John Steinbeck and the Nobel Prize
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
Christmas Book Issue John Steinbeck and the Nobel Prize By Stanley Edgar Hyman Almost the first criticism I published dealt with John Steinbeck. I reviewed Sea of Cortei in the New Republic,...
...The next book was a war quickie called Bombs Away, followed by Cannery Row, which struck me as merely an insipid watering-down of Steinbeck's engaging earlier book Tortilla Flat...
...Eventually she leaves, "her neat buttocks jumping like live rubber...
...Who cares...
...It seemed to me that away from his roots in the Salinas valley Steinbeck had nothing to say, and that perhaps he had nothing further to say in any event...
...He then holds up the bank in another fashion, when he confronts the crooked bank manager with his deed to the land and insists that he be cut in for 51 per cent of the syndicate...
...The plot involves a series of shady efforts by Ethan to better himself financially, in response to Margie's Tarot fortune...
...I wish that I could understand the minds of such people...
...One of his best," said Edward Weeks, noting specifically: "The women in it are particularly appealing...
...The choice might have been (and may yet be) Herman Wouk...
...It is the purest soap opera, a work of almost inconceivable badness...
...I said that I was no longer interested in Steinbeck, and chose instead one of the few fiction writers of the '30s to hold out against the social trend, Nathanael West...
...But to single out The Winter of Our Discontent as the occasion for it is incredible...
...In an article in the Antioch Review, June 1942, I went over all his books up to that time, finding the two novels that are like stage plays, Of Mice and Men and The Moon is Down, to be the pivots of his shifts in social commitment...
...As for Saul Bellow, he not only puffed The Winter of Our Discontent, but he defied anyone else not to...
...The hero, Ethan Allen Hawley, is descended from the first family of his Long Island whaling town, fallen on hard times and working in what he calls a "wop" grocery...
...She promptly vamps him, then starts the plot going by telling Mary's fortune with a French Tarot deck, prophesying wealth and success for Ethan...
...I reviewed Sea of Cortei in the New Republic, February 15, 1942, finding the book's ecological perspective a key to Steinbeck's earlier works...
...I'm good...
...He takes bribes...
...I wasn't too buzzed to have my way with her, but I think she could have escaped if she had wanted to...
...The reporters asked John Steinbeck if he really thought he deserved the Nobel Prize...
...Her list of lovers includes the town's chief of police and Ethan's Italian employer...
...The liveliest character in the book is a woman named Margie Young-Hunt (I wouldn't like to turn a Freudian loose on that name), a friend of Ethan's wife Mary...
...Later in the year, because my review and article were now in anthologies, the editor of a pamphlet series on American writers invited me to do a pamphlet on Steinbeck...
...Swedish papers mocked the choice, and the Academy revealed that criticism of the award this year has been "heavier than usual...
...In the first pages, he addresses his wife as "bugfiower" and has a long dialogue on the street with the banker's dog, so that the reader is fairly warned that before long he will be up to the armpits in whimsy...
...Not better than me, the soft belly...
...She remembered the number of our doll house and she could find the keyhole...
...Critics who said of him that he had seen his best days had better tie on their napkins and prepare to eat crow...
...It is a hodge-podge of superficial social criticism, ripe sentimentality, one endless joke about the urination of Steinbeck's dog, bad prose, encounters that surely must have been invented, and factual inaccuracies...
...Spotty as that list is, this was not a truth universally acknowledged...
...I'm here, the leg...
...he reports Murullo, his employer, to the Immigration Service for illegal entry...
...The Nobel Prize committee was not alone in taking this ludicrous marshmallow seriously...
...Sometimes it is Mickey Spillane ("A flare of searing red pain formed in my bowels and moved upward until it speared and tore at the place just under my ribs") and sometimes it is hollandaise ("July is brass where June is gold, and lead where June is silver...
...It seemed far too trivial and dishonest a book to waste space on, and I put it aside...
...Me, the thigh...
...At the end of the novel, Ethan gets his comeuppance...
...If her behind bounced, I couldn't see it...
...I cannot, and to assume their honesty I must disparage their intelligence...
...The end...
...These pieces were not the beginning of my interest in Steinbeck as a serious writer, but almost its end...
...Steinbeck has been a serious writer, perhaps even an important one...
...The final thing that should be noted about The Winter of Our Discontent is its soupy picture of married love...
...In ways too complicated and absurd to explain, these result in Ethan's inheriting the store and acquiring the alcoholic friend's property, on which an airport will be built...
...The "I Love America" essay with which his son Ethan Allen Hawley II won a television contest turns out to have been cribbed from a speech by Henry Clay...
