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.