Why Read John Steinbeck?
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Steinbeck in 1961, Pacific Grove, California, in front of his sister Elizabeth's home. |
"John Steinbeck brings together the human heart and the land."
That phrase, written by environmentalist and writer Barry Lopez, has resonance for
today's readers of John Steinbeck. Lopez urges us to consider two primal landscapes:
external landscapes - our relations to the land, to oaks, to the whir of night frogs
- and interior landscapes, often shaped by the places where we live. John Steinbeck's
work brings together both these landscapes in extraordinary ways, ways that may deeply
affect those of us living at the cusp of a new century.
Steinbeck loved the burnished Salinas hills and the churning Pacific. Like some of
America's greatest writers - Thoreau, Faulkner, Cather - Steinbeck made his childhood
haunts vividly real. In book after book, he charted his course in the letters or journals
he wrote as "warm ups" to the day's writing. Steinbeck wanted his prose to recapture
a child's vision "of colors more clear than they are to adults, of tastes more sharpI
want to put down the way 'afternoon felt' and of the feeling about a bird that sang
in a tree in the evening."
He asks that readers pay respectful attention to an external landscape. He invites
us to look: "Orange and speckled and fluted nudibranchs slide gracefully over the
rocks, their skirts waving like the dresses of Spanish dancers." Passages of stark
beauty are found in every Steinbeck novel, sentences that record the rapt attention
he paid to the natural world.
And then he asks that we shift perspective. American literature is full of conquest
narratives - John Smith as Virginia cavalier, Natty Bumppo as pathfinder, Ernest Hemingway
as marksman. But for John Steinbeck, nature is not a commodity, animals not for slaughter.
For his is not a man-centered but a holistic universe, with humans seen as simply
another species bound intimately to the places where they live, breed, drink, love,
suffer, and catch frogs.
In Steinbeck's California novels, characters inhabit communities and are connected
with one another: Sam Hamilton with Adam Trask, "Doc" Ricketts with Mack and the boys,
the Joads with all migrants. And all of these characters are shaped by the places
they live - Soledad, Tortilla Flat, a bone-dry King City Ranch - or to the roads they
travel - Route 66, Highway 1 to the Carmel Valley. Steinbeck's is a vision of ecological
cooperation, of the human's interdependence with nature and one another.
As important to Steinbeck is the internal landscape, often one shaped by isolation,
loneliness, failure. I always ask my students to look carefully at the first paragraphs
of Steinbeck's novels, where the external and characters' internal landscapes coalesce, Of Mice and Men in particular. The "strong and rocky" Gabilan Mountains are in the distance. George
and Lennie take shelter in a glade that has nurtured tramps, boys, and deer. That
scene evokes their lowly status - throughout the book these lonely men seek shelter
from the "strong" in the bunkhouse or the barn. Steinbeck understood such desolate
interiors. But his is never the language of despair but of empathy. George and Lennie
are great friends-of each other, of each reader.
Steinbeck reaches out a fictional hand. Emotional bonds are forged between book and
reader. Pauline Pearson, who spent countless hours interviewing Steinbeck's Salinas
associates for the Steinbeck Library's oral history project, told me once: "John Steinbeck
saved me. I was suffering, and in his work I found solace." Solace and laughter and
commitment are what many readers discover in Steinbeck's work. "In every bit of honest
writing in the world," he wrote in the late 1930s, "there is a base theme. Try to
understand men."
So why do these Steinbeck landscapes, external and internal, matter to us in a new
century? We live in an imperiled world. Many New York and California chefs have agreed
to take the endangered swordfish off menus. Mining rugged interiors poses a new threat
to the environment. Steinbeck's voice, curiously contemporary thirty and fifty and
sixty years later, urges us to take heed, to appreciate that external world and our
bonds to it.
And Steinbeck's ghostly voice of understanding and solace endures, inspires. In his
album "The Ghost of Tom Joad," Bruce Springsteen pays tribute to the power of those
interior landscapes - characters whose lives are often desolate, besieged, unacknowledged.
"I'll be ever 'where," promises Tom Joad, "I'll be in the way guys yell when they're
mad"