Understanding Grapes of Wrath: Death on the Road

There was one part of The Grapes of Wrath story that moved me to tears when I first read Steinbeck's novel in high school; so much so, I recalled it clearly when I re-read it only a few months ago.

The sections of the novel particularly moving to me were those that portrayed the death of the Joad grandfather as the family left Oklahoma, and later on, the death of the grandmother as they entered California. Both died while the family was on the road; the grandfather was literally buried by the side of the road. Those passages reminded me of what my mother told me about my grandfather who passed away before I was born; they also brought up for me memories of my grandmother who passed away when I was ten. (I grew up with my maternal grandmother living with my family.)

In Grapes, we're prepared for the grandfather passing by other characters' expressing concern about the health of another character, Rose of Sharon, a young woman who is expecting to give birth momentarily. Then we witness a dog being run over by a truck. (Yes, another small animal dies.) Then the grandfather is asked if he feels ill.

"You Goddamn right," said Grampa weakly. "Sicker'n Hell." He's dead of a stroke a few sentences later.

One of the characters expresses the thought the Grandpa started dying as soon as they left the farm. He couldn't stand to leave it. And that was what broke him.

Grapes of Wrath not only helps us understand the extent of economic agony suffered by so many Americans during The Great Depression of the 1930's; it helps me understand what my own family went through during that time. The novel dramatizes the swift and sudden reduction in the standard of living the Depression brought on for so many Americans;and how decisive it was in breaking people's spirits, health, and, ultimately, bringing on their untimely death.

In the last few months I had the good fortune of watching Ken Burns' six-part documentary series, Portrait of the Roosevelts, so, not surprisingly, thoughts about The Great Depression have been with me as we have all witnessed our country and the entire world rocked by the ravages of the Covid Pandemic. Aside from the horrible death toll, the pandemic has spread enough economic misery around the world to remind everyone (who wishes to be reminded) of The Great Depression.

I remember growing up and being told that during most of 1930s, my maternal grandfather, Sol Lieberman, owned and operated a menswear custom tailoring shop in East New York, Brooklyn, New York. He and his wife, Celia, lived in an apartment above the store. My mother, Edna and her two sisters, Pearl (older) and Doris (younger), grew up in that apartment above the store. As The Depression, which began with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, worsened through the1930s, Sol's once prosperous custom-tailoring business began to falter, not only because times were tough, but because ready-made suits, already sold in stores, began to be carried in catalogues which became increasingly popular nationwide throughout the 1930s.

Just as agricultural commodity prices collapsed (affecting the fortunes of the real-life Oklahoma farmers the Joad family is modeled after), deflation in the 1930s nibbled away at prices and profit margins for everything, including custom-made men's suits. During the first and second presidential terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the American people were suffering through the modern-day Fed Bank's worst nightmare, deflation, wherein the less businesses charge for goods and services, the less money everyone has to purchase them.

By the end of the 1930s, Sol Lieberman's business was winding down. My father, Phil Lustig married Sol and Celia's daughter, Edna, and opened retail ladies' garment stores in New Jersey, first in New Brunswick, and then in Plainfield, a town to the north, in the center of the state. Phil was able to purchase a home in North Plainfield with a few extra bedrooms; Sol and Celia closed the store in East New York and headed west across the Hudson River to Plainfield. My mother's sisters, Doris and Pearl, also married and moved to Plainfield. My older brother, Marty, was born in the fall of 1941.

My father tried to put his father-in-law's talents to work in the Plainfield store, but his health deteriorated. He passed away while my mother was carrying me. By the time I came along in April of 1945, Sol was the grandpa I never got to meet.

I often wondered if like, grandpa Joad in Grapes of Wrath, Sol's death actually began years earlier when the new economic realities and customer preferences of the Depression forced him to leave his home in Brooklyn, an urban place he loved, and venture forth to a bustling suburb that was so dependent on automobiles, and to an ill-fitting way of life the men's tailor must have found strange at best, too big in some places, too tight in others. And then there was the thought of him working in his son-in-law's business. Could there be any question his heart wasn't in it?

By the time I attended high school and read Grapes of Wrath my family and I had already mourned Sol's death as well as the death of his wife, my Grandma Celia. She had always been the strength of our immediate family that was now centered in Plainfield and North Plainfield. It was 1955. A massive stroke took her away. I was ten years old at the time.

