The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

 

The Grapes of Wrath divided opinion when it was first published. Some declared it a masterpiece, others dismissed it as crude propoganda. Charles Angoff, in his contemporaneous review, noted: 

There should be rejoicing in that part of Hell where the souls of great American imaginative writers while away their time, for at long last a worthy successor to them has appeared in their former terrestrial abode. With his latest novel Mr. Steinbeck at once joins the company of Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Norris, and easily leaps to the forefront of all his contemporaries. [The Grapes of Wrath] has all the earmarks of something momentous, monumental, and memorable: universal compassion, a sensuousness so honestly and recklessly tender that even the Fathers of the Church would probably have called it spiritual; and a moral anger against the entire scheme of things that only the highest art possesses. 

High praise indeed, but it wasn’t all uncritical acclaim: the novel was banned in Kansas and in Kern County, California (location of the Weedpatch camp in which the Joads stayed in the novel). In St Louis not only was it banned but the librarian was ordered to burn copies that had already been purchased. H. Kelly Crockett, a student in Oklahoma at the time of the novel’s publication, recalled in an article twenty years later that a common criticism of the novel at the time was that it was propogandist and, once the situation that had called into being the events it portrayed had been overcome, it would be read merely as a historical curiosity. 

Crockett’s conclusion, after twenty years, was that this had proved not to be the case and the novel retained its literary power. Seventy-plus years on, is that still the case? The fortunes of any novel wax and wane, and such is the case for The Grapes of Wrath. A largely positive review by Edward Galligan of the 1989 fiftieth anniversary reprint still balked at “purple prose, melodramatic plotting, and sentimental thinking” and enough “hamminess” to make us “gag at the prospect of rereading it.” Today, then, while Steinbeck is still read, it is mostly Of Mice and Men, while The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps out of favour. I would suggest that, for all the novel’s faults, this is a pity. 

Frank Eugene Cruz suggests that most criticism of the novel categorises it in one of four ways – as a story of migration, a recasting of Christian themes and motifs, a work of social protest or a powerful, sentimental epic. And the latter three representations are, in part, responsible for some of the ambivalence with which we tend to confront the book today. The Christian moralising and socialist rhetoric which some discern in it are too didactic: and it is true that, at times, Steinbeck batters us with his message where some subtlety would have been more effective. The unfairness, for example, of the way the farm owners used the surplus of men to drive down pay does not become any more unfair because we read of it three or four or five or six times: it was unfair the first time and the reader could have been trusted to intuit that. And the sentimentality that gives rise to Edward Galligan’s gagging at the prospect of re-reading it is certainly an issue. But, nonetheless, I would argue that The Grapes of Wrath is a great novel. 

What makes it so, for me, is the interconnectedness of those different categories that people ascribe to it. It is all of the things that people have described it as, but it is all of them in combination. If it can be read as a Christian narrative, then it is a highly political Christian narrative, as Stephen Bullivant demonstrates when he points to the novel’s connection of being a “red” with Jesus Christ, in the form of Jim Casy. Similarly, Stephen Railton suggests that Steinbeck’s use of Christianity, in the form of Casy, is a way of insinuating a revolutionary vision of militant socialism. Railton appears to posit this as a criticism, but for me the way the novel gives religious ideas political resonances is one of its great strengths. In any case, politics and religion are backdrops in the novel – essential, unavoidable, but backdrops nonetheless – and the central message is neither purely political nor religious, but rather about the nature of humanity and the need for community. And that transcends everything. 

While there is a strongly religious element to The Grapes of Wrath, it is not straightforward. Stephen Bullivant notes a letter from Steinbeck to his editor in which he states that he wants “all all all” the verses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to be printed at the start of the novel. The repeated alls demonstrate that he is adamant on the point and Bullivant therefore makes a study of the complete song in order to understand why. He notes particularly the final verse: 

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make me free,

While God is marching on. 

Bullivant is drawn to the third line, noting that, in religious terms, the concept of dying “to make men free” is novel. Martyrdom, in the Gospels, is a transcendent event rewarded by personal salvation; “making men free” suggests more of an immanent event. Such notions, of course, would have appalled social conservatives such as Eric Voegelin or Leo Strauss, suggesting, for them, the hubris of mankind, but there is nothing hubristic about The Grapes of Wrath. Far from it, there is a deep note of pessimism sounding throughout it. It may be replete with Christ figures – Casy, Tom, even Rose of Sharon – but the freedom granted by Jesus’s death is still, in Steinbeck’s vision, a highly qualified one. 

