Dedicated to the telling pose and psychological truth, Robert Capa was John Steinbeck's artistic soul mate. As Steinbeck wrote in a tribute to Capa after the photographer's untimely death in 1954: "He could
photograph motion and gaiety and heartbreak. He could photograph thought. He made a world and it was Capa's world. Note how he captures the endlessness of the Russian landscape with one long road and one single human. See how his lens could peer through the eyes into the mind of a man."
The collaboration between these two restless and creative men, notes Robert Capa, began this way:
at the beginning of a newly invented war which was named the cold war … no one knew where the battlefields were. While I was figuring what to do I met Mr. Steinbeck, who had his own problems. He was struggling with a reluctant play, and the cold war gave him the same shivers it gave me. To make it short, we became a cold-war team. It seemed to us that behind phrases like "Iron Curtain" "cold war" and "preventive war" people and thought and humor had fully disappeared. We decided to make an old-fashioned Don Quixote and Sancho Panza quest-to ride behind the "iron curtain" and pit our lances and pens against the windmills of today.
Capa's whimsical statement of purpose reveals, in fact, something about why
A Russian Journal
is in many ways superior to more ambitious, even more informative contemporary accounts of postwar Russia. Typical is an apologist for the Soviet experiment, Dr. Hewlett Johnson, dean of Canterbury
(Soviet Russia Since the War,
1947), who intones that it is "our responsibility to understand Russia," and offers a smorgasbord of topics: "A Young Woman of Aristocratic Birth," "Soviet Women Lead the World," "Childhood in Soviet Land," "Planned Industry." Steinbeck and Capa's aim was far more modest; and, unlike Johnson, they had no political agenda.
Other less biased writers articulated intentions that often echo that of Steinbeck and Capa-to understand the people of Russia- but nets are cast far more widely. Edward Crankshaw, in
Russia and the Russians
(1948), sought "to produce a picture of the Russian people, their culture, and their political ideas, against the background of the unchanging conditions of their landscape and their climate." Descriptions of the great Russian plain and detailed synopses of Russian history absorb many pages of his tome, but the "living image of a distant people" emerges only as a series of statistics: twenty-five years ago, he reminds his readers, four-fifths of the Russian population was composed of peasants, while in 1948 only half are peasants. In
Just tell the truth: The Uncensored Story of How the Common People Live Behind the Russian Iron Curtain
(1947), journalist and president of the American Agricultural Editors Association John L. Strohn had a similarly ambitious agenda: "To see and talk with people of the Soviet Union, so I can introduce them through stories and broadcasts to the people of America. . . . What I'm interested in are the common people." Visiting collective farms, he observes the damage caused by war, the absent men, and concludes-as does Steinbeck-that "it is the women who are the real heroes of the farm front-women who did practically all of the farm work during the war, who are doing even now 80 per cent of the work on collective farms today."
But the Russian women of Steinbeck and Capa, not absorbed in statistics and generalizations, strike more convincing poses: the village wit at the first communal farm who shakes a cucumber at Capa's camera. Or Mamuchka, renowned cook, owner of a new cow, Lubka, who hasn't the personality of her beloved former cow, Katushka. Capa's photos, like Steinbeck's prose, avoid the panoramic in favor of the portrait. Their joint commitment to record only what they could witness-based not on research or speculation but on visual record-is their full story. Paradoxically, their approach-to frame only what is seen-more accurately re-flects Stalin's Soviet Union, where visitors saw only scenes carefully orchestrated by Soviet officials. Journalists traced the same path Steinbeck and Capa did, the so-called Vodka Circuit, because Westerners were typically taken to Moscow, Kiev, and Tiflis, showplace cities all.
Reading several of these midcentury accounts undoubtedly supplements and enhances Steinbeck's text. Journalist Marshall Mac-Duffie, in
The Red C
arpet: 10,000 Miles Through Russia on a Visa From Khrushchev,
writes about a 1953 trip, with reflections on his earlier experience in Russia in 1946. Puzzling on why Russians fed visitors so lavishly, he writes about his 1946 visit:
We were members of an accredited diplomatic UN mission. Possibly they thought they had to entertain us. Secondly, there was a shortage of food. So, in a curious way, the giving of a formal dinner or putting on a spread assumed a special significance, as a gesture. Third, I often suspected that our visit was an excuse for local officials to throw one of their rare parties on the old expense account and get a little rich food otherwise unobtainable. Lastly, it has been long a Russian custom to entertain foreign visitors in such fashion. . . . Wherever our mission went, we encountered these relatively elaborate meals with the inevitable succession of numerous toasts.