It should come as no surprise to you that this John Steinbeck novel along with another work of his, Of Mice and Men, both had something to do with me deciding to turn to writing novels late in my life.

I found inspiration and solace in novels that looked at life and death unflinchingly. I'm grateful to have been inspired by the best.

My Grapes of Wrath: A Life-Long Journey.

John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, originally published in 1939, tells the story of economic hardship in the Oklahoma Panhandle in 1937. A severe drought, made worse by poor agricultural practices and collapsing commodity prices, caused many family farms in the Panhandle (and in surrounding States) to fail and the farmers to be displaced. The drought triggered what was dubbed "The Great Dust Bowl." The displaced farmers were called "Okies." Once the land they farmed was returned to the banks for non-payment of their loans, Okies became homeless, jobless and penniless practically overnight.

 

Many Okies left Oklahoma in their Model "T" Ford trucks piled high with their belongings, following Route 66 headed for the fertile valleys of California where they had been told there were plenty of jobs available for "pickers," migrant laborers who helped vegetable farmers and fruit tree growers in California's fertile valleys pick their bumper-crop harvests. Unfortunately, unknown to the Okies as they drove west with their foreclosed farms in their rearview mirrors (and memories), so many displaced Okies arrived in California looking for work, their numbers depressed the wages they could earn as pickers. Economic disaster (It's the Fed Bank's worst nightmare, called "disinflation") stalked Okies wherever they went.

The Great Depression was a generational catastrophe far worse than the Covid-driven economic agony we're currently suffering through. A key reason: It lasted so long. The Depression began in October 1929 and only let up as the United States began gearing up for World War II in 1940. It was far worse than any other economic downtown America has ever experienced.

 

When you read the longer, more complicated, adult version of The Grapes of Wrath (rather than the simplified, shortened, expurgated version so many of us read in high school), you'll find it rewarding in the long run, although you might find it slow in places; and, overall, uneven.

This time around I noticed how often in Grapes of Wrath, instant death gets meted out to insects and small animals. To me it's analogous to how often Okies' spirits get instantly crushed under the weight of the tragedy they endure as they leave Oklahoma, and journey to California only to learn that, far from California being the Promised Land, their suffering has just begun.

In the novel's opening pages, a grasshopper finds its way into the cab of a truck that the principal protagonist, Tom Joad, is riding in. I remembered reading these exact words when I was in high school: "A grasshopper flipped through the window and lighted on top of the instruments panel… Joad reached forward and crushed its hard skull-like head with his fingers, and he let it into the wind stream out the window."

Strangely, I also recalled reading about a land turtle. I thought, surely I had imagined that. But, no, as I was reading the novel this time, there it was, the tough, strong land turtle, as indomitable as ever. When, early on in the adult version of the novel, an entire chapter is devoted to the land turtle's wanderings, I thought perhaps Steinbeck planned to turn him into a recurring character.

I also noticed that just a bit later we read about "Cats," or the Caterpillar Tractors used in the Panhandle by the foreclosed land's new owners to essentially push houses off their foundations and make them inhabitable. With a single blow by a "Cat" the Okies were chased off what once was their land, not only making them  homeless but forcing them to "move on."

 

The way the turtle's powerful legs  are described, and the way the Cats are described effortlessly pushing over houses are comparable. I believe a close reading of the "grown-up" version of The Grapes of Wrath makes it clear that John Steinbeck knew exactly what he was doing all along.

 

By the way, that land turtle I mentioned earlier very nearly gets run over by a truck, the same truck the grasshopper earlier jumped onboard.

A few pages later, we witness nothing less than a genuine turtle-tragedy, when Mr. Turtle flips over on his back as he mounts a curb, and, for a time, has all four of his powerful legs wiggling ineffectually in the air, until Tom Joad, happens upon him after leaving the truck. He picks him up, drapes him in his unworn jacket and carries him under his arm. He later tells another character he intends to give the turtle as a gift to one of the children in Tom's family.

