The Grapes of Wrath

by John Steinbeck

  At times during that summer, though, his task seemed insurmountable, because he kept losing the “threads” that tied him to his characters. “Was ever a book written under greater difficulty?” Nearly every day brought unsolicited requests for his name and his time, including unscheduled visitors, unanticipated disruptions, and reversals. Domestic and conjugal relations with Carol were often strained. House guests trooped to Los Gatos all summer, including family members and long-time friends Carlton Sheffield, Ed Ricketts, Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, plus new acquaintances Broderick Crawford, Charlie Chaplin, and Pare Lorentz. As if that weren’t enough to erode the novelist’s composure, the Steinbecks’ tiny house on Greenwood Lane was besieged with the noise of neighborhood building, which nearly drove them to distraction. By midsummer, hoping for permanent sanctuary, they decided to buy the secluded Biddle Ranch, a forty-seven-acre spread on Brush Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos. Even though it was the most stunning location they had seen, its original homestead was in disrepair, so besides buying the land they would also have to build a new house, and that too became a source of added distractions. The Steinbecks didn’t move in until November 1938, a month after the novel was finished (final typing of the manuscript and corrections of the typescript and galley proofs took place at the Biddle Ranch from November 1938 to early February 1939), but preparations for its purchase ate a great deal of Steinbeck’s time and energy from mid-July onward.

  August proved the most embattled period. Early in the month Stein-beck noted in his journal: “There are now four things or five rather to write through—throat, bankruptcy, Pare, ranch, and the book.” His litany of woes included Carol’s tonsil operation, which incapacitated her; the bankruptcy of Steinbeck’s publisher, Covici-Friede, which threatened to end their only source of income and posed an uncertain publishing future for the novel he was writing; Pare Lorentz’s arrangements for making a film version of In Dubious Battle; the purchase of the Biddle Ranch, which Carol wanted badly and Steinbeck felt compelled to buy for her (they argued over the pressure this caused); and the book itself, still untitled (and therefore without “being”), which seemed more recalcitrant than ever. By mid-August, roughly halfway through the novel, Steinbeck took stock of his situation: The Viking Press had bought his contract, hired Pat Covici as part of the deal, and planned a first printing of 15,000 copies for Steinbeck’s collection of short stories, The Long Valley; a string of famous house guests had either just departed or were about to arrive; and he and Carol had closed on the Biddle property for $10,500. “Demoralization complete and seemingly unbeatable. So many things happening that I can’t not be interested…. All this is more excitement than our whole lives put together. All crowded into a month. My many weaknesses are beginning to show their heads. I simply must get this thing out of my system. I’m not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people…. This success will ruin me as sure as hell.” Four days later, on August 20, Lorentz arrived for the weekend. His visit broke Steinbeck’s depression and log jam. Though their film project would fall through, Steinbeck was encouraged by Lorentz’s prescience that his novel would be one of “the greatest novels of the age.” Steinbeck kept up his daily stint (he aimed for 2000 words at each sitting, some days managing as few as 800, some days, when the juices were flowing, as many as 2200) through what Carol agreed were the “interminable details and minor crises” of August and September.

  In early October, rebuked often by his wife (Ma Joad’s indomitableness owes as much to Carol’s spirit as it does to his research into Robert Briffault’s anthropological treatise The Mothers), Steinbeck roused himself from another bout of “self indulgence” and “laziness” to mount the final drive. Like a gift, the last five chapters of the novel came to him so abundantly that he had more material than he could use. Now the full force of Steinbeck’s experience at Visalia eight months earlier came into play, propelling his metamorphosis from right-minded competency to inspired vision. What Steinbeck had witnessed in that “heartbreaking” sea of mud and debris called forth every ounce of his moral indignation, social anger, and empathy, which in turn profoundly affected his novel’s climax. His internal wounding opened the floodgates of his affection, 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 rain floods the novel’s concluding chapters, so the memory of Steinbeck’s cataclysmic experience, his compensation for the futility and impotency of 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 stranger. “It must be an accident, it must be a stranger, and it must be quick,” Steinbeck instructed Covici. “To build this stranger into the structure of the book would be to warp the whole meaning of the book.” This final tableau scene—subversively erotic, mysteriously prophetic, tantalizingly indeterminate—refuses to fade from view; before the apocalypse occurs, before everything is lost in nothingness, Steinbeck suggests, all gestures must pass from self to world, from flesh to word, from communication to communion.

