John Steinbeck
JOHN STEINBECK is among the most prolific and
ost accomplished western American novelists. He is the only
western writer who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature,
the only western novelist to have a book reach the top of the
best seller list. Still, Steinbeck is not generally regarded
as a typically western writer. Perhaps it is because he lived
much of his life in the East and, late in his career, wrote books
with neither western themes nor western settings. Or perhaps
it is because he sometimes seems more than a regional writer.
In many of his books he transcends region even as he writes about
the West. But John Steinbeck was a western writer. His best novels
and short stories are rooted in the fiber and fabric of the American
West. In them, Steinbeck defines and gives meaning to what he
perceives to be the unique nature of the western American experience.
Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in the agricultural
community of Salinas, California. He spent his childhood in the
Salinas Valley, a fertile corridor of land which reaches south
from Watsonville through the sleepy hamlets of Chualar, Gonzales,
and Soledad to King City, and is bordered on the east by the
Gabilan Mountains and on the west by the Santa Lucia Range and
by the Pacific Ocean.
As a young boy, Steinbeck roamed the valley, learning about it
and its people. At that time, Salinas was a community of about
4,000 people, and was the principal packing and shipping center
of the valley. Salinas shippers sent lettuce, celery and other
vegetables north, south, and east to the major commodity markets
of the West and Midwest. About the only other commercial activity
in Salinas was the refining of sugar beets at the Spreckles factory
where Steinbeck later worked as a laborer and straw boss.
Salinas was a vibrant and prosperous community in 1900, but it
was a cultural backwater. In this regard it was utterly unlike
the towns along the shore of Monterey Bay, where the Steinbeck
family owned a cottage where young John summered. Monterey, Pacific
Grove, and Carmel were the seacoast of Bohemia, what writer Willard
Huntington Wright, in 1910, caustically called a "vortex
of animated erudition . . . a magnetizing center for writers,
near writers, notsonear writers, distant writers, poets, poetines,
artists, daubers, sloydists, and aspiring ladies who spend their
days smearing up what would otherwise be very serviceable pieces
of canvas."
As a boy, Steinbeck fell in love with the Monterey Peninsula.
He was also charmed by the special softness of the Corral de
Tierra which lies just west of Salinas, midway between coast
and valley. And he was awed by Big Sur with its majestic sea
cliffs and its dark misty forests. Steinbeck found the material
for his dozen volumes of California fiction in the Salinas and
neighboring valleys, along the shores of Monterey Bay, in the
Corral de Tierra and on the Big Sur. Of Mice and Men (1937)
opens a few miles south of Soledad where the Salinas River runs
deep and green. And East of Eden (1952) begins with a
hymn to the valley where "the whole valley floor, and the
foothills too" were "carpeted with lupins and poppies."
Frederick Manfred, another western writer and a contemporary of Steinbeck's, has noted that for most western novelists, "it's place that writes your books." 8 And surely the central California coast and valleys were to Steinbeck what Chicago was to Sandburg and Yoknapatawpha was to Faulkner. There is an informing sense of place, of region, in Steinbeck's fiction. There is a way of seeing that gives meaning to the thematic design of his best work. In that work, landscape is central. Steinbeck's California is a vital force in the lives of those of his characters who live in and move across it.
Steinbeck's father was a merchant
and a bookkeeper who became Treasurer of Monterey County. Steinbeck's
mother taught in one-room school houses all over Monterey County.
She was a cultured and broadly educated woman who wanted her
only son to be a great scientist or a great scholar. In the handsome
mid-Victorian Steinbeck family dwelling on Central Avenue near
Salinas's main business district, she shaped her son's taste
and nurtured his imagination by reading to him, first simple
fairy tales and animal stories, and then such children's classics
as Treasure Island, Robin Hood, and Ivanhoe.
Later, she introduced her son to the classics–Flaubert,
Milton and Hardy– as well as the works of such then-popular
writers as James Branch Cabell and Donn Byrne. When Steinbeck
was nine, she introduced him to the Morte d'Arthur of
Sir Thomas Malory. Rarely in the history of American letters
has a child's encounter with a book so forcefully influenced
a career in literature. A half-century later, Steinbeck noted
that it was this book which was in large measure responsible
for his love of the English language, a statement which explains
the fact that Arthurian overtones, both thematic and stylistic,
pervade his fictional canon. Malory's stories helped form Steinbeck's
sense of right and wrong, his feelings of noblesse oblige,
and his predilection for the cause of the oppressed over
that of the oppressor. Indeed, critic John R. Milton, making
what he calls "safe generalizations" about the western novel,
has noted that the plot construction, point of view, and theme
in many western novels derive from the medieval romance, from
Malory, and from the morality plays. And surely this is true
of many Steinbeck novels–of Tortilla Flat (1935)
with its Malorian form and structure, of The Wayward Bus (1947),
which is Steinbeck's version of the Everyman allegory, and of
In Dubious Battle (1936), the theme of which is informed
by Steinbeck's allusions to the epic struggle between good and
evil, light and darkness.
