John Steinbeck
Parini, Jay
/ 6 6 f you loved a book," Raymond Chandler always advised, "don't meet the author." The rule holds for this exhaustive biography of John Steinbeck. To Jay Parini, a poet and novelist who teaches...
...Sweet Thursday, about flophouses and whores with hearts of gold, was, in the memorable words of one reviewer, "at the same time highflown and flyblown...
...Steinbeck accepted an allowance from his father and went to live rent-free in his family's vacation cottage on the Monterey coast...
...S teinbeck got his first fatal taste of attention from the powerful when Eleanor Roosevelt publicly praised The Grapes of Wrath...
...Even more perplexing is why he wrote it...
...C1 66 The American Spectator June 1995...
...In some future, if you have the time and or the inclination, I hope you can come to my house and settle back with a drink and—tell sad stories of the death of Kings...
...His novella, The Pearl, was written as a cautionary tale for a materialistic society but received as a children's story—and still is...
...Hardly a new Florence King's latest book is The Florence King Reader (St...
...It was a time of no turning back, and in my mind as well as in many others, you have placed your name among the great ones of history...
...The Republic will not crumble...
...Motivation, the novelist's stock in trade, was the worst casualty in his later novels...
...like all earnest people he had an aversion to satirists, especially George Bernard Shaw, of whom he said: "[His] wit is so da771ing that we never stop to consider that he has never said anything very important...
...Johnson clung to Steinbeck to prove that all intellectuals did not hate him, and Steinbeck already had a history of clinging to powerful Democrats...
...As undifferentiated as an army of ants, they "swarm," "crawl," "creep," and "scuttle" in their instinctive march toward the place of sustenance, turning the landscape black with their old Fords and dodging inhospitable Californians who call them "a plague of locusts...
...An undifferentiated swarm has a destination but no plot line...
...There he made friends with a quirky marine biologist named Ed Ricketts, who believed that people, like fish, are group-driven, and that novelists, like scientists, should forego subjective moral judgments and concentrate on random patterns of human behavior...
...In 1952 Adlai Stevenson hired him as a speechwriter, an association that brought out his sycophancy, as we see in the letter he wrote Stevenson after his loss to Ike: I hope you will have rest without sadness...
...Such a moment was your speech, Sir, to the Congress two nights ago...
...He believed that giving emotional support to one's president in a time of trouble was honorable," claims Parini, "and he fell hook, line, and sinker for an old-style patriotism that argued one must support one's country in a time of war, even if the war in question happened to be immoral and foolish...
...Republics have—and in just this way...
...Travel books, plays, translating the Arthurian legends into modern American speech, roving sociology (Travels With Charley), a newspaper column...
...Martin's...
...Moreover, as Parini himself reluctantly admits, each man wanted something from the other...
...He also tried a satire about the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, The Short Reign of Pippin IV, which no one got...
...She writes "The Misanthrope's Corner" column for National Review...
...This connection is achieved by "a keying device," signaling them that they must now respond to something bigger than themselves and do things they would not do as individuals...
...But Steinbeck was a novelist, not an entomologist...
...Steinbeck's editor protested that the scene was too abrupt and asked that the role of the man be built up...
...What drove him to this self-defeating stance...
...In other respects, however, his life became easier...
...His old-style patriotism was noticeably absent from his smarmy letter to Adlai about impeaching Ike merely for winning the election...
...His wildly varied oeuvre earned- him the contempt of the critics, and with some justification...
...evidently, GOP administrations did not stir his blood...
...When Vietnam heated up, he wrote LBJ another fawning letter condemning war protesters ("I assure you that only mediocrity escapes criticism") and LBJ responded by inviting him and his son to the White House when young John joined the Army...
...It has been an honor to work for you—and a privilege...
...We never really find out why the businessman in The Wayward Bus rapes his own wife in a cave, or why the mother in East of Eden becomes a madam...
...People, he decided, behave as individuals until circumstances drive them to "connect to a larger spirit or will that exists somewhere beyond individual response...