  Similarly, Steinbeck’s deep participation at Visalia empowered his transformation of Tom Joad, the slowly awakening disciple of Jim Casy. Tom’s final acceptance of the crucified preacher’s gospel of social action occurs just as the deluge is about to begin in Chapter 28:

  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.

  Furthermore, in one of those magical transferences artists are heir to in moments of extreme exhaustion or receptivity, Steinbeck believed that his fictive alter ego not only floats above The Grapes of Wrath’s “last pages… like a spirit,” but he imagined that Joad actually entered the novelist’s work space, the private chamber of his room: “‘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,” he wrote in Working Days on October 20. With that break-through, at once a visitation and a benediction, Steinbeck arrived at the intersection of novel and journal, that luminous point, that fifth layer of involvement, where the life of the writer and the creator of life merge. He entered the architecture of his own novel and lived in its fictive space, where, like Tom Joad, Steinbeck discovered that it was no longer necessary to lead people toward a distant new Eden or illusory Promised Land; rather, the most heroic action was simply to learn to be present in the here and now, and to inhabit the “wherever” fully and at once.

  The terms of his complex investment fulfilled, Steinbeck needed only a few more days to finish his novel. Around noon on Wednesday, October 26, 1938, Steinbeck, “so dizzy” he could “hardly see the page,” completed the last 775 words of the novel; at the bottom of the concluding manuscript page, Steinbeck, whose writing was normally minuscule, scrawled in letters an inch and a half high, “END#”. It should have been cause for wild celebrating, but between bouts of bone-weary tiredness and nervous exhaustion, Steinbeck felt only numbness and perhaps some of the mysterious satisfaction that comes from having transformed the weight of his whole life into the new book. In The Grapes of Wrath the multiple streams of subjective experience, ameliorism, graphic realism, biblical themes, and symbolic forms gather to create the “truly American book” Steinbeck had planned. “Finished this day,” his simple final journal entry read, “and I hope to God it’s good.”

  IV

  In 1963 Steinbeck told Caskie Stinnett: “I wrote The Grapes of Wrath in one hundred days, but many year
s of preparation preceded it. I take a hell of a long time to get started. The actual writing is the last process.” Though Steinbeck actually wrote the novel in ninety-three sittings, it was his way of saying that The Grapes of Wrath was an intuited whole that embodied the form of his devotion. The entire 200,000-word manuscript took up to 165 handwritten pages (plus one smaller sheet) of a 12”× 18” lined ledger book. When he was hot, Steinbeck wrote fast, paying little or no attention to proper spelling, punctuation, or paragraphing. On top of that his script was so small he was capable of cramming over 1300 words onto a single oversized ledger sheet (the equivalent of four pages of The Viking Press text). In short, the novel was written with remarkably preordained motion and directed passion; British scholar Roy S. Simmonds says it demonstrates a “phenomenal unity of purpose,” an example of “spontaneous prose,” years before Kerouac’s On the Road. Except for two brief added passages of 82 and 228 words and a deleted passage of approximately 160 words, the emendations are not major or substantive. Ironically, though Steinbeck severely doubted his own artistic ability, and in fact wavered sometimes in regard to such niceties as chapter divisions (he originally conceived the novel in three major Books), in writing this novel he was creating with the full potency of his imaginative powers. His ability to execute a work of its magnitude places him among the premiere creative talents of his time. From the vantage point of history, the adventure stands as one of those happy occasions when a writer simply wrote better than he thought he could.

  Steinbeck had lost sight of the novel’s effectiveness and had little grasp of its potential popularity, so he warned Covici and The Viking Press against a large first printing. Viking ignored him and spent $10,000 on publicity and printed an initial run of 50,000 copies. After recuperating in San Francisco, the Steinbecks moved to their new Brush Road mountain home. It was still under construction, so they camped awhile in the old homestead, where Carol finished typing the 751-page typescript, and together they made “routine” final corrections. At Covici’s badgering (he had read 400 pages of the typescript on a visit to Los Gatos in late October), Steinbeck gave in and sent the first two chapters to him on November 29. The whole of Carol’s cleanly typed copy, which was actually only the second draft, was sent to his New York agents on December 7, 1938, roughly six months after Steinbeck had started the novel. Elizabeth Otis visited Los Gatos in late December to smooth out some of Steinbeck’s rough language, like the dozen or so instances of “fuck,” “shit,” “screw,” and “fat ass,” which were the chief offenders. They reached a workable compromise: Steinbeck agreed to change only those words “which Carol and Elizabeth said stopped the reader’s mind”; otherwise “those readers who are insulted by normal events or language mean nothing to me,” he told Covici on January 3, 1939. The novel’s enthusiastic reception at Viking was spoiled by the wrangling that ensued over the controversial Rose of Sharon ending, which the firm wanted Steinbeck to change. On January 16, 1939, he fired back: “I am sorry but I cannot change that ending.… The giving of the breast has no more sentiment than the giving of a piece of bread. I’m sorry if that doesn’t get over. It will maybe. I’ve been on this design and balance for a long time and I think I know how I want it. And if I’m wrong, I’m alone in my wrongness.” The entire post-writing flurry, including proofreading the galleys, struck the novelist, by then suffering from sciatica and tonsillitis, as anticlimactic: “I have no interest… whatever now. When the story is told I just can’t work up any more interest.”

