One cranky bastard reviews another
Too much time has apparently passed since anyone took the time to deliver a postmortem groin kick to John Steinbeck. Forty years dead, Steinbeck has not been properly pilloried by the tweedy legion of East Coast ancients for a good long while. Fortunately, the author of the seminal work on George Balanchine has stepped forward to remind the boorish vulgarians that Steinbeck was a preachy oaf who once wrote a pony story.
"You can divide his work up into coherent periods," according to Robert Gottlieb in his critique this week in the New York Review of Books, "but there's no coherent trajectory of quality."
The diatribe comes at the release of the fourth and final volume of Steinbeck's work by the Library of America.
That Steinbeck was a cranky bastard with a checkered portfolio is not a revelation, and Gottlieb is certainly correct in asserting that inclusion of "Sweet Thursday" and "Burning Bright" in a collection purporting to celebrate literature stretches its definition. Steinbeck's Pulitzer may have been a fluke and his Nobel a travesty. But every Updike has his "The Witches of Eastwick."
If the "limp" and "faux-parable" junk Steinbeck wrote led him to "East of Eden," a study of what came before his work of genius ought not be shrugged off. And his documentary depiction of Dust Bowl immigrants was a powerful indictment against a status quo that had capitalized on the suffering of others. Yes, Mr. Gottlieb, Okies named their daughters "Rose of Sharon." And, yes, she was a "symptom." That the harsh realities of American affliction still seem foreign to the Gottliebs of the world only indicates that we need more Steinbecks today.
Literature? Maybe not. An important author for his time? Of course.
Steinbeck deserves better, even if he suffered the misfortune of a California birth.
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About Joe
I write for a newspaper, the Monterey County Herald. I help produce the stock in trade for community journalism: community news, a voice for the afflicted, daily nonfiction, the first swipe at history -- and the gray type around the advertising. I've been...
Better to be reviled than ignored, I imagine
I count myself among those who suffered the misfortune of being born in California. However, had I stayed there, I might have at least had a fighting chance. If you REALLY want to be ignored by the Eastern Literary Establishment, try Alaska, the state that starts with "Alas." Of course, I really can't entirely blame it all on East Coast provincialism. I still have relatives in California who ask what currency we use up here. Even Jack London had to bail out of here to make a living.
But I have no time for sour grapes. The literary well of Alaska is as untapped as our oil reserves. We WILL be discovered. We have a population up here consisting almost ENTIRELY of cranky bastards. And then there are the MEN!
Eric Nichols,
North Pole, Alaska
Steinbecks
Hello Joe,
You wrote: "That the harsh realities of American affliction still seem foreign to the Gottliebs of the world only indicates that we need more Steinbecks today."
Yes, yes we do. We REALLY do. I'm afraid that I don't feel free to rubbish Steinbeck because his writing on a very bad day is better than anything I can hope to produce.
Your post does bring up the issue of how we demand perfection of our icons, literary or otherwise, and how vicious we can get when they don't present a flawless front. Why do we do that, I wonder? Why can't we just be happy that Steinbeck wrote some wonderful prose, brought a terrible time in US history to the attention of the world, and has left us with an intimate, immersive record of something that will never happen in quite the same way again. Why can't we have the grace to be grateful for that? Why do we demand more, like a snotty, snobby adolescent, stomping his feet?
On my eleventh birthday, my father (the writer) gave me two books. I'd been dabbling with stories which I kept nagging him to read, and I think I'd finally pissed him off. He gave me "Of Mice and Men" and "Under Milkwood". They were wrapped together in an old page from the Herald Tribune. With them was was a card that read: "Read these. If you can't write like either of these two men, do something else with your life." My father wasn't very good with children.
Admittedly, he was a sadist, although you don't recognize the tell-tale signs of that when you're eleven. Still, they were gifts: the first two pieces of grown-up literature I ever read. Sadly, my copy of "Under Milkwood" didn't survive. I was reading it aloud - doing all the voices - to a kid with chickenpox, who showed her lack of appreciation for Mr. Thomas by vomitting all over it. The copy "Of Mice and Men" I still have.
I didn't write another story until I was forty, but those two pieces of writing have haunted me all the way through life. So, you can imagine, I'm a little miffed at Mr. Gottlieb.
Hugs,
RG
You hate to keep saying . . .
. . . there's an Eastern bias, but at times t's hard to shake the feeling. For decades in the theater, for instance, it seemed impossible for a non-East Coast playwright to get a break unless the writer happened to be a genius, say a Tennessee Williams. In the meantime, very fine playwrights such as Texan Preston Jones (``The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia,'' among others) couldn't buy a break in New York. Meanwhile, some pretty ordinary New York plays by New York writers were hailed as brilliant. It has changed for the better, but it took a while. As to the anti-Steinbeck reviewers, the simple fact that ``The Grapes of Wrath'' sold more than 14-million paperbacks in 1939-40 should say something to them _ perhaps that people find his work compelling?
Elbow Room
Hi Steve!
A couple of years ago, I read Travels with Charley (I found it in a friend's "throne room"), and even though it is arguably one of Steinbeck's "laziest" works, it was a sheer delight. I've come to the conclusion that people who have never been to the West, just don't GET the West. (When you get right down to it, Alaska is just the West on steroids...when the cowboys and miners hit the Pacific ocean, there was really nowhere to go but North).
At the risk of oversimplification, this dichotomy of attitudes probably goes back to the Colonial period, or earlier. There were those who just wanted to create a New World Europe, and there were those who wanted to create something entirely new. The reason we're STILL finding sunken treasure from English ships is because they wanted to bring everything INCLUDIING the kitchen sink over here, and suffered the consequences. By contrast, the Vikings (my ancestors) traveled light. They figured they could eat once they got wherever they were going. This is one reason they were so mean when they finally landed...."Aaaarhhh...what's on YOUR wallet!" But the fact of the matter is, you are hard pressed to find ANY sunken Viking ships!
I have a Western novel called Viking Cowboy in the embryonic stages, where I delve a bit into this. We'll see where it goes. :)
Cheers!
Eric
California kicked Steinbeck out
They took him pretty seriously in California. Enough to keep him out of libraries and schools and encourage him to move East. Now the Okies run the state and the new Okies come from all over the world. He was a tremendous storyteller, but his dialogue was weak and his characters could be cardboard. I think Cannery Row was his best book and holds up pretty well.
Michael Lipsey