The Grapes of Wrath (2 page)

In early July 1938, Steinbeck told literary critic Harry T. Moore that he was improvising what was for him a “new method” of fictional technique: one which combined a suitably elastic form and elevated style to express the far-reaching tragedy of the migrant drama. In
The Grapes of Wrath
he devised a contrapuntal structure, which alternates short lyrical chapters of exposition and background pertinent to the migrants as a group (Chapters
1
,
3
,
5
,
7
,
9
,
11
,
12
,
14
,
15
,
17
,
19
,
21
,
23
,
25
,
27
,
29
) with the long narrative chapters of the Joad family’s dramatic exodus to California (Chapters
2
,
4
,
6
,
8
,
10
,
13
,
16
,
18
,
20
,
22
,
24
,
26
,
28
,
30
). Just as in
Moby-Dick
Melville created intensity and prolonged suspense by alternating between the temporal chapters of Ahab’s driven quest for the white whale and Ishmael’s numinous chapters on cetology, so Steinbeck structured his novel by juxtaposition. His “particular” chapters are the slow-paced and lengthy narrative chapters that embody traditional characterization and advance the dramatic plot, while his jazzy, rapid-fire “interchapters” work at another level of recognition by expressing an atemporal, universal, synoptic view of the migrant condition. As he wrote Chapters
5
and
6
, for instance, Steinbeck reminded himself that for maximum effect, “I want the reader to be able to keep [the general and particular chapters] separate in his mind.” In fact, his “general” or intercalary chapters (“pace changers,” Steinbeck called them) were expressly designed to “hit the reader below the belt.
With the rhythms and symbols of poetry one can get into a reader—open him up and while he is open introduce things on a [sic] intellectual level which he would not or could not receive unless he were opened up,” Steinbeck revealed to Columbia undergraduate Herbert Sturz in 1953.

The Grapes of Wrath
is an engaged novel with a partisan posture, many complex voices, and passionate prose styles. (“No other American novel has succeeded in forging and making instrumental so many prose styles,” Peter Lisca believes.) Except for its unflinching treatment of the Great Depression’s climatic, social, and economic conditions, and those interchapters that serve to halt the emotional slide toward sentimentality, there is nothing cynically distanced about it, nothing coolly modernist, in the way we have come to understand the elite literary implications of that term in the past seventy-five years. (
The Grapes of Wrath
is in some ways an old-fashioned novel, even down to its curious avoidance of human sexuality.) It is not narrated from the first-person point of view, yet the language has a consistently catchy eyewitness quality about it, and its vivid biblical, empirical, poetical, cinematic, and folk styles demonstrate the remarkable tonal and visual acuity of Steinbeck’s ear and eye.

Steinbeck told Merle Armitage on February 17, 1939, that in “composition, in movement, in tone and in scope,”
The Grapes of Wrath
was “symphonic.” Indeed, his fusion of intimate narrative and panoramic editorial chapters enforces this dialogic concert. Chapters, styles, voices all speak to each other, set up resonances, send echoes back and forth—point and counterpoint, strophe and antistrophe—as in a huge symphony whose total impression far surpasses the sum of its discrete and sometimes dissonant parts. Steinbeck’s novel belongs to that vital class of fictions whose shape issues not from an ideal blueprint of aesthetic propriety but from the generative urgency of its author’s experience. (“It
had
to be written,” Stanley Kunitz said in 1939.) Steinbeck’s direct involvement with the plight of America’s Dust Bowl migrants in the latter half of the 1930s created his obsessive urge to tell their story honestly but also movingly. “This must be a good book,” he wrote in
Working Days
on June 10, 1938. “It simply must. I haven’t any choice. It must be far and away the best thing I have ever attempted—
slow but sure, piling detail on detail until a picture and an experience emerge. Until the whole throbbing thing emerges.”

Making his audience see and feel that living picture was paramount. “I am not writing a satisfying story,” he claimed to Pascal Covici on January 16, 1939:

I’ve done my damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags, I don’t want him satisfied.… I tried to write this book the way lives are being lived not the way books are written…. Throughout I’ve tried to make the reader participate in the actuality, what he takes from it will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollowness. There are five layers in this book, a reader will find as many as he can and he won’t find more than he has in himself.

Steinbeck’s participatory aesthetic was based on a circle of complicity that linked “the trinity” of writer, text, and reader to ensure maximum affective impact. On June 7, 1938, as he completed
Chapter 5
, for instance, he kept his eye steadily on target: “Today’s work is the overtone of the tractors, the men who run them, the men they displace, the sound of them, the smell of them. I’ve got to get this over. Got to because this one’s tone is very important—this is the eviction sound and the tonal reason for movement. Must do it well.”

Steinbeck conceived his novel on simultaneous levels of existence, ranging from socio-economic determinism to transcendent spirituality. Louis Owens explains how, for example, biblical parallels in
The Grapes of Wrath
illuminate four of Steinbeck’s layers:

On one level it is the story of a family’s struggle for survival in the Promised Land…. On another level it is the story of a people’s struggle, the migrants’. On a third level it is the story of a nation, America. On still another level, through… the allusions to Christ and those to the Israelites and Exodus, it becomes the story of mankind’s quest for profound comprehension of his commitment to his fellow man and to the earth he inhabits.

Thus Steinbeck pushed back the accepted boundaries of traditional mimetic fiction and redefined the proletarian form. Like all truly significant American novels,
The Grapes of Wrath
does not offer codified solutions. Even though it treats with privilege a particular section of the migrant labor scene (Steinbeck ignores the problems of nonwhite
migrant workers—Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, and Mexicans—who made up a significant percentage of California’s agricultural labor force, according to Carey McWilliams), his book still speaks to the universal experience of human disenfranchisement, still holds out hope for human advancement. At every level
The Grapes of Wrath
enacts the process of its author’s belief and embodies the shape of his faith, as in this ringing synthesis from
Chapter 14
.