As a student at Salinas High School, Steinbeck was well-rounded if undistinguished, and after graduation he left home for Stanford University, which he attended intermittently for five years, leaving in 1925 without taking a degree. Between academic years, and sometimes during them, he worked at a variety of jobs as a rancher and cotton picker. After leaving Stanford, he went to New York to become a writer. He lived in that city for a year, working at various jobs while he tried unsuccessfully to publish some short stories. He retreated to California on a ship via the Panama Canal, a trip which provided him with the setting for his first novel, Cup of Gold, which was published in 1929. Cup of Gold is set in the Caribbean, and in it Steinbeck chronicles the life of the famous buccaneer, Henry Morgan. It was a commercial failure, and some time later Steinbeck admitted he wasn't very proud of it. "I've outgrown it and it embarrasses me," he wrote. "The book was an immature experiment. . . . And I really did not intend to publish it." 9
1930 was a watershed year in Steinbeck's life. In mid-January he married Carol Henning of San Jose, a woman of taste and intellect who would later exert a tremendous impact on his writing. The Steinbecks spent the early part of the year in and around Los Angeles. But in the summer, discouraged by high rents and with no financial prospects, they moved to Pacific Grove where they could live without cost in the Steinbeck family cottage. 1930 was also the year when Steinbeck began his association with Elizabeth R. Otis, of the literary agency of McIntosh and Otis. Not only his agent, Elizabeth Otis was Steinbeck's close friend. She believed in him and was certain he would become a great writer. She remained his agent throughout Steinbeck's career, and until her death early in 1981 was a great champion of his fiction.
Most importantly, 1930 was the year in which Steinbeck met Edward
F. Ricketts, the maverick marine biologist who owned and operated
the Pacific Biological Laboratory on the waterfront in Monterey
and who became Steinbeck's closest friend during the two decades
of the novelist's most important work. Ricketts reinforced Steinbeck's
interest in science (which began when the novelist took a summer
course in zoology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove),
and over the years provided much of the matter which makes up
Steinbeck's mature view of the world. So taken was Steinbeck
with Ricketts's person and ideas that he used the biologist as
the persona in a half-dozen of his novels. Additionally the two
men collaborated on an important work of nonfiction (Sea of
Cortez), the content of
which is seminal to an understanding of Steinbeck's best fiction.
Ricketts was a western emigrant
who was born and grew up in Chicago. At the University of Chicago,
he studied marine ecology with W. C. Allee, who schooled Ricketts
in the theory that individual animals have instinctive drives
toward communal life, toward patterns of aggregation, and that
they cooperate for purposes of survival and reproduction. Ricketts
came to California in 1923 and settled along Monterey Bay where
the granite tidepools provided him with a ready-made laboratory
for his studies of intertidal marine life. He studied the seashore
with understanding and affection; he never tired of watching
the changing tides and the breaking and retiring waves which
to him were symbols of life's most fundamental pro-cesses. His
approach was to study things not for themselves but for the structure
of their relations. Ed Ricketts believed and taught Steinbeck
to believe that specialized visions are usually fragmentary,
divisive, and reductionist. Not only a competent scientist who
authored the most complete study of the marine invertebrates
of the central Pacific Coast (Between Pacific Tides, 1939), Ricketts was also a philosopher, a
student of the arts, and an essayist. He was a humanist in the
best western sense of the word: he applied knowledge which he
gleaned from his study of what he called "the good, kind,
sane, little animals" to form a meaningful view of indivisible
man.
Steinbeck seems to have understood the quality of Ed Ricketts's
person and his thinking. In a short essay which the novelist
wrote after Ricketts's death in 1948, he notes that Ricketts's
thinking was as paradoxical as his life, so that "he was
an original and his character was unique. . . . As a scientist,
Ricketts' mind had no horizons. He was interested in everything."
And as a man, said Steinbeck, Ricketts influenced everyone near
him. Some, "he taught how to think, others how to see or
hear. . . . he taught everyone without seeming to." The man Ricketts
taught most was, of course, Steinbeck himself, so that when Ricketts
died, the novelist insisted that "it really wasn't Ed who
had died but a large and important part of oneself."
His second book (To a God Unknown) grew from an unfinished
play by Webster F. Street, a Monterey attorney whom he met while
a student at Stanford. Steinbeck converted Street's text into
a novel which chronicles the life of Joseph Wayne, a visionary
hero of godlike stature. The book was also a commercial failure,
a fact Steinbeck anticipated when he told Elizabeth Otis that
it would be a hard book to sell since its main characters "make
no more attempt at being human than the people in the Iliad.
Boileau . . . insisted that only gods, kings and heroes were
worth writing about. I firmly believe that."
When Steinbeck wrote that only gods, kings, and heroes were worth
writing about, he added that the detailed "accounts of the
lives of clerks don't interest me much," unless, of course, "the
clerk breaks through into heroism."
The Pastures of Heaven also failed to sell, though it
was accorded a more favorable critical reception than Cup
of Gold and To a God Unknown.
Steinbeck's first popular success came with Tortilla Flat,
his collection of stories about the paisanos of Old
Monterey, the structure of which springs from Steinbeck's affection
for Malory's Arthurian cycle. This is the first novel in which
Steinbeck employed the Monterey Peninsula as setting and
backdrop. The episodes in the volume follow logically from those
in The Pastures of Heaven as Steinbeck again
deals with the inefficacy of retreat; he rejects the idea of
dropping out as a means of coping with the complex problems of
contemporary life. Steinbeck identified the theme of Tortilla
Flat as "tragic-comic" for it shows, he said, how the
paisanos' court, like Arthur's round table, "forms,
flourishes, and dies." The story "deals with the adventuring
of Danny's friends, with the good they did, with their thoughts
and their endeavors." And in the end, Steinbeck shows "how
the talisman was lost and how the group disintegrated."
Steinbeck's stories of Danny and the paisano brotherhood were published by Covici-Friede after being turned down by a number of other publishers. Over time, Steinbeck and Pascal Covici became close friends, and when Covici joined the staff of Viking Press in 1938, he took Steinbeck's work with him. Covici remained Steinbeck's editor for the rest of the novelist's career.
