Working Days (5 page)

Steinbeck’s leap from right-minded competency to inspired vision was the result of one linked experience that hit him so hard it called forth every ounce of his moral indignation, social anger, and pity. In late February and early March Steinbeck witnessed the deplorable conditions at Visalia where thousands of human beings, flooded out of their shelters, were starving to death: “the water is a foot deep in the tents and the children are up on the beds and there is no food and no fire, and the county has taken off all the nurses because ‘the problem is so great that we can’t do anything about it.’ So they do nothing” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
p. 161). In the company of Tom Collins, photographer Horace Bristol, and other Farm Security Administration personnel, Steinbeck worked day and night for nearly two weeks (sometimes dropping to sleep in the mud from exhaustion) to help relieve the misery, though of course no aid seemed adequate.
¹⁵
What Steinbeck encountered in that sea of mud and debris was so devastating, so “heartbreaking” he told Elizabeth Otis, that he was utterly transfixed by the “staggering” conditions, and by “suffering” so great that objective reporting would only falsify the moment (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds.,
Steinbeck: A Life in Letters,
pp. 159, 161).

What Steinbeck witnessed at Visalia had a profound, if temporarily delayed, impact on his novel. From the outset in creating the Joad family to occupy the narrative chapters of
The Grapes of Wrath,
Steinbeck gave his novel a specific human context, a felt emotional quality, and a dramatic dimension all his earlier versions lacked: “Begin the detailed description of the family I am to live with. Must take time in the description, detail, detail, looks, clothes, gestures.... We have to know these people. Know their looks and their nature,” he reminded himself (Entry #17). Steinbeck’s symbolic portrayal of this universal human family brought the novel alive for him: “Make the people live. Make them live” (Entry #30). By conceiving the Joads as “an over-essence of people” (Entry #30), Steinbeck elevated the entire history of the migrant struggle into the ceremonial realm of art.

Steinbeck’s mythology was one of endings as well as of beginnings. Like Ernest Hemingway, whose physical wounding at Fossalta, Italy, in 1918 became the generative event for a string of stories and novels (especially
A Farewell to Arms
), Steinbeck’s internal wounding at Visalia marked him deeply, set him apart from his fellow travelers Tom Collins and Horace Bristol. Indeed, a somewhat mystified Tom Collins recalled a conversation with Steinbeck at Visalia in which the latter claimed: “ ‘... something hit me and hit me hard for it hurts inside clear to the back of my head. I got pains all over my head, hard pains. Have never had pains like this before....’ ” (Collins, “Bringing in the Sheaves,” p. 225). Clearly, Steinbeck’s experience opened the floodgates of his attention, created
The Grapes of Wrath
’s compelling justification, provided its haunting spiritual urgency, and rooted it in the deepest wellsprings of democratic fellow-feeling. In the same way that the rain floods the novel’s concluding chapters, so the memory of Steinbeck’s cataclysmic experience, his recollection of futility and impotency at Visalia, pervades the ending of the book and charges its ominous emotional climate, relieved only by Rose of Sharon’s gratuitous act of sharing her breast with a starving man.

Steinbeck’s deep participation in the events at Visalia also inspired his creation of Tom Joad, the slowly awakening disciple of Jim Casy, whose final acceptance of the preacher’s gospel of social action occurs just as the deluge is about to begin: “Wherever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’—I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build—why, I’ll be there. See? God, I’m talkin’ like Casy. Comes of thinkin’ about him so much. Seems like I can see him sometimes’ ” (Chapter 28). When the apocalypse occurs,
everything
becomes a fiction, Steinbeck suggests, and
all
gestures become symbolic. Futhermore, in one of those magical transferences artists are heir to in moments of extreme exhaustion or receptivity, Steinbeck believed that Tom Joad, his fictive alter ego, not only floats above
The Grapes of Wrath
’s “last pages ... like a spirit” (Entry #87), he imagined that Joad actually entered the novelist’s work space, the private chamber of his soul: “ ”Tom! Tom! Tom!’ I know. It wasn’t him. Yes, I think I can go on now. In fact, I feel stronger. Much stronger. Funny where the energy comes from. Now to work, only now it isn’t work any more“ (Entry #97). With that visitation, that benediction, Steinbeck arrived at the intersection of novel and journal, a luminous point where the life of the writer and the creator of life merge. The terms of his complex investment fulfilled, Steinbeck needed only a few more days to finish his novel.

