:
One elderly man lost his
whole house by fire. He saved an old rocking chair. He took it everywhere with
him: wouldn’t leave it for a moment. His whole family was killed, but he hung
on to that rocking chair. He wouldn’t sit in it. He sat on the ground beside
it, but you couldn’t get it away from him. (OTWW, p. 61).
Told in simple and toothsome
vernacular, it clearly has story-teller’s exuberant elaboration which recalls
to mind Steinbeeks’ early Junius Maltby’s goat-purchasing anecdote in The
Pastures of Heaven and one-legged whore interlude of The Grapes of Wrath
and Cornelia’s gift pig story of Tortilla Flat. Once There Was a War also
abounds in such delightful stories and anecdotes which unmistakably reveal
Steinbeck’s strength, skill and individuality as a good story-teller. The
entire chapter “Stories of the Blitz” consists of such charming tales. In
addition to these, the unlucky end of the lucky gambler, Eddie’s game; the
rescue of a pregnant women by soldiers; Bugs’ mirror anecdote; Sligo’s
disguised escape as an Italian prisoner to America; American soldiers
grape-throwing Italian reception drenching them in grape juice and raising
swarms of flies, with throwing four pound weighing pink amaryllis seasonal
flower almost wounding and hurting them, are some of the most amusing independent
tales which can be read separately for their own sake, like the ten stories of The
Pastures of Heaven, even without sacrificing the meaning and vision of the
book.
Far from providing
coherence and compactness to the book all these tales and anecdotes make Once
There Was a War loose and episodic in structure – typical of early Steinbeck;
The Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla Flat being the early notable
examples. According to his own admission concerning The Pastures of Heaven, he
wrote to his agent in 1931.
The manuscript is made up
of stories each one complete in itself, having its rise, climax and ending.
Each story deals with a family or individual. They arc tied together only by
the common locality and by the contact with the M...6
The letter obviously
testifies that he always thought of his novels in terms of episodes which were
later developed into full-length books. He mentioned the germ anecdotes of two
of his Tortilla Flat stories of Corporal and his son and of the thwarted
love of the Veljo Ravanno.7 His The Pearl is based on an incident
he heard on his
It cannot be gainsaid that
all components of Once There Was a War do not hold together as tightly
as that of many twentieth century war novels; there is no Munroe family of The
Pastures of Heaven; or Huck Finn of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, or Herman Melville’s trickster of The Confidence-Man, to
provide the physical link to the Once There Was a War episodes as such.
But I see no reason at all why the author’s presentation of “the human aspects,”
Steinbeck confines himself to, cannot be a unifying element to the tenuous
plot of Once There Was a War. Since Steinbeck did not intend to write it
as a novel, 9 it may not have the refined characters and dialogues,
well thought-out and properly conceived plot and proper organisation of
material in spite of his revision, correction and chapter headings in the Tortilla
Flat and Sweet Thursday manner of a good novel, but its literary
qualities cannot, however, be negated and denied. Whether it is superior
to his other works, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of
Wrath or not, is rather difficult to say; but it is certainly much better
than many of his latter writings. It may not be a distinguished piece of
writing, it is not a bad one also, quite unfit for critical studies as critics
have often noticed. It shows, indeed, Steinbeck’s keen interest in the novel both
as a tradition and a form.
Notes
1 John Steinbeck, Once
There Was a War (1943, rpt.
2 John Steinbeck. The
3 John Steinbeck, The
Wayward Bus (1947; rpt.
4 John Steinbeck, East
of
5 John Steinbeck, In
Dubious
6 Peter Lisca, The Wide
World, p. 57.
7 Ibid., pp. 72-73.
8 John Steinbeck, The
Log from the
9 Peter Lisca, The Wide
World, p. 197.