Viva Zapata!—Steinbeck, Motion Pictures, and the Mexican Revolution

Image of title frame from the motion picture Viva Zapata!

Unlike other famous authors of his generation such as Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway, John Steinbeck experienced more success than failure in motion picture adaptations of his fiction while he was alive. Uniquely among American writers who worked in Hollywood during the first half of the 20th century, he also found creating original scripts for motion pictures a productive vehicle for his social message and artistic vision, as well as a useful outlet for personal issues when needed. The 1952 film Viva Zapata! starring Marlon Brando as the hero of the recent Mexican Revolution exemplifies these aspects of Steinbeck’s career as a writer.

Working with his friend Elia Kazan—the director of On the Waterfront, also starring Marlon Brando, and the 1955 motion picture adaptation of East of Eden—Steinbeck produced a remarkable screenplay about the Mexican Revolution that explores themes central to his social-protest novels of the 1930s. Like the best of his books, his screen treatment of Emiliano Zapata, the martyred leader of the Mexican Revolution, represents a compelling vision of personal virtue, group corruption, and individual responsibility in a fast-moving narrative that seems fresh today.

Like the best of his books, his screen treatment of Emiliano Zapata, the martyred leader of the Mexican Revolution, seems fresh today.

But Viva Zapata! is also the story of a rebel with a divided conscience, conflicted and confused, whose fame threatens his integrity when he succeeds in his effort. The same could be said of John Steinbeck’s life following The Grapes of Wrath. He feared wealth and celebrity, and when they came they cost him. The Grapes of Wrath was an overnight sensation, both as a Pulitzer Prize-winning book and as an Academy Award-winning motion picture. Like the stage version of Of Mice and Men, it was adapted by others with John Steinbeck’s blessing. Throughout the 1940s, he wrote scripts for Hollywood motion pictures with disappointing results. Viva Zapata! he kept for himself, instigating and overseeing the project and researching the Mexican Revolution with the care of a historian before writing the script.

What made Viva Zapata! so good when other motion pictures produced from stories by John Steinbeck—such as Alfred Hitchcock’s 1944 disaster, Lifeboat—were so bad? Control, commitment, and collaboration were key to the quality of the motion picture Steinbeck wrote, financed, and produced with his trusted colleague Kazan.

Steinbeck’s Motion Pictures: From Adaptation to Original

In his introduction to the 1993 Penguin edition of Viva Zapata!—which includes John Steinbeck’s thoughtful essay on the Mexican Revolution—the scholar Robert Morsberger repeated his judgment, first expressed 20 years earlier, that “[a]mong modern American authors, John Steinbeck has had the greatest success in the movies, both with adaptations of his novels to the screen and as a screenwriter himself.” Adaptations of Of Mice and Men (directed by Lewis Milestone), The Grapes of Wrath (directed by John Ford), and East of Eden (directed, as noted, by Kazan) were major motion pictures appealing to a broad audience. They made John Steinbeck a name recognizable to millions who never read his books.

Less well known is the fact that Steinbeck started his own production company in the period between the first and last of these motion picture hits. Three of his best screenplays–The Pearl (also published as a short novel), The Forgotten Village (1941), and Viva Zapata!–are set in Mexico, a country he loved to visit, with a history that fascinated him, particularly the Mexican Revolution that gave him the idea for Viva Zapata! His script about the conflicted rebel leader Emiliano Zapata is considered by some the best work that he produced in any medium between Cannery Row (1945) and East of Eden (1952), novels based on the author’s life growing up in California.

His script about the conflicted rebel leader is considered by some the best work that he produced in any medium between Cannery Row  and East of Eden.

Writing Viva Zapata! reinvigorated John Steinbeck’s interest in collective action and principled martyrdom, the dignity of the poor, and the eternal conflict between the individual and the group—the subjects of his greatest novels of the 1930s and themes addressed in Sea of Cortez, his collaborative account with his friend Ed Ricketts of their 1940 sailing expedition to Mexico. Writing Viva Zapata! also provided an outlet for self-reflection. Like his revolutionary hero, John Steinbeck was a man in crisis and conflict, with others and with himself.

John Steinbeck and Zapata: A Personal Revolution?

Between The Grapes of Wrath and East of Eden, much of John Steinbeck’s energy was devoted to journalism, motion pictures, and plays. While his novels of this period—including, despite its popularity, Cannery Row—irritated critics in New York, he was embraced by Hollywood, where he had friends and, occasionally, lovers. His motion picture projects included some of the biggest names in the industry: John Ford, Hal Roach, Alfred Hitchcock, Elia Kazan, Darryl F. Zanuck, Henry Fonda, Spencer Tracy, Burgess Meredith, James Dean, and Brando. All told, motion pictures based on his writing received 25 Academy Award nominations and produced several winners. Ironically, Steinbeck received an Oscar nomination for best screenwriting for Lifeboat, a motion picture he tried to disown. He was nominated for best original story for another wartime film, A Medal for Benny (1945), and later for writing the story and screenplay of Viva Zapata!

All told, motion pictures based on his writing received 25 Academy Award nominations and produced several winners.

As biographers have noted without elaborating at sufficient length, Steinbeck created his own film production company in the 1940s in partnership with another friend, the colorful war photographer Robert Capa. Like Kazan, Capa was a willing collaborator, and his state-sanctioned trip to the Soviet Union with Steinbeck in 1948 resulted in A Russian Journal, a word-and-picture book. Steinbeck was attracted to common people living far from cities, and part of the book is devoted to daily life in a Ukrainian farming village. The Forgotten Village and Viva Zapata! grew from the same soil: rural folk in damaging conflict with urban culture and corruption. The films also reflect Steinbeck’s interest in documentary motion pictures, particularly the social-protest documentaries—notably The Plow That Broke the Fields (1936)—of Pare Lorentz, another friend and would-be collaborator from John Steinbeck’s most productive period.

Image of John Steinbeck's screen credit for writing Viva Zapata!

Were Motion Pictures a Way to Escape Steinbeck’s Critics?

Although John Steinbeck won a Critics Circle Award for the stage adaptation of Of Mice and Men in 1938, his reputation as a dramatist and novelist plummeted following World War II. The stage version of his short novel The Moon is Down (1942), although popular with wartime audiences, was disliked by New York critics. Burning Bright, his astringent experiment in Expressionist drama, bombed when it was produced in 1951. Pipe Dream, the 1955 Broadway musical by Rodgers and Hammerstein based on his novel Sweet Thursday, had a respectable run but lost money and was quickly forgotten.

As Warren French notes in his book John Steinbeck (1975), the aging author was increasingly compared by influential critics—unfavorably—with the young social-protest writer of The Grapes of Wrath and with stage and motion-picture “has-beens” such as Dalton Trumbo—the blacklisted scriptwriter who, like John Steinbeck, went on writing anyway and continued to make money in exile from Hollywood. But as Jackson J. Benson notes in his 1983 biography, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck distrusted celebrity and disdained critics, considering his primary responsibility to communicate truthfully through his art to common people, not book reviewers.

Steinbeck distrusted celebrity and disdained critics, considering his primary responsibility to communicate truthfully through his art to common people, not book reviewers.

A 1951 article by H. J. Oliver in The Australian Quarterly describes this dichotomy in the context of Steinbeck’s declining critical reputation at the time:

By now John Steinbeck has written over a dozen books in addition to the two or three said to have been rejected before Cup of Gold was accepted in 1929. Yet there is still no general agreement about his literary status: by some he is mentioned in the same breath as Hemingway, Faulkner and Wolfe, as a leading contemporary American novelist (and even dramatist: his stage version of his own novel Of Mice and Men won the Award of the New York Drama Critics Circle for the best American play of 1937-8); but by others he is regarded as merely a second-rate writer of realistic stories which, like most so-called “hardboiled” fiction, are really too sentimental to deserve serious consideration.

Steinbeck’s 1948 novel The Wayward Bus and A Russian Journal, published the following year, were critical failures. Warren French suggests that both efforts are evidence of an author who was out of touch with post-war culture–a John Steinbeck who “no longer had his finger firmly fixed on the frenzied pulse of the paranoid postwar world.” Were these the warning signs of a distracted, disengaged novelist with personal problems? The answer seems to be yes.  But Steinbeck was still writing, and he was quietly moving in a new direction, away from New York. Motion pictures offered an outlet for his vision and a platform for his opinions without exposing him to the ire of critics back east. As a result, the low point of John Steinbeck’s career as a novelist coincided with the high-water mark of his involvement in motion pictures—Viva Zapata!.

Viva Zapata!—Evolution, Embodiment, and Ending

Throughout the 1940s, Steinbeck dug deeply into research on Zapata’s role in the Mexican Revolution, producing a substantial screenplay that one person on the project compared to a doctoral dissertation. After winnowing the script to filmable form, Steinbeck could take pride in his only full-length, original screenplay produced with dialogue—a minor motion-picture masterpiece.

Finally released as a motion picture in 1952, Viva Zapata! was John Steinbeck’s last original piece of writing for the movies, the culmination of his desire to translate his artistic vision to the screen—for once—in his own terms. The Zapata story was legend in the guise of history, a formula familiar to readers and a return to the themes that made Steinbeck’s early fiction famous–the Arthurian anti-romance of Tortilla Flat, the labor violence of In Dubious Battle, the social drama of Of Mice and Men, and the triumphant populism of The Grapes of Wrath.

Viva Zapata! stands out as a motion picture not only because it is “his finest work in the genre,” as Robert Morsberger notes, but because “the script cannot be ignored in tracing the development of Steinbeck’s philosophy of man.” Morseberger is right in suggesting that the screenplay for Viva Zapata! is a milestone in John Steinbeck’s career because it represents the author’s “final statement about the nature of leadership, land reform, and revolution.”  When Steinbeck’s Zapata says, “I don’t want to be the conscience of the world. I don’t want to be the conscience of anybody,” readers are reminded that the insecure author of The Grapes of Wrath never wanted to be the poster child for any cause.

Image of Marlon Brandon as the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata

The conflict between living as an individual and following the dictates of one’s conscience is powerfully articulated in Steinbeck’s Mexican Revolutionary hero. Can a person be fully himself, true to his individuality and selfless at the same time? The crisis created by this dilemma ends in the hero’s martyrdom in Viva Zapata!, just as it had for the young strike organizer in In Dubious Battle. A similar note is also detectable in the execution of Lennie in Of Mice and Men and Casy’s murder in The Grapes of Wrath. Thus Viva Zapata! represents continuum and consistency, as well as change, in John Steinbeck’s protean career as a writer.

Steinbeck’s motion picture portrays the internal conflict at the center of his most memorable fictional protagonists through visual techniques that highlight the commentary implicit in the dialogue he wrote for the film. In some scenes, Kazan presents action taking place simultaneously on two planes, in the foreground and in the background of the shot, drawing the viewer’s eye to the distant movement of armed men on horseback while focusing on figures engaged in intimate conversation at a table. Immediacy is set against scope, individual against group. Brando often enters the frame only to pause in place, considering two courses of action, his strong, static profile surrounded by movement and violence. Zapata’s urge to run away from the action, conflict, and fame resembles—embodies?—Steinbeck’s impulse to escape his critics.

Seen this way, Viva Zapata! is a form of autobiography, less obvious than East of Eden but—because motion pictures show what books only suggest—more powerful for some viewers. Although John Steinbeck continued to write fiction and nonfiction in the decades following Viva Zapata!, the film represents his best effort at film writing, an important departure in a varied career developed as much by Hollywood and motion pictures as by Salinas, Monterey, and literary New York.

Reflections of an American Mossad: A Documentary Drama by Steve Hauk

Image of Steve Hauk, Pacific Grove playwright and John Steinbeck expert

Photo by Nancy Hauk

Was John Steinbeck the Albert Einstein of American fiction? If relativity means interrelatedness, the answer is yes. That’s the view of Steve Hauk, the California writer who lives in the Pacific Grove home once owned by John Steinbeck’s friend Ed Ricketts. In stories and plays set in Pacific Grove, Monterey, and Salinas, Steve captures the spirit of Steinbeck and his California circle. Everything and everybody connects. Past and present coexist, conflicting and coalescing in the lives of characters who knew John Steinbeck personally or love his work with a passion. In the play published here for the first time, Steve dramatizes the final days of a mystery man—a former member of Mossad whose habit of collecting and connecting hidden pieces of the past reveals secrets about Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner, the House of Windsor and the Vatican, and the nightmare of Nazi Germany that are almost as amazing as the man himself. 

Reflections of an American Mossad

Or

The Book Collector’s Dilemma

A play in two acts
by Steve Hauk

Copyright © 2014 by Steve Hauk. All rights reserved.

 

Characters:
MH, mid-seventies, dapper, likeable, charismatic
S, fifteen years younger, casual
MICHAEL, mid-forties, a large man, perhaps a beard
HERMAN and IDA, an attractive late middle-aged couple
A Nurse’s Voice
A Doctor’s Voice
Helen’s Voice
Some `Presences’
STANLEY HUBER WOOD (1894-1949), an American artist
ERIC MOTTRAM ( 1924-1995), a British poet and essayist
LISE MEITNER ( 1878–1968), Austrian-born physicist
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955), theoretical physicist
MARY CRAVEN (1946-2003), writer-actress from an important
American theater family
Mrs. TAKOMINI, a friend of MH’s

Act One
Scene I

The set, in an abstract way, should represent the interior of an
art gallery and upstage a door and windows looking out to a
quiet street on which a car or cars can be seen. The gallery
includes a desk and chair, phones and a computer, a settle (a
kind of arts and crafts couch), a number of paintings, mainly
landscapes. Two figures, S and MH, in separate lights. S, the
younger of the two men, open shirt, sport coat, jeans. MH, mid-
seventies, in silk tie, well-cut sport coat, slacks, shined shoes.
He approaches S and they come under a single light.