In matters of form, style, and execution Steinbeck was persuaded or emboldened by another host of haunting voices and visions. Especially in
Grapes’
digressive intercalary chapters, Steinbeck drew on the fluid linguistic style of John Hargrave’s novel, Summer Time Ends (1935), the daring, elastic form of John Dos Passos’s
U S A
trilogy (1937), the narrative tempo of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama,
Ecce Homo!,
and the sequential quality of Lorentz’s films,
The Plow that Broke the Plains
(1936) and
The River
(1937), the stark visual effects of Dorothea Lange’s F.S.A

photographs of Dust Bowl Oklahoma and California migrant life, the poetic/photographic counterpoint of Archibald MacLeish’s
Land of the Free
(1938), the reverberant rhythms of the King James Bible, the inspired mood of classical music, the poignant refrains of American folk music, the elevated timbre of the Greek epics, and the biological impetus of his own phalanx, or group-man, theory. Steinbeck’s conscious and unconscious borrowings, echoes, and reverberations throughout
The Grapes of Wrath
came from a constellation of artistic, social, and intellectual sources so varied no single reckoning can do them justice. All of these elements—and more—entered the crucible of his imagination and allowed Steinbeck to transform the weight of his whole life into the new book. In
The Grapes of Wrath
the multiple streams of subjective experience, ameliorism, graphic realism, and symbolic form gather to create the “truly American book” (Entry #18) Steinbeck had planned.

As a result of shifting political emphases, the enlightened recommendations of the La Follette Committee (that the National Labor Relations Act include farm workers), the effects of loosened labor laws (California’s discriminatory “anti-migrant” law, established in 1901, was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1941), the creation of compulsory military service, and the inevitable recruitment of migrant families into defense plant and shipyard jobs caused by the booming economy of World War II (California growers soon complained of an acute shortage of seasonal labor), the particular set of epochal conditions that crystallized Steinbeck’s awareness in the first place passed from his view (though not necessarily ours, if we witness the continuing struggles of Mexican-American farm laborers since then). Like other momentous American novels that embody the bitter, often tragic, transition from one way of life to another,
The Grapes of Wrath
possessed, among its other attributes, perfect timing. Its appearance permanently changed the literary landscape of the United States.

 

The Grapes of Wrath
also changed Steinbeck forever. Many “have speculated,” his biographer writes, “about what happened to change Steinbeck after
The Grapes of Wrath.
One answer is that what happened was the writing of the novel itself” (Benson,
True Adventures of John Steinbeck,
p. 392). Here, perhaps, is a private tragedy, a cautionary tale, to parallel the tragic aspects of his fiction: an isolated individual writer composed a novel that extolled a social group’s capacity for survival in a hostile economic world, but he was himself so nearly unraveled in the process that the unique qualities—the angle of vision, the vital signature, the moral indignation—that made his art exemplary in the first place could never be repeated with the same integrated force. Although he published prolifically after
The Grapes of Wrath,
it would be twelve years before Steinbeck summoned the resources to attempt, in
East of Eden,
another “big” book with a similarly exalted conception and theme. A less hardy writer might have become an anachronism after the success of a celebrated novel like
The
Grapes of Wrath,
but Steinbeck showed the capacity to survive through change. His new writing lacked the aggressive bite of his earlier work (he adamantly refused to repeat himself), but it had the virtue of being so different that it generally kept him from becoming a parody of himself. After 1940 much of his important writing centered on explorations of a new topic—the dimensions of individual choice and imaginative consciousness. A prophetic post-modernist, Steinbeck’s real subject in
Cannery Row, East of Eden, Sweet Thursday, The Winter of Our Discontent,
and
Journal of a Novel
was the creative process itself.