The last clear definite function of man—muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need—this is man. To build a wall, to build a house, a dam, and in the wall and house and dam to put something of Manself, and to Manself take back something of the wall, the house, the dam; to take hard muscles from the lifting, to take the clear lines and form from conceiving. For 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.

II

Behind this most public of American novels stands a reclusive writer. John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, on February 27, 1902, to respectable middle-class parents: John Ernst Steinbeck, Monterey County treasurer, and Olive Hamilton Steinbeck, a former schoolteacher. Steinbeck attended Salinas High School, where he was an undistinguished student, then enrolled sporadically at Stanford University from 1919 to 1925. There, as an English-journalism major, he took a short-story writing class from Edith Mirrielees and was published in Stanford’s undergraduate literary magazine, but he never finished his degree. He held a variety of temporary jobs during the next four years (laborer and cub reporter in New York City, resort handyman and watchman in Lake Tahoe), eventually publishing his first novel,
Cup of Gold
, in 1929. The novel scarcely sold, but Steinbeck’s choice of vocation was sealed. He never again held a traditional nine-to-five job. Beginning in 1930, with the support and encouragement of his parents and especially of his wife, Carol Henning Steinbeck, whom he had married that
year, writing became Steinbeck’s daily occupation and continued so through lean and flush times for the remainder of his life. When Steinbeck died on December 20, 1968, he had managed to support himself and his families (he was married three times and had two sons and one stepdaughter) exclusively on his writing income, primarily from the thirty books of fiction, drama, filmscripts, and nonfictional prose he published between 1929 and 1966.

Cup of Gold
, a swashbuckling historical romance based on the life of seventeenth-century Welsh buccaneer Henry Morgan, gave no indication that Steinbeck would eventually be capable of producing a graphic novel with the startling originality, magnitude, compassion, and power of
The Grapes of Wrath
. What transpired in those ten years is as arresting an example of determined, self-willed artistic growth as we have in American letters, for in the nine volumes of prose (mostly fiction) he produced in the 1930s, Steinbeck simply got stronger and stronger as a novelist. His achievement is especially moving because he rarely thought of himself as a natural genius and rarely believed he had ever “arrived” as a writer. This typical self-assessment is recorded in
Working Days
(Steinbeck’s journal is the hermetic story behind the making of
The Grapes of Wrath
, the writer’s private text behind the reader’s public one): “I was not made for success. I find myself with a growing reputation. In many ways it is a terrible thing.… Among other things I feel that I have put something over. That this little success of mine is cheating.”

Steinbeck augmented his talent with plain hard work and repeated practice. Where his characters use tools to elevate work to a dignified level, Steinbeck turned to his “comfortable and comforting” pen, an instrument that became an “extension” of the best part of himself: “Work is the only good thing,” he claimed on July 6, 1938, in
Working Days
. For Steinbeck, writing was a kind of textual habitation. He wrote books methodically the way other people built houses—word by word, sentence by sentence. His act of writing was a way of fulfilling his dream of finding a home in the architectural spaces created by his imagination. In fact, this creative and interior level of engagement is the elusive, unacknowledged fifth layer of Steinbeck’s novel. Although Steinbeck insisted on effacing his own presence in
The Grapes of Wrath
, the fact
remains that it is a very personal book, rooted in his own compulsion. The “plodding” pace of Steinbeck’s writing schedule informed the slow, “crawling” movement of the Joads’ journey, while the harried beat of his own life gave the proper “feel” and tone to his beleaguered characters. Their unsavory weaknesses and vanities, their struggles for survival, their unsuspecting heroism are Steinbeck’s as well. If
The Grapes of Wrath
praises the honorableness of labor and ratifies the obsessive quest for a home, it is because the author himself felt these twin acts called into being the most committed, the most empathetic, the most resourceful qualities of the human psyche.

By nature Steinbeck was not a collaborator. “Unless a writer is capable of solitude he should leave books alone and go into the theatre,” he exclaimed years later. Solitude was an increasingly precious commodity in Steinbeck’s life because intrusions conspired to paralyze his will and disrupt his concentration. “Every book seems the struggle of a whole life,” he lamented in
Working Days
. A grass-growing mood was rarely his, so he managed as best he could within his constraints. Although it didn’t always ensure complete solitude, Steinbeck often sequestered himself in the eight-by-eight-foot work room of Arroya del Ajo (Garlic Gulch), the house he and Carol built in 1936 on Greenwood Lane in Los Gatos: “Just big enough for a bed and a desk and a gun rack and a little book case. I like to sleep in the room I work in,” he told George Albee.

The Grapes of Wrath
’s communal vision began in the fire of Steinbeck’s own labor, but the flames were fanned by numerous people, especially Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins. Carol Steinbeck (1906–1983), his outgoing first wife, was far more politically radical than John, and she actively supported northern California’s local fugitive agricultural labor movement before he did. (According to his biographer, Jackson J. Benson, Steinbeck was not much interested in doctrinaire political theories at this point in his career.) Carol was an energetic, talented person in her own right, who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. Their partnership and marriage was smoother and more egalitarian in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought first by
Of Mice and Men
(New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), and then by
The
Grapes of Wrath
, their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol was an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, and she was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleaguered, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, which was much of the time, Carol handled—but didn’t always like—most of the routine domestic duties. She also shielded her husband as much as possible from unwarranted disruptions and intrusions, and she oversaw some of the financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Stein-beck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted on August 2, 1938.