...This is handled in a melodramatic and ridiculous scene that would disgrace a soap opera writer ("You'll feel better, sir, when you have got used to the fact that I am not a pleasant fool...
...Old Cap'n Hawley called it a 'roving eye.' It was in her voice too, a velvet growl that changed to a thin, mellow confidence for wives...
...As Ethan hands Margie a can of coffee, "every part of her body moved, shifted, announced itself quietly...
...Frankly, no," he said...
...The boy is shameless...
...Here is an account of their dalliance at a motel: "We dined in greasy dignity on broiled Maine lobsters sloshed down with white wine-lots of white wine to make my Mary's eyes to shine, and I plied her with cognac seductively until my own head was buzzing...
...In this book," Bellow wrote, "John Steinbeck returns to the high standards of The Grapes of Wrath and to the social themes that made his early work so impressive, and so powerful...
...Travels with Charley, like The Winter of Our Discontent, is clearly the work of a writer who, if he was not always a lightweight, is a lightweight now...
...Then she reveals her knowledge of all his crooked business secrets...
...That evening, when Margie visits both Hawleys, she is transformed...
...Lewis Gannett announced: "The finest thing Steinbeck has written since The Grapes of Wrath...
...The jacket of the book carries three blurbs...
...It's a cologne Mary has never smelled on me...
...Ah, that proud fanny...
...That's what they tell me...
...With The Winter of Our Discontent, Osterling said, Steinbeck "has resumed his position as an independent expounder of the truth.' "Steinbeck more than holds his own," the Academy announced in its official statement, with the five previous American winners: Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, Pearl Buck, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway...
...The prose is...
...In the course of the action, Margie is revealed to be the great-granddaughter of a witch...
...She challenges Ethan provocatively: "You've never had a quick jump in the hay in your life.' When he finally comes to visit her, she changes into something flimsy and scented, and assures him: "Don't worry...
...Everybody does it...
...Then, a month or so ago, to my amazement (and not mine alone), John Steinbeck was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature...
...Ethan prepares a loony holdup of the bank across the street, in which he will be disguised by a Mickey Mouse mask, but is luckily prevented from bringing it off...
...Margie next reappears at the grocery store as a vulgarian's vision of delight: "Her behind stuck out nice and round and bounced slowly, one up and one down with each step...
...In a radio broadcast, Dr...
...One concurrence with my opinion is interesting, honest and impressive...
...Anders Osterling, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, announced that the prize was principally for The Winter of Our Discontent, which the Academy saw as a return to the "towering standard" of The Grapes of Wrath...
...If anything was under her neat suit, it was hiding...
...It's the way the cookie crumbles...
...As Ethan stands up to go, she says: "Don't you want to go to bed with me...
...At first sight, Ethan recognizes in her eyes that "This was a predator, a huntress, Artemis for pants...
...Margie Young-Hunt is not even the most preposterous part of The Winter of Our Discontent...
...he encourages an alcoholic friend to drink himself to death...
...he says...
...The next morning Ethan brings Mary's breakfast on a tray, with "a bouquet of microscopic field flowers to grace the royal breakfast of my dear...
...Among the contenders Steinbeck had edged out, it was stated, were Lawrence Durrell, Jean Anouilh, Pablo Neruda and Robert Graves...
...I stopped reading him, thus missing what I gather is the further dilution of Cannery Row in Sweet Thursday...
...she is "pertbreasted" and possesses a "proud fanny...
...I have since read Travels with Charley in Search of America (Viking, 246 pp., $4.95), a series of travel articles from Holiday now a leading best-seller...
...The coyness of the Hawleys' love talk would turn the strongest stomach...
...Margie has had two husbands...
...I went back and reread the book...
...His father goes off to cut his wrists in the bay, but does not...
...They were there...
...There are streaks of honesty and insight in the book, and one chilling and effective look at New Orleans racism...
...She was well enough stacked in front so she didn't have to emphasize them...
...When The Winter of Our Discontent (Viking, 311 pp., $4.50) was published last year, I had returned to the curious profession of book reviewing, and I read it for review in these pages...
...The New York Times observed delicately in an editorial: "We think it interesting that the laurel was not awarded to a writer-perhaps a poet or critic or historian-whose significance, influence and sheer body of work had already made a more profound impression on the literature of our age...
...The book ran as a serial in McCall's...
...Either terrified of her witchcraft or faithful to his bugflower, Ethan flees...
...Well, it could have been worse...
Vol. 45 • December 1962 • No. 25