MH: Hello, I’m –
S (Cautious): Glad to meet –
MH: Richard – you know Richard at the photography
gallery in Carmel – he said you might be interested in –
S: Well, I’m pretty busy.
MH (Very polite, a subtle hint of hurt): Oh, well, I’m certainly
sorry to have bothered you. My deepest apology. (Staring
off.) I didn’t mean . . .
S: Oh, wait, but . . .
(MH stops, a pause.)
S: I do have a few minutes.
MH: You do?
S (Uncertainly): Yes . . .
MH: You’re sure about that, sir? Because . . .
S: Oh, yes . . .
MH: Well, I don’t want to . . .
S: No, no . . .
MH (Starting away): Because I can certainly understand a
busy man.
S: No, fine.
MH: Richard said – well, I have these paintings in my car
. . . You see my car, don’t you?
(Staring out, walking unsteadily, S following him.)
MH: If you wouldn’t mind following me.
S: The white Cadillac with the blue vinyl top?
MH: You don’t mind, I hope, that I parked in front of your
fine gallery . . .
S: No, not at all. (Looking at car.) A classic?
MH (Smiles): Well, I like it. It’s been faithful. Never let me
down that car. That’s important, don’t you think? (Opens
trunk, bends over with some pain, moves things around, pulling
items out): What I’m looking for under . . . likely under
these sport coats which I’ll move to . . . to the back seat.
(Moves around, opens door, etc.) Always travel with a few
extra.
S (Observing, interested but awkward): Lot of . . . pressed
shirts . . .
MH: Just picked them up at the cleaners around the
corner. Trying them out. Hoping I like their work, we’ll
see. I’m particular.
S: Nice . . . ties.
MH: Silk – can never have enough silk ties.
S: (Picking them up, looking at them, then): And shoes . . .
MH: Italian. Slippery soles, though, not good for me now,
I’m, you know . . . (Regretting saying it, changing subject he
shows sport coat.) Brooks Brothers . . . People that pack like
Brooks Brothers, you know.
S: Pack?
MH: Oh, sorry – carry a gun. Boxy cut, Brooks Brothers,
famous for it . . . in certain quarters that is . . . conceals you
might be packing.
S: Oh.
MH (Smiles): Well, you generally don’t want people to
know something like that, do you?
S: I’d guess not.
MH: Well, makes sense, of course. FBI likes Brooks
Brothers, too, same reason, but if it helps them dress a
little better, well that’s a godsend . . . Anyway, inside stuff.
Don’t worry, I don’t pack. Don’t favor Brooks Brothers
either. This I’m giving to a friend. (Reassuringly.) He
doesn’t pack either. My friend, I mean. I’ll put this . . .
(Loses his balance; S reaches out, helps him.) Thanks, balance a
little . . . off . . . (Embarrassed, he busies himself.) Now let’s
see, I wanted to show you . . . (Moving things around in the
trunk.) . . . There’s a portfolio in here somewhere unless . . .
unless I left it in San Francisco, I hope not, but mentally
I’m not . . . well, forgetful lately . . .
S (Awkward pause, embarrassed for him, looking in trunk,
picking up a book to cover): “The Innocents Abroad” . . .
Mark Twain . . .
MH (Large smile, glad for the change of subject): You like
Twain? You have good taste, sir! First edition, 1870,
American Publishing Company, illustrated. (Pushing it at
him.) Let’s make it a gift.
S: No, I couldn’t.
MH: Please, I’d be honored . . .
S: I just . . .
MH: It’s worn, but lot of character . . . lists at something
over . . . at . . . well, not sure about the numbers anymore
the way the market fluctuates . . . haven’t kept up . . . but
collectible, could pay for dinner . . .
S: Well . . . I am from Missouri, like Twain.
MH: There! You see? . . . Meant to be.
S: Thank you.
MH: Good. You make me very happy, sir. Hannibal?
S: Excuse me?
MH: From Hannibal, Missouri, like Twain?
S: No, St. Louis.
MH: Good Jewish town, St. Louis.
S: Lot of Catholics, too.
MH (More to himself, preoccupied): Good Jewish and
Catholic town. (Turning back to the trunk.) Now, the
portfolio . . . (Moving things.) Where oh where? . . . (Finds
something, looks at it.) Pornography. Not your thing I’m
sure. (Easily, pleasantly, a second look at the item, then putting
it back.) Another time that was. Not even sure how it got
here. I should be ashamed . . . (Smiles.) . . . but I’m not
when you live the life I . . . (Pauses. Then moving things
around, finds something, hands it back to S as he keeps his head
in trunk, looking.) The menu for the Cathedral Oaks dinner
this evening seven sharp. One of my homes, the Cathedral
Oaks Apartments. Tell me if it’s worth the drive to San
Francisco.
S: I’m sorry . . .
MH: I mean, read from the menu if you would, please.
S: Really?
MH: If you would . . . hope not an unreasonable request –
reading . . . fine print and my eyes, you see . . .
S (Looks at him, then reading): “Meat loaf and lentils.”
MH: I don’t think so . . . Next, please.
S: “Poached salmon and asparagus spears with a light
cream sauce.”
MH: Healthy except for the cream sauce, but worth a
hundred mile drive? . . . I don’t know. Read, please.
S (Loosening up a bit): How about “Rib-eye steak, mashed
potatoes and steamed broccoli”?
MH: No shequets, but I’m afraid not. I think I’ll stay in
town, pick up a greasy sandwich . . . On the other hand, if
I go up I can have tea with Mrs. Takomini on the third
floor of the Cathedral Oaks Apartments. Mrs. Takomini
has the whole floor you know. Where’s that portfolio? . . .
Oh, here . . . (Tries to remove something, has trouble.) Could
you give me a hand with this portfolio, please? Sciatica,
you see . . .
(They remove portfolio, S carrying it.)
MH: Serves me right. I didn’t believe my patients when
they told me how much sciatica hurt their balance . . .
accused them of whining. I’m a doctor, you see, but
sometimes not very understanding. Shall we carry this
back into your gallery? Good. Thank you.
(They move back in.)
MH: Thank you. Maybe we can open it now – hold steady,
please. (He unties portfolio ties, pulls out a large, unframed
watercolor, a dark, powerful image of a tree shattered by
lightning, holds it for S to see.) What do you think?
S: Well . . . . strong.
MH: The artist’s name is Stanley Wood. Stanley Huber
Wood.
S: Deceased?
MH (Nodding): Some time ago, as a matter of fact –1940s
something . . . I have a dozen here, many, many more in
storage.
S: Really?
MH: Dozens and dozens and those are just the ones I can
find.
S; They have a . . .
MH: Yes?
S: Georgia O’Keeffe look . . .
MH: Young man, you have the eye! Well, I was told you
are good. As it happens, Mr. Wood and Miss O’Keeffe
were lovers – according to Stanley Wood.
S: How do you know?
MH: I have his diary . . . (Pause, concerned.) Well,
somewhere . . .
S: Somewhere?
MH: Well, in storage in Oakland or here or Los Angeles
. . . Any of a dozen storage units to be more precise.
S: Oh. It could be important.
MH: The diary? Oh, no doubt – very important. But it’s
been a few years since I’ve seen it, the diary that is, and it’s
small as most diaries are, unless we’re talking some of the
larger literary egos like Mailer and Vidal – who never got
along, by the way – and it could be anywhere in the midst
of piles of boxes in any one of three or four cities, but I
have a good memory and might be able to recreate . . .
(Pause.)
S (Eager, after a few moments trying not to show it): And it
said?. . .
MH: Generally? . . . What I said: that they were lovers.
Rather, our Mr. Wood indicates that was the case. We
have only his word for it . . . the man’s word for it, so . . .
need to tread gently. Taos, in the 1930s. He went down
there with Edward Weston the photographer.
S (Excited): Really? Because –
MH: Yes, there’s the look of Weston, too – you are very
good!
(S looks through portfolio, quietly excited.)
S: Some of these are dated 1920s, so he could have –
Stanley Wood could have –
MH: – Yes, influenced O’Keeffe and Weston, my very
thought.
S: It’s possible. If we had the diary. . .
MH: Yes, well, no telling. Perhaps we’ll get lucky. I can’t
guarantee anything. Think we can do something with Mr.
Wood?. . .
S (Pause): All this good?
MH: I’m not the one to judge. I like them for what they are
and what they are is paintings. You see, I am not a visual
person – an art person. Pictures don’t necessarily move
me. I’m a book person, a rare manuscripts person. Letters,
too, I collect those by interesting people. I have storage
units up and down the coast of valuable books
and manuscripts and letters. When you get down to it, I’m
a collector of words. Yes, words are my . . . my passion.
S: Paintings, too, since you do have a few?
MH: Oh, yes, but a sideline. No more than two, three
storage units.
S: Storage units of paintings?
MH: Something like that – speaking volume wise, not in
one place, spread around – here, Oakland, Los Angeles,
maybe some New York. I’m not sure about New York.
New York might have been auctioned off; you know how
they do that with storage units if you don’t keep up the
rent. I don’t think I did . . . keep up with the rent, was off
in South America doing my . . . job . . . or something
. . . when the due notice came up. But I never kept letters
there . . . certain documents . . . hope I didn’t . . . just never
trusted the storage people there . . . so that’s good, but
could have lost a Shakespeare folio, maybe a Picasso
drawing or two, God knows what else. The Shakespeare, I
could cry. The Picassos, no, I wouldn’t cry just be . . . sad.
Anyway, so, if you’re interested and we could come to an
arrangement . . .
S: Yes, I think so.
MH (Smiles warmly): Good. (Starting off.) Well, this has
been a great pleasure for me, meeting you and discovering
we can do business. But if you don’t mind, I would prefer
to work out the details later. I’m a little tired. Can I leave
these with you? You sell them at whatever. You would get
what you usually get, and I would get . . . Well, what
would I get?
S: Seventy percent?
MH (Thinks about it): Seventy . . . yes, I’d accept that.
(He stumbles, S reacting, MH warding him off.)
MH: Thank you, I’m fine. (An attempt at being breezy.)
Except, it is only fair to tell you, I’m not really – I am
dying. I have perhaps seven or eight months left. Don’t
worry, it’s nothing catching, and I’m quite resigned to it.
That’s life. Well, death. I am so happy to have met you. It
has been a pleasure.

Starts out toward his Cadillac as the lights fade.

Act One
Scene II

S. MH enters, holding a can of soda in one hand, a book under
his other arm. He stops, pauses.

MH: If you, my good sir, don’t want me to bring a can of
soda into your beautiful gallery . . .
S (Mildly surprised): Hello . . .
MH: And hello to you. Surprised to see me? The – (Holds
up soda can.)
S: That’s . . . OK.
MH: Thank you. A small addiction. I know this stuff’s not
good for you . . . but health’s not much of an issue with me
anymore, is it? I’ll be careful. Won’t spill Have you sold a
piece?
S: There’s some interest.
MH: Good. I thought there might be. I hope this isn’t a
great inconvenience, but when it happens I would like
cash only.
S (A beat): Yes, of course.
MH: Thank you. It’s really very simple. I have . . . enemies
. . . and anything that could leave a trail . . . (Waits.) But no
reason for concern. You’re safe, nothing would ever
happen to you. (Smiles.) And there may be a time or two
when I will ask you to make out a check to a certain, well,
lady friend of mine. There could be several, in fact – lady
friends, I mean. Women who have been a great comfort to
me in difficult times. I want them to have something.
Would that be okay with you? I hope so. (Shows him a
book.) I brought this for you. “The Sun Also Rises.” Signed
by the man himself – Ernest Hemingway.
S: Oh no, thank you, I couldn’t.
MH: Why not, because you’re a Steinbeck man? I have
been told you are a Steinbeck man.
S: Well . . .
MH: You write on him, don’t you?. . . The threats on his
life because of what he was writing . . . I’ve seen some of
those pieces . . . well done, sir . . . So it’s understandable if
the idea of Hemingway . . .
S: No, that’s not the reason.
MH: Any other reason doesn’t hold water unless you don’t
like Hemingway, and I know some people don’t – that
macho thing they pin on him. You don’t like Hemingway?
S: I like Hemingway.
MH: Well then. I won’t be able to enjoy such treasures
much longer, so why shouldn’t I share them with people
who will appreciate them, such as yourself? You like
words, being a writer, don’t you? Literature? I mean,
Steinbeck.
S: Of course.
MH: Very well then, enjoy the book. Could I sit down?
S: Please.
MH: That sciatica I mentioned before. Steinbeck men tend
to want to know the truth straight out, am I correct?
S (Smiles): I hadn’t necessarily thought of it like that. I
mean, eventually . . .
MH: I think that’s a relatively true statement. Hemingway
men – and women – I think it’s a little different with them,
don’t you, Hemingway being more a stylist and all. But
Steinbeck . . . a writer more from the gut . . . Steinbeck men
– and women – well . . .
S: Yes, I suppose.
MH (Smiles): Take my word for it – I told you I am a book
person. (A beat.) I also told you I was dying . . . didn’t I?
(S nods.)
MH: I thought so . . . (Pulls up sleeve of his jacket and shirt.) I
could understand you not believing that. I had the
poached salmon and asparagus spears, by the way, not
bad . . .
S: I’m sorry?. . .
MH: The dinner at my home, the Cathedral Oaks, in San
Francisco. I had them hold the cream sauce. And I did
have tea with Miss Takomini and I told her about you and
your place here and if you ever need help with your work,
she would be glad to help you . . . financially or any other
way. I can take you up to the city anytime to meet her, just
let me know . . . Anyway – see the marks?
S (Pause): Yes . . .
MH: Marks of my profession, though I’d rather not have
had them done to me. I could go into a description of them
– transfusion hole, needle marks, you know. We even
have a little lifting of some skin for a graft – right here –
before they realized they’d be making so many holes in me
and a little unsullied skin would have some testing value.
(Lowers sleeves.) Anyway, I didn’t want you to think I make
these things up.
S: I really didn’t . . .
MH: Good, I don’t. So I am beginning to tie up loose ends.
And I want to be straight with you as we do business. I am
– not was, but still am, despite my terrible physical
condition – a member of the Mossad. (Pause.) Since I was
twenty-three. (Pause.) You know the Mossad?
S (A pause): I’ve heard some things.
MH: I’m sure you have. (Pause, sounding exotically foreign.)
HaMossad leModi’ in ule Tafkidim Meyuchadim – the
Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations. Over the
years I have assassinated seven Nazis, all but one by
garroting. Don’t ask about the all but one . . . that turns
even my stomach. The others – used a wire. Seven may
not seem much to people anymore, with all these thrillers
and movies seven seems like an hour’s work. Trust me,
seven is a career. Anyway, even just seven you still may
not believe me. I have strong hands, even now. Let me
show you . . . (Puts a hand on his arm, squeezes; friendly,
non-threatening.)
Well? . . .
S (Uncomfortable): Yes, very strong.
MH: I am told you wrestled – I can feel quite a bit of
muscle there, you stay in condition – you would recognize
strength . . . you could take care of yourself I suppose. . .
(Waits a moment, then releases his arm.)
S (A moment to compose himself): How do you know?
MH: Know?
S: That I wrestled.
MH: Mossad, sir. I told you. I knew about you before I
came here, easy enough. (Pauses.) You looked at me . . . a
moment ago . . . when I said . . .
S: Did I? What?
MH: I saw some disapproval? . . . When I mentioned what
I did.
S.: I’m sorry, but . . .
MH: Understandable. I understand. I’m not insensitive.
Killing, after all. Not easy to swallow. But when you go to
a family, when you say to that family that the monster
who murdered their father and mother and raped their
sister all those terrible years ago, when you tell them that
monster is dead, well, the look of relief, the sense that these
people might be able to find some peace, to sleep again, if
just a little . . . well, that is reward enough and wipes out
any guilt, believe me I have no guilt. (Begins to pace, his
balance not good, sounding German.) A death camp
commandant. He’d pull out Jews, men he’d known as a
boy. They thought they’d been saved. (Grabs a chair for
balance.) Oh no. He cut their heads off with the help of his
wife, who was a nurse and could handle a knife and later
became a concert pianist and played Wagner. They did
this to fifteen or twenty, maybe more. He had a photo
taken with each severed head. We tried to get him for
decades, but always he was guarded and we didn’t want
to kill him from a distance. We wanted him to know. And
he was smart as killers often are. But he had a passion for
books as well as heads – like me, like you for paintings.
He turned book pages like this . . . (Pantomimes licking
fingers, turning pages.) Every page that way. Lick, turn. So
we put a book at auction he desired: a rare Kafka. A
Jewish writer, imagine. Our death camp commandant was
high bidder. We made sure of that. He took the book
home and died that night. We had poisoned the pages.
(Licking pantomime again.) A slow-working poison chosen
just for him – so he would know what was happening to
him . . . and by whom. Still, an easy death compared to
what he did to his school mates. (Pauses, opens portfolio.)
Some more paintings for you, an artist named Arthur
Faber, died in a bathtub overlooking the Little Sur River.
A woman in the tub with him. Both naked. She lived.
(Shows a small figurative painting.) What do you think?
S (Pause): Lively.
MH: People – I like people in paintings. Listed in Who
Was Who in American Art, exhibited at the Whitney in the
1940s, maybe the Corcoran too . . . Do you think you can
do anything with these?
S: Yes, I think so.
MH: Good. I’ll leave them with you. A dozen sketches.
Same financial arrangement? . . . Good. (Pause, again
sounding German.) The death camp commandant’s wife,
who cut off the heads, we finally got her, too, though like
him it was difficult. A few years later . . . poison on the
piano keys an hour before she gave a concert. She fell
forward early into Wagner’s piano sonata in B flat. A
stunning finish I can tell you. I was there, front row . . .
Can I borrow twenty dollars for gasoline? . . . I’m a little
low on cash.
S (A beat): Of course.

Lights begin to fade as S reaches for his wallet.

MH: Thank you. Very kind of you, sir. I will have it when
I return next week. One thing, please, that I’ve meant to
mention . . . do not ever look me up on the internet. Do not
do that. It would be very dangerous for me. Perhaps for
both of us. There are people. Good day to you, sir.

MH takes money, starts out as lights fade.

Act One
Scene III

S and an attractive late middle-aged couple.

HERMAN: Tell us about –
IDA: There’s a painting in the back gallery . . .
HERMAN: The Chinese man –
S: Wing Chong – Steinbeck wrote about him . . . character
in “Cannery Row.”
IDA: But a real person?
S (Enthusiastic): Oh, yes – really had a general store on the
Row, knew Steinbeck, Ricketts . . .
HERMAN: Ida likes it.
S: Painted by Ellwood Graham, friend of Steinbeck’s . . .
Steinbeck gave him money, told him to go to Mexico with
his wife Judith Deim, also an artist . . . told them to learn
to paint out loud. This was, oh, 1940, ’41, when he had
money from . . . from “Grapes of Wrath.”
HERMAN: Paint out loud?
S: Steinbeck, you know – figure of speech – to open up,
paint from the soul.
HERMAN: Ah.
S: The way he was, well, could be.
IDA (Looks at her husband, persuasively): I do like it, Herman.
HERMAN (A beat, to S): Price firm?
S: Could move a little . . . for you.
(MH enters, stops.)
MH: Oh, sorry . . . I’ll come back later.
S (Awkward, not convincing): No . . . that’s fine . . .
MH: Well . . .
S: Ida . . . Herman . . .
MH (Quickly, taking Herman’s hand): Maurice. Happy to
meet you, Herman. (Takes Ida’s hand, bows his head, comes
close but does not kiss her hand, smiles while slightly covering
his mouth with his free hand.) So you must be Ida.
(MH holds her hand a moment too long.)
IDA: I suppose I must. (Blushes, then to S:) Well, we’ll think
about it.
HERMAN (To S, taking Ida by the arm): Remember now, see
what you can do – sharpen your pencil.
IDA (To MH, a bit charmed, as they begin to exit): And nice to
meet you, Mr. . . . (Stuck on the name.)
MH (Smiling, again covering his mouth): What did I say?
HERMAN: Maurice, I think.
MH: Good. Then call me Maurice.
HERMAN (A beat, then to S.) We’ll think on the painting.
See that you sharpen your pencil . . . Ida.
(They go. A moment.)
MH (Watching them leave): Ida . . . (Pause.) I meet a woman
like that and . . . (Quick change, deep concern.) Did I hurt a
possible sale?
S: Maurice?
MH: A name. No, really, did I get in the way of a sale?
S: They always think about it.
MH: Jews, yes?
S (Uncomfortable with it): Well . . .
MH: Of course they are.
S (Conceding): Beverly Hills.
MH: Temple Emanuel, I’d guess . . . Burton Way, eighty-eight
hundred block . . . good vintage book stores not far,
they know me . . . When I walked in you looked surprised.
S: It has been a while.
MH: How long?
S: You don’t know?
MH: No. I’ve been . . . well, under. Tell me.
S: A few weeks. I was worried. (A beat, surprised he said
that.)
MH (After a moment): So was I. Did you think I’d died?
S: Of course not.
MH: I appreciate your concern. (Smiles, covering his mouth
with his hand.) Thank you. Reason you haven’t seen me, as
I said, been under. And been muddled more than usual
lately .
S: Oh?. . .
MH: Yes. Been at Stanford. Maybe that’s the same thing.
They’ve figured it out, what I’ve got I mean. It’s called, it’s
the same name as, the same name as . . . as the chancellor
of Germany. A woman, you know. Do you know her
name? I’ve forgotten, on purpose probably.
S: German chancellor, that’s Angela – (Trying to remember.)
Angela . . .
MH: Yes, you have it almost – Angela Merkel! Yes, Angela
Merkel! German chancellor. I don’t have Angela, I have
Merkel! (Giggles, covers his mouth with his hand again, pauses
to regain composure.) You’ll pardon me covering my mouth
. . . I was ordered to Travis Air Force Base. The brass
wanted my opinion on a new jet in development stage. I
cracked my teeth on the controls – an overeager young
pilot preparing to take me up. A sudden stop as we taxied.
My fault also, having not attached my safety belt. My
mouth is numb. The government will fix me. If it makes
sense now with what I was saying. I was saying I have the
German chancellor disease – Merkel Cell Carcinoma. She
doesn’t have it, the chancellor doesn’t. It’s just the same
name. A skin cancer. Hard to detect, grows under the skin,
most people don’t notice it until it’s too late. That includes
me, a doctor, so that’s why I am dying.
S: You’re sure? They said that?
MH: I already knew I was dying, I just didn’t know of
what. Doctors don’t try to fool doctors, even a neurologist
such as me who has not practiced for so long now . . . One
of the doctors who saw me, he’s a friend, we were in a
kibbutz together, shared a canteen once in the Negev
Desert . . . Three, four months at most, that’s what they’re
giving me and then kaput I’m gone. So should I get my
teeth fixed, what do you think?
S (Pause): I’m sorry that you are dying.
MH: Thank you, that is very kind, but I’m a vain man, so I
think I will get my teeth fixed. I hate even I am losing my
hair – that’s how I am. We can still do business. I’m still
Mossad. Nothing changes. I can help you, Mrs. Takomini
will help you, even after I am gone. I have set that up. It is
done, don’t worry. You can contact her when I die.
S: How will I know that?
MH: That I have died? You probably won’t. They won’t
tell you. Let’s say if you haven’t heard from me for a time
then I am probably dead. If you need money . . . perhaps
to go to Taos to research Stanley Wood . . . go to Mrs.
Takomini, Cathedral Oaks Apartments, San Francisco. I
told her all about you and she feels you are a worthy
cause. Have you sold anything? A Stanley Wood or one of
those Arthur Fabers?
S: I have sold two Stanley Woods. People are excited about
them. We will sell more.
MH: Good. I am glad you will profit from our
relationship, that we will both profit. I will give you the
name and address of the woman to write the check to.
S: You don’t want the money?
MH: No. (Takes out wallet, hands him money.) Here is the
money I owe you. The twenty dollars. (Pause.) Tell me –
would you mind very much if I borrow it back? I will
return it in just a few days this time, I promise.