The mystery of creativity was on his mind during Christmas Week 1950, when Steinbeck was sifting through the memorabilia of his past. His impending marriage to Elaine Scott was about to signal another major turn in his life. He had been married twice before—to Carol Henning (1930-1943), and to Gwyn Conger (1943-1948). The first marriage resulted in some of his most famous books; the second marriage produced two sons and much of the material for
East of Eden,
which he would begin writing a month after his wedding to Elaine. The third, and last, marriage promoted emotional stability, and coincided with the international spread of his fame. One of the items Steinbeck came across in his nostalgic mood was the handwritten journal he had kept when he worked on
The Grapes of Wrath.
He sent it to Pat Covici at The Viking Press, with a letter that read in part: “Very many times I have been tempted to destroy this book. It is an account very personal and in many instances purposely obscure. But recently I reread it and only after all this time did the unconscious pattern emerge. It is true that this book is full of my own weaknesses, of complaints and violence. These are just as apparent as they ever were. What a complainer I am. But in rereading, those became less important and the times and the little histories seemed to be more apparent.... I had not realized that so much happened during the short period of the actual writing of
The Grapes of Wrath
—things that happened to me and to you and to the world. But a browsing through will refresh your memory.” Steinbeck had two requests: that the journal not be printed in his lifetime; and that it should be made available to his children, Thom (aged 6) and John (aged 4), if they should ever want to “look behind the myth and hearsay and flattery and slander a disappeared man becomes and to know to some extent what manner of man their father was.”
¹⁶

Steinbeck’s paternalistic concern formed one of the basic impulses for
East of Eden,
which was written in 1951 expressly for his sons. The process of its composition, recorded in the same oversized ledger book with the novel, was published separately, and posthumously, as
Journal of a Novel: The
East of Eden
Letters.
Although the compulsion to write
East of Eden
had been on his mind for several years, its particular ambience was prompted by Steinbeck’s rediscovery of his
Grapes of Wrath
journal. Even as he stood poised to enter the longest writing job of his life (
Grapes
took five months of sustained labor,
East of Eden
required nine; both were consummate acts of faith), Steinbeck couldn’t quite escape the influence of his earlier life. The passage from California in 1938 to New York in 1950 wasn’t as long, or as far, as he imagined, though getting back was another matter.

1. The most useful compendium on the controversial background, reception, and reputation of Steinbeck’s book is Warren French’s A
Companion to
The Grapes of Wrath (New York: The Viking Press, 1963), which includes ample selections of historical, factual, and critical material, all linked with an excellent running commentary. (French’s invaluable little book deserves to be updated and reprinted.) The quotes by Eleanor Roosevelt (from her syndicated column, “My Day,” June 28, 1939) and Congressman Boren (from
Congressional Record,
76th Con., 3rd Sess., pt. 13, LXXXVI, 1940) appear on pages 131 and 126, respectively. In April 1940, after inspecting California migrant camps, Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I have never thought
The Grapes of Wrath
was exaggerated.” Gratefully, Steinbeck responded, “... thank you for your words. I have been called a liar so constantly that ... I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard in the period of my research.” For current overviews of the novel’s public reception, critical evaluation, and place among 1930s art, see Peter Lisca’s helpful Viking Critical Edition of
The Grapes of Wrath: Text and Criticism
(New York: The Viking Press, 1972); Ray Lewis White,
“The Grapes of Wrath
and the Critics of 1939,”
Resources for American Literary Study,
13 (Autumn 1983), 134-64; John Ditsky’s comprehensive introduction to his edition of
Critical Essays on
The Grapes of Wrath (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989); Richard H. Pells’s perceptive
“Radical Visions and American Dreams: Culture and Social Thought in the Depression Years
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973); and David P. Peller’s energetic but sometimes cranky
Hope Among Us Yet: Social Criticism and Social Solace in Depression America
(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987).