A new biography of John Steinbeck authored by William Souder, a noted literary biographer, was published in 2020. A previous biography of his about Rachel Carson was recognized by The New York Times as "notable." Another he wrote about the life of John Audubon was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. It's extraordinarily telling to me that Souder titled his newest work, Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck. (I can't wait to read it.)

Now that I'm writing this essay and thinking about my reading experiences with Grapes and also remembering the John Hawks-directed movie of the novel starring Henry Fonda, I do believe "Hank" Fonda played that early scene (in which Fonda is riding in the cab of the truck) spot-on. The driver tries to politely find out where Tom Joad, who he had just picked up as a hitchhiker, spent the last four years of his life. The driver defends himself, saying, at one point, "Well, that ain't none of my affair," and at another point, "I ain't a nosy guy." That's when Tom Joad unloads on him, saying, "The Hell you ain't. That big old nose a yours been stickin' out eight miles ahead of your face. You had that big nose goin' over me like a sheep in a vegetable patch." A short while later Tom allows, "I done time." Then, as they arrive where Tom asks to be dropped off, he tells the driver, "I know you're wettin' your pants to know what I done. Well, I ain't a guy to let you down."

As the driver stops to let Tom off, Tom says a single word, "Homicide." Then he adds, "That's a big word. Means I killed a guy. Seven years. I'm sprung in four for keeping my nose clean."

Tom Joad sure knew how to make a vivid first impression on that truck driver. Ditto John Steinbeck, allowing his anti-hero, Tom Joad, to make a vivid first impression on The Grapes of Wrath readers.

Ask yourself about the hitchhiker in that scene: Are those not the words of a guy who, as William Souder put it, is "mad at the world?" I think so. Indeed, I can't wait to read Souder's biography. (The opening pages of his biography read like Steinbeck himself might have written them. (Wow!)

What I learned from John Steinbeck-V: The Grapes of Wrath, Sixty Years Later: "My, how you've grown!"

When I first read The Grapes of Wrath in high school, it was a short, snappy, action story about the plight of the homeless Joad family during the Great Depression. The version of The Grapes of Wrath I read in high school was a highly redacted or Reader's Digest version of the novel, not just shortened but also expurgated, i.e., passages thought to be too explicit for young people were excluded.

Now, as I read the entire work some sixty years later for the first time, I want to exclaim, "My, how you've grown!" That is to say, "My, how what is arguably John Steinbeck's greatest novel has grown in length, detail, complexity of story, subtlety of character development and richness of overall artistic expression."

The unexpurgated version has a curious yet fascinating chapter-structure that makes it ripe for widespread editing and excising:

The even-numbered chapters (yes, by that I mean chapters 2, 4, 6, etc.) tell the Joad-family story, the shortened, clean, action-oriented version of the story I read when I was in high school. It's also the Academy Award-winning story you might have seen on the silver screen starring the great Henry Fonda and brilliantly directed by John Ford. The story told in the film, i.e., the even-numbered chapters, is the story with which you're probably already familiar: Tom Joad who has just been released early on parole from prison (having been imprisoned for murder) returns home to his family just as his parents, siblings, aunt and uncle and their children are about to leave the Oklahoma Panhandle for California. The Joad-family farm and the uncle's farm have been repossessed by the bank after their crops failed due to drought and poor agricultural practices that worsened the effects of the drought. Tom's father and uncle have read "circulars" stating there were plenty of jobs for migrant "pickers" of fruits and vegetables in the fertile California valleys. The Joad family decides to leave for California in the uncle's Model T truck.

The odd-numbered chapters (chapters 1, 3, 5, 7, etc.) provide a motherload of rich added-value material. They're sidelights, many of which have the qualities one might find in a classic New York Times "Reporter's Notebook" article. In fact, John Steinbeck was commissioned to write a seven-part series for The San Francisco News that was published under the title, "The Harvest Gypsies." It wouldn't be surprising to me if in covering the real-life tragedy unfolding in the San Fernando Valley, Steinbeck may have uncovered and developed a great many of the thoughts and observations that he subsequently worked into these odd-numbered chapters.

Some sixty years after I read the work for the first time, I'm reading the odd-numbered intermediary chapters combined with the even-numbered Joad-family chapters, and I am appreciating the rich, artistic experience Steinbeck had in mind when he first wrote The Grapes of Wrath in the mid-1930s. Reading it in the way Steinbeck originally intended the work does require more patience and care than reading the Reader's Digest "student version."