The light fades as S hands him back the money. S seems at
ease with the “transaction.”

Act One
Scene IV

MH waiting by the car. Lights up on it. S enters from the
distance, pulling on a jacket, looking hurried. MH looks very
pale, shaky, trouble standing, bracing himself against the car.
There are some oil paintings on the roof of the car, a manila
envelope. Sounds of traffic.

MH: I apologize for –
S: No, that’s OK.
MH: I do not like bothering people at home, the home is a
sacred place, but there was no time, so I called, I hope I
didn’t bother your wife.
S: It is not a problem.
MH: I think, I do not know, but think, that my time has
come, sooner than I thought it would. You can see . . .
well, I am not good. Pale is not a good color for me. I am
going to the University of California hospital in San
Francisco. It has been arranged. A surgeon, an old friend,
is flying up from Los Angeles. He will be in charge of my
treatment. I have given him instructions if this cannot be
turned around to give me a few decent months . . . well, he
knows what to do, or rather what not to do. He owes me a
favor, so . . .
S: I am so sorry.
MH (Trying to be brisk): Yes, thank you. Because I may not
see you again I wanted to give you these . . . put them into
your care . . . (Begins to lose his balance trying to reach the
paintings, S grabbing him, then helping with the paintings.)
Thank you . . . Oils by our Mr. Stanley Wood . . . I found
them in the storage here in a large box with Italian shoes,
Salvatore Ferragamos if you are interested . . . nine-and-a-halves
. . . (Smiles.) . . . Very painful . . .
S: The diary? Did you find the diary? (Pause.) I’m sorry, I
shouldn’t . . .
MH: No, I understand, don’t worry so much. There isn’t
time for worry. You do it for Stanley Huber Wood. He
should be remembered if he influenced these other great
artists. I understand, one understands these things when
one is dying, but you are a fine writer, you have written
for museums, isn’t that so? – people will believe you if you
write it, if you do it well . . . (Indicates the top of the car and
the manila envelope, grimaces in sudden pain.) Could you,
please?
(S grabs manila envelope, hands it to MH, who immediately
hands it back.)
MH: Thank you, for you. Inside a letter of introduction to
Mrs. Takomini. A formality since I have told her so much
about you she said she feels she knows you and she will
be glad to welcome you. She would be expecting you after
my death. Cathedral Oaks, third floor. She appreciates
company and likes to serve tea. Also (Indicating envelope.)
names of two more women to send money from the sales
of the paintings. The instructions are clear. You see, I have
loved women all my life.
S: But you never married.
MH (Smiles sadly): It would have been very unwise and
unfair, don’t you think, considering my life. There was a
young woman I loved, her father was a record executive, a
very rich man, and he said he would never allow his
daughter to marry someone like me, and he was a Jew, so
it wasn’t that, I was never sure what it was, so I accepted
. . . accommodations from him – a job with his company
and an apartment in New York City that I have only been
in once in fifty years believe me or not and is worth a
king’s ransom but I can’t abide it and I can’t make myself
sell it for some reason I do not understand . . . and this
was all when I was young and before the Mossad, so I
could have married her despite him, and she was willing
and we loved each other as I have said, and it might have
all been different, so someone punished me . . . maybe
God, I think God . . . (His breathing has become labored.)
Now if you will help me to the driver’s seat while I can . . .
S (Helping him): Should you drive?
MH: If I find I can’t . . . there are people to help me. I
simply make a call. (Begins getting into the car.) One more
thing – I have left a provision for you in my will. You have
been good to me so I am good to you. (Suddenly.) Have
you looked me up on the internet?
S: No.
MH (Pauses, smiles): I know. Believe me I will know if you
do – my people would inform me immediately. One
leaves chicken scratches, all over the universe, and they
never go away. Remember that – they never go away.
(Seated inside.) Help me, please, to close the door.
S (Suddenly moved): You are a great man.
MH (Smiles, sadly): I am not leaving you so much money
as that. Goodbye, sir.

Lights fade as S closes the door.

Act One
Scene V

S enters, removing his jacket, sits at his desk, decides to collect
phone messages, pushes button.

MH’S VOICE (Foggy, disoriented): Hello, sir, it’s me. I’m at
the hospital . . . about to go under . . .
NURSE’S VOICE: Doctor – you really shouldn’t . . . we are
about to wheel you in.
MH’S VOICE: Madam, this is very impor . . . (With
difficulty.) . . . important . . . I am speaking to a friend, a
dealer of fine art. (To S.) The nurse, she means well. Sir, if I
die, and the odds seem good . . . look for a box marked . . .
a box marked with a red letter C . . . a red C . . .
(S stands, paces, looks at the telephone as he listens.)
MH’S VOICE: Red C on a cardboard box. Important. If I
don’t make much sense . . . it’s because . . . going under . . .
and this just came to me, you know, like a dream, but I’m
not delusional believe me, this exists . . . the box . . . the
cardboard box contains letters . . . correspondence
between Einstein – Albert Einstein– and Lise Meitner . . .
(S sits at desk, makes notes.)
MH’S VOICE: . . . Important letters, I’m counting on you
. . . they mustn’t be lost or allowed to get into the wrong
hands . . . Lise Meitner you don’t know was a brilliant
nuclear physicist, worked with Otto Hahn . . . deserved
the Nobel Prize as much as Hahn, but a woman, a
beautiful woman, and a Jewess, so . . . so, you can guess a
woman and a Jew how much justice can be found there . . .
(Pause.)
I’m sorry, dizzy . . . When the Nazis come into power,
Einstein comes here, ends up at Princeton as we all know
. . . Lise Meitner we know less . . . she escapes through The
Netherlands trying to reach Sweden and escape death or
worse . . . Hahn a man after my heart in this affair gives
her his mother’s diamond wedding ring to bribe border
guards . . . she makes it to Sweden . . . Stockholm . . .
(Pause, his words becoming “thick.”)
Over the war years, seventy-one letters between Einstein
and Lise Meitner . . . in the box marked with the red letter
C . . . After the war she’s invited to Los Alamos . . . She
does not go. She says, “I will not work on a bomb” . . .You
can imagine the importance of these letters . . . what a
treasure . . .
(Pause.)
I can’t die, sir, knowing they are lost or in the wrong
hands . . . The box would be in storage in maybe Oakland,
perhaps Monterey, at a place called . . . at a storage
franchise called . . . (Pronouncing it “safe-keep’’) Saf-Keep.
(A beat.) There, I’ve told you where I keep things. Tell no
one. (With sleepy humor, close to going under.) Nice people at
Saf-Keep, but they don’t know how to spell. They spell
safe –
NURSE’S VOICE (Stern if defeated): You have five seconds,
doctor.
MH’S VOICE (Sounding more under): Yes, yes, thank you,
nurse, I can do this in five seconds. (To S.) They spell safe
S – A – F. (He giggles.) No E! Well, for literary men like you
and I – and with you a Steinbeck man – what can we say?
(Giggles again.)
MAN’S VOICE (Considerable authority): What’s going on
here?
NURSE’S VOICE: I’ve tried, he won’t get off the telephone.
MAN’S VOICE: Okay, that’s quite enough, my dear friend.
Don’t you understand we’re trying to save your life. Take
the phone from him, nurse – let’s wheel him in.

Phone connection is cut. S stops writing, lights fade.

Act One
Scene VI

S. Sound of car approaching, stopping. A figure – a large man –
gets out of the driver’s seat, opens rear door, MH gets out,
enters with a spring in his step; he carries a manuscript. S looks
at him, dumbfounded. The large man remains in shadow, stands
by the car; it is a taxi cab. The figure remains more or less
motionless, arms crossed or at his side, now and then shifting
his weight from foot to foot.

MH (Smiling): So, you see, I didn’t die after all. Still several
months left it seems. I am like the person who yells fire in
the crowded building. Today’s a gift . . . My lungs were
filled with carbon monoxide – that’s why I looked that
way – from my car, my Cadillac. Leaky exhaust system.
Some doctor I am. My friend the surgeon, he said, “You
should have been dead yesterday. How did you get here?”
“I drove,” I told him. “Really? Then you should have
been arrested yesterday before you killed someone else.”
So they gave me oxygen and . . . (Spreads his arms, giggles,
covers his mouth.) . . . you see, I am still alive. As you can
tell, my teeth have not been fixed . . . the Cadillac, I drove
back with the windows down. I have parked it for a time.
Maybe I will fix it, I don’t know, maybe not, but it could
come in handy, I could give a Nazi a lift, we could go
together . . . This is my driver now – Michael . . .
(He waves, Michael stares a moment, then waves back, a simple
motion, leans against car.)
Michael is being paid for by our taxpayers, so I may never
go back to the Cadillac. Don’t tell him I said so, but I have
a feeling Michael is also being paid by the CIA. Or
perhaps is the CIA. That’s OK. A quiet man, Michael.
Have you sold any Stanley Woods?
S: One.
MH: Good. Hold the money. I need to think who to give it
to. (A beat.) They said I called you, left a message and
spoke of Einstein and Lise Meitner. Is this so?
S: Yes.
MH: I hope I didn’t say too much . . . didn’t bore you. Did
you research her? If you researched her perhaps you saw
her image and fell in love with her. A dark-eyed beauty
with the courage to call out the scientists who capitulated
to the Nazis who turned me into the killer without guilt I
now find myself. I hate them for it. They tore my passions
from me – a very great sin.
S (Pause): You said you had letters between her and
Einstein.
MH: Yes. I don’t know where – believe me, I’ve looked.
Like the Stanley Wood diary. There are so many boxes, so
heavy, and you can see physically I am not able to . . . and
there’s no one I can trust.
S: Could I help?
MH: Come to the storage units? . . . I asked my superiors
about you. They said no. They aren’t sure about you. They
looked into your past. They don’t know where you stand.
They see things in black and white – you are for them or
you are not. Of course you have never made such a stand
either way, why would you, you’re neither a Jew or a
Nazi, are you? (Shrug, smiles.) But it makes you a puzzle –
to them. I’m sorry, that is the way they are. Very careful.
Very . . . regimented? Some day, perhaps. (Hands him
manuscript.) This I did find. I entrust it to you. The only
copy, never published, given to me long ago by the
author, Mary Craven. She called it “A Portrait of Harold
Clurman.” The most important person in American
theater in his time was Mr. Clurman. Mary’s life’s work –
yet unfinished at the end of her life . . . Abuse of drugs
and alcohol . . . She called me one night when I was living
in Los Angeles, from a telephone booth. This was years
ago when they still had telephone booths. I could tell she
was in trouble. I said, “Do you see a cab driver nearby? If
so, call him over.” I had the cab driver deliver her to my
apartment. She slept thirty hours and when she woke she
wanted heroin, not food. It was then I knew it was over
for her. Not the same with Janis Joplin. I told you I took a
job with a record company in return for not marrying the
executive’s daughter? . . . Joplin was one of this record
company’s artists. I cared for her, got her a year or two
more. When she woke up from a drunk, she was very
hungry. Could eat for hours. Not Mary Craven . . . no
interest in food, it means something, that difference. Think
about it. So . . . anyway, Mary gave me the manuscript. I
promised I would try to do something with it. It has
slipped through the cracks with time. I have betrayed her
memory. I give it to you. Do what you can. She was a
woman who should have been loved, like Lise Meitner,
like . . . well, like many in my life. (Pause.)
(A cell phone rings. MH pulls it from his jacket.)
MH: Excuse me. My apologies. Very rude I know.
(Listens.) Hello. I will. (Pause.) Yes. Of course. (Listens,
hangs up.) I am wanted right away. I still live, so I am still
needed. I remain useful, even like this. You do not retire
from the Mossad. Something going on in the . . . (Stops,
thinks whether he should say it, decides he won’t.) . . . Anyway,
they need me . . . (Turns.) So, Michael!

He smiles then leaves, stooped slightly as he walks toward the
car, the cab driver, Michael, carefully opening a car door for
him, as the lights fade.

Act One
Scene VII

S at his desk. Car pulls up, same as before, the cab driver,
Michael, opens the door for MH, then stands by car, watches.
MH enters. S looks at him, they are silent for a few moments.

MH: I’m thinking aloud. (Pause.) Do you understand? Do
you understand what I am saying to you?
S: You are not speaking?
MH (Nods): Just thinking. If you are questioned, well, you
know what I mean. I am trying to protect you and, if you
wish, I won’t . . . won’t think aloud . . . Do you wish me to
not think aloud?
S (Pause, looks toward Michael then back): No.
MH (Pause): Very well, then I will think aloud . . . The call
I received here yesterday . . . I’ve been ordered to
Washington tonight to be briefed by . . . officials . . . then
make a call from Washington to a member of the Israeli
cabinet. Someone I once knew. Something important to
say to him but before that I have been given a joke to tell
him. I hate jokes, I tell them badly. I asked, “Why the
joke?” They said, “Listen, we want him in a good mood
when you tell him what we want you to tell him.” I said,
“The way I tell jokes, he will be in a terrible mood.”
(Pause.) This all makes me very . . . very nervous. I am
thinking aloud you recall . . . Do you?
(S nods. MH pauses to look furtively in the direction of Michael,
then turns back.)

MH (Lowering his voice): “Look,” they said,  “just do as we
ask, tell the joke, we have psychologists on the payroll and
they tell us this is the best approach.” I could try the joke
out on you but I am thinking aloud and no one thinks
aloud a joke . . . You do recall that I am thinking aloud?
S: Yes.
MH: Good. (After another glance toward Michael.) After I tell
him the joke, I am to tell him that the United States
government is well aware Israel is trailing a flotilla of
ships and planning a blockade at Gaza – yes, this they are
preparing to do . . . So you now know something very few
people know . . . Of course the cabinet member I am
calling will already know about the ships, just as the
Mossad knows, but knowing that the United States knows
will not be pleasant for the Israeli cabinet, not at this time.
In a few days, fine, but not now. . . they are doing this on
their own. The United States wants this Israeli I am to tell
a joke, and the cabinet and the prime minister to rethink
what they are doing, because this planned blockade could
possibly lead to . . . the danger exists . . . of bloodshed . . .
worse, of a nuclear confrontation. (Pause, nervously.) That
is the feeling . . . so . . .
(He takes a few unsteady steps.)
S (Pause): I don’t understand – are you with the Mossad or
the CIA?
MH (Turns, stares at him, not pleased): I am just thinking,
remember? . . . I am thinking possible nuclear catastrophe
and you ask me that? What does it matter if I am Mossad
or CIA or both if there is a nuclear catastrophe? How
stupid people can be. Perhaps it is only the assassins and
spies who love humanity. It seems we must kill a few of
you to save the rest of you from yourselves. (Pause, softer.)
You don’t question what a man’s thinking to himself or
aloud. I thought you understood this . . . I thought I made
that clear to you. (Pause.) Or are you trying to trick me
out? (Pause.) I thought you were my friend. I am
disappointed in you.

They look at each other as lights fade.

End of Act One

Act Two
Scene I

S. The cab already pulled up. Michael, the cab driver, helps MH
into the gallery, holding his elbow. MH holds his can of soda,
which is open.

