The Short Reign of Pippin IV

As a symbol, John Steinbeck considered Porozygaska—a piglet-pegasus, plump and cheerful, thoroughly earthy, to the very bones—yet, every now and then, it glances up at the sky and sometimes even dares to stroll among angels and larks.
“To the stars on piglets’ wings,” “a clumsy soul, yet always striving to take flight,” “wing span isn’t much, but intentions—intentions…” That is how Steinbeck spoke about himself. Critics in his lifetime wrote about him roughly the same way—and sometimes they did not hold back even with outright insults. A contemporary of Steinbeck, a well-selling and respected novelist among American citizens of the time, James Gould Cozzens, exclaimed in rage: “After ten Steinbeck pages I can’t stop myself from wanting to vomit.”
Steinbeck’s muse really does resemble Porozygaska. In the heights it feels uneasy, cold, and frightening; it scrambles under the clouds, holding on there awkwardly, bustling, flapping its wings with all its might. And having served its allotted term “up there,” it happily buries itself in fallen leaves, in the brown fertile Salinas dust, in puddles of the empty lots behind canneries, and in the soft mud of the little vegetable plots of cheerful, lazy paisanos. Porozygaska is good there—firm, earthy, confident—and from there its sharp, quick little eyes attentively notice everything around. And when it looks up at the sky, it sees far more than in the exhausting days of fluttering.
Steinbeck’s lifetime critics never came to terms with the fact that a muse can have a snout and that she can be equally comfortable darting around in the academic backyards and amid class battles, and besides, can show a taste for mythological, epic things—things that are strange for a piglet and end in “-ity” and “-isms.” Echoes of that irritation proved long-lived. In a review of the colossal thousand-page treatise “The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer” by Professor Jackson Benson, published in the mid-1980s, an observer from the Boston Globe, M. P. M. Montgomery, wrote: “Steinbeck is a remarkable writer. A lousy novelist, the author of trivial stories—but still, a writer.” And then, while acknowledging the Nobel laureate’s literary gift (1962), he added with a sneer: “He could stop lovemaking on the back seat of a car just to scratch a few notes in a notebook—for use in later writings. Such an obsession with writing could make someone a great artist, and it made him a skillful, masterful writer—but only a tradesman of the pen.”
“Juvenile predilections,” “learned the craft before growing up”—it is strange to read such things about a person whose books—every book—are still not out of print, still sold at a hundred thousand copies a year. And on the day he received the Nobel Prize, the influential “New York Times” ran the headline “Does the moralist of the Thirties deserve the Nobel Prize?”