Tamara Rombold gives a persuasive account of inversions of the Bible story throughout The Grapes of Wrath, from the superb depiction of drought in the first chapter (an inversion, she argues, of the Creation story) to Exodus (unlike the Israelites who were spared the plagues, the Oklahoma drought blights everyone), to Moses in the bullrushes (Rose of Sharon’s baby cast dead into the water) to the final scene, after the apocalypse of the flood, with Rose of Sharon in the barn with the starving man, reminiscent of Isiaiah, and the New Heavens and the New Earth. 

Rombold then draws on Jim Casy’s soujourn in the wilderness “like Jesus”, in which he realises the call of a new spirit, which he calls love. She makes persuasive allusions to Casy’s Christ-like behaviour in his arrest and death scenes. Curiously, though, she makes no mention of probably Casy’s most important speech, just prior to his death. In this, Casy himself makes an inversion of Jesus’s walk into the wilderness. The truth isn’t in the wilderness, says Casy, it is here, in the community, among the people. This is where he finds his soul. An this resonates clearly with Tom, of course, because it forms the basis of much of his later conversation with Ma Joad (and this exchange is related by Rombold), in which he reveals his intention to leave and follow Casy’s example, leading the community against the travails forced on them by the system. Thus, we have in Casy and Tom, two representation of Jesus. Casy, the pure-of-heart lover of humanity, a man who dies for his beliefs, is an earthly Jesus figure, preaching virtue and honesty and decency. Tom is at once his disciple and a symbol of the risen Christ, the one who is “with you always, even unto the end of the world” as it is written in Matthew. Or, as Tom says to Ma: 

“Then it don’t matter. Then I’ll be aroun’ in the dark. I'll be ever’where - wherever you look. Whenever they’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever they’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. If Casy knowed, why, I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad an’ I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ know supper’s ready. An’ when our folks eat the stuff they raise an’ live in the houses they build - why I’ll be there.” 

Casy, then, can be seen as Jesus, while Tom is Christ. And the gospel they preach is a radical one. As Casy says to Tom: 

“There ain’t no sin and there ain’t no virtue. There’s just stuff people do. It’s all part of the same thing. And some of the things people do is nice, and some ain’t nice, but that’s as far as any man got a right to say . . . What is this thing called sperit? ... It’s love. I love people so much I’m fit to bust sometimes - an’ I want to make them happy - maybe it’s all men an’ all women we love; Maybe all men got one big soul ever’body’s a part of.” 

For all that, though, I don’t believe The Grapes of Wrath should be read as a Christian novel. It is, if anything, a humanist novel. There are clear Christian resonances, and central characters may be comparable with Christ-figures, but that is because the fundamental tenets of Christian religion such as fairness, sense of community and so on, borrowed as they are from pre-Christian Platonic thought, are equally relevant to modern humanist belief. And so you might consider the novel christian, in the sense of evoking an ideal of human decency, but not Christian, as in following the doctrinal beliefs of any Church of Christ. As Casy says, “Why do we got to hang it on God or Jesus?” Thus, the titular grapes of wrath are not those of The Battle Hymn of the Republic, but the spirit inside man which will rise against oppression and exploitation. Casy is no longer a Preacher of God but remains, throughout, a preacher of men for men. 

Similarly, despite its sometimes overwhelming didacticism, in the end The Grapes of Wrath is not a political novel either. Politics is simply a by-product of Steinbeck’s true interest, which is human nature and human beings, the human community. In the 1930s, the prevailing difficulties which beset humanity were political, and that is therefore what he wrote about. It is Ma Joad who makes one of the novel’s most telling points: “Use’ ta be the fambly was fust. It ain’t so now. It’s anybody.” And earlier, she says: “I’m learnin’ one thing good. Learnin’ it all a time, ever’ day. If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.” 

Warren Motley, writing in 1982, complains that much of the novel’s critisism until then had focused on Casy and Tom as the core of the film and that the central role of Ma Joad in explaining the family’s gradual realisation of the need for community and cooperation is underplayed. I would agree, and I suggest that Ma Joad is one of the great characters of American fiction. She develops throughout the novel and her gradual assumption of both actual and moral control over her family is beautifully drawn. She is superb. Motley draws on the writing of Robert Briffault to explain the sense of matriarchy as exemplified by Ma Joad’s growing sense of authority over her clan as defining a relationship of cooperation, as opposed to the typical patriarchal relationships based on power. And it is through this that one can sense a note of optimism in a largely pessimistic book: 

“Why, Tom,” she says, “us people will go on livin’ when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we’re the people that live. They ain’t gonna wipe us out. Why, we’re the people - we go on.” 

And what a wonderful rallying cry that is.

 

 

 

 

 

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

 

John Steinbeck wrote: “Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love.” The base theme of all honest writing, he concludes, is “Try to understand each other.” This is the crux of his 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men. The novel is an extended combination of setpieces in which a group of men and one woman, in a number of different permutations, try to come together, try to become a community, try to understand, or care for, or even acknowledge one another. Through it all, the fragility of true community is laid bare: we see the danger of those moments of misunderstanding or self-interest or anger or fear or jealousy that countermand the basic human instinct to cooperate.