MH: This is Michael.
S: Hello.
MICHAEL (Without expression): Hello. I’ll get the trunk.
(He goes to car trunk, opens, etc.)
MH (Pause.): You saw? The incident in the Mediterranean?
S: It was all over the news.
MH: Ship boarded. Nine dead. We failed . . . I failed. (A
beat, a melancholy smile.) The joke fell flat, flatter now.
S: But no nuclear incident.
MH (Morose): But still possible. I haven’t long to live . . .
but now I feel I live too long.
(Michael enters with box, sets it down quietly, goes back to car,
leans on it, waits.)
MH: (Pause) You’re looking at the box – what do you
think is in it?
S: You’ve found the Einstein and Lise Meitner letters?
MH: No, I haven’t found them, but I think . . .
S: Yes?
MH: I hope maybe Oakland, you know, the storage
company in Oakland with the nice people who can’t spell.
That’s my thought, that perhaps that’s where the box is
with the red C . . . but just a guess.
S (Pause, then indicating the box): The Stanley Wood diary?
MH: No. I haven’t found it. I’m sorry. Odds very slim . . .
one book in all that . . . among all those things . . . more
than eight-hundred cartons. I will show you someday if
my people allow it – allow me to take you to the storage
units, when they are no longer suspicious of you . . . when
you take a stand . . . Did you sell another Stanley Wood?
S: No.
MH (Critically): You are losing your touch . . . like me. Are
you dying also? Should I find another art dealer? So, the
box Michael brought in, look in it please, tell me what you
see.
(S goes through box.)
S: Letters.
MH: I told you I have a fondness for letters.
S: And something else . . .
MH: I should imagine . . .
S (Pulling out, displaying an ice pick.): This? . . .
MH: Oh, a mistake . . . shouldn’t have been in . . . For
assassination I’m afraid. (With a gesture.) The back of the
neck up into the brain . . . really quite merciful and quick,
just a dull pain and that’s it . . . method used quite often, to
this day . . . (Smiles.) Demonstration only, that one, never
used for the real thing . . . to the best of my recollection.
(S pauses, returns it to box, removes several letters.)
S (Studying them): Eric Mottram? . . .
MH: His letters. Found them in storage here just this
morning, thought of you . . . thought they would interest
you, being a literary man.
S: I’m sorry, who is . . . ?
MH: You don’t know? I have been giving you too much
credit as a literary man! Are you sure you’re a Steinbeck
man? Eric Mottram, prominent British poet and academic
of the Beat Era. Brilliant biographer of William Burroughs
–”William Burroughs: the algebra of need.” (Pause.) You
recall, one day I told you I was teaching a class on Kafka at
Kent State during the 1970 killings – that I led my students
off campus, and you gave me one of your looks of doubt I
did such a thing or even taught Kafka? You know the look
. . . Do you recall? . . . (Gesturing.) The top letter – read the
return address and first paragraph . . .
S (A pause, looks at him, then at letter): “15 Vicarage Gate,
London W. 8. . . .”
MH: Mr. Eric Mottram’s home for many years . . . Properly
postmarked? . . . London, air mail?
S: “Par Avion Aerogramme.”
MH: July 1970? . . .
S: Yes.
MH: And what happened the summer of 1970?
S: Kent State.
MH: Yes, read, please.
S: “Hello –  ”
MH (Quickly): Don’t say my name. (Indicates someone or
something might be listening.) Humor me. Now – read,
please.
S: “Congratulations on your latest Kafka piece . . . ”
MH (Interjecting): Kafka, you hear? You may write on
Steinbeck, I can write on Kafka. Read, please.
S: “. . . on your latest Kafka piece. Rather disarming,
though, that the sheer order of a great work should still
have to be stated so clearly . . .”
(S looks at him.)
MH: Continue, please.
S (A beat): “You may imagine you have been in my mind
during the painful and disgraceful events at Kent State.
We heard what you did, saving your class . . . Bravo – one
almost imagines you were trained for this kind of thing
from the reports we were given . . . I hope that you are
well and not abominably shaken. I’ll be in Kent to lecture
this September, in spite of alarms at my safety expressed
here. Everyone here seems to think America is an armed
camp of thugs and National Guardsmen . . . ”
(S looks at him.)
MH: You hear? . . . What I say I did, I did. What I say I will
do, I do . . . remember that. So . . . many such letters from
Professor Mottram in that box. Reflections, observations
.  . . William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles,
Burroughs of course . . . Important . . . if life and thought
and passion are important, if not . . . (Shrugs.) Will you see
that they get to Kent State, please . . . No, better, King’s
College London, which was his academic home. Can you
do this? Can I trust you to do this when I am gone?
S: Yes. Of course.
MH: Good, then I leave them with you. They are a
treasure. I thank you, sir. It is a great relief that these at
least won’t be lost . . . that I can leave something. Now I
am off to San Francisco to see Mrs. Takomini and have
dinner in the Cathedral Oaks dining room. Perhaps
poached salmon again to keep my strength up. Mrs.
Takomini says hello. (He sips from the soda can, then calls,
somewhat depressed.) Michael! . . .

Starts off as lights fade.

Act Two
Scene II

S. The cab driver Michael helps MH into the gallery. MH limps
noticeably. MH indicates the settle. Michael helps him to the
settle. MH is having some trouble breathing. Michael hesitates.
MH signals him that he is OK, that he can leave. Ending with:

MH: Thank you, Michael. I won’t be long. Oh, can you
bring me a can of soda, please?
(Michael leaves.)
S: Can I get you something?
(MH signals no – he has trouble catching his breath – that he
would prefer silence, ends with:)
MH: Thank you . . . (He looks down.)
(A few moments silence. Michael enters with can of soda, opens
it, hands it gently to MH, leaves, leans against cab, opens and
reads a paperback book, glancing over the top of it now and then
at S and MH. MH removes a vial of pills from his sport coat,
takes a pill, drinks, swallows slowly, pauses.)
MH: My third today of the little morphine pills . . . they
are help from God . . . (Pause, looks at him sharply.) Tell me:
what have you done? . . .
S (Pause): What do you mean?
MH: My people have said you may visit the storage – you
must have done something. They have given their
permission. What happened – have you taken a stand?
S: I am not a Jew and I am certainly not a Nazi.
MH (Pauses, studies him, then smiles ironically.): I know you
are not a Jew . . . And the other – of course not. Yet
something changed their minds.
S: Did you ask them?
MH (Irritated, mockingly): Do you think they would tell
me?
S: Perhaps you spoke up for me?
MH: Yes, but I spoke up for you long ago and that didn’t
seem to matter to them. I told them you were a Steinbeck
man – that didn’t carry much weight. Now if I had said
you were a Kafka man . . . or a Gertrude Stein man . . . or a
Golda Meir man . . . that’s probably what I should have
done, when there was still time . . .
S: There is still time.
MH: Is there? To visit the storage? . . . If so, there is very
little and I must use it wisely. I have an appointment to fix
my teeth in two days, the United States government to
pay for everything, but is there any sense to it? Is that a
wise use of my time? Simple vanity? Am I going to be
eating much longer? No . . . Is there any reason to have a
good smile? Why? What’s so funny? . . . Going to the
Oakland storage, even with your help and Michael’s help,
is that a good idea I wonder. (He pauses, waits.)
S (Also a pause): I think it is a good idea.
MH (Small smile): Ah, of course you do, you are thinking
of the Stanley Wood diary . . .
S: And the letters of Einstein and Lise Meitner . . .
MH: Yes . . . perhaps Albert and Lise say something in the
letters that can save the world we can hope . . . Mary
Craven, her book, her manuscript, and Eric Mottram, his
letters, they are safe with you, correct? . . . So maybe you
have enough; we have saved something, you and I. Well, I
had a feeling about you from the beginning. (Pause.) There
is something else if we are to do this, save the storage
from . . . well, I’ll get to that. (Sets aside soda, tries to stand,
holds out his hand.) Will you? I need to stand . . . my sciatica
. . . I don’t want to call Michael . . . he is enjoying his book
. . .
(S crosses, helps him up, stands nearby for a few moments as
MH, grimacing in pain, stabilizes his balance, collects himself.)

MH: (Indicates can of soda): Could you . . . my cola . . .
(S gives him can of soda; MH sips, his balance precarious.)
S: You said there was something else?
MH: You want to go to Oakland with me then, meet the
storage people who can’t spell? Am I correct? . . . we have
permission now . . . Well, there is something that must be
done, but I don’t think you want to hear it. (Pause, a
dismissive gesture.) And now that I think of it, better to
forget the whole thing . . . (Turning in direction toward door
and cab.) Could you call Michael for me, please . . . so I can
go?
S: I want to hear it.
MH (Takes a step away, stops, pauses): Why? You won’t
believe me – you will think it is a trick.
S: I won’t.
MH: You’re sure of that?. . .
S: I am sure.
MH: Well, this I don’t believe but we’ll see . . . (Smiles.)
We’ll test you, shall we? (Turns slowly.) So . . . you know I
do not write or accept checks or use credit cards? And you
know why – just as I do not want to be searched on the
internet.
S: Yes.
MH: I have a friend, Victor, a rare books appraiser in New
York, he pays for the storage in Oakland as a favor to me
for that reason we speak of. There is a lady friend who
pays the bill for storage here. I repay them with cash every
four months, and with gifts of books and jewelry and
whatever I have that they may fancy. Well, something has
happened to Victor. I don’t know what; he can’t be
reached, perhaps he is dead . . . perhaps because of me he
is dead . . . not like him to not fulfill . . . obligations . . .
such a good friend . . . So, a few days ago I receive a call
from the Oakland storage people, the people who can’t
spell “safe,” and they tell me Victor is three months
behind in storage payments and tomorrow at this time
everything will be auctioned off. (He waits.) I have money,
but I can’t get to it, it is not a good time . . . not a safe time
for me . . . (He waits again.)
S: The letters are in that storage unit, the diary . . .
MH: I can’t say for sure . . . only maybe, perhaps . . . no
one can guarantee . . . In any case, I need thirty-six
hundred dollars to pay the back rent fees or everything
will be auctioned off.
S: So you need cash?
MH: It may surprise you, but cash is not a good idea in
this situation. Michael and I could drive to Oakland with
the cash, but what if something happens? An auto
accident, perhaps? . . . And you’ll laugh at this – an
assassin? . . . I can’t think clearly . . . (Shows pills.) . . . so I
am ripe for picking . . . anyone can kill me . . . (Small smile.)
Well, some can. (Serious again.) And I have lost my value
since the Gaza incident . . . I do not think I will be called
on again . . . (Pause, a subtle look toward the cab.) . . . and I
can’t be sure even about Michael . . . (Pause.) Or you, my
friend . . .
S: You think that I? . . .
MH: I wonder why it is now okay for you to visit the
storage when before . . . but I will I trust you. If the storage
is auctioned everything will be gone, scattered among
dozens of used book dealers and bric-a-brac collectors . . .
It pains me to think . . . picked over by vultures . . . gone to
who knows whom . . . maybe the Albert Einstein and Lise
Meitner letters that could save the world, perhaps the . . .
the Stanley Wood diary talking of modern art and Georgia
O’Keeffe that is so important in your world . . . (He waits.)
S (A beat): You’re saying you need my money anyway?
MH: Of course the money is needed. I have said that.
S: A credit card then?
MH (Nods slowly): The ubiquitous credit card, if we wish
to save these words of Lise Meitner and Einstein and
Stanley Wood . . .
S: If they are there.
MH: If they are there and maybe they are not . . . You look
up the telephone number yourself, sir. You call them. Ask
any questions you wish of them. Use my name if you
must; I will cover my ears. You will know where your
money is going. That should assure you . . .
S (A beat): Fine.
MH: You’ll do it?
S: Yes, fine.
MH (A beat): You realize, of course, you must call by
tomorrow morning . . .
S: I’ll call now.
MH: You will call Oakland now? S: Yes.
MH: Thank you, my friend. (He sits gingerly on the settle,
lowering himself with the help of his arms.) I am much
relieved . . . to think of those letters gone . . . well . . .
(S opens a telephone book, turns pages.)
S (To himself): Oakland . . .
MH (Tired but a smile): The Yellow Pages, under storage,
safe misspelled, no E remember . . .
(He watches. S writes down a number. MH’s cell phone rings.)
MH: Pardon me, please. Hello? Yes? (To S.) This is
fortuitous, sir. It is the storage people from Oakland who
can’t spell.
S (Immediately suspicious): Is it?
MH (Nods, small smile): A setup, is that what you think?
Such a suspicious mind you have, like some of my Jewish
friends – like me. Maybe you are Jewish after all. (Then into
phone): Yes . . . yes, we will have the money . . . you . . .
excuse me? . . . (Pause.) I was told tomorrow . . . the
fifteenth . . . (He falters.) Today is tomorrow? (Pause.) Today is
the fifteenth? . . . (Pause, his hand trembles, tries to steady it
with other hand.) I see . . . I know I was warned . . . I know
you are just doing your job . . . Tell me, young lady . . .
was there a box with a red letter C? . . . “Perhaps?” . . .
And if “perhaps” is “yes” – what did it sell for? Not that it
matters . . . I see. So it is all gone, all sold?. . . (Pause.)
Thank you, you have been very gracious . . . Yes, it is
difficult, I know, don’t be so upset, my dear, I don’t blame
you, these things happen . . . (Hangs up, puts phone in
pocket.) Put away your telephone book and credit card – I
have taken so many of these I confused the day. (Indicates
vial of pills.) It is all gone, everything auctioned off, so
many years of collecting. She – the young woman who is
so upset – she seems to recall a box with a red letter C . . .
but there was so much she can’t be sure . . . We can pray if
you believe in prayer . . . pray that the woman in Oakland
is color blind and saw instead a blue letter G . . . (Pause.)
To have let down Lise Meitner this way. . . and Einstein
. . . Well, not so much Einstein, he’s Einstein, and with me
it is always the women anyway . . . So, the box, if it was
the box with the Lise letters, it went for between twenty
and thirty dollars, to the best of her memory, as did most
of the boxes. Nothing over fifty dollars, imagine . . .
(Pause.) So . . .
S: Is there any way that –
MH: No to your question: they do not give out the names
of buyers, there’s a law . . . and who would return them in
any case? . . . they are worth a fortune, any publisher
would snap them up like that . . . I am sorry to have put
you to so much trouble for nothing . . . (Pause, takes a sip
from the can, dully.) I wonder . . .
S: Yes?
MH: What our Mrs. Takomini will say . . .
(He drops his head, then tries to stand, can’t, lifts his head,
holds out his hand for assistance to stand.)
MH: . . . She loves Lise Meitner too.
(S hesitates as lights fade.)

Act Two
Scene III

S is going through a large box on his desk, studying a document.
MH seated as before on the settle, leaning forward onto a cane
he holds with both hands. A soda can on the arm of the settle.
Michael can be seen leaning against the cab, reading a paperback
book. MH looks in Michael’s direction.

MH (After several moments): Michael is not CIA.
S (Distracted by what he is looking at): No?. . .
MH: He is a taxi cab driver. He reads mysteries. That is
what threw me.
S (Looking up, smiles.): Really?
MH: It is not always so sophisticated, this business you
know. (Taps his head.) One can think too much. I thought
he was – they were – trying to throw me off the trail by the
obvious . . . (Gestures toward Michael reading, then:) And of
course I’ve been addled . . . (A sly tone.) So tell me, what do
you think of that document?
S: What is the language?
MH (Looks at him acutely.) Italian. You told me you are part
Italian, that your grandparents on your mother’s side were
from the old country. You can’t read Italian?
S: No.
MH: You didn’t recognize the language?
S (Sheepishly): Well, I didn’t look closely, but now that I . . .
MH: I worry for you, my friend. If you had been raised a
Jew in Cleveland like me you would have been driven
from the temple. It is a letter for your information – on
parchment.
S: You found these in storage here?
MH (Nods): Some weeks ago. I just thought to show them
to you.
S: Nothing on –
MH (Gloomily): Don’t ask, please. No box with a red letter
C . . . so far. No Lise Meitner and Albert Einstein. Probably
gone in Oakland, but still two storage units it could be
found, and maybe Los Angeles so there’s hope . . .
S: But you don’t think Los Angeles?
MH: No. Unlikely. Mostly Hollywood things there and I
would not have knowingly subjected Lise Meitner or
Albert Einstein to Hollywood.
S: But unknowingly?
MH (Nods slowly): Always possible. I forget sometimes,
more lately.
S: And the Stanley Wood diary?
MH: Please, I would tell you . . . So, the letter you are
holding, you recognize it is written on parchment?
S: That would be my guess.
MH: Good, we are progressing. There is some hope for
you if you can recognize sheepskin. You note the date,
you don’t need a foreign language to see it is Seventeenth
Century. I will tell you what you are holding – letters from
a pope – you’ll find his name there – to an archbishop
whose name is also there, Garradini I think. I’ve had them
for years, purchased them in Ohio . . . in Akron I think . . .
from an old American soldier who stole them somewhere
in Italy during World War II and knew I collected words,
even stolen words. And I will be honest with you, I do not
read Italian and never knew what they said, so when I
rediscovered them a few weeks ago I sent several copies
off to an important library in Europe and copies of those
letters to a friend who is an Italian scholar at Harvard. I
received a lightning-bolt reply from the library: they
offered to purchase all of the letters for a very large sum.
Never have I had such a swift response. I said, “What
would you do with them?” They said, “Why do you
care?” I said, “Because they are words and I care about
words, so I must know or I will not sell.” They said, “We
would, at first, sequester them.” Well, that got my interest.
Then I received a call from my professor friend at Harvard
and when I told him what the library said, he replied, “I
am not surprised at their quick response. From the letters I
have translated, it seems the pope was furious with an
archbishop who was profligate and fathered many
children, and two of the children – boys – were the issue
of a woman cousin to the pope, which naturally further
enraged the pope, so he ousted the archbishop, sending
him to a monastery in Bulgaria to spend his remaining
days eating beans and breaking bread with monks.” (He
pauses to take a pill washed down by a sip of soda.) So . . .
S: So that is why the library would sequester the letters?
MH: Hardly. That’s just a ripple as scandals go, religious
or otherwise . . . (Another sip.) . . . especially religious. It
might tickle the interest of some academics or Church
critics, but not much else. No, there’s something far more
intriguing, something that would resound today, and it
concerned what the pope did with the two boys – for my
friend continued, and naturally I paraphrase, my memory
faulty, “From the third letter, it seems the pope arranged
something through the Holy See and the German family
we now know as the House of Windsor, and the boys
were sent to them and became members of that family –
the House of Windsor.” (He pauses, sips.) That’s the reason
the library wants to sequester the letters – (He grins,
reflexively covering his mouth.) Don’t you see? – to hide the
fact there are swarthy people in the House of Windsor.
S (After a pause): Will you sell them the letters?
MH: I can’t say. Being a swarthy person myself I would
trade them in a second for the Lise Meitner letters. Like
every other woman I have loved, I love her more once I
have lost her . . . this part of her . . . her words, her soul . . .
gone to where? . . .
S: You may still have them . . . we can search storage here,
Los Angeles . . .
MH: We could, but if they cannot be found? Then all hope
is gone. That I couldn’t bear. At least now I still have hope
. . . So finally I am a coward and I look slowly, maybe I
find them, maybe I don’t . . . The pope letters, I was going
to give them to you to do as you wish, sell them if you
wish, but then . . . but then . . . I have not wanted to say
this . . . I have put it off . . . (Pause, stares at him, with
intensity.) . . . but you now leave me no choice – you are
not a Steinbeck man. Steinbeck men are straight with you,
but you have not been straight with me. (Pause.) I asked
you to not google me and you have googled me, putting
my life in danger . . . Little chicken scratches all over the
internet, leading to me. Like tracks in the snow. Google
google! Buck buck buck! (Slams one shaky hand into the
other.) Now my enemies have an idea where I am . . . Even
now they are tightening the circle . . . You see, if people
google a person’s name, people in pursuit of that person
tend to think their prey is where the google comes from.
And these people are on the watch, all the time – they
know!. . . (Pauses, his breathing labored.) So you say to
yourself, this old man with the broken teeth and thin hair
is close to death anyway, so what can the difference be?
. . . If I have two seconds to live, I do not want those people
to end it a second sooner. I loathe them! So you see what
you’ve done thank you very much.
S: You believe I did that?
MH: Little chicken scratches! (He tries to stand, fails.) My
people told me! Can never be erased! Even when I am
dead they will point to here! Yes, even when I am dead
these ghouls can track me. The googles came from here or
near here. Who else but you? (Pauses, holds out his hand.)
Help me, please.
(S helps him to stand.)
S: Other people have met you here. They ask about you.
Anyone could have done it.
MH: But I believe it was you . . . You used to make me
happy, not so much anymore. (Pause, resignedly.)
Whatever, whomever, it is done . . . But I am ready if they
come – have you noticed my sport coat? Square cut . . .
Brooks Brothers . . . Do you like the fashion? . . . not
beautiful but useful . . .
(He opens the jacket to reveal a shoulder holster and revolver.)
S (Pause): Could you use that?
MH: Shoot them? Of course . . . Aim it?. . . There was the
day. Now?. . . with shaky hand?. . . (Shrugs, closes jacket.)
Life is full of questions of this question we shall perhaps
soon see . . . Here is another: Can I have forty dollars? I am
meeting a charming woman – Helen – at Costco. Michael
will drive me. I want to buy Helen a Polish dog. One for
Michael, too. You may ask why Costco . . . It is a good
place to relax . . . sample foods . . . and hide when one is
not strong . . .Tell me, sir. Have you sold another Stanley
Wood?
S (Taking money from his wallet): No.
MH (Taking the money from S): An Arthur Faber?
S (Pause): No.
MH: I have someone else with you, another artist? . . . My
memory you know.
S: No.
MH (Sighs): Times are not good . . .