One example: Steinbeck devotes an entire intermediary chapter, Chapter Three, to describing what happens in a torn-up patch of grass by the side of a concrete highway. He describes, "the grass heads heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog's coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse's fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep's wool…"

I have always admired Steinbeck's eye for detail and his willingness to go "microscopic." He often allows his focus to include insects and small animals that inhabit this tiny patch of landscape: "The sun lay on the grass and warmed it, and in the shade under the grass the insects moved, ants and ant lions to set traps for them, grasshoppers to jump into the air and flick their yellow wings for a second, sow bugs like armadillos, plodding restlessly on many tender feet."

Into this patch of grass, this micro-environment by the side of a concrete road, lumbers a single turtle: "And over the grass at the roadside a land turtle crawled, turning aside for nothing, dragging his high-domed shell over the grass, not really walking, but boosting and dragging his shell along."

For paragraphs we follow the painfully slow progress of this turtle as it moves over rough terrain: "The back legs went to work, straining like elephant legs…"

Presently, the turtle overcomes hurdles and crawls onto the highway where it is nearly hit by "a forty-year-old woman" driving a "sedan." We readers hold our collective breath. The car swerves to avoid the turtle. "The turtle had jerked into its shell, but now it hurried on, for the highway was burning hot." And now a light truck almost flattens the turtle but only manages to flip the turtle on its back: "Lying on its back, the turtle was tight in its shell for a long time. But at last its legs waved in the air, reaching for something to pull itself over which it finally manages to do. Chapter 3 ends telling us the turtle's "old humorous eyes looked ahead, and the horny beak opened a little. His yellow toe nails slipped a fraction in the dust."

Why does Steinbeck focus on the affairs of insects by the side of the highway and then proceed to narrate the adventures of a lowly land turtle for an entire chapter in his novel (even if Chapter Three takes up only a tiny bit more than two pages)? Perhaps because his democratic values insist that non-humnan stories can have value and should be honored by being told? I'd say, "yes" to that. But there are story-structure reasons that also justify it: In Chapter 4, a truck that in Chapter 2 gave an unnamed distinctfully-yet-strangely dressed man a ride, and which is the same truck in Chapter 3 that nearly ran over the turtle, drops the same man off by the side of the road. For the first time our narrator gives the man a name, but only a last name, "Joad."

Joad removes his bright yellow shoes, places them under his arm and starts walking through the dust in his bare feet.  A page later he picks up the turtle. Some pages after that we learn he intends to bring it home as a gift. After another page of description, Joad meets "Reverend" Jim Casey, and in a way, that's when our story begins in the traditional sense with dialogue and description.

Does this novel have a slow start? It does. It starts as slowly as a turtle. (By the way I don't recall in high school The Grapes of Wrath I read having a slow start; perhaps it got off to a faster start thanks to further editing.

In the "grown-up" version of the novel, we get the distinct impression the author doesn't mind the slow start; he's intent on not allowing even the most minute details escape his and the reader's purview.

Next month, more about how the structure of the unexpurgated version of The Grapes of Wrath even when addressing emotionally explosive topics like sexual assault in the workplace, adds depth and artistic richness to the entire novel.

What I learned from John Steinbeck-IV: The Great Dust Bowl, from Fact to Fiction.

By 1936, the Great Depression and the economic devastation it wrought had been punishing the American people for six hard years. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the 32nd U.S. President, had just been inaugurated months earlier, his New Deal policies had yet to brighten the bleak mood of the American people.

Meanwhile, in the Oklahoma Panhandle, poor agricultural practices combined with chronic drought turned farmers' topsoil to dust along with any prospects they might have had for a harvest, no matter how paltry.

Prevailing winds picked up the dust (formerly rich topsoil from the Oklahoma Panhandle) and transported it an easterly direction.

When mud-brown, billowing clouds started drifting over New York City a few days later, a journalist coined the term "Dust Bowl" to describe what was happening in Oklahoma, and the name stuck for all time.

