The Anti-Social Novelist

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John Steinbeck was born in 1902, at the mouth of one of the most agriculturally fertile valleys in the world, in the town of Salinas, California, some 19 miles inland from the Pacific Coast city of Monterey. He grew up in modest circumstances (his father was a local civil servant), and was expected to achieve a life two or three notches up the middle-class ladder. But, when he enrolled after high school at Stanford University, it soon became clear that he would never stay the academic course. He’d arrived at school with 50 stories under his arm, and all he wanted to do was write. For years, he bounced in and out of school, returning in 1925 to Southern California, where he began working at odd jobs—tour guide, manual laborer, estate caretaker, anything that would put food and writing paper on the table—while he wrote stories that for the most part went undistinguished and unpublished, but nonetheless got written. In 1930, he married Carol Henning, a twentysomething fellow spirit who believed passionately in him from the moment they met, and together they embarked on a semi-bohemian existence, mainly in and around Monterey, mutually devoted—Carol proved a gifted editor—to the flowering of John’s talent.

From the start, Steinbeck knew where his raw material was to be found and how he was to respond to it. As a boy, living in the Salinas Valley and working summers beside the migrants who performed the backbreaking labor of picking fruit and vegetables in season, he had seen firsthand the social and economic exploitation to which their lives were yoked, and the starkness of their condition seemed to penetrate him. “As an adult,” Souder tells us, “John would say that the one thing he could not bear was another human being oppressed, abused, or taken advantage of by anyone more powerful, especially if the motive was greed.” Once the Great Depression overwhelmed the country, people of almost every stripe and condition began to feel haunted by the astonishing multiplication of the human sacrifice that Steinbeck had observed at home in ordinary times, and were drawn to the bitter realities of the migrants’ lives. Then came the Dust Bowl disaster, and the spectacle of thousands of dispossessed sharecroppers on the road, streaming west across Route 66 like refugees fleeing a foreign invasion. Steinbeck’s moment had come.

He was a regional writer with a bent toward social realism, but at the height of his literary powers in the mid-’30s, the work Steinbeck produced—and this is what has saved him from literary oblivion—was so thoroughly encased in a kind of narrative tenderness for its subject that it often seemed to rise above the limitations of the genre writing with which he was associated. There’s a scene in The Grapes of Wrath that is pure Steinbeck. The Joads and their friends are being expelled from one of the migrant camps by the local police, but one of their number is a dying woman whose husband refuses to go on without her. The woman asks the Preacher to say a prayer over her, and when he hesitates (because he is excommunicated), she reassures him:

When I was a little girl I use’ ta sing. Folks roun’ about use’ ta say I sang as good as Jenny Lind. Folks use’ ta come an’ listen when I sung. An’—when they stood—an’ me a-singin’, why, me an’ them was together more’n you could ever know. I was thankful. There ain’t so many folks can feel so full up, so close, an’ them folks standin’ there an’ me a-singin’.... They wasn’t nothin’ got in between me an’ them. An’—that’s why I wanted you to pray. I wanted to feel that clostness, oncet more.

He had arrived at a tone of voice, an angle of vision, a narrative structure that served the story of the “common man” so well it achieved metaphor.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/36OYhb0