Fensch Steinbeck's Bitter Fruit

From the Grapes of Wrath to Occupy Wall Street
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9907181-4-7
Verlag: New Century Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten

John Steinbeck observed the plight of the dispossessed --the Okies--during the Great Depression and then wrote the epic Novel, 'The Grapes of Wrath.' The first half of 'Steinbeck's bitter fruit' details his observations of the Depression years of the 1930s--the second half shows how close we may still be to the dark decade of the 1930s .The 'bitter fruit' in the title are the grapes in 'The Grapes of Wrath'.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fensch, Thomas

Leseproben

One |

In Dubious Battle

JOHN STEINBECK WAS BORN in Salinas, California, February 27, 1902. He attended Stanford University, sporadically from 1919–1925, taking courses in Marine Biology and literature but failed to graduate. He held various jobs including working in a sugar factory in Salinas, as a caretaker of an estate in Lake Tahoe and eventually traveled to New York City to work, building the original Madison Square Garden. He also got a job as a reporter on the old .

He was hopelessly out of his element. “They gave me stories to cover in Queens …” he later said, “… and Brooklyn and I would get lost and spend hours trying to find my way back.” He became emotionally attached to the individuals he was supposed to be writing about; the editors transferred him to the federal courts beat, but that was even worse—Steinbeck had little knowledge of the courts system. He was fired. He attempted free-lancing in New York with little success and returned to California by freighter in early 1926.

He began publishing novels in 1929, just as the Great Depression hit. His first three, which were commercial failures, were all published by firms which ultimately went bankrupt. Steinbeck’s first novel, , a fictionalized biography of the pirate Henry Morgan, was published by the firm of Robert M. McBride & Co. Lewis Gannett, the critic, wrote that his first book sold only 1,533 total copies, because few critics bothered to review it when it was published, two months after the beginning of the Great Depression.

His second book, , did little better. Published in 1932 by the firm Brewer, Warren and Putnam, it earned Steinbeck $400. Neither his first nor third book earned more than the publisher’s advance of $250.

Although Steinbeck probably did not realize it at the time, 1933 marked the beginning of his sustained success as a professional, salable writer. He published two short stories, which would later become parts of , and his third book, , found a publisher, this time the firm of Robert O. Ballou, in New York, but only 598 copies were bound and shipped to bookstores.

Then his luck began to change. Pascal Covici, a Chicago bookseller and publisher chanced to read his first three books and decided to publish Steinbeck. One of the first books Steinbeck remembered reading as a child was a version of the King Arthur stories. He became enchanted with the King Arthur saga throughout much of his life; his fascination led to two books, and, much later, his own re-telling of the Arthurian saga, unfinished during his lifetime, but published posthumously in 1976, as

published in 1935, is a clear retelling of the King Arthur story, set in Depression-era California. The chapter titles are almost identical to the earliest versions of the King Arthur saga; Danny’s house, the adventures of the and the dénouement of Steinbeck’s novel reflects the original saga.

was an immediate hit for Steinbeck’s new publisher, Pascal Covici. It allowed the firm Covici-Friede some welcome financial breathing room. The book won the annual Gold Medal awarded by the Commonwealth Club of California for the best work by a native Californian. The film rights were sold and eventually resold before the film version was ever made. (MGM released the film version of in 1942. In the book , Joseph Millichamp called the film “an unreasonable sepia-toned sham that could have only been made in Hollywood.”)

Readers were vastly amused (although critics ultimately less so) by Steinbeck’s portrait of the (he had known such people in and around the Salinas-Monterey Bay area) and his mock-heroic style. Chapter nine, about the neighbor lady Sweets Ramirez and the vacuum cleaner given her as a gift, by Danny, the leader of the paisanos and his friends, shows Steinbeck at his most droll.

But once accepted as an accomplished novelist, John Steinbeck refused to be pigeon-holed and refused to follow one book with another of the same type (although he did follow , published in 1945, with the sequel , published in 1954).

His next book was , which brought him even more fame than . As Jackson Benson writes: “His fame grew rapidly with each book that followed—, and —in large part, of course, because the more he wrote about the things he knew, the more dynamic and convincing his work became.”

and could not have been more dissimilar: is charming and engaging, especially for those who recognize the King Arthur motif. is cold, brutal (Steinbeck’s words), detached and cynical.

Steinbeck critic Brian St. Pierre writes:

In the mid-thirties, Salinas was in a tumult of labor unrest, as were many other agricultural areas in the state. Labor was getting organized, and so were the landowners and farmers. The Communist Party was especially active, seeing in the systemic abuse of migrant workers a golden opportunity for power. Strikes were met with brutal vigilante repression and editorial hysteria: bloodshed was all too common.

Steinbeck’s natural inclinations would have been to side with the oppressed anyway, but having worked in the fields gave him an especially acute view of the problems. On the other hand, he had no tolerance for the Communists, whom he felt were willing to manipulate people and even incite violence in order to achieve their political ends.

Sometime during 1934, Steinbeck had met a Communist organizer who was on the run, hiding out in Salinas until whatever situation he’d provoked had cooled down. Steinbeck had smuggled the man some food and spent many hours in conversation with him, out of which came his short story “The Raid,” which was published by . He thought of writing a novel that would be the biography of a Communist, then tried converting the story into a journalistic account of a strike; but it wouldn’t be contained so neatly. In a letter, he wrote: “I’m not interested in strike as a means for raising men’s wages, and I’m not interested in ranting about justice and oppression, mere outcroppings which indicate the condition. But man hates something in himself. He has been able to defeat every natural obstacle, but himself he cannot win over unless he kills every individual. And this self-hate which goes so closely in hand with self-love is what I wrote about. The book is brutal. I wanted to be merely a recording consciousness, judging nothing, simply putting down the thing. I think it has the thrust, almost crazy, that mobs have. It is written in disorder.”

Simply stated, wages for fruit pickers were so abysmally low “fruit tramps” could work all day and not make enough to keep from starvation, let alone feed a family or travel from orchard to orchard or farm to farm seeking work. Large farms and growers’ cooperatives conspired to keep wages far too low; thus leading to general labor unrest throughout California and elsewhere, during the 1930s.

Worse, as Jackson Benson writes:

One of the tactics used by the California growers was to set one group against another, often one race against another. The Mexicans, for example, might be given a “sweetheart” contract to come in as scabs to take over from striking Filipinos or whites, or the other way around. … at one point, growers planned to import hundreds of black pickers from the south and Mexicans from Los Angeles.

And, he also writes:

In life, as in the fictional version, the law was usually on the side of the growers. “We protect our farmers in Kern County,” said one officer. “They are our best people. They put us in here and they can put us out.” Indeed, few if any of the strikers were voting residents. Many of the Mexicans were aliens, and many of the whites had come in recently from out of state. An “us versus them,” or those-who-belong versus the outsiders, psychology was operative, and there were continual calls for deporting the aliens, sending the Okies back home, and getting rid of the “paid foreign agitators.”

Steinbeck took the title from :

His underlying theme could also be the loss of innocence in the Garden of Eden, as the focus of the book details a strike in an orchard.

Steinbeck’s publisher, Pascal Covici, very nearly turned down . An editor at the publishing firm wrote an in-house evaluation, stating that Steinbeck did not have the...