East of Eden by John Steinbeck

I believe there is one story in the world, and only one, that has frightened us and inspired us, so that we live in a Pearl White serial of continuing thought and wonder.  Humans are caught--in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity, too--in a net of good and evil.  I think this is the only story we have and that it occurs on all levels of feeling and intelligence.  Virtue and vice were warp and woof of our first consciousness, and they will be the fabric of our last, and this despite any changes we may impose on field and river and mountain, on economy and manners.  There is no other story.  A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean questions: Was it good or was it evil?  Have I done well--or ill?

Adam and Charles Trask live under the heavy-handed dominion of their father, Cyrus, a former Civil War soldier who has managed to become wealthy and respected despite undistinguished service.  Adam is sensitive and intelligent, Charles dark and brooding.  Adam has little respect or love for his father, but Cyrus loves Adam the best, while Charles suffers with unrequited love for his father.  He beats Adam savagely, upset that Cyrus has not appreciated the gift of a knife he saved scrupulously for, while he adores a puppy that Adam has picked thoughtlessly from a litter.  This the point where the parallels to the Cain and Abel story are most obvious--Steinbeck even gives them the same initials--which reinforces one of the novel's main ideas, that the earliest, most legendary conflicts of human beings repeat again and again in generational patterns.  Though Cain and Abel are text more than subtext here, there are shadows also of Adam and Eve (hey, look at the title) and Jacob and Esau.

Adam suffers in the army, drifts through hobo-hood, and finally finds himself reinvigorated when a strange woman appears on the porch of the house he shares with Charles.  She's been badly beaten, and he puts all his energy into healing her, then marrying her.  But this woman--Cathy--is no innocent victim, but a sociopath who is determined to use Adam to help her to safety and freedom, then abandon him.  Steinbeck introduces her this way:

And just as there are physical monsters, can there not be mental or psychic monsters born?  The face and the body may be perfect, but if a twisted gene or a malformed egg an produce physical monsters, may not the same process produce a malformed soul?

Damn, John.  Adam moves Cathy to California's Salinas Valley over her protests; she gives him two sons--who are most likely actually Charles'--but not before trying to give herself an icepick abortion.  As soon as she's healthy enough to leave, she does, shooting Adam in the shoulder and leaving him with the two boys.  For months, Adam is in such shock he doesn't even name his children (a perfect detail in a book that has quite a few of them, I think), until he's forced to by his neighbor Sam Hamilton and his Chinese servant Lee, the novel's twin forces of wisdom.  The boys become Aron and Cal, inheriting the foreboding initials.

The question the novel then asks is, does the pattern really have to repeat?  Cal is the dark and brooding one, Aron the lovable fair one.  But does Cal's resentment have to turn to fratricide, symbolic or otherwise?  Cal, once he grows up, recognizes the conflicting impulses to love and resentment, and struggles to conquer them.  Steinbeck makes much of a single Hebrew word in the Cain and Abel story, timshel, which he translates "thou mayest," and takes as an indication that humans are free actors who can give into the powerful repeating forces of history, or break free of them.  But it's easier said than done, and it's because of this conflict that Cal becomes a much more fascinating character than the kindly and obtuse Aron.  In fact, by the novel's end, it's hard to imagine that anyone would prefer Aron to Cal at all, though half the conflict comes from the fact that everybody does.  This theme intersects with the story of the California frontier in interesting ways.  Is California going to be a new Eden, Steinbeck asks, or are its new communities going to go on repeating the same old mistakes?

East of Eden is a kind of novel that was probably a little passe by the time Steinbeck wrote it.  It has the heft of a good Russian epic, or a Dickens serial, but it reminded me most of Hardy: its pastoral idealism, its themes of generational trauma, its stagey reliance on patterns, coincidences, and paths crossing.  Brent called it a "flawed masterpiece," or something like that, and I think he's right: the flaw is in the character of Cathy.

On one level, she works perfectly.  Her cold-bloodedness is the agent of conflict that throws Adam's life into chaos and drives conflict in the novel, and in many ways she herself is a fascinating character.  But it's hard to ignore the fact that what is most suspect about Cathy is her need to be an independent woman, to enjoy the kind of self-sufficiency that becomes Adam's path after she abandons him, and which in a meaningful way is embodied by the narrative of western settlement that the novel tells.  She has all the characteristics of a femme fatale, the woman whose free sexuality is a weapon and a sin.  And she fits uneasily in the novel's self-image as myth: if men are constantly struggling to break out of the patterns that dog them through history, women are either removed from that grand conflict, or they participate in it as avatars of Eve.  A good woman is, like Sam Hamilton's wife Liza, unfailingly domestic; a bad woman, like Eve and Cathy, is antithetic to domestic life.  And let's not get started on the "ancient Chinese wisdom" of the servant Lee.