Steinbeck and Capa were, of course, similarly feted, but Steinbeck eschews generalizations and analysis, opting for humor instead- particularly when seated at yet another dinner table: one Georgian banquet was the "only meal or dinner we ever attended where fried chicken was an hors d'oeuvre, and where each hors d'oeuvre was half a chicken." It's this humorous eye that skewers Soviet excess, and the quick sympathy for the generosity behind it all-vintage Steinbeck material-that account for this book's appeal.
A Russian Journal, the
record of their forty-day trip to the Soviet Union between July 31 and mid-September 1947, was published in April 1948, after parts had been serialized in the
New York Herald Tribune
(beginning on January 14, 1948, and running on page 3 of the paper until January 31) and in the
Ladies' Home Journal
(published in February). Like most of Steinbeck's work after
The Grapes of Wrath,
it received decidedly mixed reviews. Writing for the
Saturday Review,
Louis Fischer panned it-excepting Capa's "marvelous photographs." Some felt that the text trivialized a profound topic, or added little to the readers' knowledge of Russia, or rehashed what had already been written. "As books about Russia go," wrote Orville Prescott for the
New York Times, "
'A Russian Journal' is a lot better written than most, but it is more superficial than many." Sterling North concurred: "The question arises: how superficial can books about Russia become. … It could have been otherwise if the collaborators' knowledge of Russia, their interest in Russia and their attitude toward Russia had been above the level of eating, drinking and observing pleasant surface impressions." Steinbeck deliberately and consciously, of course, avoids historical context, political posturing, and in-depth analysis, as he reminds his readers throughout. And Capa reported later that, in fact, "on any occasion where questions were asked us about our feelings toward the policy of the United States Government we always stated emphatically that even if we were to disagree with some of its aspects, we would refuse to criticize it outside of the United States." Writing one of the most thoughtful and sympathetic assessments, however, Victor Bernstein mused: "I am not at all certain that this abnegation of the interpreter's role is justified merely because it is deliberate. It is an old, old fight in the theory and practice of journalism. How much of the unseen must go into a story to make it understandable, to get at its roots, to put it into perspective? How much of the unseen should Steinbeck put into his book to make it truly objective and not merely superficial?"
It was superficial, of course, only in light of what a few knew and more suspected was occurring in Stalin's Soviet Union. The United States' views of postwar Russia were, in fact, profoundly troubled. As Arthur Miller observed in his autobiography,
T
imebends,
by 1947 "the Germans clearly were to be our new friends, and the savior-Russians the enemy, an ignoble thing it seemed to me. . . . this wrenching shift, this ripping off of Good and Evil labels from one nation and pasting them onto another, had done something to wither the very notion of a world even theoretically moral." In these liminal years, the Soviet Union was a place few comprehended. A 1948 response to the book by a Ukrainian professor, then living in Munich, is entitled "Why Did You Not Want to See, Mr. Steinbeck?" What more could Steinbeck have seen is perhaps a better question. He knew more than he says, certainly-he'd been in the Soviet Union before, although he never commented on his and Carol's 1937 trip. But in 1947 he writes only what he sees-and he sees with a great deal of emotion and understanding-because those are the artistic parameters he set. And, once again, he saw only what the Russians permitted him or any other visitors to see, an updated version of the Potemkin village.
Other American reviewers found the book highly satisfying, "objective, impartial" and "readable because [Steinbeck] loves real people and because he has a sense of humor that never lets him down." "This is one of the best books about Russia since Maurice Baring wrote his 'Puppet Show of Memory' in 1922," effused the reviewer for the
New York Sun.