He moves slowly toward cab and Michael who, seeing him,
closes his book and opens a back door of the cab as the lights fade.

Act Two
Scene IV

MH on the settle, S behind his desk, Herman writing a check.
Ida standing nearby. A few moments silence as MH studies his
hands.

HERMAN (Kidding): I.D.?
S (Also): Birth certificate will do.
(Herman hands him check.)
S: Thank you.
HERMAN (Picking up a package that is obviously a wrapped
painting): Ida.
MH: You’re going so soon?
HERMAN (Gesturing): Well, driving back this afternoon, a
long drive . . . (To S.) Watch over our good friend, please.
(MH begins to stand, has trouble, holds out a hand to Ida.)
MH (Looking up, smiling weakly): Ida, please . . .
(She helps him to his feet.)
MH: Thank you.
HERMAN (To MH): You’ll visit us again?
MH: If I can get that way.
IDA (Pats his hand): Please try. We’ll have lunch, the three
of us.
MH (Kisses her hand, looks at her): I look forward to it.
HERMAN (Watches, pleased): Take care, Maurice.
(MH smiles at his use of the name, nods. A moment, then
Herman and Ida leave, Herman carrying the package.)
MH (He watches them go. Pause): I didn’t ask for this life,
you know . . . I wanted a family, a wife like Ida . . .
Herman doesn’t realize how lucky . . . (Pulling himself up
straighter, moves a few steps.) I wanted to be a teacher and
poet like my very good friend Eric Mottram . . . but not an
artist like Stanley Wood because, as I told you, I am not a
visual person except for illustrations in books. I do like
book illustrations did I tell you?. . . I suppose it goes
without saying . . .
(The pill vial, clumsily.)
Pardon me, another pill . . . I am upset. And the morphine
again another addiction . . .
(Pause.)
I grew up in the city of Cleveland I think I told you, social
climbing parents – not only in the Jewish community by
the way. My mother specialized in being beautiful and
perfect. Never a hair out of place. Arranging events to
raise money for the museum, the symphony, the garden
club . . . My father a businessman. A closed man – not
private, closed . . . closed off. I once asked him to come to
my baseball game. I wasn’t more than twelve. He said to
me, a boy, “Never ask anything like that of me again.
Never.” But I was stubborn and wanted his love and if
you tell a child not to do something he will do it . . . so I
did – and the next year ended up in a military preparatory
school far from Cleveland and my friends, the few I had
. . . American Jewish boys did not do well in military
schools then, you know, but I did not back down from
anyone and now I look back it prepared me for my life to
come . . .
(Pause.)
My father had a second house in Cleveland where he did
some of his business. It was downtown in a bad area. A
simple place with bars on the windows. As a boy I never
understood. I only really thought about it years later, after
it had been closed up, after his death, after the Mossad
recruited me. I think I didn’t want to know what he had
been up to . . . I still don’t want to know . . . Some agent I
am.
(Pause.)
Sometimes I look back and think . . . think I was
manipulated to have this life, even as a boy . . . I do not
say brainwashed . . . persuasively “guided” is better . . . My
family’s synagogue . . . Temple Tifereth Israel in Cleveland
. . . is a great temple. Our rabbi Abba Hillel Silver was a
brilliant orator and a passionate Zionist who gave
powerful speeches for the establishment of a homeland.
He backed his words raising millions of dollars for the
new country Israel . . . If he had lived later and not under
God’s holy hand he might have been Mossad so read his
book some day about Jewish survival. He knew what
dangers we face . . . Look him up, there are books on him,
even a website on your treasured internet . . . (Smiles
ironically.) So the Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver him you can
look up.
(Pause.)
I suppose Rabbi Silver was an inspiration to me . . . You
know how these things can happen and you don’t know
they are happening until much later . . . He convinced me I
should visit Israel to see for myself . . . and perhaps serve,
he said, “if a way presented itself to me.”
(Pause.)
So when I was twenty-three I visited Israel – and what do
you know “a way” presented itself to me. Two men greeted
me on the tarmac of the Tel Aviv airport. They said to me,
“Young man, do something for your country, serve your
country.” I said, “I have.” They said, “We don’t mean
America, that is fine what you have done for America, we
know about that, America is our friend, but we mean for
this country – for Israel.”
(Pause.)
I didn’t know what they meant, not really . . . but they
seemed wise and powerful . . . and I was flattered . . . it is
easy to flatter the young of course . . . so I said, “Very well
. . . yes . . . I will . . . ”
(Pause.)
And so I did . . .
(Pause.)
. . . and soon I knew . . .
(He stands slowly with a weary smile, shrugs.)
. . . soon I know what they meant.

He touches S’s desk for a moment, then begins to move away as
the lights fade.

Act Two
Scene V

S enters. A few moments later the cab pulls up. It is twilight.
Michael enters with a cardboard box, sets it on the settle. S
stares at it for a few moments. The light dims slowly throughout
the scene.

S: Letters?
MICHAEL: I don’t know. I was just told to deliver it to
you.
S: Where is he?
MICHAEL: Gone, with a woman named Helen. A friend
he has been seeing.
S: Gone where?
MICHAEL: I don’t know. They went off in an old Cadillac.
I tried to talk him out of it. (Shrugs.) The Cadillac was
smoking, might not go far . . . I warned him, but he knows.
(Pauses, then indicates telephone.) Have you listened? . . . He
left something. He said to listen . . .
(Leaves, cab pulling off. S watches him, waits a moment, then
pushes message button on phone.)
MH’S VOICE: Hello, sir. I am down to a few days.
(Pause.)
You may believe me or not. I know you are of a suspicious
mind.
These days I will spend with Helen . . . Finally in my life I
choose the woman, not the duty . . . I have said goodbye to
Mrs. Takomini, so now I say goodbye to you . . .
(Pause.)
Remember, Mrs. Takomini will help you . . . the Cathedral
Oaks Apartments. Whatever you need . . .
What can you do I hear you saying . . . say a prayer, it
needn’t be long.
(The sound of something dropping.)
HELEN’S VOICE (Slightly old country German): Here . . .
MH’S VOICE: No, let me . . .
HELEN’S VOICE: Don’t be so stubborn . . . Here it is, now
hold tight.
MH’S VOICE (After a moment, breathing irregular): Excuse
me, not doing well . . . dropping my phone . . . A friend
helping . . . Helen . . . remember I told you about Helen
and the Polish dog at Costco? . . . Say something to my
friend, Helen . . .
HELEN’S VOICE: Bless you, sir, bless you.
MH’S VOICE: You see, I tell her about you and she blesses
you that should tell you something . . .
(Pause.)
We will go for a trip in the old white Cadillac with the
blue vinyl roof, Helen and I . . . maybe to Los Angeles to
see the storage there if the car will go that far . . . If not we
will not.
Perhaps we will see Herman . . . and the lovely Ida.
(Pause.)
Michael will deliver a box to you. It is, I am sorry to say,
not the Stanley Wood diary . . . nor the Lise Meitner
letters. It contains things of importance so take care of
them, but not so important as Lise Meitner’s letters.
Someone somewhere has those. We can only hope good
and not evil will be done with them. They are worth much
more than twenty or thirty dollars . . .
So why that should bother me now I don’t know.
(Pause.)
Pardon me, another pill.
(Pause.)
Good luck with the Stanley Woods . . . and my good
friends both gone Mary Craven and Eric Mottram treat
them kindly . . .
(With a touch of humor.)
. . . and the pope letters –the scandal will be great so stand
strong . . .
(Pause.)
Of Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner . . .
(Pause, falters.)
. . . well, Albert can take care of himself . . . even in death
. . .
(Pause.)
As to Lise Meitner, not so easy when you are forgotten . . .
(Pause.)
. . . but maybe she forgives me for not doing more . . .
(A few moments, then the sound of a click.)
S looks over at cardboard box as lights dim to darkness.

End of play

Kite Runner Author Accepts 2014 John Steinbeck Award at San Jose State University

Image of Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini, author of the bestselling 2003 novel The Kite Runner, will receive the John Steinbeck “In the Souls of the People” Award at San Jose State University on September 10, 2014. The 7:30 p.m. event benefits the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies.

An American physician, writer, and humanitarian, Khaled Hosseini was born in Afghanistan. Like The Kite Runner, his 2007 novel A Thousand Splendid Suns is set in part in his native country, which has experienced foreign invasion, civil war, and occupation by violent forces since he was born in its capital, Kabul, in 1965. His father, a moderate Moslem, served as an Afghan diplomat in Iran and later in Paris before seeking political asylum in the United States with his wife, a teacher, and their children.

Khaled Hosseini, the eldest of five, finished high school in San Jose, California, before graduating from Santa Clara University and receiving his M.D. from the University of California, San Diego. He completed his medical residency at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and continued to practice medicine for more than a year after the publication of The Kite Runner. His third novel, And the Mountains Echoed, was published in 2013.

Image of Khaled Hosseini, founder of The Khaled Hosseini Foundation

The Khaled Hosseini Foundation, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, provides direct assistance and economic support to elements of the Afghan population most affected by poverty and violence—refugees, women, and children. A multi-ethnic country with ancient roots stretching from China to South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East, Afghanistan combines beauty, tragedy, and civility that provide the rich texture and colorful context of Khaled Hosseini’s heartfelt fiction.

Cover image of Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner in DVD

The critically acclaimed film version of The Kite Runner was nominated for Academy and Golden Globe awards in 2008 and received a Christopher Award and a Critics Choice Award from the Broadcast Film Critics Association the same year. The name of the John Steinbeck Award comes from Chapter 25 of The Grapes of Wrath, an earlier novel that combined anger and love and also achieved greatness as a movie: “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.”

Image of Nick Taylor, director of the John Steinbeck Center at San Jose State UniversityNick Taylor—author of Father Junipero’s Confessor, teacher of creative writing at San Jose State University, and director of the Steinbeck Studies Center—makes the connection with John Steinbeck’s masterpiece while noting that Khaled Hosseini is the first writer who is primarily a novelist to receive the annual award since it was established in 1996:

Plenty of novelists know how to tell a good story, and plenty try to raise consciousness through their work, but very few do both. Steinbeck used fiction to call attention to the plight of migrant farmworkers, in particular the “Okies” of the 1930s, a group that many Americans had heard of, but did not know much about. Khaled Hosseini’s work does this for people of Afghanistan, a population most Americans know only from the news.

The last winner of the John Steinbeck Award was the filmmaker Ken Burns. Previous awardees include filmmakers Michael Moore and John Sayles; musicians Bruce Springsteen, Jackson Browne, Joan Baez, and John Mellencamp; labor leader and civil rights activist Dolores Huerta; actor Sean Penn; broadcast journalist Rachel Maddow; and three writers—Arthur Miller, Studs Terkel, and Garrison Keillor.

Image of Lisa Vollendorf, dean of San Jose State University's College of Humanities and the ArtsLisa Vollendorf, dean of San Jose State University’s College of Humanities and the Arts, is actively involved with the Steinbeck Studies Center, which is named for Martha Heasley Cox, Professor Emerita of English at San Jose State University. Known for her warm style, energetic pace, and attention to detail, Dean Vollendorf—whose field is Romance languages—recently helped organize an international conference in Portugal. In her comments for this post she put the 2014 John Steinbeck Award event into local and global perspective:

This fall we celebrate Khaled Hosseini, a globally important author who immigrated to the Bay Area at the age of fifteen. Hosseini credits his teacher, Jan Sanchez, with giving him a copy of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, an encounter that inspired him to write fiction in English. Hosseini’s artistic achievements are extraordinary; many credit him with single-handedly humanizing modern Afghanistan for American audiences. His humanitarian work has helped create economic opportunities and meet basic shelter needs for refugees, women, and children in Afghanistan. Khaled Hosseini’s artistic sensibilities and humanitarian work make him a perfect recipient of the Steinbeck Award. We are grateful he accepted and we are all looking forward to the ceremony.

Image from the movie version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath

Khaled Hosseini expressed appreciation for John Steinbeck and enthusiasm about receiving the John Steinbeck Award in a statement to reporters earlier this month:

I am greatly honored to be given an award named after John Steinbeck, not only an icon of American literature but an unrelenting advocate for social justice who so richly gave voice to the poor and disenfranchised. Both as a person and a writer, I count myself among the millions on whose social consciousness Steinbeck has made such an indelible impact.

Tickets to the award ceremony can be purchased in person at the San Jose State University Event Center or online at Eventbrite.

Portrait photo of Khaled Hosseini by Patrick Tehan courtesy of the San Jose Mercury News.

House of Lords Thinking: Why John Steinbeck Is Out in Winston Churchill’s England

Image of Winston Churchill, member of the House of Lords
Winston Churchill, modern Britain’s greatest leader, had an American mother. Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, is believed by elitist Englishmen to be the real author of the works of William Shakespeare. Along with other American writers, John Steinbeck has been banished from United Kingdom schools. These outcomes have a common origin.

Was the Writer of William Shakespeare’s Works an Earl?

A recent review of the Who-Really-Wrote-the-Plays-of-William-Shakespeare theory prevalent in certain heady quarters of the United Kingdom reveals how members of the House of Lords and other English gentry-folk steadfastly refuse to believe that a country bumpkin from Stratford-upon-Avon could have created the poetry or plays attributed to William Shakespeare. From the House-of-Lords point of view, the genius behind William Shakespeare had to have been one of their own, and the Earl of Oxford is their preferred  suspect.  A busy school of William Shakespeare alternative biography has grown up around this notion, a United Kingdom export that has found favor with literary-minded lawyers who like to write daft books proving the case against Shakespeare’s authorship. To my knowledge, neither Winston Churchill nor John Steinbeck bought the idea. But Churchill was half-American and Steinbeck was half-Irish, both problematic from an English House-of-Lords perspective.

From the House-of-Lords point of view, the genius behind William Shakespeare had to have been one of their own, and the Earl of Oxford is their preferred  suspect.

Fortunately, such House-of Lords thinking is largely confined to England, a green and pleasant land, which—if truth be known—would easily fit into the state of Wisconsin or Washington with room to spare.

The Members-Only Club at the United Kingdom’s Center

England’s small size deserves emphasis because at the crowded center of the once-great United Kingdom rests a nice little Club called London, where the people who own England live and work.  For the most part they comprise a genteel alumni society of graduates from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, neither of which William Shakespeare attended.  At college they spend a considerable portion of their time learning the importance of denying one’s roots (if humble), one’s speech (if less-than-upper class), and one’s parentage (if lower than House-of-Lords).  They have, to quote from a National Geographic article about Oxford University, “attended two years of higher education, and completed one year of preparing a lengthy paper about what they’ve studied, in order to become absolute snobs.”  Upon graduation, they assume the confident air that England—like the United Kingdom in its heyday—is theirs by virtue of right and tradition.

For the most part they comprise a genteel alumni society of graduates from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford, neither of which William Shakespeare attended.

Like Winston Churchill, a number of these worthy Club members run successfully for political office. They also manage the nation’s finances, determine her rules and regulations, publish her books and periodicals, run her courts and culture, and decide how folks from the hinterlands like William Shakespeare eat, sleep, read, study, and are entertained. A recent report in London’s Independent newspaper detailed how those in the Club rule English affairs. Like William Shakespeare’s coarser comedies, or like John Steinbeck’s social fiction, little that occupies the attention of the humble multitude matters much to them.  What isn’t in their interest just doesn’t count.

How England Sleeps: Crowding by Design

Take sleeping and driving arrangements in England, for example. Civic planners and urban architects—members of the Club—design housing for the lower orders that, by modern standards, is less than adequate. The schemes for jammed-together homes and flats are transmitted to a well-fed breed of bumpkins called Builders and Developers who, in the interest of higher profits, shrink building plans even further. Cost-cutting measures include the elimination of such non-essentials as spacious bedrooms, fitted bathrooms, insulated windows, proper heating,  sufficient outlets and closets, garages with room for an automobile, and enough private space to entertain more than four guests at a time.

Civic planners and urban architects—members of the Club—design housing for the lower orders that, by modern standards, is less than adequate.

In the 1960s the Club decided that working bumpkins were cluttering the highways and that the number of cars purchased by commoners had to be controlled. Their solution? Restrict allowable garage space to one per five-person house. For new apartments, the B&D people further limited the number: only one garage per seven or eight flats. The result? Urban housing estates now look like car parks, with autos crowded onto sidewalks, lawns (those that are still left), and every inch of available road space. Even the treasured rose bushes and ubiquitous privet hedges that once graced the green heart of the United Kingdom are gone, replaced by gravel, asphalt and stones made from a product called Krazy-Pavement to provide public parking.

It’s easy to imagine what William Shakespeare would make of a “box room” scene of sleep-deprived sibling rivalry on the stage.

The average family’s private arrangements are similarly limited by design: one tiny bathroom fitted with a narrow bathtub but no shower, two modest bedrooms, and a 7′ x 8′ “box room” for the ironing board and the Hoover that doubles as a bedroom for the extra .5 child produced by the median married couple. In its report, the Independent fails to quantify the psychological effects of domestic crowding on English children, but it’s easy to imagine what William Shakespeare would make of a “box room” scene of sleep-deprived sibling rivalry on the stage.