East of Eden is a terrific novel.  But I can't help but imagine what it might have been like if it had taken Cathy's dreams--or even those of Lee, who dreams of starting a bookstore in San Francisco's Chinatown, but ultimately just loves being the Trasks' domestic servant too much--as seriously as it does Adam's or Cal's.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

What more is there to say about Of Mice and Men that I didn't already say, much more snarkily than I recall, in this review? It wasn't my intention to repeat books--in fact, I am not very fond of re-reading in general--and it certainly wasn't my intention to repeat this book. But it is the last book for my freshmen, and so I was obligated.

I have very few fresh insights, and I blame this on the book itself. It is not a book that wants to be reconsidered. Consider the too-neat symbolism: In the book's middle section, an old dog is put down to spare it suffering. At the end, the novel's protagonist, George--spoiler alert, if you need it--does the same to his friend Lennie, to save him from a crueler lynching at the hands of the other migrant workers. (Lennie, exceedingly strong but with the mind of a child, has accidentally killed a woman because he wanted to pet her soft hair.)

The only real question of significance Steinbeck offers is this: Does George make the right decision? I believe that Steinbeck wants us to think so ("Slim said, 'You hadda, George. I swear you hadda.'") But I do not think it is in keeping with George's wily, calculating character to give up so easily. As such, the premise of the question strikes me as faulty, and invalidates the question.

I noted in my old review that this final scene has "great resonance," and that remains true (though I might excise great). Like George, we are meant to understand that Lennie has been somehow spared, and so George himself receives the brunt of our pity. Lennie was the only constant in George's life:

George went on, "With us it ain't like that. We got a future. We got somebody to talk to that gives a damn about us. We don't have to sit in no bar room blowing in our jack jus' because we got no place else to go. If them other guys gets in jail they can rot for all anybody gives a damn. But not us."

Lennie broke in. "But not us! An' why? Because... because I get you to look after me, and you got me to look after you, and that's why." He laughed delightedly.

George's act of questionable kindness is perhaps cruelest to himself, as it leaves him alone--and after all, the migrant workers of the novel work near the California town of Soledad, Spanish for "loneliness." But it is also possible that soledad is a state that George and Lennie have always occupied, given their natural isolation from each other and inability to connect. Can George and Lennie possibly understand each other; can they know each other, or sympathize with each other in any meaningful way? In this way their relationship mirrors the chaotic, deracinated lifestyle of the Depression-era migrant worker, in which all relationships are by nature transitory and any connection impossible, whether it be to man or to place. We find an echo of this in the ranch that Lennie and George dream about, which will go unrealized: another abortive attempt to form a bond.

This would be a cruel reading, and I have serious doubts that it's the one Steinbeck intends. But I think it would be a hell of a lot more interesting.

Cannery Row by John Steinbeck

There is no golden afternoon next to the cliff. When the sun went over it at about two o'clock a whispering shade came to the beach. The sycamores rustled in the afternoon breeze. Little water snakes slipped down to the rocks and then gently entered the water and swam along through the pool, their heads held up like little periscopes and a tiny wake spreading behind them. A big trout jumped in the pool. The gnats and mosquitoes which avoid the sun came out and buzzed over the water. All of the sun bugs, the flies, the dragonflies, the wasps, the hornets, went home. And as the shadow came to the beach, as the first quail began to call, Mack and the boys awakened. The smell of the chicken stew was heartbreaking. Hazel had picked a fresh bay leaf from a tree by the river and he had dropped it in. The carrots were in now. Coffee in its own can was simmering on its own rock, far enough from the flame so that it did not boil too hard. Mack awakened, started up, stretched, staggered to the pool, washed his face with cupped hands, hacked, spat, washed his mouth, broke wind, tightened his belt, scratched his legs, combed his wet hair with his fingers, drank from the jug, belched and sat down by the fire. "By God that smells good," he said.

