In the spring of 1938, John Steinbeck drove into the migrant labor camps of California's San Joaquin Valley and saw something that made him so furious he could barely hold a pen. He had already written two newspaper pieces about the Dust Bowl refugees flooding into the state, had already felt the inadequacy of journalism in the face of what he was witnessing, and had already abandoned one novel about the crisis because it felt too thin, too safe, too comfortable. What he saw in the camps, the children with distended bellies, the families living in drainage ditches, the systematic exploitation of desperate people by growers and labor contractors operating with the full protection of local law enforcement, broke something open in him. He went home and began writing in a white heat that lasted through the summer and into the fall, producing a thousand words a day, sometimes more, weeping at his own desk when the material overwhelmed him. The Grapes of Wrath was published in April 1939. It won the Pulitzer Prize, sold nearly half a million copies in its first year, and was banned and burned in counties across California by the very people it depicted. Steinbeck had written the great American novel of the Depression, and it had cost him, by his own account, almost everything he had.
John Steinbeck (1902–1968) understood something about place that most writers only approximate. For him, the Salinas Valley and the rugged California coast were not settings but sources, the essential generative ground from which his imagination drew its most vital nourishment. The fishermen and farmers and migrant workers who populate his fiction were not sociological types or political symbols but people whose inner lives he knew from the inside, having grown up among them, worked alongside them, and absorbed their speech, their grievances, and their stubborn dignity into the fabric of his own consciousness. When he wrote about California, he was writing about the only world he had ever fully belonged to, which is why the writing carries the particular authority of something lived rather than merely observed.
What Steinbeck achieved, at his best, was the transformation of the intensely local into the enduringly universal. The Salinas Valley becomes every fertile place that has ever promised abundance and delivered exploitation. Tom Joad's journey west becomes every migration driven by desperation and sustained by hope. The tide pools of Cannery Row become a meditation on community and survival that has nothing to do with California and everything to do with what human beings owe each other when the world turns cold. He was a writer of his specific time and place who somehow managed to write outside of both, which is the oldest definition of a classic and the hardest thing for any novelist to actually accomplish.
To explore that achievement and the life that produced it, we turn to Jay Parini, Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Middlebury College, whose biography John Steinbeck: A Biography remains the definitive account of the writer's life and his profound relationship with the landscape that shaped him. A poet, novelist, and biographer of rare range whose subjects have included William Faulkner, Robert Frost, and Gore Vidal, Parini brings to Steinbeck both a literary sensibility attuned to the rhythms of his prose and a biographer's instinct for the connections between a writer's inner life and the world that formed it. In this interview, he reflects on Steinbeck's deep roots in California soil, the moral fury that drove his greatest work, and why a writer so thoroughly of his moment continues to speak, with gathering urgency, to ours.
Charles Carlini: In recent years, there have been a handful of good biographies written about John Steinbeck. What prompted you to write your own biography, John Steinbeck: A Biography?
Jay Parini: I wrote this book at the request of my friend, John’s widow, Elaine Steinbeck. A new British edition of his works was forthcoming, and they wanted a biography to go along with it. So I backed into this project.
CC: Part of what made Steinbeck such a captivating writer was his use of social commentary as well as political and philosophical themes: many of his works addressed the plight of the working class and financial inequality in America. Would you say that the political themes in Steinbeck’s novels are still applicable and relevant today?
JP: Probably the issues remain relevant. He dealt with issues of cultural displacement, homelessness, the struggles of class—especially in his great works of the 1930s. I don't think his later work measures up to the earlier one.
CC: John Steinbeck: A Biography was written over the course of four years, during which you visited the many locations where Steinbeck lived and wrote about in his novels. Why was it important to you to visit the places of Steinbeck’s residence firsthand, and what did you take from the experience?
JP: I loved seeing and getting to know Steinbeck's places: his houses, the natural areas he walked, and so forth. I got a sense of the whole world he lived in, breathed, and made his own in his fiction. This is, of course, mainly relevant for the great California novels and stories.
CC: Some of Steinbeck’s novels (Tortilla Flat and Cannery Row in particular) were influenced by Arthurian legends he was introduced to at a young age by his aunt, Molly. What other forms of literature and mythology did Steinbeck draw on for influence in his writing? Who were his main literary influences?
JP: I would say Steinbeck got his ideas about literature from reading English and American fiction, from Dickens and Hardy to Twain and Dreiser. He was a voracious reader, and he immersed himself in great works of literature. Certainly, myth interested him, and he was a friend of Joseph Campbell, who was a great student of mythology.
CC: Steinbeck often wrote sympathetically about characters with mental illness, most famously the character Lennie Small in Of Mice And Men, and you speculate in your biography that he may have identified on some level with these characters. Would you say that Steinbeck’s own antisocial behavior and emotional instability influenced his portrayal of the mentally ill? If not, what led him to focus on this subject in his writing?
JP: I think Steinbeck did feel unstable at times—he drank too much, and this further de-stabilized him. So yes, he did identify with those who had a mental illness. I think he was especially sympathetic to people with problems.
CC: Many reviewers believed that Steinbeck’s career peaked after the 1939 publication of The Grapes of Wrath, one of his earliest works. What is your assessment of Steinbeck’s post-Grapes work?
JP: I used to have more enthusiasm for post-Grapes writing. But I now think that the decade of the 1930s was his best time. In retrospect, I find the later work rather forced and uninteresting. I wouldn't want to re-read it. But I do re-read his stories and novels of the 30s with real pleasure.
CC: In your opinion, what was it about Steinbeck’s writing that captured the public’s imagination? What aspects of his novels and stories mark them as being distinctly American?
JP: I think his vivid sense of California, as well as his understanding of working and struggling people, caught the interest of readers in the US and worldwide.
CC: Although his books continue to sell over a million copies each year, John Steinbeck receives scant attention today, except for a few academics, as an important literary figure in the same league as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald. Why do you think this is so?
JP: Steinbeck seems simplistic next to Faulkner, and he seems rather naïve next to Hemingway. He doesn't have the silken poetic prose of Fitzgerald. He is rather a homely and boyish writer. I don't think any of this plays well among sophisticated critics. There is not much to deconstruct in his work.
CC: In 1962, John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” Yet, some critics at home felt that he was undeserving of such an honor. Indeed, one critic, Arthur Mizener, wrote a scathing article for The New York Times entitled "Does a Moral Vision of the Thirties Deserve a Nobel Prize?" Why were so many critics hostile toward Steinbeck?
JP: I think his success with readers annoyed these critics. And I do think that Steinbeck didn't match Hemingway or Faulkner for literary quality or intensity of imagination.
CC: Steinbeck had an unusually successful relationship with Hollywood, unlike such authors as Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who “wanted more from Hollywood than Hollywood wanted from them.” How did Steinbeck’s approach to the film industry differ from those of other novelists of the time? Where do you feel that the early screen adaptations of Steinbeck’s novels fit into his overall legacy?
JP: Steinbeck's stories are solid, and they unfold at a pace that works on screen. His writing is very cinematic, in other words. So, there have been wonderful adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men, and East of Eden. Steinbeck was lucky in these productions, which were done by first-rate directors and starred just the right people. They're good films. Faulkner and Hemingway were not so lucky. Nor was Scott Fitzgerald.
Recommended Reading
0 comments