The thematic force in the novel comes from its contrast of loneliness and community. There is tremendous loneliness endured by these characters, but also a fragile sense of community and the overwhelming need for human companionship. Thus, we see some of the negative forces that impel us – greed, anger, bitterness – but, much more than that, we see some of the positives, those moments of connection that make us all – to use another Scottish expression alongside that which informs the novel’s title – Jock Tamson’s bairns. And every character in the novel possesses a combination of these positive and negative impulses in varying degrees.

There is much to criticise in Of Mice and Men: it is too pat, too forced, too obvious, above all it is too melodramatic. From the outset there is only one possible way the narrative can end, and this ending is further emphasised all the way through the novel. At every turn it is obvious what will happen next: Curley will undoubtedly pick a fight with Lennie; Lennie will end up doing something bad and hiding out in the pre-appointed spot at the riverside; Curley’s wife will be the catalyst which provokes Lennie’s final midemeanour; the euthanasia of Candy’s dog will foreshadow the ending. All of it flows with an inevitability too great to be truly satisfying. Chekhov’s famous dictum is that, if a pistol appears in Act 1 it must be fired in Act 2. That is true but, in Of Mice and Men, when the pistol appears it has a sign hanging from it in large print saying “this pistol will be fired soon”. All of this serves to lessen the emotional impact of much of the action. As a study of community in adversity it can’t hold a candle to, say, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.

But, as ever with Steinbeck, there is so much to admire, and so much that is simply breathtaking. He manages to instil a sense of basic human decency in the most unpromising of material, and his characters are real, heartbreakingly flawed, trapped between the height of their aspirations and the depth of their fears. Only Curley, a one-dimensional pantomime villain, doesn’t feel satisfying. The other characters live. Even Curley’s wife, a character so indistinct she doesn’t even warrant a name, nonetheless comes across as a living, breathing, self-deceiving woman, warranting dislike and pity in equal measure.

The narrative structure is deceptively simple, as much of Steinbeck’s work is. The story is in three acts, each with two self-contained scenes. Through this, Steinbeck works a series of combinations of characters, each of them exploring different facets of the troubled community which subsists on the farm. Principally, of course, we have the story of George and Lennie. Lennie is a giant with the mind of an infant, mentally handicapped and incapable of comprehending the consequences of his actions. George is his friend, nobly sticking by him despite the fact that Lennie causes nothing but trouble. As the novel begins, they are on the move because Lennie was hounded out of Weed on suspicion of attempted rape. The reader is privileged with the knowledge that this was not an attempted rape: rather, attracted by the dress of a little girl, Lennie grabs it and refuses to let go, and when the child panics and tries to escape, this causes Lennie to panic too. As soon as we hear this, we know the scene will be replicated in some form as part of the novel’s climax, and so it transpires. Lennie is incapable of change. But George is shown to be an honourable man: it would be easy for him to abandon Lennie, and few would criticise him for so doing, but he stands by him throughout.

The two men arrive at a new farm and they and we are therefore introduced to a new set of companions. Each of these is flawed in his own way. Most of them are shown to have some hidden dream. Only Carlson appears devoid of ambition or empathy. In turn, we are presented with a series of character combinations which begin to reveal the layers of human hope buried deep within the truculence of these working men. George and Slim, the main man in the mule team and the person to whom all of the men – even Curley, the owner’s son – defer, offer the most intelligent analysis of their respective hopes and fears. It is through his discussions with Slim, for example, that we learn the nature and depth of George’s friendship with Lennie. We know, too, that both George and Lennie aspire to have a smallholding of their own. When Candy, the ageing handyman who has lost a hand in an accident, hears the two talking of their dreams, he offers to help finance it with money he has saved from his compensation for the accident. Growing old, he knows he will soon become too useless to continue to work and will end up in a poor house. This is his means of escape, and he joins George and Lennie in the great dream. They will establish a community of the disconnected.

Later, when all the men have gone to a cathouse, leaving Lennie behind, he visits Crooks in his room. Crooks is black and disabled, a double outsider who is excluded from the community of men on the farm and suffers intense loneliness. He doesn’t want Lennie invading his private space, and he knows the giant offers no real prospect of conversation, but he is also deeply lonely. It is Crooks who makes some of the most telling points in the novel. "A guy goes nuts if he ain't got anybody. Don't make any difference who the guy is, long's he's with you”, he says aloud. Crooks is dismissive of the trio’s grand plan for establishing their own place, but it is obvious, to us and him, that what he wants more than anything is to be included in their plans. He offers to join them for no pay. His is one of the most poignant histories in the whole novel, and when he is threatened by Curley’s wife, his response is horrifyingly realistic. He turns himself into a non-person, divesting himself of all personality and outward appearance and disappearing into a shell of nothingness. He becomes a blank, an invisible man. It is the only means of escape for outsiders in a world dominated by those who disparage them. It speaks of cruelty and abuse. It was against this sort of intolerance that Rosa Parks rebelled in 1955 when she refused to make way on a Montgomery bus for a white person. For a moment, in that room, in Crooks’s automatic defence mechanism, we are taken into another world, and it is a repellent place. This is beautifully, powerfully written.

