Weapons and armor figure in
Pippin IV
mostly for spectacle, as do costumes from the medieval world to the
ancien regime
just before the Revolution. Carriage makers and armorers have a field day as their skills become once more in demand. Great Britain, one of the countries that still retains a monarchy, has coaches, fanfare, pomp and circumstance, Victorian-costumed guards at Buckingham Palace, sixteenth-century-costumed “beefeaters” at the Tower of London, and bewigged barristers, all of which are good for the tourist trade in an era where royalty is primarily ceremonial rather than political.
In
Pippin IV,
except when the delegates to the National Assembly regress to the code of dueling during the debate over the choice of a monarch and “Hardly a gentleman there was who did not wear scratches and cuts which proclaimed that his honor was intact,”
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all this regression to or re-creation of the past is harmless enough, like the Society for Creative Anachronism.
All of these anachronisms are colorful and dramatic, but they become comic when Steinbeck blends them in a sort of historical potpourri. During Pippin's coronation, the procession includes modern tanks and weapons, heavy tractor-drawn artillery, together with crossbowmen in medieval attire, “dragoons with burnished breastplates,” a “Noble Youth in full armor,” and paratroopers carrying submachine guns, followed by seventeenth-century “musketeers in lace, knee-breeches, silk stockings, and high-heeled shoes with great buckles.”
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Miss France collapses with a crash from the weight and heat of wearing armor like Joan of Arc.
One of the more entertaining anachronisms in the return of royalty was the custom for monarchs to have one or more mistresses. Most notable in France were such pairs as Charles VII and Agnes Sorel, Henri II and Diane de Poitiers, Louis XIV and Louise de la Vallière and the Marquise de Montespan, Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour and Madame du Barry. Even in modern times, presidents and prime ministers have had mistresses officially recognized with pensions and prominent positions at their lover's funeral. Consequently, though Pippin Héristal is monogamous, he is required to have a mistress as one of the trappings of royalty. The situation is ludicrous; the Folies Bergère hold a competition to choose the King's Mistress. The one that is selected for him is a proper lady whom he never even meets and whose name he does not know. But royal protocal requires him to have her, and even his wife agrees.
Another anachronism is that the king must reside in the royal palace of Versailles. Versailles may seem a vast improvement over the shacks and bunkhouses provided for Steinbeck's migrant workers of the 1930s and from the Palace Flophouse of Cannery Row. But though it is an impressive tourist trap, Versailles has not been kept up since the French Revolution, unlike Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, which the British have fitted out with the most modern comforts. Consequently, Pippin finds that Versailles is about as uncomfortable as the Middle Ages was for Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee. “It's drafty there,” he complains to his Uncle Charlie. “The beds are horrible. The floors creak.” It is so cold that the two hundred soi-disant aristocrats who consider themselves entitled to move in with the king are smashing up the furniture for firewood. The queen is disgusted by their posturing, bowing, and scraping, and expecting her to provide their meals, while Pippin calls these hangers-on bums. Housekeeping is a nightmare for the queen, who considers the palace a “gigantic old dustbox” with antiquated plumbing and seventeenth-century kitchens impossibly far away from the royal apartments. The ladies-in-waiting refuse to demean themselves by doing anything useful.
Pippin's wife, Marie, is an unimaginative, bored, and sometimes nagging housewife who admires but does not understand her scholarly husband. She is overwhelmed by having to run the household at Versailles. Their daughter, Clotilde, however, is a hilarious example of the liberated woman, another target of Steinbeck's genial satire.
Despite the fact that French women had long been distinguished in the arts and sciences, it was not until the end of World War II that they started to become liberated. Not unil 1944 were they given the right to vote, perhaps in recognition of their work in the Resistance,
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and soon women were elected as deputies to the Constituent Assemblies and afterward, the National Assembly, though their numbers in the Assembly dwindled in the 1950s. Domestically, their standard of living improved with many labor-saving devices, and the appearance of
Elle
magazine and Christian Dior and Coco Chanel designer clothes appealed to women who wanted to become more chic and alluring. But a law passed in 1920 and still in effect in the 1950s outlawed contraception and criminalized abortion.
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Simone de Beauvoir's book
The Second Sex
(1949) fought against the lingering inequality of women, and by the time the Steinbecks were visiting France, some Frenchwomen were acting very liberated indeed.
