Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck

Discontent

Introduction

Rereading John Steinbeck

Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle

John Steinbeck, one of only seven American novelists awarded the Nobel Prize, has long been acknowledged as one of America’s preeminent writers and has long attracted a substantial readership. So much is clear. Of Mice and Men and The Pearl are read by nearly all American high school students. The Grapes of Wrath has sold over 150,000 American editions a year for the past decade—and steadily for over sixty years; indeed, nearly all of Steinbeck’s books have remained in print. Translated into most languages, his novels are read enthusiastically outside the United States. From 1939 (the year Lewis Milestone’s Of Mice and Men was released) to 1955 (the year Elia Kazan’s East of Eden premiered) more good films were made from Steinbeck’s novels than from those of his contemporaries. Scores of artists and writers have been influenced by his social and ecological visions—Woody Guthrie, Bruce Springsteen, T. C. Boyle, and Russell Banks among others. As a writer who, beginning in the 1930s, gave voice to the ordinary man and woman, he came to be the conscience of America. With empathy and clarity he witnessed and recorded much of the political and social upheaval of the twentieth century: the Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Vietnam. And always he wrote a marvelously lucid, accessible prose. So much is clear.

But he has also been boxed in critically, his place in the much-debated literary canon unsettled, uncertain. Is he a mere realist? A regionalist? A California writer who abandoned his native land—and his own material—when he moved permanently to New York in the late 1940s? A writer to be read in high Susan Shillinglaw and Kevin Hearle school and thus not sufficiently complex for a University curriculum? A writer who did his best work in the 1930s and then drifted into baggier, less probing novels? Such categories and opinions have frequently been imposed, like a Procrustean bed, on John Steinbeck’s work. The purpose of this volume, as the title suggests, is to consider his prose in other contexts, to view it with other critical lenses. Readable and broadly appealing, his work is also highly complex and experimental. His avid reading of history and his lifelong attention to science make him a far more profound writer than many readers have acknowledged. He was a modernist outside the traditional boundaries of modernism, his prose shaped by myth; his sentences honed, like Hemingway’s, to the essential; his visionary characters as thoroughly deflated as Fitzgerald’s. He wrote again and again about the process of creativity itself, as a fine-tuned reading of East of Eden or Cannery Row makes readily apparent. John Steinbeck is a far more ambitious writer, his scope far broader, and his layered books (a description he coined) far more complex than many readers have acknowledged. These essays take this popular, accessible writer beyond the established critical boundaries, beyond well-worn thematic terrain, beyond the theoretically commonplace. And beyond America’s shores.

Steinbeck himself was long suspicious of critical categories. As early as 1932, when he was sent the galleys for To a God Unknown, he confides in his notebook that The critics will scream shame at me (LVN). Since his previous two novels, Cup of Gold (1929) and The Pastures of Heaven (1932) had received hardly any notice at all, and that mostly positive, his remark seems odd, overly sensitive. But the anticipation of negative criticism—undoubtedly self-protective—also indicates the degree to which Steinbeck felt that his work would not be fully appreciated or understood. Each book was, for him, an experiment, a point he makes clear in a little essay he wrote in 1950, Critics, Critics Burning Bright, after his highly unorthodox play, Burning Bright, received decidedly unfriendly reviews:

Since by the process of writing a book I have outgrown that book, and since I like to write, I have not written two books alike. Where would be the interest in that? The result has been (and I can prove it with old reviews) that every book has been attacked by a large section of the critical family. I can also prove by old notices that the preceding book is compared favorably over the current one and the one before over the preceding one . . . having made up their minds what the next book would be like, the critics experienced anger when it was different. (21)

