William Souder's biography of John Steinbeck's life, entitled Mad at the World, is informed by the breakthrough observations of James Gray, a literary critic who set down in a "slim but penetrating monograph" (according to Souder) a thesis that amounts to nothing less than a breakthrough way of thinking about John Steinbeck's body of work. This is Gray's thesis: The common element underlying all of Steinbeck's disparate works was the author's anger. Souder wrote, "He was America's most pissed off writer."
"All [of Steinbeck's] work," Gray wrote, "steams with indignation at injustice, with contempt for false piety, with scorn for the cunning and self-righteousness of an economic system that encourages exploitation, greed, and brutality."
When my novel, Charging the Jaguar is published, I'll bet thoughtful readers (for example, every one of my ExcitingWriting Advisory subscribers) will find the same anger in my writing as they find in Steinbeck's. (By saying this I hope you won't misconstrue: I'm in no way comparing the quality of my writing to that of Steinbeck's. I'm only comparing my tone of voice to Steinbeck's.)
Please allow me at this juncture to make a sharp left turn in my argument. (It will all make sense in the end.) Two "conditions" all high-quality novels have in common: 1) One of the characters is always a stand-in for the author; it's usually what readers and critics call "the point-of-view character." 2) Sometimes if you follow the "stand-in" character closely throughout his or her story-arc, you can get a "bead" on how the author feels about the material he or she is writing about, and sometimes how the author feels about himself in relation to the other characters and the larger story he is writing. This may sound like "esoteric writer BS" to you. General readers needn't trouble themselves with these thoughts, but I submit to you: Those novels that lack a strong point-of-view or stand-in character are weak in other respects as well, so having an obvious stand-in character in a novel is actually a good thing, a very good thing.
In The Grapes of Wrath, the "stand-in character" is clear from the novel's opening pages: It's Tom, the young man just released from prison for good behavior.
On page 255 in the edition I'm reading, you have Al, one of Tom's uncles, talking to a newly introduced character about Tom. At this point in the novel, Tom isn't present, but Al is saying about him:
"Tom. He's quiet. But—look out."
The other man, the newcomer, responds saying, "Well I talked to him. He don't sound mean."
"Oh, he ain't. Just as nice as pie 'til he's roused, an' then—LOOK OUT!"
My point is that the same can be said of John Steinbeck, the author, and of his career. He can be the nicest guy—he was a great and loyal friend!—as helpful to everyone around him as all get-out, but if he gets angry or gets his back up against the wall, or if his stand-in character does, LOOK OUT! John Steinbeck used his anger to create unforgettable characters; his unforgettable characters made the whole world want to read his novels, the kind that are translated into 19 languages or more. That is how each of John Steinbeck's novels rose to bestseller status, and then, beyond that, to "perennial classic" status, and beyond even that, to simply "great," propelled by the stand-in character's rage in each one. Of course, in the case of The Grapes of Wrath, that means, propelled by Tom's anger.
Let me describe one instance in Grapes where Steinbeck's anger paved the way for an unforgettable character who comes and goes in just a handful of pages, but who I submit changes the tone of the entire novel:
It happens when Tom and Al both drive to a junkyard to find a part they need to repair their Model-T truck. The worker at the junkyard, who's dirty and slovenly, is described this way (with some of Steinbeck's finest descriptive writing): "One eye [of his] was gone and the raw, uncovered socket squirmed with eye muscles when his eye moved." (Page 177.) Then, "The man shambled close, his one eye flaring."
What happens next was a tremendous surprise to me: Until then I had gotten the idea that Tom (via John Steinbeck) supported all downtrodden workers. But here was one example where the opposite was true and I remember feeling very surprised that, Tom, the stand-in character for the author, comes out verbally attacking this junkyard worker. In fact the short scene requires us—no, forces us!—to think in a very nuanced way about what Steinbeck is in favor of in the case of most workers, and what he objects to about this specific worker. And that's another one of the scene's strengths.
When the junkyard worker, this grotesque man with only one eye, shows no interest in his boss's business, saying to Tom and Al, "You can burn the goddamned place down for all I care," (Pg. 179) Tom turns on him, saying, "You stink!" at one point and "Wash your face!" at another.
Steinbeck then has Tom make some horribly crass, obscene comments about the junkyard worker to Al, right in front of the worker. What Tom says about this poor, downtrodden worker is nothing less than horrible.
The short scene forces me to remember that the one thing Steinbeck always championed was not only poor people, but poor people who show tremendous dignity in the way they go about working their jobs and living their lives. Take Ma, for example:
In the final pages of the novel (around page 400) absolutely everything has gone horribly wrong for the Joad family: The preacher, Casey, was murdered by a strikebreaker in front of Tom, and Tom, seeing the injustice of it, in a fit of righteous anger, murdered the strikebreaker on the spot. Now Tom is a wanted man. Police and strikebreakers are looking for him. He has an open wound on his cheek that will give him away, that truly makes Tom "a marked man." The Joad family, now led by Ma, has to leave the migrant camp and move on so Tom won't be discovered hiding in a folded matrass in the truck that's piled up with the rest of the Joad family's belongings. The family has run out of food. They've run out of everything, even pepper. Ma makes a meal with the family's last pennies. She holds it, the meal, the family, together, just barely. She is the last bastion of dignity and self-respect. She demonstrates tremendous self-possession at the very worst time. It's tremendously moving to me due to the stark contrast we had with the junkyard worker hundreds of pages earlier who had allowed himself to become slovenly, and go around dirty and smelly, without a patch over his missing eye, not even caring about whether his employer's place of business thrives or is lost in a fire. (That line of dialogue is eerie to me: "You can burn the goddamned place down for all I care.")
To my way of thinking the entire novel turns on this night-and-day contrast between the junkyard worker and Ma. The junkyard worker is self-indulgent and lacks self-respect. He feels sorry for himself and has stopped caring if he grosses out the people around him or lives his life with even a shred of dignity and decency. Ma, on the other hand, is strong and disciplined. She never feels sorry for herself. She displays tremendous discipline even as the end closes in on her.
So the question I ask myself always comes down to this: Would this contrast have worked better if Steinbeck (via his stand-in character, Tom) had been less angry at the junkyard worker? If he had cut that guy some slack and felt sorry for him for not caring, for not taking showers, and for not wearing an eye patch? No, quite the opposite. It would have fallen flat. Steinbeck had to be 100% pissed off at the junkyard worker to have any hope of making the contrast be instructive to the reader, of getting the reader, in fact, to feel a deep love, admiration and respect for Ma in the final pages. You see, Steinbeck's approach only works when the stand-in character's anger is fanatically extreme. And that's why Steinbeck loves being mad at the world, and why I do, too. Wouldn't have it any other way.
