The Grapes of Wrath is a controversial classic because it is at once populist and revolutionary. It advances a belief in the essential goodness and forbearance of the “common people,” and prophesies a fundamental change to produce equitable social conditions: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.... in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage” (Chapter 25). This novel—part naturalistic epic, part dissenting tract, and part romantic gospel—speaks to a multiplicity of human experiences and is squarely located in our varied national consciousness; nearly every literate person knows, or at least claims familiarity with, its impassioned story of the Joad family’s brutal migration from Oklahoma’s dying Dust Bowl to California’s corrupt Promised Land. In their ironic exodus from home to homelessness, from individualism to collective awareness, from selfishness to communal love, “from ‘I’ to ‘we’ ” (Chapter 14), Steinbeck’s cast of unsuspecting characters—Ma Joad, Tom Joad, Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon—have become permanently etched in our sensibility and serve constantly to remind us that heroism is as much a matter of choice as it is of being chosen. Similarly, Steinbeck’s rendering of the graphic enticements of Route 66—“the path of a people in flight” (Chapter 12)—from Middle America to the West defined the national urge for mobility, motion, and blind striving. The novel’s erotically subversive final scene, in which Rose of Sharon, delivered of a stillborn child, gives her milk-laden breast to a dying stranger, then looks up and smiles “mysteriously” (Chapter 30), simply will not fade from view. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor, The Grapes of Wrath’s radical voice of protest can still be heard. As a tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the most fragile thread of hope—The Grapes of Wrath not only summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art, but, beyond that, has few peers in American fiction.
Steinbeck’s book has been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and defended by Eleanor Roosevelt for its power (“The horrors of the picture ... made you dread ... to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.”) But The Grapes of Wrath has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as immoral, degrading, 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.”)1 In fact, from the moment it was published on April 14, 1939, The Grapes of Wrath has been less judged as a novel than as a sociological event, a celebrated political cause, or a factual case study. If the past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, there has been plenty of proof that it elicits widely divergent responses from its audience. Perhaps that is to be expected, considering that Steinbeck intentionally wrote the novel in “five layers,” intending to “rip” each reader’s nerves “to rags” by making him “participate in the actuality.” What each reader “gets” from The Grapes of Wrath, he claimed, “will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollow-ness.” 2 Steinbeck’s participatory aesthetic ensured the novel’s affective impact on a broad range of readers. By conceiving his novel on simultaneous levels of existence Steinbeck pushed back the accepted boundaries of traditional realistic fiction and redefined the proletarian form. Like most significant American novels, The Grapes of Wrath does not offer codified solutions, but instead enacts the process of belief and embodies the shape of faith.
Behind the welter of conflicting opinions and wild imaginings about this most public of novels stands one of the most reclusive of American writers—John Steinbeck (1902-1968). His private story, with its equally impassioned emphasis on the punishing journey toward artistic fulfillment, is recorded in this journal. Working Days, too, is a tale of dramatic proportions—false starts, self-doubts, whining complaints, paranoia, ironic intentions, personal reversals, and—woven tenuously throughout—the fragile thread of recovery. And like the novel, the journal has its own cast of characters, all of whom belong, in one way or another, to the moment of Steinbeck’s labor. Some lives impress upon his, some overlap, some run parallel, some appear and disappear like chimeras, and some remain unidentified, anonymous, lost forever to the currents of history. Among the people who left their stamp on the novel, two names joined preeminently with Steinbeck’s in a kind of spiritual partnership. Without them, the novel might have been far different.