Steinbeck wrote most of the fiction
for which he will be remembered during the 1930s. His acknowledged
masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath, was published during
the last year of that decade. A year later, he and Ed Ricketts
embarked upon a scientific expedition to the Gulf of California,
a record of which appears in Sea of Cortez along with,
among other things, a narrative exposition of many of the ideas
Steinbeck had been working out in his fiction. In Sea of Cortez,
Steinbeck identifies man as "a two-legged paradox" who
"has never become accustomed to the tragic miracle of con-sciousness.
. . . Perhaps," says Steinbeck, "his species is not set,
has not jelled, but is still in a state of becoming, bound by
his physical memories to a past of struggle and survival, limited
in his futures by the uneasiness of thought and consciousness."
15
This tragic miracle of consciousness
is, for Steinbeck, man's greatest glory as well as his greatest
burden. It is the central thematic concern in his fiction, from
his characterization of Henry Morgan's self-directed drive for
power in Cup of Gold to Ethan Hawley's search for meaning
in the spiritual wasteland of The Winter of Our Discontent
(1960). Steinbeck perceived accurately the gulf between man's
dreams and his ability to translate those dreams into reality.
He argued, though, that man can transcend his own weakness if
only he will not surrender to despair but will rather struggle
against the darkness that confuses and disinherits. At the same
time, he pointed out that there is no place for innocence in
the contemporary world, and that while most men play out the
allegory of innocence lost, they must move to a higher level
of consciousness, knowing that their only reward may be the satisfaction
that comes from accepting things as they really are.
Steinbeck's notion of the tragic miracle of consciousness underscores
the stories in The Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla
Flat. It is also a pervasive theme in his only collection
of short stories, The Long Valley (1938). In "The
Harness," a widowed Peter Randall seeks emancipation from the
shackles of a stifling marriage, but he cannot achieve it because
he cannot come to terms with the fact of his wife's death. In
"The White Quail," Steinbeck creates in Mary Teller a character
who wallows in fantasy and so cannot respond to the beauty of
the environment in which she lives. And in "The Chrysanthemums,"
perhaps Steinbeck's most famous short story, Eliza Allen's penchant
for illusion and self-deception thwarts her attempts to achieve
happiness.
While the popular success of Tortilla Flat and The
Long Valley made Steinbeck a national figure, his reputation
was based largely on his ability to tell entertaining tales.
And, indeed, while Steinbeck understood that a writer is always
engaged in recording his beliefs about life as well as his observations
of it, he followed the advice of Edith Mirrielees, his English
teacher at Stanford, who taught him "the short story writer's
medium is the spotlight, not the searchlight."
Steinbeck uses environment as meaning in telling the story of Jody Tiflin. His portraits of sinister forces working in a benign land, of human smallness in the midst of expansive nature, give his stories an added degree of tension and irony. He writes them out of what Leo Marx called "the pastoral design." In The Red Pony, and in all of his best early fiction, he portrays inherently decent men and women who want only to live in peace and harmony in a green pasture. He shows also how dreams are destroyed by the follies and foibles of the dreamers as well as by the inevitable incursion of history, or how innocence gives way to growth of character that clarifies and enriches experience and enables man to make the necessary adjustments and adaptations to the way things are.
As he grew to maturity as a writer, Steinbeck gradually became a novelist of affirmation for whom the key to living comes not only in recognizing the wholeness of experience, but acting on that recognition to achieve worthwhile, purposive goals. Steinbeck's most famous characters face squarely the tragic miracle of their own consciousness as well as the incompatibility of the pastoral ideal with the facts of contemporary life, and they move through and beyond these understandings to improve the human condition. To portray this theme in fiction, he needed first a broader, more expansive world view, and then a fictional vehicle large enough to suit his thematic purpose. The former he got in large measure from reading and from his friends, particularly from Ed Ricketts, who helped him see beyond a naive romantic anarchism to a philosophically sound order of things in which strong-willed individuals can grow beyond themselves and work to benefit all humankind. In the narrative portion of Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts identify an overall pattern of life in the Gulf of California in which everything is related to everything else. And this leads them to ponder the sociological and biological patterns which underlie this unity and underscore the equilibrium among all living things. They identify the world's greatest thinkers as those who recognized this unity and acted responsibly on that recognition: "a Jesus, a St. Augustine, a St. Francis, a Roger Bacon, a Charles Darwin, and an Einstein" came to their greatness through a "profound feeling" that "man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality known and unknowable." 18
The vehicle which Steinbeck employed to portray his fully developed
world view grew from his understanding of the complex sociopolitical
problems of California agriculture. Steinbeck's background in
Salinas helped him understand the issues in the farm-labor conflict.
When he worked in the fields for the Spreckles Sugar Company,
he gained firsthand knowledge of farmworkers and their problems.
He had come to understand that he could achieve real power and
depth in fiction only if his narratives were "true," if
they resulted from things he knew through careful observations.
And so he worked hard to place his stories in familiar settings
and to be scrupulous about the accuracy of detail. Agriculture
in California during the 1930s consisted largely of farm factories,
owned and operated by large corporations who employed migrant
laborers at low wages to pick fruits and vegetables. During the
winter of 1934, Steinbeck heard about two farm labor organizers
who were hiding in an attic in a house near Monterey. He visited
them, and as the result of a series of long conversations with
them, he acquired much of the material that went into his most
ambitious and important fiction: Of Mice and Men, a novelette
about two itinerant ranch hands who travel from job to job, always
dreaming of a little house and a couple of acres with rabbits
where they will "live off the fatta the lan'," In
Dubious Battle, which was called "the best labor
and strike novel to come out of our contemporary economic and
social unrest,"
19
and The Grapes of Wrath, an
epic treatment of the struggle of a group of tenant farmers as
they journey from the Oklahoma dustbowl to the fruit and vegetable
orchards of California. The Grapes of Wrath won the Pulitzer
Prize. It has been in print
continuously, and to this day remains an American classic.