Steinbeck repeatedly and forcefully declared his independence from expectations: A good writer always works at the impossible, he observes in the notebook he wrote for East of Eden (JN 4). Indeed, with his reputation established in the late 1930s, he enjoyed for the next thirty years the freedom to write, for the most part, whatever he pleased. In the year following publication of The Grapes of Wrath, for example, he severed his ties to the novelistic tradition, declaring that I’ve worked the novel—I know it as far as I can take it. I never did think much of it—a clumsy vehicle at best (SLL 193). To discover the form of the new he turned to widely different pursuits: two theses for John Cage to set to percussion music: Phalanx and the Death of the Species (WD 106); an allegorical play about Cannery Row, God in the Pipes—In form . . . almost like a ballet (WD 116); a film script that became The Forgotten Village (1941), and a work of scientific inquiry, Sea of Cortez (1941). His rebirth is an explosion of creativity, of trying out new forms and approaches. During the war years that followed, he wrote with similar virtuosity, completing a non-fictional work about bomber crews, a film treatment called Lifeboat, a novella, The Moon Is Down (1942), a series of war dispatches for the New York Herald Tribune and perhaps the first ecological novel ever published, Cannery Row. These few years from 1939 to 1945 give ample evidence of Steinbeck’s range. He refused to be pigeonholed as a realist, a writer of fiction, a committed social critic, a regional writer. This fierce independence is one of his most salient features as a writer.

The first section of this text embraces Steinbeck’s independence of thought and approach, the essays considering the author’s versatility. From a consideration of sentimentality in The Grapes of Wrath to studies of his influence on Bruce Springsteen and Native American writers, these essays note his willingness to experiment with style, structure, and content; his eagerness to embrace new disciplines and perspectives as ecologist, journalist, playwright and scriptwriter; and his considerable impact on writers, artists and readers. Perhaps what unites these essays is an insistence on Steinbeck’s appeal to a wide audience. His novels are, as John Seelye, among others, asserts, a good read. His plots engage. His characters are accessible. He wrestles with issues that resonate with a diverse readership. Indeed, although none of these essays discusses Steinbeck’s experiments with the play-novelette, it is perhaps that form that best conveys the versatility in Steinbeck that each of these essays explores. In 1936, finished with Of Mice and Men, he wrote a short piece explaining the experimental form he’d created, the play-novelette, in which he notes that the novel reaches a literate audience, and a play a broader audience. Combining both forms, a play-novelette would reach the widest possible audience. Furthermore, not only might the novel benefit by the discipline, the terseness of the drama, but the drama itself might achieve increased openness, freedom and versatility (The novel might benefit 51). Like Walt Whitman, Steinbeck reached broadly across America with his new form of expression, and the steady endurance of Of Mice and Men as text, play, and film gives testimony to the powerful versatility of form. The ghost of George Milton, who shoots his friend Lennie out of love and need, throws shadows over the twentieth century as fully as does The Ghost of Tom Joad, who calls Springsteen, and others, to political and social engagement.

The second section considers Steinbeck as world citizen, a stature he has certainly attained. This most American of writers is, in fact, a quintessential Westerner in his restless curiosity about new terrain. From the time he left his hometown of Salinas in 1919, he craved new experiences—at one point leaving a note for his college roommate at Stanford that he was bound for China, a trip that never materialized. But when he finally had the funds to travel in the mid-1930s, he started traveling widely and writing about the places he saw. In 1935 he and his wife Carol went to Mexico, a country he visited and wrote about with some frequency because, he notes, there’s an illogic there I need. Two years later he and Carol sailed to Scandinavia and Russia. He went overseas as a war correspondent in 1943, covered post-war Russia in 1947, and, with his third wife, Elaine, wrote various magazine pieces about his travels to Spain, Paris and Italy throughout the 1950s. In 1963 he, Elaine, and Edward Albee toured Russia and Poland on a trip sponsored by the State Department. In 1967, he covered the Vietnam War for the Long Island paper, Newsday, in a highly controversial series called Letters to Alicia. Steinbeck was at home in the world at large. Shortly before his marriage to Elaine in 1949, he writes, You said that this [the Pacific Grove cottage] was my home but I have thought about it deeply. I think I have no ‘place’ home. Home is people and where you work well. I have homes everywhere and many I have not even seen yet. That is perhaps why I am restless. I haven’t seen all of my homes (SLL 382).

