Just How Good Was He?

It has been a 100 years since John Steinbeck came into the world and more than three decades since he died, but his presence on the landscape of American literature has not dimmed. The reason for this, of course, is that his books continue to draw readers: what Gore Vidal called “voluntary readers” who come to the printed page for sustenance of a particular kind. They migrate to Steinbeck because he entertains, enthralls, challenges and inspires them.

In his day, Steinbeck lined up well behind Faulkner and Hemingway, the American masters of modernism. This was, in part, because he was accessible in a way those writers never were, and this diminished him in the eyes of some academic critics. For decades, he has been a writer for junior high school, where “Of Mice and Men” remains a staple. High school students have traditionally been assigned his masterpiece, “The Grapes of Wrath,” the epic story of the Joads as the family makes its way from the Oklahoma Dustbowl to California’s imagined Eden. Few novels are more central to the construction of American experience. Tom Joad, the novel’s hero, is an idealized version of the American man. His broad sympathies and perseverance--he’s a bundle of good, rugged values--appeal to a vast audience. The novel continues to attract a readership around the world, and it will always do so.

Steinbeck may never sit easily on a college syllabus because he does not present a kind of textual complexity that lends itself to critical interpretation or exegesis, but his position in the American pantheon seems firm--a testament to his readerly-friendliness and to the quality of the work itself, which is better and more varied than many academic critics want to acknowledge. This range is evident in two recent publications timed to coincide with the centenary of his birth. The Library of America has just issued its third volume of Steinbeck fiction. It includes all of the major work of the decade 1942-1952, beginning with a slight wartime novella, “The Moon Is Down,” and working through “Cannery Row” (1945), one of his most enduring novels; and “The Pearl” (1947), a somewhat cloying novella that nevertheless appeals to eighth-graders in a big way; and concludes with “East of Eden,” another masterpiece, albeit a flawed one.

This volume alone explodes the commonly held notion that Steinbeck never did anything of value after “The Grapes of Wrath,” which was published in 1939. In “Cannery Row,” Steinbeck’s wry genius is apparent on every page, beginning with its famous opening paragraph, in which all of Steinbeck’s distinctive qualities as a writer are on display: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.” Readers in search of whimsical, poetic and deeply felt evocations of the American West--its land and its people--will find them abundantly in these pages.

Perhaps more surprising is the new selection of Steinbeck journalism--much of it long out of print--gathered for his centenary by Susan Shillinglaw and Jackson J. Benson. “America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction” presents a feast of good reading, and it reminds us that once upon a time readers expected important writers of fiction to be journalists as well. Steinbeck was, in fact, a born reporter, and he brought the same quality of attention to language that is characteristic of his fiction to casual pieces of reportage for Collier’s and Holiday and Newsday, a point this collection makes obvious. Steinbeck wrote vividly about places he loved--Salinas, New York City, Sag Harbor--and these evocations of place begin the book, welcoming the reader to Steinbeck at his most fetching. In his more important journalistic work, however, he engages with social issues, such as the devastation wrought by agribusiness in California--the subject of his novel “In Dubious Battle” (1935)--or the pitiful condition of squatters in “The Harvest Gypsies,” a series written for the San Francisco News in 1936. His most incendiary piece is probably “Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” commissioned by Life but rejected because of its overtly radical politics. It still crackles on the page, fueled by indignation. That Americans should have found themselves hungry and helplessly poor in the midst of plenty enraged him.

As Steinbeck says in “Writers Take Sides,” a brief statement of beliefs aimed at his opponents: “I am treasonable enough not to believe in the liberty of a man or a group to exploit, torment, or slaughter other men or groups. I believe in the despotism of human life and happiness against the liberty of money and possessions.” Needless to say, this seems just as radical in post-Reagan America as it did 60 years ago: perhaps even more so in a moment in our history when irony--especially in politics--is painfully lacking.

This volume also contains some of Steinbeck’s reports from the front during World War II. The writer dispatched 86 articles from Europe during the war, publishing most of them in the New York Herald Tribune. His assignment was to “see the war through the eyes of the common man,” as London’s Daily Express suggested in an article that mentioned Steinbeck’s reporting. He did so with remarkable ease and grace, taking us onto troop ships, into hospital wards and training camps in North Africa. He plunged right into the caldron of war itself in southern Italy, witnessing the invasion of Salerno. Some of the best of these pieces are reprinted here.

Unwell in his mid-60s, suffering from heart disease and a bad back, Steinbeck nevertheless trooped off to Vietnam to visit his son, a soldier, and to report for Newsday about the progress of that particularly sour war. (He had been encouraged to do so by Lyndon Johnson, whom he considered a friend.) The circumstances of that war, so unpalatable and difficult to rationalize, defeated him as they defeated this nation as a whole. Indeed, Steinbeck was driven to distraction by the war, and he suffered a major relapse on his way home from Southeast Asia. He died in 1968, disgruntled and confused by a war that made no sense.

This volume also contains the buoyant final essays that Steinbeck published in “America and Americans” (1966). He had been asked to contribute some text to a volume of photographs, but the project expanded as he found himself writing more easily than he had in years. This is, as he admitted in his preface, “a book of opinions, unashamed and individual.” He saw his country as “complicated, paradoxical, bullheaded, shy, cruel, boisterous, unspeakably dear, and very beautiful.” It is difficult to resist such a portrait, especially from an author willing to admit that there are “jagged holes in our system.”

Radicals will, not unreasonably, argue that Steinbeck never went far enough with his politics. Toward the end, he tended to side with those in power and was less fiery than when young, less committed to rooting out injustice. This is all true. Nevertheless, his view of America and Americans, as presented in these brief, rather abstract essays remains appealing: One just doesn’t see this hint of guilty optimism any more. Steinbeck saw that there were endless possibilities for goodness in our national character and that if these were not thwarted by greed and stupidity, Americans--a patchwork entity created out “of work, of bloodshed, of loneliness and fear”--might well do some good in the world.

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From ‘Starvation Under the Orange Trees’

The spring is rich and green in California this year. In the fields the wild grass is ten inches high, and in the orchards and vineyards the grass is deep and nearly ready to be plowed under to enrich the soil. Already the flowers are starting to bloom. Very shortly one of the oil companies will be broadcasting the locations of the wild-flower masses. It is a beautiful spring.

There has been no war in California, no plague, no bombing of open towns and roads, no shelling of cities. It is a beautiful year. And thousands of families are starving in California. In the county seats the coroners are filling in “malnutrition” in the spaces left for “causes of death.” For some reason, a coroner shrinks from writing “starvation” when a thin child is dead in a tent.

For it’s in the tents you see along the roads and in the shacks built from dump heap material that the hunger is, and it isn’t malnutrition. It is starvation. Malnutrition means you go without certain food essentials and take a long time to die, but starvation means no food at all. The green grass spreads right into the tent doorways and the orange trees are loaded. In the cotton fields, a few wisps of the old crop cling to the black stems. But the people who picked the cotton, and cut the peaches and apricots, who crawled all day in the rows of lettuce and beans, are hungry. The men who harvested the crops of California, the women and girls who stood all day and half the night in the canneries, are starving.

--John Steinbeck, 1936