Working Days (2 page)

Still, it seems now, as it seemed then, all I could demand of Steinbeck as a writer, and maybe all any of us can ask of our favorite artists. Sometimes, as though this
Grapes of Wrath
journal weren’t occasion enough, in my mind’s eye, I see Steinbeck as I envisioned him then—solitary, bent to the task, his pen in motion, gathering light from the air around him to “spread a page with shining.” Along with the debts listed below, I think that moment, which is another name for privilege (mine), or maybe for courage (his), is among the best things I experienced in California, and certainly far better than I had any right to expect.

Robert DeMott
Athens, Ohio
June 1988

Like
The Wayward Bus,
which Steinbeck once confessed to an interviewer contained an “indefinite number of echoes” from earlier literary masters, this book, too, is a product of numerous echoes and convergences. There are so many, in fact, that it is difficult to isolate their origins, especially where the enormous amount of information on Steinbeck and his times is concerned. Obviously, I am grateful to everyone who has written on
The Grapes of Wrath
—they have helped this book in ways I cannot fully identify. I am specifically indebted, however, to the following people for facilitating publication of Steinbeck’s journal, though responsibility for use of their contributions, and for the selection of its title,
Working Days,
rests solely with me.

Elaine Steinbeck encouraged the project from the start, as did Eugene Winick and Julie Fallowfield of McIntosh and Otis, my superb editor, Gerald Howard of Viking Penguin and his assistant, Renée Klock. Without them, this book would still be a neglected manuscript at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas. Jackson Benson stands tall, both in and out of his
True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer;
his knowledge of Steinbeck is matched only by his propensity for sharing it. Ditto for Preston Beyer, John Ditsky, Warren French, Tetsumaro Hayashi, Carlton Sheffield, and Roy Simmonds—their generosity, knowledge, and support have heightened this occasion. Adam Marsh provided a discretionary award from Ohio University’s Research Committee at a crucial moment. Without the dedicated help of N. Miki Armstrong at San Jose State University and Donna Spencer at Ohio University I would still be gathering notes. Dr. Susan Shillinglaw, Acting Director of San Jose State’s Steinbeck Research Center, cheerfully came to my rescue more times than I can count. I was also aided by Mary Jean S. Gamble of the John Steinbeck Library, Salinas; Joseph Johnson, Reference Librarian, Monterey Public Library; Kathy O’Connor, National Archives, San Francisco branch, San Bruno, California; and Sara Timby and Margaret J. Kimball, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University. Rima O’Connor, Head of Inter-Library Loan, Alden Library, Ohio University, made easier the indispensable microfilm borrowings from the University of Virginia, the University of California, and Columbia University.

I thank Elaine Steinbeck, and McIntosh and Otis, agents for the Steinbeck estate, for permission to quote from Steinbeck’s writings. The unpublished Steinbeck manuscripts and correspondence that I draw upon are utilized through the courtesy of the Berg Collection, the New York Public Library; the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley; the Clifton Waller Barrett Library, Special Collections Department, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville, Virginia; the Department of Special Collections and University Archives, the Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California; the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin, Texas; the John Steinbeck Library, Salinas, California; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City; the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C.; and the Steinbeck Research Center, Wahlquist Library, San Jose State University, San Jose, California. I am grateful to the administrators and staffs of these exceptional Steinbeck archives for their assistance.

Communications with the late Mrs. William Brown (Carol Steinbeck), Gwyn Steinbeck, and Elizabeth Otis, all conducted for my earlier book,
Steinbeck’s Reading,
have come into play here as well. And during the several years this project was in the works, I have also benefited from Elizabeth Ainsworth, Bernadine Beutler, Jack Douglas, James Dourgarian, Robert Harmon, Cliff Lewis, Pare Lorentz, Craig Nova, Pauline Pearson, Virginia Scardigli, Thomas Steinbeck, the late Robert Woodward, and Nancy Zane. San Jose State colleagues Hans Guth, Mary Lou Lewandowski, and Nils Peterson repeatedly eased the burden of being a stranger in a strange land. So did Los Gatos neighbors Larry and Adrienne Vilaubi, cronies through thick and thin. Students in my Steinbeck courses at San Jose (especially Greg Moss and friends) and at Ohio (especially Brian Railsback in my graduate seminar), listened attentively to these journal entries and then politely pressed me for helpful annotations. Mark Rollins cajoled me into swapping my typewriter for a word processor, which in turn made creating those annotations considerably easier. My parents, Jim and Helen DeMott, and my daughter, Liz DeMott, were tireless cheerleaders from beginning to end. In them I have been triply blessed.