While the clouds carried the topsoil east, many Oklahoma farmers having no way to repay the loans they had taken out to plant their crops that spring, headed west. Economically ruined, but hearing enticing stories about their being "plenty of jobs to be had" in California,they packed up their belongings in their family Model-T Fords and followed Route 66 from Oklahoma to California.

Unfortunately, far more "Oakies" were arriving in the fertile San Fernando Valley than were needed as laborers to harvest the crops. Uprooted from Oklahoma but now penniless, with nothing to eat, slim prospects for work, and no place to go, the Oakies crowded into migrant labor camps that had been set up by the State of California to feed and house them and relieve their suffering.

That same year the San Francisco News, sensing a humanitarian tragedy in the making essentially on their doorstep, commissioned novelist John Steinbeck to write a seven-part series titled Harvest Gypsies about the plight of the displaced "Okies." The articles he wrote were published in October and early November of 1936.

(Of course the circumstances causing it are totally different, but if you've heard about the "camp" for displaced Middle-eastern immigrants that sprang up and still exists in Calais, France, it might provide an instructive modern-day analogy to what was going on in the San Fernando Valley in the fall of 1936. The overcrowding and dangerously poor health conditions in the Calais camp, especially during the Covid Pandemic, bespeak the plight of an abjectly poor, displaced and highly vulnerable group of economic refugees, which can be compared and contrasted with the plight of the "Oakies" in 1936.

Even before 1936, the State of California had set up a number of migrant labor camps to serve itinerant laborers and help alleviate suffering by housing them in humane conditions.

Tom Collins, the director of one of those migrant camps, the one called "The Arvin," wrote a series of reports about the conditions experienced by the Okies as they flooded into the California camps.

Of course, Steinbeck visited the camps himself and conducted interviews with the migrant laborers there, but knowing the controversy that was likely to be aroused by his passionate defense of the "Okies" as being exploited by a corrupt system gone awry, the author used Collins reports in researching his San Francisco News articles, as well as when he drafted his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath first published in 1939. In Steinbeck's writer's journal, which he kept at the time, he wrote, "I need this stuff [Collin's reports]. It is exact and just the thing that will be used against me if I am wrong." He certainly comprehended the sensitive and controversial nature of what he was writing about.

Eighteen of Collins's reports are available on EDSITEment.com, which is a National Endowment for the Arts website devoted to "driving excellence in humanities education."

According to the website, "comparing the reports to The Grapes of Wrath offers students a rare look into a writer's process of converting nonfiction material into fiction."

In coming months I will explore what I consider this "rare find," but in the remainder of this essay, I'd like to emphasize that in my view the power and authenticity of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, the Pulitzer Prize-winning epic tale of the Joad family, derive from it being scrupulously fact-based. I believe the passion very much in evidence in Steinbeck's voice as you read his work derives from the truth of it, as if the work itself wants to cry out and say, "What you're reading was once an American tragedy that happened to so many families just like the Joads during those very dark days."

 

If one simply reads chapter one, which is only four pages in length, one immediately understands this is a work of fiction based on fact:

"The sun flared down on the growing corn day after day until a line of brown spread along the edge of each green bayonet."

Without ever using the word "drought" or ever coming out and telling the reader that Steinbeck here is describing the climatic conditions that bring a stubborn drought into existence, the author patiently describes the pre-conditions for drought, until, "The dawn came, but no day. In the gray sky a red sun appeared, a dim red circle that gave a little light, like dusk; and as the day advanced, the dusk slipped back toward darkness, and the wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn.

"Men and women huddled in their houses, and they tied handkerchiefs over their noses when they went out, and wore goggles to protect their eyes."

Sounds a little like life during Covid, doesn't it? The pervasive sadness is the same as during a pandemic. I think it's the ever-present and inescapable notion that something very fundamental is very wrong. In the case of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, we find that along with damaging crops, drought damages human beings' spirits:

"The men were silent and they did not move often. And the women came out of the houses to stand beside their men—to feel whether this time the men would break… Horses came to the watering troughs and nuzzled the water to clear the surface dust. After a while the faces of the watching men lost their bemused perplexity and became hard and angry and resistant… Women and children knew deep in themselves that no misfortune was much to bear if their men were whole. The women went into the houses; their hands were busy with sticks and little rocks. The men sat still—thinking—figuring."