Steinbeck "has a most observant eye, a deadpan humor and a command of the English language unsurpassed by any American of our time. The Steinbeck style is one of the marvels of the age. It is entirely unpretentious. . . ." Bernstein, among others, praised Capa's lens, which "suits the prose which surrounds it, lean and restrictive, without the furbelows of the self-conscious artist, and yet full of sensitivity and attention to detail." And supportive reviewers acknowledged that Steinbeck and Capa's book would help the West better "understand the Russians emotionally," a real contribution. Again, one of the most sensitive reviews posed a tough question: What were the political implications of such a book? Joseph Henry Jackson, writing for the
San Francisco Chronicle,
notes that the text would please no political faction-as the author himself admitted in his final paragraph. "A good deal here," notes Jackson, "will probably annoy the devout Left, for the two Americans, visiting with the best will in the world, were often irritated by the way things were done in Russia, by the miles of red tape that had to be unwound whatever they wanted to do. . . ." He continues, "On the other hand, the case-hardened Right will also be irritated by the book, on the ground that nobody's got any right to be saying a good word on behalf of any kind of Russian excepting a dead Russian."
Indeed, this trip to Russia brought back for both Steinbeck and Capa the specter of their own political agendas. The suspicion that
The Grapes of Wrath,
with its magnificent endorsement of "we" over "I," was communist propaganda lingered in the minds of some, certainly the FBI, who had maintained a file on Steinbeck since 1943. The truth was that Steinbeck had long despised the communist agenda:
In Dubious Battle,
a novel about striking workers in California, shows the communist organizers to be self-serving, willing to sacrifice the people's needs for the party's. When writing
The Grapes of Wrath,
with its emphasis on fair treatment for the working man, Steinbeck insisted that the lyrics for the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" be printed on the endpapers so that there would be no doubt about his patriotism. "The fascist crowd will try to sabotage this book because it is revolutionary," he wrote his publisher. "They will try to give it the communist angle. However, the Battle Hymn is American and intensely so … if both words and music are there the book is keyed into the American scene from the beginning."
In spite of his protestations, however, muted accusations that Steinbeck was "Red" lingered into the 1950s. In 1939, as
The Grapes of Wrath
was about to be published, he was convinced that the FBI was investigating him-in Monterey a local bookstore owner reported being questioned by Hoover's men and in Los Gatos his name had been turned into the local sheriff's office. FBI files on Steinbeck uncategorically deny that he was under investigation in the late 1930s, but they do detail a full investigation made of the writer in 1943 "to determine his suitability to hold a commission in the U.S. Army," a commission denied because of suspected communist sympathies. "Associates and friends," the FBI report notes, said that although he "exercised poor discretion during his early days of writing by associating with some elements of the Communist Party, he was not interested in advancing the cause of the Party but in gathering material for his writings on certain social conditions existing in the US at that time." In fact, evidence of communist leanings is decidedly thin: in 1936 and 1938, Steinbeck published two articles in the liberal Carmel magazine owned by Ella Winter and Lincoln Steffens, the
Pacific Weekly;
in 1936, he also lent his support to and possibly attended the Western Writers Conference, later labeled a "communist front" according to the committee on Un-American Activities; in 1938, he gave his 1936
San Francisco News
accounts to the Simon Lubin Society, allegedly "a Communist front for California agrarian penetration"; in 1938, "the Committee to Aid Agricultural Workers was organized under Steinbeck's leadership"; in 1946, he was invited to a reception in New York for three visiting Soviet literary figures. That was it. John Steinbeck was-no communist, but he was very curious about communism's effect on the average man.
Nor was Robert Capa a communist, although his passport was confiscated in Paris in 1953 on allegations of communist sympathies; the evidence in his FBI file as thin as that in Steinbeck's. According to Whelan, Capa's dossier records only trivial associations with communism: "he had sold photographs to
Regards
during the Spanish Civia War; some of his pictures had appeared in a magazine published by Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; he had been either a member or an honorary member of the 'Radical anti-fascist' Photo League; he had gone to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck; the
Daily Worker
had reported his
Herald Tribune
Forum speech with approval. In 1950 it was added that he had spoken out against jailing the Hollywood Ten." Both men, according to Capa, "stated very clearly before and during our trip that we were not Communists or Communist-sympathizers." For their careful stance, however, they were reviled by the Soviet press after the book's publication, described as "gangsters" and "hyenas."