Best of all, some convergences remain constant—persistent and resonant like familiar music. For me, the ideal audience for this journal of a writer’s life is Dave Smith, who lives it. My gratitude to him surpasses everything else.

—Steinbeck, in a self-created interview for Joseph Henry Jackson’s syndicated NBC radio program, April 16, 1939.
(Courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

 

 

 

 

John Steinbeck’s greatest novel,
The Grapes of Wrath
(New York: The Viking Press, 1939), winner of the 1940 Pulitzer Prize, cornerstone of his 1962 Nobel Prize award, and one of the most enduring works of fiction by any American author, was actually written at the same time as another book. The novel itself Steinbeck finally wrote after a couple of unsuccessful attempts in a sustained burst between June and October 1938. Then there is the accompanying journal of its making, which he composed daily during that same stretch, and—a gratifying bonus—which also includes two other sections he wrote in February 1938, and from October 1939 to January 1941. In the past half century the novel has sold more than 14 million copies (it still sells over 100,000 paperback copies a year), has been translated into nearly every language on earth, and has become an accepted masterpiece of world literature. It is one of those novels with its heart in the right place. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
or Mark Twain’s
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
two other novels that humanize America’s downtrodden,
The Grapes of Wrath
has become required reading across our cultural curriculum. And though
The Grapes of Wrath
has attained a legendary reputation, and John Steinbeck’s name is recognized worldwide, this three-part journal, containing the personal record of the novel’s creation and fevered aftermath, has until now been virtually unknown.
Working Days
ought to enhance our understanding of the novelist’s working methods and explain the tangled circumstances from which his greatest writing emerged.

The Grapes of Wrath
is a controversial classic because it is at once populist
and
revolutionary. It advances a belief in the essential goodness and forbearance of the “common people,” and prophesies a fundamental change to produce equitable social conditions: “There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success.... in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage” (Chapter 25). This novel—part naturalistic epic, part dissenting tract, and part romantic gospel—speaks to a multiplicity of human experiences and is squarely located in our varied national consciousness; nearly every literate person knows, or at least claims familiarity with, its impassioned story of the Joad family’s brutal migration from Oklahoma’s dying Dust Bowl to California’s corrupt Promised Land. In their ironic exodus from home to homelessness, from individualism to collective awareness, from selfishness to communal love, “from ‘I’ to ‘we’ ” (Chapter 14), Steinbeck’s cast of unsuspecting characters—Ma Joad, Tom Joad, Jim Casy, Rose of Sharon—have become permanently etched in our sensibility and serve constantly to remind us that heroism is as much a matter of choice as it is of being chosen. Similarly, Steinbeck’s rendering of the graphic enticements of Route 66—“the path of a people in flight” (Chapter 12)—from Middle America to the West defined the national urge for mobility, motion, and blind striving. The novel’s erotically subversive final scene, in which Rose of Sharon, delivered of a stillborn child, gives her milk-laden breast to a dying stranger, then looks up and smiles “mysteriously” (Chapter 30), simply will not fade from view. Wherever human beings dream of a dignified society in which they can harvest the fruits of their own labor,
The Grapes of Wrath
’s radical voice of protest can still be heard. As a tale of dashed illusions, thwarted desires, inhuman suffering, and betrayed promises—all strung on the most fragile thread of hope—
The Grapes of Wrath
not only summed up the Depression era’s socially conscious art, but, beyond that, has few peers in American fiction.