Carol Henning Steinbeck (1906—1983), the novelist’s outgoing first wife (they married in 1930), was more politically radical than John, and she actively supported members of the fugitive agricultural labor movement before he did.3 She too was an energetic, talented person—among other things, a versifier, satirist, prose writer, painter, caricaturist—who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. It seems to have been a partnership based more on reciprocal need and shared affection than on deep romantic love. Their marriage was smoother, more egalitarian, in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought by Of Mice and Men (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol, an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleagured, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, 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 oversaw some of their financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Steinbeck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted in Entry #45. Once in a while she also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. Carol, not John, went to New York for the opening of Joseph Kirkland’s disastrous play version of Tortilla Flat, and during that same visit, in January 1938, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, arranging between them Lorentz’s first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck/Lorentz movie version of In Dubious Battle and a private showing of Lorentz’s pioneering documentary films (“APPROVE LORENTZ AFFAIR GREATLY,” Steinbeck wired Carol on January 13, 1938).4
Most important of all, as she did with all her husband’s manuscripts, Carol typed and edited The Grapes of Wrath, served in the early stages as a rigorous critical commentator (though by late September 1938, during the book’s final stretch, she confessed to having lost “all sense of proportion,” and felt unfit “to judge it at all”), and, in a brilliant stroke, chose the novel’s title from Julia Ward 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. (“Tell Carol she is a whiz at picking titles and she has done it again with the new one,” Annie Laurie Williams exulted.) Her role as facilitator is evident throughout this journal and is recorded permanently in one half of the novel’s dedication: “To CAROL who willed this book.” Eventually, however, in the wayward recesses of Steinbeck’s heart, Carol’s brittle efficiency, managerial brusqueness, and violent mood swings (she, too, was exhausted by the novel’s completion and histrionic reception) seemed to cause more problems than they solved. His involvement with a younger woman, 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.5 They separated rancorously in 1941, s
old their beloved Los Gatos mountain home (which Steinbeck had facetiously taken to calling “Carol’s ranch”), 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 himself served as Steinbeck’s real-life prototype for Jim Rawley, the fictional manager of the “Weedpatch” government camp. (That camp became an oasis of relief for the harried Joads, and is featured in Chapters 22 to 26 of The Grapes of Wrath.) 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 (featured in the fourth installment of Steinbeck’s 1936 San Francisco News reports, “The Harvest Gypsies,” a documentary forerunner of The Grapes of Wrath) 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, the forerunner of the F.S.A.; by 1940, with New Deal budgets slashed by conservatives in Congress, only fifteen were actually completed or under construction.)6 Collins possessed a genius for camp administration—he had the right mix of fanaticism, vision, and tactfulness—and he and Steinbeck, both Jacksonian democrats, hit it off immediately in late summer 1936, when the novelist went south on the first of several grueling research trips during the next two years to investigate field conditions. (Contrary to popular belief, Steinbeck never traveled with a migrant family all the way from Oklahoma to California.)
Fortunately, Collins was a punctual and voluminous report writer. His lively weekly accounts of the workers’ activities, events, diets, entertainments, sayings, beliefs, and observations provided Steinbeck with a compelling documentary supplement to his own researches. In fact, Steinbeck and Collins struck a deal: Collins would guide Steinbeck through the intricacies of the agricultural labor scene, put him in direct contact with migrant families, and supply Steinbeck with valuable information; in return, besides broadcasting news of the workers’ plight in his own writings, Steinbeck would edit Collins’ reports and pave the way for their publication as a full-length book. Toward that end, at his home in Los Gatos in late 1936, Steinbeck introduced Collins to one of his agents, Annie Laurie Williams, who was in California on a business trip. Williams was immediately impressed with Collins’ forthrightness and with the importance of the “social documents” he had compiled. During the ensuing eighteen months she and Mavis McIntosh set about superintending the book’s evolution, corresponding with Collins, keeping abreast of additional material, and sending the manuscript around to various publishers for evaluations.
Obviously, the more preoccupied Steinbeck became with his projects, the less he did on Collins’ compilation, preferring instead to incorporate some of its “great gobs” of information—always with Collins’ permission—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 Entry #24.) By late June 1938, already a month into the final version of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck was out of the editorial picture entirely; W. W. Norton Company had hired a writer named Madeleine Ruthven to put Collins’ book “in shape for publication.”7 Though he ostensibly “approved” of the Ruthven arrangement, Collins may have been miffed that Steinbeck was unable to maintain his part of their collaboration. That September, after a disagreement with Steinbeck in Los Gatos (“Tom was here. Little trouble Saturday because of liquor and talk,” Steinbeck wrote in Entry #69), Collins, increasingly busy with the creation of new camps, simply failed to supply McIntosh and Otis—and hence Norton—with all the material he promised. As a result his documentary book never appeared. In 1940, at Steinbeck’s suggestion, Collins worked as a technical advisor to John Ford’s striking cinematic production of The Grapes of Wrath. And later—probably spurred by the success of both novel and film—Collins himself wrote an autobiographical/fictional memoir, to which Steinbeck, who appears as a character, added a Foreword. This book by “Windsor Drake” (Collins’ pseudonym) was accepted by Lymanhouse, a California publisher, though it never reached print because the owner of the publishing company, pleading wartime paper shortage, reneged on the deal.8 After that, Collins resigned from the F.S.A., and he and Steinbeck passed out of each other’s lives.
