Holt Uncensored
August 15, 2002

A Grand Night for "The Grapes of Wrath"

It's Tuesday night on a warm summer evening as 35 people watch Terry Ryan stand before a giant map of the United States with a black marking pen and draw a circle around Sallisaw, Oklahoma, follow old Route 66 and end up with another circle on Bakersfield, California.

"That's about 1500 miles," she says. "It takes them 10 days in their makeshift truck to make it, going 35 miles an hour at most with frequent stops along the way. That was in the 1930s. Now, if only they had consulted MapQuest.com, they could have cut their time to 23 hours and 5 minutes."

Tittering at the joke notwithstanding, people shake their heads. The line Terry has drawn looks like a straight shot West, but as they know, in John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," his protagonists in the Joad family travel in a stripped-down 1926 Hudson that's been rebuilt to carry every mattress and stick of furniture they own - not to mention 12 "fambly" members and a preacher - through the worst mountain and desert terrain one could travel - with $150 to their name.

We're here at Book Passage Bookstore in Corte Madera to discuss the Steinbeck classic because it was named by the California Council of the Humanities as the first selection in the statewide reading program modeled after librarian Nancy Pearl's reading campaign of 1998 called "If All of Seattle Read the Same Book."

The idea struck a nerve in dozens of cities, and tonight we're all very glad that for some reason California made it statewide: Despite his Nobel Prize, John Steinbeck still rankles critics on the East Coast, and "The Grapes of Wrath" is still among the most censored books in America because of its perceived Communist ideas and famous (nearly deleted if Viking had had its way) breast-feeding scene.

But in California this Pulitzer Prize-winning book has as much meaning today as it did when originally published in 1939. Or at least that's the message when bookseller Elaine Petrocelli opens the discussion asking for a show of hands: It's exhilarating to see that everyone in the audience has recently ("not just back in junior high") read the entire 619-page masterpiece.

And what a heady, stunning, rich discussion ensues. People catch the fact right away that this story of "Dustbowl Okies" trying to find work as migrant workers in California not only uses Biblical incantatory language but draws parallels from the Bible that range from Christlike transcendence to a final, sacred scene (the most controversial one, of course) of unexpected communion.

They discuss the symbolic use of a land turtle crawling Southwest by instinct while the Joads and some 300,000 other Dustbowl farmers are torn from their land and head West in desperation. They admire the call to history Steinbeck makes in his "intercalary chapters," where he stops the story and describes the larger picture - a drought, a used-car lot, growers' fears of "those degenerate Okies" and "the Western States, nervous under the beginning change."

One man says that his father had been a fruit-picker on the West Coast during the Depression but "never spoke about those years." It's only through reading "The Grapes of Wrath" that he, the son, has "any idea of what was going on politically in California or what it means today."

A woman who was raised in the Midwest comments that she read the book in high school and remembers that "the town hated Steinbeck for his 'exploitation of immigrants,' but I find nothing of that when I read it now."

A 17-year-old stops the discussion in its tracks when he insists that corporate agribusiness was inevitable, "because if it weren't, what would you have? You'd have a lot of small farmers fighting each other."

A number of people turn to him. "It's hard to know, when you're raised in Marin County today," one woman says, "what it was like in the United States when 40-acre farms were everywhere." Another says, "Steinbeck was not against capitalism per se; he was a New Deal Democrat who felt there was a humane answer to economic crisis."

Others talk about the Great Depression and its resultant closure of banks; the push by bankers to take short-term profits from Dustbowl cotton farms; the protests of farmers who said that without rotating crops, the land would die; the loss of topsoil as so much "blood-red dust," and the subsequent era Steinbeck charts as "People in flight."

"Oh, come on," says one man. "Steinbeck was the most heavy-handed writer of his time. He makes those self-governing migrant camps sound like utopia. I *hate* utopian novels. He portrays the growers as all evil and the workers as all good. Surely you don't fall for that."

To say a spirited discussion follows would be the understatement of the evening. Disagreement is considered fertile ground. "As for the visionary ending," a woman notes, "Steinbeck wasn't prophetic. The migrant laborers weren't saved by working together and bargaining with the growers; they were saved by World War II, which happened to come along and bail everybody out."

True, others say, "but do we want historical accuracy from a novelist or an enlightened vision?"

The discussion was so rich with commentary and ideas that the only thing more thrilling was to realize that thousands of these meetings - as well as photo displays, films, essay contests, "Teen Weeks with Steinbeck"and lectures - would be taking place in bookstores, schools, museums, unions and libraries throughout the state far into October.

If that kind of activity is what it means "when everybody reads a single book," I'm all for it. I don't think I'll ever forget how everybody in our group tried to bring a sense of history (and of the future) to that 17-year-old young man. Or how moving it was to hear ideas exchanged about justice and injustice, sin and grace, capitalism and socialism, story and allegory and the cycle of life and death, all stated with emotion.

Many years ago I remember Malcolm Margolin of Heyday Press predict that one day people would leave their television sets to go to book discussions, author presentations, reading clubs and the like. At the time, I thought he was crazy. Today it feels as though utopia - literary, any way - has visited us at last.

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"Holt Uncensored" is a free online column about books and the book industry written by former San Francisco Chronicle book editor and critic Pat Holt. To subscribe or "unsubscribe," send note to pat@holtuncensored.com. Archived columns can be viewed at http://www.holtuncensored.com.