I should've read this in high school, back when living out that scene was my daydream and greatest aspiration. That outdoor beatnik lifestyle, the zen-like indifference to materialism, poverty and public image, that's what I got from Cannery Row. This is a street (like, for real) in Monterey, California lined with sardine canneries and, by Steinbeck's telling, a very respectable whorehouse, Lee Chong's grocery, and a marine biology lab, populated by a close-knit community of starving artists, care-free bums, and assorted destitute but kind-hearted individuals.

Much of the book is based on Steinbeck's own experience in Monterey, and I know that at least one character, Doc, the marine biologist, is based on a close friend of his. Doc, a man after my own heart, has a passion for beer, octopi, Gregorian chanting, and women, and is a well-loved and well-known figure in the small neighborhood. Mack and the boys are a kindly gang of bums whose MO is to obtain and imbibe whiskey, or anything they can get. Mack is brilliant, and through his shrewd dealings they manage to get a house (The Palace Flophouse and Grill), and spend most of the novel trying to do something nice to repay Doc for all of his kindness. But most of their good intentions go awry for the same reasons that they became bums in the first place: inability or disinterest in worrying over anything other than pleasure and friendship.

The novel is really a collection of short stories centered around Cannery Row, telling the individual dramas and comedies of its residents. Doc and Mack and the boys are the most recurring and pivotal characters, and really the only drawn-out plotline. Just the stories on their own are wonderful for their humor and the quirks and tics of each resident. Collected, they're all a testament to the vibrance and ingenuity that thrives in a place familiar with poverty. The closest the book comes to philosophizing is Doc's revelation that Mack and the boys are better off than most:

Doc said, "Look at them. There are your true philosophers, I think," he went on, "that Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that ever will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else." This speech so dried out Doc's throat that he drained his beer glass. He waved two fingers in the air and smiled. "There's nothing like that first taste of beer," he said.

I don't think that could ever not be relevant. It fit in the 1940's, and it fits now. It was kind of a shock to go from John Updike's overwhelmingly complex, strikingly human Rabbit to Steinbeck's whimsical Doc and Mack, who are mostly simple and straightforward, sort of fleshed out personality traits and desires. I've been reading that Steinbeck's other works are much more serious, and not nearly as lighthearted, so I'm glad to have stared with this one. I found absolutely nothing to dislike about this book. It might not be a symbol-ridden, broad-reaching metaphor for the human condition, but it's beautifully nostalgic and simple, and makes me wish I lived in Monterey.

John Updike worked for The New Yorker at 25 and was a successful author by 27. John Steinbeck was first a chemist, an apprentice painter, hod-carrier (had to Wikipedia that one), estate caretaker, Big Sur surveyor, and itinerant fruit picker. Keep hope alive!

EDIT: I forgot to mention how much I love paperbacks that were printed before I was born. This one is about eight months older than me.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Everyone I talked to who had read The Pearl disliked it. Even the normally mild-mannered Christopher called it "dreck" in recent review of Of Mice and Men. So, is The Pearl really the nadir of Steinbeck's bibliography?

I haven't read nearly everything of Steinbeck's, but out of his popular works (Of Mice and Men, East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, and The Pearl), the latter is easily the weakest. I wouldn't classify it as dreck, but it has some serious problems. Complete spoilers follow.

The plot concerns a poor pearl diver named Kino whose child is stung by a scorpion. While diving for a pearl big enough to pay the doctor to treat his son, he finds "the pearl of the world," a perfect pearl bigger than an egg. What initially seems like good fortune turns dark, as the villagers turn against him and try to steal the pearl, the doctor poisons the child to extract more money from Kino, and the pearl merchants attempt to rip him off by convincing him that such a large pearl is nothing more than a novelty. Kino decides to journey to the city, a couple weeks' journey, but soon after leaving, he is pursued by several men intent on killing him and taking the pearl. The chase ends in the death of Kino's baby, and he throws the pearl into the ocean, blaming it for the ruin of his life.

The biggest problem with The Pearl is the the plot doesn't progress logically. Within a day, the villagers have gone from marching to the doctor's house with Kino to demand care for his son to attempting to kill him and steal his pearl. Kino is initially a sympathetic character, but as the pearl begins to corrupt even him, he becomes less so, hitting his wife and risking the life of his family to get what he believes the pearl is worth. The book is also muddled because the actual message of the fable is unclear. Is the message that Kino was too greedy, that the townspeople were fickle, that wealth corrupts, or that pearls are evil? Is it a thinly veiled parable for the benefits of socialism (of which Steinbeck was a proponent)? Is it a cautionary tale about the dangers of individual betterment? It's hard to tell, and although this ambiguity is probably why the book is assigned reading in most high schools, it's not particularly complex or satisfying.

