West of Eden

My late brother Christopher liked to ask me deadpan questions designed to search out my opinions or knowledge on whatever subject he was being forceful about at the time.  In one of our final conversations, he suddenly said to me (and I cannot remember how it arose, except that we must have been discussing what politicians read) : ‘Barack Obama says a book by John Steinbeck influenced him strongly. Which book do you think it is?’ .

 

Had I read the New York Times a few months before, I would have known, because they had produced a list. But I hadn’t.  Even so, I disappointed Christopher by getting the answer dead right, and immediately. I knew, from the specially toneless way in which the question was asked, that it wouldn’t be the obvious Steinbeck book,  the  mighty classic, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’.  I suspected it wouldn’t be a front-rank book at all.  So, partly, because I have always thought that Mr Obama was a good deal closer to America’s old, hard Left, and partly because of the foregoing,  I said ‘In Dubious Battle’.  I got a silent, slightly disappointed look , and then I think the phone rang, blast it.

 

Later I hit back by talking about a Kingsley Amis short story he’d never read (and the very existence of which he therefore doubted) and a novel by Elizabeth Taylor (not her, the other one) which he was also unaware of. ‘Who? Who?’ he asked, like the Duke of Wellington listening to the names of a lot of dud Cabinet ministers.  We used to play these fraternal, not-wholly-fair games. Now we can’t.

 

I hadn’t read ‘In Dubious Battle’ a  not-very-good account of Communist agitators stirring up a fruit-pickers’ strike in Roosevelt-era California for years and years and years (I’ve re-read it since, and it doesn’t get any better, though the author obviously wasn’t eating well while he wrote it, as it goes on and on about food). I suspect the New York Times reporter who compiled the President’s book choices hadn’t read it either, or he or she might have been more interested  in a President who selected that of all things. I had read it at school, aged 15, along with almost everything Steinbeck ever wrote (I have always drawn the line at finishing ‘The Short Reign of Pippin IV’, and, since it became a compulsory school classic, I’ve been unable to face ‘Of Mice and Men’ again, though I suppose I will have to eventually. That damned mouse). I’ve even read ‘To a God Unknown’ and ‘The Moon is Down’, though ‘Cup of Gold’ has passed me by and my recollections of Cannery Row are dim. I shouldn’t think I understood more than about a quarter of it, when I was 15. I didn’t much like ‘Winter of our Discontent’, which had a feeling of having been written to justify winning the Nobel Prize, a hard burden for any living, active author to bear, when his best work is done.

 

I won’t write here about ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ because I can think of nothing new to say about it. Parts of it are lodged permanently in the minds of all those who have read it, and it is always interesting to find out which parts have lodged most strongly. Perhaps we’ll discuss that later.

 

The ones I really value, and have read more times than I can count,  are ‘East of Eden’ and ‘Travels with Charley’. I tediously recommend both of them to anyone who will stop and listen. Why? Well, ‘Travels with Charley’ explodes into the imagination if you haven’t seen America, but does so five times more so if you have. It also describes the end of an older America, when freeways were still new and TV hadn’t completely obliterated local characteristics. Its description of Steinbeck’s journey to the landscape of his childhood (very brief indeed) is extraordinarily poignant, made more so by the knowledge I now have that he thought he was probably dying when he set out on his journey.

 

I believe it’s now said that he spent a lot more time in comfortable hotels than in his purpose-built camper truck than he lets on in the book. Good for him. I don’t care. The journey, in any case, provides him with a  way of describing one of the most haunting, haunted and ( as it happens) melancholy landscapes.  There’s also a brief moment, in which he muses on a friend’s recollection of the hunting down and the destruction of the Nez Perce Indians, which should move any decent person to tears on sight, and cause him or her to ponder on who really has title to the land he lives in, and how it was come by (always useful before lecturing Israelis or Ulster Protestants on the subject, I think).

 

 The presence of the dog Charley gives it a necessary escape into occasional humour, very badly needed when he visits the Deep South and sees the demonic passion of racial hatred at its very worst . Leaving aside its descriptions, it’s also powerfully good about the loneliness of travel, and the irresistible urge to hurry home at all costs which seizes every long-distance voyager at some desperate point. Whenever I read it, and see him sitting by the truck with a lonely cup of coffee and his ageing, eccentric dog snuffling and whimpering, I see it as that moment when the light starts to thicken and the world becomes an exciting but disturbing place of solitude and mystery.  There’s a passage in Macbeth (spoken I think by a murderer) which beautifully evokes it ‘ The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day; now spurs the lated traveller apace to gain the timely inn’ . Not long before, Macbeth himself has remarked : ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood. Good things of day begin to droop and drowse; whiles night’s black agents to their preys do rouse”.

 

The funny thing is that, the more I like the book, the less I like its author.

 

The same is true of his masterpiece, ‘East of Eden’. I won’t spoil the plot for those who haven’t read it,  which everyone should.  I would urge nobody to see the film version, which barely begins to do justice to the enormous  story it tries to summarise in a few hours of celluloid. I hope never to see it again, though I hope to read the book at least twice again before I die.  Like most good books, it reveals more and more of itself each time.

 

It is a  tragedy in which there is some redemption, but only some. Its central theme is that we are not forced by our parentage or by fate to continue the sins, feuds and follies of our forebears, but are ultimately free to choose our own fates. But there is much, much more in it than that, not least a real understanding of what Americans are like, and why.

 

It is built ( as Biblical scholars will immediately see from the title) around the theme of Cain and Abel.   Like so much of the best American fiction (I think here of the strange semi-detached middle of  Robert Penn Warren’s sublime novel ‘All the King’s Men’), it has some unexpected roots in the Civil War. It contains one of the most unrelentingly evil characters ever conceived in fiction, and one of the most loveable.  From time to time it is a bit overwritten,  as Steinbeck tries too hard to be literary in a style that was over and done with even when he aimed at it.  But for the most part it is very spare, as spare as the Salinas Valley in which it comes to its ferocious conclusion.

 

It is strange that the clunky propagandist of ‘ Dubious Battle’ could also have written such a work .  ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ might be said to be a mature, greatly expanded and hugely improved attempt to make the same point to many more people, by widening it from Communism to a more generalised support for the Roosevelt New Deal . But ‘East of Eden’ is something else entirely. As with ‘Grapes of Wrath’ I have parts of it stuck irremovably in my memory. But I also find myself (when I reread it) realising that various thoughts that I have long imagined were my own have in fact come from its pages.