Vintage Steinbeck

100 years after his birth, where does 'Grapes of Wrath' author stand among literary giants?

By Dixie Reid -- Bee Staff Writer
February 27, 2002

A baby boy born 100 years ago today in a Salinas cottage grew up to be one of America's greatest writers. When he died in 1968, at age 66, he was the most-loved American author in the world and, even now, sales of his books approach 2 million a year.

Never, though, has John Steinbeck been a darling of the critics.

"He's too popular and he's too deceptive," said Louis Owens, a Steinbeck scholar and English professor at the University of California, Davis. "That's always been the hit against Steinbeck."

A recent story in the New York Times quoted literary critic Harold Bloom as saying, "You can't read three paragraphs of Steinbeck without thinking of a poorer Hemingway, with characterizations that are contrived." The Times also noted that college-level literature courses tend to ignore Steinbeck while high schools don't, because Steinbeck is "an easy read."

But Steinbeck does have his academic defenders. Owens, who has taught strictly Steinbeck classes in universities for 20 years, said, "He came of age in the era of Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Joyce and Wolfe -- the modernist period -- when writers were supposed to be really obscure and the surface of the text was supposed to be difficult to read. Steinbeck's complexities lie underneath a simple-seeming surface. He tricks the reader constantly in really wonderful ways. He creates beautiful snares."

Steinbeck's 1945 novel "Cannery Row" is, on first read, a lighthearted comedy about rapscallions living beside the sea. But, said Owens, the novel is dark and complex.

"It's about someone, the Doc character, who's cut off from life and who is lost in this kind of isolated psychic terrain. And it's about the failure of the American dream. These lighthearted bums are bitter failures. Steinbeck makes it very clear that they're the flotsam and jetsam of America."

Likewise, he believes that "The Grapes of Wrath," generally considered Steinbeck's finest work (it won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize and was the cornerstone for Steinbeck's 1962 Nobel Prize), is far more than a simple defense of the yeoman farmer.

"Steinbeck is not excusing those Okies for a minute. He implicates them completely in the ecological disaster of the Dust Bowl," Owens said.

When the sharecropper voice says, "Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land. Maybe we can kill banks -- they're worse than Indians and snakes," Steinbeck places them squarely in the short pattern of American history, which is violent and exploitative and destructive, Owens explained.

"His whole life's work is a critique of the so-called American dream. I think Steinbeck is going to come into his own even more in the 21st century, because people are starting to look at the deeper aspects of his writing. He says the illusion of innocence is the most deadly, that unless you accept your own history, you end up destroying everything. That's a major point of 'The Grapes of Wrath.' That's why he says, 'Grampa killed Indians, Pa killed snakes for the land.' He wants to remind us of where we came from and the truth of who we are."

Later this year, all Californians will be encouraged to read "The Grapes of Wrath" as part of the inaugural California Reads project. A number of cities have attempted mass readings (Chicagoans read Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird" last year) but this is the first time it will be attempted by a state.

Jim Quay, executive director of the sponsoring California Council for the Humanities, said the Steinbeck book was selected because of the centennial and because it speaks to California's thousands of modern-day arrivals.

"It examines the archetypal California image that propelled the Joads to come here, and when the image wasn't what they expected, they had to make a living here. You don't have to be descended from Dust Bowl migrants to feel a kinship to what the Joads went through," Quay said.

The Steinbeck centennial also prompted Penguin Books to publish commemorative paperback editions of six of Steinbeck's books, including "The Grapes of Wrath," "East of Eden" and "Cannery Row." Viking, Steinbeck's publisher since "The Long Valley" in 1938, has issued a new hardcover book called "America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction," a collection of Steinbeck's journalistic work.

Throughout the year, Steinbeck will be honored and remembered with various events and programs in 39 states. The most-ambitious celebrations are taking place in his home state, centered mostly around the National Steinbeck Center in Salinas and San Jose State University, home of the Center for Steinbeck Studies.

Katie Rodger is one of two Steinbeck Fellows at San Jose State this academic year. Her master's thesis on Steinbeck's biologist friend Ed Ricketts (the inspiration for Doc in "Cannery Row," "Sweet Thursday" and "The Snake") is coming out as a book, and the fellowship allows her to continue the work she started as a graduate student.