Some of Steinbeck's satire deals with the uninhibited antics of Pippin's precocious daughter, Clotilde (her name is taken from a Merovingian queen), who at age fifteen published a novel,
Adieu Ma Vie,
in revolt “against everything she could think of,” which was made into a movie. Then at sixteen, she became prominent in politics as a Communist but considered dropping out and becoming a nun dedicated to giving pedicures to the poor. Instead, she engendered a cult of Clotdisme, a philosophy of fashionable despair that inspired “sixty-eight adolescents to commit suicide by leaping from the top of the Arc de Triomphe.” She fought several rapier duels with Academicians and gave wretched performances in several epic movies before becoming a princess. It would seem that some of her notoriety would have attached itself to her father, but when Pippin is proposed to be the monarch of France, no one objects to his daughter, whose activities were condemned by the church, or even mentions her. Pippin himself seems to respond to her erratic careers with mild amusement.
Clotilde is based, with considerable exaggeration, upon Françoise Sagan (the pseudonym of François Quirex, 1935-). With the publication when she was eighteen of her first novel,
Bonjour Tristesse
(1954), a best-selling picture of disillusioned and embittered French sophisticates, Sagan became an international celebrity with the very sort of people she was writing about. Her second novel,
Un Certain Sourire
came out in 1956, the year before
The Short Reign of Pippin IV
. A film of
Bonjour Tristesse
was released in 1958; it features a moody and precocious teenager who breaks up an affair her widowed playboy father is enjoying by destroying his mistress on the French Riviera.
Un Certain Sourire
(also released as a film in 1958) concerns a romance between a young Parisian couple studying at the Sorbonne that is broken off when the young woman is seduced by a rich, older, married
roué.
Both leave a bitter taste of disillusionment.
After an interesting, eccentric beginning as a prodigy, Clotilde falls in love with a visiting American, Tod Johnson, whose multimillionaire father is the Egg King of Petaluma, California, and she spends the rest of the novel languishing over him.
Pippin Héristal is a reluctant king. He loves his former placid life, his astronomical hobby, his basically being left alone. He wants no part of the trappings of royalty nor the duties of office. As Shakespeare put it, “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.” But once Pippin agrees to accept that crown, he determines to govern as well as he can. For practical advice, he consults his uncle Charles Martel, a dealer in art and antiques, named for the victor of the battle of Tours. But Uncle Charlie is a consummate con man, who passes off fake paintings as unsigned works by Renoir, Boucher, Roualt, and other masters and justifies his swindles by saying that “A man must live.” He addresses Pippin like a priest giving absolution to a penitent, calling him “my son,” “my child,” but his advice is invariably cynical, trying to dissuade Pippin from his impractical ideals. Uncle Charlie introduces Pippin to Tod Johnson, and the two of them introduce him to martinis, to which he is becoming addicted.
Through Tod Johnson, Steinbeck funnels his satire on the United States. Tod's father is a self-made man who hates liberalism and Democrats. Tod is far more open-minded and confesses to Pippin that his father would be horrified to know that he voted Democratic in the last presidential election. But although Steinbeck calls Tod “the ideal American young man,” who is enamored of Pippin's daughter and shares Pippin's enthusiasm for progressive jazz, Tod is also skeptical of the king's idealism and shares Uncle Charlie's materialism, learning his business, planning to open fraudulent art galleries in major American cities, and proposing that the two of them team up to sell French titles to American millionaires. When Pippin protests that such trickery is not right, Tod replies, “What do you mean by right?”
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He believes that the main questions in business are “What have you got to sell and who is going to buy and have they got the money?”
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Never mind business ethics. Tod's philosophy is “The first function of business is to create the demand and the second to fulfill it.” When Pippin argues that, “It seems to me reprehensible to search out areas of weakness and to exploit them,” Tod asks, “Aren't you going to have some difficulty being king, sir?” He adds that as king, “You've got a great little thing here, great, but it can blow up in your face if you don't play your cards right.”