But Steinbeck’s internationalism cuts more deeply, as these essays suggest. His novels and plays, most set in America, have won an international audience that has sometimes been more passionate about his writing than have been his American readers. When The Moon Is Down was published in 1942, for example, the American public, polarized by war, was tepid in its response to this fictional treatment of totalitarianism. Two influential critics, Clifton Fadiman and James Thurber, attacked the writer’s patriotism and alleged that Steinbeck—soft on Nazis because he portrayed them as people, not automatons—had a naïve grasp of world politics. In France, England, and Norway, however, readers embraced the writer’s parable about Nazi forces invading a country much like Norway. Foreign readers felt that this American writer, far from the European front, had captured, in the midst of war, their suffering and their unflagging spirit. Steinbeck’s empathy knew no cultural boundaries. He understood ordinary people and relished small scenes of human drama: I do not know what the people of France are thinking, he writes in his first article for Collier’s magazine in 1952, but I do know to a certain extent what the farmers, winegrowers, teachers and kids of the little village of Poligny are thinking and talking about. This seems important to me. People like these are the soul and guts of France (26). And, one certainly might add, working people are the soul and guts of his fictional world. He sought urgently to understand and to help readers see clearly as well. In every bit of honest writing in the world, he observes in 1938, there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other (LVN). Throughout a long career that was his aim.

Steinbeck’s signature fictional relationship is, undoubtedly, male friendship—George and Lennie, Casy and Tom Joad, Mack and the boys, Lee and Adam Trask to name only a few. But the role of what might be called a feminine sensibility is far more compelling in his fiction than a brief overview of his work might suggest. The Grapes of Wrath concludes, after all, not with Casy mentoring Tom but with Ma’s final lesson to Rose of Sharon, delivered wordlessly. If Tom learns political engagement, Rose of Sharon appreciates the value of human connection, humility, and generosity of spirit. Men figuring gets the migrants only so far. Essays in the third section of this text look at Steinbeck’s consideration of gender, and do so in ways which illuminate the extent to which feminist literary criticism and Steinbeck criticism have both become more subtle and more theoretically sophisticated over the last few decades. In her introduction to the anthology The New Feminist Criticism, Elaine Showalter notes that In its earliest years, feminist criticism concentrated on exposing the misogyny of literary practice (5). Steinbeck, with his platoons of happy prostitutes and his ranks of powerful but seemingly stereotypical maternal presences, received his share of comeuppance from early feminist readings. But as society began to explore the broad notion of what it means to be feminine, and as feminist critics began to question the ways in which society and literary works construct gender roles, it became clear that Steinbeck’s female characters were far from incidental, and that Steinbeck’s relationship as an author to the gendering of his culture is far more complex than anyone had previously imagined.

Finally, the fourth section considers Steinbeck’s lifelong interest in science. In his 1959 book The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, physicist-turned-novelist C. P. Snow decried the growing cultural divide between science and literature. Snow noted that specialization within and among academic disciplines had created a situation in which the finest minds in science and the arts were no longer able to inspire each other across their gulf of mutual incomprehension. The science section of this volume brings together a series of essays analyzing some of the many ways in which Steinbeck’s works bridge that gulf. John Steinbeck and his best friend Ed Ricketts were a pair of Renaissance men. Together they wrote Sea of Cortez, which continues to be revered by marine biologists around the world. Mythology guru Joseph Campbell once admitted that in the months he’d spent with Steinbeck and Ricketts they’d taught him more about comparative mythology than he’d taught them. Clearly, John Steinbeck is the great pre-Thomas Pynchon exception, among twentieth-century American novelists, to Snow’s pronouncement about our divided civilization. As these essays illustrate, Steinbeck’s characters are thinking animals, and although they may behave in accordance with their sentimental beliefs, Steinbeck’s books do not.