Crooks’s defence is, of course, what Lennie cannot do: when Curley is looking for trouble, Lennie calls attention to himself by laughing at his own thoughts and Curley, thinking he is laughing at him, lashes out. The capacity for invisibility, then, is a powerful defence mechanism, and all too often it is called on by the dispossessed of the world.

There are a couple of animal relationships in the novel, too, and each of these is significant. Firstly, there is Lennie and his pets, a mouse in the opening scene which he has petted too forcibly and killed, and later a new-born pup which he is given at the new farm and which, again, he is too rough with and kills. Nothing Lennie does is out of malice: he simply does not understand his strength or the consequences to others of that strength. And secondly we have Candy and his old dog, a lame, ill, half-blind thing, probably not far from death. In an early scene, Candy is persuaded, against his will, that the dog needs to be put down and Carlson takes it out and shoots it. The dog is Candy’s only friend. Companionship is lost. It is a poignant moment but, of course, the euthanasia of the dog, with a bullet in the back of the head, is a direct foreshadow of what George does to Lennie at the novel’s conclusion.

The catalyst for that ending is the final meeting of Curley’s wife and Lennie. From the outset, it is obvious what will happen, but it does not make it any less horrifying when it does. Again, Lennie cannot understand his own strength, again he is panicked by the panic of someone else, and again this fatal conjunction of events overwhelms him. He breaks Curley’s wife’s neck. Before this, however, we see something of her nature, and this scene is important in terms of turning her from being merely a McGuffin into a character in her own right. She is naïve, not particularly bright, as manipulable as she is manipulative. She dreams of a career in Hollywood but we know such dreams are as impossible for her as the dreams of a smallholding are for George and Lennie and Candy. She simply wants something better. She wants something good. In her heart, she knows it won’t happen and she settles instead for marriage to Curley and a loveless life and endless longing.

Thus, through this series of character combinations we are taken into different conceptions of personal happiness and its link to community. There is genius at work in prosecuting these descriptions. To create sympathy for characters who are as resolutely self-centred or pathetic as some of the characters in Of Mice and Men is remarkable.

The ending, although utterly predictable, is nonetheless very complex. It is simplistic to portray it, as many have tried to when banning the novel from libraries, as advocating euthanasia. Clearly, there is a direct correlation being drawn between the killing of Candy’s aged, infirm dog and the killing of Lennie: the inference, then, is that euthanasia for dogs and for humans should be regarded in the same way, and the concomitant of that, the argument goes, is that euthanasia for mentally ill people must therefore be acceptable. But that is too reductive an evaluation of what is happening in this novel. It ignores the rest of the contextual detail of the narrative and reduces everything to a contrast between those two events. This is exactly the opposite of what Steinbeck is trying to posit in this deceptively complex piece of fiction.

It is important not to make twenty-first century judgements when reading twentieth-century novels. It is important not to decontextualise the events of this novel and suggest that they must offer a single and perfect solution to any example of the issues raised. What Steinbeck so carefully displays in this novel is the complexity of human nature and human community. Within that particular community of men, at that time, the only course of action that was humane is that which they take: they kill the dog because it is in pain and nearing its end; George kills Lennie because he knows the alternative is either lynching or incarceration in a lunatic asylum. Both decisions were honestly made, both caused inconsolable pain to the people who made them. Within the fragile community of the farm, those were the only viable options. Within the structures and beliefs of that community they were the right decisions to make, the honorable thing to do.

To extrapolate from that and suggest that, in any circumstance, euthanasia is correct, is to simplify Steinbeck’s narrative too much. If one attempts to do that, the beliefs of that close-knit community, which led to those decisions being made, are adulterated with modern-day sensibilities, and this renders the actions meaningless. It is for precisely this reason that Cormac McCarthy offers a completely neutral description of the violence of the 1840s west in Blood Meridian: to do otherwise, to filter it through modern-day sensibilities, would completely lose the impact of the story. Of Mice and Men must be read within the context of its own narrative, and any meaning which one can derive from it must be derived within that context. If one can take a message from George’s actions at the end of the novel, it is not the facile suggestion that “euthanasia is correct”, it is that “love forces us to do things we would rather not”. That is an altogether different, and more complex, and more sombre message.