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

This "book" is only sixty pages, and yet it took me a week to read. I'm just trying to give this thing away to Carlton.

But anyhow, Of Mice and Men is one of John Steinbeck's short novels--a list that includes some really fantastic works like Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row, and some dreck like The Red Pony and The Pearl that are the reason no one who ever went to high school likes John Steinbeck. I'd say that Of Mice and Men falls pretty squarely in the middle of those, lacking the detail and flavor of the former two but not making me want to kill myself like the latter. Part of the reason is that Steinbeck meant it to double as a novel and a play--that is to say, it is written with a heavy concentration on dialogue and interaction over description. The result, I'm sad to say, is that it tends to be a little dry.

But the plot is pretty neat (spoilers): two migrant workers, the cunning, cynical George and the hulking man-child Lennie, find work as "bindle stiffs" (this is something to do with hay, or something) in a migrant worker community. Their plan is to make enough money to buy a little plot of land where Lennie can tend rabbits and George can do a little farming, and it seems as if their plan is close to fruition when the old one-handed ranch hand Candy agrees to pitch in with his considerable savings. But, you know what they say, the best laid plans of something or other. Lennie, who has the strength of an elephant but the mind of a six-year old, accidentally murders the boss' wife while trying to stroke her hair, and, well, everything goes to hell after that. The final scene, in which George shoots Lennie from behind to spare him an awful death at the hands of a lynch mob, is one of great resonance and power even if I'm not sure I completely buy George's actions.

In any case, I don't recommend this book, if just for the fact that Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row are so much better. Read those, and then save this one for the days when you need to catch up in the Fifty Books Project.

To a God Unknown by John Steinbeck

I have not read much by Steinbeck. I read Of Mice and Men three or four years ago, and I am fairly certain that I was assigned The Grapes of Wrath in high school, although I am not certain that I actually read it. The cover of this book caught my eye, before I noticed anything else. It was a painting of a man approaching a large gnarled tree, which stood at the top of a hill. (The picture to the left is the only one on the official Penguin Classics website. I was unable to find the correct cover.) Seeing that it was written by Steinbeck, but not recognizing the title, I flipped the book over and read the first sentence of the summary on the back. It read, “Ancient pagan beliefs, the great Greek epics, and the Bible all inform this extraordinary novel, which occupied Steinbeck for more than five difficult years.” After reading this, I had to read the book.

That one sentence summarizes To a God Unknown very well. Set in the early 20th century, it is a story of four brothers who move from Vermont to California to homestead the land. Joseph Wayne is not the oldest, but he is the leader of the brothers since their father gave him his blessing before he died. Joseph becomes convinced that the spirit of his father inhabits a large tree on his farm. He secretly communes with the tree, talking to it, seeking advice, and even offering sacrifices.

Amongst his brothers and their wives, opinions about Joseph vary. Thomas puts up with it, seemingly amused. Rama, the wife of the oldest brother, reveres Joseph. She tells Joseph’s new wife, “I do not know whether there are men born outside humanity, or whether some men are so human as to make other seem unreal. Perhaps a godling lives on earth now and then. Joseph has strength beyond vision of shattering, he has the calm of mountains, and his emotion is as wild and fierce and sharp as the lightning and just as reasonless as far as I can see or know. I tell you this man is not a man, unless he is all men.” Later the priest of a nearby town mirrors her thinking. As Joseph leaves, the priest thinks, “Thank God this man has no message. Thank God he has no will to be remembered, to be believed in, else there might be a new Christ here in the West.” However others feel about Joseph, Burton, a staunch Christian, thinks that his brother is practicing a kind of devil worship. He fears that he is allowing evil to take root in their land, and voices his disapproval to Joseph on a number of occasions.

Whether as a result of Joseph's actions or not, the Wayne family does prosper. Their crops are bountiful, their livestock reproduce at an alarming rate, and there is never any want for wild game on their property. But it is not long before the ground begins to dry up and the animals begin to die and leave the land. Joseph is certain that he knows what brought on this change, and he knows what he must do.

All throughout To a God Unknown, Steinbeck alludes to and borrows from Greek mythology and a wide range of religious traditions. In so doing, Steinbeck creates a mystical tale of his own, adding to his mythology of California.