Besides Carol Steinbeck and Tom Collins, a caravan of other people crisscrossed the novelist’s life between 1936 and 1941. George West, chief editorial writer for the progressive San Francisco News, instigated Steinbeck’s investigations of the migrant labor situation for his paper. Frederick R. Soule, the enlightened Regional Information Advisor at the San Francisco office of the Farm Security Administration, 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, escorted Steinbeck to the Central Valley, where the writer encountered Collins at the Arvin Camp for the first time. (In a convoluted and unintentional way, the federal government underwrote Steinbeck’s research.) A continent away, in New York, Steinbeck’s publisher, Pascal Covici, kept up a running dialogue with the novelist. The two men remained loyal to each other through the embarrassing bankruptcy of Covici-Friede in July 1938, and through Covici’s relocation as an editor at The Viking Press, a felicitous arrangement which also included the purchase of Steinbeck’s contract. Steinbeck had an incredible knack for aligning himself with loyal, generous, and responsible associates. In his literary agents, McIntosh and Otis, he was triply blessed. Mavis McIntosh, Elizabeth Otis, and Annie Laurie Williams not only kept his professional interests uppermost at all times (Otis nearly single-handedly engineered the Viking contract), but did so with the kind of selflessness that made them more like family members than business managers. All three women became trusted confidantes in every conceivable realm of Steinbeck’s life. And closer to home, Ed Ricketts, Ritch and Tal Lovejoy, Louis and Mary Paul, Joe and Charlotte Jackson, George and Gail Mors, Martin and Elsie Ray, Charlie Chaplin, Pare Lorentz, Carlton Sheffield, and Webster Street all managed, at various times, to help keep Steinbeck’s body and soul together. All these people—and more—left tracks in Steinbeck’s journal during the most eventful period of his life.
At the center of this maelstrom Steinbeck remained, if not exactly in control, then at least resolutely committed to his art, to the single vision of his purpose. 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.9 Solitude was an increasingly precious commodity in Steinbeck’s life in the hectic years from 1934 through 1941, during which everything from the death of his parents to the demise of his marriage conspired to paralyze his will. Despite the constant tumult, he wrote several of his strongest books in stressful situations. “Every book seems the struggle of a whole life,” he lamented in Entry #49. A ruminative, grass-growing mood was rarely his, so he managed to do the best he could with the conditions he had. Although it didn’t always ensure complete solitude, Steinbeck sequestered himself in the “tiny” work room of the Los Gatos Greenwood Lane house: “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 (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 133).
By entering his writerly posture, Steinbeck created a disciplined working rhythm and maintained what he called a “unity feeling”—a sense of continuity and habitation with his material. Ideally, for a few hours each day, the world Steinbeck created to
ok precedence over the one in which he lived. Because both worlds can be considered “real,” at times during the summer of 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 his wife). It was a shift exacerbated by Steinbeck’s shrinking sense of humor, his growing popularity, and, of course, by the grim subject matter of The Grapes of Wrath. The hard reality of California’s contemporary farm labor conditions—the pitiful spectacle of “three hundred thousand” utterly dispossessed migrant workers and their families (Chapter 14)—demanded his attention so fully that he 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 resolved in Entry #92.
Furthermore, Steinbeck, an imposing, but self-confessedly homely man, literally escaped what he once called his “confused, turgid, ugly, and gross” self when he wrote (quoted in Benson, True Adventures of John Steinbeck, p. 291). 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 (Entry #30). If The Grapes of Wrath praises the honorableness of labor it is because the author himself felt it called into being the most committed, the most empathetic, the most resourceful qualities of the human psyche: “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, wear what they weave, use what they produce, and in every way and in completeness share in the works of their hands and their heads,” he reminded San Francisco News columnist John D. Barry (Entry #36, Note). The communal vision of The Grapes of Wrath begins in the ceremonial sweat of Steinbeck’s lonely labor. In fact, Steinbeck believed writing was redemptive work, an act full of transformational possibilities. Ironically, his engagement with the “Matter of the Migrants,” from 1936 to 1939, required so much of himself that by the end of the decade he was not only sick of writing fiction, but needed to turn to other arenas for respite and for inspiration.
Working Days Page 2
