“Once There was a War” and

“Once There Was a War”
and Steinbeck’s Use of Fictional Modes

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 London, and on the ground the sirens howled and the tremendous system of alarms and defenses went into action.

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 into a rubble. The screen went blank. The raider banked his plane, whipped around, came , 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 Battle, Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday works.

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 Battle, Of Mice and Men, puts all the right words in their mouths. One can here hear the soldiers speaking pidgin English, talking in broad Georgian accents a “sour French thrown here and there” and also conversing them with each other through hands by acting out their conversation in detail. (p. 123) Private Big Train Mulligan though speaks picturesque English when he refers to “a toothy smiling girl as looking like a jackass eating bumblebees,” (p. 87) it has a touch of Georgia-Oxford dialect in his addressing people as “mate” or “mait”. He doe8n’t differentiate between a petrol station and a gas station but refers to lift and braces, Sligo’s is Brooklyn English: “I‘m not supposed to be here. Hey don’t put me on dis ship. Hey, I’m Americano, Americana....soldier. You canna poot me here”. (p. 132) Luigi’s is banana pushcart and the pizzerias spaghetti patois.

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 Sea of Cortez expedition and recorded therein.⁸

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 itis 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. New York, Viking, 1958), p. xi. Hereafter cited as OTWW andall page references in the text are to this edition.
² John Steinbeck. The Long Valley (1933, rpt. New York: Bantam Books, (1967) p. 22. Hereafter cited as LV.
³ John Steinbeck, The Wayward Bus (1947; rpt. London: Corgi Books. 1969), p. 40. Hereafter cited as WB.
⁴ John Steinbeck, East of Eden (1952; rpt. New York; Bantam Books, 1967) p. 263. Hereafter cited as EE.
⁵ John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (1936, rpt. Cleveland and New York; The World Publishing Company, 1947), p. 142. For more details about Steinbeck’s use of realistic language see Peter Lisca, The Wide World of John Steinbeck (Brunswick N. J., 1958), pp. 110-112.
⁶ Peter Lisca, The Wide World, p. 57.
⁷ Ibid., pp. 72-73.
⁸ John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, (1941; rpt. London: Pan Books, 1971), pp. 162-163
⁹ Peter Lisca, The Wide World, p. 197.