“Atque Vale”
This essay commences with a paragraph detailing the many qualities which white Americans had come to come to “expect in negroes.” Among them: to be wiser, more tolerant, more dignified, courageous, possess greater self-control, and even to be more talented. Of course, it goes without saying that Steinbeck is exercising irony - not irony in the white supremacist sense that it would be ridiculous to expect such qualities, but irony for precisely the opposite reason. When whites who struggle to meet any of these goals even halfway most of the time considers white people superior to blacks, what chance do African Americans possibly have to meet a realistic standard? Racism is a rigged game, Steinbeck is saying, that places impossible standards to meet thus ensuring they won’t be met which only serves to solidify the racist myth of superiority.
“L’Envoi”
Steinbeck and his wife were invited to attend the Inaugural Ball of Pres. John F. Kennedy. They declined, preferring instead to stay at home and watch the festivities on television along with millions of others. Toward the end of this short essay which details this incident, Steinbeck observes with uncharacteristically wry irony:
“I guess it was the best ball I was ever invited to, and I enjoy it the most, too.”
“Over There”
In an essay originally titled “Over There” published in the Ladies Home Journal and later published as part of the book Once There was a War, Steinbeck relates the tale of a soldier named Bugs. Following a hard-won battle in Sicily, Bugs came across a mirror in the ruins more than six feet high and two feet wide that he proceeded to carry with him on his back through the rest of the war. The mirror survived marching, encampment and artillery. Ironically, however, the first time he found himself billeted inside an actual house, he attempted to hang the mirror on the wall only for the nail to come loose and send it crashing to the floor, shattering into pieces.
The Nixon Problem
The 1956 election was all about the incumbent GOP team of the highly popular Eisenhower and barely tolerable Nixon seeking re-election. Steinbeck was assigned to cover a Republican Convention that was already a done deal leaving him to muse about the possibility of just making stuff up. Ironic humor was almost the only things which saved him from that option:
“The main issue seems to be Richard Nixon. From what I’ve picked up, both parties are passionate for his nomination. I listened in on a Democratic bull session where the feeling was that Nixon, Dulles, and Benson are Democratic assets.”
Casualty of War
Even today, when the majority of Americans have never heard of Joseph McCarthy and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc is lumped in with the Great Depression, World War II and Woodstock history from another century, it is still quite easy to find criticism of The Grapes of Wrath as communist propaganda written by radical socialist lefty pinko. For most of his career Steinbeck was—totally deserving or not—an iconic literary figure for leftist politics in America, though claims to being a radical communist were always overblown. They became even more so with the ultimate irony of Steinbeck’s political aspect: being rejected by those very same people who had conferred upon him his lofty status as a traitor to the progressive agenda when he turned his talent for war correspondence to the situation in Vietnam. When his eyewitness accounts begin hitting newsstands with a perspective fully supporting the Johnson administration’s extremely and increasingly unpopular war policies, the radical red writer of the was all but officially declared anathema among the political left growing increasing unified as a result of their shared wrath at the soured geen apples of American imperialism Steinbeck was defending.