Learning to Speak Like a Member of the House of Lords

The Independent article details the time spent at elocution lessons by upwardly mobile university students born outside the Club. Received Pronunciation—known in the United Kingdom as RP—is a style of pronunciation that, when mastered by ambitious bumpkins for public speech, proves that they were born, if not bred, to lead.  We don’t how William Shakespeare or Edward de Vere sounded when they talked, but the broad vowels and clipped consonants of BBC radio commentators are the norm for today’s ruling class. No one in the United Kingdom believes this sound is God-given, but its acquisition is felt to be a sign of superiority once mastered. No one in the Club really wants to reveal his or her origins in Liverpool, Yorkshire, Lancashire, Bristol, Cornwall, Scots, Wales, Suffolk, Midlands, Newcastle, Birmingham, or London’s East End. As a result, only the standardized speech emanating from London (RP) is heard on the airwaves or in most public speech. Regional stations and local politicians may vary, but the rich linguistic diversity upon which William Shakespeare’s pointed puns depend is disappearing from England’s ear.

We don’t how William Shakespeare or Edward de Vere sounded when they talked, but the broad vowels and clipped consonants of BBC radio commentators are the norm for today’s ruling class.

Winston Churchill was a Club member on his father’s side and overcame personal obstacles to become a forceful public speaker. But two later prime ministers who advanced from Churchill’s Conservative Party to the House of Lords—Margaret Thatcher and John Major—were famous for losing their outsider accents at university to hide traces of their non-Club origins. Thatcher’s parents operated a grocery store in Lincolnshire, far to the north of London; Major’s father puttered around the family’s minor South London residence making  concrete garden gnomes. Commoners by birth, neither was ever totally accepted by the Club, and both were unceremoniously jettisoned after serving the Club’s purpose. Denying that a rustic could have written the plays of William Shakespeare is another way of making the same point.

Closing the Door on American Writers in English Schools

Having swapped Shakespeare for an earl, the Club’s education bureaucracy recently decided to put works by American writers—including John Steinbeck—on the Do-Not-Read list. (The education office order effects England, Wales, and Ireland, but not Scotland or other parts of the United Kingdom.)  So in Great Britain, it’s out with Herman Melville, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Henry and Arthur Miller, and both Sinclairs—Upton and Lewis. Also banished from the classroom—despite their Pulitzer or Nobel status—are Carl Sandburg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Pearl S. Buck—like John Steinbeck, a double awardee.

Also banished from the classroom—despite their Pulitzer or Nobel status—are Carl Sandburg, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, and Pearl S. Buck—like John Steinbeck, a double awardee.

In William Shakespeare’s sceptered isle, where a book selling five thousand copies is considered a best-seller, popular American writers like Edgar Allen Poe, J. D. Salinger, Langston Hughes, Frank L. Baum, and Kurt Vonnegut are now non grata. William Shakespeare’s sonnets are still in because their author (Edward de Vere?) was English, but those by the American poet Emily Dickinson are out.  The literary pub has also closed for such rustic regulars as Jack London—like Steinbeck, a Californian—and Eugene O’Neil—like Steinbeck, half-Irish—as well as my hometown favorite, Thornton Wilder.  It’s even time for T.S. Eliot, the clubbiest of Anglo-American literati since Henry James, to round up his cats and go home to St. Louis.

What Would William Shakespeare Say About the Ban?

We have no way of knowing of course—even if Shakespeare was really the Earl of Oxford—but I have my own ideas about the Club bureaucracy’s decision to drop American writers from the English-school reading list. While living in the rolling green hills of Warwickshire for a long period, I found most Englishmen to be both agreeable and sociable. But a minority viewed anyone not born in England as an intruder—particularly “overpaid, over-sexed, over-here” Americans who had overstayed the temporary welcome extended by Winston Churchill in World War II. Beginning in 1943, the villages of William Shakespeare’s island were stuffed to the scuppers with GIs being readied for the invasion of Normandy. Meanwhile, bombed-out London attracted pro-English American writers, including John Steinbeck, sent by press or government to report on the action and build confidence back home.

Beginning in 1943, the villages of William Shakespeare’s island were stuffed to the scuppers with GIs being readied for the invasion of Normandy.

But that was then. Today human nature—English nature—has returned to the pre-World War II habit of disliking the other guy because he isn’t one of us. Parts of the United Kingdom, such as Scotland, are more populist, but in England this elitist thinking is driven from the top down. Its accumulated force is powerful, supported by heavy taxes paid from the bottom up. At Westminster, the magnificent home of the Houses of Lords and Commons that together make the United Kingdom’s laws, there are 20 members-only bars subsidized by taxpayers—count them: 20—serving healthy pints of ale, generous snifters of brandy and port, and beautiful cut-glass tumblers of Scottish whiskey to insiders. According to the August 10 London Guardian, booze and food for ruling Westminster’s elite cost the British public more that six-million pounds last year, with the House of Lords imbibing the lion’s share of subsidized fare and accounting for an over-sized increase in tax-funded expenditures for lavish clubroom renovations.

The House of Lords: England Reflected in the Bar Mirror

Each of the private bars funded by the people serves one or another social class or political element exclusively. The bars maintained for the House of Lords are closed to members of Commons; those for House of  Commons ministers are off limits to taxpayers.  One bar tolerates visitors, but you have to be invited in by a member of the House of Commons, and it’s called The Strangers. To the House of Lords, all citizens are strangers equally. The House of Lords has 775 members, of whom 774 are white. Two-thirds attended public (in English, private) schools; 660 of them are life peers and 89 are hereditary peers; 635 of them are men, 181 women—a total (816) that doesn’t compute with the official number.

To the House of Lords, all citizens are strangers equally.

All of the private bars funded by taxpayers for the benefit of Westminster politicians allow only one or another class or political element in. Those for the House of Lords are closed to MPs from the House of Commons; those for House of Commons ministers are closed to members of the public who, in fact, pay the bills. There is one bar for visitors, but you have to be invited in by a Member of Parliament, and it’s called The Strangers. To those in the House of Lords, apparently all citizens are strangers, but there you are: that’s England for you—overwhelmingly white, over-educated at exclusive schools, and class-ridden; pampered at the top and neglected at the bottom. As noted, official figures sometimes fail to agree. Poor math or too much free booze? Whatever the cause, the notion that an English earl actually wrote the works of William Shakespeare is wacky enough, but it’s been around for some time. The banishment of American writers—including John Steinbeck—from schools in the United Kingdom is something new, and it’s totally idiotic.  Winston Churchill must be turning in his grave.

Remembering the San Francisco Journalist Who Interviewed John Steinbeck During Travels with Charley

Image of Curt Gentry, the writer who interviewed Steinbeck during Travels with Charley

The death of the San Francisco freelance writer Curt Gentry on July 10 made me especially sad. An old-school journalist, a loyal fan of John Steinbeck, and a fearless writer about subjects close to Steinbeck’s divided heart (J. Edgar Hoover, San Francisco whorehouses), he helped me greatly when I researched Dogging Steinbeck, my true account of Travels with Charley, Steinbeck’s so-called non-fiction book. Curt Gentry was a gentleman, and one of the nicest guys I ever met.

Cover images from Helter Skelter, J. Edgard Hoover, and other books by Curt Gentry

Helter Skelter, J. Edgar Hoover, and Travels with Charley

As noted in his San Francisco Chronicle obit, Gentry made his fame and fortune co-writing Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders, and a devastating biography of John Steinbeck’s dark nemesis, J. Edgar Hoover. Controversy and power never frightened Curt. Among his 13 books were histories of the downing by the USSR of an American spy plane during the Eisenhower Administration, detested by Steinbeck, and of the legendary madams who made San Francisco famous and, for Steinbeck, appealing.

From the mid-1950s until his death, Gentry lived in San Francisco’s trendy/hip North Beach neighborhood. In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip to rediscover an America he said he no longer understood. Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

In late October of 1960, Steinbeck pulled into town with his wife Elaine and their dog Charley on the California leg of the author’s Travels with Charley road trip . . . . Gentry deftly landed an interview with his literary hero and wrote a long piece for the San Francisco Chronicle about what Steinbeck told him.

Fifty years later, Gentry was one of the first people I tracked down when I began my research before I wrote Dogging Steinbeck, a book that reveals how Steinbeck and his editors at Viking padded Travels with Charley with fictions and fibs, then passed it off as a work of nonfiction for half a century. In The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer, Steinbeck’s biographer Jackson Benson mentioned Gentry’s San Francisco Chronicle piece without giving the young journalist’s name.

Thanks to the San Francisco Public Library and the Internet, I found Gentry’s address and phone number and called him from Pittsburgh to ask for his help retracing Travels with Charley for my book. How would the man who exposed Helter Skelter and J. Edgar Hoover but admired Steinbeck react when he heard I was trying to piece together his hero’s actual (as opposed to imagined) Travels with Charley? He replied he’d be happy to meet me for lunch whenever I was in San Francisco. I met with him twice, on two separate trips, during long, memorable lunches at nearly empty North Beach restaurants.

Image of San Francisco Chronicle interview with Steinbeck about Travels with Charley

“Steinbeck Meets the Press” During Travels with Charley

Here, in this “Steinbeck meets the press” excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck, is what Curt Gentry told me about his encounter with John Steinbeck at Steinbeck’s San Francisco hotel during Travels with Charley in 1960:

“Headquartered at the St. Francis, Steinbeck hung out with old friends at some of the city’s top bars and restaurants. The local print media instantly discovered his arrival. Herb Caen, the famed city columnist of the San Francisco Chronicle and ‘the uncrowned prince’ of the city, reported in his daily column on Oct. 28 that his friend John Steinbeck had ‘chugged’ into town ‘from New York’ on the evening of Oct. 26.

“The next day local writer Curt Gentry got a tip from a Chronicle staffer. Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

Doing what any hustling freelancer would do, Gentry called the famous visiting author in his hotel room and begged for an interview. Steinbeck was notoriously publicity shy, but he told Gentry to come to the St. Francis the next morning.

“Gentry, then 29, would go on to write more than a dozen books, including his biggest one with Vincent Bugliosi, Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders. But in 1960 he was a struggling writer, ex-newspaper reporter and bookstore manager. He lived in North Beach, the super-hip Italian neighborhood in downtown San Francisco. He mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“On my research trip in the spring of 2010 Gentry met me at the Washington Square Bar & Grill. In its heyday the dim, aging, wood-lined North Beach landmark was a hangout for writers, politicos, musicians and the city’s in-crowd. But the WashBaG, as Herb Caen had nicknamed it, was almost empty when I was there and in a few months would close forever. Gentry, as well known to the staff as the owner, was easy to spot at the bar, looking dapper in his brown cap. He was the real deal. Helter Skelter made him rich. His 1991 New York Times bestseller J. Edgar Hoover exposed Hoover’s paranoia, his serial abuses of power and how he created the myth of the FBI as invincible and incorruptible.

Gentry, then 29, . . . mixed with jazz musicians, young writers and the Beats, who were headquartered at Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore at the corner of Broadway and Columbus. He knew Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg in passing and novelist/poet Richard Brautigan well, but Gentry was also a serious Steinbeck fan.

“At 79 Gentry was still writing tough books like the one he was working on about the Las Vegas mob. He couldn’t have been nicer, more helpful or more supportive of my Charley-retracing project. Not only did he buy me lunch and ignore our wide political divide. But he told me stories about the 1960 North Beach scene, repeated his favorite Steinbeck gossip and, when I expressed doubt about pulling off a book deal, kindly said, ‘I have faith in you.’

“On top of that moral support, Gentry gave me something else that was priceless – 10 pages of notes he had typed up after his meeting with Steinbeck. An observant record of what Steinbeck was doing and thinking in mid-Charley trip, Gentry’s account depicts a politically partisan 58-year-old at the top of his game, not lonely, not depressed, but full of piss and vinegar.

“When Gentry went to the St. Francis for his 11 a.m. interview, he said, Elaine was still in bed, Charley was in a kennel and John was hung over. ‘It looked like they both had quite a night,’ Gentry told me. A longtime admirer of Steinbeck, Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

Gentry showed up at Steinbeck’s hotel suite with two shopping bags filled with every Steinbeck title he could carry – 21 books.

“He asked Steinbeck to sign the books, which he cheerfully did. Steinbeck had just finished sending Adlai Stevenson a telegram containing some silly anti-Nixon jokes and was sewing together the clasp for his walking stick. Later, after Steinbeck finished a rant about what he called the immorality of Americans, Gentry wrote that ‘he tossed the stick across the room in anger.’

“In his notes, Gentry described Steinbeck as friendly, talkative and animated. They discussed, among many subjects, the presidential election, what was wrong with America, why his friend and neighbor Dag Hammarskjold would make a great president and why Hemingway should write about people not bullfighting. Steinbeck told Gentry he was driving across the country in an attempt to find out what the American people thought about politics. ‘Everywhere he has traveled,’ Gentry wrote in his notes, ‘there is fantastic interest. People are not indifferent, or undecided. They just won’t say.’

“Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’ Gentry also noted that Steinbeck ‘had much to say on Richard Nixon, a great part of it unprintable.’ According to Gentry, Steinbeck was down on Americans for becoming soft and what he called ‘immoral.’ Previewing what he would express in his recently completed but not yet published novel The Winter of Our Discontent, Steinbeck defined immorality as ‘taking out more than you are willing to put back.’

Telling Gentry he had lately been seeing signs of a close Kennedy victory, Steinbeck made fun of Eisenhower and bemoaned the fact that for the previous eight years the Republicans had ‘made it fashionable to be stupid.’

“Steinbeck, wrote Gentry, ‘went on to note emphatically that “a nation or a group or an individual cannot survive immorality. The individual can’t survive being soft, comforted, content. He only survives well when the press is on him. In Rome when they began taking more out than they put in they began to decay.” And then his voice grew louder, his gestures became more emphatic as he added “If a fuse blew out in the Empire State Building today a million people would trample themselves to death . . .  No one can do anything anymore. Who could slaughter and cut up a cow if they had to? No it has to be carefully cut for them, cellophane wrapped. They have lost the ability to be versatile. When either people or animals lose their versatility they become extinct.”‘

“When Gentry asked if he’d ever come back to live in California, Steinbeck said what he would later write in Travels with Charley after visiting his old haunts in Monterey. Steinbeck, according to Gentry, ‘said, sadly, “The truest words ever written were Thomas Wolfe’s ‘You Can’t Go Home Again.’ I wish it weren’t so but when I come back to California to stay it will be in a box.”‘

“Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited. The piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday, Nov. 6, 1960, under the headline ‘John Steinbeck: “America’s King Arthur is Coming.”‘ (In an eerie presaging of Jackie Kennedy’s post-assassination comment that her husband’s presidency had been ‘an American Camelot,’ Steinbeck had said, apparently in reference to JFK, that all countries have legendary King Arthur-types who show up during times of trouble.)

Gentry had another gift for me. He gave me a copy of his original Steinbeck article, before it was edited.

“In his article Gentry described Steinbeck as ‘big in body, mind, and heart’ and ‘full of humor, vitriol, compassion and strong feeling.’ What Gentry had written was printed in the paper verbatim until it came to his attempts to share some of Steinbeck’s stronger political opinions with the Chronicle’s readers. A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“The edits didn’t surprise Gentry. He was very involved in politics in 1960. Like Steinbeck, he was a devout Adlai Stevenson Democrat. During the 1956 presidential year, when he was active in the Young Californians for Stevenson, Gentry was called upon to drive Stevenson around town a couple times. He also was a driver for JFK, who apparently was on his best behavior because Gentry had no sexy story to share.

A 500-word chunk at the end of his article containing all the mean things Steinbeck had said about Nixon and Eisenhower had been simply lopped off. The newspaper, which along with the San Francisco Examiner gave its editorial support to Nixon, wasn’t going to let a famous author trash its Republican hero two days before the election.

“Gentry and Steinbeck kept in touch, exchanging several letters over the next few years. After Steinbeck’s death Gentry wanted to write a book about him and his relationship with his close friend Ed Ricketts, the marine biologist and real-life model for Doc in Cannery Row. Steinbeck’s agent, Elizabeth Otis, liked the idea, Gentry said. But widow Elaine – who controlled Steinbeck’s estate with a firm hand – nixed it. Elaine was, to put it kindly, not Gentry’s favorite Steinbeck. One thing that bothered him, he said, was the closeness of Elaine to Steinbeck’s biographers, Jackson Benson and Jay Parini.

“’They automatically accepted anything she said about his first two wives, Carol or Gwen,’ he said. ‘Everything I’ve read and heard is that Elaine was a real ball-buster and a terrible person, with her ex-husband, Zachary Scott (the movie actor), manipulating her in the background.’ That was a new bit of inside-Steinbeck World gossip/dirt for me. I had no idea if it was true and didn’t care one way or the other, but it sounded like something a guy who wrote an expose of J.E. Hoover might know.

“Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints. That was pretty much all the ‘entertainment’ there was in 2010. But in 1960, the clubs and bars spinning around the intersection of Columbus and Broadway were booking stars of the present and incubating stars of the future. Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Tatum played in clubs. Johnny Mathis got his start in North Beach in the mid ‘50s right after high school.

“The famous North Beach nightclub the Hungry i, by itself, is said to have launched the careers of Lenny Bruce, Mort Sahl, Bill Cosby, Jonathan Winters and Barbra Streisand. The Hungry i was owned by mad impresario Enrico Banducci, who also opened up Enrico’s Coffee House on Broadway. Upstairs was Finochio’s, the famous nightclub featuring a vaudevillian floorshow of female impersonators. Gentry knew and liked Banducci. As soon as he made enough money, Gentry said, he basically lived in Enrico’s sidewalk cafe, which by day was a Herb Caen watering hole and by night a jazzy de facto after-hours club for cops, prostitutes and scuffling writers like him.

“Enrico’s Café, now closed, still existed in 2010. But its glory days, like North Beach’s, were ancient history. The afternoon I went to check it out it was closed for lunch. Basically unchanged since 1960, its outside tables were jammed inside behind big glass doors. The sidewalk patio was showing its age, its concrete cracked and its booths worn at the corners. The three-story building needed a paint job. The top floor where Finochio’s raunchy floorshow once shocked or entertained the straight world looked vacant.

Since Gentry had lived almost exclusively in North Beach since the mid-1950s, he was a good person to ask about how the neighborhood had changed. The biggest difference, he said, was the proliferation of striptease joints.