  Plenty of other people had interest, though. The Grapes of Wrath was widely and favorably reviewed and its fidelity to fact discussed and debated in the popular press when it was first published. It has been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers alike as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and validated by Carey McWilliams, whose own great work, Factories in the Fields (1939), is the classic sociological counterpart to Steinbeck’s novel. The Grapes of Wrath was defended on several occasions by President and Eleanor Roosevelt for its power, integrity, and accuracy. For instance, after inspecting California migrant camps in 1940, Mrs. Roosevelt said, “I have never thought The Grapes of Wrath was exaggerated.” (Steinbeck responded gratefully: “I have been called a liar so constantly that… I wonder whether I may not have dreamed the things I saw and heard.”)

  But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries for its rebellious theme and frank language, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as communist, immoral, degrading, warped, and untruthful. Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.” A Jesuit priest, Arthur D. Spearman, called it “an embodiment of the Marxist Soviet propaganda.” The Associated Farmers mounted a smear campaign to discredit the book and its author. Rebuttals, designed to whitewash the Okie situation, were published by Frank J. Taylor (“California’s Grapes of Wrath”) and by Ruth Comfort Mitchell, Steinbeck’s Los Gatos neighbor (Of Human Kindness). None of them had one iota of impact.

  Since then, of course, The Grapes of Wrath has been steadily scrutinized, studied, interrogated, and analyzed by literary critics, scholars, historians, and creative writers. It is no exaggeration to say that, during the past half century, few American novels have attracted such passionate attacks and equally passionate defenses. It seems hard to believe that critics have read the same book. Philip Rahv’s complaint in the Partisan Review (Spring 1939) that “the novel is far too didactic and long-winded,” and “fails on the test of craftsmanship” should be judged against Charles Angoff ’s assessment in the North American Review (Summer 1939) that it is “momentous, monumental, and memorable,” and an example of “the highest art.” This dialectic still characterizes the novel’s critical reception. In a 1989speech, the prominent cultural critic Leslie Fiedler attacked the novel as “maudlin, sentimental, and overblown”; another review a month later by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist William Kennedy praised it for standing “tall… a mighty, mighty book.”

  The past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, though most contemporary analysts now treat the book as a legitimate work of fiction rather than a propagandistic tract. As a result, there is a great deal of deserving attention to Steinbeck’s art and technique. Whether Grapes is viewed through a social, historical, linguistic, formal, political, ecological, psychological, mythic, metaphysical, or religious lens (all examples of recent critical methods), the book’s textual richness, its many layers of action, language, and character, continue to repay enormous dividends. As scholar John Ditsky observed, “the Joads are still in motion, and their vehicle with them.” Intellectual theories to the contrary, reading remains a subjective act, and perhaps the only sure thing about The Grapes of Wrath is its capacity to elicit powerful responses from its audience. This of course was Steinbeck’s intention from the first. “I don’t think The Grapes of Wrath is obscure in what it tries to say,” he claimed in 1955. “Its structure is very carefully worked out…. Just read it, don’t count it!”

  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 that signaled the beginning of their successful assimilation (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. 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 altered the literary geography of the United States.

  It also changed Steinbeck permanently. The effects of writing 260,000 words in a single year “finished” him, he told Lawrence Clark Powell on January 24, 1939. After his long siege with the “Matter of the Migrants” (“I don’t know whether there is anything left of me,” he confided in October 1939), his “will to death” was so “strengthened” that by the end of the decade he was sick of writing fiction. It was a decision many critics and reviewers held against him for the rest of his life; they wanted him to write The Grapes of Wrath over and over again, which he refused to do. “The process of writing a book is the process of outgrowing it,” he told Herbert Sturz. “Disciplinary criticism comes too late. You aren’t going to write that one again anyway. When you start another—the horizons have receded and you are just as cold and frightened as you were with the first one.”