Before that, however, Steinbeck rarely questioned the risks involved in bringing his whole sensibility to bear on The Grapes of Wrath. Like Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Steinbeck’s novel had a complicated foreground and grew through a similar process of accretion and experimentation. The Grapes of Wrath was the product of his increasing immersion in the migrant material, which proved to be a subject of such related intertwining that it required an extended odyssey of his own 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” (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 129), through October 1939, when he resolved to put behind him “that part of my life that made the Grapes” (Entry #101), the migrant issue, which had wounded him deeply, remained a central preoccupation.
Between 1936 and 1938 Steinbeck’s commitment to his material evolved through at least four major stages of writing: (1) a seven-part series of newspaper articles, “The Harvest Gypsies”; (2) an unfinished novel, “The Oklahomans”; (3) a completed, but destroyed, satire, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg”; and (4) a final fictional version, The Grapes of Wrath. Each stage varied in audience, intention, and tone from the one before it. All the versions overlapped, however, because they shared—with differing highlights and resolutions—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 overriding concern was humanitarian: he wanted to be an effective advocate, but he did not want to appear presumptuous. (“I am actively opposed to any man or group who ... is able to dominate the lives of workers,” he announced later to John Barry.)
Not counting a warm-up essay (in the September 12, 1936, issue of The Nation), or his editing of Tom Collins’ camp reports, Steinbeck’s first lengthy excursion into the migrants’ problems was published in the San Francisco News, a Bay area daily paper. “The Harvest Gypsies” formed the foundation of Steinbeck’s concern, raised issues and initiated forces (which reverberate in Part Two of his 1938 journal, and so enter the history of The Grapes of Wrath), gave him a working vocabulary with which to understand current events, and furthered his position as a reliable interpreter. This first stage of Steinbeck’s commitment actually stemmed from the notoriety caused by his recently published strike novel, In Dubious Battle (New York: Covici-Friede, 1936), after which Steinbeck found—often against his will—that he was fast becoming considered a sympathetic spokesman for the contemporary agricultural labor situation. (This was a profound irony, because while In Dubious Battle exposed the capitalist dynamics of corporate farming, it took no side for or against labor, preferring instead to see the fruit strike as a symbol of “man’s eternal, bitter warfare with himself”; Steinbeck’s “unequivocal” partisanship occurred later, in the winter and spring of 1938.)
Thus, at the invitation of George West, Steinbeck produced “The Harvest Gypsies,” which, punctuated with Dorothea Lange’s graphic photographs of migrants, appeared in the liberal, pro-labor San Francisco News, from October 5 to 12, 1936. These hard-hitting, unflinching investigative reports detailed the plan of California’s feudal agricultural labor industry. The pieces introduced the antagonists, underscored the anachronistic rift between the Okie agrarian past and the mechanized California present, explained the economic background and insidious effects of the labor issue, examined the deplorable migrant living conditions, and exposed the unconscionable practices of the interlocking conglomerate of corporation farms. Primarily, though, his eye was on the migrants, who were “gypsies by force of circumstance,” as Steinbeck announced in his opening piece: “And so they move, frantically, with starvation close behind them. And in this series of articles we shall try to see how they live and what kind of people they are, what their living standard is, what is done for them, and what their problems and needs are. For while California has been successful in its use of migrant labor, it is gradually building a human structure which will certainly change the state, and may, if handled with the inhumanity and stupidity that have characterized the past, destroy the present system of agricultural economics.”10
Written mostly in a measured, restrained style (the voice is reasonable, the tone is empirical, the ends to be achieved are understanding and intelligent solutions), Steinbeck’s News articles are full of case studies, chilling factual statistics, and an unsettling catalogue of human woes (illness, incapacitation, persecution, death) observed from close contact with migratory field workers he had met. But in the best tradition of advocacy journalism, Steinbeck concluded his series with a number of prophetic recommendations for alleviating the conflict with federal aid and local support; this in turn would create subsistence farms, establish a migratory labor board, encourage unionization, and punish terrorism. When they were published in 1936 (and again when they were printed in 1938 as Their Blood Is Strong), Steinbeck’s articles solidified his credibility—both in and out of the migrant camps—as a serious commentator. “The Harvest Gypsies” (and Tom Collins’ continuing reports) provided Steinbeck with a basic repository of precise information and folk values. It would still be more than a year before the subjective intensity of his engagement deepened; however, events were already transpiring in his hometown and elsewhere that would eventually change his attitude from methodical reporter to literary activist.