Of Mice and Men resembles
much of Steinbeck's earlier fiction in that he again employs
the spotlight rather than the searchlight to tell the story of
George Milton and Lennie Small, who come to a Salinas valley
ranch where they have contracted to harvest barley. But the book
surpasses his earlier fiction in scope of treatment because it
takes on a parable-like quality as Steinbeck depicts man's voluntary
acceptance of responsibility for his fellow man. George and Lennie
dream an impossible dream–to have their own land where they
can enjoy peace, leisure, and economic self-sufficiency. At one
point in Steinbeck's narrative, they almost translate their dream
into reality when Candy, the bunkhouse swamper, offers George
money to buy the ranch. But the dream collapses when Lennie,
whose brute strength is not matched by an adult mind, accidentally
kills the wife of the boss's son. The story ends when George
kills Lennie to save him from an angry mob.
Of Mice and Men is a sophisticated and artful rendering
of the basic conflict between two worlds: between an idealized
landscape and the real world with its pain and anguish. It is
a moving story of two men who need each other and who want to
live in delicate partnership with nature. But while Steinbeck
portrays the garden's beauty and even allows his characters a
momentary glimpse of it, he checks our fantasies (and theirs)
by showing how the dream cannot be realized. A vision of an idealized
community is undone because, alone in a world they do not understand,
Lennie is destroyed and George reduced to a life of personal
survival. In Of Mice and Men, then, Steinbeck pays tribute
to the power of human friendship and to the Arcadian Garden,
but those tributes are sadly ironic.
In Dubious Battle is, in many ways, Steinbeck's most expertly
crafted novel. In it he uses the spotlight approach to plot and
character he employed so effectively in his shorter fiction,
but he does it in a narrative expansive enough to stand as a
rich, full-bodied work of fiction. Steinbeck's prose is less
lyrical and more disciplined in In Dubious Battle. The
surface of his narrative is more realistic than that in any of
his earlier books. Yet narrative realism and accuracy of detail
were not, for Steinbeck, ends in themselves. Rather, they were
a means for him to portray in believable terms his view of "the
tragic miracle of human consciousness." While finishing In
Dubious Battle, he wrote to friend and fellow writer George
Albee:
From the earliest days of settlement, agriculture was what tied
Californians to the land. Even before the gold rush, newly settled
emigrants celebrated California's central and coastal valleys
as utopias of wheat, grapes, oranges and olives, where they and
their children might realize the Jeffersonian dream of a life
on the land. As early as 1852, newly settled emigrants wrote
that the future wealth or poverty of California depends "on
the success or failure of our agricultural pursuits. But, from
the beginning, the dream seemed doomed to fail. Overblown promises
and hopes were matched by confusions of land titles and the uncontrolled
growth of monopolies, as well as by natural difficulties–the
summer droughts which produced thick clouds of alkaline dust
and the winter rains which turned fertile lands into impassable
mud. Novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, who in 1879 visited Salinas
(which he called "a town of purely American character"),
identified the existence of these large land monopolies as the
"present chief danger and disgrace of California," and told
his readers that "we have here in England no idea of the
troubles and inconveniences which flow from the existence of
these large landholders–land thieves, land sharks, or land
grabbers, they are more commonly and plainly called."
I don't know how much I have got over, but I have used
a small strike in an orchard valley as the symbol of man's eternal,
bitter warfare with himself. I'm not interested in ranting about
justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the
condition. But man hates something in himself. He has been able
to defeat every natural obstacle but himself, he cannot win over
unless he kills every individual. And his self-hate which goes
so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about.
20
In Dubious Battle is a realistic
strike novel, perhaps the best in our literature, but realism
was not the determining factor in Steinbeck's choice of the novel's
theme. Rather, he used facts from well-known California farm-labor
disputes to write a complex novel which would be a parable of
the human condition.
The history of California agriculture
is the history of the contradiction between man's desire to live
and work on those lush and endless fields under vast and empty
skies, and the complex political forces which forced the farmers
to exploit their acres as they in turn were exploited by the
forces that governed them: the railroads, the commodity markets,
and the eastern financial establishment. Near the end of the
nineteenth century, Frank Norris, America's first great novelist
of California agriculture, spoke to the subject in The Octopus.
It was the most ambitious effort to date to put the raw history
of California agriculture into significant fiction. But The
Octopus fails as literature because of Norris's melodramatic
plot, his over-reliance on myth and symbol, and the ambiguity
of his social protest. In Dubious Battle succeeds where
The Octopus fails, and largely because of history. By
the mid-1930s, almost all of California agriculture was consolidated
and monopolized. Norris's pastoral idylls were implausible in
an era which witnessed the collapse of eastern markets, the disregard
of the rights of labor, and the oppressions of capital.
Steinbeck's novel deals with the efforts of Mac, a seasoned labor
organizer, and Jim Nolan, a political neophyte, to organize an
uprising among the migrant poor in the Torgas Valley. With the
help of migrant leaders and the assistance of Doc Burton (who
is based in part upon a real doctor of the same name–a union
physician who worked in the fields–and in part on Ed Ricketts),
Mac and Jim organize the farmers and establish a camp on the
land of a small grower named Anderson. When vigilantes destroy
Anderson's farm, the strikers disperse and the strike is doomed.