“Enrico’s Café’s near neighbors in 2010 were strip clubs like the Hungry I Club (‘The Best Girls in Town’) and Big Al’s adult bookstore. But still on the corner of Columbus and Broadway was City Lights Books, which became world famous in 1956 after its owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti published Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Howl.’ The precedent-setting First Amendment test-case that followed ultimately overturned the country’s obscenity laws and allowed banned books like Lady Chatterley’s Lover to be published in the Land of the Free.

“For several days in the fall of 1960 Steinbeck loafed only a few hundred feet from City Lights, yet he had nothing to do with the Beats and their revolutionary scene, and vice versa. Ferlinghetti’s assistant told me Ferlinghetti and Steinbeck – the new literary generation and the old – never met then or any other time. By 2010 City Lights and the Beat Museum – a well-done retail shrine to the lives and works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and other dead Beats – were the only two reasons left for going to what was once one of the coolest, most cutting edge, most culturally important intersections in America.”

Curt Gentry’s Book Blurb for Dogging Steinbeck

“I still believe John Steinbeck is one of America’s greatest writers and I still love Travels with Charley, be it fact or fiction or, as Bill Steigerwald doggedly proved, both. While I disagree with a number of Steigerwald’s conclusions, I don’t dispute his facts. He greatly broadened my understanding of Steinbeck the man and the author, particularly during his last years. And, whether Steigerwald intended it or not, in tracking down the original draft of Travels with Charley he made a significant contribution to Steinbeck’s legacy. Dogging Steinbeck is a good honest book.” – Curt Gentry

Photo of Curt Gentry by Jim Wilson courtesy San Francisco Chronicle. Excerpt from Dogging Steinbeck courtesy Bill Steigerwald.

Summering with Steinbeck, Who Traveled with Charley: Pack The Portable John Steinbeck for Your Trip

Image of John Steinbeck with the dog made famous by Travels with Charley

John Steinbeck’s dog Charles le Chien remains a creature to be envied, having been squired across mid-20th century America by his restless owner, the author who transformed their journey together into Travels with Charley, a lyrical paean rich in social commentary that became a favorite of Steinbeck readers then and now.

As if a 10,000-mile, tree-filled experience weren’t heavenly enough reward, Elaine and John Steinbeck’s big blue Poodle also gained literary immortality, taking a star-turn in the book that records a road trip taken more than 50 years ago and continues to be read and debated. The appellation lucky dog comes to mind, but Charley was ready for his role as the author’s celebrated sidekick. Steinbeck wanted to see America on his own, but needed a companion who listened well. Charley did.

Wartime Portable Steinbeck Published BC (Before Charley)

Cover image of John Steinbeck's The Portable SteinbeckNo fan of John Steinbeck will ever be quite as lucky as Charley-dog. But may I suggest a second-best experience for two-legged vacationers half a century after Travels with Charley became a national bestseller? Take along your own copy of Viking’s The Portable Steinbeck when you travel this summer. Like John Steinbeck’s polite, attentive Poodle, this popular anthology of the author’s work travels well and fits any space.

A compact book designed for stuffing into suitcases and knapsacks, The Portable John Steinbeck remains an unsurpassed introduction for newcomers to John Steinbeck’s writing and a continuing delight for long-time lovers of The Red Pony, East of Eden, and The Grapes of Wrath.  With apologies to a fellow author Steinbeck admired deeply, allow me to call The Portable Steinbeck a moveable feast for readers on the run who favor timeless prose and strong ideas over mindless literary escapism.

The Portable Steinbeck was first published in 1943 at the height of World War II as part of the Viking Portable Series—a literary brainstorm attributed to the writer-broadcaster and soldiers’ champion Alexander Woollcott. As noted at the website AbeBooks.com, “The physical characteristics of the wartime Portables owed more to practicality than anything else. The books were meant to be ‘built like a Jeep: compact, efficient, and marvelously versatile.’”

Idea by Alexander Woollcott, Introduction by Pascal Covici

Woollcott wanted the Portables produced for “the convenience of men who are mostly on the move and must travel light”—soldiers far from home fighting in both theaters of an uncertain war. John Steinbeck shared Woollcott’s belief in the democracy of books and the heroism of young soldiers, some as young as 17. The  editors at Viking echoed Woollcott’s words on the jacket of the original Portable Steinbeck, the second book they published in the series.

The Portables, they explained, were produced to present “a considerable quantity of widely popular reading in a volume so small that it can conveniently be carried and read in places where a book of ordinary format would be a hindrance.” Domestic resources were scarce, and the wartime Portables featured “light paper, small margins, and other production economies” while offering a “well and legibly printed and sturdily bound” book designed as much for durability as for literary quality and content.

Like Travels with Charley, Portable Steinbeck Still Popular

Sturdy indeed. The John Steinbeck anthology has gone through numerous editions since 1943, although this Baby Boomer patriot particularly cherishes a pair of copies published in the 1980s, each with an elegant introduction by Pascal Covici Jr., the literary son of Steinbeck’s loyal editor and friend from the prewar 1930s.

The younger Covici’s introduction to John Steinbeck’s long-lived anthology is a model of to-the-point prose:

The gusto of Homer and of Whitman is indeed here, along with the thoughtfulness of Emerson, that philosophical presence which more and more readers have been finding woven into the sturdiest standards of American literature. A humor sometimes sly and often carelessly robust finds its way onto Steinbeck’s pages too.

Contemporary cynics might anticipate a lawyerly disclaimer at this point: Individual reader’s results may vary. But the book’s content lives up to its billing as an introduction to the variety of works written by John Steinbeck, including in its pages the complete version of The Red Pony and a self-contained segment from Cannery Row, along with excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath and (in later editions) the full text of John Steinbeck’s inspired Nobel Prize acceptance speech.

Portable Steinbeck—Beach Reading for the Eternal Ocean

I can think of no better way to make the inner light shine brighter for modern readers than this brilliant passage from The Grapes of Wrath:

If you who own the things people must have could understand this, you might preserve yourself. If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “We.”

Or read the sunny lines spoken in passionate hope for the future by John Steinbeck in Stockholm in 1962:

And this I believe: That the free exploring mind of the indivdiual human is the most valuable thing in the world. And this I would fight for: the freedom of the mind to take any direction it wishes, undirected. And this I must fight against: any idea, religion or government which limits or destroys the individual. This is I what I am and what I am about. I can understand why a system built on a pattern must try to destroy the free mind, for that is one thing which can by inspection destroy such a system. Surely I can understand this, and I hate it and I will fight against it to preserve the one thing that separates us from the uncreative beasts. If the glory can be killed, we are lost.

The Portable Steinbeck is a summer book for any season, but it’s far from shallow—a beach read, if you will, that plumbs that ocean of eternal wisdom. Covici in his introduction describes the progression and profundity of the excerpts selected:  “a focus of interest more implicit than realized in the very early works, then gradually emerging into sharpened consciousness until it becomes a matter of articulated intention.”

As a child of icy winters spent on the Great Lakes, I embrace summer days. Like John Steinbeck with Charley, I relish them with my favorite fellow-traveler, The Portable Steinbeck, in tow.

Of Mice and Myth: John Steinbeck, Carl Jung, and The Epic of Gilgamesh

Image of statue of the Sumerian epic hero Gilgmesh

John Steinbeck’s short novel Of Mice and Men is a powerful exploration of isolation, disenfranchisement, and problems of social integration in an era of cultural fracture. Divided by class, race, and gender, its characters struggle to assimilate into the small social world of a 1930s California ranch. But Steinbeck’s story possesses a timeless dimension as well—one that bears examination in the context of the psychologist Carl Jung’s concept of the unconscious and of two ancient narratives: the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis story of Jacob and Essau.

Carl Jung and Of Mice and Men as Mythic Pattern

Some critics argue that the appeal of Of Mice and Men derives from its dramatization of universal themes, while others suggest that its continued popularity results from its depiction of the reality of the lives of migrant ranch workers: from the power of realism and relevance. However, there is at least one other way to explain the novel’s resonance with readers of every type. Certain formal elements open Of Mice and Men to a mode of criticism that is interested not in realism or in theme alone, but in the psychological relationship of theme to character, specifically the potent symbolism of the character pair comprised by George and Lennie.

Carl Jung’s psychoanalytical vocabulary and myth criticism offer insights into the significance of Steinbeck’s use of a traditional archetype in describing George and Lennie, suggesting that much of the novel’s power derives from an ancient mythic pattern. Employing the character-pair archetype also found in The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Genesis story of Jacob and Esau, Steinbeck invites us to consider a fundamental principle of personal psychology and myth narrative that is related to Carl Jung’s transcendent function of the unconscious.

Carl Jung’s psychoanalytical vocabulary and myth criticism offer insights into the significance of Steinbeck’s use of a traditional archetype in describing George and Lennie.

In this context, Of Mice and Men can be taken as an example of a specific psychological process, rendered artistically, that seeks to externalize the relationship between the conscious ego and the unconscious, a process Carl Jung describes in his 1916 essay “The Transcendent Function.” In fiction and poetry, as in myth, we see this process take place through narrative and metaphor. The purpose of the process is the achievement of  psychological balance. The tools of the process are mythogenes, the building blocks of myth—images drawn from the collective unconscious that facilitate communication between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. In art, the result of the process is often the creation of a myth narrative.

Along with a number of classic myth narratives that express this transcendent function in the acts of gods and heroes, we can point to works of modern fiction that represent mythic patterns such as that of the “unassimilated” man or woman estranged by nature from society. William Faulkner’s character Benjy in The Sound and the Fury and John Steinbeck’s Lennie in Of Mice and Men are examples, and Lennie shares similarities, both literal and thematic, with the character Chief in Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Bengy-Lennie-Chief character type is a modern iteration of an ancient archetype: the unassimilated outcast or alien who represents unacceptable or unwanted urges of the unconscious mind and who—despite friendships and affections—is unable to integrate successfully into society. He is the shepherd in an age of farming. He is mute in a time of great debate. He is the man without power over his personal history or his place in society.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Genesis, and Steinbeck’s Story

Although Of Mice and Men is enriched by the Jungian archetype of the unassimilated man, the novel’s echo of The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Biblical story of Jacob and Esau is equally consequential. All three narratives depict a character pair in which one individual, the true hero, is bonded by birth and fate to the other, the unassimilated man. The parallels are striking in number, detail, and effect: on multiple levels, George and Lennie are Gilgamesh and Enkidu, Jacob and Esau. Though The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Genesis story, and Of Mice and Men differ in other ways, each focuses on a pair of characters who appear to be cut from the same cloth—the “cloth” of mythology that Carl Jung identified as the material of the collective unconscious.

In Of Mice and Men, Lennie is the character with the closest relationship to the Jungian concept of the unconscious. Driven by animal impulses that he is unable to control, Lennie enters the scene trailing behind George through the brush, “a huge man, shapeless of face, with large pale eyes, with wide, sloping shoulders [. . .] dragging his feet a little, the way a bear drags his paws” (Steinbeck 798). In the opening chapter, his behavior is likened to that of a carp and a horse; going to the river, he “drank with long gulps, snorting into the water like a horse” (Steinbeck 798). Animalistic images and associations are carried through to the climax of the novel in which Lennie’s uncontrolled violence is compared to that of a wild beast. In the end, he returns to the river, “as silently as a creeping bear moves” (Steinbeck 872). Throughout, he is drawn to small creatures—mice, puppies, and rabbits—and he threatens to flee the society of the ranch to live in a cave.

In Of Mice and Men, Lennie is the character with the closest relationship to the Jungian concept of the unconscious.

Enkidu in Gilgamesh and Esau in Genesis share these qualities. Born in the wilderness, Enkidu is described as having a body that is “rough” and “covered with matted hair” (Gilgamesh 63). Just as Lennie is attracted to the solitude of the river, Enkidu “had joy of the water with the herds of wild game” (Gilgamesh 63). Like Lennie, Enkidu is physically strong but mentally unprepared for social survival (Gilgamesh 65); his bond with the animals of the wild is broken when a harlot teaches him the ways of society (65). Arriving in the city, he establishes a bond of brotherhood with Gilgamesh and becomes tasked with the guardianship of the hero, who is the king of Uruk. Genesis describes Esau similarly—a hairy man, a shepherd and hunter at home with wildlife and wilderness (Tanakh 38). When Jacob wants to pass as Esau, his older brother, he puts goat hide on his hands and the neck (Tanakh 41). When Esau complains to Jacob that he is hungry, he demands that Jacob give him some of the “red stuff,” trading his birthright for a bowl of stew (Tanakh 38). Esau’s appetite for “red stuff” is echoed in Lennie’s demands for ketchup in Of Mice and Men (Steinbeck 804). Like Enkidu and Lennie, Esau is undone by a woman (Tanakh 43).

However, in the pairing of an unassimilated man with a heroic companion in Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Of Mice and Men, relationship transcends individual identity. George and Lennie’s mythic significance lies in the nature of their archetypal connection with one another. As characters, they are both complementary and opposite, two halves of a codified relationship and two parts of a single unit. Their antecedents in the older stories—Jacob and Esau, Gilgamesh and Enkidu—are brothers. Steinbeck’s pair wears the same clothes (Steinbeck 797-798) and speaks a single voice (Steinbeck 812, 815), brothers in behavior if not by birth.

In the pairing of an unassimilated man with a heroic companion in Genesis, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Of Mice and Men, relationship transcends individual identity.

Of the two, George is sharper and worldlier, “small and quick, dark of face, with restless eyes and sharp strong features” (Steinbeck 798). Just as Jacob in Genesis conducts business shrewdly (Tanakh 47), George proves capable of negotiating, manipulating, and conducting business with surprising skill (Steinbeck 802, 842). Gilgamesh, too, is savvy, smoothing the way for his quest by manipulating the powers that be in Uruk (Gilgamesh 72). The figures of George, Jacob, and Giglamesh dominate each of the fraternal relationship, not by seniority but through their ability to integrate with society and play by its rules.

While the less adept, unassimilated character remains a social weight on his socially skillful partner, this drag is accepted by both parties. Though “Lennie’s a God damn nuisance most of the time” (Steinbeck 41), George feels the obligation to protect him at any cost. For Jacob, Esau represents a function of reality itself, unavoidable and equally permanent. The fear of Esau felt by Jacob is significant and suggests Carl Jung’s concept of the Shadow self. Likewise, Lennie and Enkidu can be seen in terms of fear and Shadow—Jung’s term for the suppressed but active elements of the unconscious (Jung 146). The tie that binds each pair of characters is deep, dark, and definitive. Viewed in social terms, the unassimilated man in all three stories prevents his more socially adept partner from fully entering into and succeeding in the world. The psychological dynamic that results creates conflict: the socialized character must eliminate his animalistic, amoral, and unassimilated Shadow self to achieve complete social integration.

Viewed in social terms, the unassimilated man in all three stories prevents his more socially adept partner from fully entering into and succeeding in the world.

But the dominant partner has other gifts as well. George, a “smart little guy” (Steinbeck 825), is able to read the signs in a situation and, in a way, prophesy the future. Similarly, both Jacob and Gilgamesh possess the power of divination, interpreting dreams (Gilgamesh 78) and seeing visions—the stairway to heaven—while wrestling with angels (Tanakh 43, 52). Early in Of Mice and Men, George predicts trouble with Curley’s wife (Steinbeck 820), repeatedly voicing his anxiety about the probable outcome: “She’s gonna make a mess. They’s gonna be a bad mess about her” (Steinbeck 835). Though this sounds to us like common sense, no other character in Of Mice and Men “gets it” as George does. The other men in the bunkhouse recognize Curley’s wife as a threat, but none sees or says what seems inevitable.

The final vision described in The Epic of Gilgamesh is particularly remarkable in relation to George’s prophetic power in Of Mice and Men. Lamenting over his dying brother, Gilgamesh cries, “The dream was marvelous but the terror was great; we must treasure the dream whatever the terror; for the dream has shown that misery comes at last to the healthy man . . . .” (Gilgamesh 93). In this way Gilgamesh reads the last dream of Enkidu in which Enkidu is approached by a woman who questions him before awakening “like a man drained of blood who wanders alone in a waste of rushes; like one whom the bailiff has seized and his heart pounds with terror” (Gilgamesh 92-93). In narrative detail and poetic imagery, this passage presages the climactic conclusion of  Of Mice and Men: Lennie flees after being questioned by a woman; terrified, he moves alone through the brush along the Salinas River. His dream of tending rabbits in a happy future with George dies, like Lennie himself—and like Enkidu, who leaves his bereaved partner Gilgamesh in “misery,” muttering about failed dreams.

Of Mice and Men: Social Commentary or Timeless Myth?

Applying Jungian psychoanalytical theory to Of Mice and Men is not the most common critical approach to John Steinbeck’s most widely read novel. The social realism of the text and its topical themes relating to migrant labor, disenfranchisement, and the American Dream typically take precedence over readings that emphasize the work’s psychological elements, raising this question: Can a work of social realism be read as myth or as psychological allegory?

In response, one might argue that the simplicity of setting, character, and dialog—as well as the deliberate use of types and stereotypes (racial, gendered, professional, intellectual, and class-based)—invites both political and psychological/symbolic interpretation. As noted by John Steinbeck’s sometime-friend, the mythologist Joseph Campbell, formalized tropes of character and setting are precisely the stuff of myth (Campbell 12-15). As much as Of Mice and Men may be read as a social-realist text, therefore, it is realistic only insofar as it is interested in the social and political issues of its era. In style and formula it falls neatly into the timeless categories of symbolic and myth literature, forms of narrative in which the application of Carl Jung’s insights are particularly fruitful.

Can a work of social realism be read as myth or as psychological allegory?

The archetypal pair represented by George and Lennie in Of Mice and Men evokes two principles of Jungian psychoanalytic theory: the Shadow and the transcendent function, concepts related to the individual ego’s relationship with the unconscious. As in the example of Jacob and Esau, the unassimilated character is associated with impulsive, irrational, and anti-social behavior. Like Lennie, Esau represents the Jungian Shadow, characterized by “uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions [. . .] like a primitive” and “singularly incapable of moral judgment” (Jung 146). The individual ego both desires and fears communion with this dark element of the unconscious: in the end the ego wants to exorcise the Shadow in an ultimately transcendent function.