The last of Steinbeck’s San Francisco News articles ended with a comment that became the basis for the second stage of his writing: “The new migrants to California from the dust bowl are here to stay. They are of the best American stock, intelligent, resourceful, and, if given a chance, socially responsible.” Steinbeck understood that the migrants wouldn’t vanish from sight, and couldn’t be ignored, though official California tried to do just that. Steinbeck built on his News experiences and on at least one more month-long field trip, in October and November 1937, with Tom Collins to plan the writing of a “big” book. They started from Gridley, where Collins was managing a new camp, but then roamed California from Stockton to Needles, wherever migrants were gathered to work. By late in the year, after hitting several “snags,” he was working on a “rather long novel” called “The Oklahomans,” which, he reported a few weeks later, was “still a long way from finished.” Steinbeck, generally guarded with interviewers, revealed enough to journalist Louis Walther to indicate that the focus of his novel was on the salutary, irrepressible character of the migrants, who, he believed, would profoundly alter the tenor of life in California. “Their coming here now is going to change things almost as much as did the coming of the first American settlers.” Furthermore, “The Californian doesn’t know what he does want. The Oklahoman knows just exactly what he wants. He wants a piece of land. And he goes after it and gets it.”11
Quietly, in late January 1938, Steinbeck stopped work on “The Oklahomans” (the manuscript has never been found and it is doubtful that he had actually written a great deal on it). Judging from his comments to Louis Walther, however, it is reasonable to assume that “The Oklahomans’ ” uncomplicated duality of conception, the untangled lines of its proposed struggle, and the dispassionate tone of its narrative voice (probably a holdover from “The Harvest Gypsies”) struck Steinbeck as belonging increasingly to the re
ductive world of pulp fiction or wish-fulfillment. The truth was the migrant situation had worsened, and along with it, Steinbeck’s capacity for pity and his need for direct involvement had grown. The misery of the migrant condition was heating up in the winter of 1938, especially in Visalia and Nipomo (Entry #1, Note), where thousands of families were marooned by floods. From Los Gatos, Steinbeck wrote Elizabeth Otis in February:
I must go over into the interior valleys. There are about five thousand families starving to death over there, not just hungry but actually starving. The government is trying to feed them and get medical attention to them with the fascist group of utilities and banks and huge growers sabatoging the thing all along the line.... In one tent there are twenty people quarantined for smallpox and two of the women are to have babies in that tent this week. I’ve tied into the thing from the first and I must get down there and see it and see if I can’t do something to help knock these murderers on the heads.... They think that if these people are allowed to live in camps with proper sanitary facilities, they will organize and that is the bugbear of the large landowner and the corporation farmer. The states and counties will give them nothing because they are outsiders. But the crops of any part of this state could not be harvested without these outsiders. I’m pretty mad about it. No word of this outside because when I have finished my job the jolly old associated farmers will be after my scalp again (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 158).
Suddenly Steinbeck realized that the issue was not as simple as portraying the “naive directness” of the migrants’ desire for land. Indeed, the cauldron of his own soul was beginning to boil with frustration, powerlessness, and anger; “The Oklahomans” could not adequately redress the injustices he had recently contemplated. “When I wrote the The Grapes of Wrath,” he declared in a 1952 Voice of America radio interview, “I was filled ... with certain angers ... at people who were doing injustices to other people....”