Steinbeck's writing here is spiritual, spare and elegiac; the deep sadness the people feel is evident; as well, the extra weight placed on the men just to comprehend what is happening to them, no less find a solution. Indeed, before Steinbeck has finished telling his story some men will be broken and some families, ripped apart.

Next month, more about how Steinbeck dramatized the real human tragedy occurring in Oklahoma and California in 1936 by inventing the Joad family and telling its story.

What I learned from John Steinbeck-III

John Steinbeck's Cannery Row tells the fictional story of a community by using an ensemble cast of what are truly "characters" who, during the worst days of the Great Depression, live in a poor industrialized neighborhood called Cannery Row just outside Monterrey, CA.

Its story structure is called "episodic" because the overall story can be broken down into individual, easy-to-watch-or-read "episodes" or "chapters," short stories that all work together to tell a longer and much larger story. Typically, episodic stories have "ensemble" casts of characters who play off one another to bring off the entire work. That's certainly the case with Cannery Row and Schitts Creek.

The word "ensemble" is French in origin. It may sound like a "fancy" word in English, but in French all it means is "together."

Whether you're viewing comedy TV shows like Schitts Creek or reading novels like Cannery Row, the episodic story structure lends itself very nicely to humor. And invariably, I've found, episodic stories feature an ensemble cast of characters.

Sure, Schitts Creek has its lead characters and its "stars;" so does Cannery Row, but the primary concern of both works is to tell a story of a community, using an ensemble cast, not just one or two principal protagonists.

So, for just a moment, let's look at the episodic story structure of Cannery Row. I think it's very soundly devised, beginning at the spiritual center of the community, and moving outward.

At the very heart of Cannery Row is Lee Chong who knows everyone because virtually everyone in the neighborhood owes him money. The novel starts off describing Lee Chong and his grocery. It goes on to tell how, after Lee purchases a nearby vacant building in payment for grocery debts, he negotiates a deal with a character named Mac "and the boys" (his cronies) to occupy the property in exchange for a monthly "rent" which Lee knows very well Mac and the boys will never pay.

So, given Cannery Row's episodic "start at the center and move outward" story structure, it's not surprising that the next major chapter (which is chapter three; chapter two is what I'd call an "interlude") discusses how Mack and the boys move into this vacant property; how they furnish it, and come to name it "The Palace Flophouse."

We learn that Mack is a no-account, extremely clever "bum," who's the ringleader of "Eddie and the rest, and whose ultimate goal is to live a life that never requires one to show up at a job. (Just as well, because during The Great Depression in the 1930s, there were an extremely limited number of those to go around.)

The next chapter describes the property directly to the left of the Palace, "the stern and stately whore house of Dora Flood; a decent, clean, honest, old-fashioned sporting house where a man can take a glass of beer among friends."

From this brief description I think you can begin to see how the novel's story structure contributes to making Cannery Row delightfully entertaining to read.

Cannery Row pushes beyond mere ensemble. It allows for individual characters, or pairs of characters to "have their own chapters" while the lead characters are off-stage. It's a perfect story structure for a novel like Cannery Row, where the tone is comic, and the reader gets to enjoy a series of eccentric and poignant characters mixing it up.

An episodic story structure is extremely solid when it's used to tell a comic or comedic story. Think of the TV show Office from the 1990s, or Ricky Gervais's current series, After Life. In both shows we see an ensemble cast that supports a story that's larger than any one character. But this kind of cast can also be used to support heroic or adventure stories.

As for why we binge on episodic comedies or action adventures like the ones mentioned here; I think it's that we feel extremely comfortable with the "set-up" of each show while individual chapters or, in the case of TV, individual "episodes" deal with specific stories, some with limited cast members “on stage” at the same time. That's the case with Steinbeck's comic novel Cannery Row as well as with Steinbeck's classic tragedy, The Grapes of Wrath, which I'll be discussing next month. Don't miss it.

What I Learned from John Steinbeck - 2

I'll bet you've heard of the expression "ensemble cast," used to describe certain plays and movies. It denotes "a group story structure" where characters interact with one another in the telling of the story rather than the story focusing on any single protagonist who undergoes a catharsis.