The central characters in In Dubious Battle, Mac and Jim, are based upon two labor organizers who worked for the Cannery and Agricultural Workers Industrial Union, Pat Chambers and Caroline Decker. And the major events in the novel are composites of information Steinbeck gleaned from conversations with Chambers and Decker about a strike in a peach orchard in Tulare County and an uprising among cotton pickers near Bakersfield, both of which occurred late in 1933. But while the novel is, in this sense, realistic, it is by no means an historical record of the reaction by organized labor to California agribusiness. Indeed, Steinbeck wrote a friend just after the book was published: "I'm glad you liked the Battle. I knew what it was about once, but I've heard so much about it that I don't know now. I still think that most `realistic' writing is farther from the real than most honest fantasy. The Battle with its tricks to make a semblance of reality wasn't very close." 23
In Dubious Battle is a brutal novel, a fact Steinbeck recognized when he acknowledged that it was brutal because it had no author's moral point of view. It is a tough-minded exposé of the wrong perspectives, the wrong approaches, and the wrong solutions. The novelist uses a small strike in an apple orchard to symbolize "man's eternal, bitter warfare with himself." The battle is indeed dubious; the goals sought by its protagonists reflect muddled social visions and distorted political objectives.
Mac and Jim, unlike their real-life counterparts, are cold-blooded
revolutionaries who care little for those whose plight they are
trying to relieve. And Doc Burton, a scientist by training but
a philosopher by disposition, who strives "to see the whole
picture . . . to be able to look at the whole thing,"
24
is incapable of applying the insights
of his understanding to alleviate the problems of the disinherited.
At the end of the novel, Burton ends up a lonely man, "working
all alone, toward nothing." The book ends where it began, its
characters clouded in confusion and nightmare. The epigraph
from Milton's Paradise Lost is instructive and while,
as Jackson Benson and Anne Loftis note, In Dubious Battle
may not be Milton's hell, it is certainly hell, nevertheless.
25
That this depiction of hell, this
parable of man's self-hatred, is even today regarded as one of
the most truthful novels of our time, is a comment on our time,
on our tastes, and on our belief about relationships between
literature and history.
Whereas In Dubious Battle ends in chaos and confusion,
The Grapes of Wrath ends in triumph. It is without question
Steinbeck's most successful novel; the epic scale on which the
book is written enables the novelist to say virtually everything
he knows and feels about the human condition. When Steinbeck
began writing The Grapes of Wrath, he had just completed
an assignment for George West of the San Francisco News, who
had asked him to do a series of articles on the dustbowl migrants.
Those articles were published as "The Harvest Gypsies" in
September of 1936, and they remain today as superb examples of
advocacy reporting. They conform to the mode of the documentary,
popular at the time, and perfected by James Agee and Walker Evans
in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1946). Steinbeck was
familiar with the documentary as artistic idiom. He had seen
the famous photographs of Dorothea Lange and the films of Pare
Lorentz, and he uses their techniques to heighten and enlarge
the scope of the narrative in The Grapes of Wrath. That
narrative is the story of the Joad family, a group of Oklahoma
tenant farmers who pursue a dream of prosperity in the lush fruit
orchards of California. What they find, of course, is poverty
and squalor. They join the many thousands of migrant poor who
compete for pitifully low wages and are forced to live in shabby,
overcrowded accommodations not even suited for animals. "There
is," says Steinbeck, "a failure . . . that topples all our
success," "a crime here that goes beyond denunciation,"
"a sorrow that weeping cannot symbolize."
This book's thematic design is informed by work Steinbeck had
done on an essay he wrote while completing In Dubious Battle
and which he
called "Argument of Phalanx." In it, he
noted that men are not really final individuals, but are part
of the phalanx which controls individual men and which, because
it is more than a sum of its parts, can achieve ends beyond the
reach of individual men. "It is impossible," says Steinbeck,
"for man to defy the phalanx without destroying himself.
For if a man goes into a wilderness, his mind will dry up and
at last he will die of starvation for the sustenance he can only
get from involvement in the phalanx."
In In Dubious Battle, Doc Burton is unable to key into the striking migrant phalanx and provide direction to the blind party organizers. He grows lean and hungry and drifts away into the night. But in The Grapes of Wrath, Jim Casy, the clear-visioned ex-preacher who travels with the Joads to California, returns from the wilderness knowing "we got a job to do." And he applies the principles of his unified view of life, of the wholeness of all experience, to bring the migrants together. He keys into the migrant phalanx and dedicates himself to help those"`folks out lonely on the road, folks with no lan', no home to go to.'" 28 During the course of the novel, Casy turns social activist, and he gives his life to help end the oppression of the dispossessed. He becomes a Christ who directs his "disciples," the Joad family, from need to concept and finally toward action. His life and death serve as a catalyst which unites the Joads with the entire migrant family in the struggle for dignity and a decent standard of living. At the beginning of their journey from the dustbowl to the valleys of California, the Joads are a jealous, self-interested group of individuals. But, during the course of their journey, Steinbeck chronicles their movement from the "I" to the "We," in which the Joads recognize their kinship with the vast human family which, in Casy's words, "`got one big soul ever'body's a part of.'" 29 Steinbeck's story begins with the migrants sitting in the doorways of their houses, "their hands busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still–thinking–figuring." 30 But, gradually, as need turns toward concept and action, "the fear went from their faces, and anger took its place and the women sighed with relief for they knew it was all right–the break had not come; and the break would never come as long as fear could turn to wrath." 31
Jim Casy and those members of the Joad family who become his
disciples are, then, true Steinbeck heroes. They come to understand
the unity of life; they know, as Tom Joad says, that man does
not exist alone "`cause his little piece of a soul wasn't
no good `less it was with the rest.' "
32
And they break through the walls
of self-interest to do battle against political and economic
injustice. In East of Eden, Steinbeck's last California
novel, the novelist notes that while "most men are destroyed,
there are others who like pillars of fire guide frightened men
through the darkness."
