The Grapes of Wrath Read online

  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.

  Carol also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. In January 1938, on a trip to New York City, she met with documentary film-maker Pare Lorentz (1905–1992), arranging between them his first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck-Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle (which was never made) and a private showing of The River and The Plow That Broke the Plains. These pioneering documentary films, which Lorentz made for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal-inspired Resettlement Administration (fore-runner of the Farm Security Administration), dealt with human displacement and natural erosion caused by the Dust Bowl and Mississippi Valley floods. After their initial meeting, Lorentz
became an increasingly important figure in the novelist’s life, providing everything from practical advice on politics to spirited artistic cheerleading.

  Carol left her stamp on The Grapes of Wrath in many ways. She typed the manuscript, editing the text as she went along, and she served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (after typing three hundred pages, she confessed to Elizabeth Otis that she had lost “all sense of proportion” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”). In a brilliant stroke, on September 2, Carol chose the novel’s title from Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” perhaps inspired by her hearing of Pare Lorentz’s radio drama, Ecce Homo!, which ends with a martial version of Howe’s song. Steinbeck was impressed with “the looks of it—marvelous title. The book has being at last”; he considered it “Carol’s best title so far.” (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” his drama agent, Annie Laurie Williams, exulted.) Her role as facilitator is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed it.” On February 23, 1939, Steinbeck told Pascal Covici that he had given Carol the holograph manuscript of The Grapes of Wrath:“You see I feel that this is Carol’s book.”

  Eventually, however, Steinbeck’s heart changed its tune. Carol’s brittle efficiency, managerial brusqueness, and violent mood swings seemed to cause more problems than they solved. She, too, was exhausted by the novel’s completion and at her wit’s end over its histrionic reception: “The telephone never stops ringing, telegrams all the time, fifty to seventy-five letters a day all wanting something. People who won’t take no for an answer sending books to be signed…. Something has to be worked out or I am finished writing. I went south to work and I came back to find Carol just about hysterical. She had been pushed beyond endurance,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis on June 22, 1939. His involvement with a much younger woman, a Hollywood singer named Gwyndolyn Conger, whom he met in mid- 1939 and who quickly came to represent everything Steinbeck felt romantically lacking in Carol, signaled the beginning of the end of their marriage. They separated rancorously in 1941 and divorced two years later.

  The second part of the novel’s dedication—“To TOM who lived it”—refers to Thomas Collins (1897?–1961), the novelist’s chief source, guide, discussant, and chronicler of accurate migrant information. Collins not only put Steinbeck in touch with the real-life prototypes of the Joads and Jim Casy, but he himself served as Steinbeck’s real-life prototype for Jim Rawley, the fictional manager of the Weedpatch government camp. That camp, an accurate rendering of Collins’s Arvin camp, became an oasis of relief for the harried Joads and is featured in Chapters 22 to 26 of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck portrayed Collins with photographic accuracy in Chapter 22: “A little man dressed all in white stood behind [Ma Joad]—a man with a thin, brown, lined face and merry eyes. He was as lean as a picket. His white clean clothes were frayed at the seams.” Steinbeck also caught Collins’s effective interpersonal technique in having Jim Rawley wear frayed clothes and win over Ma Joad by the simple request of asking for a cup of her coffee.

  An intrepid, resourceful, and exceptionally compassionate man, Collins was the manager of a model Farm Security Administration camp, located in Kern County at the southern end of California’s Central Valley. The Arvin Sanitary Camp was one of several proposed demonstration camps intended to provide humane, clean, democratic—but temporary—living conditions for the growing army of migrant workers entering California from the lower Middle West and Dust Bowl region. (More than two dozen camps were planned in 1935 by the Resettlement Administration; by 1940, with New Deal budgets slashed by conservatives in Congress, only fifteen were actually completed or under construction.) Collins possessed a genius for camp administration. Labor historian Anne Loftis calls Collins a “hands on” administrator; he had the right mix of fanaticism, vision, and tactfulness. He and Steinbeck, both Rooseveltian Democrats, hit it off immediately in the late summer of 1936, when the novelist went south on the first of several grueling research trips with Collins during the next two years to investigate field conditions. (One of the many legends that grew up around The Grapes of Wrath purported that Steinbeck traveled with a migrant family all the way from Oklahoma to California; that never happened, though he and Carol did follow Route 66 home on a car trip from Chicago to Los Gatos in 1937.)

  Fortunately, Collins was a punctual and voluminous report writer (a plan to publish his reports eventually fell through). His lively weekly accounts of the workers’ activities, events, diets, entertainments, sayings, beliefs, and observations provided Steinbeck with a ready documentary supplement to his own research. In a section called “Bits of Migrant Wisdom,” noted in Collins’s “Kern Migratory Labor Camp Report for week ending May 2, 1936,” he records a discussion with two women about how best to cut down on the use of toilet paper: “One suggested sprinkling red pepper through the roll. The other suggested a wire be attached to the roll so that every time a sheet was torn off the big bell placed on the outside of the building for the purpose would ring and let everyone know who was in the sanitary unit and what she was doing.” Steinbeck saw the humor in the account and utilized some of the original material in Chapter 22: “‘Hardly put a roll out ’fore it’s gone. Come right up in meetin’. One lady says we oughta have a little bell that rings ever’ time the roll turns oncet. Then we could count how many ever’body takes.’ She shook her head. ‘I jes’ don’ know,’ she said. ‘I been worried all week. Somebody’s a-stealin’ toilet paper from Unit Four.”’ Collins guided Steinbeck through the intricacies of the agricultural labor scene, put him in direct contact with migrant families, and permitted Steinbeck to incorporate “great gobs” of information into his own writing. “Letter from Tom…. He is so good. I need this stuff. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong,” Steinbeck noted in Working Days on June 24, 1938.