"Steinbeck," Rodger said, "is one of the quintessential American writers, certainly the voice of California, and his themes are still pertinent today. His appeal not only to students and scholars but to the general readership are the best testament to his themes, his writing style, his message. He's a very accessible, readable author, and there's a definite resurgence of current scholars appreciating him. He was a visionary in many ways. His ecological themes are being explored now. He's being re-read."

Owens, the UC Davis professor, grew up in Atascadero, in Central California, and knows well Steinbeck's beloved Salinas Valley. He labored on farms and ranches up and down the valley, hoeing beans, working cattle, building sheds. He lived one summer in a bracero camp.

When Owens was a boy reading Steinbeck, he recognized the landmarks they both knew and was amazed at how Steinbeck elevated those places to metaphorical landscapes. By the time he reached graduate school, he had begun to discover the "hidden" social, political and environmental depth of Steinbeck's work.

Owens has written two Steinbeck studies -- "John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America," published in 1985, and "The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land," published three years later -- and has read each of Steinbeck's 17 novels at least two dozen times.

"I always find something new," Owens said. "He gives us the easy reading and lets us rest there, but there is always something more. I love the way he lays traps. I think Steinbeck did a lot of things as a writer for himself, and if a reader discovers these things, so much the better, but they're challenges he set for himself."

For instance, in the 1952 Cain and Abel saga, "East of Eden," Steinbeck takes readers behind the scenes as he puts himself in the story as its author. He is the "I" character, who learns about the novel as he writes it.

In "The Grapes of Wrath," Steinbeck lays out the structure of the book in the first paragraph, which begins with a wide-screen view of the red and gray country of Oklahoma, then focuses on weeds and moves back to the panorama. That, said Owens, is Steinbeck subtly preparing readers for a story that will move back and forth between the big story of the Dust Bowl exodus and close-ups of the Joad family.

"What I think is astonishing is how Steinbeck technically, brilliantly establishes that pattern in the first paragraph," Owens said. "It's in such a way that no one notices. I think that's symptomatic of why Steinbeck isn't read correctly by critics: It looks simple, yet it's an extraordinary aesthetic accomplishment."

Steinbeck also tried something different with "Of Mice and Men," writing a novel for the stage. The experiment worked: In 1937, it won the New York Drama Critics Award as best American play on Broadway.

Owens considers "Of Mice and Men" a technical tour de force. Most people, he said, read it as the sentimental story of George and Lennie and the failure of brotherhood and the dream. But there are other ways to read it: Lennie is dangerous and destructive, and society will rid itself of anything that threatens it.

"There's yet another, more interesting read," said Owens. "Steinbeck always said he wrote in layers, and people tend to dismiss this, but it's true. Carlson shoots Candy's dog because it smells bad. He's purifying the bunkhouse and the ranch. The death of the dog clearly foreshadows Lennie's death. He's shot with the same gun in precisely the same way."

That gun was a German Luger.

As Steinbeck wrote "Of Mice and Men," he was observing the eugenics movement in Germany. Eugenics was the pseudoscience that Hitler's Nazi regime used to justify killing Jews, psychiatric patients and disabled individuals. And so, said Owens, when Slim says George "had to kill" the childlike Lennie, that wasn't true.

"Slim is the ubermaster. He is Steinbeck's blue-eyed Aryan superman," he said.

Owens admires Steinbeck for the experimentation in his work, for writing a different kind of book each time.

"I think his greatest artistic success is 'Of Mice and Men,' " Owens said. "It accomplishes so much in so few pages that it stuns me. "The Grapes of Wrath." is his most successful book, with social and political impact. It's a brilliant achievement, but I've never found it as satisfying as some of his other books.

"There's no one like Steinbeck," said Owens. "No one, I think, combines the complexity and the apparent simplicity like Steinbeck does. He's been sort of written off as a social realist but was far more interested in bigger issues and bigger ideas than he was in chronicling his own time. It's in the structure of his books, the idea of his books, that his real interest lies."