Steinbeck’s book has been praised by the left as a triumph of proletarian writing, nominated by critics and reviewers as “The Great American Novel,” given historical vindication by Senator Robert M. La Follette’s inquiries into California’s tyrannical farm labor conditions, and defended by Eleanor Roosevelt for its power (“The horrors of the picture ... made you dread ... to begin the next chapter, and yet you cannot lay the book down or even skip a page.”) But
The Grapes of Wrath
has also been attacked by academic scholars as sentimental, unconvincing, and inartistic, banned repeatedly by school boards and libraries, and denounced by right-wing ministers, corporate farmers, and politicians as immoral, degrading, and untruthful. (Oklahoma Congressman Lyle Boren, typical of the book’s early detractors, called it “a lie, a black, infernal creation of a twisted, distorted mind.”)
¹
In fact, from the moment it was published on April 14, 1939,
The Grapes of Wrath
has been less judged as a novel than as a sociological event, a celebrated political cause, or a factual case study. If the past fifty years have seen little consensus about the exact nature of the novel’s achievement, there has been plenty of proof that it elicits widely divergent responses from its audience. Perhaps that is to be expected, considering that Steinbeck intentionally wrote the novel in “five layers,” intending to “rip” each reader’s nerves “to rags” by making him “participate in the actuality.” What each reader “gets” from
The Grapes of Wrath,
he claimed, “will be scaled entirely on his own depth or hollow-ness.”
²
Steinbeck’s participatory aesthetic ensured the novel’s affective impact on a broad range of readers. By conceiving his novel on simultaneous levels of existence Steinbeck pushed back the accepted boundaries of traditional realistic fiction and redefined the proletarian form. Like most significant American novels,
The Grapes of Wrath
does not offer codified solutions, but instead enacts the process of belief and embodies the shape of faith.

 

Behind the welter of conflicting opinions and wild imaginings about this most public of novels stands one of the most reclusive of American writers—John Steinbeck (1902-1968). His private story, with its equally impassioned emphasis on the punishing journey toward artistic fulfillment, is recorded in this journal.
Working Days,
too, is a tale of dramatic proportions—false starts, self-doubts, whining complaints, paranoia, ironic intentions, personal reversals, and—woven tenuously throughout—the fragile thread of recovery. And like the novel, the journal has its own cast of characters, all of whom belong, in one way or another, to the moment of Steinbeck’s labor. Some lives impress upon his, some overlap, some run parallel, some appear and disappear like chimeras, and some remain unidentified, anonymous, lost forever to the currents of history. Among the people who left their stamp on the novel, two names joined preeminently with Steinbeck’s in a kind of spiritual partnership. Without them, the novel might have been far different.

Carol Henning Steinbeck (1906—1983), the novelist’s outgoing first wife (they married in 1930), was more politically radical than John, and she actively supported members of the fugitive agricultural labor movement before he did.
³
She too was an energetic, talented person—among other things, a versifier, satirist, prose writer, painter, caricaturist—who agreed to relinquish a possible career in favor of helping to manage his. It seems to have been a partnership based more on reciprocal need and shared affection than on deep romantic love. Their marriage was smoother, more egalitarian, in the struggling years of Steinbeck’s career; with the enormous success—and pressures—brought by
Of Mice and Men
(New York: Covici-Friede, 1937), their situation became more tenuous and volatile. Carol, an extremely strong-willed, demonstrative person, was often frustrated, resentful, and sometimes jealous; John, inordinately shy, was frequently beleagured, confused, and demanding. In the late 1930s, whenever John was writing daily, Carol handled—but didn’t always like—most of the routine domestic duties. She also shielded her husband as much as possible from unwarranted disruptions and intrusions, and oversaw some of their financial arrangements (an increasingly large job) between Steinbeck and his literary agents. “Carol does so much,” Steinbeck admitted in Entry #45. Once in a while she also served as his cultural envoy and stand-in. Carol, not John, went to New York for the opening of Joseph Kirkland’s disastrous play version of
Tortilla Flat,
and during that same visit, in January 1938, she met with documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz, arranging between them Lorentz’s first visit to Los Gatos to discuss a joint Steinbeck/Lorentz movie version of
In Dubious Battle
and a private showing of Lorentz’s pioneering documentary films (“APPROVE LORENTZ AFFAIR GREATLY,” Steinbeck wired Carol on January 13, 1938).
⁴