The Rescue of John Steinbeck

This fascinating article appears in the current issue of the New York Review of Books. I find it so interesting is that, as with Freud, long after his death, amidst declarations of how pedestrian and bad his work, critics can not leave Steinbeck out of their focus of attention.

Steinbeck is my favorite writer. Well, I thought so once, and as it really doesn't matter any longer, I leave it at that. I got a little bothered at the criticisms hurled by this writer at Steinbeck, and then realized it didn't matter personally. So I read the article with interest.

As was the case when he was alive, and as Gottlieb writes (Nor is dismissal of his work by the literary establishment anything new. When to everyone's surprise, including his own, he won the 1962 Nobel Prize, the reaction was startlingly hostile), critics love to hate Steinbeck. Perhaps one of the things they hate about him is that his books continue to sell. Who knows?

Gottlieb dissects the writer and his works, and throws in some criticisms of the man as well. A few criticisms are so pedantic it boggles the mind. First there is a sort of dismissal of Steinbeck's style as simplistic.

Tortilla Flat (1935), that rompy account of salt-of-the-earth down-and-outers in Monterey. They drink, they brawl, they fornicate, they steal—oh, those happy simple paisanos! And what about their dialogue?"

Of course, this is a book written more than 70 years ago. But that does not spare it or its writer from criticism. Witness this gem.

Danny's house, we're told in a preface, "was not unlike the Round Table, and Danny's friends were not unlike the knights of it." They're innocents, and they're all for one and one for all. Most important, they're "clean of commercialism, free of the complicated systems of American business." Far better to be a bum with a heart of gold than a solid citizen.

The contrast drawn between bum and solid citizen seems absurd. Solid citizen? Seems too absolute, but, that's me. Yet, to be fair, Gottlieb does give Steinbeck some praise.

The style of In Dubious Battle is radically new. Description, action, dialogue are straightforward and gritty. Still, Steinbeck can't resist injecting an idealized guru figure into this realistic world—a kind of fellow-traveling doctor who lends the strikers a hand. "Doc": "Man has met and defeated every obstacle, every enemy except one. He cannot win over himself. How mankind hates itself." Jim: "We don't hate ourselves, we hate the invested capital that keeps us down." One suspects that this is what the endless bull sessions between Steinbeck and Ricketts must have sounded like. Even so, In Dubious Battle is an impressive step forward.

Impressive; that's good. Even kinder is this assessment of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men.

Uninfected by moralizing, ingeniously if stagily constructed, and credibly populated, Of Mice and Men—far from Steinbeck's most ambitious book—is the closest he came to a fully satisfying work of art.

Lest one suspect Gottlieb has softened, he quickly turns back to slashing at Steinbeck, quoting Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin in the process.


As Kazin put it, "Steinbeck's people are always on the verge of becoming human, but never do." Wilson:

The characters of The Grapes of Wrath are animated and put through their paces rather than brought to life.... It is as if human sentiments and speeches had been assigned to a flock of lemmings on their way to throw themselves into the sea.

Still, The Grapes of Wrath is unquestionably a major achievement.

Well, that's kind. But it is not to last. Critiquing East of Eden, Gottlieb slashes again.

It's a perplexing book—melodramatic, self-indulgent, even trashy; yet at last you feel you're reading a real novel rather than fictionalized reportage—a novel with strong characters, large-scale story development, a central idea holding it together.

Then the man comes in for criticisms that border on the personal attack. Can any one's life, would Gottlieb's life, come through as wholesome and sane and balanced? Under the glare and microscope of being dissected by the media and critics? 40 years after dying?

When Steinbeck returned from California after Ed Ricketts died in a car accident, his second wife, Gwyn, asked for a divorce. She also told him that she hadn't loved him for years and had been abundantly unfaithful to him... [and "confessed"] that he was not the father of their second son. In his book The Other Side of Eden (2001), the younger John dismisses this notion as preposterous...

Some rudimentary Freudian analysis is dispensed before Gottlieb drops this little gem into his essay:

Young John's book is a horrifying portrait of dysfunction, his father alternately overprotective and indifferent, his mother alcoholic and violent. On his sixteenth birthday, he tells us, she became so drunkenly abusive that he threw a TV set out of the twelfth-story window of her apartment and then "punched her in the mouth as hard as I could, and hammered at her body for God knows how long." Therapist: "Why didn't you go to your father for protection after you beat your mother?" Young John: I'd already given up thinking he would protect me from her insanity. He was into his Great Writer Bubble, so it wasn't like having a dad around, but instead having the Great Writer present. By the age of thirteen, I realized my father was an asshole.

There: Steinbeck was an asshole. Bad man. But he retained some talent... his last novel, The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), which, although hardly a masterpiece, was Steinbeck's best work since East of Eden. Steinbeck had found his last big subject—the moral deterioration of the times.

Finally, though, Steinbeck can not escape criticism. Gottlieb tosses this softball: Steinbeck's heart, as always, is in the right place, but there's something artificial about Charley: many of the encounters he reports sound like pure inventions. His son John put it bluntly: "Thom and I are convinced that he never talked to any of those people.... He just sat in his camper and wrote all that shit."

And some final disapproval: You could say that by the end he had evolved into a kind of minor and irrelevant prophet, both disillusioned and irredeemably optimistic.

Worst of all, And he's become that unfashionable and embarrassing thing, a patriot. Somewhere along the way, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" had turned into "My Country, 'Tis of Thee."

Bad John: a patriot, corny. Bad John. I'm amazed that Gottlieb can lambast Steinbeck for being, embarrassingly, patriotic.