A Russian Journal” are being published this month by Reed Books. The first under its William Heinemann name and the others (both republications) under Minerva.
Does Steinbeck prove the cliches about writing and writers to be truisms?
You have to have human misery and suffering to provide the counterpoint of human sacrifice to make good writing. Good writers have to live in turrets, poverty and financial deprivation. Good writers are awful to their family and friends because they are so single-minded about their work.
Jay Parini, in the plainly titled “John Steinbeck, a biography”, provides enough material to make the case.
Once money and Hollywood got him, that was the end of creativity: Steinbeck the one-novel wonder of American literature was ruined by money and fame. He should have been a Russian. Doing what he did with California _ where human misery is only self-imposed _ imagine what he could have done in a more afflicted time and place.
The Great Depression was his gold mine and it yielded The Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer Prize and in effect the Nobel Prize for literature.
“”I’ve always been afraid of it because of what it does to people,” Steinbeck wrote of the prize. “”For one thing I don’t remember anyone doing any work after getting it save maybe Shaw. This last book of Faulkner’s was written long ago. Hemingway went into a kind of hysterical haze. Red Lewis just collapsed into alcoholism and angers. It has in effect amounted to an epitaph. Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but I wouldn’t have accepted it if I hadn’t thought I could beat the rap. I have more work to do an I intend to do it.”
The work he referred to was America and the Americans, which as Parini points out was dismissed as a coffee-table book. Parini disagrees, but even Steinbeck’s greatest detractors would not dismiss the Grapes of Wrath as a coffee-table book. Steinbeck did not beat the rap. He died saying, “”All my life has been aimed at one book and I haven’t started it yet.”
Yet, there was material (after “”The Grapes of Wrath”) for great fiction; Steinbeck himself saw it.
After travelling around America for “”Travels with Charley” he wrote in a letter to Pat Covici:
“”In all my travels I saw very little real poverty, I meant he grinding terrifying poorness of the Thirties. That at least was real and tangible. No, it was a sickness, a kind of wasting disease. There were wishes but no wants. And underneath it all the building energy like gases in a corpse. When that explodes, I tremble to think what will be the result. Over and over I thought we lack the pressures that make strong and the anguish that makes men great. The pressures are debts, the desires are for more material toys and the anguish is boredom. Through time, the nation has become a discontented land.”
That discontent was never a subject in Steinbeck’s fiction in the way the grinding, terrifying poorness was the subject of “”The Grapes of Wrath”.
Steinbeck was a product of California. Materialism was his reference point, even if he was not materialistic himself (though that is arguable).
Do you need material poverty in both writer and subjects to get good writing; isn’t poverty of spirit enough?
The other side of the story is the determinedly creative writer who will put himself through poverty and squalor to write and to get the material and experience to write. The quality of his personal lifestyle had an almost inverse relationship with the quality of his writing. In later years he drove in comfort around America for “”Travels with Charley” and “”America and the Americans”. In earlier years, like George Orwell being down and out in London and Paris, Steinbeck was down and out in Palo Alto and New York.
In Palo Alto, aged 23, Steinbeck forsook the Stanford dorms for a shack behind some stables.
Parini writes: “”Steinbeck’s tackroom was dubbed “The Sphincter’ by Dook Sheffield, and it had the singular virtue of being dirt cheap: five dollars a month. . . . There was no running water or plumbing of any kind out there . . . . The Sphincter was infested with ants, pill bugs and spiders, but Steinbeck appears to have relished the sordidness. He had only three or four pairs of underwear, and these were always hanging on a clothesline that stretched across the dimly lit room. The grove of pines just outside the building was often used as a latrine. One can’t help but think of the grubby but wonderful little house in “”Tortilla Flat” which houses Danny, Big Joe, Pilon and the carefree friends.
“”Steinbeck’s romantic streak was long and wild, and the Sphincter was his version of the traditional writer’s garret. He slept on an army surplus cot and wrote stories on his old-fashioned Corona typewriter, which he propped on an orange crate. For diversion, he made his own red wine in gallon jugs, which he had collected from a nearby grocer [it was Prohibition]. The wine, according to one friend was foul but strong. Steinbeck nursed many a hangover in that dark little room.”
He left Stanford degreeless after getting a job through a friend’s mother-in-law at a holiday lodge in the then undeveloped Lake Tahoe. He lived in a tent and pounded at the Corona late into the night through the summer and autumn.
Then he returned to San Francisco and got a job on a boat going through Panama to New York. At stops in Panama and Havana he hit the high life spending his father’s money and arrived in New York broke.
“”I crept ashore _ frightened and cold and with a touch of panic in my stomach,” Steinbeck recalled. “”I guess I hate New York because I had a thin, lonely time of it there. And I remember too well the cockroaches under my wash basin and the impossibility of getting a job.”