...Later, he went to Vietnam himself and wrote Johnson that "we have here the finest, the best trained, the most intelligent and the most dedicated soldiers I have ever seen...
...Parini gingerly describes Steinbeck's letters to LBJ as "somewhat inflated," but the academic left condemned him for his hawkishness and his critical reputation plunged...
...Thank God for the impeachment provisions...
...phalanx theory clashed with his liberal-humanist belief in the dignity of man and his New Deal Democrat belief in progress...
...Reading his sycophantic letters, one suspects that at heart he was less a patriot than a courtier...
...Steinbeck applied the theory in his novels of social protest...
...In his later years he was all over the literary map...
...The sadness is for us who have lost our chance for greatness when greatness is needed...
...An obsessive idea can be the grain of sand that creates the pearl, but Steinbeck's romanticized biological determinism became a stone in his shoe...
...He tried to support himself with factory jobs and write after work, but the hard physical labor left him too exhausted to think...
...The keying device goes off loud and clear in the famous last scene of Grapes when Rose of Sharon, whose baby has died, gives her breast to a starving man...
...East of Eden, which even the doting Parini calls "an exercise in secular scripture," was panned for its labyrinthine plot and baroque language...
...As a result, says Parini, he rarely turns up in critical studies and is steadily disappearing from anthologies...
...Our people will be living by phrases from that speech when all the concrete and steel have long been displaced or destroyed...
...To Jay Parini, a poet and novelist who teaches at Middlebury College, Steinbeck can do no wrong, but his over-explained rationalizations only serve to expose his subject as a muddy thinker, derivative author, closet snob, and sycophantic toady of Democratic politicians...
...But for JOHN STEINBECK: A BIOGRAPHY Jay Parini Henry Holt /536 pages/530 reviewed by FLORENCE KING idea, as the well-read Steinbeck certainly knew, but he fell completely under Ricketts's spell...
...Worse, the The American Spectator June 1995 65 a little while, please don't reread Thucydides...
...Husbands do not hear the call of the keying device simply because they are in a cross-section-ofhumanity book, and plenty of women married to cold men manage somehow without joining the world's oldest phalanx...
...To make it fit his preconceived notions, he tinkered with it until he came up with an on-again, off-again phalanx...
...Socially gauche with his peers and self-conscious about his ugliness, he could relax with working-class people because his own middle-class origins made him feel a cut above them...
...When he won the Nobel Prize in 1962 he received some perfunctory White House invitations from John F. Kennedy, who liked to be surrounded by intellectuals, but he hit paydirt with Lyndon Johnson, who could lap up flattery as fast as Steinbeck could pour it on...
...The movement of Okies to California in The Grapes of Wrath is a phalanx...
...Pushed by his parents to make something of himself, he compiled a chaotic record at Stanford before quitting to become a writer...
...Having a finger in so many literary pies kept him from developing a style, like Hemingway, or an artistic landscape, like Faulkner...
...Steinbeck refused, insisting that it had to be a complete stranger to make the point that the Joads, previously a separate family with selfish concerns, are now part of the phalanx, reflecting man's humanity to man in a vast connected chain...
...Yours in disappointment and in hope...
...He latched onto the concept of the phalanx, derived from the Greek word for "spider" and rejuvenated by the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, who used it to describe group behavior of any kind...
...He never wrote anything worthwhile after The Grapes of Wrath" became a mantra among critics, who were alternately infuriated and dismayed by his later output...
...His letter praising LBJ for his 1965 civil rights speech would have embarrassed any other recipient: In our history there have been not more than five or six moments when the word and the determination mapped the course of the future...
...John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in 1902, the son of a failed businessman who had settled into a comfortable bureaucratic sinecure as county treasurer...
...to tell a story he needed individuals...
...T o the intelligentsia, Steinbeck's political sins were matched by his literary disappointments...
...His last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent, is a sustained wail against American "affluence," possibly inspired by his friendship with yet another important Democrat, John Kenneth Galbraith...
Vol. 28 • June 1995 • No. 6