Ensemble or group-story structures lend themselves extremely well to comic or comedic tales. That's the case with Cannery Row, where we get to enjoy a cast of funny, eccentric characters interacting with one another.

In my view, the funniest character of them all is an artist by the name of Henri whose art includes creating assemblages of chicken feathers to paint portraits of chickens. Well, as we hear two other characters, Doc and Hazel, talking about Henri, we learn he's had a turn of artistic inspiration: "…He done all our pictures with chicken feathers, and now he says he got to do them all over again with nutshell. He says he changed his—his med—medium…."

"He still building his boat?"

"Sure," said Hazel. "He's got it all changed around. New kind of boat. I guess he'll take it apart and change it. Doc—is he nuts?"

"Nuts? he asked. "Oh, yes, I guess so. Nuts about the same amount we are, only in a different way."

"But that boat," he cried. "He's been building that boat for seven years that I know of… Every time he gets it nearly finished, he changes it and starts it over again. I think he's nuts. Seven years on a boat."

"You don't understand," he said gently. "Henri loves boats but he's afraid of the ocean."

"What's he want a boat for then?" Hazel demanded.

"He likes boats," said Doc. "But suppose he finishes his boat. Once it's finished people will say, 'Why don't you put it in the water?' Then if he puts it in the water, he'll have to go out in it, and he hates the water. So, you see, he never finishes the boat—so he doesn't have to ever launch it."

When I read this, I laughed uproareously assuming Henri was a stand-in for the type of artist who never gives himself permission to finish a work of art either because he or she is a perfectionist or, worse, a controlling coward who can't bear to send the finished work out into the world where it may be criticized. That kind of artist always finds something to change. If it's not fear of criticism, it may be an artist who doesn't know what he or she wants to say in the first place. An artist like Henri operates like a chameleon; he or she always wants to incorporate the latest artistic trends into his or her work.

If Henri were a novelist he'd never finish his novel because he doesn't have a strong conviction about what he wants to say.  Just as Henri is afraid of the ocean, this novelist is afraid of launching his novel into the world, and learning what readers and critics think of it; this is, finding out if it floats or sinks.

Reading about Henri tickled me because I recognized how some of Henri's artistic traits at one time summed me up perfectly as a novelist; the satirical sendup of your's truly hit far too close to home for comfort. 

 

While it's true that at one point I may have resembled Henri, that's not the case today. True, for years I wandered in the desert, not sure what I wanted to say or how I wanted to say it. I've long since stopped  wandering. I'm on my way towards completing and launching my boat. I know exactly what I want to say with my novel, and I fully expect, if it's taken seriously, as I hope it to be, people will say about it whatever they will. I'll never forget that my novel will be imperfect because, after all, it's written by a human being.

That short sketch of Henri turned me into an ardent fan of John Steinbeck's writing. I thought to myself, either Mr. Steinbeck at one point in his life came across someone like Henri (perhaps when he hung out at Cannery Row) or else, more likely, I believe, he recognized that there is a little bit of Henri inside him as well as inside every artist. It's someone who is reluctant to launch his work into the world to sail the ocean's seas where everyone can read it; it's an author who always wants to be thought of as avant-garde. But the truth of the matter is, the instant the work sails into the public domain, it starts becoming dated.

Next month: More about Cannery Row's story structure.

What I Learned from John Steinbeck-I

I learned that when we write about a place like Cannery Row, we should never forget that places can only come to life and live on the page once characters and relationships between characters are described and made meaningful. As John Gardner wrote, a successful novel must possess the quality of "a continuous dream."

Ask yourself: Have you ever once had a dream without any characters in it? I haven't.

In his novel Cannery Row, Steinbeck is writing about a place that existed during the Great Depression and still exists today. Steinbeck is a patient builder, and he begins by describing and making real for his readers a single store that is central to the neighborhood, Lee Chung's grocery. Yes, he describes Lee Chung's but as he does so, he's actually describing Chung's personality as revealed by how he runs his grocery store. For example, Lee Chung gives credit to practically all his customers, which not only says a lot about Mr. Chung, but also about his customers, i.e., that they are in need of credit.

Steinbeck's choice of the first sentence to begin chapter one: "Lee Chong's grocery, while not a model of neatness, was a miracle of supply."