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At Pippin's request, Tod gives him lessons in American democracy, but Tod may not be a reliable advisor. He tells Pippin that it doesn't make much difference which major party is in power. Steinbeck, a staunchly liberal Democrat, would not agree. Tod's most provocative analysis is that the real government consists of corporations, who rule benevolently, claiming to hate socialism yet providing pensions, medical care, accident insurance, vacations, and most of the benefits of the welfare state, not out of kindness but out of pragmatism, figuring that healthy, happy workers will be more productive and be able to buy their products. To some extent this was true in the 1950s, when the American Dream of middle-class prosperity was probably closer than it ever was before, half a century before it turned into the growing nightmare of twenty-first-century cutthroat corporate greed and corruption. Nevertheless, Tod is an apostle of crass materialism who sees nothing wrong with rigging tax laws. Despite their friendship, Tod and Pippin are antagonists, Tod wanting to look out for number one, while Pippin wants whatever is best for the people as a whole.
Seeking solace, Pippin goes to a third confidante, his wife's old school friend Suzanne Lescault, who worked as a nude dancer at the Folies Bergère until her arches fell, after which she became a nun, Sister Hyacinthe, who offers Pippin kindly, benevolent advice, mixed with platonic flirtation. She provides comfort but little else.
During Pippin's brief reign, France prospers, as foreign loans and investments pour in, tourism thrives, and nature provides idyllic weather that promises a bountiful harvest. But Pippin himself accomplishes little and spends most of his time preparing himself to lead France. Brushing up on French history, Pippin identifies with Louis XVI, who would rather have been a clock maker than king (just as Pippin would rather remain an astronomer), who was the best of the Bourbons but was guillotined for crimes of his ancestors rather than for his own. Pippin says, “To a certain extent I think I am like him. I am trying to see where he made his errors. I should hate to fall into the same trap.”
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Having led a sheltered life, Pippin sneaks out of the palace incognito whenever he can, like the
Arabian Nights
Caliph Haroun-al Raschid and the medieval French Louis XI, and goes around Paris and its environs to see what France is really like, not only getting to know the ordinary people, whom Steinbeck called “the soul and guts of France”
44
but also inspecting the infrastructure and examining wages, prices, the cost and condition of rented buildings, and the operations of the market. Ironically, his various disguises look ridiculous and give him away, and he finds that his own bland appearance allows him to be overlooked and escape from his bodyguards better than wigs, false moustaches, and other theatrical getup. To go a bit farther afield, he takes to driving a motor scooter.
When Uncle Charlie warns that his idealism, if put into practice, may bring retaliation against him, perhaps even a tumbril to a guillotine, Pippin's reply is scathing. “I did not ask to be king . . . but I am king and I find this dear, rich, productive France torn by selfish factions, fleeced by greedy promoters, deceived by parties. I find that there are six hundred ways of avoiding taxes if you are rich enoughâsixty-five methods of raising rent in controlled rental areas. The riches of France, which should have some kind of distribution, are gobbled up. . . . And on this favored land the maggots are feeding.”
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Though Pippin speaks about France, Steinbeck made similar charges about conditions in the United States, and his anger would come to a head in his next and final novel,
The Winter of Our Discontent,
which tipped the scales of the judges to award him the Nobel Prize.
The nature of leadership has been an ongoing concern throughout Steinbeck's fiction, from his first novel,
Cup of Gold,
about the seventeenth-century pirate Henry Morgan, who became knighted and made governor of Jamaica. It resurfaces prominently in
In Dubious Battle,
in which, on the one hand, an unscrupulous veteran Communist organizer instructs a novice in how to organize a strike and manipulate the workers, not for their own benefit (he wants some of them to be killed) but for the ultimate aims of the party, and on the other hand, Doc Burton, who believes in benevolent cooperation. A key scene in
The Grapes of Wrath
occurs when the indomitable Ma Joad takes over the leadership of the family from the dispirited Pa. In “The Leader of the People,” Grandfather's richest memory is of having led a wagon train across the West. In
The Moon Is Down,
there are two kinds of leadership. In opposition to the Nazi “herd men” who conquer Norway, the townspeople also act as a group, unregimented but spontaneously cooperating in resistance to terrorize and sabotage the invaders. Except for the Quisling, Corell, the free citizens act as one man. Corell's response is to advise the Nazis, “When we have killed the leaders, the rebellion will be broken.”
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The issue of leadership thus focuses not on the Fuehrer but on Mayor Orden, who insists that his people “don't like to have others think for them,” that “authority is in the town” and not in any individual, and that he simply carries out the collective will of the community.
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