Reflections on John Steinbeck and The Grapes of Wrath
I took a bit of a John Steinbeck sojourn last weekend,
traveling to the
Salinas to visit the
National Steinbeck Center
museum, reading much about John Steinbeck’s life and career, and then retiring
to our family cabin at Arroyo Seco for a brief and much needed writing retreat.
I am also 200 or so pages into
The Grapes
of Wrath, the only Steinbeck I will have really read beyond the much
shorter and more easily digested
Of Mice
and Men. On my trip, I learned for the first time (or perhaps had just
forgotten) the degree to which Steinbeck was vilified not only for his
politics, as encapsulated so clearly in
The
Grapes of Wrath, but also for the way he allowed these views to hijack his
writing. Oklahoma state and Kern County officials protested loudly, as did many
reviewers, against the content of
The
Grapes of Wrath, and critics the world over lambasted the Nobel Committee
for granting Steinbeck the Nobel Prize in 1962. Such was the impact on the
author that he never published another word of fiction in his life after 1962.
(He died in 1968 at the age of 66.)
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| National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA |
Steinbeck was obviously a great writer. One critic
astutely observed that the Nobel Committee needed Steinbeck in 1962 much more
than he needed them. In fact, asked the day after the prize was awarded whether
he deserved it, Steinbeck himself answered, “Well, no.” But looking at the
since released Nobel records showing who he was up against, you’ll come upon
the names of four authors of the time you have likely never heard of, and most
certainly have never heard from since. Steinbeck, in contrast, has been thrust
in front of every high school and college certainly in the western states for
decades and is the subject of the only museum in America dedicated to a single
author.
Steinbeck is also a Northern Californian, a native son born
in Salinas who
set most of his work in and around the Monterey Bay Area. As such, I have an
impulse to leap to his defense, particularly given that the world did experience the Great Depression,
that the forces of commerce were
largely responsible for it, and that social and government action were needed at the time, and were, in
retrospect, incredibly successful. However, reading the pages of The Grapes of Wrath, I have to admit
that the critics who have accused Steinbeck of crossing over from writing into preaching
do have a point. Take for instance this passage from page 194 of my 1976
Penguin paperback edition:
One man, one family driven from the land; this rusty
car creaking along the highway to the west. I lost my land, a single tractor
took my land. I am alone and I am bewildered. And in the night one family camps
in a ditch and another family pulls in and the tents come out. The two men
squat on their hams and the women and children listen. Here is the node, you
who hate change and fear revolution….This is the beginning—from “I” to “we.
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.”
I’d be surprised if one could find a clearer or more
urgent call to collective action published anywhere in the world in the 1930s.
Setting aside the fact that The Grapes of
Wrath was such a wildly successful book, and that it was published at the
height of both fascism in Europe and communism in Russia, the simple and observable
fact is, Steinbeck is preaching an idea here. I personally believe it’s an idea
that is not the sole purview of communism or socialism but can in fact be
compatible with American capitalism, but that’s not the point. The point is,
the fiction writer is most certainly becoming the social critic here, stepping
outside the story to make a point—in fact, to preach a point. As great a writer as he was, the critics who accuse
him of this have a leg on which to stand.
So what does all this mean to writers writing, as
Steinbeck did, about work, family, and society in a time of tumultuous change—writers
doing so, but doing so today, in a very different time?
The first thing to realize, of course, is that The Grapes of Wrath was written in a
time of superlatives, a time when deprivation was so widespread that extremes
could be convincingly portrayed in the black-and-white terms of good and evil.
The work of a writer like Steinbeck, with its sermons and wistful descriptions
of the great unwashed innocents, could find and sate an audience in 1930s America.
Today, society’s trials are different. We live in a time of relative plenty,
the country is populated largely with knowledge workers, not laborers, and the
conflicts that touch our work lives—and thus our families and our society as a
whole—are anything but superlative. They are subtle and confusing, offering no
black-and-white, but only gray. Our characters, typically, will not be the
downtrodden Joads of Oklahoma. In my case, in fact, since I was born in Silicon Valley and have lived here my entire life, I am
often writing about characters who are the lucky ones, human beings placed by
circumstance and personal initiative into the center of an aberration of good
fortune. The question for characters like these is not, how does a man respond when pushed to the brink? The question is, how does a human being respond when the
brass ring is there, but sacrifices must be made? An offering must be made,
a series of choices, and it is in those choices, with all their complexities
and hidden, even invisible elements, that the story lies.
Furthermore, The
Grapes of Wrath was written in a time when American literature was
accepting of sentimentality and melodrama—I think of them as the “pre-Salinger
years”—when an author could simply write this about a character:
He had never been angry in his life. He looked in
wonder at angry people, wonder and uneasiness, as normal people look at the
insane.
It was a time before the great burden of ambiguity was
heaped onto the shoulders of serious American writers by authors like Bellow
and Updike, Carver and Cheever, Dee and Strout. Writing in a simpler time makes
for simpler writing, and Steinbeck’s career is a good example of that, but you
also have to recognize that this point in the endless drama where we 21st
century writers have walked onto the stage also presents some great advantages.
A fiction that needs ambiguity is a good fiction for the subtle and complex
dramas of our complicated world. We are freed from portraying good guys and bad
guys, and while we still need to create the tension that for millennia came
from binary narratives of good vs. evil, we can place much of that work onto
the reader: we can create active engagements with the characters, occasions to
understand what’s going on (with little effort if we’re successful), and then
choose a side and begin rooting (with much effort if we’re successful). A
string of these dramas does not need to lead the reader to a political
position, it just needs to lead them to a deeper understanding both of the particular
drama we are portraying and similar dramas that unfold all over the world every
day, and in the life experiences of everyone. A breach in the family occurs at
the end of The Grapes of Wrath, and
there will often be breaches at the ends of our stories as well. But these
breaches will not be sentimental and melodramatic endings to small stories with
torches to carry. They will be common—almost universal—endings to stories that
could happen at any time: today, tomorrow, and every day thereafter.