That first sentence is not "artistic." It's not exactly funny but, in it's succinctness, it does make me smile. (The novel as a whole is comic, and at times comedic; it's poignantly funny.) It doesn't tax the reader with image. You don't have to imagine anything. It's about a business and the man who created the business and the purpose it serves in the larger community. During the course of the second and third sentence of Cannery Row, I counted fourteen mentions of specific product categories that can be purchased at Lee Chung's by "a man" both "to live and be happy," which tells you something about the world Steinbeck is writing about that, at that point,  purposely excludes women. And after another sentence of detail, he concludes his first paragraph with a sentence reflexive back to the larger community: "The one commodity Lee Chong did not keep could be had across the lot at Dora's." We later learn "Dora's" is a house of prostitution.

 

With restraint and consummate skill for expressing far more than his individual words seem to be saying, Steinbeck ennobles Mr. Chung, raises him up from a simple grocer to perhaps the closest thing Cannery Row in those days may have had to a power broker: "Lee's position in the community surprised him as much as he could be surprised. Over the course of the years everyone in Cannery Row owed him money. He never pressed his clients, but when the bill became too large, he cut off credit. Rather than walk into the town up the hill, the client paid, or tried to."

We're now at the beginning of the third paragraph and both Steinbeck and we, his readers, are yearning to learn something about Mr. Chung's physical description. So far not a word has been said about that. Steinbeck starts out seeming to give us what we want but then, like a ball in a pin-ball machine, he ricochets off in a completely different direction: "Lee was round-faced and courteous." What do those two thoughts have to do with one another? Nothing! Why do they deserve to be in the same sentence? They don't except that John Steinbeck decided they should be. Then the next sentence, which truly ennobles Lee Chung yet makes me laugh out loud: "He spoke a stately English without ever using the letter R." What a loving, entertaining way to say he spoke with a Chinese accent?

We couldn't have a finer enunciation of the deeper values that dwell at the heart of this novel: A belief in the nobility of the common person, that all people deserve respect; that all fictional characters deserve their humanity on the page.

At so many points in this novel, characters are shown in tremendously vulnerable circumstances, speaking their truth. I intend to share some of that with you in upcoming EWAs.

I came across a number of conversations between two characters of starkly distinct intellectual and emotional attainments in Cannery Row. Those scenes were tremendously moving and powerful to me. They reminded me of the power I remembered from having read Of Mice and Men, which Steinbeck published in 1937, earlier in his career. He published Cannery Row in 1945. Interestingly, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1962, six years before his death.

Perhaps I have so much reverence for John Steinbeck's writing ability as displayed in the opening pages of Cannery Row, because I believe what he's doing here is extremely hard to sustain without it going dead, flat, boring or all three. I've tried and I know. John Steinbeck pulls it off because he's more than happy to jump around from one sentence to the next, until, looking back we, his readers, realize he hasn't actually been jumping around so much as weaving for us a looser narrative fabric than perhaps other writers weave (for example, John Irving) but despite this looser weave, Steinbeck's narrative fabric is no less durable. As an example, discussing Lee Chung's "fortune," Steinbeck writes:

"What he did with his money no one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't get it. Maybe his wealth was entirely in unpaid bills. But he lived well and had the respect of his neighbors. He trusted his clients until further trust became ridiculous. Sometimes he made business errors, hut even these he turned to advantage in good will if in no other way. It was that way with the Palace Flophouse and Grill. Anyone but Lee Chong would have considered the transaction a total loss."

I'm smiling all through that paragraph. Aren't you? Consider the sentence, "Maybe his wealth was in unpaid bills." Admittedly it's dry humor; I think it's hilarious. And this: "He had the respect of his neighbors." Doesn't that make you smile? I find an abiding love and warmth for people throughout this book that draws me to Steinbeck's body of work. At this point in Cannery Row I think Steinbeck is warming us up. He's teasing us. He's giving us snippets of the story to come. "The Palace Flophouse and Grill." What a name! Who would give a place a name like that? Well, we're about to find out who named it and why that person gave it that name. Steinbeck is selling us on wanting to read his novel. But he had me from the opening paragraph. He didn't have to try that hard to sell me, but I'm certainly glad he did.

Next month: Story structure and pacing in Steinbeck's Cannery Row.