The science section of this volume includes one essay by a scientist, a number of essays by literary critics on the influence of the scientific method and contemporary science on Steinbeck’s writing, and even one essay suggesting that Steinbeck became a less scientifically minded writer after Ricketts’s death. The essays do not, however, universally support C. P. Snow’s notion that we are becoming a civilization of two cultures: one scientific and another artistic and humanistic. One of the important trends of the last quarter century has been the increasing humanistic and historical contextualization of science. With such classic works as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the history of science has established itself as an important academic discipline with much to reveal about both the timeliness and the socially constructed nature of scientific truths. A number of the essays in this volume, in fact, suggest what Steinbeck and Ricketts acknowledge so frequently in Sea of Cortez, that far from offering timeless pronouncements of truth, everything they write is of contingent value: its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits—our own without reservation (1). These essays analyze Steinbeck’s science in historical and social context to reveal not only how much Steinbeck broke through the boundaries between science and literature but also just how much in his scientific thinking he was a man of his time.

Reviewing a little-known book that Steinbeck published in 1948, A Russian Journal, William McFee wrote that Steinbeck possessed an observant eye, a deadpan humor, and a command of the English language unsurpassed by any American of our time (qtd. in McElrath xx). Beyond Boundaries: Rereading John Steinbeck nudges readers toward that kind of full appreciation of John Steinbeck’s work.

I

Beyond Boundaries

1

Come Back to the Boxcar, Leslie Honey: Or, Don’t Cry For Me, Madonna, Just Pass the Milk

Steinbeck and Sentimentality

John Seelye

Seelye answers Leslie Fiedler’s attack on Steinbeck as a sentimental writer by comparing Steinbeck to sentimentalists—especially comparing Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck uses sentimentality as an aspect of his characters and readers but then has chance, a quintessentially un-Christian and anti-sentimental force, crush it.

I want to start by rendering a précis of a famous work of fiction: it is about the breakup of families, chiefly caused by the vagaries of staple-crop agriculture; it is about a man of humble origins and Christly virtues, a lay minister for a time, who emerges during the course of the novel as a scapegoat for the people he represents and who is killed by the forces of exploitative, capitalistic agribusiness, figured as intolerant, bigoted, and ignorant wielders of absolute authority; it focuses on family and on the values promoted by domestic virtues by means of scenes with women who are central to the plot, who prove far stronger than the men with whom they are associated; it stresses the importance of motherhood, figured as a positive force working to maintain the coherence of family even as the domestic unit is torn asunder by centrifugal social forces which have disempowered male authority. This work of fiction is founded on carefully gathered facts; it transcends the particular, however, and is epical in scope, for the action ranges widely along the length of a longitudinal geopolitical axis of the United States; it is a movement through space permitting a documentary series of vignettes demonstrating the social ills caused by an economic system indifferent to the integrity of the family, to the suffering of the dispossessed, to the basic needs of humanity. The action from time to time builds to violence, in which a courageous few do battle with the many who draw their strength from a code of laws that are based on the sacredness of private property essential to the Constitution.

It is a work of sentimental fiction, which attempts to enlist our sympathies, to draw from us tears of grief for the tragic lot of families torn asunder by economic forces, to move us to better the lot of our fellow human beings. It ends with the conversion of a son of one of the farming families to radicalism, virtually swearing on the grave of his Christ-like friend that he will join the growing ranks of those aroused to anger and action by the tragic inequities permitted in American society. We as readers are reached out to by his conversion, which is intended to move us to do likewise, to enlist us in the same struggle. We weep tears of anger but they are not idle tears. Thousands of our fellow readers weep also, a torrent of water that will sweep away the iniquities to which we have been vicarious witnesses, that will turn the wheels of the millstones of God, grinding a wrathful vintage from the perpetrators of injustice. A great war is coming, just beyond the closing pages of this book, a war that will lift the intolerable burden of suffering and poverty from the families and open the doors of opportunity wide to them.