33
Jim Casy and his followers are
those pillars of fire. They affirm Steinbeck's belief that "man,
unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe,
grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges
ahead of his accomplishments."
34
The Grapes of Wrath was
published early in 1939, and it left Steinbeck exhausted. So
when Ed Ricketts suggested that they collaborate on a study of
the marine life in the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck jumped at the
opportunity. Steinbeck and Ricketts traveled to the Gulf of California
in March of 1940, and the record of that expedition was published
in December of 1941. Most assumed that Steinbeck wrote the first
part of Sea of Cortez, a narrative about the trip, and
that Ricketts wrote the second part, a phyletic catalog. Actually,
the book was a true collaboration. Steinbeck shaped the narrative
from a log Ricketts kept during the trip. Sea of Cortez is
a literate study of the ecology of the Gulf. It is also a work
of travel literature and a treatise on philosophy and ethics.
The best passages in the narrative portion are those in which
Steinbeck and Ricketts depict a world-view in terms more mystical
and intuitive than scientific, and in which they affirm the importance
of a comprehensive culture. Putting together the narrative late
in 1940, Steinbeck noted that the book was a good clearing out
of a lot of ideas that had been working on him for a long time.
It is a record of a scientific voyage and of explorations in
philosophy, "bright with sun and wet with sea water," and
"the whole crusted over with exploring thought."
35
The war deprived Steinbeck of the California idiom which underpins
his best fiction. He tried to regain this idiom in Cannery
Row (1945), which is, as he claimed, "a kind of nostalgic
thing, written for a group of soldiers who had said to me, `Write
something funny that isn't about the war."
The setting is less authentic and
the characters not nearly so endearing in Steinbeck's next novel,
The Wayward Bus (1947), a complex allegory of modern life
in which a diverse, petty, self-directed group of people thrown
together on a bus bound from one California community to another
are forced during their journey to examine themselves and their
relationships with one another. The novel ends on a positive
note: the wayward bus and its redeemed passengers lumber on into
San Juan de la Cruz, but somehow we just don't care. Juan Chicoy,
the bus driver and Steinbeck's protagonist, and the passengers
he helps redeem do not grow beyond their concepts because they
have none; they do not emerge ahead of their accomplishments
because they accomplish little. Rather, they do what the animals
that Steinbeck and Ricketts observed in the Gulf of California
do: "survive." And this is the book's irony, the tragedy
of man's pilgrimage through modem life.
Steinbeck's postwar fiction, Cannery Row and The Wayward
Bus as well as The Pearl, which is based upon a fable
Steinbeck heard during his Sea of Cortez expedition and which
is set in the Gulf of California, reflects the vision of a man
living in a changed America where the simple human virtues have
given way to the onslaught of material civilization. To make
matters worse, Ed Ricketts was killed in a freak train-car accident
in May of
1948. Steinbeck was devastated.
By this time he had divorced his
first wife and married and divorced his second. He lived in New
York and so distanced himself from the California backdrop of
his best fiction. Still, he labored on a giant novel about California
which he tentatively titled Salinas Valley and which was
published in 1952 as East of Eden. During the composition
of this novel, he completed work on his third play-novelette,
Burning Bright (1950), which is less a work of art than
an abstract piece of philosophizing which Steinbeck works out
through an imaginary dialogue with Ricketts. He also finished
a screenplay for Viva Zapata!, a fictional history of
the Mexican agrarian reformer which Elia Kazan made into a successful
film in 1952. In it, Steinbeck tells of Zapata's drive for land
reform in Mexico. He not only recreates one of the most turbulent
and exciting periods in the history of that country, but he conveys
again his belief in man's personal capacity for greatness of
deed and spirit. All the time, however, he continued work on
his big novel. East of Eden is a sprawling study of three
generations of two California families (the Trasks and the Hamiltons)
in which Steinbeck's central theme is his thesis that man can
rule over sin. His thematic vehicle is the Hebrew word timshel,
which he translates "thou mayest," and which he says
is man's greatest glory–an affirmation of free will by which
man can assert his moral impulse.
Somehow though, East of Eden does not work. In combining
the story of his own family, the Hamiltons (which he tells with
great sensitivity to place, the California he knew and loved
so well), with the story of the Trasks, given through a fictional
dramatization of the Cain-Abel tale, Steinbeck confused narratives.
More importantly, he allowed conventional morality to replace
science and intuition as a way of seeing and so he moved away
from his unique view of man and the world. His characters are
symbolpeople whose symbolic values are not simply discernible
but overwhelming. East of Eden is not a major work in
Steinbeck's overall literary canon. But this, the last of his
major novels set in the American West, is certainly impressive
for the largeness of its scope and for the expansiveness of its
design.
Steinbeck would write several more novels and works of nonfiction,
but none would match his best works of the 1930s, nor even equal
the ambitious range of East of Eden. Sweet Thursday (1954)
is an empty sequel to Cannery Row. By the time Steinbeck
wrote it, the sardine industry in Monterey had collapsed. The
world of the novel is the world of the Row Steinbeck found after
the war, where there were only silent "canneries of corrugated
iron" and where "a pacing watchman was their only life.
The street which once roared with trucks was quiet and empty."
Steinbeck's next novel, The Short Reign of Pippin IV (1957),
is a languid tale about what happens to a retiring, middle-aged
astronomer suddenly drafted to rule the unruly French. Set in
Europe, it is a slight book which was written during a time when
Steinbeck had begun work on a modernized edition of Malory's
Morte d'Arthur. He prepared for this task by reading extensively
about the Arthurian legends, and by travelling through the English
and Welsh countryside with his third wife, Elaine. Over the course
of several years Steinbeck translated major portions of the Morte
d'Arthur. Five of the six parts of The Tale of King Arthur
and other fragments were published posthumously in 1976 as
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights.