  In 1939, at Steinbeck’s suggestion, Collins worked as a well-paid technical advisor to John Ford’s Twentieth Century-Fox production of The Grapes of Wrath.(“Tom will howl his head off if they get out of hand,” Steinbeck told Elizabeth Otis.) And later—probably spurred by the success of both novel and film—Collins himself (under the pseudonym of Windsor Drake) wrote an autobiographical-fictional memoir, to which Steinbeck, who appears as a character, added a foreword: “Windsor and I traveled together, sat in the ditches with the migrant workers, lived and ate with them. We heard a thousand miseries and a thousand jokes. We ate fried dough and sow belly, worked with the sick and the hungry, listened to complaints and little triumphs.” The book was accepted but never reached print because the publisher reneged on the deal. After that, Collins resigned from the F.S.A., and he and Steinbeck passed out of each other’s lives.

  Clearly, Steinbeck had a knack for associating himself with gifted, generous people. George West, chief editorial writer for the progressive San Francisco News, was the man who instigated Steinbeck’s initial investigations of the migrant labor situation for his paper (to be discussed below). Frederick R. Soule, the enlightened regional information advisor at the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, and his assistant, Helen Horn, provided statistics and documents for his News reports and otherwise opened official doors for Steinbeck that might have stayed closed. Soule’s colleague Eric Thomsen, regional director in charge of management at the F.S.A. office in San Francisco, personally escorted Steinbeck to the Central Valley and introduced him to Tom Collins at the Arvin Camp for the first time. (Jackson J. Benson was the first to recognize that, in a convoluted and unintentional way, the federal government underwrote Steinbeck’s research.) A continent away, in Manhattan, Steinbeck’s publisher, the intrepid and irrepressible Pascal Covici (1888–1964), kept up a running dialogue with the novelist. In his literary agents he was triply blessed. Mavis McIntosh, Elizabeth Otis, and Annie Laurie Williams not only kept his professional interests uppermost at all times but did so with the kind of selflessness that made
them more like family members than business managers. Of the three women, Elizabeth Otis (1901–1981) became his most trusted confidante.

  III

  Steinbeck lived to write. He believed it was redemptive work, a transformative act. Each day, after warming up with a letter to Otis or Covici and an entry in Working Days, he created a disciplined working rhythm and maintained what he called a “unity feeling”—a sense of continuity and habitation with his material. “Let the damn book go three hundred thousand words if it wants to. This is my life. Why should I want to finish my own life? The confidence is on me again. I can feel it. It’s stopping work that does the damage,” he admitted in Working Days on July 7, 1938. Ideally, for a few hours each day, the world Steinbeck created took precedence over the one in which he lived. Because both worlds can be considered “real,” at times during 1938 Steinbeck didn’t know where one began and the other left off; walking back into the domestic world from the world of imagination was not always a smooth shift for him (or for Carol). His work demanded his attention so fully that he finally refused to dissipate his energy in extra-literary pursuits: “I won’t do any of these public things. Can’t. It isn’t my nature and I won’t be stampeded. And so the stand must be made and I must keep out of politics,” he promised himself.

  Steinbeck’s doubts about his ability to carry out the plan of his novel surface repeatedly in his working journal, but he rarely questioned the risks involved in bringing his whole sensibility to bear upon it. Like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, that other populist manifesto of the American spirit, Steinbeck’s novel had a complicated growth process. The Grapes of Wrath was the product of his increasing immersion in the migrant material, which proved to be a Pandora’s box. It required an extended odyssey before he discovered the proper focus and style to do the topic justice. In one way or another, from August 1936, when Steinbeck discovered a subject “like nothing in the world,” through October 1939, when he resolved in Working Days to put behind him “that part of my life that made the Grapes,” the migrant issue, which had wounded him deeply, remained his central preoccupation. He produced a seven-part series of newspaper articles, “The Harvest Gypsies,” an unfinished novel, “The Oklahomans,” a completed but destroyed satire, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” and The Grapes of Wrath. Each version shared a fixed core of elements: on one side, the entrenched power, wealth, authority, and consequent tyranny of California’s industrialized agricultural system (symbolized by Associated Farmers, Inc.), which produced flagrant violations of the migrants’ civil and human rights and ensured their continuing peonage, their loss of dignity, through threats, reprisals, and violence; on the other side, the powerlessness, poverty, victimization, and fear of the nomadic American migrants whose willingness to work, desire to retain their dignity, and enduring wish to settle land of their own were kept alive by their innate resilience and resourcefulness and by the democratic benefits of the government sanitary camps. From the moment he entered the fray, Steinbeck had no doubt that the presence of the migrants would change the fabric of California life, though he had little foresight about what his own role in that change would be. His concern was humanitarian: he wanted to be an effective advocate, but he did not want to appear presumptuous. “Every effort I can bring to bear is and has been at the call of the common working people to the end that they may eat what they raise, use what they produce, and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and their heads,” he declared unequivocally to San Francisco News columnist John Barry.