The novel is, of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. James Baldwin has called Uncle Tom’s Cabin Everybody’s Protest Novel, in an essay that I for many years, not having read it, thought was about The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, a novel which bears a certain resemblance to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (149). These points of similarity are worth consideration, if only because Leslie Fiedler, who in Love and Death in the American Novel pronounced Stowe’s book the greatest of all novels of sentimental protest (264) of the nineteenth century, has denounced The Grapes of Wrath as maudlin, sentimental, and overblown (Looking Back 55).

Now Fiedler is an icon, whose courage to make outrageous statements provides a model inspiring us not to walk the line but dance along the edge. It was courageous in 1960 to praise Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and positively foolhardy in 1989 to stomp on The Grapes of Wrath in the presence of a host of Steinbeckians: From this pressing came no sweet communion wine, but, as I have been informed, tears shed in maudlin and overblown grief at having to witness the public dismantling of a beloved object. But that has been Fiedler’s mode ever since he shocked the literary establishment by proposing that the love between Huck and Jim was the kind that passeth the laws of Mississippi. Fiedler is a kind of lumberjack, whose critical dynamite loosens up academic log jams and gets the wood moving again, rafting it downstream toward the pulp mills that roll out the paper on which, according to Fiedler, our greatest masterpieces are written. And regarding his attack on Steinbeck’s sentimentality, I am as always grateful to Fiedler because he has provided the fulcrum for the lever I am about to set in motion. To my mind, Steinbeck’s book is assuredly the greatest sentimental novel of protest of the twentieth century.

Moreover, like Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1960s, which owed its advent in the curriculum to the increased attention being paid to African Americans during the struggle for Civil Rights, The Grapes of Wrath is greatly relevant to the present, a time when the problems of migrant workers are once again being brought forward. And as for the homeless, well they are always with us, but never in such numbers I think as now. To borrow President Clinton’s imaginative and highly evocative metaphor, if there is a bridge to the twenty-first century, a broken-down automobile with a family living in it is stuck half-way across, from which vantage point you may see a group of foreign nationals wading over to the farther side.

Before we join them, pending the universal loss of tenure, let us for a time consider the meaning of the word sentimental, that being the problematic half of the whole, for surely all of us can agree what a protest novel is. And it is at the start important to point out some differences between Stowe’s novel and Steinbeck’s, which like the similarities are helpful in defining what the sentimental was to writers of far different cultural origins and historical generations.

First off, let me say that Steinbeck probably never read Stowe’s novel, which during the 1920s and 1930s was thought of, when it was thought of at all, as a literary curiosity of the nineteenth century, which survived largely through the Tom shows that were a regular part of traveling carnivals. Steinbeck surely knew about Uncle Tom. Everybody knew about Uncle Tom, especially James Baldwin, for whose generation Stowe’s hero was generally confused with Booker T. Washington as black men who danced Jim Crow to the white man’s tune. We now know differently, having over the past thirty years developed a much more intimate and informed acquaintance with Stowe’s novel, and realize that Uncle Tom is a latter-day Christ, who in refusing to take up the whip and flog his fellow slaves at the behest of Simon Legree guarantees his own crucifixion. It is an act not of cowardice but great courage, an act moreover that strikes at the very heart of the system of which Tom and his fellow slaves are victims, which corrupts whites as well as blacks because of the effects of absolute power. It is an extreme version of the civil disobedience about which Thoreau was writing at the time, and for which he logged a famous night in the Concord jail. It is, that is to say, an intensely political act, that reaches for its impetus beyond the laws of men to that higher law to which Thoreau himself had reference.

But where Thoreau thought of the higher law in general, perhaps even deistic terms, as that body of self-evident truths to which Jefferson made reference in the Declaration of Independence, Uncle Tom (and Harriet Beecher Stowe) were thinking about gospel truths. Tom draws his strength from the Bible, from the example of Christ. As Neitzsche observed, Christianity was the religion of women and slaves; it was (and is) the religion of the oppressed, that holds out the consolation of heaven to those who suffer without hope of relief here on earth. Women and slaves were equals in Rome in the time of the Caesars as persons without power; it was a situation that had not much changed by 1850 in America. Harriet Beecher Stowe responded in a characteristic evangelical manner, by holding out to women and slaves the promise of power implicit in the Gospels; indeed, she gave that power to the women and the slaves in her novel, as an example to her readers of what could be done through the liberating agency of faith—in opposition to the oppressiveness of man-made and unjust laws. That power is essential to the force of sentimentality in fiction.