Steinbeck's last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1960),
is set in New England, and is a vision of the modern wasteland,
a study of the moral vacuum in contemporary America, where all
codes of decency and morality have given way to a fast-buck philosophy.
Realizing, perhaps, that he had nowhere to go as a novelist,
Steinbeck returned finally to nonfiction, a mode which reflected
his personal interest in travel and in journalism. In 1962, he
wrote Travels with Charley in Search of America, a record
of his trip across the United States with his French poodle.
In 1966, he wrote America and Americans, a book-length
photo essay of reflections about Steinbeck's America.
Two years later, in December of 1968, he died in New York City.
His body was carried back toS 1a inas for burial. Though Steinbeck
remained, to the end, a writer of affirmation–particularly
in America and Americans, where he notes that while we
have failed sometimes, taken wrong paths, paused for renewal,
filled our bellies and licked our wounds, we have never slipped
back–the tone of his last book is of loss. The end of
Travels with Charley is instructive: Steinbeck's remark to
a New York policeman that "I've driven this thing all over
the country–mountains, plains, deserts. And now I'm back
in my own town, where I live–and I'm lost,"
In his best work though, in those early treatments of the denizens
of the Corral de Tierra, Salinas, and Old Monterey, and then
in his great political novels of the 1930s, Steinbeck treated
with sympathy and deep compassion man's fumbling efforts to deal
with the realities of life. Against the backdrop of a California
which held out the promise of unlimited possibility, Steinbeck
wrote memorable pictures of American lives, not the way books
are supposed to be written, as he once said about The Grapes
of Wrath, but about the way lives are really lived. The subject
of those books is the human condition. The excellence of such
volumes as The Pastures of Heaven, Tortilla Flat, Of Mice
and Men, In Dubious Battle, and The Grapes of Wrath affirms
that he is among the most important writers in the history of
the western literary experience.
RICHARD ASTRO, Northeastern University
Notes 1. Willard Huntington Wright, "Hotbed of Soulful Erudition," Los Angeles Times (May, 1910), as republished in Tales of Monterey, eds. Davis and Judy Dutton (Sausalito: Comstock Editions, 1974), p. 78.
2. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Bantam, 1955), p. 2.
3. John Steinbeck, Tortilla Flat (New York: Viking Compass, 1963), p. 1.
4. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York: Bantam, 1959), p. 1.
5. John Steinbeck, "Flight," in The Long Valley (New York: Viking Compass, 1956), p. 45.
6. John Steinbeck, To a God Unknown (New York: Bantam, 1955), p. 29.
7. John Steinbeck, The Pastures of Heaven (New York: Bantam, 1951), p. 113.
8. Frederick Manfred in conversation with Richard Astro, May 10, 1975.
9. John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, as published in Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, eds. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (New York: Viking, 1975), p. 17.
10. John Steinbeck, "About Ed Ricketts," Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Viking Compass, 1962), p. xi, xvii, x, xi, xiii.
11. John Steinbeck to Elizabeth Otis, as published in A Life in Letters, p. 69.
12. A Life in Letters, p. 69.
13. The Viking Critical The Grapes of Wrath, ed. Peter Lisca (New York: Viking, 1972), p. 861.
14. Tortilla Flat, p. 1.
15. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 96.
16. Edith R. Mirrielees, Writing the Short Story (New York: Doubleday, 1929), p. 3. Steinbeck acknowledges the influence of Ms. Mirrielees on his writing in his Preface to the Viking Compass edition of Mirrielees's Story Writing (New York: Viking, 1962), pp. vi–viii.
17. John Steinbeck, "My Short Novels," published in Steinbeck and His Critics, eds. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957), p. 38.
18. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 217.
19. Fred T. Marsh, New York Times (February 2, 1936), section 6, p. 7.
20. John Steinbeck to George Albee, as published in A Life in Letters, p. 98.
21. J. H. Carson, "Early Recollections of the Mines," as published in Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 192.
22. Robert Louis Stevenson, "The Old Pacific Capital," in Tales of Monterey, p. 68.
23. John Steinbeck to Carl Wilhelmson, postmarked April 1, 1936, as printed in Jackson J. Benson and Anne Loftis, "John Steinbeck and Farm Labor Unionization: The Background of In Dubious Battle," American Literature 52 (May 1980): 222–223. The Benson-Loftis article is the best published study of the novel's background.
24. John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (New York: Bantam, 1961), p. 103.
25. Benson and Loftis, p. 223.
26. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Viking Compass, 1958), p. 477.
27. John Steinbeck, "Argument of Phalanx," as published in Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), chapter 4.
28. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 76.
29. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 33.
30. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 7.
31. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 592.
32. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 570.
33. East of Eden, p. 274.
34. The Grapes of Wrath, p. 204.
35. Log from the Sea of Cortez, p. 271.
36. "My Short Novels," in Steinbeck and His Critics, p. 39.
37. "The Old Pacific Capital" in Tales of Monterey, p. 71.
38. John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (New York: Bantam, 1956), p. 1.
39. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America (New York: Viking, 1962), p. 245.
Selected Bibliography Primary Sources
1. Books by John Steinbeck (in order of publication)
Cup of Gold. New York: McBride, 1929; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1937.
The Pastures of Heaven. New York: Brewer, Warren & Putnam, 1932; London: Allan, 1933.
To a God Unknown. New York: Ballou, 1933; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1935.
Tortilla Flat. New York: Covici-Friede, 1935; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1935.
In Dubious Battle. New York: Covici-Friede, 1936; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1936.