He stayed with his sister and got a job wheeling cement 15 to 18 hours a day at the construction site of Madison Square Garden.
His sister said: “”He couldn’t even read the newspapers when he got home at night. I’d give him a sandwich, and he’d go straight to bed, where he’d sit with a pencil and try to write a few lines. But he knew it would never work. You couldn’t do that kind of physical work and think at the same time.”
Steinbeck was lucky with his family. They were not rich, but comfortable and had some connections. So he got a job as a reporter, but his style was too florid and filled with metaphors. He was sent to the Federal Court where, in his words, he “”did some lousy reporting”.
“”I did, however, perfect a certain literary versatility,” he said later.
This was because federal judges often passed out confiscated whisky to bored reporters, many of whom got too drunk to file, so Steinbeck ghosted in the different styles of their papers.
However, his work for his own paper was haphazard and he was fired. Steinbeck was elated at first, saying he was now free to write a novel.
Parini writes: “”For several weeks he lived on cans of sardines and mouldy crackers, involved in a frenzy of creativity.”
After initial encouragement, he was rejected. He got a passage back to California as a ship’s steward and ended back in Lake Tahoe.
Tahoe made him or saved him as a writer. He got the job as caretaker over winter _ snowbound. After the squalor of Palo Alto and the hustle of New York he now had time and peace to consolidate.
Parini said: “”Like the young writer hero of Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Steinbeck knew he had to cut himself off from his bourgeois origins, from his family, his religion, from everything that held him back. He had to seek the isolation necessary for creative production.”
Parini’s book has a fair amount of semi-Freudian analysis about Steinbeck’s relationships with women, revealing his good and bad and ugly side.
It was a youth of self-indulgence because there was always a family member to come to the rescue with money, a job or connections or all three. His down-and-out and bohemian phases of his youth were always financially underwritten by someone else. He was not financially independent until the publication of “”Tortilla Flat” in 1935, when he was 32. It was a very Californian youth.
After that was the struggle within himself. As his diary shows.
After writing the first part of “”The Grapes of Wrath” he wrote, on June 30, 1938: “”I felt very small and inadequate and incapable but I grew again to love the story which is so much greater than I am.”
In mid-August: “Demoralisation complete and seemingly unbearable.”
August 16: “”I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.”
August 23: “”Always I have been weak. Vacillating and miserable. I wish I wouldn’t. I wish I weren’t. I’m so lazy, so damned lazy.”
Then Charlie Chaplin enters his life. Steinbeck has bought a nearby ranch (on the success of “”Tortilla Flat” and “”Of Mice and Men”). It took till the end of October, 1938, to finish “”Grapes”, and it was published the next year.
He travelled frequently, upsetting his wife, Carol, and then Hollywood got him. He announced he wanted to spend a month there. “”I’ve got to go,” he told her.
Hollywood treated his work well. “”Of Mice and Men” and “”The Grapes of Wrath” were done in film with great artistic integrity, which is more than you can say for most of what it does.
At the end of 1939 Carol became pregnant. Steinbeck insisted she get an abortion because of the possible effect on his career. An infection developed and she had to have a hysterectomy.
Parini described Steinbeck’s behaviour as bordering “”on gross inhumanity”.
Carol had typed his manuscripts, edited them, helped him immensely.
“”Like many artists, Steinbeck was willing at times to sacrifice his family to pursue his work,” Parini writes.
In general, though, the biography is generous. Perhaps too generous.
Steinbeck went through political vilification from those who thought “”Grapes” unfairly attacked land-owners and was communist-inspired and the paranoid J. Edgar Hoover sent his agents to hound Steinbeck. But that story is fairly well-known.
The letters show another Steinbeck _ his ordinariness and mundaneness. A bit like Shakespeare washing his socks. Looking at the 900 pages of letters (and that’s not all of them) you wonder why he did not feel they were wasted words that should have gone into something more creative. Certainly the editors should have culled more; the gems are far between. Still, there is still that haunting memorableness about the best of Steinbeck’s work that will transcend the life of the man who created it. Rose of Sharon offering to suckle the dying man at the end of “”The Grapes of Wrath” recurs in the memory.
Steinbeck never matched that in 30 years more of his life. He remains one of America’s best-loved and most-read writers, but without something to be angered and affronted by and without at least some personal hardship to jolt him Steinbeck never reached that height again. True, he wrote well, with wit and insight, but not with genius.
He was wrong when he wrote at the end of his life: “”All my life has been aimed at one book and I haven’t started it yet.”
He had finished it thirty years earlier.
John Steinbeck, a biography. Jay Parini. 614pp. William Heinemann (division of Reed Books) $45. John Steinbeck. A Life in Letters. Elaine Steinbeck and Robert Wallsten (eds) 906pp Minerva (a division of Reed Books) $14.95. A Russian Journal. John Steinbeck. 220pp Minerva $14.95.