As a novelist, Steinbeck often experienced a delayed reaction to piercing events. He needed time to let them gestate before they rose to the surface of his awareness and began pushing back at him, demanding their transformation to words. From February through May 1938, the third stage of his writing development produced “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” With this abortive—but necessary—venture, Steinbeck’s migrant subject matter took its most drastic turn, inspired by an ugly event in Salinas, California, his hometown. Earlier, in September 1936, Steinbeck had encountered the vicious clash between workers and growers in a lettuce strike—“there are riots in Salinas and killings in the streets of that dear little town where I was born,” he told George Albee (Steinbeck and Wallsten, eds., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters, p. 132). The strike was smashed with terrorism, and recollections of the workers’ defeat festered in Steinbeck for more than a year. Then, in early February 1938, galvanized by reports of the worsening conditions in Visalia and Nipomo, Steinbeck felt the urgent need to do something direct in retaliation. “It seems to be necessary to write things down,” he said in Entry #1. “Can’t stop it.” John Steinbeck never became what dyed-in-the-wool activists would consider fully radicalized, but by putting his pen to the service of a political cause, he was stepping as close to being a firebrand as he ever would. He launched into “L’Affaire,” a vituperative satire aimed at attacking the leading citizens of Salinas, “the committee of seven,” who organize and direct the ignorant army of vigilantes. The cabal of organizers remain aloof, but “work out the methods by which vigilantes are formed and kept steamed up.” The vigilantes were assembled from the common populace of Salinas—clerks, service station operators, shopkeepers—all of them “dopes” and “suckers” for creating mayhem.12
By all accounts, “L’Affaire Lettuceberg” was the angriest, most thesis-ridden book Steinbeck ever attempted. It presented difficulties from the outset. Carol, his closest critic, did not like its subject (despite her leftist beliefs), its title was concocted and unwieldy, and its approach was a detour from his main concern for the migrant workers, already adumbrated in “The Harvest Gypsies.” In fact, “L”Affaire“ wasn’t really a ”literary“ work, but a ”vulgar“ tract. In May 1938 Steinbeck confessed to Annie Laurie Williams: ”I’ll have the first draft of this book done in about two weeks. It is only a little over seventy thousand words. And it is a vicious book, a mean book. I don’t know whether it will be any good at all. It might well be very lousy but it has a lot of poison in it that I have to get out of my system and this is a good way to do it. Then if it is no good we can destroy it. I’ll send it on for the opinion of you all though before I destroy it. I feel so ferocious about the thing that I won’t have much critical insight. Probably be almost ready to send out by the first of June. But it is going so rapidly there will be a good deal of cleaning up about it.“13
Within days Steinbeck’s critical insight returned. The careful artist triumphed over the ferocious propagandist, and he destroyed “L’Affaire Lettuceberg.” Immediately, Steinbeck wrote to Elizabeth Otis, his main literary agent, and to Pascal Covici, who had already announced the publication of “L’Affaire,” to inform them that he would not be delivering the manuscript they expected. The following excerpted letter to Otis, written around mid-May 1938, offers a statement of Steinbeck’s artistic integrity, because it serves as a covenant with the abiding principles of his art and with the noble qualities of his migrant subject matter, which his blind anger had blurred in the headlong rush for revenge. This letter also sets up a resonant echo with many of the concerns voiced in the main journal section of Working Days:
This is going to be a hard letter to write ... this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can’t be printed. It is bad because it isn’t honest. Oh! these incidents all happened but—I’m not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can’t do satire.... I know, you could sell possibly 30,000 copies. I know that a great many people would think they liked the book. I myself have built up a hole-proof argument on how and why I liked it. I can’t beat the argument but I don’t like the book. And I would be doing Pat a greater injury in letting him print it than I would by destroying it. Not once in the writing of it have I felt the curious warm pleasure that comes when work is going well. My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can’t do better I have slipped badly. And that I won’t admit, yet.
... It is sloppily written because I never cared about it.... I had got smart and cocky you see. I had forgotten that I hadn’t learned to write books, that I will never learn to write them. A book must be a life that lives all of itself and this one doesn’t do that.... I beat poverty for a good many years and I’ll be damned if I’ll go down at the first little whiff of success....
I think this book will be a good lesson for me. I think I got to believing critics—I thought I could write easily and that anything I touched would be good simply because I did it. Well any such idea conscious or unconscious is exploded for some time to come. I’m in little danger now of believing my own publicity....
Again I’m sorry. But I’m not ready to be a hack yet. Maybe later. Carol feels the same way about it.14
The fourth and last stage of Steinbeck’s writing culminated in The Grapes of Wrath. His conscience squared, Steinbeck stood ready to embark on the longest sustained writing job of his life. From late May 1938, when he struck the first words of the new novel to paper (“To the red country and part of the gray country of Oklahoma, the last rains came gently, and they did not cut the scarred earth”), through the winter of 1939, when the last of the corrections and editorial details were settled (“I meant, Pat, to print all all all the verses of the Battle Hymn. They’re all pertinent and they’re all exciting. And the music if you can�
�), The Grapes of Wrath was a task which, as the main section of Working Days makes clear, fully commanded his energy. Everything he had written earlier—from his 1936 Nation article, “Dubious Battle in California,” through “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” an April 1938 essay that functioned as the Epilogue to Their Blood Is Strong—became grist for his final attempt. From his numerous field travels with Tom Collins, and from countless hours of talking to migrant people, working beside them, listening to them, and sharing their problems, Steinbeck drew all the concrete details of human form, language, and landscape that ensure artistic verisimilitude, as well as the subtler nuances of dialect, idiosyncratic tics, habits, and gestures, which animate fictional characterization. But the choreography of details alone, the dance of his ear and eye, won’t fully account for the metamorphosis from “The Harvest Gypsies” to The Grapes of Wrath.
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