If Lennie is the submerged Shadow, George is the ruling ego—aware, socialized and civilized—for whom the threat of the unconscious will exist until the transcendent function is enacted and the Shadow has been purged by being brought to light. According to Carl Jung, this takes place when the two forces, ego and Shadow, achieve a direct and “compensatory relation” to one another (Jung 294). The means may be aesthetic, as the ego attempts to formalize the formless unconscious and the repressed unconscious attempts to “rise” into conscious mind. In this way the transcendent function “manifests itself as a quality of conjoined opposites” (Jung 298); the goal is for the ego to find the “courage to be oneself” (Jung 300), a state of psychological singleness that George accomplishes when he shoots Lennie.

If Lennie is the submerged Shadow, George is the ruling ego—aware, socialized and civilized—for whom the threat of the unconscious will exist until the transcendent function is enacted.

Thus George and Lennie can be interpreted as two parts of one “mind,” symbolically undergoing the necessary process of overcoming a latent set of “wild” impulses that impede full social integration. As long as George keeps Lennie with him, he will never “stay in a cat house all night long” or “set in a pool room and play cards or shoot pool” (Steinbeck 804). Impulsive, ungovernable, and “incapable of moral judgment,” Lennie holds George back from normal social activity. When Candy shows George the dead body of Curley’s wife, George’s social future in the predictable aftermath is his first concern. When Candy asks George if the plan to buy their own ranch is off, George replies by forecasting a future in which he can “stay all night in some lousy cat house. Or I’ll set in some pool room till ever’body goes home” (Steinbeck 868).

But Lennie’s representation of the unconscious goes beyond his relationship with George. Uniquely within the world of Of Mice and Men, Lennie has the ability to bring out the impulsiveness latent in other characters and to engage them in conversations about dreams, resentments, and other emotions. His conversation with Crooks demonstrates this trait, as Crooks breaks with social convention to let Lennie into his room and explore hidden feelings that he suppresses with everyone else (Steinbeck 849). A similar dynamic characterizes Lennie’s conversation with Curley’s wife when she divulges things that she “ain’t told [. . .] to nobody before” and “ought’n to” (Steinbeck 863). Not only is Lennie incapable of self-control; he inspires this incapacity, however briefly, in others as well.

Not only is Lennie incapable of self-control; he inspires this incapacity, however briefly, in others as well.

Duality of mind and will is a common theme in mythology and in modern literature. Steinbeck’s use of the archetypal character pair in Of Mice and Men dramatizes this duality, offering us a deeper understanding of its meaning. As in much American writing of the 1930s, social repression and human disenfranchisement function socially and politically as facts of contemporary life. But they are also internalized. Ironically, the humble American dream of property ownership is aligned in the narrative with irrational, unconscious urges, with the primitive and undeveloped Shadow represented by Lennie. To survive in the hard world of Of Mice and Men, characters like Crooks suppress their desire for friendship in favor of being accepted, abstractly and impersonally, by the group. Characters like Curley’s wife are shunned and isolated because they are associated with desires that the group considers taboo. Lennie, unassimilated and unsocialized, accesses these suppressed elements in others, bringing them briefly into the open until he can be eliminated.

Ironically, the humble American dream of property ownership is aligned in the narrative with irrational, unconscious urges, with the primitive and undeveloped Shadow represented by Lennie.

On a literary and functional level, Steinbeck’s archetypal character pair serve as a vehicle for demonstrating social values and for considering a compelling question: What must be eliminated from consciousness—from the ego personality—in order for an isolated individual to integrate with society? Steinbeck’s answer is painfully clear. As one partner dies, a path opens for the survivor. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, the survivor is made king. In Genesis he becomes the father of nations. Unlike Genesis and Gilgamesh, however, Of Mice and Men constitutes a sad and somber commentary on group values and cultural norms. To survive, a man must put away his innocence and his love for “nice things.” He must be hardhearted and ruthless. He must not dream.

What must be eliminated from consciousness—from the ego personality—in order for an isolated individual to integrate with society? Steinbeck’s answer is painfully clear.

By the time Of Mice and Men ends, George has acknowledged and accepted the severity of this requirement, proving his emotional and psychological fitness for social survival in a difficult environment. His world is heartless, but he can cope: He has eliminated his unacceptable impulses—embodied in Lennie—by slaying them. If we accept the literary critic Alfred Kazin’s axiom that “psychology is always less true than art,” we can hope, at least, that applying Jungian psychoanalytical criticism to Of Mice and Men does not lower Steinbeck’s art to the level of psychology but raises psychology to the level of art. Seen in this light, the power of Steinbeck’s most popular novel can be located, in large part, in the writer’s use of mythic archetypes to explore a psychological truth.

Works Cited

Anonymous. The Epic of Gilgamesh. London: Penguin Books. 1972. Print.

Anonymous. Tanakh. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society. 1985. Print.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 3rd Edition. Novato, California: New World Library. 1949. Print.

Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. New York: Random House. 1929. Print.

Jung, Carl. “The Transcendent Function.” The Portable Jung. New York: Penguin Books. 1976. 273-300. Print.

Kazin, Afred. The Inmost Leaf. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1941. Print.

Kesey, Ken. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. New York: Penguin Books. 1962. Print.

Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men. Steinbeck: Novels and Stories 1932-1937. New York: Literary Classics of the United States. 1994. 795-878. Print.

Winston Churchill Rolls, George Orwell Rejoices: American Authors Banished from Schools in Great Britain

Image of Winston Churchill and George Orwell

Winston Churchill is turning in his grave as George Orwell rejoices. John Steinbeck and other American authors, a group deeply disliked by George Orwell, are about to be dropped from Great Britain’s school curriculum. According to “Syal but no Steinbeck in English GSCE,” a BBC news report, English education bureaucrats expressed dismay at discovering that Of Mice and Men remains the most frequently read novel by British middle-school pupils. Henceforth, it is decreed, only British authors can be “taught-to-test” in government-supported schools throughout England, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

As an ex-English teacher and Anglophile, I have good cause for hating edicts by education bureaucrats, American or British. Here are 10 reasons why I despise this one with a passion:

1. Winston Churchill’s mother was an American, and America came to England’s aid in its darkest hour, inspired by Winston Churchill’s Anglo-American fortitude and friendship.

2. Most of my ancestors were English immigrants. My father, an Army corporal, was stationed in England. After the war my parents named my brother David Winston (for Winston Churchill, not George Orwell’s Winston Smith). I studied a pair of British authors for my PhD degree and consider George Orwell John Steinbeck’s equal as a writer, a compliment to George Orwell.

3. A disaffected Communist who disdained American authors and refused to visit the United States, George Orwell accused John Steinbeck of being a Soviet sympathizer as the Cold War heated up. Such calumny is to be expected from right-wing British authors who came, saw, and ranted—Evelyn Waugh, for example—but it’s unforgivable in a left-wing journalist like George Orwell who never crossed the Atlantic or questioned Steinbeck to find out for himself.

4. John Steinbeck loved and lauded England and had cherished English roots on his Dickson grandmother’s side. He was a war correspondent in London in 1943 and spent much of 1958 in Somerset, the period his widow Elaine said was the happiest time in their marriage.

5. Steinbeck mined British authors from Thomas Mallory to John Milton in his writing. Unlike George Orwell, he declined to criticize other American authors, at least in public, and as far as I know he gave George Orwell a pass when Orwell said nasty things about the United States.

6. Two classics by George Orwell will be spared in the impending purge of American authors, along with British authors considered too old-fashioned, from English schools; both George Orwell books—1984 and Animal Farm—continue to be taught in American schools, along with masterpieces by older British authors from Shakespeare to Dickens.

7. Winston Churchill, a world-class writer, understood the connection between what one reads and how one thinks. So did George Orwell, despite his parochialism. English students who never read Steinbeck will be as uninformed about the Dust Bowl and Depression as young Americans who never read British authors are about, say, Winston Churchill and World War II.

8. F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Arthur Miller are also Out in English, Welsh, and Irish schools. Henceforth, ideas about America will come from Hollywood, hip hop, and other sources unpolluted by American authors. Future generations in Great Britain can be expected to care as little about our cultural heritage as most Americans care about that of England.

9. Instead, Sherlock Holmes and Meera Syal, the British screenwriter of Bollywood Carmen Live, are now In. This switch is the English equivalent of replacing American authors like Steinbeck and Faulkner with Jerry Seinfeld in American public schools.

10. AQA—the educational bureaucracy that wants to banish American authors from British schools—is short for “Assessment and Qualifications Alliance.” The English equivalent of our SAT Educational Testing Service, the organization frames its ponderous pronouncements in the educational equivalent of George Orwell’s Doublespeak, a sin against meaning in every sense of the word.

In my court, that last offense may be the worst. If you can’t express yourself as clearly as Winston Churchill or George Orwell, you probably aren’t thinking straight. Notwithstanding those British authors unmolested by the ACA, the bureaucrats in Manchester aren’t qualified to banish American authors from any country, least of all Winston Churchill’s glorious land.

Readers are encouraged to submit their own reasons to dislike the idea of dropping John Steinbeck and other American authors from schools in Great Britain. Personal or professional, silly or same—feel free to express your opinion in the Comment space below.

John Steinbeck Explains Marco Rubio on Global Warming in Sea of Cortez

Image of Marco Rubio live on ABC

This week the issue of global warming caused embarrassing problems for Marco Rubio as the Republican Senator from Miami rolled out his unofficial entry into the 2016 presidential race. Sorry, but I couldn’t help noticing. Although I am not a Republican and no longer live in Florida, I once owned a home on the Intracoastal Waterway near Palm Beach. During hurricanes, our little beach disappeared along with half of our yard. A two-foot sea rise will leave storm water at the new owner’s front door. Another two feet will make the house, along with thousands of other coastal homes, uninhabitable. So I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming—an odd position for any elected official from South Florida to take. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

I’ve been scratching my head over the confused case Marco Rubio tried to articulate for doing nothing to mitigate global warming. Oops! There goes Miami Beach!

As usual, John Steinbeck helped me think. Because his science book Sea of Cortez is also political and philosophical, I turned to the writer’s “Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research” in the Gulf of California to help me understand politicians like Marco Rubio who (1) deride global warming data, (2) deny that fossil-fuel use is a factor, or (3) insist that it’s too late to turn back, so what the hell! During the course of speeches and interviews in New Hampshire and elsewhere, Marco Rubio denied global warming so often and so recklessly that he became the butt of a Wednesday night Stephen Colbert Show “F*ck It!” segment. What part of Rubio’s brain shut down when he opened his campaign for president? Three observations made by John Steinbeck on the biology of belief and behavior in Chapter 14 of Sea of Cortez provided clarity, but little comfort, about Marco Rubio’s recent statements regarding global warming. Hold the applause. They are nothing to laugh about.

1. Forget simplistic causation. Find provable relationships and prepare for complexity.

Sea of Cortez starts with first principles. From microbes to mankind, variation in nature is a universal principle; causative relationships are complex and outcomes aren’t always predictable. But worldwide climate disruption is a particularly violent variation with measurable relationships and very clear consequences. Denying the significance of man-made carbon emissions in accelerating global warming by implying, as Marco Rubio and others do, that . . . well, shit happens . . . is like letting a drunk drive on the theory that other things can go wrong too, so what’s the big deal? Ignition failure, bad brakes, lousy weather, all contribute to accidents on the road. But driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

Driving while drunk, like loading the atmosphere with pollutants, foolishly increases the severity and consequences of co-contributing factors.

“Sometimes,” John Steinbeck would have agreed, “shit just happens.” But try taking that excuse to court and see what happens there—if you survive the wreck you caused. Steinbeck was a Darwinian who tried not to judge, but deadly driving while drunk has been described by those who are less forgiving as a form of natural self-selection for stupid individuals. Unlike solitary drinking, however, global warming denial is a social disease. Following the dimwitted herd of reality-deniers, like lemmings, over the looming climate cliff? That takes systematic self-delusion and self-styled leaders like Marco Rubio. How do they operate? John Steinbeck had a theory.

2. Reality-denial is a form of adolescent wish-fulfillment. It’s most dangerous in a mob motivated by a self-appointed leader.

Sea of Cortez—co-authored with Steinbeck’s friend and collaborator, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts—develops many of the ideas Steinbeck expressed in the fiction he wrote before 1940. His 1936 novel In Dubious Battle, for example, dramatized the murderous behavior of opposing mobs, behavior worse than anything within the capacity of their individual constituents. Steinbeck’s characterization of politically-driven leaders like Mac, the novel’s Communist labor-organizer, is particularly disturbing, even today. Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Sea of Cortez develops both of these core ideas—the behavior of mob members and the psychology of mob leaders—using biological terms that help explain Marco Rubio and his position on global warming.

Like Steinbeck’s metaphorical ameba in Sea of Cortez, Mac the Communist and Marco Rubio the Republican are political pseudo-pods who detect a mass-wish within their followers and press toward its fulfillment: “We are directly leading this great procession, our leadership ‘causes’ all the rest of the population to move this way, the mass follows the path we blaze.”  But one difference between Mac and Marco Rubio, worth noting, was apparent in this week’s events. Steinbeck’s labor agitator was a tough guy with street smarts who stayed on-message; Marco Rubio manages to look as unfixed and immature as he sounds. In right-wing global warming politics, Rick Perry—no George Bush, and take that as a compliment—seems statesmanlike by comparison. Oops! I meant Department of Education!

3. Extinction is possible. Double extinction.

John Steinbeck read encyclopedically, and in Sea of Cortez he explains what he calls “the criterion of validity in the handling of data” by citing an example from an article on ecology in the 14th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica. It concerns the extermination of a certain species of hawk that preyed on the willow grouse, a game bird in Norway. Failing to note the presence of the parasitical disease coccidiosis in the country’s grouse population, the Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by uninformed human behavior.

The Norwegians systematically eradicated the predator that kept the infection under control by killing off weaker birds affected by the disease. The result was double extinction—hawk and grouse—caused by unintelligent human behavior.

Like Steinbeck, I loved college biology, and the biology department at Wake Forest was very good. My freshman professor, a John Steinbeck-Ed Ricketts type named Ralph Amen, introduced us to an idea that makes Marco Rubio’s anti-global warming demagoguery more than a little scary 50 years later. “Imagine,” Dr. Amen suggested, “that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?” A question in the spirit of Sea of Cortez, which on reflection I’m certain he had read.

‘Imagine,’ Dr. Amen suggested, ‘that the earth is an organism, Gaia, with a cancer—the human species, overpopulating and over-polluting its host. What is the likely outcome of this infection for Gaia and for mankind?’

John Steinbeck, a one-world ecologist even further ahead of his time than my old teacher, would have answered, “things could go either way.” The cancer might kill the host or the host eradicate the cancer. But global warming presents a third possibility—double extinction. Now imagine that Marco Rubio is a soft, squishy symptom of global warming denial, a terminal disease. Then reread John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez as I just did. Reality-based thinking is our first step toward a cure, although under a president like Marco Rubio it could also be our last. Oops! There we go—along with the planet! How in the world did we let that happen?

My Grandpa Was a Beekeeper: Sketch

Image of Alan Brasington's upstate New York ancestorsMy Grandpa was a beekeeper. He kept bees in little white bungalows with a drawer at the bottom for wax combs and honey. Grandpa searched out bees in hollow trees and when he found them, dipped a roll of damp newspaper in gasoline and set it on fire to smoking. He put the paper inside the hollow tree and it confused the bees. They didn’t know what to do. We could see them flying in circles before they lit on Grandpa. They covered his head and arms, like a crawling long-sleeve shirt and hat. His eyes peeped through a mask that kissed his face. For the bees didn’t sting, Grandpa said, “because I’m not afraid.

“And smoke makes bees calm,” he said. “It bee-wilders them.”

They buzzed when Grandpa reached his arm into the hollow tree. His hand came out with the Queen in his palm. She was long and waxy-white. I knew if bees could scream that hive of bees were for they circled Grandpa’s head before they sat on him again. I could hear them crying: “Oh Man, you touched our Queen!”

Grandpa drove their Queen home on the seat of his Plymouth car. When he got there, he set her inside an empty white bee bungalow. And all the other bees flew off Grandpa and settled about their Queen. “Anyplace their Queen is, is home,” said Grandpa. “An’ there’s no place like home.”

“Stop playing around with those damn bees!” Grandma shouted through her kitchen window over the sink. “You hafta be crazy doin’ with those creatures,” she said, but Grandpa, who loved his bees, kept on.

The day after, a bee stung my father on the hand. His eyes swelled way up and so did his throat. He fell down on the ground and couldn’t breathe, hardly, so Grandpa took him to the hospital in the very car that had carried his Queen-of-Bees. The doctors said my father was allergic and gave him a shot of something so he could breathe again. And when he could see, they sent him home.

When they reached Grandpa’s field of bees there was only a black patch where the village used to be, because before my eyes, Grandma burned Bee Town to the ground in a great conflagration.

“My bees!” Grandpa cried as he ran from the car. “You murdered my bees!”

“About time, too,” called Grandma from her window.

A few months later my father was called into the Army. He was stationed in Georgia and got poison ivy. He wrote from the hospital to tell us he was allergic. So the Army sent him to Texas.
He telephoned to say he was in the hospital again. “I’ve come down with poison oak,” he said.

So the Army sent him in Hawaii, where he developed jungle rot. He was in the hospital for a very long time after, and when he was cured, the government sent him home. I thought maybe they’d heard about Grandma’s murder of the bees.

My father and mother went shopping the day after he arrived. And when they came back my father carried a box into the house.

“You can’t look yet,” said my mother. “Close your eyes.”

When she said, “Open now!” my parents were looking at me hard as they pointed to two new shirts on hangers over our living room door.

The one on the right was light green to represent the sea. There were puckering white waves with black fish swimming below them. Men in fishing boats, with creels beside them, held onto fishing poles. One man in a red shirt, his fishing line taut, his pole bent like a hunting bow, was pulling a huge swordfish toward the boat.

The shirt on the left was bright yellow. It had coconut buttons and large white Hawaiian flowers like those you’d see in a Tarzan movie.

“Which one do you like the best?” my father asked. My parents’ eyes looked deep into me as if his question was the most important one any person had ever asked.

It really made no difference to me, but I pointed to the yellow shirt. And from that day my father was allergic to me. Following in the footsteps of his mother, he burned me to the ground every time our eyes met.

“My bees!” my Grandpa cried at Grandma. “You murdered my bees!” And in that very same way my father continually murdered me.