Of Mice and Men: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937.
The Red Pony. New York: Covici-Friede, 1937; enlarged edition, New York: Viking, 1945.
The Long Valley. New York: Viking, 1938; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1939.
The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Viking, 1939; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1939.
Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely ]ournal of Travel and Research, by Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts. New York: Viking, 1941. Republished in part as The Log from the Sea of Cortez, New York: Viking, 1951; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1958; adds "About Ed Ricketts," by Steinbeck.
The Moon Is Down. New York: Viking, 1942; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1942.
The Moon Is Down: Play in Two Parts. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1942; London: English Theatre Guild, 1943.
Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. New York: Viking, 1942.
Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945; London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1945.
The Wayward Bus. New York: Viking, 1947; London &Toronto: Heinemann, 1947.
The Pearl. New York: Viking, 1947; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1948.
A Russian Journal. New York: Viking, 1948; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1949.
Burning Bright. New York: Viking, 1950; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1951.
Viva Zapata! Rome: Edizioni Filmeritica, 1952; new edition, ed. Robert Morsberger, New York: Viking, 1975.
East of Eden. New York: Viking, 1952; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1952.
Sweet Thursday. New York: Viking, 1954; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1954.
The Short Reign of Pippin IV: A Fabrication. New York: Viking, 1957; Melbourne, London & Toronto: Heinemann, 1957.
Once There Was a War. New York: Viking, 1958; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1959.
The Winter of Our Discontent. New York: Viking, 1961; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1961.
Travels with Charley in Search of America. New York: Viking, 1962; London, Melbourne & Toronto: Heinemann, 1962.
America and Americans. New York: Viking, 1966; London: Heinemann, 1966.
The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, edited by Chase Horton. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.2. Short Fiction in Periodicals
"Adventures in Arcademy: A Journey into the Ridiculous." Stanford Spectator 2 (June 1924): 279, 291.
"Fingers of Cloud: A Satire on College Protervity." Stanford Spectator 2 (February 1924): 149, 161–65.
"His Father." Reader's Digest 55 (September 1949): 19–21.
"How Edith McGillicuddy Met Robert Louis Stevenson." Harper's 183 (August 1941): 252–258.
"How Mr. Hogan Robbed a Bank." Atlantic 197 (March 1956): 58–61.
"Miracle of Tepayac." Collier's 122 (December 25, 1948): 22–23.
"Sons of Cyrus Trask." Collier's 130 (July 12, 1952): 14–15.3. NonFiction in Periodicals
"Always Something to Do in Salinas." Holiday 17 (]une 1955): 58ff.
"Conversation at Sag Harbor." Holiday 29 (March 1961): 60–61, 129–131, 133.
"Dubious Battle in California." Nation 143 (September 13, 1936): 302–304.
"Fishing in Paris." Punch 227 (August 25, 1954): 248–49.
"How to Fish in French." Reader's Digest 66 (January 1955): 59–61.
"Jalopies I Cursed and Loved." Holiday 16 (July 1954): 44–45, 89–90.
"The Secret Weapon We Were Afraid to Use." Collier's 131 (January 10, 1953): 9–13.
"Some Thoughts on Juvenile Delinquency."Saturday Review 38 (May 28, 1955): 22.
"The Stars Point to Shafter." Progressive Weekly (December 24, 1938) [np.].4. Manuscripts
Steinbeck correspondence and/or manuscript material for his books is on file at the libraries of the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Virginia, the University of California at Berkeley, Stanford University, San Jose State University, Ball State University, and the Salinas Public Library. For a selected inventory of the contents of these collections, see A Handbook for Steinbeck Collectors, Librarians, and Scholars, ed. Tetsumaro Hayashi, Steinbeck Monograph Series, No. 11 (Muncie: Ball State University, 1981), pp. 29–44.
Secondary Sources
Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. A comprehensive study of the impact of Ricketts's thinking on Steinbeck's fiction and nonfiction.
. and Joel Hedgpeth, eds. Steinbeck and the Sea. Corvallis: Oregon State University Sea Grant Program Press, 1975. Short volume of critical essays.
Davis, Robert M., ed. Steinbeck: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1972. Collection of better articles on Steinbeck written between 1930 and 1970.
Fontenrose, Joseph. John Steinbeck: An Introduction and Interpetation. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1963. Brief but useful introduction to Steinbeck with emphasis on his use of myth and legend in fiction.
French, Warren. John Steinbeck. New York: Twayne, 1961. Solid critical introduction with a particularly valuable study of The Grapes of Wrath.
Hayashi, Tetsumaro, ed. Steinbeck's Literary Dimension. Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1973. Collection of comparative essays which contrast Steinbeck with other major modern writers.
Kiernan, Thomas. The Intricate Music: A Biography of John Steinbeck. Boston: Atlantic, Little Brown, 1979. Informal, unbalanced and inadequate biography.
Levant, Howard. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974. Difficult but worthwhile study of Steinbeck as a stylist.
Lisca, Peter. The Wide World of John Steinbeck. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1958. Perhaps the best, most comprehensive study of Steinbeck's literary achievements.
Marks, Lester. Thematic Design in the Novels of John Steinbeck. The Hague: Mouton, 1969. Useful study of Steinbeck's major fictional themes.
Moore, Harry Thornton. The Novels of John Steinbeck. Chicago: Normandie House, 1939. Dated but still interesting first study of Steinbeck.
Steinbeck, Elaine, and Robert Wallsten, eds. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: Viking Press, 1975. A comprehensive autobiography in letters, carefully selected, expertly annotated.
Valjean, Nelson. John Steinbeck: The Errant Knight. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1975. Interesting, folksy biography of Steinbeck's California years.
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