Suffering in sentimental fiction, according to Jane Tompkins, may cause tears, but they are tears of identification and sympathy. Women, in effect, by prayerfully suffering abuse from drunken husbands and dying pious deaths from tuberculosis and other lingering diseases, gain terrific power by imitating Christ in his passion, who died from the effects of entrenched Orthodoxy and the Roman empire. But we need to add a third factor here; in Stowe’s novel suffering in imitation of Christ is not empowerment per se, but is used to give impetus to the abolition movement. Along with her emphasis on the family, a strategy to gain the interest of her middle-class readers, Stowe’s use of Tom as a black Christ, however heart-felt, was an effective device that appealed to that class of Americans who had political power. Hers once again is a protest novel, the strategy of which is to move her readers to take action; a call from the author herself comes at the very end of the book, when she instructs her readers to do that which makes them feel good. Obviously doing nothing was not what Stowe had in mind.

It perhaps helps here to remember that for Jane Tompkins the pluperfect sentimental novel is The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner, the end of which brings the heroine to an absolute sense of her own unworth, a humility born of Christian doctrine that promises the ultimate reward: a heaven on earth identified with marriage to a minister. There is no reference in Warner’s book to the social and economic inequities of her day, even though she and her sister were victims of the very unstable commercial situation that was typical of speculative capitalism in mid-nineteenth century America. For Christians like Warner, then and now, the evils of this world are simply irrelevant to the larger design, which is preparing oneself for the next and far, far better world to which they will be going, having done those far, far better things for others to which Charles Dickens, the ultimate sentimentalist of the day, made frequent reference. Dickens for his part was well aware of the inequities of this world, which are displayed in full in his fiction, but though he showed Stowe and Warner how sentimentality could be used to good effect in arousing sympathy for the underprivileged and dispossessed, Dickens did not write novels of protest. Thus, in Oliver Twist, having exposed the horrors of workhouse life, he proposed no alternative solution to poverty. Instead, he put considerable emphasis on personal benevolence, that is, the happy hearthside condition which his long-suffering orphan boy finally attains, not because of any government program, but through the agency of his regained birthright, an action that is providentially determined.

On the other side of the Civil War we have the instance of Bret Harte, who was, to borrow the title of his popular poem, Dickens in Camp. Mark Twain sneered at Bret Harte’s saintly whores and sanctimonious sons-of-bitches, but Harte, like Stowe, owed a great debt to Dickens, from whom he abstracted the idea of his golden-hearted gamblers and open-handed gold miners. Harte went Dickens one better, for he had no social agenda at all; indeed, the world he wrote about had already disappeared by the time he began writing about it. He was merely playing with an idea that was given warrant by a situation, namely the essentially male makeup of California mining-camp life. But in eliciting his readers’ often tearful sympathy for these rough-surfaced but tender-hearted and sensitive West-Coast guys, Harte was providing an almost linear demonstration of what is much more complex in both Dickens and Stowe, namely the exponential diagram implicit in The Luck of Roaring Camp, in which the presence of a child brings out the mother in all of the men resident in the place, rendering Roaring Camp ambiguous in implication, at least to modern ears. For what are we talking about here but cross-dressing? But the effect of this transformation is to bring out as it were the mothers in all of us as well, so that we brim over with human sympathy and then weep at the ending when a sudden flood wipes out the camp and leaves the little Luck dead in the arms of one of the rough miners, who died in trying to save him. There is a certain element of mischief in Harte’s fiction, and the flood that destroys the camp and child is the kind of water that turns the works in sentimental fiction. For the kid misnamed Luck is a male version of Little Nell and Little Eva, not used by Harte to move us to promote social reforms but assuredly to move us to