☰
What It Means to Be a Writer: John
Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize Acceptance
Speech About Slicing Through
Humanity’s Confusion
BY M A RI A P O POVA
“Mankind is challenged,
as it has never been
challenged before, to
prove its maturity and its
mastery — not of nature,
but of itself. Therein lies
our hope and our destiny,”
the great marine biologist
and author Rachel Carson addressed the next
generations as she catalyzed the environmental
movement with her courageous exposé of the
industry-driven, government-concealed chemical
assault on nature.
Six months after Carson delivered her poignant
and prescient commencement address, another
writer of rare courage and humanistic idealism
took another stage to deliver a kindred message
that reverberates across the decades with
astounding relevance today.
On December 10, 1962, John Steinbeck (February
27, 1902–December 20, 1968) took the podium at
the Swedish Academy to receive the Nobel Prize in
Literature “for his realistic and imaginative
writings, combining as they do sympathetic
humour and keen social perception.” Two decades
after he contemplated the contradictions of
human nature and our grounds for lucid hope, the
sixty-year-old Steinbeck proceeded to deliver a
stunning, sobering, yet resolutely optimistic
acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Writers
on Writing (public library) — the collection that
gave us Bertrand Russell on the four desires
driving all human behavior, Pearl S. Buck on the
nature of creativity, and Gabriel García Márquez’s
vision of a world in which “no one will be able to
decide for others how they die, where love will
prove true and happiness be possible.”
John Steinbeck
After some endearing and strangely comforting
opening remarks, indicating that even he — one of
the world’s most celebrated minds, standing at the
podium to receive the Nobel Prize — is bedeviled
by impostor syndrome, Steinbeck considers the
abiding role of storytelling in human life:
Literature was not promulgated by a pale
and emasculated critical priesthood
singing their litanies in empty churches —
nor is it a game for the cloistered elect,
the tin-horn mendicants of low-calorie
despair.
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out
of human need for it and it has not
changed except to become more needed.
The skalds, the bards, the writers are not
separate and exclusive. From the
beginning, their functions, their duties,
their responsibilities have been decreed
by our species.
In a sentiment Iris Murdoch would echo a decade
later in her insistence that throughout history “the
artist has tended to be a revolutionary or at least
an instrument of change in so far as he has tended
to be a sensitive and independent thinker with a
job that is a little outside established society,”
Steinbeck bows to the lineage of great truth-tellers
but raises the artist’s duty to a higher plane of
humanism, tasked with more than merely
exposing fault:
Humanity has been passing through a
gray and desolate time of confusion. My
great predecessor, William Faulkner,
speaking here, referred to it as a tragedy
of universal physical fear, so long
sustained that there were no longer
problems of the spirit, so that only the
human heart in conflict with itself
seemed worth writing about. Faulkner,
more than most men, was aware of
human strength as well as of human
weakness. He knew that the
understanding and the resolution of fear
are a large part of the writer’s reason for
being.
This is not new. The ancient commission
of the writer has not changed. He is
charged with exposing our many grievous
faults and failures, with dredging up to
the light our dark and dangerous dreams
for the purpose of improvement.
Furthermore, the writer is delegated to
declare and to celebrate man’s proven
capacity for greatness of heart and spirit
— for gallantry in defeat, for courage,
compassion and love. In the endless war
against weakness and despair, these are
the bright rally flags of hope and of
emulation. I hold that a writer who does
not passionately believe in the
perfectibility of man has no dedication
nor any membership in literature.
Art by Shaun Tan from A Velocity of Being: Letters
to a Young Reader.
Having witnessed the devastation of the atomic
bomb — a gruesome turning point in our
civilization’s balancing act of technological ascent
and moral grounding — and speaking at the peak
of the Cold War, Steinbeck offers a sentiment that
has only swelled with poignancy in the half-
century since, as we have continually let our
technological capacities run unconsidered,
outpacing our ethics:
The present universal fear has been the
result of a forward surge in our
knowledge and manipulation of certain
dangerous factors in the physical world.
It is true that other phases of
understanding have not yet caught up
with this great step, but there is no
reason to presume that they cannot or
will not draw abreast. Indeed, it is part of
the writer’s responsibility to make sure
that they do. With humanity’s long, proud
history of standing firm against all of its
natural enemies, sometimes in the face
of almost certain defeat and extinction,
we would be cowardly and stupid to leave
the field on the eve of our greatest
potential victory.
With an eye to the dark backstory of how the Nobel
Prize was founded, Steinbeck reflects:
Understandably, I have been reading the
life of Alfred Nobel; a solitary man, the
books say, a thoughtful man. He
perfected the release of explosive forces
capable of creative good or of destructive
evil, but lacking choice, ungoverned by
conscience or judgement.
Nobel saw some of the cruel and bloody
misuses of his inventions. He may have
even foreseen the end result of all his
probing — access to ultimate violence, to
final destruction. Some say that he
became cynical, but I do not believe this.
I think he strove to invent a control — a
safety valve. I think he found it finally
only in the human mind and the human
spirit.
To me, his thinking is clearly indicated in
the categories of these awards. They are
offered for increased and continuing
knowledge of man and of his world — for
understanding and communication,
which are the functions of literature. And
they are offered for demonstrations of
the capacity for peace — the culmination
of all the others.
Echoing Carson, Steinbeck considers the choice
before humanity half a century after Alfred Nobel’s
death — a choice that remains the same, though
posed with exponentially greater urgency, yet
another half a century hence:
The door of nature was unlocked and we
were offered the dreadful burden of
choice. We have usurped many of the
powers we once ascribed to God. Fearful
and unprepared, we have assumed
lordship over the life and death of the
whole world of all living things. The
danger and the glory and the choice rest
finally in man. The test of his
perfectibility is at hand.
Having taken God-like power, we must
seek in ourselves for the responsibility
and the wisdom we once prayed some
deity might have. Man himself has
become our greatest hazard and our only
hope. So that today, saint John the
Apostle may well be paraphrased: In the
end is the Word, and the Word is Man,
and the Word is with Man.
John Steinbeck gives Nobel…
Couple with the visionary scientist and poet Lewis
Thomas, writing another two decades later, on the
wonders of possibility of this very choice — a
choice that is still before us, and it is not too late
for us to make wisely — then revisit Steinbeck on
kindness, the discipline of writing, the crucible of
creativity, and his timeless advice on falling in
love.
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